skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There isn't just one single general mantra. For example, the notion that success/money prove the value of what you're doing -- instead of your own rational reflection, nothing else -- is often heard, from big shots to wannabes. Just look at the crap Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, Google and Apple got/get away with. Yeah we bitch, sometimes, but generally it's a-okay because the ends justifies the means, they're household names, la-di-blah. If we're already that FUBAR with stuff that is out in the open, the full spectrum is probably not very flattering either.
NON-FICTION
1) Thinking fast and slow
(currently reading)

2) The Lean Startup
(Read when I joined founders institute, was helpful in quite number ways. Doubled it with same course on udemy )

3) Banker to the poor - Md. Yunus
(Got a chance to interview Md.Yunus,)

4) Business Model Generation http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/book
(Quite a read, for business model generation. One can explain whole biz plan in 1 page)

5) The Dilbert principle

6) Steve Jobs

FICTION
1) The Hobbit
2) Ulysses
3) Sense of ending
5 Tips for Rocking Your PR Around the Holidays
What would free will even be? It sounds as if it was a meaningful concept, but perhaps it really isn't. What would be the entity making decisions? And how would it not follow any rules? That would mean it would be random?
What strikes me about this article is the utter lack of understanding.

It is a highly subjective, very politicized and ideologically tainted description without any kind of understanding, and some of the attempts at interpretation of cultural and legal differences are either plain wrong or deliberately misrepresented.

It's an anti-European rant, nothing more. Here's a great gem for example:

"To work hard, to work long hours, is actually illegal in Europe."

Seriously.
"It is harder than it looks" foremost because the usability of that coloring app needs improvement.
There's some light and some shadow in this article. I can't tell about southern europe, but most of this does not apply in germany - even the parts that are specifically about germany. There are recommendations about how a work-place should look like but they are mostly common sense [1] and not mandated by law, at least not in the IT Business. There is a law about workplace safety [2] but that's like 12 pages long and enforces very basic limits: You must have toilets, sufficient lighting, sufficient heating and the escape routes must not be blocked. If you feel like you can use your garage or your living room.

Bonus payments are no problem at all either. If you feel like paying a bonus, pay it. If you want to have a written formula, write it down in a contract - but then you need to pay it if the employee qualifies.

If your employee pretends to be sick, send him to the public health officer. If he isn't sick it's an immediate firing offense. Even verbally threatening to go on sick leave is an immediate firing offense.

Severance packages are not mandated. You can have them in a contract, but the default is no severance package. It's still somewhat harder to fire someone than in the USA since you need an actual reason to do so. "She's irresistible" won't do. [3] It's pretty common to have 3-6 month probation period in a contract where both parties can terminate the contract on short notice.

The part where he's right is extra work. The law is pretty strict here: 8 hours a day is the normal maximum, 10 hours a day for a limited time, maximum of 60 hours a week. There must be a 10 hour break between end of work and beginning on the next day. You can break those limits in emergencies, but you need a qualified reason. That sounds pretty harsh, but it's reasonable. It protects the employees on one side, but why would I want them to work more than 8 hours a day on a regular schedule when productivity drops sharp after 8, maximum 10 hours. We can do crunch time for a couple of weeks, but after that it just doesn't pay of. 12 hours a day are neither healthy for the employee nor for the startup. A team of zombies just doesn't perform. So I'm very little bothered by that law. Germany seems to be doing just fine productivity wise.

