skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one is pointing a gun to your head. Okay someone is "pointing a gun to your head" in the same sense they are "pointing a gun to your head" to prevent you from murdering someone.

But unless you are posting from North Korea you live in a country with the world's longest undefended border (aka the Canadian border). You can leave at any time and renounce your citizenship and literally no one will stop you.

Seriously, "pointing a gun at my head" is child talk for "making me follow the rules that I have implicitly agreed to obey by living in society", and you can at any time stop agreeing with those rules by leaving the society. Living in the society, enjoying its benefits and then crying about having to follow the rules is childish and hypocritical. If you don't like it, leave.

No one will try to stop you from leaving at gunpoint.
Tim from GoCardless here - that's a really cool idea.

We'll look into it for sure, and we'd definitely consider down the line releasing more general data about what our merchants' customers call us about. We think it's really important to help those using us to optimise their integrations.
I think your boobs can use an algorithm. I am without them myself, but, I have heard complaints about bra sizing forever, and am aware of the (now common?) knowledge that most women are wearing non-ideal bras.

It doesn't matter if "most women" don't buy bras every month, if 1% of them do, and True & Co captures 10% of that market then that 2M seed funding will be a great investment.

Your boobs don't need an algorithm that doesn't work, of course. But if some smart people are able to ask you three minutes worth of questions, and then provide you with support that will make your life significantly better.. who cares?

I think the idea is that they are trying to turn a product that 'needs to be felt' into something that doesn't, because "it just works". Anything "that just works" is good, and VC money will chase after it.
I think there's a difference between quoting something in a review or as part of a presentation about film theory (or whatever), and quoting it in the context of a remix, where you're essentially engaging in fan-fiction first and commentary as a distant second (because the commentary is implicit and arguably subordinate to the entertainment function).

Now I am in favor of fairly wide latitude for this sort of reuse, which is a big reason I favor much, much shorter copyright terms, and graduated copyright at that (eg exclusive for 20 years, mandatory cheap licensing for the next 30, PD after that - for example). But it's hard to ignore the rightsholder's concern that this work is less about commentary than simply hitching a ride on a currently-popular franchise. It's not cashing in, since the person isn't trying to monetize it directly, but the person is trying to build their creative reputation from rearrangement of others' work, while denying any and all revenue to the original creator.

As someone who has spent the last decade making films from scratch rather than remixing others' work, I think this is pretty weak sauce, just as I think that DJing falls far short of musicianship. I engage in both activities, but when I'm DJing I don't consider that to be creatively equivalent to composing something original. People who say all creativity is fungible are lying to themselves.
The good thing about taking your web stack's password reset feature, if it has one, is that you're probably going to find out quickly if there's a bug discovered in it.

Note though that that's not the case for 3rd-party password reset libraries or, more likely, the all-purpose security library that provides it. I'd be very wary about using a 3rd party library for password reset unless they've got a credible for story for it having been reviewed.

Django: Good.

3rd Party Library: Less Good

Just Using A Random Token: Good

Cryptography: You Will Perish In Flames
Yeah he definitely did the due diligence before bringing it public...

On a side note, he did post his video here with popups that are basically an "American Pie" like parody of popups in films... except that I think the popups are supposed to be serious. They make watching the remix utterly impossible though.
http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/popupvideo/
I love this post and it underlines a common problem I see being repeated from the early dotcom days; people investing in things they find exciting rather than things that actually make sense.
After 5 years as lead dev small startup, what now? 
I wanted to know your thoughts on what I should do at this point in my career. I've worked for the same startup for 4 years now. I am not a cofounder but I have been with the company from the start as the head of development/technology. We are a very small shop, and I don't foresee the company growing more than 10% a year from here on out. I'm also a bit unhappy with my manager's tendency to micro-manage. He is non-technical, and I feel he has little appreciation for how good of a developer I am (something like this: http://xkcd.com/664/).

I have some stock options but I doubt they will ever be worth anything as we will likely never IPO, and acquisition is possible but I don't have any reason to believe we are moving in that direction. The company is profitable.

I make ~100K, + 15%-20% bonus, but I want my base pay to be at least ~125K + bonus. I'm unhappy with the personal and career growth opportunities at this company. I have to go way out of my way to keep current with even relatively recent tech (most of the first 4 years was spent on legacy systems with 8+ year old tech, the past year was the 1st greenfield project and I knocked it out of the park with new stuff).

I'm looking around to see what the opportunities are, but I also have a performance review coming up in early Feb, so I wanted to know what I should be aiming for in case I decide to stay. What's the normal next step for a director level lead developer at a small, profitable startup after the first 4-5 years? Besides a salary increase is there anything else I should be asking for?
Hi - I'm Tim from GoCardless, writer of this post.

