skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a joke in Silicon Valley that one of the levels of success is "Your new company issues a press release that you've been hired."

It goes something like:

You know you are successful in Silicon Valley when:

followed by silly things like "You are Time's Man of the Year" or "On Wired's most Influential list" that sort of thing.
What do you think Google could have done?
Imagine if everyone were required to sign up for a food/water plan to make sure they and their children would be covered for all of their food related needs. Employers would be required to pay a percentage of food plans premiums for all full-time employees. And if you don't buy a food plan you will be fined $700 annually by the Federal government.

The benefit is that you could never be denied basic access to food/water for the rest of your life. Of course, the government would decide what sort of food each food plan offers and how much grocers can charge for food.

I mean, food is just as much an inalienable right as health, right? So all sense would go out the window if you don't agree with this?
Because the poster above you deleted his comment, can you explain what the LCA thread is, and what was so problematic about it? I'm curious what the discussion was here.
I have tried those services. They never give me any info - you see, nobody has ever used that name before.
Maybe not but you can get a fix it ticket from the police.
Being a start-up really has nothing to do with number of employees.
Completely agree with your reasoning. However, there's a difference with how Balanced operates. The marketplace understands the credibility/reputation of the seller in a way that a merchant processor never could.

Balanced gives the marketplace the ability to control when the seller receives their money. The most important factor is trust and some form of buyer confirmation that fulfillment has happened to their satisfaction. It's the job of Balanced to push the money to the seller as fast as possible.
I get where the author is coming from but I have to say that the autocorrect/autochanging of words on iOS drives me crazy and cursor placement is a pain. I don't have the author's distraction problem, either, but there are word processors like WriteMonkey or Darkroom.
Yes it does, but that doesn't make their arguments valid. My whole point is not to keep experts out, but to judge the content on its scientific merit alone.
Stypi shifting focus from coding to rich text
I get what you're saying and I apologize if my comment seemed to attack you. That having been said, these ARE VERY important discussions, but I feel like the only one that serves as a criticism of Larry taking independent action is that it might support the "just let the super rich be charitable"... and I think a further discussion of that is a GOP tactic to distract from the bigger issue of making up the difference through a more guaranteed and reliable method (ie, public health care).
And your proposed alternate approach would be?

Keep in mind that these are volunteers from a broad set of backgrounds. Their only demonstrated expertise is running small to medium events. The central TED organization is modest in size and staffed by people who are fiendishly busy. Go!

If the problem isn't tractable enough to apply hard science, then rough heuristics and human judgment are about the best you get.
Not completely proven & scaled business model?
Actually, anything short of "I braked specifically so you would hit me" makes it the fault of the following car in most states.
Guido apparently wrote a web-based code review tool for Google:

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/11/google-mondrian.htm...
12/21/12: Definitely Not the End of the World
Depressing that a list of calm mostly common-sense suggestions is seen as some deeply flawed oppressive list.

The HN kneejerk contrarianism is a bit frustrating.
>The competition on "speed-of-opening-apps" on WP7 where nobody was allowed to win?

That's wrong. Even before that specific incident, they did give out prizes to people who won, and there were multiple winners before and after. That particular incident might have been about one particular employee but certainly was not widespread. Guess which incident makes it into the news and onto HN front page?
I suspect a "startup" is any company that is serving a market that has yet to prove it is viable. Many folks use that term to describe any privately held company that is growing into something much larger.
MetaSploit 4.5 analyzes your sites exposure to phishing attacks
Even if the encryption is using a known-good algorithm, there's absolutely no way for the JavaScript client to generate anything close to a cryptographically secure random string for the key.

Unless they use random numbers supplied by Mega itself, I just don't see how that would work. If they are using entropy supplied by Mega, then they might as well not bother with the whole encryption thing.

ED: The screenshot does mention that they gather entropy via keystrokes and mouse movements (like modern OS do), but I'm still not sure that would provide anywhere near the randomness needed.
> The basic logical error here is obvious

It's too bad that having at least a qualitative understanding of Bayes' Theorem and Bayesian inference is not a requirement for graduation from high school. That would make it a lot easier for the general public to spot those logical errors.
The problem isn't the color per se, it's the brightness. Blue LEDs are very efficient, and if run at the same current levels as red or green ones that used to be more popular, are insanely bright.

About 15 years ago, when blue LEDs were rare and expensive, I built a piece of equipment and decided to use one as a power indicator. As I said above, driving it with the same current (about 10 milliamps) as I was used to doing with a red LED, basically lit up the whole room. Dropping the current to a fraction of that gave it a nice, almost subtle blue/purple glow that it still maintains to this day.

