skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It looks like the guy is a graduate from
Stanford's business school... and is the
co-founder of Pricenomics. What the heck.

I used to make that mistake - or what I assume was the mistake, which now seems to have been corrected.

Many guides to using apostrophes [1,2,3,4] say they can be used for contractions (the dog's outside) and to indicate possession (the dog's ball) - Why shouldn't something possessed by "it" use a possessive apostrophe?

Some people tried to correct my using of "it's" to indicate possession by explaining "Apostrophes are used for contractions like it is" which was unconvincing as obviously they can be used to indicate possession.

It wasn't until I got to college that someone gave me a satisfactory explanation: It/Its belongs to the same class of words as he/his, her/hers, your/yours, who/whose which do not follow normal apostrophe usage rules as the rules are descriptive, not prescriptive and nothing obliges the language and its users to be consistent.

[1] http://www.economist.com/style-guide/apostrophes
[2] http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
[3] http://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/apostrophe.html
[4] http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe
One of my favourite customs for propositioning marriage has, unfortunately, largely died out.

In Wales, and I believe parts of Scandinavia (which opens up interesting theories as to vikings bringing the custom to Wales), a man would propose with a spoon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovespoon

To me that is infinitely more expressive and thoughtful than purchasing a transparent rock. Maybe it's because I currently live in Wales, or the fact that I carve spoons for fun, but there's a romance there which I just can't see in a ring.

Unfortunately the pressures of society (especially not helped by Disney fairytale romances) seem to have brought us to the point of no return. My girlfriend knows that diamonds are worthless, but I know that were I to propose without one that there would be a part of her which felt like she was missing something; even if she didn't want to feel that way.
We allowed you to buy Amazon gift cards with Bitcoins
I agree with this. My wife wanted a ruby ring, not diamond, for our engagement. The expectation clearly was that it would still be expensive though!

The marketing campaigns by jewelers have first and foremost been successful at setting an expectation of big spending. The stone type itself might be somewhat negotiable.
If it's good enough for Priscilla Zuckerberg (née Chan) it should be good enough for anyone: A ruby engagement ring!

http://www.yourengagement101.com/files/2012/05/mark-zuckerbe...
hello moto!
To their credit, they didn't sound very surprised or disappointed about getting shut off.
(person I know) worked for GE (General Electric) on their industrial diamond production process back in the 90's, and I got to hear lots of fun stories from this.

Diamonds that are man-made[1] are stronger (fewer imperfections) than those that are mined from the earth. Because of this, industrial diamonds tend to be man-made. (for reference, industrial diamonds when cutting hard materials, such as metals).

While working on these diamonds, GE decided to start investigating making consumer level diamonds that could be sold for jewelry. They were able to produce diamonds that would have excelled when compared to natural diamonds (when it comes to the 4 Cs). One of the fun things was they could add various gases to the manufacturing process to create diamonds of various colors. There is still a decent cost associated with producing diamonds this way, so they probably would have still been expensive, but not at the levels that De Beers was charging at the time.

At this point GE started to look into what would happen if they would have actually gone down this line, selling consumer-level diamonds. After a little investigation, the GE lawyers and upper-management decided to kill off the idea as it would not have been worth the hassle. De Beers started a small campaign that was discrediting man-made diamonds, and it would have gotten a lot worse if GE even tried to enter the market. GE decided it was not worth the hassle, and killed the consumer-level diamond project.

De Beers has created an artificial market and they are doing what they can to prevent anyone else from entering their market. Most companies don't want to deal going up against them, so they just leave De Beers to run around gouging consumers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#High_pressure...
Limbo periods - Unclear rules.
-> Personal experience: applied for EAD card to work, graduated from a top school with a masters. Death of a family member occurred right after. Could not(?) go home for fear of not getting back to country to start the job. Had (and have) huge student loans to pay off.
Make a Movie with Google Web Speech API
How many others are reselling the product? Which product are you reselling?

