skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would be fine if we all lived on our own planet in the middle of our own universe. As it is, we have an obligation to others simply because we must co-exist. If someone is suffering it is likely because they have been deprived of something, be it resources, "property", or some technological innovation. We cannot artificially restrict each other into poverty, and if you cannot understand this you should take a moment to reflect on your morality.
Did you go into an ATM vestibule? The readers that let you insert your card to get to "safe" ATMs inside the bank lobby after hours are often targets of skimmers too. They look something like this: http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/lmskim...
Zed shaw tried to make libevent work with Ruby, but this was when we had Ruby 1.8.5 and there were problems with Ruby interpreter that prevented this (around threading IIRC).
+1 The player doesn't even work for me on Linux
In OSX Lion, Apple released Auto Save and Versions, which does exactly this. Except that just a tiny amount of applications I use in my daily development life does this. But in casual use, it's actually quite nice. If the application implements the whole set of Lion auto saving / state API's, you don't even have to save the files for them to remain available.

I can write on multiple unsaved documents with TextEdit, close TextEdit, and all the documents open up in their unsaved state as I open TextEdit. It's quite nice. But to have these features, requires too much of a workflow change to what people are used to, and the LaLa Land of it breaks down right after the user hits an application that does not implement the system, and loses their data (by clicking on don't save or assuming that everything is recovered after a crash).

More info on Auto Save and Versions: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4753
What I mean is, Poisson distributions don't look like normal distributions if lambda is low - there's a long tail.

There's about 500,000 centenarians (thanks bitwize for the spelling) in the world. That's about 0.01%. In a town of 10,000, that's an average (lambda) of 1. About 36% of such towns will have no centenarians, 36% will have one, 18% will have 2, 6% will have 3, 1.5% will have 4, and there's a long tail with 5 (0.3%), 6 (0.05%) or more.

It doesn't seem logical that most towns will have 0 or 1 centenarians, and some will have 5 or more, but it's just the way the numbers work.

If you pick a higher lambda (for example, the number of 50 year olds) it looks like a normal distribution. If some place has 2X the number of 50 year olds, there will be a good reason. If you pick a higher lambda (the number of people who survive incurable cancer) it looks even wackier, and it's very hard to draw conclusions.

What I'm saying is, it's hard to draw conclusions when you are looking at rare events, because there can be so much variation.
This is fantastic. So much more useful than your average site blocker because it actually lets me get to the (admittedly rare) important notifications on Facebook while preventing me from wasting extra time.
Using Bundler With Rubymotion
This is yet another one of those rambling, wide-dispersal attacks on SV.

So here's the thing: we have solved many of these problems. Many of these problems boil down to trust relationships and increased information in the marketplace. The internet is pretty good at this.

Ever order something from a person on E-bay? Why? Heck, with big-ticket items on there, you could easily get ripped off. And back in the early days it happened a lot more. But E-bay implemented a peer-to-peer rating system. Now when you buy anything, you look at the seller's rating. They look at your rating. People with long histories of happy transactions are highly unlikely to ruin it all for just one. It happens, sure, but it's highly unlikely.

Nobody is arguing to throw grandmother out into the snow. I think anybody with a brain realizes what various laws were put into place to do. And anybody with a heart would agree with their goals. But it's a fair question to ask if the solutions from 1950 still make sense in the internet age. Many times -- not all, but many times -- they do not. We've got a better way worked out. We figured it out through trial and error and rapid iteration.

EDIT: And for those of you who missed the kicker, perhaps I didn't make this clear enough. We've found that peer-to-peer ratings/trust systems statistically outperform enforcement activities, because you are enlisting everybody in the community as an enforcer So you get your great social goals _and_ better adherence. It's a thing of beauty.
This comment sounds like one of those BS ISP ads where they promote "Unlimited" serviece but it's not unlimited bandwidth only an "Unlimited" connection. Or how about the cell phone providers offering "Unlimited" data where there's a star at the end and it states that you'll be throttled after 5 GB.

