skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny how thin the ice he's skating on is, when he writes:

>"Ownership Rights: Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos. Nothing about this has changed. We respect that there are creative artists and hobbyists alike that pour their heart into creating beautiful photos, and we respect that your photos are your photos. Period.
I always want you to feel comfortable sharing your photos on Instagram and we will always work hard to foster and respect our community and go out of our way to support its rights."

He should add in brackets that the user has automatically given Instagram "Ownership" of a gold plated license to do whatever the hell it wants with content posted, in case anyone was wondering.
nitpick: It's a loooooooooot less than 1%
The Mac is not a commercially viable gaming platform.
"Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos."

-- http://blog.instagram.com/post/38252135408/thank-you-and-wer...
IIRC

Midpoint
v(n+1) = v(n) + a(n)*dt
x(n+1) = x + v(n)*dt + 0.5*a(n)*dt^2

Velocity Verlet
v(n+1) = v(n) + 0.5*[a(n)+a(n+1)]*dt
x(n+1) = x + v(n)*dt + 0.25*[a(n)+a(n+1)]*dt^2

With fixed acceleration a(n)=a(n+1) so the two methods are equivalent.
Hear, hear. I left management consulting precisely because quality and impact are almost ignored in favor of hours billed. What will prevent people from logging lots of "junk miles" to up their stake? Seems like this approach may result in a pissing-contest type workplace where people stay until very late even when there is no work to do.
I have read about that one. There's a significant difference in verbs between the two stories. In one sentence it's "stabbed", in the other it's "killed".

And only seven of them needed to be taken to the hospital.
The new TOS doesn't come into effect until one month from now.
I like how he said "The language we proposed ... " to refer to "Yesterday we introduced a new version of our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service that will take effect in thirty days."
Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today. They're your friends, or just like your friends. Knock it off.

-- If not in jest, this is rediculously naive. just FYI.
Better way to make money is to take out a personal loan for 100K, same opportunity cost of two years of programmer-salary on startups. Buy out of the money options on small-cap pharmacuetical facing FDA decisions, you have the ability to also make $10 million overnight with 30% success. Go for insider-tips to max out on your success.
For me, that's too late. Flickr mobile app is getting better, using it.
How many times a gun has ended in murderer's hands after being bought legally? That doesn't show up in homicide statistics either, does it?

Human rights as popularly known are the global rights established by the UN and I am pretty sure they don't mention guns. Or it must be a list of human rights you created yourself that I am not aware of.
7 Reasons Most People Should Build Lifestyle Businesses, Not Startups
Both my mother and step father are therapists, both had clinical experience - my mum worked predominantly with young girls with eating disorders as she was beginning her career, then she switched to adults and then into a business consultant. My step father on the other hand worked with drug addicts, now applying innovation in coaching (using Second Life as a tool, for instance).

I would put it this way: apart from really impressive experience and knowing very well what goes on in people's minds (of course in a different way than the neurologists do), my mother has never paid for a speeding ticket, because she knows how to talk to a policeman to avoid the fine, discovering all his weaknesses, fears, frustrations in 5 seconds - honestly, I'm not exaggerating! She get's paid for two hours of work what many people earn by working the entire month.

She usually deals with CEOs and other top-management guys who, for instance, are extremelly good and efficient in what they do, but their subordinates cannot stand the pressure the boss is creating, or to put it straight - the managers are practically monsters. And so she comes in and turns a Steve Jobs into a Wozniak, if you know what I mean.

Think for a second of a police negotiator who persuades a terrorist not to blow himself up, or a suicidal person not to jump out of the window.

I know I have used the examples remotely related with therapy, but I wanted to give you a broader picture of what this artful science (yes!) is coupable of.

There are of course certain limits to what can be achieved and an experienced psychologist is able to define if a person needs to consult a psychiatrist to get medication, or if recovery is at all possible - the goal of the therapy can be differently defined, sometimes it is just to make the patient "stable", but healing is not possible.

To give you an example, while meeting my mother at the mental institution where she worked, I once stumbled upon the head of the drug addictions department whom I asked what is their "success rate" in therapy. She asked me: "What do you mean?" - "How sure you can be that a person is not going back to the addition", I replied.

"We are sure that almost all our patients sooner or later would return to drug abuse". I was shocked, but this is the realistic, frank approach.

