skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not criticising them for being a clone company. Especially not when they are cloning companies that are not interested to come to europe.

I think they treat their employees bad.

I have worked for one of their companies as a freelancer and I would never want be an employee there. It was an eye opening experience though.

I would recommend not working for them without researching their modus operandi first. If you like to be yelled at in meetings and told a three year old would do better work than you, maybe this is the right place to work - for you.
So, you're saying that the code would be less reliable if there was no work to prove it formally? Of course you aren't. What you're saying is that proving code is correct is insufficient. Of course it is insufficient. Your comment adds nothing to the debate.

What I'm saying is that asking that mathematicians produce their proofs in a form amenable to mechanical checking is like asking programmers to produce their code in a form that is amenable to mechanical checking. It's long, tedious, error-prone in its own right, and simply not going to happen. It's like asking people who write multi-million line programs in high-level languages to get the same functionality by writing in assembler.

Programming doesn't happen like that, and proofs don't either.
The ad on the video is quite annoying!
I wouldn't say it severe no purpose other than bureaucracy, waste and limiting competition.

My understanding was that the 3 tiered system came about as a method to closely monitor and control alcohol sales. For example, medicinal brandy was still legal during prohibition and much of it was diverted for recreational use. Tightly controlling manufacturers, distributors and retailers helped keep that sort of stuff under control (kinda of... not really).

I don't disagree that it serves a very limited purpose now.
Add some screenshots .
I have to ask, is there anyone who honestly believed this?
I think that that's an attempt to try and prove that they're not an assassination market:

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

An assassination market or market for assassinations is a prediction market where any party can place a bet (using anonymous electronic money, and pseudonymous remailers) on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately...

It has been argued that the feasibility of an assassination market precludes the acceptance by governments of any form of anonymous electronic money.
Well, I'd let them install devices to track my heating usage. Just like I accept that Google, who is handling my email, will check that email for relevant content to display ads.

However, if Gmail was trying to access to other things that it wasn't associated with, we'd have a problem.

Sort of like your "rhetorical question."
Bootstrap is so easy to customize. An hour spent changing the variables in the variables.less file with be well worth your time.
There's three plans available, but no way to see what the difference between them is.

You should also look into Twilio for phone/SMS reminders and confirmations. It's really straightforward to integrate.
There are many ways to grow. See, for example: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

Depends upon your market and what you're trying to build.
Uhm... since when did Sweden's political and legal systems slip into a being extremely right wing?

Compared to the US, Sweden is extremely left wing (whether you like it or not).
Good point. I tend to operate under a certain level of self imposed stress plus whatever actual stress there is with the job. Not monstrous breakdown type stress, but definitely a heightened sense of urgency most of the time. Personally, my self imposed stress comes from my desire to make things perfect and my fear of failure regardless of the job at hand. I attributed most of my personal stress to nurture, and the lack of a family to fall back on should I fail.
As new proofs are distilled, understood, enhanced, and internalised, so conjectures that were previously thought out-of-reach become more reasonable. "Easy" is a relative term - many things now presented at undergraduate level were once post-doctoral work. The "more sophisticated mathematical machinery" becomes an everyday tool for the working mathematician.
Almost complete agreement here. There seems to be a 'shortcut mentality' among some hackers - the idea being that if you are faced with a difficult subject, begin with the assumption that standard learning material is padded with lots of useless filler material, and hence conclude you can save time by going for the more summarised stuff.

I think this is not generally a bad strategy in many subjects (business comes to mind), but mathematics is different. There really is no 'royal road' to any subset of it. There are shortcuts, sometimes, but every shortcut you take (with the exception of clever mathematical tricks, which count as solid learning here) deprives you of the opportunity to make a small but significant improvement to your logical problem-solving apparatus.

And that is probably a greater waste of time than anything else: shallow learning. Again, this is possibly not a bad strategy in many subjects, but again mathematics is not one of those.
Know your closures: Ruby's blocks, procs, and lambdas
Awkward that you're using Lavaar Burton's name in your tagline.
Has this been done before, but without BTC?
I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know what I mean) to correct faster?
That being said, as you can see, professors in Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.
I believe it is used to describe a woman rather than being always said by a woman.

