skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spent 6.5 years in a call center for a smallish (really only covering a single state) dial-up internet service. Everything you say is true. Though I'd add the caveat that while I am more comfortable talking to strangers after that experience (I was, and still am, a shy introvert), I now loathe speaking on the phone, even to friends/family, where before, I had no problem talking on the phone for hours. I now try to use email/text messages as much as possible.
It's easy to rise 46% in terms of subscriptions when they offer tens of thousands of dollars worth of their service for free.
I found this from a link from Jason Mendelson's blog. It's kind of amazing that the class is free, being that it's Brad Feld teaching it. Then again he's an investor in Sympoz :)

The interesting thing is the interactivity piece. When talking about something as general as a startup idea it's difficult to engage in a general way. Sympoz attempts to solve this with questions indexed to the video playhead. This is interesting and its very cool that Brad has engaged in some of these discussions. I think I'd much prefer to watch these and have someone lead discussion or answer questions in person though.
Pentagon Paying China To Carry Data
its a big internet
It's fine to ask for money, but they could solicit money without declaring themselves open source yet, with a promise to do so in the future, or they could actually release the source now, and continue to solicit money. Instead they are claiming to already be open source but not actually opening anything. I think that's what got people a little put off.
"What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup." - Boris Pasternak
Time to uninstall Opera from my computer.
The whole article is really poor in my opinion. It ostensibly tries to disprove (or get you to believe that some research disproves) previous research that earnings beyond $75K per annum in 1st world countries does not make people happier. To do this, it shows 2 graphs where 99% (my approximation) of the data points are for 2nd world countries or 1st world countries with earnings below 64K.

To prove their thesis (and disprove the previous research), they would've needed straight lines for 1st world countries that continue straight up between 64K and 128K. There is only one that I would say looks statistically significant (USA), but it is balanced by one that definitely looks like its not straight (could be Japan).

In the second graph, I am very skeptical of how they determine where that line bends. If you ignore their lines, you could draw a straight line through the data points. By what statistical method did they determine that a bent line approximated the data better and that this particular bent line was the best. Essentially, saying that this data should be represent by a bent line instead of a straight one seems like an economist's trick.

And in the end, the author trots out the 75K figure and pretty much agrees with it. The income redistribution statement is odd but further proof: taxing the rich (above 64K) and "giving" it to the those below 64K would have the biggest happinss effect.

About all I take away from this article is that Brazil and Mexico have the happiest inhabitants on very low wages.
So do all console games.
>It's a well known fact that GDP per capita is well correlated with other indicators made by organisations with a liberal agenda, such as the HDI - so much that it is problematic both for these organisation, and for a usual neoliberal opinion (with diminishing marginal returns).

Why would that be problematic for those organizations?

Saying "GDP is correlated with happiness" (what you're saying) is a looong way from "Impact on GDP is the best metric for determining policy" (what would refute the 'liberal' GDP replacers).
I LOVE Visual Studio and working in C# / Asp.Net MVC. I do it full time at work, and now writing my SaaS in it which I plan to host on Azure (though, I wish they had an official MongoDB offering).

I've always done PHP on my side stuff, partly because of the hosting issues, but now with PaaS' like Azure and Appharbor, people who enjoy the MS Stack at least have reasonable options.

People bitch about MS, but without competition from Azure, Google, and others, Amazon wouldn't keep lowering their rates.
GTAC 2013: Drinking the Ocean - Finding XSS at Google Scale
do you have any plans to make this more than an iphone app?
Thank you for explaining what I'm missing from your point of view. However, I've been following this legalization since it was being discussed a long time ago and it's absolutely about returning works to the public domain. Sure there might be some areas to iron out but it was not conceived as a gift to big corps but as a way of slowly eroding their ability to use copyright to crush competition. Their ability to use the odd photo unpaid is a far smaller issue, it's just one they've discovered resonates so are pushing it as a phony grass roots issue which people are jumping on. This is how big corporations always attack restrictions.

The balance of benefits to society will outweigh the negatives if we can increase the ability to recla orphaned works for the public domain. People reacting against this miss the point that right now if they want to use your photo they will and you'll probably never even find out and have little recourse if you do.
Study suggests doctors are nicer to patients who aren't fat
The bait and switch is what got me too. I don't see the need for giving us the run around. It would be easy to be up front about what's going on. Changing a few sentences from present tense to future tense would go a long way.
They probably are, just not directly to him, but to his lawyers.

At least, for the US-side lawyers (I'm presuming Mozilla's US lawyers are on this one) due to conflict-of-interest rules, they would not be able to step in to offer advice and guidance to him directly, because the representation would probably be adverse to Mozilla's interests.