[1] The monitor should be placed parallel to the window to reduce reflections, the chair and the table must be adjustable in height, ...
[2] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bundesrecht/arbst_ttv_2004...
[3] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/22/us/iowa-irresistible-worke...
i highly recommend all of these:
- "Cathedral and the Bazaar"
- "Buddhism Without Beliefs"
- "Mindfulness in Plain English"
- "Godel Escher Bach"
- "People's History of the United States"
- "Debian Administrator's Handbook"
I recently start working in freelance , and I think that the payment doesn't worth it ,and the employers are not generally serious, you keep waiting for the payment , and they usually don't pay , now I deliver work like a demo , it only works for a few days , just so that I can be sure they pay .
ps: what websites do you use ?
Sorry to hear that. The problem with assert() at production code is that it crashes the program. IMNSHO, it's a medicine worse than the disease (is this why we get a "blue screen" on a popular OS?). Most, if not all tools should be lenient about errors - both user errors and system/environment errors - not just safety systems. There are very few cases that a tool should say "there is a problem, please contact the vendor" - and even then it is unreasonable to do it while crashing (maybe the user is willing to give up the last task but wants to start over with a different task).
If you are not convinced, I am not able to explain it in any simpler and clearer way. Thanks for your time.
Domain matters more than language for this sort of thing. People tend to have these arguments around business applications.
Agreed but to be honest there is nothing else that has that good integration that you can shoehorn your entire business process into.

As for startups taking this on, there isn't a chance in hell. The problem is too big to solve quickly enough to get market traction. SharePoint is big and complicated for a real reason.
Teledildonics... ROFL! XD best branch of telematic robotics ever!
Even though most of the dismissal comments here are fair and true, I find that this article contains some true gems:

> When starting a company in the US, informality rules, we all know the HP story that HP was started out of a garage. Now in Europe work is so regulated that you can’t start a company out of a garage because you can’t legally work in a garage.

> A friend of mine was fed up with an employee who worked poorly and told him that if he didn’t work harder he would fire him. This employee went to see a doctor, told the doctor that work depressed him and he was declared a mental patient, as a result my entrepreneur friend had to pay him for a year of doing nothing.

As a European (Netherlands), I recognize these points very strongly. This is not just Southern European stuff. It's absolutely ridiculous how easily angry/unmotivated employees can suck a firm or department dry though sick leave and whatnot.

That said, there's also

> In the end what many European employers do is not give out stock options and give tiny bonuses. In the end what these laws do is that employers go for low fixed compensations and don’t expect outstanding work.

This is so American that it hurts: want people to perform? Put a carrot in front of their noses. The European approach would be trying to make their work interesting and the work environment good, so that employees are intrinsically motivated to do outstanding. Sure, there's many companies that don't understand this, but then there's real many that do. It is simply not a strong part of European culture to be motivated by money, primarily.
Is Wall Street's Love Affair With Apple Over?
I'm not certain about it but I think debts from criminal offenses are not cleared on personal bankruptcy. Sozialversicherungsbetrug (not paying your employees social security) and tax evasion are criminal offenses for the manager of a company so they'd not be cleared. However, if you start up a company with employees you'd want a limited liability company of some form anyways, so personal liability only extends to criminal negligence or criminal offenses. It's still easy enough to get burned and indebted as manager though.
Mozilla and Xiph.org are developing Daala, free video codec superior to h.265
I'm really not sure what's the state of the art on verdict libraries is (or how it was done before), but as always I suppose most impacting results are more divulged.

But believe me "just the law book" is not as easy as it sounds.
Empty an Array with JavaScript
"the problem with this is that it is harder to convince a group of Europeans that they are out to conquer the world in their field. It is cultural."

It's called World War I and II, and having learned a thing or two. "Conquering the world" in itself is a phrase only an utter brute would think, much less actually brag about.

Why can you not get to know the world, and cooperate with it? What are you scared of? Why not be a peer amongst peers, who but a coward would want to be owner? Keep the crap that makes your country crap in that country kthx.. there is no point in moving to the EU if you're not going to actually learn from it.
So how did entrepreneurs like Sarkozy and Berlusconi ever get elected?

Get off it.

Entrepreneurs aren't worshiped like gods by default just for being entrepreneurs, that's all.
Apple controls the store. Control it all
Except it isn't that easy to. There is probably going to be some bias, not to mention that subtle unconscious hints from participants could be picked by the participants.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22144-brain-might-not-...

