skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found that terrifically lame, right from the moment when they injected "big data" into Moneyball. Yes there's statistics in Sabermetrics, but I'm pretty sure you can fit all the data in a relatively small amount of storage, like a usb key.
>The level editor was programmed in a rush and he didn't think that anyone would exploit something offered to them for free.

There's simply no way he actually believed that. It reads as a way to further shift blame to the exploiter by painting him as someone who hasn't just exploited an indie game darling, but has taken advantage of their altruism.

>In the end, the guy who warned him that an "evil hacker" could compromise the system, turned out to be that evil hacker himself.

I really wonder if Mr. Hacker would have gone ahead and done that if Tommy hadn't been so smug about blowing the guy off. If "it's fine" was asking for trouble, "I've done this for a while now" was positively begging for it.

I vaguely recall this incident from when it happened, but having recently watched Indie Game The Movie puts a new perspective on it.

That chain of events fits the personalities demonstrated in the documentary like a glove.
In the great scheme of things, I'd claim that it is a much more important function of money to a: facilitate trade and b: have a predictable value in the short to medium term, compared to having a value that is stable in the really long term.

The main reason we have money is not to store value, but to make the economy run as smooth as possible.
Total worldwide gold production amounts to $132 billion, or only 0.2% of world GDP. Even if we saved all the gold mined every year, it wouldn't support any substantial amount of real saving.
That's ebay's choice, but they're certainly not obliged to do that by copyright -- in the EU, at least. First Sale has been upheld (in the context of software) by the ECJ pretty recently (even for software you've downloaded rather than bought in retail), in the UsedSoft case -- http://www.linklaters.com/Publications/Publication1403Newsle...

Choice quote:
"This broad interpretation of Article 4(2) is necessary as otherwise the effectiveness of the rule of exhaustion would be undermined since suppliers would merely have to call the contract a “licence” rather than a “sale” in order to circumvent it."

IANAL.
> We get the age of cellphone number through a process called cellphone underwriting, which reveals all of the above and more, and which is perfectly legal but secretive enough that I won’t reveal how it works. At the end of the day, we’re looking for entrepreneurs who are young, stable, middle class, and who have the support of family and friends networks — and the age of the cellphone number tells us all those things.

> So, I take the approximate age of a founder’s cellphone number and then during due diligence, I get a stat: The average time of their first phone call in the day. If you and your entrepreneur team are making and taking calls at 6:30 a.m PT, you’re probably talking with people back East and there’s a 50-50 shot you’re making north of a million in revenues.

This smells like complete bullshit. There are no other (relevant) Google results for "cellphone underwriting": https://www.google.com/search?q=cellphone+underwriting (add the quotes yourself, they're being removed by HN's comment code)

GigaOM has really gone to the dogs.
Gold and silver have very little inherent value, only trade value (other than a few industrial applications, but they can often be replaced by copper). We don't save very much food, or surplus housing, or surplus machinery or petroleum or solar panels, mostly because these things degrade physically and become obsolete when saved. Instead, we rely on today's economy to provide these things.
It has to be a joke. They claim they can snoop on your private call records (but only for iPhones?).
I think this is where customer testing comes in. Watch 10 or 100 customers try to use you product, and observe the features they "reach for" but are not there - and the ones that are there, but they never use.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

It makes me seriously sad when people say that their occupation takes all their time, they have no time off and no time for what we call "life".

This is a sad state of affairs. We all should be working 40 hours weeks and take the honest time off for the remaining 128 hours in that week.

(The most bizzare thing is when it happens in education. Come on, children are supposed to play and read books and play computer games and just slack off. They are not supposed to work long hours. Who set this up?)
What's your skillset/professional profile?
Well yes, that's why you enter into a distribution agreement with a wholesaler in that market if you can rather than sitting back and letting your stuff be republished for nothing.
Came here to say this. Show us results, not something that sounds like it was pulled out of thin air.
I actually think you are wrong here. Money does not decouple bartering transactions as bartering transactions is not what we would have without money. In practice, we'd have a society that lends services and goods in return for other services and goods. Money allows this to work a lot better and allow the creation of real markets and greatly improves the ability to set a fair price.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Occupy_Oakland it was the use of tear gas and beanbag rounds on Oct 25. This resulted in Scott Olsen (ex-marine and Iraq veteran) suffering a skull fracture and needing to be hospitalized.