At the moment, we still use Desk.com for our emails. Here, we were looking for a simple system for tagging our phone calls, but one which could be tightly integrated with our internal services and metrics. We found that the best way to do this was to build our on.

Twilio has been great, offering a huge amount of flexibility to build this how we want to.
> two "coherent claims" are so broad that they capture most of the the individual specific arguments

That's not been my experience (I linked to a discussion from a month ago, but you can find the same points reiterated in this discussion by others). Those "other points" are not remotely covered by these two claims, and are touted far more often.

> a conservative could reply that there are only a few "coherent claims" for public insurance too.

That's true; perhaps it's just one claim - but it's a matter of fact, rather than opinion:

1. Every western country that implemented single payer spends significantly less for comparable or better results (normalized by just about every attribute you want)

(corollary) 2. Medical bankruptcies (that is, attributable directly to cost medical treatment, rather than, say, the inability to produce income due to sickness) are essentially nonexistent in any other part of the world, yet are the reason for more than 25% of US bankruptcies http://www.factcheck.org/2008/12/health-care-bill-bankruptci...

re: education - I'm with you on that. That's also something that the US can learn from other western countries - where generally, public education (at all levels, including preschool and academic levels) outperforms private education.
You really need to analyze what you mean by "work." Everyone is different and thus their learning styles are different. Personally, Codecademy was not the answer for me in the beginning.

When I began learning to code, I would go to a website and "steal" their source code. Then take that code and upload it into my code editor. From there, I manipulated the code and watched how it changed and what it did. After doing that for a while and feeling quite comfortable, I was curious to learn more and kind of like one would look into a dictionary to understand certain words, I looked into Codecademy to understand new concepts.

To tell you the truth, Codecademy isn't the best "Code Dictionary" but it is a great way, once you have a solid base, to learn more and to make sure there wasn't anything important that you have missed.

In all truth, the best way to keep learning is by coding a lot. Build, create, fix and contribute.
Thanks - we really appreciate it!
Ask HN: Apple Search
It's under agreement that on the web Google has one of the best ROI's for the marketer because intent is so clear in search. Few other people have the scale of Google to identically replicate that business model but I was curious why Apple doesn't try. Obviously there search has the same purchase intent, probably greater seeing as everything in the store is a way to derive income.

Is it for purity of the App Store? To not anger developers? Is it because the App Store is just a means for people to buy the hardware product so they want to deliver the best apps not the best funded ones?

I'm curious as to the reason why thats never been attempted seeing as implementing a promoted or adwords type product could be very lucrative for them, especially on iPad devices that possess greater real estate.
Thanks for the link. I hadn't seen this video before. It's really well done, and indeed is an original and convincing critique of the insufferable Twilight series. This sort of speech can only take place in a context of fair use. They had to show Ed's pasty mug so they could stake him.
It does seem that VCs have a bias towards funding business models that are popular in the valley, even if they haven't been proven yet. The subscription box o' crap is a model being used by dozens of startups, but I can't think of any that is really successful.
- I don't know about $20 billion 6thsigma but from this link ~> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnrABZ3E0SpidDF... many billion companies have been found. Thank you for your response 6thSigma. I really appreciate it.
What’s on TV at CES
what was wrong with putting desktop machines in the library which you can check out by, you know, sitting at the desk, and which are hard to steal because they are bolted to the furniture?

what exactly are we maximizing here? the amount of money spent by the university?
Tim here, writer of the post.

Indeed. We'd love to open-source it, and I plan to get it to that stage in the long term. The challenge is updating it as so that it's useful for more people and not tied into our internal services and metrics platforms.

Watch this space.
No, I don't point a gun to your head.

Instead, we agree on a mechanism by which to make decisions and reach compromise. As everyone has different opinions and agendas, compromise is required. Not everyone, no one perhaps, will get their full agenda realized. Via those mechanisms (voting, representation, legislating, enforcement), we establish the rules of the society.

If you don't like the rules of the society, you can choose to engage the mechanisms in an effort to change the rules. Or you can choose to leave and find a society more appropriate for you. Or you can choose to incite rebellion and expect appropriate resistance if the majority of the population do not support you.

What you don't get to choose is to enjoy the benefits of the society and ignore the rules, requirements and responsibilities of the society. You can be a sore loser, take your toys and go away, but you can't be a freeloader by enjoying the benefits but not taking on the burden of responsibility.

Now, that's an idealized version of civilization, I understand. The rules are often broken, twisted, manipulated. These are the injustices we must resist and fight to overturn. Yet I argue that the imperfect nature of civilization is not an excuse to reject it, but rather a call, or even a responsibility, to participate.
Ask HN: Considering moving to a Mac - development pros and cons?
My Windows 7 laptop of 3.5 years is starting to get a bit flaky. I have been considering making the move to a mac for development, but have heard that they are not necessarily my best bet for development. I am also not sure what to think about Windows 8 yet.