Also it's important to remember most of science theories can be overturned easily by new evidence. So I'm not sure science is 100% certain in either way.
Java Bests Adobe With Most Exploited Flaws
The number of layers is one of the factors controlling model complexity.

Interesting, the number of units in the hidden layers isn't as important as the size of the weights of the hidden units. This is a famous result from the 1990's.

Hence, a principled way of controlling overfitting in NNs is: Pick a large enough number of weights that you don't underfit, and apply l2-regularization to the hidden unit weights. This is superior to fiddling with the number of hidden units in an unregularized net.

A related result is that you can control model complexity by imposing sparsity on the activations of the hidden units.
> Mail is a joke of an app on Windows..
What windows are you talking about? I agree that windows 8 mail app sucks..
but mail app on windows phone 8 is one of the best mail app on a smart phone..
What I thought "singularity" meant is merely that eventually human work will become worthless as easy to replicate machines will be more intelligent.

I agree that predicting when it would happen is somewhat silly. Also, I had no idea that "merging" humans into machines had anything to do with the singularity.

If you just take the notion that eventually AI will surpass human intelligence, I think it is a very reasonable idea.
That's a very nice UI, yes.
In the UK that would be interpreted as 'constructive dismissal' and you could be spanked pretty hard for that at an employment tribunal. Is it that hard to get rid of someone within the rules?
This is the sort of reason I buy my stuff from Amazon / 7digital. The mp3 container format has no provision for DRM so it cannot be abused.
Introducing the HTML5 Datalist Element
What's worse, were it gets specific on country and regulation, it still gets it wrong, seemingly deliberate.

It's a political anti-regulation rant. Nothing more.
This is just flat out misinformation. You can use lucene from pretty much any environment. In rails it is utterly trivial to integrate solr/lucene, it's probably about 2 or 3 lines of code. I assume it's similar for other frameworks.
We definitely are closer to an AI than we were.

More and more functions that were once human-only are now a machine capability. Intelligently playing games, voice recognition, image recognition, and some (though this is still undergoing intensive research) working with natural language.

I really really don't see how you can believe that humans will forever be more intelligent than machines. What makes humans so special? Why would you believe that?
Build and Connect Network Devices into Cloud Services
Comcast physical address disclosure hole
Quickly Convert Objects to CSS Using Photoshop CS6.1
Certainly, in British culture, hard work carries a certain amount of respect, and those who are perceived to have obtained wealth without putting the work in (as applies to many 'entrepreneurs') are absolutely resented.

Perhaps related is the fact ostentatious displays of wealth are generally frowned upon. In the US it seems fashionable for entrepreneurs to become fabulously wealthy, then flaunt their wealth as 'inspiration' to other would-be entrepreneurs. In Britain, if not the rest of Europe, this draws resentment more so than admiration.
I use disposable emails only to signup to services. I later save the email and pwd with 1Password. I've been doing this for a long time.

The reason I do this is because many startups (and non-startups) keep abusing on the amount of email they send you, even if I unsubscribe from their "newsletter" they come up with other non-newsletter emails - and this is just unbearable. I feel like being spammed most of the time.

The advantage of using disposable email is that I have access to the service, I decide when I receive emails and it's a great way to protect my account from being hacked (think of any recent social eng hack a la Amazon, Apple, etc. they couln't do it without your signin email).

A handful of other colleagues do the same thing. If you blacklist users who want to protect their privacy and want control over their inbox all you are doing is blocking (in our case) affluent users.
> I am not a fan of how he uses 'Europe' when he often means Spain and France.