Could describe the girl he has been talking about throughout the documents.
Good article. Seems like common sense information but still, good stuff.
My first reaction on seeing that was that it was the Bootstrap home page. There's nothing wrong with using Bootstrap, but if you do I suggest you go to Bootswatch (http://bootswatch.com/) and use a theme other than the default one.
Yeah. I took one look the site, decided that it look illegitimate and/or suspicious, and closed the page.
Dependency injection is not a virtue
It's called Pixel-QI
Ready.js is now v3.0.0 - continuous javascript integration
No metric is perfect. If you think it's so bad, why not suggest a better one?
> Snip is a software product that helps you spend less time on the tedious parts of being a stylist or salon owner. Click below to learn how Snip can make your life easier.

Or something like "Do you run a hair salon? Do you find appointment scheduling and anther administrative tasks tedious? Snip is for you."
I'm interested in seeing Ubuntu getting a fair shot at the market. I don't know what to think about web-apps based operating systems like Firefox OS yet, but I think it will help Firefox, the browser, become more competitive from what they learn making the OS.

I don't care as much about Tizen and Sailfish, but I'd rather see strong open source competitors standing up against Android and iOS, than more closed ones like WP8 and BB10.

I think, if not Samsung, at least more desperate companies like HTC, LG and Sony should definitely give Ubuntu a fair try. Asus might do it anyway, as they are already making Ubuntu laptops, and they have that whole Padfone thing going on, but they haven't been very successful in smartphones yet.
Ahem.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfinished_Tales

Not exactly prime rib eh?
>"I put the $20 in his hand to defuse the situation as fast as possible, but I had a hammer in my hand just in case."

Well that could have ended poorly.
Well, he actually seems to be implying that the tires were not suitable for the snow, not that the car itself doesn't work.
I'll augment this with an excerpt:

"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created. Among the most important are immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality; properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single individual. They enable a corporation to manage its own affairs and to hold property without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand. It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men, in succession, with these qualities and capacities that corporations were invented and are in use."

-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819

Corporations have rights because human beings have rights: they're just using the corporation to exercise those rights. But you'll note that there are some rights which aren't really transferrable, such as voting, and that corporations don't get to exercise those. Likewise, being eligible to be counted as an occupant of a vehicle for the purposes of carpool statutes... not really transferrable either.
Ditto comments about design, wall of text, layout, logo, etc.

Also add one or more photo to illustrate what your service does; maybe include a beauty salon, appointment book, salon employees at work, etc.

Make your best call to action easy to find on the home page "Sign up for 30-day free trial.."

Improve the call to action on your contact page from something like "Snip was built, and is run, by Jason Swett, who can be reached in the following ways..." to "If you'd like to schedule a personal conversation to talk about what Snip can do for your beauty salon, just call..."

The phrase "hair salon software product" sounds like a vague and dull description of your service. Your description of what Snip is and does should be more clear and appealing.
You should never leave VMware management ports open to the internet.

I suggest you install a Windows XP, Win Server inside the virtual, turn on the "automatic start up" on that VM, just after you the automatic start up of your virtual FW and use RDP with a 2 factor authentication (duo security is free and works beautifully), which now is you "management" machine.

Just my 2 cents on Virtual Security, since this is the setup I have :)
I second your comment, it's a very valid concern.
And your comment adds nothing to the debate while picking on a joke.

"is like asking programmers to produce their code in a form that is amenable to mechanical checking. It's long, tedious, error-prone in its own right, and simply not going to happen"

But programs are done in a form that's subject to mechanical checking. Compilers do that and only compile code that adheres to a strict syntax and grammar. In a higher level there are static code analysers that look for other defects. Some of them are in compilers already for optimization purposes.

Also, semiconductor companies use automated checkers for the inner parts of their processors, like floating point multipliers to make sure they are correct.
this isn't exactly programming related.
HN has downvotes (and the post you refer to did get downvoted) but you don't get access to that feature until you have a certain level of karma.
I'm not an SJ lover, but this is one case where we can see Apple with and without Jobs. Apple was nearly out of business when he took back the helm. To ignore that the leader has a huge amount to do with the success of any group is to ignore human history. You're also ignoring the stories of SJ who by all accounts was obsessive compulsive with shipping over all else. Do you really think that his attitude towards shipping didn't permeate through the entire organization?
Yes, that's even better. Get the right people hoped within the first few words.
Wow, it sounds like being an airplane pilot. Work for $16,000 a year, and pull crazy hours. End up with a 9-5 job, for $300,000 a year.

