skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it kind of clashes with the careful Disney like feel good image Campbell has developed and doesn't really indicate a lot of public relations awareness, whether it was private or public.

Here's how I would have handled it if I was in charge of that thing. I'd have read that essay and thought, wow, OK, this does look like an attempt to get a lot of free engineering work and publicity. Then I'd either ignore it and hope it blows away if I had no authority, or if I did, talk to the other executives and point out that the particular issue of not paying travel and accommodations to New York is really not fair at all to the individual hackers and designers (since this is open to individuals and not design firms with a sales team and funding). I'd then publicly thank him for his insightful feedback, insist it was simply overlooked, and announce that OF COURSE Campbells is going to be paying airfare and accommodations to the 30 people that are selected to give presentations, and a family member if they like.

What I would definitely NOT do is pull out my rolodex and "contact every colleague I have client-side and agency-side" (this must be hundreds if not thousands of people) to inform them that a very mean and awful hacker has found my hackathon has some flaws with it in that I'm not paying people for the expenses necessary to comply with my demands, and so will they join in my pile on against him, the stupid annoying hacker, and his filthy company that has DARED, DARED I say to criticize the Almighty Campbells Soup company, which has been around need I remind him longer than he has even been alive the little piss ant!

Because that would be a really very stupid thing to do instead of just offer to pay the accommodations and airfare for these people who are doing free work for my company, and come out all roses having mastered such a minor PR challenge which has such an obvious solution to it.

It's not like Campbells isn't a Fortune 500 company (it is) who drops tens of millions on a Chunky Super Bowl XLVI Sweepstakes without blinking an eye at the cost. Their advertising and software development costs should not be subsidized by hackers. Given that most hackers are under IP contracts that prohibit them from entering something like this in their free time, most of the people legally able to enter are going to be hackers going through a spell of unemployment. Expecting them to do extensive free design work and fly out to meet clients for something that isn't even going to be all that much pay in the end if they do win the contract isn't a reasonable expectation. I expect though that a fair number of people will enter despite this. They might get better quality material though if they are at least willing to pay actual expenses of the finalists.
Arguing against piracy on the internet is a giant waste of my time because if you have it in your head that piracy is "good" or "ok" then you will rationalize bad arguments all day defending an incorrect position.

Don't you have it in your head that danenania's position is incorrect and it's therefore a waste of time to argue the subject with you? It certainly seems so, specially since danenania isn't actually arguing for piracy, just that (s)he considers the steps of eliminating piracy to go against more important values.

As an analogy, the fact that I defend almost absolute free speech doesn't mean I'm in favor of all speech, it just means that eliminating said speech is worse than allowing it to exist freely.
You'll have to be more specific -- "space" covers a lot. What are you producing? Goods? Services?
> Communism, no matter its form, only leads to slavery and poverty.

Capitalism has created dangerous situations for workers worse then slavery! Countless people (including children) have died of work related injuries in capitalist societies throughout history.

When a slave dies well working, the master is disappointed that he just lost a valuable piece of property. On the other hand, a capitalist boss doesn't give a fuck if one of his workers dies, he can just pay someone else to do the job for the same price.

In 1833, the city of Lancashire reported deaths of a total of 401 workers under the age of 11 and 2,292 child laborer’s between the ages of 11 and 16. Factories were hot, crowded, and distracting with no safety regulations or protective equipment and child workers would frequently get caught and die in machines. The capitalist bosses didn't give a fuck that children were dying in their machines, children are replaceable.

This was the reality in the 19th century, before there were any safety laws whatsoever, and when Marx was analyzing these things. There wasn't any sort of socialism in North Korea, Cuba, or China when Marx was alive so they cannot be used to criticize his original ideas.
For something like this, you don't even need to generate the entire MAC address space. As of right now, there are a little more than 17000 assigned OUIs ( http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/oui.txt ), which means there are about 281 billion legitimately allocated MAC addresses. So, with simple filtering, you could fit that hash table into a few terabytes of storage space, and generate it in a handful of minutes.
> If you been using both browsers for a while, you could (at least IMHO) feel the increasing slowness of FF comparing to Chrome, at lest within last 2 years.

Chrome starts a lot slower for me. It seems to really hit the disk a lot more than Firefox.
Aaron Swartz: cannon fodder in the war on Internet freedom
Interesting.