I think the underlying problem is an engineer somewhere was taught to drive indicator LEDs at 10 mA and then saying, "screw it, it's good enough to ship." People just don't care about aesthetics anymore.
Hi Ben, the ES connector was part of it. At a certain point we had our custom oplog follower working well. After so many years working with MongoDB, we just lost trust in it, to be honest. We ran into so many bugs, replication issues (two secondaries and no primary) and the only way to get what we needed out of it was to use all SSD storage (Even flashcache did not work).

I have to admit that this was for our use case, and I know that MongoDB works extremely well for some people. We still use it in Beanstalk for our deployment logs and have no complaints. It's a much smaller dataset though.

Really nice to see that 10gen made an ES connector. ES is still young, but it's amazing. One thing that I always respected about 10gen is how they maintain all of the drivers and code.
Implementing pushState for Twitter.com
There is a lot of resources available (http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20111025/how-effectiv...). Numbers like 40%, 50%, 60%, 70% appear in research - a lot of bias.

"While the vaccine does work, and we still recommend that it be used, it does not demonstrate the kind of efficacy that has often been reported," says study researcher Michael T. Osterholm, MD, of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy." - from "Lancet"

In case of flu it is difficult to measure vaccine effectivness since it is often hard to figure out if someone got flu or was attacked by some other virus that has similar symptoms.

It is usually not feasible to do indepth virus (genetical?) analysis to check which kind of virus attacted given sick person.

Symptoms are so common to many other virsu infections, so the data is very noisy and it can work both againts and for vaccines.

It would be cool if some HN community member figure out to measure that better :)
>f Ubuntu does that, the problem goes away

No it doesn't. Ubuntu's "problem" is that it's not making any money, at least not enough to support the 500 employees it has. Making it non-default will kill 99% of the revenue from Amazon since hardly anyone(not enough people to make money on) will go out of the way to click the toggle button.
Probably very similar to why Universities want Nobel Laureates on the faculty. Sure, they want their brainpower, but it's also huge for prestige and a symbol to the World of what a great University they are.

This will probably help greatly with recruiting. What Python engineer wouldn't want to work with him?
That's the point; for better or worse we don't do novelty titles here. I think the thought is that it is the content that should garner the upvotes, not naming cleverness, and that this is an important message to send to the community that will spill over into comment and submission quality.
I bought the 4S 32GB (locked) with a new contract. It came out to ~$360, if I recall correctly.

I'm with Verizon, so monthly payments would be ~$100. But because I like to save money, I'm on a family plan with other people and we divvy up the costs. Because of that, I end up paying way less than the regular Joe. I pay $50/month and I feel I can still pay less, except there is a married couple in the plan, and friends and other relatives, and the costs are divided slightly unevenly. Anyway. I don't know the specifics of the plan, because I hardly use my phone. But I think it goes something like unlimited texts and 1000 minutes shared, and for my line, 2GB of data. 2GB data alone costs $30 with Verizon.
Time Warner Cable: Demand Not There for Google Fiber
For cooking: I'd say 'pinch' or 'dash' and then clarify if the person asked for clarification. If he or she looks puzzled, I'll offer the clarification unsolicited and as naturally as possible. When I cook pancakes on the weekend with my three year old daughter, we talk about how the appearance of the edge of the pancake changes as it gets closer to being ready to be flipped. To get even further off topic -- if you like cooking, take a look at "Tartine Bread" which is damn near the pinnacle of this sort of communication.
"Some people only need to be introduced by their first name" - maybe so, but it would have been nice for them to mention it at least once.
The researchers are from Cal Tech and Univ. of Rochester (in case anyone was curious, since the article for some reason fails to mention the institution responsible for the research)

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v6/n11/full/nphoton.20...
In reading the comments generally I feel like there's two main groups being affected here: small businesses and small groups (families, geeks, whatever).

The first group—small businesses—can of course afford $50/user/year, even if they would rather not spend it.

The second group—enthusiasts—even if they could afford it, likely cannot justify $50/user/year. I personally have a custom email hosted by Google for a small group of my friends, and I know that there is NO WAY any of us would pay $50 each per year. The price would need to be an order of magnitude lower for us to consider it. (Yes, I know that for the moment we're grandfathered in.)

Seems like there should be a way for Google to distinguish between the two groups based on services needed and then price two tiers accordingly. For example, offer a Small Group Plan at $5/user/year with a limit of 10 users & no phone support; and another Small Business Plan that offers up to 50 users, limited phone support & whatever else help small businesses for a higher price.
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/
Most professors I know are not professors because of the money. These are usually the people who were the best students and as such could have found nice jobs in other sectors.

