skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Of course it's a solution for a problem– the problem is that employees need to get to work every morning.

And Google haven't solved that problem apart from a very narrow subset of workers, all of whom are Google employees. Thus, it's just a kludge.

I reckon Google is more than capable of designing a better public transit system - they'd have to be allowed to use location data. But there's nothing in it for Google to do this. They'd just have to battle against entrenched industries and they'd end up with something that's not as good for their workers (although better for the planet and for everyone else) than what they have now.
Upcoming pieces in the series:

Why People Hate The Microsoft Cafeteria

Why People Hate The Oracle 401(k) Program

Why People Hate The Adobe Workplace Health Insurance Plan

Seriously, this is what people complain about?
Petition to release Cameron D'Ambrosio
Define "anonymously".

Hypothetically someone steals a lot of money from somebody else, if the amount is large enough the victim may be willing to do a lot of detective work in order to trace the funds.

This detective work might include...

* Blockchain analysis

* Offering money to bitcoin mixers in return for information

* Traditional private investigation

Cash has the same problem, bills can be tracked if the parties involved are motivated enough. Cash does go a long way to providing privacy though, for example in days gone by a husband might have bought a pornographic magazine with cash and the wife would be unaware.

This will annoy the libertarian crowd, but a truly anonymous and untraceable medium of exchange is not only most likely impossible, but also undesirable. The failed war on drugs aside, a lot of the things people want to do completely anonymously are illegal for good reasons (CP, human trafficking, etc).

It remains to be seen if bitcoin can offer the same kind of privacy that cash does, if bitcoin adoption continues I expect blockchain analysis to become very sophisticated.
"The city knows better than anyone that technology companies like having things their way, whether it be taxes, transport or lifestyle."

Since moving to San Francisco from NYC, I have realized that almost everyone in SF likes having things their way. It's not just the tech companies, it's a pervasive attitude.

This is why people will wait in line for an hour to get "the best" ice cream.

This is why people complain when it is slightly too chilly to have a completely pleasant bike-ride every single day of the year.

This is why people will wear t-shirts and shorts to business meetings.

This is why people get upset that their neighborhoods are being gentrified, and fight to keep low capacity charming housing.

By comparison, in NYC, I was accustomed to there being a higher level of acceptable shittiness, randomness, and contingency for everyday things.

Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoy the fierceness to which SFers are dedicated to setting up their lives exactly according to preferences.

The negative side arises when people stop getting their way. There have been handful of times that I have seen this happen, and the veneer of California laid-backness peeled away, and people get pissy about things that I would consider an overreaction.

I'm not saying that this is true of everyone in SF. I'm just saying that I've observed this phenomenon more frequently since I moved here.
That's absolutely correct.

Google Reader ignored an important part of the RSS 2.0 spec, but I kept producing content that they couldn't parse, and if people used the tools that existed before GR, they didn't notice any difference, even though GR came to dominate RSS aggregators.

BTW, that's probably a reason why Twitter never could really support RSS, not because the spec didn't cover what they were doing, rather Google didn't.
I suppose it's well past the point where we can complain about every radical Islamist group being called Al-Qaeda with no regard for, say, what they actually are. Because terrorism. Or something.
Google is not what I would call an adversary. Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and others are willing to go in the same direction, they don't share the same priorities and it's all about negociations and stuff.

When Mozilla and Google renewed their partnership, I heard that Bing was ready to pay Mozilla a bigger check than Google was, yet they choose to stick with Google because they thought it was a better option for the user. If it's true, I think we can trust them about the way they earn money and use it.

On the other hand, as far as I understand, Firefox OS is built with partners from the industry, which probably means that development costs are shared, and not only supported by Google's money.

Last but not least, we probably have a lot of different experiences with firefox, but my setup does not crash every so often...
> The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key
> component in education, communication, collaboration,
> business, entertainment and society as a whole.

This is true. Alas, too many forget, that "internet" is not the same as "web" and think that everything internet is should be made of HTML, CSS and ECMAScript, instead of thinking of internet as the net of interconnected devices.
If you can redirect someone to that page you could redirect them to any page...
But they want to go to PayPal, you send them there, and you pass along some post data to hijack their session.
Agreed. Twitter is in no sense a protocol. I think it became a great deal once people realized it is the only place for real time information flow, or at least that's how it's perceived among the Twitter users I know.
bitcoin user not affected
In all fairness, no ones going to donate to "Save books from Ansar Dine," are they?

