skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines

It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless.

1. They have no production as of yet.
2. They have no carrier partners as of yet.
3. They have a retail partner who will sell the phones—if the carriers approve them.

The claim is that the retail partners control the mobile relationship with the carriers in China, but that would greatly surprise me. It's not impossible, but colour me skeptical.

It's also my understanding that Europeans don't necessarily get subsidized phones, either—but they still (nominally) control which phones are allowed on their networks.

It gets worse later in the article where it suggests that the carriers and handset manufacturers are going to have even more freedom to modify the base OS than Android manufacturers do. This alone guarantees that Sailfish will not be a viable platform—you will become as locked into a single manufacturer for any app you buy just like you did with "feature" phones that had BREW or JME games & apps.

The suggestion that Sailfish avoids patent infringement is also laughable: there's so many patents out there that I suspect that absolutely no one can write software that doesn't infringe on something these days. They think that they've avoided patent infringement (just as Google does with WebM), but until someone decides to sue over an alleged patent infringement, no one knows whether Jolla would win.

There's an interesting bit buried in the story, too: they have changed CEOs at least once. The current CEO is Marc Dillon; he attained that post in October when Jussi Hurmola stepped down and became a consultant to the company. Hurmola is supposedly looking after the Sailfish ecosystem. According to what I saw on LinkedIn, Hurmola may have only had the CEO position for as little as eight months, but possibly as much as eighteen (Jolla was founded in March 2011). For a startup with big ambitions, I would want as much stability at the top as possible, personally.
Just like camera's, the best programming language is the one you already know. It makes no sense learning a new language when, in the same amount of time, you could build and ship something real. If you're new to web development, I'd go with Ruby if you already have some experience, or PHP if you're blank. I'm well aware of the pitfalls of PHP, but there's just so much code and tutorials on the web to learn from.
Link for the lazy: http://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY
I also ordered it. From what I've read so far, it will go alongside SPIN Selling and Crossing the Chasm as my favorite sales/marketing books.
There certainly does seem to be a lot of political posturing going on, but I don't think it is coming from the scientists.
This isn't exactly about the article, but I think it's a little unfair to call this a "UPS Scam" (cf. domain name.) It's a customer-service slip-up, and they probably already issued the charge by the time the invoice was received.

Writing about this prior to calling back or even waiting to see if the chargeback went through seems like a kneejerk reaction, and it's made all the more inflammatory by calling it a scam.

(If it does happen to be a scam, it might be the least-effective one in the history of corporate scams: UPS is now CAD44.60 more in the green than it was before they took that payment. That's enough to buy, I don't know, a new blanket?)
>>I mean, I can't study for 10 minutes straight, much less 10 hours. It's certainly a talent I wish I had.

I bet if you try enough you can add another 5 minutes to those 10 minutes. And then later another 5 minutes, and then later another 5... And so on and some day you will go to 10 hours.

People often ask how somebody can sleep only for 6 hours. Or get up to work at 3 AM in the morning. That's possible only after trying hard enough for weeks a little bit at a time.
I found the source : http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/...
Statistical rankings of every college football team, vizualized
I had the same problem, FWIW. I gave up about 3 pages in. I've hired a lot of technical people, but no non-technical people.
Native Ads In 2013
They could have dug into their own pockets and paid their drivers the 2x pricing,

That would do nothing about demand (spiked because of mass transit closures). Discouraging consumption with price increases is to customers' benefit: it keeps the service available. You have choice of not riding by taxi, or paying twice the price; with a shortage, you have no choice -- you're stuck. (Of course Uber's PR is about the supply side; the demand effect is way too non-PC).
Hardly, unless Apple is in business of making babies.
So, to "protect consumers", they are proposing the following regulations:

* A rule to forbid luxury car services from using GPS to meter the precise time and distance
* A rule to forbid drivers from accepting electronic hails
* A rule that forbids limousines from arriving in less than 30 minutes.

The regulators are going to have a hard time convincing anyone they're actually doing this in the consumer's interest.
One single productivity python I'd like to share here is to use 'string foo'.partition(' ') instead of splitting. The reason is the edge cases are better handled with partition: you always get a 3-tuple, no matter what. No need to precheck that the split is here, or to postcheck the length of the splitted list.
Finally, some sense. Let's not forget the basic situation here: Uber's business model depends 100% on phenomenally expensive infrastructure built at the public expense: New York's roads, bridges, and tunnels. The cab network is an integral part of the transportation network of New York City, and has tremendous impacts on the tourism industry which is a huge part of the city's economy. This isn't just "big bad entrenched regulators" trying to fuck over a sprightly new startup. That's part of it, yes, but it's also about legitimate stakeholders ensuring that this new startup doesn't basically make money by arbitraging on regulations designed to protect the public and achieve a certain planning of the city's transportation infrastructure.
Worst time to join a startup is right after it gets initial VC financing (2009)
Asperger's syndrome dropped from the DSM psychiatrists' handbook
David Blane has a very interesting TED Talk on this, in which he shares how much preparation goes into doing some of his endurance tricks.

