skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been seeing comments like the one you have responded to more and more here. Commenters seemingly confusing legality with ethics and politeness, or perhaps mistakenly thinking that the later two do not exist.

If we swapped out companies with strangers and HN with facebook, would these people be responding to their friends posting venting comments about whistlers on the bus to work with "It's a free country, they are allowed to whistle on the bus, so shutup."? To be honest, I don't think so. I think the reason this reply is absurd is patently is likely obvious to them when the subject of the criticism does not involve a corporation. It seems as far as they are concerned, as soon as a company enters the picture, all criticisms become invalid if they do not involve law-breaking.

Why this is the case I can only guess.
The problem is that in tournament-style professions, their prospects are leagues below that of the world champions.

One heart breaking example I witnessed personally was a family member. He wanted more than anything to be a classical musician. From the age of four, he was taught by the same teacher who trained a very successful NY Philharmonic pianist (opera coach). He practiced many hours a day all through his school years and earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees in clarinet performance. By any objective measure he was a very good clarinetist. But he wasn't good enough to make a real living at it. Unlike his mother, who had perfect pitch by the end of grade school, he never developed it. He saw more than one talented peer surpass him in despite his extreme work ethic. In the end, after putting over 25 years of his life and his passion into it, he finally gave up on his dream and became a programmer. Unlike his experiences in music, he very quickly rose to the top of development groups and it was he who was the one surpassing others who had been working at it longer and harder.

I often wonder what he could have done if he'd given up his initial dream after just 10 years instead of 25.
Hi matt1,

Being a good developer and being a good designer doesn't always go hand in hand.
Your project is a one month side-project. Not only does it work well, but it looks great as well.

May I ask how you did manage the design part of your project ?

Thanks -- vhf (my side projects were ugly as hell till bootstrap came, and by now I'm tired of its look. How dare you come with a one month side-project not only usable but also good-looking ! ;) )
I did mean fmt.PrintLn.

A canonical hello world program should have a non-success exit code if the "hello world" printing failed. This will happen automatically with exceptions and similar mechanisms.

The problem with Go's error approach is that you have to handle it where it happens. You can't delegate the error handling to a function 5 levels back in the call chain. So you end up having to write boilerplate code around every single call and intermediary layer, or just not be diligent, and that lack of diligence starts with hello world.

It is the boilerplate code I object to, and exceptions are just one pre-existing solution. For example Go could recognise code patterns and automatically run code that returns errors to the caller if not otherwise handled or marked as ignored, although this is a certain amount of magic.

Since there is no code for ignored errors, that means there is no code test coverage for them. For example coverage on hello world will always be 100% even though the case of println failing didn't happen. Multiply this by a larger program and there be gremlins.
Famine undertones? There's far too much food on Pintrest for that.
Yeah, I was thinking GQ, Vanity Fair, or Rolling Stone -- still counterculture (sort of, at least for RS), but wider circulation.
Anyone more knowledgeable in assembly and file formats care to expand on this:

>It serves no purpose, except proving that files format not starting at offset 0 are a bad idea

What exactly does it mean to start at offset 0 and why don't these file formats do that? Is there an advantage in not starting at offset 0 or is it simply oversight/indifference? Any kind of background on the problem would be appreciated, I'm really quite intrigued.
I only use it in cases where an underlying framework does not expose or provide the functionality I need (and subclassing is not an option). I wouldn't necessarily say it means these frameworks are not well-designed though.
Confusing post. It's an example of core.logic, not really an interesting Sudoku-solver, as all of the logic is in core.logic
core.logic is awesome and if you want an entertaining introduction take a look at the video of the session that Edmund Jackson did at EuroClojure 2012

https://vimeo.com/45128721
Google Wallet now available for all cards (Visa, Mastercard, AMEX)
Bill would force patent trolls to pay defendants' legal bills
Referly Goes Social - You Can Now Follow Profiles
Awesome work! I have been using a pen and paper but found I can't get to in depth with the analysis. I signed up. Looks great!
And that's just as bad as the government wanting to search my laptop.

No, no it isn't. It isn't in the same league of bad. Even if they were lying outright, it wouldn't be.

The government has the power to put you in prison for life or even take your life. Any bad from an organization like that will always be far worse than an attempt to get an emotional reaction to a cause by stretching the truth.
Charles Dickens greatest quotes still apply today
They need to get WalMart, Target and some large grocery stores to gain critical mass here.
Late to the party but please submit the android app to the amazon appstore, the kindle fire might be a good platform for it.
I rode an MTA bus for the first time this past weekend with 0 knowledge of the MTA in general and had a pretty positive experience. Why are people staying away?
When can I use my HTC One X as a replacement for my credit card? Call me when that happens, until then I see this as just another PayPal.