The thing is, unions don't represent workers. They represent the kind of workers who run the unions - senior workers.
My Retina Macbook Pro 13" is my main machine and I connect 2 27" Viewsonic monitors to it daily. It works just fine for everyday work (iterm, vim, intellij, rdp and office apps)

If only it had 16GB (not available on the 13" rMBP model), it would be the perfect laptop
I, for one, welcome our new self-replicating machine overlords
Get a nice logo maybe including a scissor illustration.

Create a favicon from the logo

Hire a designer or buy a website templates/theme as a starting point for your design. Themeforest.net has lots of options for a starting point. They have some good admin themes that might improve the app interface.

Setup a pricing table/page.
Something like http://www.bidsketch.com/pricing/

Consider using Stripe.com for payments so you can easily get their credit card info up front and offer a 14 day trial.

Playing around in the client interface it needs some work to make it easier to use . . .

Refine the user interface and make it easier for them to add services, etc.

Get feedback from your current users on ways to improve the app and get their feedback on pain points in their business for further improvements. And for marketing get their feedback on the features that save them the most time and what made them sign up for snipHQ. Then make those items the focus of your marketing.

For marketing start posting articles of ways to improve salons and dovetail in how your software can help.

Include more graphics/screenshots on the website to get potential clients interested.

Once you have it up and running like a top consider approaching beauty brands to use your system. Their current system is dated and needs a refresh.

Listen to StartUpsForTheRestofUs.com.

Congrats! You have a SaaS app and paying customers now build on it.

Good luck in 2013.
First, you need to do a better job articulating the differences between your plans.

Second, you are too reliant on Bootstrap, occasionally to the detriment of the UX. Bootstrap is fine for a page layout, but you can't exclusively use stock elements. It just looks perfunctory.

Third, you never actually show the product. This is understandable if you haven't completed it yet, but you need images of the product at some point.

Fourth, going after a small, specific market could be lucrative, but could also backfire. Are you even sure that salon owners would be willing to use a service like this?
I'd disagree both with you and the comic.

The problem with publish or perish is that it leads to people gaming the system. If pay rises (or employment) solely hinge on the amount of (however graded) publications you have achieved, this leads to people essentually using parts of books they are writing as articles etc. This in turn leads to a doubling of information, inconsistencies etc, alongside the fact that not every topic can be adequately dealt with in a journal article.

The system actively punishes big projects and thoughts in favour of small, more easily digestible (and thus publishable) projects. If a university only looks at the number of publications and not at their nature, they shift from quality to quantity, which in turn is bad, because it fundamentally undermines the purpose of academia.

edit: I just saw _dps also linked to the gamification bit, but the rest holds true nonetheless (and I do agree with him)
> It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

Nobody in Canada does research then? No classes does not mean vacation.
Keeping it small is definitely a good idea when it's possible, but whether that can be done depends on what you're creating.

I've found that this works when making small feature changes/additions to a consumer web app, but fails catastrophically with B2B software that has to interact with client systems (especially old ones!) or legal regulations. If you start writing code after talking to the client, you'll find it's about 30% right and often requires major architecture changes. If you iterate through a spec you can spot a lot of problems right away, especially ones that have to do with obscure quirks in the client's systems.

Note that a spec is essentially an outline designed to be read by and solicit feedback from multiple people. A spec only needs to cover the things that everybody involved can read and discuss. A developer-client spec for a product with no UI might just be a few flow charts + a few words of explanation. A Data Scientist-Developer spec should go into algorithms and math. A spec for a UI-based product should primarily consist of wireframes. Etc.
Thanks for sharing. Very inspirational story!
Okay, but you're addressing only the ideal scenario of beneficially matching buyer and seller, where the product user is buffered by (honest broker) Google and thus not yet revealed to the advertiser.

But once you cross over (via clicking), whatever fraction of your digital identity is effectively sold to third parties who keep packaging your identity further upstream, in very durable ways.

Now you exist in many data warehouses, who are eventually integrating the various fractional identities into a good picture. And it is no longer hypothetical to have those identities connected to your real identity. I do believe Google is an honest broker but we have no reason to trust third parties.
They would not become good enough until they allow you to influence the real world (that everyone is living in) in a noticeable way.