At the end of the talk he actually breaks down. Its one of my best TED Talks, I watch it almost every week to remind that even the most magical thing is hardly magical when you look at the effort that goes behind it.
And here I'm going to point to Bret's later writing, http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming. It's not about the sliders it's about the understanding. A good example is the first large loop setting up the texture.

for ( var i = 1; i < 16; i++) {
var br = 255 - ((Math.random() * 96) | 0);
for ( var y = 0; y < 16 * 3; y++) {
for ( var x = 0; x < 16; x++) {

...

}
}
}

If this was a first introduction to programming it would scare off many people.

My interpretation of Bret's idea is that it would be better to have the ability to highlight the section of the texture being written by each section of the loop. It's not the sliders & live editing that are most important it's about linking abstract control into meaning within the learner.
Kombee - Property management made simple
California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace "Made in Honduras" labels on garments with "Made in the USA."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoner...
@mikkel Thanks so much! That's a nice rubric to think about. As with many "startups" or "pre-startups" I have a vision, a big idea and lots of chutzpah. The only thing I don't have is technical know how and I'd really like to start learning soon.

Just started Codecademy today!
No wonder most successful people just look lucky to the masses. Because they achieve feats which can't be achieved with ordinary efforts. If you go by the normal effort, it isn't surprising successful people look lucky, just like magic.
Enjoyed that immensely, thank you!
Yes, I did and unfortunately I didn't get in. The interview was nothing like I expected, i.e. it was just PG and I talking about the idea. I intend to write a few blog posts covering the different stages of the application process as long as PG doesn't mind.
Hey, thanks for the comment. Makes sense and we made changes to the survey to address this. We're mostly focused on non-technical hires because that's what we primarily help companies recruit for (e.g., scaling marketing, biz dev, customer service, etc). But I agree that the survey needs to have N/A options so thanks for pointing it out.
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You make my argument for me. Crypto means nothing when you can be accused of rape, pedophilia, drug trafficking etc and have your life destroyed at the leisure of the powers that be. The only defense the average person has is security through obscurity.
I know that feel.. keep building awesome stuff.. you will get there eventually :)
Most of C++ production code I know, looks very similar to Java. memory managers, garbage collectors etc. are being used, most of language features are not used, so the code is simple, like Java,

Powerful language full of features yet programmers are scared to use most of them.
They may have since changed the requirements, or there may be a loophole elsewhere, or people may simply be disregarding the law. As noted below, however, it's pretty simple to find many accounts of this with some simple Googling.
If they are releasing any more Maemo phones (and I'm not sure they are), it's just a few last devices they had in the pipeline. At this point they've already decided that Maemo shall have no future.
This is barely newsworthy. It's being incorporated under the broader (and more nuanced) diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders.
I think it's more a little nudge at upsell: the 27 inch iMac's RAM is user-upgradeable.
What's the purpose of the Surface Pro?
What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What
As you can write Fortran in C (I've done it), it misses the point of D to view it through the lense of being a marginally improved C++. D is a substantially different language with a very different focus, and different paradigms.
However, note that Northern Marianas produces products with the "Made in the USA" label, despite not being in, near, or part of the USA, and having a history of terrible labor practices and corruption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mariana_Islands#Econom...
Could you explain a bit more? I am curious to hear your opinion.
Indeed reflection is limited.

There's a library called Reflex: http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/reflex

SOCI uses generic template accessors to read/write full objects: http://soci.sourceforge.net/doc/exchange.html#object_relatio...
A) In the 1980s there was a rabies scare in the UK. There was a TV series about rabies; a man tried to extort money by threatening to import rabies and release infected foxes.

i) What was the name of that TV series?

ii) Are there any newspaper reports about that man and his scheme?

B) Recently on british tv (probably BBC) there was a programme about people (possibly Indian?) who lived by reclaiming gold.

i) What is this tv programme called

ii) BONUS: Is there an on-demand legal playback for this programme? Is there a transcript for this programme?

(it is Welcome to India (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n8278) )

C) I watched a movie / tv programme.

i) What was the song played during that scene?

ii) What make of watch was the character wearing?

D) ALMOST ANYTHING USING AMAZON'S SEARCH TAKES FAR FAR TOO LONG AND IT IS A HATEFUL EXPERIENCE (apologies to any Amazoners reading this, but come on, the search is broken.)