To sum it up let me just mention that when my dear mother was doing PhD she had a very distinguished supervisor, one of the best specialists in the country, for many years the chairman of the National Psychologists Association (not in US/UK obviously), and one of his most important books was titled something like "The therapeutic aspects of therapy", and his conclusion was "talking to people change them, but it is yet to be discovered how and why".
My view scares me, too, but I think you have the right idea: It's a terrible business decision. Much like the Netflix/Qwikster ordeal, I imagine the result to be some sort of mass exodus.

Obviously, our use of any application is simply a privilege, and participation is not compulsory. As creators of the application, it's Instagram right to control their application how they see fit.

That point is easily overlooked. It's the principle I'm defending, not the decision.

My hope is that great companies will make great decisions. I think we've seen a little bit of that from organizations like Google and MapBox doing the "right thing", and they have great products to show for it.
The real Silicon Valley will never be televised.

I feel this way as well but I am curious as to why. My reasoning is that the incentives for entrepreneurs to swap dirty laundry for publicity isn't a worthwhile exchange for most entrepreneurs. I hear about how startups are extremely boring but I think people overestimate how much "fun" other professions are and how television works. It doesn't matter if 90% of a start-up is writing code like a robot; what matters is the other 10% and I think we have plenty of true, crazy stories to go around if founders had much of an incentive to play them out on air. I sure don't. I don't want my B2B customers nor investors to judge me only from the 10% dramatic part of my life.
> legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible

legal documents reuse diction that has been ruled on and has court established precedent, which creates a bias towards diction which ended up in court in the first place.

i read that in a HN comment somewhere, sorry, no citation.
But most likely it wouldn't make the user experince worse. If anything, it would allow them to avoid banner ads and make the experience better.

That said, sounds like people aren't willing to "agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."
I just tested one recently that used client-side Javascript to generate the new temporary password for whatever account was submitted in the POST parameter.

Needless to say, you could arbitrarily set any account's password to whatever you wanted.

Account harvesting through the password reset functionality is one that pops up all the time. A lot of businesses now just accept the risk (which I no longer really get all that worked up over, at least provided they aren't also enforcing account lockout for invalid attempts)
The leader in talent communities
I don't see how a 480w battery can power a 750 watt motor for 30 miles.
Considering that neither party, those who don't want to enable the windows key during full-screen and those who always depend on the windows key to function normally, is served without an unstable and error prone method it would seem the API is failing both parties in some cases.

I think the author would agree with your last statement. By forcing the applications to handle this logic and break what some users expect the API isn't serving the users or developers well.
If the number of cases is small and can be completely enumerated, sure. But there are plenty of algorithms out there where the number of cases is effectively infinite -- the matrix inversion function someone else mentioned is a great example -- where it is prudent to routinely check results to make sure the algorithm is working. (Mind you, also having a unit test to sure it works on a small set of carefully chosen cases is a great idea.)
This would just increase competitiveness, arguments and gaming the system.
Ah, brilliant. I haven't had time to dig too much into it yet, but it'll be really interesting to see how powerful this thing is.
There was a verbal offer with specific dollar amounts ($525 million, in fact), an offer specific enough that Instagram had to back out of it before it was signed. I'm not talking about filling out an SEC-mandated press release, I'm talking about a direct question from state lawyers about whether there were any offers from other companies besides Facebook, and Systrom lied and then tried to employ weasel words about "formal offers" to talk about something else.

Can you at least read the article before talking about generalities of mergers&acquisitions?
Where can you buy muni bonds that earn 6%? Most of the muni bonds yields I've found online are in the 3.5-4% range.

That is unless you're talking about the city of Detroit (which is flirting with bankruptcy) that pays 7% plus and is riskier imho than doing a startup.

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/fundmastery/2010/03/12/goldman-...
>> The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question. Our main goal is to avoid things like advertising banners you see in other apps that would hurt the Instagram user experience. Instead, we want to create meaningful ways to help you discover new and interesting accounts and content while building a self-sustaining business at the same time. ---- <<<

.

This whole time, I was thinking, "whatever they do, they won't back away from this language...why else would they drop a bombshell if they weren't willing to suffer the blowback"...And it turns out, it was just some optional path they were considering and thought, "what the hell, let's just put in there for now, no biggie"

???

Is that seriously the mindset of a billion dollar company? All I can imagine is:

1) They are lying

2) They really thought people wouldn't read the TOS (hasn't Facebook learned by now that someone will read it and make a big deal about troubling language?)

3) They are an incredibly careless company who will make other "mistakes" that could harm users.

I had been mostly ambivalent about this whole thing, as I don't maintain a very active Instagram account. But now I might just put in the energy to delete my account.
No idea if you're being sarcastic or not.