And once they do, the division between games and life disappears. They just become different interfaces to the real world.
Spelling and punctuation issues aside, I'm having trouble following this story. What $20? Why? What was the hammer for? Did he plan on bashing this guy's skull in? If so, why are we proud of how this was resolved again? How is luring a thief into your apartment considered a good idea? Why did he have to follow the thief up the stairs if he was going through the front door, wouldn't it make more sense to just wait for the guy? The thief figured our how to use the dating website account but couldn't be bothered to check if the name on the door was identical to the person whom he took the phone from?

Either this is really bad reporting or all parties involved are complete idiots.
Nor does it really have to be.

I think this was an interesting case wherein someone used available technologies in a clever manner to retrieve one's stolen personal property. (Though the man could not have handled the situation more poorly.)

Not really something you see on an everyday basis.
Shorter point: Being a tenured professor is nice but getting to be a tenured professor is essentially a lottery process - lots of work and luck is required to get there.

Similarly, being "a movie star" is a pretty sweet gig, but that doesn't mean being "an actor" is all that great as a career option.
> Aside from political dissidents under oppressive regimes, I don't see much reason for people to worry about someone trying to figure out what you like

I don't share the Google paranoia but It's not about what you like or don't like. It's more a profile of you. That means Google is (in theory) able to identify to a certain degree if you are sick, if you have problems with the law or any other other personal trait that may be problematic. Your insurance company would probably like to know about this. Your employer would also like to know about it. I'm certain that Google won't share this data but others might do.

> Every time I meet some tech savvy developer who only uses a Linux distro he built himself to avoid government spying, runs all his phone calls through encryption software, and encrypts his entire hard drive on every device, I immediately wonder if he's a paranoid schizophrenic or has very illegal hobbies.

That is a slightly rephrased variant of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry". And it's unrelated to Google IMHO, so I'll talk only about encryption here:

It's not the government, it's also other companies. And it's great to have the possibility to encrypt your HDD and be anonymous.

You don't need to be in an oppressed country, look at Wikileaks, journalistic work, industrial espionage. There are lots of legit cases for encryption.

I'm doing freelance work, I have several root passwords on my hdd. For me it's logical to encrypt the drive. The only technical somewhat secure way to encrypt your drive is full disk encryption. I think my clients deserve that I'm not leaking their passwords when my laptop is stolen.

> Am I being dangerously nieve? What specific things should I be concerned about that I'm not?

If you are a company: Industrial espionage, malicious hackers, law enforcement

If you are a private citizen you probably want to control the data trails you leave. They can bite you have bitten numerous others.

You can e.g. easily create graphs of your social connections and cluster you based on these. You can then make assumptions about these clusters. That means your mobile provider knows where you are and were your connections are. Now when law enforcement decides to collect these data from a whole city the structure of your group is clear. You can identify influencing persons and concentrate on these.

This happens, last I checked activism was not illegal.
I don't blame him. Instead, I just didn't read it.
Wow. Great job! Keep pushing!
You cannot post links directly unless of course you share a link. You can post it in comments by prefixing with http://
Well, whether or not you actually allow cash withdrawals is of secondary importance. The fact is that these cards can be used as payments. It's money laundering if the authorities decide that it is, then it's up to you to prove that it isn't.

The best way forward for you would be to consult a lawyer from the place you're going to register your corporate entity in, and then the same thing with every place where you intend to do business with.

That's so you don't end up like mr. David Carruthers.

You're on the right track by looking at the ways in which the system can be abused. Things to watch out for: regular users (you're aiming for travellers, so a person that uses this year long should stand out), volume purchases (extraordinary amounts / numbers of cards) and so on.

Establish what you think are reasonable parameters and ruthlessly prune whatever lies outside that. (aka the paypal method).
I'm not sure when you were a professor, but things have changed a lot in the just the past four years. My sister is a professor at a California public university and unless you have a Nobel Prize (or are prominent in some other manner), everyone is being scrutinized. Tenure no longer means a job for life. It means they need to have cause to push you out (no one actually gets fired) -- whereas w/o tenure they needn't have any cause.

Apparently a common tactic is to increase your teaching load so high that no reasonable human can do it. These people either go to a different university or leave academia disgruntled.