E) I want a new spectacles case. I want it to be really freaking nice. I'm not sure what I want, but I'd know it when I saw it. I think I want something machined from a lump of aluminium / aluminum or a nice titanium shell. A solid, well made, box.

i) How can I find the case I want, while avoiding the SEO'd warehouses of bulk cheap and nasty glasses case websites?

I have lots of examples of things that take me too long to find. I used to know how to tweak the search query to get Google to give me better results. I've lost that ability, and the tweaking sometimes takes me longer than I'm interested in the subject. Sometimes I go back with a fresh mind and the tweak is obvious.

I'll keep a list of queries that don't work. (And the fixed query if I find it.)
I feel like you and your source misunderstand the phrase. It is worded confusingly, so it's not all that surprising.

Perhaps a better wording would be "Information tends to spread". It's really about the arrow of time. It's much easier to give someone information than to take information away from them. Taking public knowledge and making it secret is a lot harder than taking secret knowledge and making it public.

> Trade secrets don't want to be free, marketing projections don't want to be free, formulas don't want to be free, troop placements don't want to be free, CAD designs do not want to be free, corporate financial information doesn't want to be free, my credit report sure as hell doesn't want to be free!

Personification confuses the issue here, but assuming those examples were meant as "want to be secret" rather than the much weaker "don't want to be free ('cause they're information, and have no will of their own)" then I should point out that it's actually YOU that wants your credit report to stay secret, and the army that wants troop placements to remain secret. The information wants nothing, but will tend to spread.

There's nothing to stop you working against this natural tendency, but it requires you to put in a certain amount of effort and maintenance. Water tends to flow downhill, but we can make hollows and dams and the like to keep it in, and that's a very useful thing to do. But in a sense water could be said to "want to flow downhill".

Of course, if someone argued against dams because "water wants to flow downhill", that would be ridiculous. I'm sure that a lot of (most?) people who use that phrase mean it in exactly the way that you interpret it, which is unfortunate as it is then reduced to something more like "I feel we have a moral imperative to share information". And surely there's a better way of phrasing that.

So maybe I'm the one misunderstanding. But I like my interpretation better.
http://xkcd.com/1138/ - the per-capita data is useful, but the overall map is a classic population heatmap.
For me, "hiring" our accountant/HR company was probably my hardest hire so far -- I used advice from an investor and then checked with a couple smart people (joshu, etc.) if they were good.

Patent lawyers were comparatively easy (one of the 20 smartest security people I know from cypherpunks became a lawyer and then a partner...), and for main lawyers, I went with a strong recommendation from an investor/friend, and they were next-door neighbors at the office.
Facebook to buy WhatsApp? Here’s what could be really interesting about that
Dropbox is going brogue
If you had everything go through two or more "feeders" then it would be harder for the enforcers to control the whole chain. Also, what if everyone just appeared to be a feeder. So a feeder doesn't know if the message it's receiving originated from the sender or is just being passed on by the sender. I'd imagine this would result in a pretty slow protocol. If I'm not mistaken this is kinda how Tor works though.
I feel that we have to understand that using technology to fight legal battle never is the right answer. As soon as the government sees a particular technology as a hinder, threat or even an inconvenience, they can legislate against it. This holds true for encryption, VPNs and all other technological "saviours" that internet evangelists keep ranting about.

The truth is that the only reasonable thing to do is to become politically active.

If you can't beat them, join them.
Great - thank you! (also thanks for your newsletters)
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=4863561&whence=%69...

That talk was quite interesting. Especially interesting was the last question about being in a simulated universe. If he is finding error correction codes in fundamental equations, is the an implication there? He brushes the question of as currently philosophical, but the way he does it makes me think he might believe it.
Why do you say Amazon the worst corporation on the face of the earth? I can honestly think of nothing that would justify that statement.
I'll check with hr on the current process and try to update you!
Obviously Groupon's situation isn't a perfect parallel, but with lots of competitors smelling blood in the water and circling a nascent, rapidly growing, revenue positive, high profile market, it seemed apt.

Also, regarding barriers to entry, Groupon and its competitors felt the need to hire all those sales reps and writers to put together deals. They may have been able to scale more efficiently, but all those hires were certainly a barrier to entry, to say nothing of their exorbitant land grab marketing budgets.

Also, I think the Ponzi scheme rhetoric is way overblown. You could argue that its investors were sold an over-hyped bill of goods, but Groupon's core product was/is sound. If they can scale down their head count a bit, maintain market share with only a maintenance marketing budget, and hopefully expand into local ecommerce, they can still do well. It just might not be a 30 billion dollar business.