If not its quite common, thats what PR companies do, usually they just do positive stuff, but when you have a lot to loose it can go negative.

Having worked in big media you learn very quickly that everything is paid for in one way or another. Sometimes quite innocently, free interviews on TV which involve the use of there company name. Other times more sneaky stuff, basically differing levels of bribery.

Generally its not to bad, an interview with a pop star releasing a new album, my friend however gets flown all over the world regularly to review movies and games. Everything paid for, thousands and thousands of dollars splashed on him... as long as he continues to write positive review... he'd hate to loose his free holidays in Germany or Las Vegas or London every 6 months or so. So he writes things in a way that keeps his perks. Judging by the lack of negative reviews I'd say the game industry has almost every game reviewer paid off.

The ones that annoy me the most are advertorials, paid stories about certain topics or companies. PR companies basically come in with the story finished, all the wording the way they want it and are willing to pay money to get it into the prime time news.

I'll admit 90% of the time they get turned down on there first try, but they keep trying, and generally they get there way as smaller agencies and especially bloggers will take the money forcing the larger companies to publish a story as well not to loose market share.

Some blogs have bene exposed multiple times for doing it, I believe engadget went on the defensive after being accused of these practices, and there has been a few other examples involving Google and Facebook I can faintly remember within the last year or so.

If you weren't aware of that going on I hope I haven't shaken your trust in the media to badly. But its all about money at the end of the day, and with dwindling profits more and more agencies are caving to PR money.
I don't think you are reading it wrong.

There was an interesting controversy at Google about ownership of what you worked on in your own time, and their assertion that the carve out in California law about 'having to do with the business' basically covered everything because they were pretty much into everything.

If you read it in a strict legal sense, by signing the employment agreement you agreed to give Google a lifetime perpetual right to anything your worked on at any time during your employment with them. So a cry went up, and the official response was "You know what we meant, we aren't really claiming everything." So I said, "Ok, lets rewrite it then to say that you don't mean everything, you only mean things that are in businesses that Google is actively pursuing, and not things Google isn't pursuing." my intention was to align the legal text with the statement of their intention. Silence. Tried again. Silence. Eventually presented HR with a 'modified agreement' which had the new language, they refused to sign it. So I asked, which is it? To which they said "We stand by what we said, you are reading too much into this." And my lawyer said, "If I was a lawyer and had this on file and decided I really want to use whatever it was you were working on, this language clearly says you agree to them taking it from you without any compensation."

That was when I decided to leave.

I get that it is "simpler" and reduces the companies risk to have that language in there, after all it would be hugely painful to have to compensate someone more than they already did to use something that person wrote, and it keeps folks from creating a business "on the side" and then selling it back later, but there is what they say, and what they do. And what they will do. My lawyer once said, "If they say it doesn't mean that, then have them update it, if they won't then they do mean that, even if they don't want to say it."
There is a pretty important caveat in the comments at LBTP: "Basic machine learning breaks down under an adaptive attacker." I think ML could be a valuable extra layer for some systems, but I don't see it either solving the problems of the password or serving as a second "factor". This is partly for analytic reasons: how does ML fit into the established hierarchy of crypto primitives like e.g. hashing, authenticated encryption, etc.? Also, people are still arguing that TLS is too slow to use on many sites, but I expect ML to be slower yet.

Still it's nice to see original thought about authentication.
I don't have any problem with an arrangement like this if only because it causes everyone to TALK about it. The fact is...every startup can come up with whatever way they want to split up equity. If this works for everyone involved then go for it.
Well, I'm sorry that this guy can't read. I have read many different copyright licenses, and this copyright license is not "boilerplate". You can have very different copyright licenses for such web services. You can get an overview at http://tos-dr.info/topics.html#copyright-scope

As you can see, the new Instagram © license is like Facebook's or Twitter's. But very different from others. (Actually, the current Instagram © license is okay)
Have you done any calculations as to what it would cost to rent say, 20 x $100 a month dedicated servers spread across multiple datacenters, that can do virtualization with OpenVZ, Xen, or KVM (takes care of network, power, bandwidth, hardware issues) vs. what you spend monthly with AWS?

Bluntly it seems like you must have spent some dev or ops time learning all this and migrating away from EBS etc. even if you didn't hire someone.

Frankly, if your bills are greater than $3K per month with AWS I question whether you are truly saving anything.

