skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way I get around that is running emacs on the remote server in screen/tmux. If there's a better way I'd love to know it, but I haven't found it to be too much of a problem.
Wait, are you telling me I'll LOSE money if I sell things below cost? That's not a "grave financial error", it's an egregious violation of common sense.

He was basically running a Groupon for moms, and no one stopped to say "Hey, Groupon never turned a profit. What makes you think your company will?"
BOSTON FALSE FLAG +48,000 CHILDREN PARALYSED
Civic Accelerator boosts young businesses who want to do good
It sure sounds like parallel map/reduce tasks are begging for a 'just kill the process and re-fork a fresh worker' solution instead of garbage collection.
I spent the last 4 months redesigning and improving CraftStudio and I just launched the Beta last night. It comes with a physics engine, a HTML5 Web player (http://store.craftstud.io/games) built with Three.js and Lua.js, a completely redesigned user interface and initial (though still a bit buggy) Linux support, among other changes.

CraftStudio is my real-time multiplayer "game to make games". I built it out of my own frustration with existing game-making tools and a desire to let everyone (gamers, most importantly) make their own games. Minecraft was an obvious inspiration to its blocky, pixelarty nature.

If you guys have any questions, technical or otherwise, I'll be more than happy to answer them.
By contrast if my right to free speech could be shut down just because Bill Gates does not like that particular picture

You have a right to free speech, but I'd argue that bill Gates ought to have a right to privacy that would prevent the police from releasing his mugshot in the first place.

To take a more serious example, I have Showdead enabled on HN so I see all the posts on the new page that are auto-flagged. The other day I saw one from a site I didn't recognize relating to photographs of the Boston bombing suspects (this was before the second one had been caught). It had been flagged but I was curious about the ongoing story so I went to the URL. well, it turned out to be the morgue photo of the older brother, on a blog that specializes in, well, morgue photos. I've worked in a hospital including a stint in a mortuary so I'm not mentally scarred by seeing a dead body, even a badly damaged one, but I do question to what extent freedom of speech should allow commercial exploitation of this sort.

There is no such mugshot of me, but I would not think it a big deal if there was.

Sure, because in Bill Gates' mugshot, you can tell he's not terribly worried about how this is going to affect his life, and I wouldn't be either for some kinds of offenses. But suppose you were unfortunate enough to be an alcoholic or got caught up in some sticky situation. If you were falsely accused of a sex crime or something your professional life might suddenly come to a crashing halt.
Is it so hard to actually look at the username?

I think you're reading "invest" more broadly than I am, and it's not unlikely that I am misusing a technical term, but I certainly do not want to be taken as arguing that debt is intrinsically bad.
Do you have any website, tutorial, pdf, etc. for me to reduce the latency on Hadoop?
People who drink also make more money.
Not in a similar situation, I'm in my late 20's, a programmer who have done Bioinformatics research in academia and in Pharma R&D.

Programming done in most startup's and corporate settings are very similar to lab-work. The young grad students are lured by PI's to do repetitive work with promise of publication when the reality is it's a lottery. After a few years, what is looked upon as glamorous and interesting by onlookers of the high-end instruments and high-impact research, will turn into mundane and repetitive lab protocols that's intellectually stale and unstimulating; any results and interpretation is only esoteric and vague in the academic sense.

The actors are different but the characters are the same. PCRs, blots will be replaced with repetitive coding exercises being asked of you by project managers. PIs will be replaced by MBA bosses. The academic grind for glory amongst the sub-field of 5 people will be replaced by maximizing profit in the business logic of the sub-field of the company you are in.

The pay is slightly better or equivalent; the job security much worse. People threw around the 150K mark here as an average developer salary. It's analogous to say that the average lawyer makes 220K. It's not true. After working for about 5 years in Boston, most of my peers are getting salaries around the range of 90-110K. Only people I know who are getting over 150K at programmer level live in SF which in their case is not very much. Most software engineering job req's I looked for in Boston tops out at 150K, this includes senior positions for 10-15 years of experience and at well-funded companies.

If your goal is to achieve intellectual autonomy and financial independence by becoming a programmer, it's very difficult. The sub-culture on this forum skewers towards college students and recent grads who are more naive about the field. Others might give more defensive answers to your query, but I want to give you a honest opinion.

I chose coding over Biology because it was attractive for a young person out of school and didn't want to get on the grad school treadmill. But if I inherited a lot of money suddenly, I'd want to apply to Biology grad school and do research for fun, without caring about my PI and departmental politics; and/or work on open-source games without caring about IT career jockeying or monetization. Just food for thought.
Microsoft has a new Android app called Switch to Windows Phone
Curious is good. Things definitely move quickly in the tech industry, and I'm willing to bet that within 5 years things can change. And I'd support building up the skills / infrastructure needed to hedge against the uprising of ARM.