Would you be more passionate about reselling Raspberry Pis than reselling iPhone accessories?
dribbble.com

/thread.
This was tried (and it failed) many times. You should do some research on it.
Isn't this the risk any time you build on top of someone's API? At least with Google Drive they have a clear revenue story - compare that to say, Twitter.
It doesn't qualify (3), which is a very important one.

I've got a daughter. She's only 4 months old, but I've had occasion to think a bit about this. I would not want her to marry someone who wasn't willing to give her a ring? Why? Reasons (1) and (2) I mentioned, sure, but also reason (3). It is the mark of a sensible man that he cares what other people think about him. People who buck social conventions sometimes become trend-setters and are incredibly successful for it, but more often just make life harder on themselves and the people that depend on them. Do I want my daughter to be with a man that is willing to create headwinds for himself out of foolish principles and refusal to conform? All else being equal, no (although I don't have any illusions about how much of it is up to me!)
Think of how men are marketed to and you'll see the difference.

It's not a name brand or a lifestyle, almost everything marketed to men has some sort of pragmatic function to it. Be it the big F-150 that can tow a ton, to the comfortable (yet fuel efficient!) 4-door sedan. Sport cars might be an exception for most men (although not for me). As much as you don't need it, a $2000 60" HDTV is still more functional than a purse that costs the same amount of money.

And now to the marketing for women. Victoria's Secret: you want to look as good as this. Coach: you want a purse that looks like you can afford it. Disney: every girl is a princess. DeBeers: it shows you he loves you. I can go on, but there's no practicality in any of it. It's even worse when the target of the ads are women but the stuff they are selling are for men, since women do a lot of purchasing in relationships. You see this a lot in 'high-end' stuff like watches and sunglasses.

It's not sexism if it's honest - just accept that men and women are wired differently otherwise you do a disservice to women.
This is stressfully dehumanizing and is one of the reasons we have the term "heteronormativity."
I agree with the article in many respects, but I find there's a giant blind spot that needs addressing given the author.

I don't understand how Marco can't view Apple as a proprietary monoculture, and one that is somewhat worse in the sense that you can't clone the features of it without being sued (what if Reader had patents covering it and sued if you tried to create a clone?)

Apple frequently force upgrades users and develoeprs, some would say by planned obsolescence. For example, early on in IOS, people built apps that allowed in-app purchases and subscriptions, because Apple had no API for them, so we had a federated, open system for that feature. Then Apple changed their T&C and mandate use of Apple infrastructure to do this, and people now have to resort to hacks (remember Dropbox getting banned because of a link to sign up?) Slowly, the apps were forced onto Apple monoculture services.

Basically, when Apple introduces monoculture, it is viewed as a good. It simplifies user experience, etc. But for everyone else, it's somehow bad and evil.
What were the names of the companies that failed? I've heard of Kozmo, but that's not the same thing as this.
Honestly, I find the notion of "man as provider" to be perverse, but if I buy into your worldview for a moment...

1) Your wife can measure how much you can provide just as well by having you actually provide valuable things. Like a house.

2) Your wife can measure your unselfishness by having you buy something that is actually valuable to her but useless to you. Like daycations with her friends. There's no sense in buying something which is valuable to neither party.

3) The need to demonstrate your social standing to other people is the result of low self-esteem. Maybe your wife needs therapy, not a diamond.
The price gap in natural vs cultured diamonds in the colorless range is far too narrow to make it a viable business model. So the effort, and profit, is made in the color end of the spectrum. Yellow and blue are the most popular, and the price gap is significant.
That's pretty cool. Does he have a writeup of the process?
Lenovo, Why Are You Designing ThinkPads No On Wants?
How is that arrangement a contract? If you came to Starbucks every morning and bought a cup of coffee, would you consider that to be creating some kind of contract with them?
I don't know him although I now realize I've watched a bunch of his talks on youtube. I'm very grateful for his contributions to Django. It's the best avenue I've found for myself to get into web development and it definitely seems like he will be greatly missed by the community.
For a rational person there's a giant leap from the premises of "someone willing to give up money for someone else -> better" and "it follows that we should purchase diamonds from DeBeers" that you might want to call her on.