The rule in most states (based on the ABA model rules) is " A concurrent conflict of interest exists if:
(1) the representation of one client will be directly adverse to another client; or
(2) there is a significant risk that the representation of one or more clients will be materially limited by the lawyer's responsibilities to another client , a former client or a third person or by a personal interest of the lawyer."

Even if you don't believe #1 applies, #2 definitely applies.

Norway may have different rules, but the local Mozilla lawyers are bound by their local state bars, where this rule (or some variant) would apply. I've avoided discussion of whether this conflict could be consented to by him, etc, as it varies from state state

This of course, only applies directly. They can and probably are talking with his lawyers, just not advising him directly.
Space Cartoons to Space Psychedelia: How Sci-Fi Book Covers Evolved
Agreed, but... the standards themselves have changed since 1999.
"Legos" makes the tiny bit of OCD in me go crazy
> Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available?

What is your apparently universal definition of "better," please?
Some jerk injected pedo links into the Bitcoin block chain. So it goes.
What a fantastic course, and a great show of character from Mr. Target. Hat tips all round.
> Wonder how this panel's decision will affect projects such as Textsecure and Redphone

I say it is only a matter of time. The wheels are already turning in that direction. Just need a few terrorism/child porn high profile cases where someone on behalf of FBI will testify how they had to let the evil perpetrator go because encryption made it impossible to wiretap them -- and bam legislation will be out in no time.

Remember many countries make cryptography illegal and even in US exporting string cryptographic software was the same legally as exporting the designs for bombs and rockets. And ban and/or arm twisting fines are just around the corner I suspect.
Both would be nice. I generally restructure commits before pushing them to master in order to make them easier to read, which is nice for others. However, I think about the code in the order I built it, especially when I need to remember why I did something. Unfortunately, that information gets lost if I forget.

On the whole, I think restructuring is good (I haven't always felt this way), but something is lost in the process.
> #edit: also, how exactly does one get as familiar with a closed source OS as an open source one?

Work for Apple.
How to Accept and Decline Job Offers
Sliders: A Guide to Caring About Everything
Sure enough... It might be possible to host the site on the Pi itself. However, I think that's probably risky.

My main concern is that the Pi is powered by an Ethernet controller that is connected to the USB bus, and it might drop out in special circumstances

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=3...
The Most Powerful Laser In The Whole World - High Tech Point
They have 2 problems (and they somewhat conflict with each other). They _need_ strong, quality encryption to use it themselves. NSA advises and certifies on picking correct algorithms, with right sized keys on particular hardware, certified using this and that certificate (FIPS 140-2) and so on, when it comes to what government agencies should be using to keep their secrets safe. BUT at the same time they want everyone else to use something that is crack-able, traceable and easily controllable by them.

Their wet dream is key escrow, something like "You can use your strong 2048 bit keys but please be kind enough first to send it to the NSA for escrow storage".
I'm using Fastmail, so I'm essentially an Opera customer. I'll wait to see what comes of this lawsuit before deciding whether to continue with them.

(Annoyingly, I'd just changed over to Fastmail from Gmail. I hope Opera is in the right here otherwise I'll have to change again ...)
Amazon micro instances are basically the same thing...
I am guessing that the student in question was from India. That's how many Indians write official/business letters; likely a relic of the colonial times.
> many people who moved to FastMail for the biggest reasons - "privacy, pure email as in firm's passion for good email service"

And I guess all the internet connected services / devices they are using are equally "private and pure" - including their ISPs, their smartphones, their mobile service providers, online retailer they purchase things from.
Aha, bingo, that is why big companies love that. It kills the smaller, more agile competitors. Big monopolies will just pass this right through to the customers. As long as customers don't have an option to use a non-American carrier they have not choice.
Alibaba buys stake in China's Twitter-type Weibo service
It's not money (or material possessions), it's freedom. Freedom to pursue your ideas, freedom to have options, freedom to do your own thing, freedom to give, or not to waste time on things you hate.

All these things can definitely make a person happier.
HDI and others were created because it was said that GDP per capita was not measuring happiness well enough, and was too economic.

But now we realize they are correlated, which begs the questions : are the parts about education, healthcare etc. within the HDI so unimportants ? (ie why did bother creating the HDI if GDP/capita works just as well on most cases)

But if works so well, shouldn't we also see diminishing marginal returns in GDP per capita ? (in neoclassical theory, diminishing marginal returns are everywhere !)

Some studies have added ad-hoc trigger points (up to $75k and you'll be happy, then not so much) but still from what I get it's a weird situation, and we are still learning important facts about the utility of money. It's quite interesting.