But at the moment, the evidence is solidly in favor of the typical 2U Xeon. (by nature of ARM servers barely exist right now. Maybe next year ARM will have something ready)

Atom looks mostly dead however, with Intel beginning to advertize 16W Xeons. Can two 8W Centrino Atoms compete against a 16W Xeon? I doubt it. Intel only has the resources to choose one "hero" chipset in server-space, and it looks like it will be the Xeon again.
From what I've read of it, a lot of it is cultural as well. Outside a few liberal, cosmopolitan parts of society (whether left-liberal or right-liberal), many Swiss just don't want more than a handful of immigrants, and like maintaining a closed, stable Nation of people whose great-great-grandfathers were Swiss. This even (perhaps especially) extends to negative sentiment directed at German immigrants by Swiss-Germans.

One paper I ran across (via Wikipedia) suggested that negative sentiment directed at Germans might be due to their similarity: if the objective cultural difference between two groups is not huge, then an influx of immigration is particularly threatening, because it might erase the fragile boundary: http://img2.tapuz.co.il/CommunaFiles/44893554.pdf
We've tried using checklists a bit for code review, and hit the problem that our checklists would be pretty much guaranteed to have at least one item that was arguably inapplicable to the changeset. So you'd have some changeset that was very small, or not contain UI elements, or did contain UI elements, or was related to build tools, and so on.

And so we'd get into a situation where we'd have to decide whether a particular item was even applicable or not, which somewhat defeats the point of checklists, since you're supposed to be able to decide immediately whether an item is satisfied or not.
Chechnya and the Caucasus - in 99 seconds
While I've never raised money from traditional VCs, I have raised millions of dollars from angels. Out of more than a dozen angels I've worked with, never once has anyone even contemplated having the company pay the legal fees of the investor. If this is the norm, I'm glad I dislike VCs enough never to have approached them.
This is absolutely true. But he was only put in danger once the Fox News affiliate broadcast the image (purportedly from the FBI) of Salah and his friend.
Sorry about the slow reply - I didn't expect this sub-thread to be so lively. I get the legal arguments for your position, but have a third perspective, being from Western Europe. I think the best thing I could do is work this pet issue of mine up into an essay and make it into its own thread later.
Thanks for the tip! I really appreciate the response. While they're probably not the spot, I'm pretty sure it's a way batter place to ask the same question. Cheers,
You're assuming that everyone that enters the states received a visa. This is very far from the current state of affairs. Although I don't know exactly how the author came into the country, there are countless ways to sneak in.
>> A large problem was Sherman did not understand some basic business principles. "I would bring the financial statements to Jody who would glance at them so cursorily and wave me away with 'no one can understand this without extensive analysis,' Prentiss writes. "Critically, he did not understand margin. At the end of December when things were getting truly desperate, he said to me, 'Phil, just bring me a forecast that shows how much we need to sell to break even.' He did not understand, after three years of negative margin, that increased sales resulted in increased losses. He had built his house by raising money and when times got tough he went with what he knew."

If the above it's true, it's really scary. You should not be in any business, let alone commerce, if you don't get this basic stuff. Building a business is about making money - coaxing it right out of the unit economics - not raising money.
One strong drink is enough for me, so I just tip 100% at the local place where I regularly camp -- whether I'm camping or picking up a drink. If your coffee shop is near a university, bring your regular barista something nice, some food, etc. during finals. He or she is probably pulling doubles. This is coming up soon...
Thank you so much.
Edit: I don't work at facebook.
meh, the previous generation is /dramatically/ better set for retirement than this generation seems to be. Defined benefit pensions are a real thing for them, as is healthcare for life as a retirement benefit. Often these things start in the '50s.

a lot of this is that risk-free investments had a positive expected return when they were working. Imagine that; T-bills that pay out more than inflation! I mean, it's a total thing of the past now, of course.
Its hard to find a good match these days, people will either kill you or themselves at the beginning of a PVP match.
> in reality he admitted that he helped Gonzales who he knew was going to use it to commit crimes.

Maybe he thought (or was told) that this would "show remorse" and that he'd get a lighter sentence than otherwise.
Even if it were true that "the economy of this country would not stand as strong without the constant influx of immigrants" -- and it's not true, it's foolish -- you would still want to consider before selling your birthright for the bowl of red.
> when I'm dead don't refer to me as "John" as if I was your friend or property

What do you want people to call you -- "Mr. Graham-Cumming"? I wonder if that preference is based on your age or based on British culture (or maybe a little of both?). I think it's common to refer to virtually everyone in our society by their first name -- Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, etc. You never hear them referred to as anything except their first names. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point...
I have tried this, and it works fine...almost :) The only problem I have is that doesn't give you some of the GUI goodness. For example, I find CEDET's code folding incredibly useful when I want to get a bird's eye view of my modules, and the CLI version doesn't seem to support drawing the expandoes.