I do a variety of Java/J2EE (for work, don't judge!) as well as various web development and am looking to get into Ruby as well.

What OS/hardware would you recommend for a general purpose development machine?
The USA will still have nukes. People will still drive cars. This aint changing...
"Ah, the age old "tort reform" line. Haven't heard that one in a while."

I would guess that your not following all of the issues. Tort reform is going to have to be on the table or we are going to lose more general practitioners (not terribly popular now) and OB/GYNs. Insurance costs are not just a patient issue.

"Your stats about Canadians is total BS."

Not really sure how to respond to this one. If you mean the waiting list times, then you are wrong. If you mean the cancer survival rates, that you are wrong. These are not exactly in dispute and are very much related.
- Sad to say but I've never heard of Excite & Everquest. I would do research on them. As for MySpace, Facebook (& Twitter) destroyed that game/competition a long time ago.
To my amazement , Trilian has Skype support without the need of your Skype runing. Go give it a try!
Pebble smartwatch set to ship to project backers
I'd wait a bit and then get a Windows 8 ultrabook. It comes down to personal preference though, in the end.
I'm confused. Were you logging in every month to a product you didn't use? If not, you weren't in the active users set.
Great idea, this is called an authorization hold for credit cards however I believe most banks will only honor this for about 7 days.
If you make your large payments with a credit card you can both rack up awards and avoid the need to file a 1099-misc.
Machine Learning literature surveys, reviews, and tutorials
Journey from C# to Ruby.
What's wrong with plain old writing? No reason to use any of the work at all imo. Video editing takes an insane amount of time in my experience.
I don't think we are disagreeing here. When asked the question "how are these maintained", I was providing a technical answer (with similar tools that labs use) and you are providing a business answer (by outsourcing). Both are valid answers, and appropriate perspectives for HN.
ghc6 ...

We have been at ghc 7 for quite a while now (the Debian package is `ghc`).

You might start to see bit rot.
Samsung, Microsoft hype new 'Youm' flexible OLED display tech
Are you really asking why someone would want to use a laptop instead of a desktop?

Students could take it off campus to their home or use it anywhere outdoors within campus, take it to some other location off campus.

Also, Macbooks are < $1k with an educational discount. How is it a waste of money to make 12 more computers available to students that can be used anywhere on/off campus?
That's not a dealbreaker, though.

Having a virtual frame is fine, especially if it were designed to display content like the current time, notifications and maybe feed data. You could still use the capacitive surface in that space to support edge-swipe style gestures, and you could allow apps to go "fullscreen" when warranted (for games and content like movies).
net of teeth cleaning, it is included in the $0 basic packages (paid by taxes, so of course you pay for it if you pay taxes. But you get it even if you never worked and are unemployed and never paid taxes. Also, the taxes are independent of any "pre-existing condition" or anything like that).

Dental is not included in the $0 package. A dental package likely includes cleaning, for less than $1000 a year, yes.
In all fairness, many people aren't going to want to watch, read, or associate themselves with Twilight after viewing this video.
Lego has some of the best customer service of any company I've ever dealt with. A year or two ago our new puppy got ahold of one of my Lego Architecture sets (Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater", IIRC) and chewed up a large chunk of it. I ordered replacement parts through Lego's part replacement program, and noted in the order that the parts had been puppy-chewed and were not missing from the manufacturer, and I asked how much the replacement parts would cost.

A few days later I got a (non-form-letter) email from a Lego rep, telling me they were sorry that my model had been damaged, and that they hoped the puppy suffered no ill effects from chewing on the bricks (she didn't swallow any, just chewed on them), and that they were sending my replacement parts out at no charge.

It wasn't a huge order. If I'd have paid for it it probably wouldn't have been $10 for the bricks and shipping. But the nice email and a token no-charge replacement order, and I'm a customer for life. I'll say with confidence that Lego is at the top of my list when it comes to buying gifts for kids in my family, and they've more than made up that $10 since then, probably dozens of times over.
> It wouldn't surprise me if they let a load of people know every time something is posted, [...]

Sure, it's called "RSS". *scnr
Right. But unless you want the products to stay on the asteroid, you have to ship it somewhere. Shipping it somewhere would also move the asteroid.
> Compared to Haskell I found the syntax very obtuse and it was not obvious why Lisp would be more powerful than Haskell.

What do you mean by "obtuse"? If by that you mean difficult to understand, Haskell's syntax is far harder to understand because it has operator precedence tables. Even if you manage to memorize the language's built in operator precedence levels developers can define their own operators with custom associativity and precedence.