You have to understand the layperson won't know anything about tables etc and stating "infinitely scale" is a HUGE selling point for potential customers. If they wanted to be truthful they wouldn't say that, or they would say we CAN provide infinite scaling IF the following conditions are met.
> dominates the experience of the entire (+/- 5%) personal computer market.

How can there be entire + 5%? Sometimes people try to be too clever.
I'm familiar with the Greenspan quote, but in retrospect, they didn't destroy themselves. They'd seen the presidence of the savings and loan scandal and seem to have acted as if the government would be there to back stop them. In fact, given the willingness of the government to bail them out one could even argue Ayn Rand was completely right about the whole situation and that they acted rationally by taking on huge risk. If they banks were allowed to fail early and often from their mistakes, the behavior we saw likely would not have happened(for the exact reasons Rand states).
I'd like to think that the RIAA blocked the video for his use of hip hop quotes sprinkled through his talk.

"I'm from where they send shots then we send 'em back
A half a million dollars worth of crack money
Wrap your parents up, now you got a black mommy
Yeah I did it, true to my religion
Two guns on me, both with extensions"

-Two Chainz
Lessons learned from launching CS50x
The reason they get attacked in unlicensed cabs is because the drivers of licensed cabs can be easily identified.

Unless the driver of the licensed cab wants to go directly to jail, he politely refrains from raping passengers.

To be clear, I don't believe that argument works against Uber, quite clearly the drivers can be identified, so I don't know what the author's point is.
I have disabled all notifications from Facebook. I find myself not visiting Facebook that often anymore.
Did you use a different HN id when you applied? I was curious which group you were part of, but there has never been an application including this HN id.
> green threads (which look just like normal threaded code) as the best and simplest interface to the event-loop - as seen by Golang, gevent, Eventmachine, Coro (Perl) etc etc.

That list is just screaming for someone to write a comment mentioning that you forgot Erlang.
Interesting:

> PRIVACY CONCERN! How do I stop websites from doing this?
Great question. So far, I've found that using Private Browsing
in Safari will stop ALL evercookie methods after a browser restart.

I wonder if Safari is the only one or if it's just the only one the creator put to the test (i.e. what about Chrome Incognito).
Not to judge this presentation up or down; I'm not a Rubyist... but a reflection for myself - you know you're getting old when you see ideas that have come and gone and come and gone come again.
Types of Modeling
Types of Modeling - the genres of the modeling industry
Well Hammer-Lahav calls it "the biggest professional disappointment of my career" on his blog[1] so I guess he's aware of that aspect (more[2]).

The Mozilla Foundation's Persona[3] looks to be further along in terms of code and in terms of other people using it[4], differences with OpenID are partially described here[5]. Regardless of quality I think someone flying solo is going to have a hard time getting ahead of Persona at this point.

[1] http://hueniverse.com/2012/07/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to-hell...

[2] http://hueniverse.com/2012/07/on-leaving-oauth/

[3] http://identity.mozilla.com/post/32395255498/announcing-the-...

[4] http://identity.mozilla.com/post/31008721633/application-and...

[5] http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7669886219/how-browserid-di...
On the main level it was pretty bad on the right side closest to the stage. The audio speakers sounded muffled, but sounded fine as you stepped further back.

You could tell we couldn't hear anything because no one was laughing when everyone else was.
Every solution has a free and open source implementation.

It's like saying I'll bake a cake at home with the free and open source implementation available online instead of buying it from the store.

It about how much you weigh your time and the quality of your product.

Of course, there are exceptions, the cake you buy from the store might be bad but, that's unlikely if you buy from a reputed store.
If two people were debating the merits of an application, they'd look at it, and they'd both see the latest version.