Unless we're already there, but some short internet searches found nothing but misleading blog post titles.
Your final note is accurate, yes. But honestly, why should a web developer have to account for your niche-case decisions? Javascript is a perfectly valid language, and it's perfectly valid to assume that Javascript works in a browser since... it does. Normally. Why should I or anyone else have to add code specifically to tell users of NoScript that they need to be reasonable? You don't have to tell users of Mosaic that they need to upgrade to a browser made in the last 15 years. It's pretty obvious at this point.

I use AdBlock and Ghostery to disable ads and Facebook buttons. But when I get to a sign in page and there's no links, I know that it's a Facebook login button. When I watch a video on Hulu and it doesn't load, I know that AdBlock is preventing me from seeing that show. But I don't go on forums and complain that developers should cater to me breaking their websites. I say to myself "oh hey, I've made a choice that broke this site. Let me take 5 seconds to fix it myself."

"Your site doesn't work with NoScript" means the same thing to me as "they don't speak German at the Chicago McDonald's". I mean, that sucks for you, but honestly do you ever step back and wonder why that is?
For what it's worth, I've been playing around with making a really tiny MV* library called Ivy (http://adamsanderson.github.com/ivy/).

It's similar to Knockout with data binding, dom templating, and some nice debugging tricks.

The entire thing clocks in around 900 lines with comments, and has no dependencies so if you're curious, have a look.
Halide from MIT for photo processing
Ridiculous Gigs
I agree to some degree.

However, I think it's easy to underestimate the benefit of hindsight here.

I seriously doubt Mr. Mayfield was thinking "Awwww yeah, I'm about to get paid off this bullshit!" when he was arrested.

More likely, just thinking over the possibilities of being wrongfully implicated in a horrific act of terrorism took a few years of his life.
here goes Dalton..... again.
I think Perforce should buy it.
When a file format starts at offset 0, it simply means that it starts at the first byte of the file.

Other than that, I can't provide any information on file formats allowed to start at offsets other than 0, or why this may or may not be a good idea (I suppose maybe it would allow an enterprising programmer to hide a malicious file by embedding it in an otherwise-innocuous format?), though I am certainly curious as well.
Finally, Proof That Jesus Is Real
The expense is mainly because of the driver. The moment self driving vans become economically feasible the delivery expenses will drop precipitously.
Poor Andrey. I'm not being insensitive, he's at his first job (Facebook) after getting his masters out of UMich (12/09) and he's complaining that Performance Reviews suck because they aren't actionable. I wonder if it was the first one he got or if he's had more than one since starting at FB. Either way it seems like a pretty small sample set from which to select.

Performance reviews are a tool like a table saw, in the hands of a skilled manager they can help mentor someone to great potential. In the hands of someone who doesn't know how to use them they can do great harm. It doesn't help that the suing your company/manager is popular and so the company goes to great lengths to warn new managers about being too interpretive or too specific.

You should, the employee, should get three things out of a performance review. First and foremost is feedback in the context of the previous one, and if you are newly hired in the context of the job that was offered you. The second is an external analysis of your strengths and weaknesses (this can be hard to hear sometimes) and third a discussion about where you are headed.

The first part is pretty straight forward, "We hired you, Bob, to be the build master. We measure the quality of the build master by their ability to adapt to new build requirements, achieve rapid turn around of builds, and provide accurate and actionable feedback on problems to the source of those problems so that they are quickly resolved." The job has some requirements, the employee is doing the job, they are either not meeting, meeting, or possibly exceeding, against the execution goals of the job (the stuff that has to get done).

Part two is a bit harder, the orthogonal axis to performance is 'fit' which is a combination of how you get things done, and how you react/adapt to changes in the requirements. These vary from job to job but generally they involve group dynamics (can people work with you), ability to make progress in spite of barriers, and your state of mind. Some folks see this as the 'popularity contest' part of a review and it can be, if done poorly, but the real meat is the amorphous concept of teamwork.

The third part is a vector for the review after this one. You and the manager agree on what you're good at, where you are most effective, and how that works (or doesn't) with the company. This part can give you a sense of whether or not continuing to work at the company is the right thing for you to do.

Its important to remember that a review is a conversation between you and the company. They are telling you what they think of your contribution and what they are looking for in the future, and you are evaluating if you still want to work there. When you are both on the same page its great, when you are on different pages, its painful.
you could simply put the controls on the gun like in the Cabelas dangerous hunts game. They managed to cram an entire Xbox 360 controller on to their gun periphial. I've longed to use this with other games and the kinect.

http://www.platformnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Cab...
Learn About Product Development From Mark Zuckerberg [Free Video Course]
awesome that prices are mentioned in title -- saved me time!
Are you just waiving fuel costs?
How much elapsed time would make it OK? 6 months? a year? 10 years? Expecting a large company to know where it's going a year in advance and reveal it to outside devs seems unreasonable, even for pure platforms.
The work required to port Android to RP is very similar to the work needed to port ChromeOS.
Interesting.