I will take the uniformity of Lisp syntax rather then the complicated, incomprehensible, and hard to parse syntax of Haskell any day. Lisp syntax is so much simpler then syntactic languages like Haskell that you can even build a simple reversible parser that converts textual code to and from list structures with whitespace metadata: http://lisp-ai.blogspot.com/2012/09/reversible-lisp-reader.h....
Google invests $200M in Texas wind farm
> 2. Record that token in your database, timestamped, along with the user account for which the token was requested.

The token is a password equivalent, and should thus not be stored in clear (use scrypt or a similar scheme).
Direct link to the video:
http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/downloads/Buffy_vs_Edward_36...

or
http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/downloads/Buffy_vs_Edward_36...
I love lisp. I use/used it to build my web service product[1] and anything else I can.

=how do I do X?=

java: something similar to X is already done in Y. add abstract class and redo X and write Y. +200 LOC

lisp: something similar to X is already done in Y. realize you can generalize X and Y into a new pattern and use it for ABC too. -70 LOC

=there is a bug in function X=

java: open X.java. edit line. restart program. X seems to be working correctly.

lisp: two hours later, ah ha! I understand this code. fix X. write unit test. eval unit test. X works correctly.

[1] demo: https://a.keeptherecords.com/demo, source: https://github.com/ThomasHintz/keep-the-records
There is some fundamental truth here though.

I'm not in college you see. Even though I went for three years and was doing perfectly fine GPA wise, and was on track to a "dream career" with the admiration of everybody around me even though I knew I was not learning very much in school.

I decided to take that another path, where I actually try to measure what I learn beyond the grade inflation that was rampant at school and the mind-numbing pace at which things were offered and the lack of curiosity with which most things (not all) were perused.

I have not rejected my family though, nor their friends, nor any of my friends and everytime I get asked, at least once a week or so (or used to), "What are you studying?"

I tell them, "Nothing."

People don't believe it and usually I am being bullied into going back. (I wanted to say it was a discussion, but these people usually never listen to me.)

Sometimes I get the feeling that I should lie to them, but to do so would be to deny the legitmacy of what I am doing. I usually hope the mention of that comes off with little reaction and we can go on as if everything was ok.

That usually never happens and I have to risk the chance of getting bullied one more time, often by people whom I like and care about. To say something different however, that's out of the question.

A "let's talk about that later" is sometimes considered, but when you say that, the other person ALWAYS gets real curious and wants to ask you again. I'm in Latin America you see, and privacy here is not as respected...
I think some primitives are still unexposed. Cons, if, etc?
Why are C11's char16_t and char32_t simply typedefs for uint16_t and uint32_t instead of new distinct types? C++ needed a distinct char16_t type so functions could be overloaded for both char16_t and uint16_t. I guess the C standards committee wants to ease char16_t adoption for code that is already using uint16_t for UTF-16.
Cascade - custom design toolkits for startups
Terrific analogy! A most elegant way of describing the "scratch your itch" approach. Take an irritant and make a pearl out of it.
I would assume it is a software/application issue, perhaps a screen resolution issue too. I always thought an interesting application of the Motorola ATRIX tech where your smartphone plugs into a 'dock' which turns it into a laptop, would be public laptop/screen stations that you could then put your 'compute unit' into and be online.

We use IPMI in our data center which provides 'console' access to a PC type system (servers in our case) over the network, and I've wondered if you could create a 'desktop' over a suitably fast network that could be instantiated with a network key and some local peripherals. Its a logical (if extreme) endpoint on the terminal/xterminal/thinclient/remote connections path.
I'm seeing "Mrs Eaves". And I'm on a Thinkpad T60, so definitely not high resolution. Of course I increased the font size from the site's default, but I usually do that, so that I don't need to use the reading glasses that I need to use to read books (ah, to be young again!).
Well, the subscription box model is working out okay for the likes of Tonx (coffee - http://tonx.org - and delicious coffee at that) but I'm not aware that they're trying to go the Silicon Valley venture-capital startup route at all.
I live in Argentina and most of people are doing Ingenieria de Sistemas, although it seems to be a Computer Science degree in Bs. Aires, let's hope it's a good one.
So you think gay people shouldn't act on their feelings?
Zuckerberg didn't give this money to another corporation or a private charity, he gave it to public schools. The money belongs to the people of Newark after that. For parents and teachers who work in the schools there, isn't it expected that they should be concerned about what this amount of money is going to be used for, and whether there are strings attached? If Zuckerberg had something else in mind he could have set up a foundation to create separate, private programs that support public schools (this is what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation often does).
"Sad to say but I've never heard of Excite & Everquest."

Exactly!

"As for MySpace, Facebook (& Twitter) destroyed that game/competition a long time ago."

Yes, just like Myspace destroyed Friendster. Do you see where this is going?