No one would try to talk about an application without it open in front of him; they're too complicated and there are too many of them.
My favorite talk was the one given by Jessica Livingston.
The way she simplified what it takes to be a good entrepreneur, resiliency and drive and the "monsters" you'll meet along the way was amazing.
My least favorite moment was Uber's founder talk. I love and use the app but his talk sounded too much like 30 minutes comercial on Uber... A special award to Ben Horowitz for humor and to Robert Scoble who managed to speak (ask a question to Ron) even though he wasn't on the speakers's list :)
After using EventMachine in heavy production at Minefold for the last year and a half we're finally ditching it for Go. Our experience has been similar to the OP's. However we had random exception gobbling, internal threading issues and increasingly worse performance + code maintainability.

We've been happily using Go for a few internal systems are are slowly galvanising most of our backend with it too. Life is happier.
Yes! People who apply to anything would be so much better off if they tried to envision the conditions under which the applications are read.
Yes, because we only added the second one I mentioned a few cycles ago.
Does AWS count as highly available?
Your best free business tool? Listening Skills
Author of Packet (https://github.com/gnufied/packet) a Reactor library that did use Ruby IO primitives here. I wrote this before, eventmachine had pure Ruby reactor. Non blocking calls were introduced in Ruby 1.8.5 IIRC and my library made heavy use of them, and they were buggy. Some issues I found:

* select() call used to segfault.
* the non blocking read/write behaved very differently under different OSes and I am not talking Windows. There were differences between Linux and OSX for example.
* Again frequent crashes when reading/writing when nonblock flag is set.

I am sure, situation is lot better now but for building a reactor library, native Ruby IO primitives fell short. There is always lack of advanced selectors (Epoll/KQueue) as well.

Now as I replied to thomas(?) below and since you yourself have wrapped libevent for Ruby 1.9, there were severe limitation in interpreter back then for even libevent wrapper to work. So I guess, given historical reasons, it made sense Eventmachine did not use native Ruby IO primitives or libevent.
Gotta say that Startup School 2012 had some really great talks. I had the chance to attend in person and it exceeded my expectation. The speakers shared some great insights and stories about their startups and each one gave a different perspective.

My favorite speaker probably was Joel Spolsky (and his slow, organic growth vs land-grab talk).

I love how Joel used Fog Creek to fund StackExchange's development and now Trello, which both seem to be land-grab businesses. It's almost like Fog Creek is it's own startup incubator now. Maybe a new model of funding/startups?
There are a couple of interpretations that makes this article interesting 7 years after it was written.

1. Is MS now "risking it all" with Windows 8? Windows 8 is certainly ballsy, but no, MS is not risking it all. The worst case scenario for Win8 is another epic marketing fail like Vista and slow adoption, followed by immediate uptake of Win9. Unlike companies such as RIM that have been largely banished from their core markets by Apple, MS's core market hasn't gone anywhere and isn't going anywhere. MS has expanded their hardware division somewhat (e.g. the Xbox), but to nowhere near the same extent as Apple. MS has not been pushed to the brink such that they need to risk it all to survive. MS hasn't shrunk in fact. The company just looks small now that Apple has shot past them to become so big. Win8 is not a desperate bid for survival, but rather, a new foray into areas MS hasn't been successful in to date.

2. Is Apple now in MS's shoes from half a decade or so ago? iPod - 2001, iPhone - 2007, Ipad - 2010. While Apple hasn't exactly disrupted any industries lately, it's not as if they've had a long dry spell. Still, there are some worrying signs. The iPod was immensely profitable for Apple because it took so long for halfway decent competitors to arise. The iPhone was under siege by Android in a much shorter period of time and the iPad in a shorter time-frame still. The iPad mini actually arrived after it's competition, with inferior specs and a higher price to boot. The only thing it has going for it is branding. Was this a fluke or is Apple losing ground? What is beyond question is that Apple is now a giant with everything to lose rather than the nearly bankrupt company of the late 90's that had just two choices: innovate or die. Apple is sitting on such a giant pile of cash that, instead of trying to innovate, they could easily decide to just keep making their stuff smaller (or bigger) and sue the pants off of anyone who makes anything similar. They could do this, but it's very premature to say that they have. Apple is leaking more product info these days, but it's not like a retina 13" macbook pro was such a surprise that it had to be kept secret. Apple may still have disruptive stuff under wraps somewhere in the dark recesses of Cupertino.
I totally agree. Her talk was by far the most practical, and provided serious actionable advice. I really liked it!