But for the record, they are AQ affiliated. It's not a completely random connection.
19-year-old gets 135 months in prison for sending SWAT teams to his enemies
I still use it too, but I stopped developing new stuff using their APIs a couple of years ago.

Next month they're probably going to break my last app that uses their API, and then it's going to create a tough choice for me.

Do I post stuff there manually, or do I just stop pushing links through Twitter.
The "floodgates" will not necessarily open. This is meant to remain an invite only community
If that was an actual issue (I doubt it is), they could have done a oneoff repack server side (reordering changesets to optimize compression).

Edit: I think the third point would have been enough, network effect for free software is important. Size (reorder your repo if it matters), branching (use bookmarks, not named branch unless you know what your are doing), and history rewriting (use evolve) are dubious points.
Bringing attention to misinformation is useful
The concept is one line long. I didn't see a reason the add too much wording at the moment.
Ed Weissman says it best:

http://edweissman.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/how-do-i-achieve-...
How do I achieve laser focus and concentration?
This is a backstory on the project from the New Republic: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112898/timbuktu-librarian...
What a horrible propaganda peace.
Yeah EC2 is basically a VPS rental, but with a number of services surrounding it to help with ops. So it is more convenient than a pure VPS service, but by no means "takes care" of ops for you.

With Heroku you use files to specify your dyno configurations, and in the runtime file you can explicitly set the version of software to use. Heroku will read the file and take care of everything for you. Whether the version switch breaks your application code or not you have to test out on a dev dyno first, there is no way Heroku can help you with that. They will not touch installed software versions without your explicit consent. They might change the default runtime software versions though, so you should always explicitly state the version you want.
>the problem is that employees need to get to work every morning.

Plenty of them don't need to get to work every morning, and don't need to live within commuting distance of SV, to do their jobs. That's a company policy decision, not a law of nature.
How does one make a ban happen?

edit: Did I miss something, all the other comments are good? =/
Wow this is badly written. It's almost a stream-of-consciousness serious of unrelated anecdotes.

The article only touches the main point that has caused any real opposition to the private buses: real estate prices in San Francisco.

SF is almost a schizophrenic city. It's a mix of the cultural revolution of the 60s (and the offshoots from that), hipsters and "tech elite" (to use the article's populist label).

A significant portion of SF (and, let's face it, the Valley) wants things to stay the way they've always been. This means no high-density building, they want rent control (a disaster from an overall housing point of view), a desire for the city to remain relatively affordable (that ship has sailed), etc.

Some want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the money the tech sector brings in but they still want nothing to change.

Economics is a bit like water. It'll find the leaks. Terrible public transport to and in SF? Well, that's almost be design to keep people out. The solution? Private bus companies of course.

I couldn't work in the Valley personally. The Valley is expensive suburbia that makes one car-dependent. Living in SF and spending 2-3 hours a day on the bus? No way in hell. I'd go insane.

The Valley's position of tech-dominance is largely historical. This is far from guaranteed. The biggest threat is the difficulty on businesses to grow in size (in or out of SF) and the increasing lack of affordable housing, well, anywhere.

Compare this to NYC where I live in the city and have a 5 minute walk to work. Sure this isn't cheap but if you worked in NYC you could, say, live in Queens/Brooklyn. If you want a house, you can live in NJ, Westchester or Long Island and get to the city in <45 minutes for cheaper than you can buy a house in, Santa Clara or Mountain View. And you'll get good public transport to boot.

Plus if you live in NYC you don't need a car (many still maintain cars from what I see in SF).

IMHO NYC has done a lot of things right. You pay NYC income tax but you get a lot for your money. The MTA which runs 24x7. Cheap cabs. A responsive police force. And total NYC taxes are probably lower than CA taxes now too.
$39/month available via ovh:

http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/
Telling someone to stop being an asshole is useful
This already exist(In Europe at least) http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml
And for even cheaper
Just read git-pull.sh: it's a 300-line shell script. How much simpler does it get?
In the voice of the late Don LaFontaine:

Two strawmen battle it out to see who will become the One. True. Scotsman.

Your point seems to be that some people aren't subject to mental illnes, and that some of those people are smart, courageous, etc. Sure, and vice versa.

It's not a zero-sum game where you decide you have 12% of this quality and 73% of this one one, so that means you should be compensating for (or naturally adept at) depression by focussing 38% of your energy and intelligence on...social things or whatever.