EDIT: Marking normative suggestions with regards to GDP per capita - I don't think I would, cause that's quite a bit off my league. There are different models, and many variables - not one simple solution.
To a first approximation, ZIP codes are post offices. My understanding is that sorting starts with the postal codes, but I'm not clear exactly how much sorting happens where. For instance, the first three digits of the post code denotes a regional central processing facility. When 123xx has mail for 456xx, do they sort it before or after sending it to 456xx? Does the central facility for 123xx sort the mail for 12345, or just send it all to the post office? I could see it going either way.
Morbid Reality: 60 Minutes Interviews Night Nurse Serial Killer Charles Cullen
Why "Business Types" Should Learn to Code
Deaf to Negative Feedback
Web Design Business is Dead

Right, the web design business died right along with the webmaster business.Seems this article is written by someone still stuck in ten years ago. Sure there is always more competition and that puts pressure on prices, but not as bad as mentioned in this article.

Going niche seems to be a good way to go also.

Outsourcing gets lower prices for only so long, then prices start edging back up as those markets mature (much the same as manufacturing in China.) These days you can get low end U.S.developers for the same rates as what dev shops in third world countries are charging.

Also, a bit of trivia for you. Third world countries aren't cheaper to live in. Standards and expectations are just lower. Your ~$5 / hour developer is probably living in a hut with three generations of family or living right on the poverty line. As your life gets more westernized in a third world country, your living expenses start looking westernized as well. In large metro hubs such as Bangkok or Shanghai, your cost of living can skyrocket as you start moving away from living like the locals.

You just need to hit the right market. A web property can be very little or very big. It can be a 5 minute Wordpress installation or it can be a billion+ dollar thing with thousands of employees and multiple data centers. To get paid, you need to be working on things which will create enough value to (or at least have the potential to) return that investment. Few people will see that return on a $10 web site.
Only 1 U.S. submarine has ever had 2 nuclear reactors (bonus points for those who know why it was designed with 2).

Soviet submarines often had 2 though.

For the U.S. submarines they frequently would test shutting down the 1 operational reactor at-sea and trying to recover from the casualty, just to prove that it could be done when you didn't have time to pre-plan.

Edit: U.S. subs do have diesels though. So next question: how do you bring up the diesel engine and its required auxiliaries without AC?
How to Measure Your Start-up’s Success
For a larger company with more signups/uploads, I'm envisioning a wall of LEDs, controlled by an Arduino board.
-Wswitch-enum
Graphics drivers aren't open source either. A very large amount of actual Mac OS X performance problems and crashes come from the combination of the graphics drivers and CoreGraphics/Aqua. Both of these systems can use main memory and therefore might be influencing or be influenced by paging issues.

If you can get a reproducible case and capture enough useful diagnostic information you can give that to Apple to try to get a fix in some future version of OS X. Have a look at /usr/bin/sysdiagnose and /usr/sbin/spindump among other tools. I'm sure there are more diagnostic tools internal to Apple, which would require that you have a case that is reproducible from a new OS X install rather than from a system with files copied over. If you can identify the one file from ~/Library or wherever that triggers it, then you can pass that along as the repro case.

In general people (like me) just don't have the time to hunt down every crash, hang, etc. we find when using a computer. So I can understand if one doesn't bother with capturing diagnostics and repro cases or with downloading Darwin or Android source to debug a crash. I can also understand where huge frustrated discussions like this one come from. But deep down there is an answer, and it likely is not from some huge corporate failing on Apple's part.
Own goal? You're the one who put the goalposts there.
I've been using azure a bunch at work. I don't know where the sales numbers come from. I have reasons for being skeptical after being in on conversations with their sales reps. I hate how they hide important details about their systems. The shroud of mystery is really infuriating.

Useful bits in terms of performance metrics just aren't there or just aren't visible. I've used Amazon's services and Rackspace's services as well. I've had mixed experiences with all of them. I honestly feel that I'd be getting work done much quicker if I was just handed a vmware portal and managed VMs in a datacenter to implement our systems. It's very nice when you're able to SSH into a system and run top or other tools to see what's going on. Running queries or checking out charts that show data at hourly intervals is next to useless. As an added bonus, I wouldn't have to stop queries and go up to the application layer and reconnect to another shard in order to continue my query.

I honestly don't know what's so appealing about Azure. Maybe devs these days don't know how to ping a server or set up a database. If it weren't for getting tons of free cash to start, we'd be on about 1/10th the "budget" using other services. But it's hard to beat free.

Would I ever pay for it? Yes. But only in the situation where I had a bunch of sub-par developers. Id also be looking for an out from the company while getting patted on the back for going with MS.
Tattoo monitors brainwaves and baby bump
The Trouble with CodeSchool
Top Ten Hacking Countries
I wonder why he didn't use something like IFTTT.
If it's Good for the Web, I at least am happy to chat, give advice, mentor, to the extent that I have free time. I do that on a regular basis for local companies, but that's just because it's more convenient. I expect many Mozilla folks do the same.