I also agree that Travis was probably the only one who didn't give much insight or advice into entrepreneurship, which was unfortunate.

I tried to summarize most of them here if you don't want to watch video http://www.backspac.es/tag/sus2012

PS. Scoble tried to ask Ron if he would still invest in Highlight
For the US would never allow spying in the telecommunications infrastructure, would they?
> I hate it when security people treat everything black and white.

That's because experience shows if things are "grey" then someone can almost certainly break in.
Right, because power structures don't arise naturally from the topography of human social relationships, but from the erection of organized government.

The rule that wealthy will buy of govt is not a rule. Its just an observation that is pertinent today because they adapted to the legislative system, and the legislative system didn't evolve fast enough to get away from them.

The corruption and overtake of the US government is many years in the making. It isn't complete, and it is repairable and it has historical been able to achieve a stable healthy dynamic equilibrium.
You can do that on udemy.com
> 7 years after it was written

Funny, I didn't even realize this while I was reading the article. My only thought that aligned with this was "it's an odd mistake for him to refer to WinRT as WinFX."
I imagine it's slightly more complicated than X do Y ergo respect.

And really, if I was more okay with paraphrasing/slicing up the original text, I probably would have removed the "are respected and" bits.
David Allen on How to Fix Your Life
People that use average to describe the middle of non-symmetric distributions are dumb.
If I owned the only bridge in town, I'd be giving lots of money to the people that had the power to authorize new bridges; they may even be personal friends or current employees of mine (who better to call the shots on the bridge than someone who has already built one).

I'd also sign near perpetuity contracts with all the shipping firms offering them lower rates for exclusivity of my bridge.

I'd push for tougher building and environmental standards so that any would-be competitor would have a larger barrier to entry and have to go through a longer approval and vetting process than I ever did.

My bridge would be the one with the proximity of gas stations, factories and major roads simply because it was there first.

Other bridges then wouldn't be built not because I'm offering a better service, not because the patrons are charged fair tolls, and not because the roads are clean and well maintained.

No. Other bridges wouldn't be built because my friends wouldn't approve them; they would be further away from the major roads, they would have to go out and pitch to each shipping client, and face a substantially higher cost of constructions. Additionally, they would have to deal with the arguments "We already have a bridge" and all the NIMBY lawsuits that comes with it. Hell, I'd even pay for their lawyers.

I'd focus on maximizing profit and making sure I remain the only game in town.

When someone has the capital and motivation to effectively stop the competition from ever forming it's in their interest to do everything they can to pre-emptively do so from the start.

Heck, it's probably even outlined in the initial business proposal given that addressing potential competition is such standard practice.
Using Objective-C Collection Operators
I once listened to a lecture by a guy at the ACPFG (Australian Centre for plant functional genomics) who was working on computer vision -

the problem is to evaluate a large amount of pictures of plants to gather information about each individual, i.e., how large the leaves are, how green (or healthy) the plant is, how large the plant in itself is etc.

I don't think they got that far, as they are still (AFAIK) evaluating their experimental plants by "eye". Might be something for you!

They've been looking for people in the past: http://www.tafejobs.com.au/show.php?title=research_associate...
Its actually very funny, to me, that you suggested this.

In my previous job, this was precisely the structure the firm evolved to give to certain customers who were on the fence about the service. (B2B - financial Services)

We had one tweak to it, and once people used it, they never got out.
How is it misleading? Iran has shown willingness to use fake certificates and the US has been cyber-attacking them. It's a reasonable example for a country. The point here is to make the threat less abstract by using a scenario, not to rally political sentiment.
This is really nothing special, so many large companies have a no-sueing clause, such as Steam/Valve, Sony and ebay.