How ever did women vet men to their social circle before DeBeers came along and saved the day 80 years ago??!
Bitcoin and me (Hal Finney)
The best you can hope for is a compromise.

- get a secondhand stone and have it re-set.
- get certified non-conflict diamond (or in my case, an Australian diamond)
- get some other precious stone

The best one is to get hold of a family heirloom. Costs nothing and has far greater emotional value.
I wonder whether it makes sense to define a weaker class of "economically secure" digital cash systems, where it is merely uneconomic to counterfeit and double-spend the currency.

Of course this means that such a digital cash system may be vulnerable to non-economically motivated attackers, and I suspect it is also a class that is harder to precisely define.
But she probably has a better reason for owning them.
You can find some by googling "like Kozmo" or search Hacker News for "Kozmo": https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=kozmo
It's easy to say that but that's not how human nature works.

When you buy things for other people, it is generally a positive for your relationship with them. In general, they are happier and think better of you. Getting upset about it and saying they don't 'really love you' is not true and not super helpful.

Human nature is very hard to change, no matter how intelligent / introspective we become. Do you never buy your significant other dinner, a night out, or gifts of any kind?
Thanks for continuing to speak in this thread. As someone who has not spoken up when I felt objectified or uncomfortable in the context of sexual jokes at technical conferences, I am relieved by how you've handled this. I wouldn't say I feel suddenly comfortable with speaking out to someone directly, but let's say that I feel a bit more like if I did speak to someone directly, they might not attack me.

It's an unfortunate fact that speaking up often has far more downside than upside for women professionally. It's only recently I think that women have had enough status in the tech community to speak up and not be a) blacklisted or b) harassed by whoever they spoke up to. Clearly, this thread demonstrates that lots of people still feel that their ability to say whatever they want, whenever they want, trumps all. It makes me sad, to say the least.

This is a big community, and I hope you find a new job soon. If there's something I can do to help, you can ping me on twitter or gmail.
Postmates Has Raised $5 Million to Expand Into Seattle And Beyond
What do gay people do (in general) for things like this? The most I've seen (with male-male couples) is gold wedding rings; I'm not sure about female couples.
Wait, are we talking about be fired (i.e., "for cause") or being laid off? As I understand it one isn't eligible for unemployment (in the US) when it is the former.

"No layoffs" is a stronger (and harder) criterion to meet.

(My condolences either way. Neither is the end of the world, but they both suck. If you haven't yet found a new gig, hang in there. Persistence will pay off. Like any sales, applying for a job is a numbers game.)
Emails Of GitHub Enterprise Users Outed In Email And Then Posted On Pastebin
Again: would you like to provide anything other than anecdotes? These are worthless to me (and demonstrate your biases fairly obviously, see next paragraph).

I'm amused at your implied claim that men aren't advertised to in fashion, since I can barely turn on the TV or radio without hearing an ad for Men's Wearhouse. Disney absolutely sells the prince metaphor to little boys too, and the fact that they grow into men who wants princesses is a big part of why that whole thing has stuck around so long. And if you think diamond advertisements aren't at least partially to men who don't know their wives and are at a loss for what will please them besides jewelry, then you simply aren't paying attention to the imagery in these ads or the types of shows they get placed on (e.g. the god damn Superbowl).
Most of the time government hires (and has for a long time) the traditional defense contractors or government-specialized small contractors to do their IT work. It is actually mildly impressive that a 'normal business' IT provider like AWS has broken into the government field.

See http://www.lockheedmartin.com/isgs/
What about a house? All three covered.
Today's Email Incident
The library has a switch to turn the animation on/off

//Boolean - Whether to animate the chart
animation : true,
I remember reading about this back then and thinking "Bull" seems just as crazy today.
Your above points are correct; depreciation in general is a bad thing but for a "parallel currency" aiming for a particular niche like Bitcoin it's probably not an issue, especially because holding Bitcoins is definitely not without risk.