Thanks for the tip though.
Idiots, the whole lot of ’em
How a Free Chat App Ate Into Profits of China's Communist Party
Any chance of a Linux SDK? I'm cut my teeth on AS3 and it would be fun to play with again.
Well then the word is quite uninteresting and meaningless.
That's part of his point, yes.
> Software "zealots" promote their fanatical opinions but they don't worship "software".

Indeed. But software zealots exhibit the same behavioral properties as normal zealots. "Normal zealots" is understood to be "religious zealots", because those behavioral properties are derived primarily from analyses of religious behavior.

Worship, at the end of the day, has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
You're right. A more ambitious thing might get a bit closer to people's "real interests" would be to follow posted links and topic model the contents of those links.
I believe humanity's data was increasing by around 23% a year in 2007 when we were estimated to have around .3zb. Assuming that trend's holding steady with respect to the internet I'd expect us to massively outrun increases in storage.
Paypal considers Bitcoin
Women make teams smarter.
Judge Denies FBI Request to Hack Computer
I guess if someone were writing a hagiography of me I'd prefer that they use "Graham-Cumming", e.g. "Graham-Cumming was best known for knowing too much about GNU make and..."

Could be age or culture related; could also be that it's almost midnight and I'm patching another fucking WordPress vulnerability.
> This post was on HN six months ago[1] but I'm glad it was posted again because I missed it on the first go-around.

If you missed it, how did you know it was posted before? Do you just check for reposts even if you haven't seen the post before??
Interesting read, I never knew the founder(s) had to pay VC legal bills just to get the paperwork all situated.

Can you...pay the legal fees with the money the VC gave you? :)
Suggesting that meditation is a "waste of time"... Wow, that's hard to imagine thinking that way if you do creative work!
It's something to keep in mind, though.

You gave some of the bigger examples, but I'd bet there were a lot of smaller failures in there, too.
Not that a traditional VC will ever hand me a term sheet (I wouldn't approach one), but if one did and it specified that I had to pay their legal expenses, I would reject it on principle. It's rather underhanded, and I would immediately begin scouring the paperwork to see what other sleazy tactics they were employing.
Now that's just pathetic. Can they not come up with anything more clever than blatant poaching of customers?

Same approach with many Bing commercials. Microsoft just hates Google for reason.
Just found this cool paper from Facebook: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.4145.pdf

It goes some way to answering the dynamics question.
Well attended Memorial service of MIT Police Office Sean Collier
As socalnate1 mentions above this is very possible to scale up a small e-commerce operation and be profitable immediately - especially in niche products. There are several case studies for this.

For example I sell cases for mobile bluetooth speakers. Our Jambox case was profitable instantly and I paid for the first batch of inventory with revenue from a pre-launch sales discount. The first batch of inventory was paid for with sales before I had the product on hand. I packaged and shipped them out of my home office until it was a pain in the ass and now we use Amazon FBA. We use profits to purchase additional inventory at greater quantities to increase the profit margin. Rinse & repeat.

Granted this isn't Amazon scale but it's working. See Dodocase for another example (they are doing way better than us). http://mixergy.com/dodocase-patrick-buckley-interview/

One of the keys is to start small to prove the market so you don't end up with a shit load of inventory in your garage. Or better yet do what I did and sell them before you even have them made. We started with 50 units which I was fortunate to sell almost all of using pre-launch tactics before we ordered the inventory from our manufacturer.
Million Dollar Luxury Laptop Goes On Sale
Facebook (accidentally) censoring pro-Bush article 
Keith Hennessey, a Stanford professor, wrote a fascinating article that defends George Bush. Here's the link: http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/. Try posting it to Facebook. You'll get the message "The content you're trying to share includes a link that's been blocked for being spammy or unsafe: http://files.wordpress.com/2013/04/43-paint-splattered.jpg." (The URL is for a file that doesn't seem to actually exist). Clearly, Facebook isn't purposefully trying to block Republican political discourse, and it is likely that this happened because of a spam-threshold algorithm. However, this shows the danger of automatic spam detection, because if enough people don't agree with the opinion presented in an article and decide to flag it as spam, it will automatically get blocked. I'm not sure how this can be dealt with or prevented. Does anyone have any ideas?
Edit: doh. Posted this without realizing that you'd made an edit, dobbsbob. Oh well. I think the point is still valid, just not as a response to you :)

---

While I tend to agree about overzealous prosecutions when it comes to computer crimes, let's not pretend that there aren't individuals being hurt by some of these crimes. I am a bit fuzzy on the exact nature of the fraud, but I get the impression that it was either small businesses or individuals that were hit. Dealing with fraudulent charges is neither easy nor stress free, even when it is clearly the case that fraud occurred. Sure, most eventually get it resolved, but as someone who has had to navigate those bureaucracies before I know how unpleasant it is.