(I figured that midsized instances vs. dedicated servers are about 5:1 in terms of performance)
http://alestic.com/ is the best thing I've come across (Ubuntu focused, but many general solutions as well).

FWIW, we (at DuckDuckGo) ended up in much the same place: ditched EBS, avoid anything that relies on EBS, and multi-zone and multi-region redundancy (also for latency purposes). For ephemeral storage purposes, we end up mainly using xlarge machines since they have the greatest stability and speed (with 4 drives in RAID-0).
Why I decided to visit Kansas City: it’s not just Google Fiber
Ask HN: Can you suggest something that I can build/do in few days/a week?
Hey HN!

I am graduating in 2 days (yay) and I want to build or do something in my break before I decide on what to do next. Anyone has an impelementable idea and lack time to do it? Please suggest it.
The Evolution Of Batman Logos
Source?
I've seen data pegging startup failure rates anywhere between 50-90%, but I've never seen a credible source claim that over 99% fail.
Mathematically, no investor would be able to stay in business if 99% of their investments fail.
I'm guessing failure rates for startups that have funding or bootstrap through revenue are closer to 75%.
author appears to be an expert in start-up vernacular.
How should one properly secure a "password reset" feature?

Ooh, I think I can actually do this: You send the address on file an email which contains a random, time-limited, one-use token which allows them to log into their account. You should not disclose presence or absence of the account via the reset mechanism on the site (only via email), but that's a comparatively minor issues. A successful password reset should end all in-progress sessions for the account. You should also do all the table-stakes web development things like e.g. not allowing SQL injection or XSS on the page.

There's plenty of failure conditions for password resets:

1) You create non-random reset tokens, such as MD5(user.id) or MD5(user.email), potentially compromising security of accounts.

2) You allow resets of your teams' admin accounts to happen through the publicly accessible password request feature. (n.b. Almost never a good idea, for one because it means you're probably doing shared authn/authe between your app and your admin console and that is generally a very bad idea. I say this in spite of shipping it in every product I write.)

3) You allow password reset tokens to get re-used, which increases the attack surface against individual accounts by e.g. making saved-to-disk emails into attack vectors for them. (Standard reset mechanisms only make emails-in-flight into attack vectors.)
I also noticed that they stepped short of saying they wouldn't be taking a non-exclusive perpetual license for any use out of the ToS. What does "ownership" mean in that case? Only that you can negotiate other deals with third parties.

It can mean that they cannot re-license your work, which is to say you wouldn't have to compete with them in terms of pricing to a third party but I don't know if that is what the ToS says so a closer reading is in order.
Here's another take that disagrees with their blog post -- and this one is from an actual practicing intellectual property attorney:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57559859-38/instagram-riva...

"That effectively guts the user's control over the use and exploitation of the photo," says Daniel Schaeffer, an attorney with Neal & McDevitt, a boutique law firm in Northfield, Ill., specializing in intellectual property. "The most obvious and immediate example is the ability to allow businesses to use your photos in advertising, but the actual effects could be even farther-reaching."
Does anyone else find the phrasing "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret. So I’d like to address specific concerns we’ve heard from everyone..." to be eerily similar to Dr. Breen's PSAs in the beginning of Half-Life 2?

Dr. Breen: "Let me read a letter I recently received. 'Dear Dr. Breen. Why has the Combine seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle? Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen.' Thank you for writing, Concerned. Of course your question touches on one of the basic biological impulses, with all its associated hopes and fears for the future of the species. I also detect some unspoken questions. Do our benefactors really know what's best for us? What gives them the right to make this kind of decision for mankind? Will they ever deactivate the suppression field and let us breed again? Allow me to address the anxieties underlying your concerns, rather than try to answer every possible question you might have left unvoiced."
If the game had been open source from the beggining, it probably would not be an undocumented mess right now. Sure, open source is no guarentee for quality, but open source and popular means that many eyes will look at the code, and it will naturally develop documentation.
How do you manage this? In my experience ephemeral storage is about 8GB. Are you able to just parition all data so that you never reach this limit, or is there a way to increase ephemeral space that I don't know about?

PS great article
Show HN: Scientific Literature Browser
On the PS2 you could adjust the roll and pitch of your car in midair. It was possible to do backflips.
That sounds like an entire startup in itself.
What the hell? Responding carefully and specifically to a lawyer's question is not suspicious, it's standard operating practice whenever lawyers are involved. Systrom has no obligation to spill the beans about anything that some guy on the Internet thinks might be called an offer, and courtrooms have rules against assigning malicious interpretations thereunto.