skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To answer the question: "wtf just happened."

If you have ever seen the TV show "House" [1] its the part where each doctor makes a different diagnosis and Dr. House keeps trying to fit all the pieces together to get to the real issue.

Clearly Color is in a state of transition, I know of no company with an absent CEO, and no COO, that are stable. The tech "press" is in a feeding frenzy trying to be the first to 'diagnose' the cause and the eventual effect. Apparently its a solid bullet point in one's blogume' to say "I broke the <company> story."

[1] The TV series House as written up by Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(TV_series)
I feel like this is what the rating system helps deal with. You should be finding yourself with drastically more taxi experiences where 20% is a reasonable tip.
This is such a horribly written headline. What a hyper-convoluted way of writing.
>That's an outright lie. cf. http://opalang.org

While I agree with you wrt to there being other examples, and the original claim was wrong/false, it could be considered presumptuous to label this as 'an outright lie'.

Most people I know, and the internets, seem to agree that lying requires: intent to deceive.

Having chatted with Matt DeBergalis online and in person on occasion, he comes across rather honest in my admittedly subjective opinion (although welcome to hear contrary info). So if we accept that, then it seems unlikely he would intentionally allow the team to spread falsehood knowingly (especially if it's so easily refuted).

FWIW, I think Meteor is cool for certain camps and projects, but I also really like the 'pick and choose' NPM-friendly style of node development (in fact my personal preference at the moment is for an open modular ecosystem vs a monolithic framework with plenty of magic), so it's not like I have any particular emotional investment in saying this, other than to correct the record.

So in conclusion, this does not seem like a totally fair assessment of the author.

(And yes I realized you mentioned no-one by name, but a project website cannot 'lie'. At the end of the day, a person was still responsible for writing those words).
It was obvious from day one that Color was going to be acquired for a pretty penny. It's even in their pitch deck:

http://www.slideshare.net/kitseeborg/color-faux-pitch-ddeck

See slide 45: "We're going to flip this bitch like flipper!"
"High double digits" seems like a lot to pay for color.com and @color (although it is a great domain and handle).

Maybe they have some really cool patents that they can use to sue Samsung or Google for $500 million and make the acquisition a net profit.
Meteor possibly seen in Silicon Valley
Great work! I made a similar extension a few months ago but only for Craigslist (https://github.com/yonran/craigslist-shortcuts), but it’s great that your one works on many different websites. I still prefer simply focusing the link instead of also adding a background-color, though.
Wow I would love to learn the details of this technology.
Most websites are busier during the week, while we are all procrastinating at work.
So...color has lupus?
It would be hypocritical to say "Everyone should voluntarily not use their special rights to vote twice" and then vote twice. It's not hypocritical to say "The law should be changed" and then go vote twice.

As in, there is no contradiction or hypocrisy if someone explicitly states their ordered preferences like this:

1) The law states that everyone gets one vote, I vote once.

2) The law states that college grads get two votes, I vote twice.

3) The law states that college grads get two votes, I vote once.

Jeff Bezos isn't opposing patents on moral grounds; he thinks that there would be economic benefit to everyone, including his company, to get rid of them. It would be of economic benefit to only everyone but Amazon if only Amazon abstained from having patents.
Very compelling, thanks for posting this. A123 sounds like it will be an usefull case-study somewhere, in years to come.

I always thought that they should have focused on smaller items. A car is a major item and it's something that grabs headlines, but A123's cells could be used for other applications

One interesting question, in hindsight, might be would they have survived/ succeeded at reduced scale? And what role valuation and politics had in force-feeding them into a make-it-or-break-it aspiration.

Hopefully some of their good stuff will remain available, in whatever form, however.
That's a great point about the Harry Potter Lexicon case. One thing that's interesting about that ruling is how narrow it was, and the implication that if the Lexicon contained more extensive commentary it would be legal.

