skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting... these guys had a heavy presence at my campus last year (Texas A&M University) but have since been nowhere to be found. I know of no one that uses the app anymore at all, not many people did in the first place.

It should be interesting to see what Apple does with this acquisition.
We do; it's called Google Voice.
Color was introduced to the iPod touch a few weeks back, so maybe.
I think this is the most important point left out of the article. How hard it is to admit that you don't know something is dependent on the costs of doing so. Sometimes it's harder to pretend you do know.

The better real world example isn't poker, but it comes up anytime you're talking with someone who knows less than you: your boss, customers, friends. The cost of being caught at wrong answers is often quite low.

And often the cost isn't only low to yourself, but to all parties involved. The article's author makes the leap to academic dishonesty right away. But, especially in this field of work, we talk a lot about the value of social skills over pure technical skills. BSing has a bad connotation but you can also think of it as consistently leaving good impressions or presenting things in the best light. It's not a rigid distinction.

A good example is the post below who said he probably got passed up for promotions because saying I don't know made the boss think he lacked "confidence". It's not surprising that the person in charge might disagree with the value of "I don't know". It's probably part of the social skill set that put him in charge in the first place.

Of course in the technical field the cost of a fudged truth can be very high, but the potential benefits are equally high, because you're often dealing with people who don't have the background to judge anything on its technical merits. The less knowledgeable they are, the more they have to rely on your presentation.

The "courage" to say I don't know is a good standard in academic and technical fields, but in the fields of business and politics (and social interactions in general!) it's not so clear-cut.
Whether it's customer or user, the experience better rock! Less time on semantics and more on great products that people want to use.
If it makes it any better, most of the phrasing was from their About page.
Unfortunately it's not available in most places.
High-level guidelines for writing manageable and maintainable CSS
Drones can testify in court? Advanced!
In the 'faux pitch deck'? It's called a joke.

Or did you really think after Slide 2: "Colors: people love that shit" this was a real pitch deck?
Even Color doesn’t know what’s happening at Color
For those like me who have no ides what ETL stands for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load
They had locations?
Are the sources sure that the rumors don't refer to Silicon Color which was reported yesterday?
Amazon's IO/IOPS performance is pale on comparison to a lot of providers (shameless plug): http://serverbear.com/benchmarks/io
Source? If true, brilliance on Bill Ngyuens end and shame on the tech press for not getting it.
Relevant > http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4666978
I eat that way too. You (well, I) simply don't get hungry until you eat, once you adapt. Adaptation only takes 2-3 days. Now I feel high energy all morning.
Apple just jumped the shark if this is true.

Bill Nguyen is massively talented at making things work for Bill Nguyen - his prior business bought by Apple for ~$80m, Lala.com, was lackluster at best.

Under Jobs you could kind of, sort of get your head around $80m for essentially a talent acquisition in streaming / digital music which is/was an important revenue stream for AAPL.

But even under Jobs the supposed golden boy, Nguyen, bailed. Taking his vision and some of his best people with him.

So I see this as "Apple makes the same mistake twice" - and if Apple is going to jump into the "social around you, bullshit, blah blah blah" game through this acquisition I am truly sad.
unless you're a magician played by Steve Valentine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Don%27t_Want_to_Know
I don't mean to be insensitive about the poster's situation, but it would just seem to me that if you're going through with the long and dramatic process of changing your gender that the commit behavior of a common source code control system would be the least of your considerations.

Men may not change names as often as women, but they certainly change email addresses, job titles, and other affiliations. This creates very similar practical considerations, not just with SCCS, but with mailing list archives, web archives, and most every other form of electronic record.

This poster seems to have an issue with the static and un-malleable nature of the written past in general.
That's a great point which didn't occur to me; thanks for mentioning it!

For people curious about what was merged, see https://lwn.net/Articles/518711/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/519883/
Saying you would use the rules to your advantage even though you disagree with them is very much hypocritical.

You may not agree with Wikipedia's definition of hypocrisy. That's fine, find another. But practicing the opposite of what you believe fits it perfectly.
Just because you have competing offers doesn't mean that you should tell them the exact amount.

Tell them you have other offers, and cannot respond to them immediately but will get back to them. Tell them your concerns about remuneration: quality of life, work role, etc. but so you have more points to negotiate upon.

If you make it about a singular point, it could just break negotiations and get you less in terms of total compensation than you'd have otherwise been able to gain.
That was on October 16 of 2006, not 2012.
It is unfortunate (for the rest of us) that datacenter tech is such a competitive advantage for Google. If they were able to share their breakthroughs more readily with others, imagine how much less of the "1.5% of all power globally" datacenters could be using.
My mother had lupus, and she lived to 99.
Don't they make each application you use run with it's own user?
You've gotta tell 'em! <strike>SOYLENT GREEN</strike> Users / Customers IS PEOPLE! We gotta stop them! Somehow! Listen! Listen to me… PLEASE!!!
With Uber, you pay for a higher-quality of service. The ratings and screening should give you better drivers and maybe even better maintained cars and shorter wait time.