(In the unlikely event that Bitcoins ever became widely popular with speculators, then governments will tax or restrict domestic purchasers or exchanges for Bitcoins (they can't and won't be especially efficient at doing this; the US/EU don't need to be to severely damage the exchange value of a Bitcoin.).
Pretty easy for an older one (993, even, or a low end 996 with issues)
If we want to be understood we had better start communicating more effectively. The onus isn't on others to understand us, it's on us to make ourselves understood.
Great question. We should add it to a FAQ. The PCI-DSS rules apply to systems that store the entire credit card number ("PAN" in PCI-DSS parlance). We don't accept the full credit card number -- just the first six digits (which identify the type of credit card and bank) and the last four (typically printed on receipts), which the PCI-DSS rules allow for. So if you're PCI compliant already, you'll still be PCI compliant if you use Sift Science.
> Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode

What makes you think it is a minuscule cost? Crawling the millions of feeds and updating the XML parsers as feed formats change is going to cost very real dollars.
BlackBerry CEO Slams iPhone as No Longer Innovative
A diamond ring is a signal that is _always_ showing, unlike something like a house. It's a signal to the world that displays someone's wealth, commitment, etc.

This doesn't make it right, but there are numerous human psychology reasons why this tradition endures and so many people take part in it. Writing off people who want or provide a diamond ring as mentally ill (as many people in this thread seem to be doing) is silly.
I laughed when MSN published this article last night http://money.msn.com/exchange-traded-fund/diamonds-investors... about diamonds being an "investor's best friend" as it was called on the front page. I can't believe they'd go so low as to publish bullshit like that.

At least now we know where MSN news is getting it's money from.
It's mostly because we used their logos. It didn't help that they had just released Amazon Coins themselves...
> Amazon.com has requested that we shut down the site and discontinue use of their logos and graphics.

Soooo yeah, companies have things called "trademarks" and "copyrights"... you can't just go putting another company's name inside your company's name, and then make your imagery the same as theirs, without their lawyers sending you a strongly worded C&D. However I don't see why this would have to shut down based on that -- why not restart under a new, distinct name and branding?
I recently switched from using the Google Translate API to the Bing/Microsoft Translator API for my Android app, because Google charges usage fees while MS is free at the lowest tier. This was the first time I saw Google charge money for a service that Microsoft offers for free.
While De Beers business plan was/is genius, i think Swaroski topped it. While De Beers sells useless rocks for top prices, Swaroski sell glass imitates of these for similar prices.
Had their website been called buywithbitcoin.com or something similar, they would probably still be around.

They used Amazon's name/logo. What did they think was going to happen?
the one thing that i haven't seen mentioned, in all this chatter about how "RSS is dead" -

RSS feeds are free in both beer and speech, and were likely authored (or co-authored) by Aaron Swartz to be that way. The Google Pluses of the world, not so much...
Tech guys need to stop scoffing at non-tech "business" guys looking for co-founder arrangements. Yes, there are a lot of "startup groupies" out there who don't add any value, but someone with solid marketing abilities and/or "hustle" could help out a lot in OP's situation.
Apple wants a cut of the money you make. That's it. Dropbox could have a sign up link if they agreed to pay the 30% fee. I do think it's a bit shortsighted, but they don't block open protocols or monopolize services.
how about a '$3k donation to redcross' and buying a fake diamond so that all her friends will think you are still part of the herd?
This is more of a consequentialist argument, but Reading List didn't have the same ripple effects as Reader did.

I think that, to be fair to Google, they could not have predicted the popularity of Reader, and the resultant growth in responsibility along with it.

Hands up, who would give a shit if Reading List got axed tomorrow?

There is a cognitive dissonance, as you bring up, because Reader is in a sense a service the same way Reading List is.