That timeline gives Nov 2 as the first truly violent act by protestors, namely the setting of a police barricade on fire while the police were attacking the protestors with tear gas, etc. (I'm not counting the tearing up of deposit slips on Oct 22 as violent - and the protestors cleaned up the mess that they caused on that occasion.)
We do, but our rate of nominal wealth accumulation bears no relation to the rate at which we accumulate tangible physical assets. Not to mention that most of those physical assets depreciate, which must be accounted for.
Didn't make it, just thought it was interesting. Always enjoy how people capitalize on every event with a t-shirt.
If that was the case, sure. But in what world is this a buyer's market? At the last tech meetup I went to:

Employers looking for developers: 11
Developers looking for work: 2

Austin, TX, for reference.
Yep. I wouldn't want a VC firm that didn't understand the difference between data and "big data". Good thing I wouldn't pass their tests.
Thanks, yes that's correct. The key detail from the quote pull was "suggest", I didn't intend to indicate that this general method is detection is invalid.

The details in the article came down to they were pulling signal out from deep within noise in a way that other planet finders were skeptical of: "They're really digging deep into the noise here. The community is going to find it hard to accept planet discoveries from signals so deeply embedded in noise."

Even the researchers themselves are quoted as saying they don't consider anything here proven, they are just seeing if anyone else wants to have a go at finding further confirmation or disproof: "We felt that the best thing to do was to put the result out there and see if somebody can either independently confirm it or shoot it down."

The researchers themselves have not made the claim of finding an earth like planet around Tau Ceti at all. It's not been established or accepted by experts in the field that there are planets around this sun, what their orbits are, their composition, or that they are "earth-like" in a way that any non-specialist reader would interpret "earth-like". Even the authors don't make those claims. Maybe someday those things will be confirmed or disproved. Today is not that day.

The journalist is aware of this too. At the end of the article he says "If the planets exist...", acknowledging it is not established at all, before then engaging in fanciful speculation that is unlikely to appear in a reputable science news source with a competent editor: "That may just explain why no one from Tau Ceti has ever contacted beings as primitive as us."
What Progress Looks Like
(I work for EFF.)

This article is a quick end-of-year summary of two issues that have been active during the year. The description of what Kirtsaeng was doing was likely omitted for brevity, not as a cover-up. (The person who asked my coworkers to write these end-of-year posts specifically asked for short, broad summaries instead of detailed analysis.)

If you follow the link given in the article (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/parade-horribles-supre...), you'll see another article from October by my colleague Parker, where he writes:

"Wiley claims that this doctrine only applies to goods that are manufactured in the U.S., and that the defendant, Supap Kirtsaeng, was infringing its copyright by purchasing books at a reduced rate in his native Thailand and selling them below list price in the States."

This description appeared on the same EFF blog (Deeplinks) where the item that you're concerned about did.

One of the most important aspects of the Kirtsaeng case that we've tried to get the Supreme Court to appreciate is that the plaintiff's theory would limit first sale in a wide range of situations. (One example is artworks, like paintings or manuscripts, that were produced outside of the U.S. and that were brought to the United States by their legitimate owners, who are not the copyright holders. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, there is also a question of whether publishers intending to sell works in the United States can choose the location of their manufacturing operations to make first sale a dead letter.) So even people who think that parallel importation as practiced by Supap Kirtsaeng is bad or should be restricted by law may have cause to be concerned about the Kirtsaeng case. Those consequences and concerns are the focus of this summary post.
Indeed. Government works best when it is the scrorekeeper, not when it is both scorekeeper and a player.
Then maybe those creditors shouldn't be lending and should instead be investing. Bond holders should be punished for taking money out of circulation and instead of investing or consuming them at good yields they invest in bad yields.

Inflation is just the kicker to get them to suck it up and help fund the next Google.
I just tore through that book just a few days ago! Definitely a lot of eye-opening things happening in relation to rails and architecture.

I think a lot of people/projects/companies have been burned attempting to upgrade rails, or have a slow test suite, or having a terrible time trying to figure out where to fit core application logic into the rails stack.

And then you have an epiphany and say, wait, rails should not define my app. You say, I should be able to upgrade to rails 4 on day 1. Rails does not define my application, my application defines my application! So if you do just a wee bit of partitioning, it goes a very long way. (much to the chagrin of DHH, who for some reason evangelizes having your core logic in ActiveRecord models, to a fault)
Thanks for that. The PDF and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family were both fascinating.

