skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The problem is that the laws have to be almost impossibly vague.

No they don't! Please don't say things like that in public, someone may actually believe you.

It is not possible for the laws to be perfect. They can't be like programs or catch every possible nuance or edge case (and when they try they look like the tax code). But we have specific articulable laws that are severely defective in ways that normal laws aren't, and they can certainly be improved to attain roughly the same level of imperfection found in the large body of legislation rather than their current state of total absurdity.
"Your employer is paying you to deliver things that make them money. They're not paying you for your time."

Several people already pointed out how wrong you are...

In addition to that there are a lot of administration living of public funds whose goal is not to make money but to provide a service. I'm not saying at all that I like that (I think socialism already brought Greece to state default and we'll see more and more state defaulting in Europe soon).

I'm just stating a fact: in a lot of socialist countries (for example throughout Europe), there are a lot of jobs for programmers in administrations. There are cities where the biggest employer of computer programmers are administrations.

I'll just give one example: there are administration whose yearly budget is in the $bn range (eg european institutions) which have very strict pyramidal structure. When division x has a budget y and someone decides, for example, that each application in maintenance needs to have one programmer maintaining it, then there's a budget for that programmer (who very often is a contractor).

And the budget and number of hours MUST be respected precisely.

They do not care at all about you delivering anything: all they want is their arses covered in case the shit hit the fan.

You can be there, sitting 8 hours per day reading WoW forums (and some do just that), because they paid for your time.

I'm not saying it's "good". I think socialism is deeply flawed.

But I'm getting tired about reading the same old "Your employer is paying you to deliver things that make them money" (just as I'm tired of reading "if it's free, you're not the user, you're the product").

As a side note and as it has already been pointed out: that's not was most contract between employers and employees or contractors do state. Most contracts talk about number of hours / days and not about "project" or "things to deliver because it is going to make the company more money".
Physics Students Calculate What Hyperspace Travel Might Really Look Like
>> So I'd add a fifth explanation: You're seeing lots of these stories because you're following people who blog about Apple.

Is this your gut saying it can't possibly be true that Apple attracts lots of negative press mainly because it has been King of the Hill for so long, when it comes to fat profit margins and popularity?

I couldn't disagree with you more. Sure enough other companies get unjustified bad press every now and then, but you have to be blind to deny the fact that each and every website, even if it's only remotely related to technology, appears to be populated with people who can't resist the urge to slam Apple for whatever is the popular Apple-fail-du-jour.

It's not unlike the 90', when Microsoft was in the position that Apple is now. No matter what they did, it was bad, evil, anti-competitive, it sucked, they stole the idea, whatever. I'm was guilty of irrational Microsoft hate myself back then. Today, people almost feel pity for poor Microsoft, finally trying to innovate in the smartphone and tablet space, but failing spectacularly to attract people to their platform.

There's really nothing surprising here. In dutch, we have this saying that goes along the lines of 'higher trees catch most of the wind'. I think it has something to do with human nature. People envy success, especially when they don't understand it. Combined with a tendency to herd around the popular opinion, it's not hard to see how successful companies attract most of the bad press. In the last few years I've seen some of the most nonsensical arguments against Apple products you couldn't even make up yourself, almost go viral on the internet.

At some point in time some other company will take Apple's place as the big evil technology corporation that can't do anything right. Facebook would be a pretty obvious candidate, the moment they start getting more successful at monetizing their service, I predict they will become the centre of attention for haters and trolls.
Using an Electron Beam to Manipulate Nanoparticles
You realize there are large swaths of humanity that have no electricity. And that in the past and even today humans survive winters in much colder places than NYC without electricity.
Flap closed, donkey fine.
You can choose order of signers with HelloSign: http://imgur.com/zjEHn
It's obvious the donkey is rolling around in the dirt, saw the car coming, felt awkward, got up and walked away. Nothing to see here, move on.
And the site looks like a giant scam too — the supposed live auctions are rotating animations, and the bid buttons turn into register buttons when clicked. I know plenty of scam sites have great tricks to increase conversions but that's not where i'd look for inspiration if i were trying to create a landing page for a real and legitimate business.
People certainly care about hacking, why do you think it is in the movies so much? What people don't care about is an accurate portrayal of hacking.

The problem occurs when people are trying to make ethical calls in a context outside of hollywood movies. Any string of technobable sounds insidious to them; writers (quite reasonably) use this to their advantage to reduce the amount of research they need to do, but prosecutors also use it to their advantage.