And do you really think they would have difficulty getting funding for climate research contradicting the current consensus?
Anyone else seeing the Chrome anti-aliasing bug during the css animations? Text gets thinner for the duration of the animation.
If I was a language designer looking for a change, I'd go to Yosemite and apply as park ranger. That would be a change.

But dropbox?
Thank you for this, Jesse, if you're reading. Python people embarrass us Rubyists yet again. ;)
Are you then shorting the shares of the companies whose CEOs do not buy vaccines?
I've tried multiple forms of marketing.
1. Admob - Got users to the app, but the app did not retain those users and it was quite expensive to even get them to the app. Over $1 per user for me.
2. Tried facebook ads. Just a complete failure for me.
3. I cross promote my apps within my own apps. That does ok. I'm not exactly sure the exact amount of traffic it drives, but it probably accounts for 5% of the user base on the apps i promote.
4. Facebook, Twitter Sharing. This probably accounts for 5 - 10% of new downloads within an app.
GitHub now has Issue Attachments
Python has been a backbone of Dropbox since its early days as it
allowed the startup to write code once but deploy it across platforms.

Can anybody elaborate on this? Is the argument that Python is cross-platform because everybody uses GNU tools on every platform, or are there other reasons why Python is more cross-platform than other languages?
5 Gutsy Steps to Remain a Relevant Web Developer
Thank you. I will consider it. I used to not want to carry two bulky things, but that was because I used to live in a city where I only used public transport. Since I've moved to the US, I now have a car, so I guess I can always leave the MP3 player in there.
I heard that this tool was not well received at Google; anybody else hear this?
It gets even worse out in the country where I live. Driving in pitch darkness in a sports car that's low to the ground and having every other oncoming vehicle be a full-size pickup truck is a recipe for almost constant blindness because their headlights are exactly at my eye level. That's when you automatically look away to the side and hope a deer hasn't just jumped out behind that truck, into the road.
I'm with IWantMyName.com too :) Really clean and awesome provider.

They also plan to release a revamped dashboard early next year.
I don't think it's coming from a place of naivety. Thiel's legal pedigree is pretty impressive (Stanford JD, clerk for the Court of Appeals, etc). Maybe "optimistic" is more apropos.
The TED folks are definitely not making an argument from authority; if they were they would say: all things said by people with scientific bona fides are true and you can't question them.

Instead, they're correctly observing that there's a correlation between scientific bona fides and scientifically accurate speakers. And that organizers will be better off if they use that as one rule of thumb in evaluating speakers, which is also true.

You only see an argument from authority because you've reduced their argument to a straw man. The purpose of TEDx isn't to be a final arbiter of all things true; it's just to surface things that are true and interesting.
The Big Take-aways from Tim Cook's Interviews
Would someone like this be paid based on their fame and/or positive PR value, or would they be paid based on position just like everyone else? I've always wondered if these "programming celebrities" make substantially more just based on their personal brand, or if their personal brand just affords them the opportunity to have any job they so desire (but with the "standard" pay)
> Germany makes more money making things.

Per capita. But not even close on an absolute basis - the US makes more than twice as much as Germany.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009104319/g20-manufactu...

I couldn't find more recent numbers.
> 我会讲中文。

Google Translate renders this as "I can speak Chinese.", which speaks volumes about how far it's come with East Asian languages.
Look, we can quibble about how many women are actually raped over the course of their lifetimes. Can we agree that it is "a scary amount"? As in, enough that there's reason for women to be rationally nervous about people they don't know making sexual advances on them? At four in the morning? In a context that doesn't even remotely suggest "I want to go get a beer with you and then maybe have sex?"
FWIW, Guido's role at Google wasn't specific to Python. He worked on real product teams and contributed much more than his Python expertise.

The article seems to think that Dropbox hired him for his thorough knowledge of Python, which probably had some role in the hiring decision, but I expect that the primary motivation was to acquire an excellent engineer.
I've always liked Steve Blank's definition:

"A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."

I would say Dropbox has found a repeatable and scalable business model.
If I were you I wouldn't use a non-geographically neutral extension to start with, unless you only intended to keep your business strictly in Canada.
SSL'd SMTP is a non-standard extension that nobody uses. (In fact, the port assignment for it was revoked in 1999!) TLS on port 25 is how you do secure email (mostly so you can advertise AUTH PLAIN safely.)

I think there are probably some MTAs that will STARTTLS for normal SMTP connections, but again, I've never heard of anyone using SSL/TLS as a spam-filtering criterion. (I might look through my old logs to see if anyone other than me ever issued STARTTLS on my mail server. But I'm guessing the number was near zero.)
Guido says goodbye to Google
Can someone explain to me the difference between the new Mega and something like SpiderOak?
No so much a back-story as several back-stories all with the common theme of quacks, sometimes with degrees in irrelevant fields, making plainly false claims.
> Effectively, if we continue to strive to eradicate localised IT and software related words from non-English languages and replace them with English words instead, language development will stagnate and all languages will eventually become English.