I then read a bit about an attempt to port Hurd to L4, which floundered for reasons which are beyond my understanding.
My comment was in reply to the parent comment "dissent: one misunderstanding away from jail".
I didn't see one thing in there about evaluating the business. That said, assuming that this isn't a prank post, perhaps this kind of reasoning is behind the fact that many great ideas flounder for lack of funding while many bad ones do get funding. Perhaps the VC's behind those ventures aren't looking at the business at all - they are just looking at the age of the founders' cell phone numbers.

I do believe that alot of this kind of thing goes on though. I invented some authentication technology back in 2004 and couldn't get anyone to take me seriously. After a former friend of mine with serious credibility in the tech investor community came along and formed a business around it, he was instantly able to raise money and soon thereafter sold it for $64 million (incidentally, he screwed me out of the $13 million I was supposed to get, but that's a story for another day). The point is that great technology often goes nowhere until the "right" people are behind it - which probably does all of us a serious disservice.

Rather than rejecting great technology with what the investor believes are weak founders for arbitrary reasons, they should keep teams of what they consider to be great founders around to help those "weak" teams with great ideas.
Hi,

As I mentioned in a reply above, an earlier EFF blog post (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/parade-horribles-supre...) on the Kirtsaeng case did describe what Supap Kirtsaeng was doing ("purchasing books at a reduced rate in his native Thailand and selling them below list price in the States").
Well, I highly doubt that, to be honest.

It's pretty simple and known why Chrome is not in software center: Google. They won't allow it. Chrome would have to go in the partner repository, hence needs collaboration with said partner. Think Skype.
I'm fairly certain that any half decent PI can fetch a cell account history by a phone number.
If the transaction is initiated by a US consumer inside the US, it's considered to be a US sale. If you dig into the case law on this, you'll find that the concept of first sale doctrine is perfectly well understood by the legal establishment and is not about to shrivel up and blow away.

There's an excellent (albeit technical) introduction to these issues in the 9th circuit's ruling on Omega S.A. v. Costco Wholesale Corp.. Read up also on some of the journal articles from the Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_S.A._v._Costco_Wholesale_.... and if you're really itnerested, dig into the amicus briefs.
Some are sinkers some are floaters.
I don't think either position is more right than the other. I think both have valid points. Chris' genius move isn't something that magically allowed him to find gold...it was merely a tradeoff of equity for the ability to handpick your investors and advisors.
It seems their algorithm has codified age discrimination. It's a shame really that this is a component of their strategy.
Then what do you propose is the measurement that can be applied to determine the actual effectiveness of a consulting company?

Of course, it's true that GP is not a good measure, if taken alone, of the delivered value just as revenue and signings do not necessarily make good indicators. However, if one assumes that customers are able to gauge the effectiveness of the consultancy they receive then measurements such as backlog seem reasonable indicators of success; if clients are not receiving value, they would be cancelling contracts and/or not resigning and hence backlog would start to decline year on year. In the case of IBM, their services backlog went up 1 percent year on year and sits around 140 billion USD.
This is a common misconception. Ever since the Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act of 2006[0,1] was passed, it has been illegal to obtain telephone records if you're not a law enforcement or intelligence agency.

Edit: Here[2] is a more comprehensive list of records that private investigators cannot legally obtain: banking and financial records, telephone records, credit information, nationwide criminal records, and a comprehensive individual profile. However, I have no confirmation of the veracity of that website, as I just found it with a quick search.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_Records_and_Privacy_P...

1: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-109hr4709enr/pdf/BILLS-10...

2: http://www.diligentiagroup.com/legal-investigation/5-myths-w...
> Edit: If anybody can work out a way to share custom reports in Google Analytics, let me know - I would be interested in sharing reports with others, for specific cases such as this.

Haven't tried it myself but it seems like you can share reports and dashboards in Google Analytics:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/03/share-your-custom-repo...

https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
I rather think the opposite — every password would comprise of 18770 of the same character.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying it would be silly for me to buy a broken project car because I know nothing about them and perfectly working cars are available.

The people you're taking about have probably never heard of GitLab. They're surely quite happy with GitHub.

It would be like me going on CraigsList and emailing my neighbor selling his in- pieces old sports car and asking what the hell I'm supposed to do with a car in pieces.

I feel like I keep having this same conversation and it's always about git. People wanting things to be easier does not magically make them so.
It seems like a trade-off: obvious control flow and some extra `if intermediate_result is None: return BogusValue` error checks are replaced by non-obvious control flow.

Is the only value that you save a few lines of error-checking? It just doesn't seem worth it to me.
did you read the article? ironically, he's kind of concerned about people like you.
I read his book, "You are not a gadget", and found it really thought-provoking and inspiring to focus more on real-world stuff I needed to do and less on reading about the ever latest fad that has no impact on my life whatsoever.