Here's a question[1]. Let's say you took a work that was not in the public domain but has been the subject of extensive academic study, like A Perfect Day for Bananafish. Every line of that short story has been quoted in an academic paper at this point, and each quote was fair use. What would happen if you compiled all of those papers in a single website? That website would contain the full text of A Perfect Day for Bananafish, but in a fragmented form. Would it still be fair use?

Now let's say you pieced the quotes together like a jigsaw puzzle, and included the extensive commentary in flyover annotations. Is it still fair use? Probably not, would be my guess.

What if only half of the quotes were pieced together, and the rest was summarized? What if the annotations of the summaries included quotes that fill in the rest of the story? Where exactly is the line drawn?

I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing, I promise. I just find it interesting. It's like we're facing the metaphysics of copyright, sort of a Borges As IP Lawyer thing.

[1] Posed as a thought experiment, because I have no idea what the answer is.
You could probably get away with a single rule - avoid processed foods and drinks. If a machine is used to break something down, it's invariably increases the GI of the foodstuff. Blending a banana into a smoothy will leave you with a higher GI meal than simply eating the banana. Drinking juice leaves you with little to none of the soluble fiber which would slow the release of sugar into your system. Let your body do the work of breaking down your food.
I guess there isn't enough detail to raelly work out what would happen - its not clear that they meant whole disk encryption in the way you described. I thought they encrypt the disk _only_ after loss of communications. The private key is not on the VM anywhere. Thus, the vm once encrypted, is useless (without the passphrase, which presumably only exist in the head of the operator of tpb).
Kuenselonline » Blog Archive » Accessing an e-book
it's never lupus.
I agree, and would've preferred

"How your productivity is determined by what you eat"

"The science behind" is a convoluted way of saying "how".
not to be persnickety but its a BSON document store. Theres a difference.
In this instance, I think Amazon's past transgressions make Bezos' argument more credible, not less. Amazon is a poster-child for successfully and profitably abusing the patent system by getting a trivial patent. If even they are willing to turn around and say the system is broken, then the breakage must be severe and obvious.
The first rule is: Eat food.
The long-term value of a company is based on the amount of value they create for customers. The short-term value of the company depends on profit.

So, for example, an MBA can increase profits by cutting R&D. Or by cutting costs in a way that harms product quality. The company will do well for a while because it takes a while for things like reputation and mindshare to decline. You can hide the declines for longer by investing more in promotion.

The engineer-style approach, in contrast, is to focus on cutting waste rather than cost. This is a high art in the Toyota Production System:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_%28Japanese_term%29

I don't know that the leveling off is a necessary consequence of the MBA approach. But it's certainly what I've seen, and it makes some intuitive sense. Given that some ways to increase profit improve productivity and some harm it, it's plausible that all the cheap ways to improve productivity would be exhausted early in the MBA approach.

I also think the MBA approach can lead you into a local maximum that's pretty screwed up:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n...

That's a great radio story about NUMMI, one of GM's worst plant that under the Toyota system became one of the best.
So, I'm going to be that guy.

Twilio makes its money on SMS and voice services. Those services are cheap and very easy to develop with using Twilio.

Note though that most cellular carriers are moving towards data plans instead of voice packages (Verizon especially) because most people use their phones/mobile devices for data consumption, and less as phones. So while I think Twilio provides fabulous value now, I feel like they're at the tail end of the telephone-based telecommunications revolution. As people move more away from POTS calls (and more towards Skype, Google Chat, iMessages, etc), the need for phone calls and SMS messages will drop quite a bit, as they'll all be handled over other services.

TL;DR Twilio has a shelf life. It'd be like developing services around a shrinking but still necessary industry (like the postal service).

Disclaimer: I love Twilio. I went to last year's TwilioCon and have met management.
This almost seems like a dismissal of your users. As he says, square has two types of user: buyer and seller. Only the seller is really square's customer, by the traditional definition of that word. By dropping the term user, and only talking about customers, it seems like the buyer might end up getting neglected.