And it applies to anything?
He probably means "caucasian".
Yeah, or the fact that Aereo has one antenna per user,
Wow, new ads.
>One of the virtues of Twitter is that this approach is feasible because of their character limit

Photos? Videos?
He might have meant that the mental categories he used when classifying Swartz did not include race. If you'd asked me, I'd have acknowledged his race, but I wouldn't have used it as a way to describe him. "Young hacker", not "Young white hacker". Rich, even, but it would not have occurred to me to mention the color of his skin. We have been, after all, discussing the content of his character instead.
Is any actual software developer even considering entering? I mean a developer that has a full time day job developing software. I do sw development by day, so by night any sw project would have to be very very interesting for me to consider participating. Otherwise I would rather spend time on my own sw projects or interests. The soup hackathon is just a 'Please use our api for something since we can't think of any useful thing ourselves' so I doubt it would peak the interest of anyone who gets a salary doing sw develoment. So who is left? Well as far as I can see, the unemployed sw developer looking for a job and trying to spruse up his resume and make some money, and the independent freelance/self employed developer who pushes out an endless supply of small apps anyway. For those developers such a hackathon is just another opportunity and better than nothing I guess, even though you are most likely just working for free.
Math in Fiction – over 1000 short stories involving math or mathematicians
Is there a reason why all the fields for protobuf are declared as "optional", when it looks like they are in fact not optional at all?
Step 1: Write the next PayPal.
Despite what Google might say, Sheppard Mullin is not in that building.

http://www.sheppardmullin.com/offices-7.html

"Tang Capital Partners, LP is an investment fund that focuses on the life sciences industry," so it's not a law firm.

http://www.streetinsider.com/entities/Tang+Capital

"Sanderling: an investment firm dedicated to building new biomedical companies since 1979," is also not a law firm.

http://www.sanderling.com

The other individuals' names listed by Google appear to be lawyers who work for Cooley LLP. I admit I didn't check them all but I think it's pretty clear what's going on here.

Ethan Christensen - http://www.lawyerdb.org/Lawyer/Ethan-Christensen/

Fred Muto - http://www.cooley.com/mutoft

John Kyle - http://www.cooley.com/jkyle

Joe Leventhal - http://www.cooley.com/65631

Karen E. Hernandez‎ - http://www.cooley.com/65668

Based on this, the sign on the building, and the sign in front of the building, there appears to be one major tenant in the building: Cooley LLP.
I have been finding more and more interesting eBooks for purchase online. But I don't buy them for a few reasons.

First, without ratings by people with good reputation I have no idea whether the book is good or bad. In this case, Grady Booch gave it a thumbs up, but I would still like to see more endorsements / reviews. I know Amazon can be rigged, but for certain genres I've found individuals I trust.

Second, my experience with self published books is that they are often pretty poor in terms of eBook production, even by good authors. I have books by good authors who have gone the traditional route and then tried self publishing; the difference is often night and day.

Last, when I purchase an eBook, I like that it is stored permanently in some place online, so I can refresh it at will. When new formats become available, I want the option to download it for free. I'm not paying for separate PDFs and ePubs. Both OReilly and Informit allow this, and when new formats become available, its easy to get them.
It'll be like everyone has an AI genie, granting them wishes!
Study up on Martine Rothblatt.

Per Wikipedia, "she is responsible for launching several communications satellite companies, including the first nationwide vehicle location system (Geostar, 1983), the first private international spacecom project (PanAmSat, 1984), the first global satellite radio network (WorldSpace, 1990), and the first non-geostationary satellite-to-car broadcasting system (Sirius Satellite Radio, 1990)."

All this, back when running a commercial space company wasn't as easy as today :-) And she did NOT have millions like Musk.
Here's the fast way to do it unless you're Elon Musk:

Take your pile of investment money. Now, take half of it (or more, if you'd like) and destroy it. Return the other half to your bank account and go home.

Space is a rough business. It's highly regulated. Your competitors are often subsidized entities, sovereign governments, or extremely well politically connected. Testing is hard because you often only get one shot to get things right, and if things go wrong it could set you back years and destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of work (made only slightly better if you have gone to the trouble of spending lots of money on insurance) and could generate a massive amount of bad PR in an instant that will haunt your company for years. Export controls are a bitch. A lot of industry standard parts pipelines are heavily optimized for massively overfunded government contractors so getting your hands on things like radiation hardened CPUs is going to cost an arm and a leg.

And these are all just the problems that aren't related to the core, irreducible complexity of building whatever it is you are wanting to build.

Ultimately any advice is going to be heavily contingent on your goals. Do you want to put colonies on Mars? Hotels in Earth orbit? Telescopes in space? Rovers on asteroids? Do you want to build spaceships, launch vehicles, space suits, scientific instruments?