It seems physicians have a long history pompous bullshit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_...
You also have another way of making a few more bucks here and there. Supermarkets often have coupons, and also buy one get one free type offers. The former can reduce the cost of goods to you, and the latter means you can charge two customers for an item but only pay for it once.
I'd start with this and see what the output looks like: http://www.professorcloud.com/svg-to-canvas/
Burning bridges, huh? I usually show up on my first day at a job with gas can and matches in hand. By the time I'm leaving a company, any criticisms I've had at all about anything there have been voiced quite publicly and, ideally, to the highest executive I get a chance to expose to my thoughts on any particular subject that might be bothering me. Most of my peers think I'm kind of an ass sometimes, but I'm friends outside of work with many of them and they have a general respect for my willingness to challenge authority on the job.
Outside of work, however, I'm a wuss...you never know what you're going to deal with and I could get beat up if I'm too much of a dick!
Aaah, we initially considered stacking the open source version against the enterprise version in a comparison table, but due to some previously made design choices, were unable to fit the column properly in time! Instead, we opted to drop that column in favor of being able to launch today and potentially fix in a future update.

Considering the feedback from this thread, it definitely looks like something we need to fit back in and will be among the things we'll work on for the next iteration/deploy. Thanks for the feedback and kind words, it's much appreciated seeing as we've been working on this for a while now; it easily becomes hard to look at things with a fresh pair of eyes after a while, which is definitely needed for giving a good first impression imo.
I think his issue was that the meeting was in bad faith. He was under the impression that he would be demoing his technology so it could get visibility within Facebook, not walking into a negotiation.

While it is true that he said the thought he would be demoing, I don't think the discussion about an acquisitions was a problem in itself:

I said that if Facebook wanted to have a serious conversation about acquiring my team and product, I would entertain the idea.

I think his problem was that Facebook were negotiating from a position of strength (and were honest about that), and he didn't like it.
Actually I meant jwz himself. He's always so self righteous and pompous, which in my book is never something to strive for.
Probably far more complicated than that. If HBO receives $8 of a $20 subscription, and the cable company got $12, is the marketing that the cable company does free?
Either a misspelling of feminine or referring to the thinspiration bannings:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/26/pinterest-thinspira...
Congrats Apoorva! Glad to see us 08 Elecs trying to change the world for the better.
Im always surprised by peoples aversion for trying to put blame on someone or some thing. Finding where the fault was is part of the process to make sure an error doesn't happen again.

I think there's confusion with the "blame game". As in, once you can blame someone, the problem is over and solved but that's just the start to solving the problem. I always want to know who did something wrong and how it happened so we could work to prevent it from happening again in the future.
Keynote's just the state of the art in Powerpoint presentations

You know Microsoft succeeded when Powerpoint has become so generic that Keynote is described as being for "Powerpoint presentations".
I think they should try to make it happen, absolutely. I just think the "those people are fools refusing the money that I'm trying to give them (as long as it is on my terms)" argument is pretty shallow.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gerard-williams-iii/a/95a/278
Entangled Particles Break Classical Law of Thermodynamics, Say Physicists
I ended up getting a decent raise because of my predecessor's exit interview. She told the HR staff that she was leaving because she didn't get the (actually quite meager) raise she asked for, and she was doing the work of three people. They ended up hiring two additional people to replace her, and I got a 7% raise.
There's a lot of them that have yet to deliver years after they have gotten funding. In the technology sector, the link is here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/technology/su...

Scroll down until you get to projects a year older or more, then take a look at the comments and updates of those projects. You'll find that few have delivered yet and a lot of them failed outright. Some that have delivered have quality issues (what did you expect) and a few have actually delivered. My advice is don't kickstart a project if you think you are actually purchasing a product. You're funding someone who promises that they will deliver you a product if they are successfully able to make it at or below their initial estimate. If they underestimated, don't expect a refund. Nobody gets a refund from kickstarter.
UBS to take legal action against Nasdaq over Facebook IPO
Please Let This Apple Rumor Be True: An iOS Smartwatch That Talks to Your iPhone
I dunno. The definition of a militia is a volunteer organization where people furnish their own weapons. I think it would be hard to argue that personal ownership of nukes serves either self-defence or the militia interest. I do think the machine gun ban is questionable though.
> Brandon Mayfield was arrested as a material witness, not as a suspect.