If this is something that makes you close your paypal account, it's probably something you should've done years ago, because that update is nothing. The extent the anti-paypal circlejerk has come on HN is ridiculous, at least be mad over things which actually are bad, not something which is the norm.
Oh nonsense. It's not like you can just come along and set up another bridge; that takes years, and the incumbent is likely to leverage some of the economic rents to frustrating your purpose.
Oddly enough, an early landmark Supreme Court case in the US involved the owners of one bridge suing to try to stop a competing bridge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_River_Bridge_v._Warren_...
I feel like the Rand stuff was shoe-horned in to make the title fit

Not really. It is just buried in the long article (probably too deep).

TL;DR: he likes Rand, has the cover of one of her books as his Twitter avatar, and defends her ideas on the web.

The passage:

From an interview with the Washington Post:

“WP: I noticed your Twitter avatar is the cover of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”

Kalanack: I don’t know what you’re talking about. [Laughs.] It’s less of a political statement. It’s just personally one of my favorite books. I’m a fan of architecture.”

See. Not a political statement. He’s just a fan of architecture. And one can only assume, then, that it was a completely different Travis Kalanick who responded to the Mahalo question “How would Ayn Rand react to the current policies and realities in the USA?” thusly…

One of the interesting stats I came across was that 50% of all California taxes are paid by 141,000 people (a state with 30mm inhabitants). This hit home as I had recently finished Atlas Shrugged. If 141,000 affluent people in CA went “on strike”, CA would be d

one for… another reason you can’t keep increasing taxes to pay for unaccountable gov’t programs that offer poor services.
Can this not be named Oz? Oz is the name of a perfectly fine programming language.
It's quoting the Canadian general counsel.
Could be a selective grab of one of Mr. Norton's quotes in the article:

“The Morouns are greedy. They are manipulative. They are cynical.”
There are density based clustering algorithms which I believe help with this.
Twitter's API guidelines claim another victim: News.me
The social news aggregator that bought Digg announces it is dropping its iPhone and iPad apps and points the blame at Twitter.
If You Haven’t Seen Your Doctor In A Few Years, Expect To Pay ‘New Patient’ Fee
You also have to look through the app store's search results. And sign up in the app if it requires it.
Skyfall : Javier Bardem, le méchant à la tignasse blonde 
À deux jours de la sortie de Skyfall en France, Javier Bardem livre ses impressions sur le film de Sam Mendes. Il est le méchant du 23e James Bond qui affronte Daniel Craig, dans la peau de 007.
Yes, the Falcon patches work like a charm against p286.
You hit the nail on the head about Windows and Office. I think Microsoft could bank (and has to an extent) on customers flocking to its services if they could work on delivering specifics instead of, what seems like for the last decade, just reactions. There are a lot of purchasing managers and CIOs that know that if MS puts out a product in the enterprise space it's at least a safe bet. But they lose that as the enterprise blurs into the realm of the personal and MS makes larger bets into the personal space.

Microsoft's problem is that while Windows and Office give MS the freedom to explore new markets those same two things let them treat these new markets as nothing more than multi-billion dollar whims that ultimately leave customers gun shy. I'm probably one of the last ten or so people that still has a Zune subscription (because the price and software are really compelling) but I also know that if they shut the entire thing down tomorrow and told all their Zune customers to go pound sand it wouldn't make a single penny's worth of difference on the Earnings Per Share report at the next quarterly earnings conference call.

But while you say that Windows Phone was a wake up call it doesn't seem like it from the outside. When Apple announces things they give dates and prices, Microsoft announces things like the Lumia line, which look great, but they lose when they fail to deliver specifics instead just relying on everybody knowing that anything the demo will be available in the next 6-18 months.

MS may have finally turned a corner by not releasing a half baked tablet OS in an effort to fight for the number 2 spot in the tablet wars, they waited until their "perspective" on tablet usage was ready. But still, they failed to outline specific dates and prices until relatively recently. People will "flock" to commitments to specifics, not so much so to "oh, shit if we don't find a MS response to threat X it's going to be bad".