This would only be true if a language only consisted in IT and software related words :)

> I don't need Github localised, but I would like to localise it for the purpose of creating technical terms in my own language. I fear that most of the localisation into Danish would simply be English words instead, despite the fact that Danish actually has words for 'push' and 'pull' (»puf« and »hal«, respectively).

Having had the misfortune of spending this week working on a Javascript codebase partly coded in French, let me tell you it's a very bad idea. The disconnect between variable/function names and language identifier is jarring. Please, just code in English, even if your English is bad.
I hadn't thought about the language. I noticed there's an awful lot of skin-tone with the extreme closeup angle there. Even if they do have face detection, it may be too close to even catch it.
If someone wants to go, how could a company, even a great one like Google, keep them?
Congrats to both Dropbox and Guido.

I'm ashamed to say I didn't know until TFA that Guido is the BDFL...I actually thought Linus had inspired it, though that's because he seems to be the one who most frequently causes others to invoke it.

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

Also kind of funny that Matz is the only creator of a recent [*and major] language that isn't in that Wiki list. Is he really that hands off of Ruby (compared to Guido and Python?)
We just shipped Issue Attachments: https://github.com/blog/1347-issue-attachments
My comment was not to ask anyone to stop forcing a service on me, or to point out that it's harming me. As I said:

> This isn't to say one organization going mainstream PSP will hurt Bitcoin. I simply don't see the point, that's all.
What does he do at Google exactly? I thought he was more like giving talk, optimizing Python and consulting Python engineers.
If you need to just host a .NET website, there's Azure Websites [0], which has a free plan.

[0] http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/web-sites/
Are you really saying that risk of nosocomial infection is sufficient to offset the value of influenza vaccination? Really?
Why is it bad science to be radically questioning the status quo? For centuries many major scientific breakthroughs have been in spite of the dogma of the scientific community of its day. Statements like good science = "It does not fly in the face of the broad existing body of scientific knowledge" or bad science = "Has failed to convince many mainstream scientists of its truth" is just garbage. Sickening to me, in fact. Everything that so-called "fringe psuedoscientists" complain about in regards to the arrogant elitism of the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of science are validated with this kind of letter.

Dislike.
He was a core member of the app engine team, wrote ndb[1] (the next generation datamodel library for their schema-less datastore), wrote the code review web app tool that was awesome, and a bunch of python infrastructure AFAIK.

[1] https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/ndb/
I guess that's why it's called "Silicon Valley" rather than "Sense of Humor Valley."
Dunbar's number makes little sense for directly determining/classifying organizational sizes. Most of peoples' relationships lie outside of the organization they work for. You'd probably have little to no relationship with people in your organization way before you reach Dunbar's number.
The main difference in this case, you can get other people sick with your contagious illness.
It's important to remember this is for TEDx, which can be put on by some small, humble groups. My city (hardly a scientific or academic hub) just held a TEDx and the planning committee was only able to secure one talk from someone outside of the planning committee and its immediate circle. If someone outside the area peddling bunk had applied, the committee would have probably not looked over them too closely. Additionally, the bulk of the committee members would not have had the knowledge to evaluate the scientific claims. Guidelines such as having a degree in the field about which the topic is concerned, publishing peer-reviewed and others are bright lights to help guide people who cannot discern the quality of the actual content and lack the motivation to spend a lot of time trying to find faults in a presenter.

Organizers of prestigious TEDx events, and of TED itself, have many more interesting submissions to choose from and are more qualified and more motivated to examine the quality of submitted talks, so the selection committees are more easily able to welcome quality extra-disciplinary presentations and minority opinions because they can sufficiently evaluate the actual content to be presented.
Umm.

I think you mean we need an open solution to domain registration.

DNS is one of the oldest open Internet protocols.
Seriously. I would pay good money for a system that would alert me to a deer on the side of the road ahead at night. They don't call whitetails "timber ghosts" for nothing.
Quite so. They are not proposing a blacklist of all people without degrees in their subject matter.. they are presenting general guidelines to skepticism to a group of people (TEDx organizers) who seem to have forgotten their skeptics cap at home a few times too often.

There should be nothing controversial about telling people to be on their toes when somebody without a relevant degree tries to tell you something fantastic.
Billion/million rule is the cutoff for "real startup".

It stops being a startup when, if acquired or IPO'd for $1 billion, a full-time entry-level engineer makes less than $1 million after taxes. For straight equity, that puts the cutoff around 0.2%. For options, it depends on the strike.

By 250, new employees are getting much less than that.