Finally, Uber has gone from a near standstill to disrupting a major industry in record time, with almost no experience in the industry. As other commenters have pointed out, one of Uber's chief competitors is now Hailo, a rapidly growing service built by people with tons of industry experience and connections. I don't really see insurmountable barriers to entry here for their competitors, especially given that Uber's detractors would argue that its main competitive advantage has been to simply thumb its nose at what should have been its own barrier to entry: regulation.
There is a difference between defensive violence and offensive violence. For example, do you believe that you own your body? I do, and I would defend myself if necessary. I would only use violence against those that are threatening me though. If you hold that you own your body, then by extension you own the output of the things you create with your body.

There has been much thought on this line of philosophy, it's called the non-aggression principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle)
Read this: http://www.neowin.net/news/editorial-how-piracy-changed-my-l...
This assumes a zero sum "lifting up" equation. People can lift each other up and be mutually beneficial.

This isn't exactly a new idea. http://bible.cc/proverbs/27-17.htm
There will be absolutely ZERO return on your customers' investment.
Why are "None" and "Not Applicable" grouped into one answer? Surely they are significantly different responses.
Total Eclipse of Arduino
What I don't really like to follow are people or brands with less than 10 posts. I absolutely hate the ones with zero posts :)
I respectfully disagree with your use of low level, though I do understand your analogy about the pixelbuffer being like a frame buffer.

But he's actually using Javascript arrays which can get passed around inside a javascript VM, and do not have a set size. Not very "low level".

I spent a moment and changed the arrays to Float32Arrays which have set sizes and sit in memory without being fucked with by the VM and sped the demo up dramatically.

http://jsfiddle.net/uzMPU/2612/
I'm with you. God knows the place needs help (no pun intended), but what its currently got isn't the help needs/wants. I don't pretend to have an answer, but what it's got seems to me to be further alienating the country.
I really don't buy that argument. The "optimized for performance" statement is pretty much a marketing ploy to downplay Microsoft (who doesn't make hardware, but that's changing).

The only argument here is for the GPU. Apple has put in a lot of work to maximize usability by targeting a specific GPU/CPU combo. RAM is a constant that doesn't really play into the design of the OS, since all RAM manufacturers make the same thing, but with different guarantees.

RAM is about the easiest thing to upgrade, second maybe to a hard-drive. This used to be trivial to upgrade, but now they're making it unnecessarily difficult to lock in customers to paying out the nose for something that should be a simple and cheap upgrade. They're operating on insane margins in the RAM arena (and CPU arena, but that's a different story).
Or voting cabals; it goes either way.
Grandparent was talking specifically about replacing GPS; I pointed out one example where even an absurdly accurate DR system wouldn't be sufficient to completely replace GPS.
The NGOs (actually, mostly individuals, mostly religious people) who were in Afghanistan from 1970s to 2001 did a lot of good. I met several -- really amazing how they managed to survive and do good things.

If the military left, along with all the big NGOs, maybe something organic would come about to help.
Should really go talk to someone about this stuff, or at least read a book.

Gotta know the rules before you can break them.
I will tell you my favorite hiring trick, by far. Before I do, though, I'll set the scene. I was looking for a new gig a few years back. I was mostly happy at my job, doing interesting stuff, not killing myself, and making good money, but itching to do something new. Wanted to get in the startup scene, etc. So I see a new company's job posting, and it looks like a perfect fit (location, mission, everything). I meet with the CEO, have a few conversations with investors and employees, and things are looking good. Then they throw me a curve ball - "We want you to do something interesting with our product." - I spent the next two weeks working my ass off nights and weekends. Mind you, not compromising my full time position in any way. In the end, I did something interesting, and it turned out to be a great thing for the company. More importantly, it let me get to know their product deeply, and I understood the kind of environment I'd be entering.

The moral of that story - when hiring, challenge people to do something for you. Give them a week to work with you. Pay them even. Just see how they actually work. It'll work well for you, and them - even if your rate of hiring is lower than you'd like.
got any tips/resources for an aspiring emulator programmer? I find emulation fascinating, I've always wanted to write an emulator for my favorite console (neo geo) but I'm mostly a CRUD programmer without a lot of comp architecture knowledge.
Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich Anyone?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl...
To follow up for any Googlers reading:

"Word order matters" - but [black cats site:com] is the same as [site:com black cats]

Small words (a, the) now matter, when they didn't use to.

> "Punctuation that Google ignores: ¶, £, €, ©, ®, ÷, §, %, (), @, ?, !"

Except [£10 in €] gives me the conversion tools.

Google used to not ignore brackets. [+garden +(chair OR lounger)] (Yes, I know that + is now not used to force inclusion and that "quotes" are used instead.)

Google does have various blogs to keep up with that stuff.

---

Another thing that was hard to find:

F) During the English "expenses scandal" of UK MPs an MP was accused of odd expenses claims, and she then got media training to reply to her accusers. She claimed the cost of that training on expenses.

i) Who was that MP?

ii) What newspaper was it in? (I think Telegraph, but I'm not sure.)