> You kind of have to care about something in order to put in the effort to attack it.

Yeah, and that something they care about is "ze evil haxxors". They care about a topic they have absolutely no technical insight into.
It's a penny auction site. I'm not sure I'd call it "honest." You are very likely not their target market. I don't have any inside information, but I'll bet that these tactics work really well on the type of people who are likely to sign up for a penny auction.
Obama calls for research into link between video games and violence
The conclusion is clearly wrong. The dust from the car is in the opposite direction and this indicates that the donkey was ahead of the Google Street View car, not behind it.
Microsoft Roots, Social Media Chops: Spindle's Take on Local Search
If you want to know how effective a system of action is (petitions, marches, strikes), look at how the government reacts to it. Left-wing causes are a threat to the regime. That is why we saw police being organized to crush OWS, and why Federal prosecutors threw the book at Aaron Schwartz.

If you're going to effect a significant change, you're going to need a critical mass of people coming together to do it. Lone wolves are picked off with ease.
Landing page: http://orangethirty.github.com/marketing_bits/

This project was born due to the avalanche of emails that I receive every week. From hackers and startups looking to learn how to market more effectively. Rather than answering each email independently, I chose to address the most common issues and share them with the community. Every bit of knowledge comes from my own experience developing my own startups, and from helping others develop their own. This is not the usual marketing babble, but what has worked for me and my clients. It is written in a manner that most hackers will understand. I have put a lot of effort in writing each bit as if it was a programming related article and not marketing. This to avoid all the usual marketing buzzwords that plague the industry.

I am also publishing a newsletter[1] around the articles that will include a lot more materials for you to use. I want you to subscribe to the newsletter, because you will learn a lot from it. I will not spam you, and only send you the newsletter. You will not get any annoying emails from me, or from anybody else. I will not share or sell your information. Do subscribe. I have a lot of great stuff coming out soon and I want you to benefit from them. I owe a lot to the HN community, and this is a way for me to give back in a manner that makes you money. Think of this as my own open source project about marketing.

This is all free. No need to buy anything. I was going to publish this as a book, but there is so much material to cover that in the end its just easier for all to just read it on github and/or subscribe to the newsletter. Topics include marketing, sales, copywriting and PR.

I expect your feedback. Pull requests are welcomed. Emails too.

Edit:

If you have subject suggestions please include them here. I had some good ones over at the #startups IRC channel that will be addressed in the coming days. This also includes any particular answers you may want answered (like a specific problem you face). Do note that this will be published publicly. I will remove your name and/or startup name by request (but do keep in mind it will help you get free PR).

*
[1]Subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/t2tyL
General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord?

“I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!”
That's not a problem. A mall has the right to kick you out even though they don't identify or authenticate each person coming into the building.
Lookups for syntax and the like is very annoying. However, learning new languages is all about the principles you pick up.

I'm a better iOS developer today, because I learned how awesome blocks can be from Ruby. Same goes for meta-programming.

Languages usually have features that span everything you do in that language. Getting comfortable with blocks in a language that uses them as a primary/native data type shows me how useful they can be in a language that uses them more cumbersomely.

That's how I've benefitted from learning multiple languages. As well as the fact that I will avoid Java/.NET because they and I don't agree! :D
I think starting your own open source project works to better improve your programming skills that contributing to existing open source projects.

Existing projects already have most of the code already written. A typical open source changeset is maybe 3 +'s and 5 -'s. Mostly contributing to open source projects will improve your people/communication skills because most of that you'll do it is talking to existing developers to understand the problem/how to debug the problem.
You made a sudoku game and most people who want a sudoku game already have one.
This is a non-story. This occurred in Botswana, where cars drive on the left side of the road, so the donkey is in front of the car. You can also see the donkey standing by the side of the road if you move slightly further along.
>I'm saying that eventually Android and other platforms will grow to match or exceed the spends of iOS customers.

Android playing with low margins has so far just resulted in it wining a huge share of the demographic that doesn't buy many apps and don't much care for smartphones anyway.

The App Store can probably be more profitable than Android apps even with 1/10 the users -- as long as those are the right users.

Not sure. It's been thirty years since the "desktop PC" market and Apple still commands the majority of the profits from personal computers sold.