When your boss asks you a question like "how does this impact the customer", you tend to only think about the people who pay you money, not the other strange definitions of customer that jack might have invented.
Entrepreneurs, Investors and Financial Engineers – Not All Are "Business People"
It's entirely possible that Apple saw, in Color, the ability to acquire some valuable patents, talent, or capabilities at fire sale prices that it would spend a lot more trying to develop in house.

Remember that distressed assets in one company's hands are highly productive assets in a different company's hands. If the company actually has been run into the ground, all the better for Apple, because it can get a steeper discount on the assets it's after.
They do have some patent for HD video, battery, and more. Up to 6 is what I've read.
Definitely not - UBERx is still going strong and we'll keep adding cars to it. We just didn't want to confuse people by lumping X/Taxi into one post.
Hooray! For-profit universities are almost uniformly a scam.
And Socketstream
This Likely Explains The Silicon Valley Fireball - Orionids Meteor Shower 2012
Here's the real color.com VC pitch, not the fake one they distributed.

=====

"Look, we want a bunch of money from you VCs. A LOT of it. Here's what we've got: Some great patents, and the prospect of some more as we continue R&D. More importantly, these patents are in a strategically critical space where Google, Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft are all vying for supremacy.

"So here's what we're going to do with your money: Either (a) Shake a bunch of people down for big bucks, in which case we'll need your money for legal fees. Only we may not need it, but knowing we can afford to pay lawyers will make the big guys settle. Or (b) Sell the patents.

"Yeah, we anticipated the "We don't fund patent trolls" objection. Here are the bullshit products we plan to roll out. Sure they suck, but they buy us credibility in the valley as an operating entity. Nobody will accuse you of funding a troll.

"And hey, one of these dogs with fleas may actually catch on, you never know. If not, we shoot it and make another, we just call it "pivoting" while we carry on negotiations for patent royalties.

"Whaddya say, how does M$40 sound, plus an extra mil so we can say "The low forties" on the press release?"
Hey there, we have about 65 taxis in SF already and should be up in the hundreds shortly. It's a completely different regulatory environment than NYC, and (thus far) much friendlier toward innovation. You can still use Square to pay for a cab in SF, but not in NYC.
Real Estate was the last bubble. University of Phoenix and all the other manifestations of academia will be the "next" bubble to burst. And it ain't gonna be pretty.
This is the reason Jack is the modern day Steve Jobs.
1 word: leverage.

It's easier for you to take a below-market value without switching companies than it is for you to quit your job, take a risk and hope for a higher value on the open market.

The best thing to do in this situation is to have leverage. other offers, networks, or a side business that lets you call them out on their offer and start negotiating for something better.
If it's automatically added, it's just part of the price. It's like saying "we automatically add 20% for the cost of gas."
I'm not sure if these were so wild, since they don't seem to be companies as high-profile or controversial as Color. Siri is somewhat wild insofar most people didn't expect that Apple was working on such a project. I'm talking more about the Apple will buy Twitter/EA/RIM stories.

http://technologizer.com/2011/07/29/a-brief-history-of-apple...
That was a very poor analysis. I am not a statistician either but I have experience in analysing large pools of data, and you would typically look at a number of other factors, such as day of the week, impact of weekends, impact of seasons, error range, standard deviation in order to get a hint of what is out of the average or not. Just plotting data and comparing bars does not quality, even remotely, as an analysis.
Just look at FB, Twitter, Tumblr. We are customers to them because we're clicking on ads, interacting with the site, and driving traffic. If those sites were a store, and we walked in and looked around, would we be considered customers or users? Customers.
In practical terms, it's a way for Uber to put more cars on their network, which hopefully makes it more likely that there's a ride nearby when you open the app in the Sunset, Richmond, Pac Heights or wherever else there's a low concentration of taxis (OK, so everywhere in SF).
Meteor.js?
Zamfi nailed it - NYC is 10x the population, but Manhattan is not. If you've ever tried to get a cab in both NYC and SF, you know that difference in medallions is very real.
The Internet Has Gone Too Far
Agreed with this, but I can get over it for now.
The opening lyric is a little confusing. "She got a big booty so I call her Big Booty." CEO's aren't necessarily good leaders; that's not why they're the leader. CEO's are the founders. Find a better lyric, maybe? Right?
Indispensable comment about Opera having fully customizable page and browser keyboard navigation that works with every site built in since prehistorical ages (in Chrome timeline 8-). http://imgur.com/I2Vpk
In the upcoming House movie, they find out that every disease is Lupus.
What's cheaper? UberX, Lyft, or UberTAXI?
I'm more interested in what this story says about HN? How often does HN get wrapped up in personal stories without hearing the other side? Or get wrapped up in virtually meaningless drama like this such that we have THREE such major "stories" throughout the day distracting from things of legitimate interest or value to "hackers" (or their bossses, etc).