None of those benefits are guaranteed, obviously, but it's easy to imagine it working after having used Uber Black for so long and constantly being impressed by the professionalism of their drivers and quality of the experience.
Seriously. I can't believe they require JavaScript to view this all this eye-candy and server porn.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/

I thought GWT was designed to "compile" rendered pages for a wide variety of browsers and permutations of configurations?

The pictures are very pretty, but that's really awful of them to release a PR site like this, and force users into using JavaScript.

Unforgivable.
Just a suggestion, he should compare MongoDB and Riak on Hacker News. For laughs
Fact-Checking Obama and Romney on Apple and China
I'm gonna get downloaded, but seriously, fuck this.
You also need to consider that most wage earners have more discretionary money available at the end of the month. Some of this money will be spent on alcohol derived entertainment, and a consequent increase in the number of DUIs. I wonder if different types of violations are more common by time of month.
so if you're a foreign news correspondent, blackberry may be just to tool for you, but that's a fairly small market segment to be targetting.

Most people don't type articles on their phones, can charge once a day, and down feel the need to remove start-up animations,etc.

It's a bit of a shame, I was really hoping somebody had found a shining light for BlackBerry.
The closest solution for this is the SHIELD act. Write your elected officials and rally support!
On the other hand when you apply any non mathematical (ie. not standard deviation, etc) segmentation on the dataset you are artificially fitting the data.

The correct approach would be to search for patterns over time in the dataset (frequency analysis) and see what turns up.

not arbitrary segment the data into week sized blocks because you 'think' there might be a data pattern in there.

I see this sort of 'inspiration based' analysis in web analytics all the time, and it's complete nonsense.

Look for patterns in the data, don't look at the world and try to fit the data to it. You'll end up with stupid and statistically invalid results.
All good points. I want to make note of two other cases that seem relevant, both related to Youtube. In 2010, a judge in the US threw out Viacom's lawsuit against Youtube/Google, ruling that they were protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act when users posted copyrighted material[1]. In Lenz vs. Universal Music Corp.[2], a judge ruled that rightsholders have to consider if a piece of content is protected by fair use before filing DMCA takedown notices.

Let's say an annotation platform allowed users to post snippets of material as freely as Youtube, along with annotations and commentary. And let's use A Perfect Day for Bananafish again as the source of these snippets of text. Imagine the following sequence.

Alice posts the first paragraph of the story, along with extensive notes. Bob posts the second paragraph of the story, along with extensive notes. Carol adds an annotation to the first paragraph with a link to the second paragraph. Dave, Eve, and a few dozen other people jump in the mix, and pretty soon you have the entirety of A Perfect Day for Bananafish on the annotation site, and it's incredibly easy to read the paragraphs in full and in their original order. Maybe the annotation site even has an algorithm that detects related pieces of content, and creates the links automatically. (This is certainly the case for Youtube.)

Where should the takedown notice be directed? Each person in the chain only posted a small part of the work, and each post includes annotations and commentary that would seem to grant it fair use protections. Taken as a whole, though, the entire work has been recreated in full. Can the rightsholder demand that the website remove links users make between posts? If so, under what section of the DMCA? And what happens if the links are made algorithmically?

Does a rightsholder have to issue takedown notices for each piece of the chain individually? If the people who made the posts file appeals, does the rightsholder have to take each and every one of them to court in separate cases? And if they do, would they get demolished by counterclaims?

This isn't an idle question, when you think about the annotations for The Great Gatsby[3] that the founders of Rap Genius have been mentioning in their recent interviews. It seems like this sort of scenario is inevitable, and I don't know if copyright holders have any way of actually dealing with it.

[1] http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h_AfErLSM...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_v._Universal_Music_Corp.

[3] http://rapgenius.com/search?q=the+great+gatsby

Edit: It's important to keep in mind that, in this scenario, all of the potentially infringing content is being posted by people with no commercial motive, which makes it different from the Shepard Fairey case. The annotation site itself is making money, but is protected by the DMCA under current understanding of the law.

Edit x2: I love how deeply annotated this discussion of annotations is. Quick, someone link to this thread from Rap Genius and close the loop!
well, just signed up.

My first programming experiences were actually small games for the TI-83, a humble dream soccer and a bowling game.

PC's were very expensive around '95, a fact which also lead me to take computer science for having access to them at school and obviously, gaming :-) Warcraft, Dune 2, Lost Vikings and the sorts.