Secondly, there is no choice in faring better in solitary confinement, whether imposed or elective, nor in social situations because people simply do what they do and follow their emotions and reasoning, for the most part. Would you say Grigori Perelman is mentally ill?
You would have constant moderation dramas though, since you would need moderators going over every thread and finding stuff that was off topic or letting users flag it.

Then you would have a lot of disagreement about whether something was on topic or not.
(anon to protect the innocents)

I have been through the exact same scenario: acquisition, take it or leave it offer of employement to join the employer.

You know what? Go to your boss, in a non-confrontational way, tell them that you are underpaid, the market (meaning other companies) are making you offers left and right at much higher salary. It's not you who is greedy, it's the market telling you what you are worth. Then say you very much want to stay.

The deadline they give you about signing the original offer? Let it expire. Until you do that, they don't take you seriously. You're just a whiny engineer. Once their deadline is gone, see who calls first. They will call you in a panic and find out what it is you want (you already told them by the way). Then they'll move real fast to make a counter-offer that is at least half-decent. Done.
Is anyone else horrified that they were running Windows?
Tweets do have recipients, which makes them different from a web page.

At the next level up from the one you describe it is very much a protocol.

Users get to decide whose tweets they follow and don't. And senders can block receivers if they want to. Twitter may have a very small something to say about that (spam, community standards) but for the most that's a free choice on the part of both the sender and the receiver.
Good luck!

Summation looks like a great idea.
On personal laptops? On machines that just do dietary stuff? No, it's okay.

It's a bit scary that this isn't the first time malware has got into space nor onto the Space Station.

Considering how intrusive the procedures must be for astronauts I'm gently surprised that intensive malware scanning isn't a requirement for anything that goes into space.
I imagine that if you want an API you could ask nicely... :-)
This article was a weird read for someone like me who meets regularly with psychologists from a scientifically oriented research department of psychology (at the University of Minnesota). The conclusion of the article begins,

"In conclusion, the depression observed in children with high potential would seem to be characterized by narcissistic vulnerability associated with genuine traumatophilia,"

and the old-fashioned terminology like "narcissistic" and the use of outmoded (and never validated) projective tests of personality (like the Rorschach) shows the article is far out of the mainstream of current psychology. I was wondering how such an old-fashioned article could come from 2012, so I focused my attention on the academic affiliations of the authors (not from major centers for the study of high IQ or of depression) and the journal of publication (not a top journal in this field).

There is a huge prior literature on associations between high IQ and mood disorders, with much of that literature summarized in the authoritative textbook by Goodwin and Jamison.

http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...

As a parent of four high-IQ children myself, painfully aware of how toxic the United States school system can be for such children,

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

I first of all sought local friendship networks of other parents who understand such children. We have been homeschoolers throughout our children's childhoods, and that seems to have provided our children with some extra scope for creativity and added resilience for facing personal challenges (including two international moves during the childhoods of our three oldest children). Through association with the Davidson Institute for Talent Development Young Scholars program,

http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/

we have learned about--and have shared--resources with other parents about building optimism in children. I especially like Martin E. P. Seligman's book The Optimistic Child

http://www.amazon.com/Optimistic-Child-Safeguard-Depression-...

as a framework for children to learn how to reality-check their own thinking and not to be depressed by setbacks in life.
it was. the ceo stole the idea from a small-time silicon valley inventor, while said inventor was soliciting him for money. thus it was never in the US or EU where patents applied.
I'm that guy whom the post is talking about. I decided against weighing in on the original thread on HN because I was still dealing with the downfall. A couple of things that I noticed:

* Our users were very understanding of what happened. We have received nothing but encouragement to keep on working.

* Some comments on HN were nasty. I'm glad to be 33 and not 23. Otherwise, I could have been driven away from building my product because of my own incompetence.

* Many commented on devs vs ops. The way I see it, I can ask a dev to supervise the work of an ops contractor. I can't hire ops + dev at this stage.

Any start-up has three main constraints: time, money and talent. These are not set in stone, you can use time to produce money (consulting), you can use money to buy talent (hiring), and you can even convert time in talent (training).

So, when people say "let professionals handle it". Well, no, my particular set of constraints won't allow me to do this. My budget for this is around $100/mo. In an event where I completely run out of money I'd have to take down the site indefinitely, which causes the same effect as an HD loss.