-

In a broad sense my advice is this: start small (garage project small); work iteratively; explore some problem space that isn't receiving as much attention as it should; acquire domain knowledge, expertise, and experience with bending metal and hands on the hardware; leverage existing domain knowledge (through hiring or personal experience); make connections; and have a vision.

Some ventures to draw inspiration from: SpaceX (of course, http://www.spacex.com/), Armadillo Aerospace (http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/), XCOR aerospace (http://www.xcor.com/), Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (http://www.jhuapl.edu/), HyperV technologies (hyperv.com), Malin Space-Science Systems (http://www.msss.com/), CubeSat (http://www.cubesat.org/), and the many nanosat missions.

I'll draw special attention to HyperV as an example. They have previous domain knowledge with plasma jet technology as it applies to fusion research and they used kickstarter to fund research into pulsed plasma jet electric thrusters for space applications.

Edit: if there's still interest in this thread tomorrow I'll followup with a list of open problems in spaceflight / space exploration that are amenable to investigations or R&D at a relatively small scale.
Why To Do Lists Don't Work
Link to a random version that has it. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mother_Teresa&... and then the 5th paragraph onwards.
Instead of treating their illness and making them not die.
OP here. I see the changes as goofy and sloppy, likely indicative of a larger "our company has no idea what we're doing" problem...

They don't even encrypt passwords, so God help those advertisers/publishers whose information they store...

(HN Geek Corner: curl "hxxp://www.haycfld.us/htmlscreens/OfferScreen_[1-1000].zip" -o "OfferScreen_#1.zip" -f

This will pull down all the bundles they offer. Interestingly, you'll find they only have 42 current advertisers... and not Norton/others listed on the site. So add liars to the list of words to describe this company.)
In fact, they say so themselves:

What if I don't trust you? Is it still safe for me to use MEGA?

If you don't trust us, you cannot run any code provided by us, so opening our site
in your browser and entering your password is off limits. If you still want to use
MEGA, you have to do so through a client app that was written by someone you trust.
It's intriguing following the submission history of this item, and similarly interesting comparing the comments here with the comments three years ago. I idly wonder how much they reflect the change in the HN readership in that time.

We all know about sentiment analysis, I wonder if a similar sort of analysis could be done between this thread and one or both of the others. Find some sort of change, then look for similar changes in other items, discussed twice with a long gap.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408 1971 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492615 1426 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951095 1157 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1539538 912 days ago, 68 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024576 761 days ago, 31 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2531994 620 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262788 425 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3615532 334 days ago
‘Auxo’ update adds new toggles, VIP apps, and native Activator support
I agree with the article, but if we say that Cambell is unethical then where do we draw the line in general? Eg. Is Kaggle unethical and exploitation as well ? Like the Cambell hackathon, in Kaggle competitions you work for free and only a limited number of people actually get paid for their work. Even if Kaggle promotes that everyone's work actually helps (indirectly) to pin down a good solution, not everyone is getting paid.
The Reference Frame: What did the winters look like before global warming?
In the ideal case, you'd only need to hash ~17000 * 2^24 MAC addresses to have a complete table, but the reality is that there are a lot of manufacturers who assign MAC addresses in products using OUIs that they haven't registered. (Registering an OUI costs US$1885, and when you're a factory working on razor thin margins, that's a lot of money.)

As an example, a $17 802.11n travel router I bought from Monoprice a few weeks ago uses 00-B0-C0 as the OUI, which has no corresponding entry in IEEE's OUI database. In the past, I've purchased cheapo no-name PCI Ethernet cards (usually with Realtek chipsets and lots of empty pads and/or through-holes on the PCBs where capacitors are supposed to go) which had similarly unregistered OUIs in their MAC addresses.
It's in Help center: Account. https://mega.co.nz/#help_account
I can see the author's argument, but I think there are more fundamental issues to be dealt with. My high school, for example, discontinued Computer Science classes altogether due to low enrollment.
The Astronaut Who Captured a Satellite
It's more. Marketing is you, your partners, your service, your FAQ, the way to handle email/phone calls, interviews, the building of trust.
I never claimed the services are equivalent, just that you don't need Dropbox to have a local backup of the files.
Raw Thought: The Weblog of Aaron Swartz in Markdown, PDF, and ePub
I think that one thing that Microsoft shouldn't have touched was their wordmark. The symbol - sure, it was a PoS and needed to be replaced, but all these fragile sans-serifs in bleak "friendly" shades of gray really can't hold a candle to this -

http://i.imgur.com/Ctu9Aht.jpg
The Power Tower
There has never been anything close to a communist economy. Communism means there are such advanced productive forces and automation technology that there is no antithesis between mental and physical labor:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! - comrade Karl Marx
Perhaps he realizes this and goes there not to save the world, but just for a free Xbox :)
> India is full of examples of abject poverty. Do you view India as a failure too?