And even then, he tends to be more wrong than right (overtime isn't illegal in France, as far as I know, although mandatory overtime is; and depending on the status of the employees overtime pay may or may not exist: broadly-speaking blue-collar workers are on the clock and paid overtime, white-collar workers are on "260 days" contrats an won't get paid extra if they work 20h/day of their own volition. They'll likely have to get paid (or get extra time off) if they have to work more than 5 days a week or during holidays)

> Also here; it is not incredibly difficult to fire people. But as an employer, you need a good reason

And there usually is a delay of some sort, although in tech it can often be waived through mutual agreement.

> the trial period (usually first 3 months)

Which, depending on the country, can be renewed once.

> firing people is more easy than usual.

Trial period is essentially equivalent to "right to work" US states: either side can terminate employment at will.
I was really unsure if I'd like this article. I'm still not sure if I do. It's about how a teacher motivates his students (science can help his son), but the way it's framed is very grating.

There's this wrong idea out there, that you run into everywhere, that love is independent of physics. That a simulation of a human, grounded in rules of reality, wouldn't tend to its children. It grates me.

A good analogy is: would you take an article about the fun of skydiving and title it "Can falling trump physics?"?
Best and worst IPOs of 2012
You say that, but when I was working in the Netherlands, my colleagues and I were repeatedly told that we could not stay to work in the office past normal working hours. Even with impending deadlines that for the life of the company could not be moved, which is why we were working the long hours in the first place. To put it in perspective, at one point we were even told to work from home if needed, but to not tell them about it. I truly don't think there is any cultural misinterpretation there, this was pure legal paranoia. At least on this particular issue you pointed out.
RIP coder.io
Well yeah theoretically you're safer but Apple announced that iTunes music would become completely DRM-free back in 2009. And they've kept their promise, up until now that is. I don't think anybody thought they'd sneak it back in. I was really surprised when I found out they did. Hope it's just a glitch they'll fix soon.
> I am a great believer in hard work. The luckier I get, the more of it I seem to be able to do.

Correlation != causation.

People fundamentally underestimate the complexity of the world and due to a variety of psychological factors grossly over attribute successful outcomes to personal attributes.

Give some more of your hard work bullshit to people without legs.

Oh yeah, you don't, because your ability to see complexity only extends to the edge of your own ego.
Nice article, at least as a heads up for people. But, there are two areas that he did not go into. One was possibility of building a business around relationships with contractors rather than employees. I can imagine there being laws that would make that hard also. The other is that maternity/paternity leave is big consideration also. While I think they are great in many contexts, I've heard from business owners in Northern Europe that they can be particularly painful for small businesses.
How is not working long hours a bad thing?
Wow. I didn't notice this. It's affecting anything that I've bought since the 14th of December.

I did open one of the .m4p tracks in VLC.app and it played back fine.
The quote uses conditional probability - you must have an aforementioned high impact strategy to make it a useful quote.

For example - starting a PC company in the 70s would be a good place to use this quote.
Yes I was there then - in fact I had a load of DRM'ed tracks from iTunes back when I owned an iPod.

Why would you trust Apple not to do it though? They haven't exactly been trustworthy on any front over the years.
I wonder whether there is a hidden clause in the EULA. If not, this could be legal trouble.
Bravo! Good points all round.

However this only works if the market is decently efficient.

Looking at defence contracting incentives - this is not remotely the case.
And this once again is why I still prefer to "pirate" music.

Most "legal" services are either very vague about format, quality and DRM, not available in my country and/or have a limited collection.

The effort involved in buying something legally and DRM-free is just ridiculous, and the notion that I can trust pirates more to be honest, transparent and upfront about their offering really takes the cake.

Only in the copyright exploitation industry is the legal business more shady than the "criminals".
Regarding the HSBC settlement :
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageo...

(Follow the links for a bunch of other relevant articles)
Twitter Shuts Down Accounts After Hackers Expose Images of Child Abuse
>You don't really understand how a car works, only that most of the time you can get in it and go places. When it doesn't work, you take it to another person. She may also not understand what's wrong.