(and if it's a thing that should/could be a Mozilla consumer product someday, then yes, check out the Hatchery, that's a more structured program w/ a bunch of coaches).
If you require that each individual commit meets semantic criteria then you can still require that to occur during a git rebase by rewriting the commit. Which you should probably be doing anyways, if you're pulling breaking changes from upstream.
So do you work for Google, or do you do work for Google? I only ask because in earlier comments you lectured on the correct use of terminology, yet having said explicitly you work for Google you now talk about the company in the 3rd person plural as if you are not an employee.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install
Nice list. It's always good to be able to quantify your progress - which can definitely help get young companies through rough patches where it might seem there's no growth happening.
You guys don't get it. It's not about how old you are, it's about what kind of persona you project. If you are confident, tall, good looking, have all your hair, young enough _looking_ for your age, well rounded, intimidatingly brilliant, experienced, and professionally successful, then you are good to go - age does not matter. If, on the other hand, you are all washed up then yes age is a negative factor. This doesn't just apply to software programming, the same patterns occur with, e.g. investment bankers.
Been planning on making an app that does this based on current location. The government in South Australia lists source information like this along with almost every named street, suburb, etc. Should be standard worldwide IMO.
Can't agree more, I'll push it even further...

Use G2! which does pull --rebase magically on your behalf.

http://orefalo.github.io/g2/

https://github.com/orefalo/g2
I humbly submit that this is a holy war. I personally am on the side of "history is just another part of the project to be maintained," but tread carefully friends; there's dogma at work here.

On one hand it's good to preserve things exactly as they happened. How else will we blame Dumb Steve guilt-free when someone branches from an arbitrary hash to give a one-off release to an angry customer, thereby bifurcating the state handling logic that allows the machine to be certain that it's not emptying a crucible on a crate of orphaned puppies? Think of the puppies!

On the other hand, it's good to align commits to units of work. It's cool that you've forked the project to handle massively concurrent input caused by edge case X (sorry, I used up most of my creativity on the last paragraph), but really I just want your cool configuration parsing piece. Can I cherry-pick that, please?

Git was designed to give you the choice. Do you care about preserving the ability to perform an arbitrary audit, or do you care about treating development as a series of portable patches? You decide, and then do what's right for you.
I would argue it's the most important - if you don't know whether or not people are sticking around, the total number of overall new users is somewhat meaningless
Things I Learned At The National Hobo Convention
I love how Google doesn't really look different at all. Looks the same on IE5 basically as it does in IE10, ha.
http://gramps-project.org/

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~ddr/GeneWeb/en/

There are others. I guess there aren't many, but there are some.
I'll admit that I am no IP expert but I'm told that winning an IP suit is impossibly difficult and extremely expensive. To pursue it, you really better believe that you have a tremendous amount of upside (ie, deep pockets on the other side) and that you have a very strong case.

You might say that they are "just suing for $3.4 million" and that they might settle out of court, but I'd bet that unless Opera has a really strong in-house counsel in this area, this whole story will evaporate pretty soon. Usually things like this start out because one party is pissed-off and then once cooler heads prevail they realize it's just not worth it and move on.

Not sure what the laws are or where Opera is headquartered, though so IP laws may be vastly different.
Something like 99% of all large corporation middle management at their very best can do nothing apart from maintaining status quo. Come in, run affairs as usual and leave. This includes pretty much every one even at the (S)VP levels. This is why good folks are always the biggest asset and threat to the company.

The idea of these companies, is there must be no one to disturb this status quo. There are instances where companies have acquired start up's just to kill them. Its because they understand given their own inefficiency and inertia they can probably never compete with some one small, good and agile.

These sort of acts only prove that the company is bad at getting stuff done- It exposes what looks like frustration with their own selves for being bad, and they sure realize that their competitors are better than them in converting ideas to usable products.

They know they had a good guy on on board, they knew he was better than others in their own company. They now think they own him- They expect him to do whatever work they want, at whatever price they wish to pay him- No questions asked. Now how dare this guy go and do whatever he likes, or work where he wants, while they own him and he owes them lifelong service???

That is the attitude.
This seems like a really great use for raspberry pi. I recently finished a project involving a pi + a relay to activate a door buzzer, written in javascript. It was surprisingly simple and straightforward.

Besides turning on lights, the cool thing about relays is that most things involving physical push-buttons can be taken apart and easily wired up to a relay.
Ask HN: Best job forums?
I've noticed that the places I think to look (hn, craigslist, linkedin, stackoverflow) seem pretty low-traffic. I know there are jobs out there. Where do you look?
A perspective on the use of machine learning in IT
C2FO ... Accelerates.... Capital exceeds 227,305% Growth