If I'm sitting in jail and have not committed a crime, the underlying legal excuse for my unjust detention isn't going to matter to me. The net result is the same.
I've been thinking about ways to solve this. I also find it tedious (I track behaviours via chains.cc). My current exploration is randomised text messages, but they can quickly pile up.
Most of the Game of Thrones/HBO stuff discussion sounds like whining because, well, it's whining.
Generating small amounts of hydrogen is easy. Generating it fast enough to support a flame is a bit harder. Hence acid and magnesium.
I think you're on to the right answer (though I don't know for sure myself).

It seems to me that if all file format identifiers started at the zero offset, it would be impossible for a single file to identify as more than one format. However, when different formats use different offsets to identify themselves, it is possible to construct the file in such a way that it validly identifies as more than one format.
There's an online used bookstore (Estante Virtual) in Brazil that kind of does this, though obviously with books. It's a network of 9 million titles, all coming from secondhand bookstores throughout the country who have uploaded a list of their inventory. When I browse for a book, I can choose a local vendor and if I want, find out the location so that I can just go there in person if I think that's faster than Brazil's national courier services (as many times, payment to the vendor means making an in-bank deposit to their account).
I've seen files have been distributed on 4chan before via a .rar file embedded in an image.
Which puts them in the beautiful company of the rest of humanity.

Edit: Also Semmelweis was a badass.
Every major file type (or nearly every, anyway) has a set of signature bytes, a "magic number" or something equivalent that identifies it as being of that type. This lets programs identify what kind of object a file represents without requiring this information to be supplied by the user.

Most file types have this magic signature as the initial few bytes of the file. For example, a Windows executable always begins with the ASCII characters "MZ".

The point is that with non-overlapping magic signatures, a single file can be simultaneously identified as more than one type.
Quality art is more important to me than some geek fantasy of internet delivery

Or, if you're like me and doesn't want to get basic cable, you can be patient and wait for internet delivery through iTunes or similar later.
Startup PR: The DIY Media Kit for Startups
As noted elsewhere, this system is not designed to be used as things happen. It's meant to be filled out once at the end of each day and should take no longer than a few minutes. It's supposed to be as non-intrusive as possible.

That being said, several folks have mentioned this so it's a possibility down the road, maybe.
Hmm, this sounds a bit like "how to get an internship if you have friends/family with great connections". Not really a scaleable solution.

However when you are young you have lots of free time and very low overheads. If you have decent tech skills there are plenty of things you can do to kickstart your career.

I was around 16 during the first dotcom boom, pretty much every business wanted a "website" but had no idea how to go about it. Even building simple HTML websites and uploading them to free hosts could earn you a hundred $ or so, which definitely beat working in the local deli with the other kids.

This was also the era of Windows 98, so everyone had PC problems, if you could pretty much guarantee a fix (usually just backup everything+reformat) every time and charged callouts at minimum wage you would get plenty of business.

This helped a lot with university applications too, as the professor dealing with admissions was impressed enough to drop the grade requirements (the only person they had dropped them for that year IIRC).

Not sure what the equivalent would be nowadays, but you could probably get a decent portfolio or a few $ doing work on freelance sites.
Great ideas; will work on it. Appreciate it.
Hrrm.. much of the discussion here is missing what I think is the important point.

If you build on Facebooks platform, there is a good chance you will end up competing with Facebook. Or Twitter.

We need a social platform that is distributed and that nobody "owns".
I'm not an expert on file formats so I looked into Wikipedia. Here's what it says on PNG[1]:

A PNG file starts with an 8-byte signature.
The hexadecimal byte values are 89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A;
the decimal values are 137 80 78 71 13 10 26 10.

So if a file starts with 89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A, you know it may be a valid PNG, otherwise you know it's not.

GIF starts with another marker at zero offset, so no valid GIF is a valid PNG, and vice versa.

Some formats are mutually exclusive because they “fight” for contents of first several bytes.

Some formats are more relaxed and introduce the exploited possibility of carefully engineered ambiguity.

edit: removed a section that was utterly wrong

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics
Yes, retrievable data is obviously accessible by a site admin somehow. But the way he's got things set up:

1) It's trivial for him to inadvertently see something deeply personal to someone just by browsing the 'recent' list or doing a search.

UPDATE: I overstated this one - Maciej let me know by email that he can only access private data on the search / recent page if he intentionally masquerades a user. He can only inadvertently see private data when viewing individual user pages.

2) If his account's ever compromised (let's hope he's not reusing that password elsewhere!) then someone else gets that ability as well, accessible from any browser anywhere.

It's one thing when you have to ssh into a server somewhere and do a SQL query to access someone's private information. It's another thing to set up your admin account so you're casually exposed to it.

I like Pinboard's service too, but this isn't remotely cool.