After my first job and subsequently, that fascination on developing games faded away under other things like e-commerce, corporate applications and messing with Linux also sinked a large deal of my spare time etc but haven't yet lost hope of finding a way into it.
Ask HN: Are tech companies becoming more unrealistic in hiring?
Yes, we know the problems of hiring the "wrong person" and the disasters they can bring to the team. However, the loss opportunity of being understaffed to not do all the projects you want to do is also an equally difficult problem.

Lately, I've seen the requirements of tech hiring get higher and higher and higher. If it get's any higher, the only people that's available to hire are sociopaths and liars because no living person on earth could ever fulfill these requirements. If the trend keeps going this way, a guy like Dennis Ritchie would be unhireable!

Is it just me or are tech companies becoming more unrealistic in their hiring practices? Is this a good thing in the long run?
Your argument lacks sense. Care to elaborate on how greater supply leads to higher prices?
Last I checked iTunes Match, which is the child of the Lala team, is working pretty well.
Thanks for the clarification.

The note about "beyond Django's ability to control" seems hand-wavey to me. Avoiding the use of the Host header to construct URLs -- not necessarily as a quick fix, but as a long-term better-practices goal -- would put safety against such attacks completely under Django's control, and provide a bit more defense-in-depth.
A 1940s' kid's return to the city with LA Noire
Wait, Don't We Want This Guy?
Honestly, my $5 stake in App.Net seems to be one such case.
Explaining Focused Controller - Ruby on Rails
Not quite... we don't give Facebook or Twitter money - their advertisers do. So, their customers are the advertisers. What are they selling? Us - our eyes and attention.

So, we are using the site, but we don't directly give them money to do so. Instead, they get money by putting ads in our faces while we use the site.

Now, the Facebook/Twitter user can be a customer in this scenario, just not of Facebook or Twitter. We (typically) are customers of the advertisers who want us to buy a car or sugar water or a widget.

So, the store analogy isn't quite apt for this... instead you could think of it more like a TV network. They don't call the people who watch their shows customers or users, but rather "viewers". TV network's customers are the businesses that buy time to air their commercials.
Why not open a window (assuming they open)?
He should have left out the for profit universities as part of the problem (they're a symptom not the cause). It's all about the free federal dollars. The parallels to the housing bust are pretty clear. Cheap and widely available mortgages led to exorbitant housing prices and an eventual bust. Cheap, widely available, and undischargable loans for education are leading to exorbitant education costs. It'll be interesting to see how this bubble ends.
How about you don't?
If true this might actually make it even easier for Nguyen to raise in future. If they have done little right and managed to deliver a return on a $40mil investment.
Bringing Google Calendar to the Play Store
The same story seems to be happening again and again.
http://www.businessinsider.com/its-crazy-that-the-us-kicked-...

Last time, due I suspect to much of the publicity that was garnered from the lack of an available visa, Amit (CEO of CruiseWise) was given a visa to stay in the country, and his company has continued and grown in the US as a result.
To some extent I'd agree, but these patterns are already deeply ingrained into corporate-speak external to any particular startup culture. Language such as "user issue" versus "customer feedback" is generally an indicator of importance. Perhaps not very meaningful (depending on your perspective), but important nonetheless.
Wow, apparently my attempt at sarcasm on the Internet failed with some people. Yes, I know the slide deck is a joke. sigh
On the social network I run, I call them members. I think it's a lot nicer than users. I also sometimes refer to them as musicians (since it's a site for musicians).

If I called them customers, they'd think I were trying to sell them something... which I'm not.
I'm pretty sure they're primarily an online university and the locations were for testing and some classes.

I only visited their campus in Phoenix once though.

Edit: The article actually confirms that most of the students are online, and it's closing "satellite learning centers".
World's Most Prominent Figures in One Picture - Solvay Conference 1927
People only want to fund great research that theoretically could stand on its own, but just gets done faster with government funding.
Thanks, we'll check it out!
I would downvote this story if I could. Color operates in a parallel bizarro world that most of us will, thank god, never know. $40M in funding and no users? Check. Three months off to Hawaii as founding CEO? Check. CEO who says he would pivot if he was back in the office? Check. Move along, there's nothing to see here.
Couldn't TPB do something like Silk Road with Tor and a .onion domain? I'm not exactly sure how that works, but from the limited knowledge I do have, it seems like that sort of approach would be slightly more difficult to access but also more difficult to take down...
Awesome, my parents make my sister play piano but she "hates" it. I wonder if this will help, haha
Haven't there been a handful of startups that are aquihired after announcing they're closing up shop?
There's a big difference between funding research, particularly defense-related research, and playing VC, guaranteeing hundreds of millions in loans to build factories. I don't think individual DARPA grants approach that size within an order of magnitude.