As always, was it the book or my state of mind/stage in my life during which I read the book that made me change my mind about re-prioritizing? I don't know. But I'd recommend the book for an alternative perspective not often heard in the TechCr/otherblogs/Forbes/BW hype cycle that is the tech (esp consumer internet) world.

FWIW, the book didn't strike me as elitist at all. I didn't know anything about him before, so I was strictly considering his arguments for their merits.

Edit: Just finished the Smithsonian article, which I consider singularly unhelpful in really understanding the points he makes in his book. Do not judge his book or his arguments by this article. The article is an incoherent mess.
I worked for a company who do big enterprise sorts of things, who seem pretty good as agents go, and understand how to create a path from contract to permanent, if you want to: FDM.

Emphasis on "big enterprise" however.
I'm aware of steganography, but this would be slightly different than any published steg technique that I am aware of, as it would not be hiding in a preexisting carrier signal, it would be creating its own.
The article doesn't really comment on the merits of the case for Kirtsaeng. The EFF isn't trying to convince people to support any position in that case, nor should they, I agree with you that it is definitely a legal grey area.

What the EFF is taking issue with in that case is the potential precedent that could be set depending how the case turns out that could undermine first sale. The only reason EFF is interested in the case is because the legal arguments being used could impact first sale.

What's happening in that case is not simply that publishers are trying to claw back rights from US consumers

True... but that's the part of the case that the EFF is concerned about.

In contrast, in the Capitol case the article very clearly takes a position, and while I'm not familiar with that case I give the EFF the benefit of the doubt and assume they're being truthful.
It's not just work, and there's a name for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgroup_homogeneity_bias
I wish a full transcript was available, because it's hard to tell if the writer has turned Lanier's views into an incoherent mess, or if his views actually are a mess, and the writer is doing the best he can to synthesize them.

Page 2 seems to imply that part of Lanier's dislike of digital culture stems from the fact that MIDIs can't represent saxophone music. Was that really such an important part of the interview that it deserves space in what's clearly a short summary of a long interview? It sounds more like an aside that's been taken out of context.

Later on that same page, the article seems to imply that automatic translation is bad because "by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy." That is, because technology allows something to be done more cheaply, it's actually hurting the economy by shrinking nominal spending. But that's precisely why technology has been the primary driver of economic growth since the industrial revolution. You can make a case that it hurts some people while helping people in the aggregate, but, read as written, his criticism is an attack on pretty much any technology, ever.

And then there's all the straw men, like the idea that "Web 2.0 intellectuals" think that "we shouldn’t be self-critical and that we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves is irresponsible." Isn't every other non-tech article on HN a critical piece? If anything, the consensus here seems to be that criticism is given too much attention (e.g., the most upvoted comment in many HN threads is a comment telling people not to be so harsh, the criticism of 'middlebrow dismassal' [1], etc.)

[1] If my comment qualifies, I apologize. I'm writing this because I literally don't understand why Jaron Lanier believes what he does or what this article is trying to convey. The article is full of logical fallacies and contradictions that are so absurd that they're surely not his real views. Other people around here seem to be familiar with Lanier; perhaps someone with more background can make sense of this article.

EDIT: his wikipedia page is decent, although it's a bit light on content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier. I don't agree, but, unlike the article, wikipedia presents his opinions in a reasonable light.

EDIT2: Just as an aside, one of the biggest anti-features I find when I read HN is that there are often many comments expressing variants of the same opinion. They're not exactly redundant, because each presents a unique viewpoint, but it makes comment sections overly long.

I'll often delete my comments after other, similar, comments pop up, to reduce the reading load. I'd delete this, because there are now six other comments expressing the opinion that either Lanier's opinions aren't cogent or that the article isn't representative of Lanier's opinions (and only one dissenter), but it's bad form to delete a comment after someone's quoted it, so I'll leave it here for posterity.
Ah, but it can't repeat any of the previous 30,689 passwords. Better break out the Unicode chart...
I think there is another story: Not that many people where working on GNU.
How prevalent is Tor usage in China? Is it a PITA because one has to go through bridge relays?
Does anyone else feel compelled to read any article with a headline like this? I know if I don't read it and then for some reason find myself on a sinking helicopter the only thing I will be thinking about is why didn't I read that article!

As it turns out, this article only talks about specialised training and special devices and the dangers of crashing in cold oceans. Probably not many handy hints for the casual helicopter passenger.