I pay about as much attention to these stories as I do the stories that volley back and forth on peoples' blogs and the front page of HN.

Though I must say, three in one day was enough to troll me into both coming here and even commenting a smidgen of frustration/surprise.
65? How do you expect this to be any different from NYC if NYC had double? I want to see this grow, don't get me wrong, but 65?
I'm surprised Palantir didn't buy them just to take over their prime downtown Palo Alto real estate leases (one of the few big spaces not taken already by Palantir...)
LOL! But never going to happen!
Pacemaker hack can remotely deliver deadly 830-volt jolt
Very tempted to ask "In what way does postgres compare to an assembler and mongodb to a high level language?" but I think I'll just assume that you're trolling.

Besides, SQL sounds more high-level than map-reduce to me.
Is Lyft actually cheaper than a taxi?
Where are the pics ?
At present, the only way to access all of my "saved stories" is to send
in a scraper to keep walking the 'more' link until it no longer exists.
With the "unknown or expired link" timer, one would have to repeatedly
hit the site quickly to get all of the saved stories. Similar is true
for a user's comments and submissions. Needless to say, HN already has
enough trouble with bots/scrapers, so it would be rather unfriendly to
add to the load.

Is it possible to provide a 'download all' link for a user to get their
own comments, submissions, and saved stories?
In LA, the Uber black rates are approximately 20% more than the same trip via taxi. So since it all works out to the same, it doesn't make sense to not go for the Uber black service.
As a fellow member of our startup world, congratulations to Color! They deserved success after spotting the opportunity the new mobile era presents for transforming the way people share the stories of their lives. Their constant innovating and striving to learn and grow was sure to bring them plentiful benefits.
Thinking further, another factor may be that MBA thinking tends to be focused on external competition, while engineers tend to optimize regardless of competition. So the American car companies could have leveled off because their major competitors were doing equally well. By the time Toyota was an obvious threat, they were too far behind to even understand how they were being beaten.

Google is another good example. They didn't seek out data center "best practices". They radically bested the competition, proceeding one step at a time, with careful attention to what they needed. In an MBA analysis, that would be seen as spending a lot of money on risky R&D with no obvious ROI. In fact, they'd want to re-task all those expensive engineer brains to something more directly related to revenue. And probably drop the quality of the ops staff as a money-saving measure.

It's only when the years of patient engineer-style optimization add up to an insurmountable lead that it looks good in a B-school spreadsheet.
There's no reason for Apple to buy Color. A couple of patents on recently invented stuff? Unlikely. Buying the patents would make sense, not buying the company. Acquire a team? Why not just hire them? Is the team really that attached to a company going nowhere?

So I call this rumor nonsense. On the other hand, if this rumor is true it says a lot about Apple management and none of it good.
Think of it as a paid/free post-grad degree! And I say this to you as someone sitting in NYC...
Sarcoidosis
You can still use Square to pay for a cab in SF, but not in NYC.