India's poverty exists because of the massive corruption & inefficiency in various levels of the government. For eg: Tons of grains rot in government storages. Not many in the public service are held accountable.

The Government theoretically allots for those below the Poverty line, but they never get the aid they're supposed to get.

India is far from a failure. Because Information/Education is not limited nor restricted.
First off, how motivated are you really if you can't even write a couple of paragraphs explaining your situation, motivation, specific goals etc.? Second, what sets you apart from the hundreds of millions who read or watched sci-fi and idly entertained similar thoughts at some point?
Same goes for Vietnam, if not more so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Economy

I was in HCMC/Saigon recently ... it seemed that almost everyone was working in some private business or another, often small family run businesses.
> No, it's communist.

It isn't anything Marx would call communist. North Korea guarantees protection of private property in its constitution and it is a member of the world intellectual property organization.

A communist society shouldn't have an antithesis between mental and physical labor or intellectual private property. It should be a society where everyone is free to work and collaborate on whatever creative projects they want to.
YES! Thank you. It's not exactly what I was thinking about but it is close. Bookmarked!
Blogroll « UK Walking
By this logic, the government should confiscate each and every casino in Las Vegas. People commit numerous crimes, then lose the proceeds in these casinos. In some cases, the crimes occur on property - people are staying there when, for example, they phone in an unauthorized wire transfer from a corporate account, sell drugs, or commit other crimes in order to obtain gambling money. They are profiting from and are the impetus for many fraud, embezzlement, robbery, and drug cases each year.

The casinos have no on-site fraud/embezzlement monitoring programs for the crimes that occur in their hotel rooms, despite numerous cases every year arising from their properties. Someone call the Nevada equivalent of Carmen Ortiz and get these multi-billion dollar businesses confiscated! (I'm being sarcastic, of course - this type of thing is insane and deplorable in a country like the US).
> Do you view India as a failure too?

You realise this is a platitude, right?

I hear this all the time, but in virtually all situations its irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

Historically, communist countries have had terrible standards of living; this is extremely well documented; some (actually, just china as far as I know) have stepped away from an entirely government controlled economy to a government directed economy, and that seems to be working out for them pretty well.

Being a democracy doesn't mean you'll have a great economy and a high standard of living. There are plenty of examples of that not working as well.

...but we've got a few more examples of that working out, than we do of communist regimes working out, historically. You think perhaps there might be a bit of causation there?

Certainly, and importantly, this is totally irrelevant to India.
Well, the easiest part is that space is free and there's a lot of it.

The hard part is everything else.

Maybe there is a way, if you consider building "micro satellites" a "space company". Sensing, research, etc could be done. The base hardware is already very expensive though, and you would need to hitch a ride in a rocket (maybe for a fee -> $$$$$)
Here are a few suggestions:

1. Find a parking lot which has gone unused. Approach the owner
and offer to either purchase or lease said parking lot, or
simply provide an attractive revenue share. Charge people for
parking space.

2. Locate an unused office building. Similar to the parking lot,
negotiate with the owner and then charge people for office
space.

3. Get a bunch of hard drive storage which is accessible online.
Write some software to let others make use of the storage, and
charge them based on utilized disk space.

As you can see, I've only scratched the surface of how you might start a space company. It all depends on what kind of space you're interested in. Perhaps more details of what you're trying to achieve will help narrow down the options.
Neu.Node – an implementation of Node.js-compatible API for iOS devices
Hi,

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Please email me at
atag40@gmail.com
Work hard for 20 years
Every time I read about North Korea, part of me keeps wondering:

How many international treaties would I break if I were to sneak in some surveillance tech in there? Just a small robot that looks like mouse and shoots photos, or a small UAV deployed on the South Korean side of the border? Just to get out to the world some photos of how real NK looks like. I wonder what kind of consequences would such an attempt have and why no one seemed to have tried so far.
Ugh, yeah. I should have taken into consideration penny-pinching companies when doing that math. Especially when their behavior makes it hard on everyone else when the inevitable MAC conflict happens.
I used to feel exactly the same way. To me it felt like sacrificing things in my personal life was all 'just part of being an entrepreneur'. Sure you're going to need to give up some things if you want to succeed, but I don't think that should ever include spending time with the people that are closest to you.
Startups: How to Share Data with Academics