It is clear now that I lack enough resources to run a complex app reliably. My focus in the next months is procuring those resources (money) so I can put it back into the product (ops and devs).
Basically you need to put something like this on a page you control (where "xss code" is the code triggering the XSS):

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/de/cgi-bin/searchscr?cmd=_sitewide-search" method="post">
<input type="text" name="queryString" value="xss code" />
</form>

Then, just as the page loads, submit that form and you're executing JS on a paypal.com page. This would work great for phishing or session hijacking.
Jealousy is perhaps the most potent political force.
And no single word about animal sources
C++ is a horrible language, by Linus Torvalds. What's your idea about that?
The best thing you can do is to let yourself be "pulled" by something. Intrinsic motivation beats any trick you can possible come up with.

Find something that's exciting for you to create. Create it using whatever tool you want to learn. Don't worry too much about whether you're building it The Right Way yet. You will be forced to learn enough to get the job done.

Then repeat N times for desired level of expertise. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Asymptot...
I think this book did a pretty good job for me of justifying equality from a philosophical perspective: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0141...
That was the answer that I was secretly hoping for. Thanks :-)
The Chromium Security team pays bounties to adults representing minors; Paypal could have done the same.
I would do it so that the thread owner was the moderator. There could still be some baseline site rules, but each thread would be up to the owner to look after (I suppose it would be nice to allow helpers). It should still be possible to open threads without any extra rules.

Reddit sort of does this, at the subreddit level instead of the thread level. But it also sort of isn't a discussion site anymore, it is something else.
Of course - I'm thinking in terms of usage, not necessarily the true age of the language. (As a long-time ColdFusion user, I've had interesting conversations where someone told me they were abandoning the "old" language, which came out in 1995, for something newer and fresher like Ruby, which is only 5 months "younger")
>I am not saying that a degree is a solution. Just that is positive to add it in the equation. And yes... if you are the next Zuckerberg don't follow my recommendation!

But a degree takes limited time and resources; why do you think a degree gets you better ROI on those scarce things than, say, writing a book? I mean, if you know a subject well, you can probably pump out one or two published technical books with that level of effort.

I mean, part of my problem is that school was, well, pretty difficult for me. from what I see, it's one of those activities where being really good sometimes doesn't make up for being really bad sometimes. It's one of those jobs where showing up on time is the most important part. It plays to all my weaknesses, so while I think I could probably pull it off, getting a degree from a mediocre school would take more effort, say, than publishing another book. I'm pretty sure the book would be better for my future marketability, even after the technology in question is obsolete.
>And Google haven't solved that problem apart from a very narrow subset of workers, all of whom are Google employees. Thus, it's just a kludge.

...

"Employees need to eat while on the job, and Apple's cafeteria is only for Apple employees.

They haven't solved that problem apart for a very narrow subset of workers, all of whom are Apple employees. Thus it's just a kludge.

I reckon Apple is more than capable of designing a better meal system– they'd have to be allowed to use dietary preference data. But there's nothing in it for Apple to do this.

They'd just have to battle against entrenched industries and they'd end up with something that's not as good for their workers (although better for the planet and for everyone else) than what they have now."
This opinion piece is by someone who campaigns on this issue. The website has lots of citations to research. I haven't checked those, so I don't know if the journals are reputable or if the research is hooey or not.

(http://www.eatwild.com/jo.html)
You know what would be even better for traffic and the environment? If Google employees didn't live fifty miles from their Mountain View offices.
Looks a lot like the Sparrow Mac OSX client turned into a web interface. While it looks good, do we really need another webmail service ?
So they proved out the first version in a high level dynamic language and then someone reimplemented in C for performa performance reasons? Sounds like a solid process.
Coming up with an algorithm to implement the "as if" rule for a C compiler, to avoid needless widening. (Not my current job, I hasten to add.)
Account hacked perhaps?
An important fact to take in account about Big-O is that it represent the upper bound of the time or space complexity.
Maybe he got his account hacked or something...
What's crazy is how expensive the San Francisco suburbs are. You can buy a house in Pehlam for $500k walking distance from a train that'll get you into midtown in 30 min (leaving every 15 min during peak times). Westchester towns are built around the train stations (no huge parking intimidating pedestrians), so you can take the train everywhere. Greenwich is a few stations up, with all the WASP-y shopping places, Port Chester has the Costco, etc. Everything is walkable from a train station.
Why? It's great either way. If improvements to Ubuntu help get people into linux, and they choose to stay on Ubuntu rather than move to Debian, how is that not a win?