(Lots of techies and tinkerers also choose Android for it being more "open", but those are an insignificant minority that doesn't mean anything money wise).
When Men Start Pitching to Women
Right. Which is why it's so weird to call this a fallacy. It does not strike me as fallacious.
No, Google did not run over a donkey in Botswana
6 Reasons Yahoo Pipes Failed
Ask HN: Why aren't you using two-factor authentication?
I need to answer this question for research purposes for a product I've been working on: https://www.gauthify.com . I want to be ready for launch (expect a show HN soon) and want to know what people attribute as the primary reason for not using two-factor authentication. Hopefully, we already covered some of the reasons but if we didn't we still want to fix and improve.

Thanks for all the help!
Ask HN: Hostname Conventions for Distributed Systems?
I've gone through a variety of hostnaming strategies over the years, and the one I use now is <service><##> (eg zookeeper01).

With distributed systems in particular, but any system in general, boxes can come and go, and I hate having holes in my names (eg zookeeper01, 02, 04, 05, 06). That, and by choosing the number of leading zeroes, you're guessing at the max number of servers this service will be served by.

How do people manage this? I'm thinking something like <service>-<random_token> (eg zookeeper-fi2) would make sense and be more scalable, but I'm interested in what strategies other people use.

(I'd create a poll but I don't have the 200 karma) =/
Saying, "I don't want to see this on HN" when it clearly fits the criteria for submission and aids in making the audience of HN more aware[1] does suggest that you are ignoring these sorts of issues elsewhere in your life.

[1] Though this post wasn't particularly informative, it did stir debate.
No, it's one thing to talk about technology. It's another to mount a campaign about how the WSJ got the story wrong about stock prices when it will all be settled within a few days.

There are other issues that exist at Apple which are far more important.

I could say the same for any tech company but I expect more from those who pretended to be above it all.
> Isn't Python 2.7 the version usually used by those

Not necessarily.
To me personally (I don't keep up with professional design trends), that is an amazingly well designed page. I click on it and I immediately know what the website is used for. All of the well-designed websites are too low on content; I have to search for what the website is about, and if I didn't already know what the products were I would be immediately turned off.

For instance, on the Spotify website, I am told two things: it is called Spotify and it has something to do with music. "Music for every moment" doesn't tell me much about the functionality of the product and really doesn't sell me on it. Lapka is even worse by not telling me a single thing on the actual page.
A better link is one contained in the article, straight from Google: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/01/never-ass-ume.htm...
New features, new fixes: OS X Server’s six-month checkup
>To have 2 of them (that we know about) stemming from prosecutions by one individual, I would have to say, is pretty remarkable. While it could just be a coincidence, the one common denominator in these two statistically rare incidents is Stephen Heymann.

Careful. You are subtly reusing evidence in an invalid way.

The reason that Heymann's record is under examination in the first place is that Swartz committed suicide while Heymann was prosecuting him. That's the observation that generates the hypothesis "Heymann is more aggressive than the average prosecutor, and this leads to an increase in suicides". So then we test that hypothesis by looking at Heymann's record and seeing if we find more suicides.

So far so good, but what we can't do is then reuse Swartz's suicide to support that hypothesis. Appropriately enough, this is an example of the prosecutor's fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy). The key is that we have to keep an eye on the context of the original hypothesis. If someone had looked at Heymann's methods and said "Wow, that's going to lead to people killing themselves", and then looked into his record and said "Willikers! Get a load of this body count!", then they'd be right to count both Swartz' and James' suicides.

But that's not how we got here, so the question has to be "Is the number of suicidal defendants prosecuted by Heymann — other than Swartz — significantly out of line with expectations?"

And that number is one. To answer the question would require some data. I've tried gathering data from different angles, but I'm not sure it's out there. Maybe someone else can take a whack at it.
Quality Control - how NASA JPL ensured success of Mars rover Curiosity.
Didn't we just see a round of stories about component order cuts indicating Surface sales were tepid?

These stories quite clearly happens to everyone.

That said, there is something unique in the way that Apple stories are linked, repeated and shared, getting visibility of a level that Microsoft, Samsung, et al almost never do.

But that's ultimately just a function of tabloid-style sites trying to make tabloid style-stories out of everything, but only getting traction when they hit companies/services that people actually give a shit about: Apple, Google, etc.
I think that's the problem.
"What a weird system."

A little yeah. But check this out. If you steal something, you won't automatically go to jail. Someone has to sue you because of that first. Same thing, I think.
I second using Sentry, and it has UDP support. Maybe a few Ruby devs can just improve the Sentry Ruby client?
It's yet another sudoku game. No matter how good it is, or looks, you compete with the multitude of free sudoku games out there.

Try something more vertical niche, and hunker down. A fill-in-the-blank game is not super-profit worthy. Even Rovio took a decade before they hit it with Angry Birds.