Oh, please! "She"? Let's all ruin the flow of our prose in an attempt at social engineering that probably isn't even worthwhile, shall we? I suppose you didn't bat an eyelash at Denzel Washington as savant pilot Whip Whitaker either.
They were under contract to not cut more than 3K jobs per year, but had to get rid of almost 20K persons.

Saw what constructive dismissal is - how is this making the employee life unbearable - he is getting full salary for doing nothing and nobody is harassing him. He is just not allowed to communicate with the rest of the company.
Malware target on Android OS set to increase in 2013
Just because you once had a job where your employer told you the law said a particular thing, doesn't mean the law actually says that particular thing.

I've worked long weeks before without any issue between myself and my employer (in the UK). Most people I converse with/encounter would probably say the same thing. All the EU working time directive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive) says is that an employer can't force you to work more than 48 hours a week. If you want to work 23.5 hour days, 7 days a week, and an employer who's willing to pay for that, knock yourself out.
You can still ban Mailinator by simply resolving DNS (or even only MX record) and reject if it matches 72.51.33.80.
Reddit blewit
There are huge differences between the countries. I have two friends working for two different us gaming companies doing basicly the same job. One in France and one in Germany.

The one in France has a strict work schedule. If he has to do some special works like traveling for a fair or similar, he will be rewarded with freetime and/or money. Working late? Rewarded.

The guy in Germany has a real problem. He is working late in the night on daily bases but he is payed only for the 40h stated in his contract. Everybody knows about it. Everybody is doing it. The workload demands it also. Nobody is talkig about it. Sure he could sue them but hey, they don't tell you to do it.
Just to be sure I checked Amazon before writing my "pro piracy" rant elsewhere. It's a) not available in my country, and b) between any specific mp3 offering and telling me the usual "fuck of, you're from the wrong country", and no point does Amazon inform me about the nature and quality of the download, other than the mp3 format.

Yeah, I can infer the fact that it is non-DRM from the mp3 format, but other than that it's still shadier and less informative than the average piracy side.

Not to mention insulting and utterly useless to me and 16 million fellow countrymen in one of the richest Western nations, were, oh surprise, piracy rules.
Falling can be described in terms of physics, but the rush you get from it can't be. Not with today's machinery. The model we call physics may be so off-base as to be inapplicable at that stage.

I see what you're saying, but he's talking about 'the meaning of it all', which doesn't feel like a scientific thing.
Making them sit in a room for hours at a time with no work, monitoring them for any activity they use to distract themselves so you can use it to fire them - that's basically abusive, verging on mental torture. The company being under contract is no excuse for abusive conduct.
Look At All These Guns People Got for Christmas
This is why assume-worst-case/at the edge/corner case thinking is particularly useful.

> OK guys let's invert our thinking and stop joking around for a moment. Let's say SpaceX is going to destroy us. Now what do we do?

Being able to think like that should somewhat immunize people against disruption.
Mark Cuban Answered Questions On Reddit About Being Rich,..
Just adding this, for learning purposes, libsvm works just fine, but for most real problems I've run into I've had to hand code my own SVM libs. All open source solutions I've run into use libsvm or some derivation there of which does not scale well. It single cpu usage on an algo that can easily thread out (or even better run on distributed clusters using Hadoop). It also blows through absurd amounts of memory when the number of support vectors and or the vector features are large.

The libsvm train function and some of the associated tools grid.py do a fairly mediocre job at refining the coef (as someone else mentioned) when doing nonlinear SVMs. It getts really tricky to select good coef then. Also using the eigen matrix to cut down the number of important vector features ends up being a pretty big deal if you end up black box using SVMs on massive input data sets.

If you work in a space where you data set isn't a 50/50 mix of classification data, finding coefficients to maximize accuracy and cut incorrect classification, becomes a mess.
Yes VLC supports (some?) .m4p files, but most other apps and devices don't.
Will Facebook Kill Snapchat? And Does It Matter?