Why would I want to? NYC cabs have credit card readers.
Wrong company - apparently its "Silicon Color" not "Color" that got bought.

http://appleinsider.com/article/?id=2147
I'm sure that it will be encrypted.
When you do a benchmark you usually run the code more than once. It's milliseconds. The real question is how many time the code loop.

But anyway the interesting number is how many times it's slower compared to an equivalent code.
Not to be confused with "Apple acquires Silicon Color"

http://appleinsider.com/article/?id=2147
Microsoft fails to explain Windows 8 vs. Windows RT to consumers
This thread is going to be hilarious. There's nothing quite so beautiful as people who read the same half dozen pop science books arguing about nutrition, a stupidly complex science about which almost no universal statements can be made (with one and only one exception[2]).

For example: I am an intermittent faster[1]. I don't have breakfast, have a modest lunch and a large dinner (heavy or light on carbs, depending on my training). I lift weights 5 or 6 evenings a week.

I am as productive as hell in the mornings.

The reason I eat this way is because I suck at portion control. 3 small meals, fiddling with plates or not, is torture. Whereas I am perfectly capable of not eating in the first place.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/17/my-diet/

[2] That net calorie balance is the determinant of long term average bodyweight. Lots of people are annoyed by that: http://chester.id.au/2012/05/26/fat-and-simple/

[3] Yes, I know I'm spamming links to my own blog. It's just easier than typing out the same stuff all over again.
> And to the caching point -- having data cached locally in memory is great, but you can't trust that.

You can if you design around handling a possibly-stale cache.
How Does the Internet Works?
Hi Ed, Colin, co-founder of Customer.io here. We haven't chatted yet, but I totally agree about the growing interest in this space helping all of us.

I'm thrilled to be working with you all as peers. I met Des from Intercom recently -- stellar guy. And from what I know of Chris and James at Vero, they seem great too.

Haven't met the rest of you guys yet, but if you'll be at the "Inbox Love" conference next week in SF, I'd love to chat there.
Two things caught me by surprise:

for ($i = 0; $i < count($array); $i++)

I thought PHP would be smart enough to optimise this.

'contains no dollar signs'

I practised the single vs. double quotes thing religiosity. I'm kind of embarrassed it doesn't actually make a difference.
> If authorities wanted to intercept the communications of a person using Silent Circle, it is likely they’d have to resort to deploying Trojan-style tools—infecting targeted devices with spyware to covertly record communications before they become encrypted.
11 years ago I worked as a developer in the ER department of a hospital near Seattle. During my first two weeks I noticed that many of the workstations in the department were compromised (even though they had antivirus software). I was 18 at the time and figured the best way to start a dialogue about the problem was to email one of the mailing lists that showed up in Outlook when I started typing "IT". Unfortunately it was a list of IT vice presidents who now wanted to know why their direct reports had no idea that there were issues with malware or viruses. Those direct reports in turn wanted my head; I quit soon after because it became so uncomfortable.

I learned a valuable lesson, though: don't work for companies that would rather save face than know about serious issues. I've also tried to be slightly more tactful since then. :P
That website would contain the full text of A Perfect Day for Bananafish, but in a fragmented form. Would it still be fair use?

This is a good question. The Academic purpose, however, would seem to be very useful as a criterion for Fair use (under point 1). The completeness of a compendium, however, may create its own issues (under point 4).[1]

The closest commercial example, might be sampling of music. Perhaps the early 80's, with the emergence of DJ culture etc. Small pieces of extant art, repurposed. This did not usually impact the original adversely. And the issue is not that no new value is being created -- it most certainly is -- its just that these things tend to end up in court. So, to avoid that, people settle or license.

I would be open to hearing other arguments or cases, but I think that we would need to start with something that has at its origin a commercial endeavor. Another example that comes to Mind is Shep Farley, the Obama Hope poster. This had a good amount of transformation on top of a sample of an image from a photograph. But ended up being settled out of court. See eg:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey#Legal%20issues%2...

_______

[1] Eg if it rendered away in full the need to buy at least 1 extant copy to study