I think this is a problem too:
Price: Free

Well, unless you make up for it in quantity...?
If by politician you mean a tireless statesman, fighting the good fight, a champion of worthy causes that benefit us all, then I enthusiastically concur.

But if by politician you mean a low, corrupt, power-mad petty puppet jerked around by evil special interests, then sadly I have to agree.
This is awesome, it solves a problem for me. Congratulations on finding common problem and delivering a nice solution to it.
I think the benefit of learning a new language is only felt when you are at the expert level on that language. For instance, I'm an expert at python. If I were to learn Ruby at a novice level, I would get nothing out of it. I need to learn Ruby to the expert level to get the full benefit of knowing another language.
At the risk of being mildly self-incriminating...

> 1. Are you bypassing a security mechanism by changing your MAC address?

As far as I can tell? Quite possibly. If I don't make my router use my laptop's MAC address then I get hit with a captive portal at random times. This appears to be a security measure, though in my unresearched opinion I believe it to be a mis-firing of a security measure.

> 2. Did you gain something and/or cause them losses exceeding $5,000?

Considering the cost of my bill, it won't take me all that long to cross that limit.
Wow, you guys have clearly had this problem before. Thanks for all the attention to detail you put into this.
I love the Economist's dry sense of humor (italics are mine):

"That could lead both to cheaper power, and to the burial of many of the pylon-borne power lines that disfigure so much of the rich world's countryside. In a deeper, sense, then, perhaps Edison will have the last laugh, after all."
Well here's some advice: since you've written an article about your game, link the name of your game to the app store or a review or something. Also, mention that it is free since it is free. And explain what the game is and why anyone should care. In other words, you are always advertising and the biggest mistake people make is to not remove the roadblocks from all the roads. Marketing is easier when you realize, by default, no one cares. Not in a rude way, but no one will put in effort to care about something for no reason. Give them a reason.
The donkey was obviously trying to fraud google into paying him millions of dollars in damages
An interesting argument. I've thought for years that the reason why this stuff happens with Apple and nowhere else is their vaunted secrecy. Nobody else clams up like Apple does, which leaves a void for tech-press dummies to gleefully fill up with whatever silly shit they invent, which of course is exactly what they do.

But more generally, Apple is different from any other company near its size. The secrecy is one big difference, but there are others such as their approach to product development. These fundamental differences cause cognitive dissonance in the people the article talks about. These people are taught to think that Apple products are the same as what everyone else makes, just better-marketed and way more expensive, therefore Apple customers are status-seekers, not rational consumers. But Apple's incredible success makes it difficult to seriously hold that viewpoint anymore. You could think that when Apple's customer base was a handful of people who worked in movies and graphic design, but not anymore.
Thousands of people have no electricity, running water OR HOME in New York all year round -- not just as a temporary inconvenience because of a storm.

And hundreds of millions, nay billions, have no access to electricity or running water in the third world. Most of them have no access to food or doctors either.
I like to think of everything as ephemeral. You can always write software for a new box to "fill in" holes when systems are replaced. I like this because it helps me when I assign roles or node based redundancy to my boxes.
>What interests me more is why does this stuff keep happening in Apple’s name? No one comes out and says this crap about Samsung, Google, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft or any other big name in technology. It’s all Apple, all the time.

Err what? I've seen this happen to every company on that list.

For example, lets take Nokia. Three months after launching the Lumia 900, they discounted the price on contract at AT&T from $99 to $49. This led to a huge cacophony all over the internet with a lot of publications reporting "Nokia discounts phone by half", totally ignoring the fact that it was on contract price, so the price discount was closer to 10% and was totally normal. There was no such hype when other Samsung, HTC etc. phones were dropped in price as part of the normal pricing cycle of such phones.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...

Nokia, RIM and Microsoft are some of the most beat down companies in analysis and news. The "news" is universally junk and has more to do with attention grabbing headlines and flamebait, regardless of the companies involved.

I think the author is suffering from a huge selection bias.
I would highly recommend downloading and installing DCIntrospect[0]. It's designed to let you tweak layout in the simulator, but what it's really useful for is probing the UI in large, complex apps. Need to tweak the font size on a specific element, but you have no idea what that view class is? Enable DCIntrospect, click on the element, log its class name and properties. This has saved me, literally, hundreds of hours of debugging time over the years.

[0] https://github.com/domesticcatsoftware/DCIntrospect
Can disagree as to whether it is a problem?