What exactly was "blue sky" about Solyndra or A123? Why trust politicians rather than the market to figure out how we'll generate and store energy in the future?
In post-trial battles with Samsung, Apple fights to keep documents sealed
Did you actually have any problem understanding it? I suspect that you didn't.
Nope. That is in reference to an actual, physical event, not a startup. My guess is that it's related to this: http://menlopark-atherton.patch.com/articles/orionids-meteor...
That seems like rather venue-specific advice. In the average lecture hall or conference room I've presented in, all the seats can see the full screen just fine.

In fact, I've sometimes put important graphics as low as possible, knowing the lights in a particular room tended to wash out the top half of slides a bit.
So voice is an iteration on Phil's Zfone product he was pushing a few years back...
I don't think it's just you. Hopefully enough people get sick of the "Required: 5 years of experience in every programming language created in the last 20 years" bullshit sooner rather than later.
I also eat this way. I feel great all day. Especially during the fast. It's much better than grazing, in my experience, which usually just leads to me being hungry all the time.
OpenJumpstarts is now Launcher.io
Good stuff - and good prizes
The acquisition is worth ~0.015% of Apple's marketcap. Maybe Apple has some misguided strategy here - maybe; your argument for this is overly-simple - but the acquisition is so small analyzing the affect on Apple is difficult.
This is a handy tip but calling it the zeroth law just because a cranky blogger got stuck at the back of a presentation is extreme.
It would be acceptable if salaries rose along with requirements. I do not see that happening where I am.
>Engineering and economics thrive in the Matlab world, especially in academia. It's a fairly good setup for them.

This is precisely what I'm concerned about. R is open source and used in production in various high profile places around the world. Matlab has the same (or lesser?) expressive power and is very expensive.

Why is Matlab (or its derivative Octave - often sold as "if you dont have Matlab...") used in academia at all ?
I'm interested if they will release enough to reproduce the entire system, or only the client aspect. It's apparently using client-client protocols, but there is obviously some level of discoverability provided by the network that is a monetisation avenue for the company.
Excellent article and I'm glad I read it, very interesting. Probably totally off topic for Hacker News though.

Summary for those who don't have time to read (it's long): she was raped, when she tried to report it was discouraged and told to go for counseling instead, did so. Since no one was listening to her she was upset and depressed. She was then declared mentally ill and forcibly institutionalized. The college then tried to use the hospitalization to block her from returning, claiming substance abuse (which wasn't true), until someone at the hospital pointed out to them that they were punishing the victim while the rapist goes free. So she was allowed back, but administration thwarted all her academic plans, while continuing to use the forced hospitalization as an excuse to control her life. In essence she was raped a second time.

It's not isolated either, a couple of other former students confirm similar handling of their own sex assaults in comments in the original published article. 'Daniel' reports the school trying to send him to a psychiatric hospital after reporting an assault. 'Kirby' reports similar attempts to shame her into not pressing charges. These reports suggest this is not an isolated incident but is an unwritten policy. http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article%2F2012%2F10%2F1...

These stories are similar to other accounts I have heard of how rape victims are treated. It's clear many institutions have policies of containment, and disenfranchisement, and will use forced institutionalization as a weapon to create someone who is then quite easy to completely discredit, by simply bringing up that they had been institutionalized. Makes the nasty rape statistics go away and the college gets to maintain its record of low crime incidence.

Worth noting Amherst is named after Lord Amherst, who was the insidious individual who approved the idea of giving smallpox infected blankets to indians as a form of germ warfare. (for skeptics, here is an actual letter in his handwriting saying so: http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/34_41_114_fn.jp...)

Amherst lives up to its namesake, but unfortunately many other colleges work the same way.
Methods to build a functional Hangman/Blackjack and many other games
I'm not in a senior position and I HATE getting the shit sandwich, it's irritating and insulting. Most of my coworkers (in various positions of seniority) also hate it.

I wouldn't use it period, unless you know for certain the specific person cannot handle criticism.
I'm the guy who wrote the accounts management platform for Silent Circle. Rest assured, passwords are stored as PBKDF2 hashes. (I realize bcrypt is popular around here, but when it comes to crypto stuff, standards are a good thing, most of the time...)

edit: s/DK/KD/
If I understand this properly, it is a gratuity. The way I understand it, the taxi is still a normal taxi in operation but essentially has hooked into Uber to give it a new way to find fares and to have people pay. If this is the case, then the rate is the same with or without Uber and you still need to pay the gratuity and Uber just automatically selects that gratuity to be 20%. It's actually appreciably different from Uber choosing a rate and then adding a 20% automatic gratuity on top of it.