Apple made Reading List, because such services were popular to the extent that Apple wanted to give people a native solution. That's hardly much different from what Google did, except we impute a less noble incentive on their part - user adoption, ad impressions. Or perhaps it's that we are left to impute their incentive to dicontinue it - G+ redirection.
77 days of measurement
If a product manages to be better than all the alternatives, it's hard to argue it's not a good product. At the very least it had to be better than "whatever everyone was using before" and "not using anything."
> Honestly, I find the notion of "man as provider" to be perverse, but if I buy into your worldview for a moment...

Why? It is, to this day, even in the U.S., the dominant arrangement between men and women, especially in the context of relationships that result in children.

> The need to demonstrate your social standing to other people is the result of low self-esteem.

That are very pragmatic reasons to invest in signals of social standing. It minimizes the cultural friction between yourself and the people who can help you get ahead, who are overwhelmingly people of high social standing themselves.
Visualizing the March Madness Field using Machine Learning
You could be kicked out of Dev Bootcamp
SecPoint Will Allow You To Silk Road Black Market From Any Browser
I'm genuinely curious as to how the site owners expected to not find themselves in a precarious legal position using this name/imagery. Care to enlighten us?
> I would not want her to marry someone who wasn't willing to give her a ring

That seems like a really shallow and material evaluator of the character of a human being.

> People who buck social conventions sometimes become trend-setters and are incredibly successful for it, but more often just make life harder on themselves and the people that depend on them

Well thank God that Jackie Robinson, Marie Curie, or Barack Obama didn't believe this. Sometimes being different from the rest of the crowd and following your passions is more worthwhile rather than striving to "fit in" by purchasing status-enhancers.
The case about walled gardesn is the same old argument but in new clothes.

Every so often, someone comes along and says that people don't know what is good for them, so its better that someone decide for them rather to let "them" decide.

Sometimes it happens in politics, and we get dictatorships. Sometimes it happen in the market, and we get illegal monopolies. Sometimes it happen with the police force, and we get a police state. Sometimes it happens in crime, and we get mafias. Sometimes it happens in families, and we get forced marriages. And sometimes it happen with software, and we get walled gardens.

Deciding for people by removing all choices are not "a better way". We just tend to forget what the cost are of losing the ability to choice for our self. Its that, or we are just saying that all software around us is just of such small importance that being allowed to decide your own fate is not an important thing.
Except that in 1813, the diamond ring wasn't prevalent for engagements.
Some of Google's API do have this, it'll be in their terms of service under "Deprecation Policy". The deprecation policy is a promise that if the service is going to be discontinued you'll have at least X notice.

The examples I can think of off hand are all Google App Engine related but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Drive APIs have the same thing.
I think it would be nice if TC disclosed Arrington's involvement with SoftTech VC, which has invested in Postmates.
I don't have an opportunities for you, but It'd be helpful to be more specific in your experience, and to include a way to contact you in your profile (you should probably create a random gmail account just for this purpose).
Show HN: Handpicked Front-End Dev news from HN
Hi HN,

I created a personal site ( nej.cc ) as a collection of hand picked articles surrounding the web/mobile front-end development world. My main source of the links is from HN itself. I'm planning on using this site as my consulting site as well. Wanted to see what you guys thought of the whole site (design/performance/etc).

tl;dr
HN has a lot of information on a daily basis and becomes overwhelming, this site, curated by me, filters through the daily dose and adds them on the site with a focus on Front-End Development.

Setup:
- Jekyll
- Amazon S3
- Amazon Route 53
- Disqus
Are there particular consequences you have in mind?
Any internet left? :)
1LPjVfUFtwqy1DToVogtT2Fob3du4qXSa5
Tadayoshi Kohno at UW?
I thought part of the point is that it is conspicuous and expensive and, yeah, kinda wasteful. What better way to prove you have lots of money than by buying something expensive that depreciates dramatically in value once you buy it?