This is not to say that business owners facing high stress and uncertainty about their financial future is sufficient justification for the magnitude of the punishment, but it isn't always just the major corporation that suffers.
If after my death you care enough about my passing to discuss me you can totally call me Andrew even if you think i was a jerk.
What can't you do with ST2 if you write a plugin? Or is that just a relative pain compared to emacs & vim?
There is nothing novel about this situation. The law on aiding and abetting has been stable forever. A person does not is not responsible if an, otherwise legal, tool they create is used to commit a crime. A person is responsible if an, otherwise legal, tool they create is used to commit a crime, and they know at the time of rendering that aid that there is a certainty or high probability that aid will be used to commit a crime. There is nothing illegal, for example, about opening a door. It is illegal, however, if you open a door for someone being chased by cops to help him escape and you know that the person is running away from a crime scene.

> You see some videos on the evening news of some people getting killed by a drone you helped build. Do you bear responsibility for the use of that drone?

Of course you do. You created a tool that you knew not only had the potential to kill people, but would be in fact used to kill people. But it's not a crime because it's not a crime to kill people in war.
Why Are Journalists Always in A Rush? — Pen to the Online Paper
> It has all desirable values of gold

No it doesn't. Bitcoin is only valuable as long as it's valuable. Yes, that's tautological, but it's also true. Bitcoin is only valuable as long as people are willing to pretend it has value. However, gold has an intrinsic value that it possesses whether or not people are willing to invest in it, because gold is useful for more than just investing (for example it's used in jewelry, dentistry, electronics, etc). If everyone in the world decided tomorrow to stop investing in gold, you could still sell any gold you had for an amount based on its utility. But if everyone in the world decided tomorrow to stop investing in bitcoin, its value would immediately plummet to $0.
Yep, Rope in emacs is the way to go. I remember having trouble getting Pymacs set up the first time around, but if you are working on an actual python project (not just some loosely couple source files) I have not found a better environment anywhere.
Nice trick to hoodwink emacs :) It didn't work though.

I understand what you're saying in the rest of your comment though -- basically I will have to learn some elisp. Thanks for the help.
Love that this is #1 on HN and I'm going in for my YC interview on Sunday to explain how we can help insurers, banks, and VCs (and apparently startups) reduce their legal expenses.

It's a sign!

For a more substantive comment, moving the legal bills into the hands of a "bigger fish" is bad news for law firms. VCs are less likely to be willing to pay for over-billing, unnecessary tasks, and other bad behavior. (shameless plug) VCs, especially those that use my team's software, can save a bundle on legal fees with very little effort.
Does anyone have some research links on analysts/opinion leaders and their hype cycles?

I remember Nouriel Roubini bashing Gold on Twitter like never before all of the sudden starting about two weeks before the gold "crash". The whole thing happened without any significant "new" developments taking place (at least from my laymen perspective). These boom and burst cycles seem a lot like echo-chamber hyping. I would so love to see some research on how these echo waves start and succeed/fail.
That is of course exactly what Startups do today. And it feels unfortunate. "Wait, you have me cash just to spend it on your legal bill?"
No its not like it or not sovereign states use of force in a Just war is not the same as knocking over a bank.

Anyone whose worked in high end technical computing will have faced this and you have to decide at the time if you are cool with that.

For example at my first job I had to anlyse data from one of our test rigs and I commented to the guy I shared an office with that that looks like a REDACTED and his comment yeah probably REDACTED the Upgrade for the REDACTED weapon system - the one the then PM hadn't told the Cabinet about for a long time.

I had to sit down and think how I felt about this and if I was happy working on this sort of thing.
In some cases you can end up paying a charge for using a credit card. Low cost airlines are an example. EasyJet adds a 2.5% surcharge for credit cards. People still use them.

http://www.easyjet.com/book/paymentoptions
ShowHN: ipinfo.io - simple IP info site and API
There are tons of different websites that will give your IP address, but most are packed with ads and I can never remember the URLs anyway. http://ifconfig.me recently become my go-to site when needing to lookup my IP, but it doesn't do geolocation, so I often have to search for other sites to do that.

I built http://ipinfo.io to be an easy to remember one-stop place to get all the info you might need about your current IP, geolocation, and browser headers. You can also get your IP or the other details from the command line with curl.

I know this is going to save me a bunch of time - hope it's useful for others too!
The ligature appears for me, but the font only seems to mess up in firefox. Which is weird, because i would have expected Firefox and IE to have the same behaviour owing to DirectWrite..(?)

http://imgur.com/a/HNH5H From top to bottom: Chrome 27/beta, Firefox 16, IE 10 on Windows 7 x64.
I understand that, I'm simply saying that bloggers' liability for third party comments is no worse for Indieweb than it is for the centralized services, and nobody's complaining about it for them.