skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any time I get something I don't want I click the unsubscribe link. If the link doesn't work, if there aren't any or if I need to do more than legally necessary (e.g. logging into my account), I click "Report spam" in Gmail.

I don't feel bad about clicking it because I trust Gmail as a whole to be smart enough not to penalize an account globally if I'm the only one reporting it. Plus, when I do it, it's because it's actually spam.

Over time, it really works.
“The short answer of how we handle terminations, really, is the same as we approach all other decisions at the company. It is a peer-driven process. If it turns out that we made a bad hiring decision, or that somebody is just not working out, there’s a method we use to get the people who are involved in the same room and to walk through the decision about what should really happen as a result of this person not functioning very well.

“Some of the details are kind of boring, but the main answer is that it is peer-driven, just like we evaluate each other as peers.”

(Valve’s Greg Coomer - http://www.pcgamesn.com/tf2/not-valve-employee-handbook-firi...)
Get the hell out of there, find a better job, always be looking.
Rule of thumb: if they don't say, they're not going to say. Given the situation here, where the business has been "sold" to its key operating employee, it's probably some kind of capped profit share.
Good advice for zero inbox, unfortunately most people aren't this organized and don't think this way and it seems like Google wants Gmail to benefit the most people.
O'Reilly Media launches git-based authoring platform
I believe the "male" writer is actually Grandin's ghostwriter.
Love the analysis. Great stuff.
I'd argue that for many student from a undergraduate CS background, taking a course-based MSCS program from a top school with a specific direction can be tremendously helpful to the student both professionally and personally. I did not have a specific focus in my undergraduate study in CS and I'm doing HCI+AI for my Master's, which has been min-blowing so far as I'm taking more graduate level courses and exposed to content of much greater depth than my undergraduate study. These courses are usually structured with small research projects/paper readings and I've seen many students come up with research quality work out of the project portion of the classes.

For a student like me, there is also a tradeoff between during research vs doing your own side project vs taking more courses in school. Doing research can be extremely time consuming and potentially affect other course selection density and even performance. I've also seen may CS graduate students who take undergraduate level courses out of MSCS and they max-out the amount of course they can take. These are usually great courses that their previous school does not offer. Doing research in a specific area is probably the most counterintuitive for those who're taking lots of diverse courses. You can argue that these type of students are still figuring out what they want to do and that's what they should have done in their ugrads. But the truth is when you realize you can do much more, the curiosity to discover more is not that easy to stop.Doing research in summer usually is the ideal choice if the students take too many courses in other quarters and they do not want to do an intern.
Two of mine:

https://rachelbythebay.com/store/ - just put this up yesterday - easy enough.

http://scanner.rachelbythebay.com/main - this one's been using Persona since it was called browserid. (Hit the gear on a call to see the login prompt - you only need the login for certain extended functions)
London Calling: Moore's Law fail at NAND flash node
[..] and every line of JavaScript code costs too much time to maintain.

At this point, go to the next blackboard. Write after me:

You can not debug Elm. There is no debugger.
You can not debug Elm. There is no debugger.
Fair enough, thanks for correcting me.
Nasdaq to Pay $10 Million to Settle SEC Charges Over Facebook IPO
Not sure to get what you mean. Could you explain a bit more?
Ubuntu installation requirements: 2 gb ram, 1 ghz processor, 20 gb free hard drisk space, a 9-year-old girl
I feel that like 90% of the time, programmers don't really trust the project they're working on, because 90% of those projects are not actually worth a damn.
Comcast San Francisco, outside intro rate. Tv + 20+ Mbps Internet.
Damsel in Distress (Part 2) Tropes vs Women | Feminist Frequency
The problem that I have, and that many here seem to have, is that as "advanced" users, we've already built a fully-customized system for ourselves. Like when Dropbox came out, and we all had git/svn/cvs versions of the same thing going back years.

As a result, any changes are inevitably going to break our workflow. Even changes that are better for the common man cannot be better than our customized system.

For example, now it filters social email into the same folder: great, I can ignore it while I'm at work. Except my twitter alerts from my company account. So it breaks.

As another example, you apparently can't customize the tabs, and it disables multiple inbox. I spent a few years coming up with the optimum GTD steup for myself in gmail, and it's broken now.

I think the solution here is really for people like me to use a different email client. Gmail has become the defacto winner, but there's probably a market in making a different client for tech-savvy, very heavy users, with customizable interactions.
The overall strategy and vision, sure. But you can not spend tons of time making sure every team member understands every little detail of what implications it has on projects far outside of their remit.

At some point, especially when dealing with senior developers in a fast moving startup environment, you have to assume you're dealing with reasonably responsible engineers who understands that if something doesn't make sense to them immediately, their first instinct should not be "I can rewrite this component that isn't remotely part of my job in a few weeks, no need to ask anyone", but rather to ask "what am I missing? Please explain this to me".

I've personally come across many cases where something looked trivial to do better, and occasionally I'm right, but I'm also humble enough to go ask the questions before I put aside the work I've been asked to do and go off to rewrite something else.
Show HN: Serious Business Random Avatar Generator
Oh I read it, but since it was confined to programming only, leaving out the vast domain that is the rest of the world, and with the weight of evidence so far is on the other side, it didn't seem as interesting to me. In addition to the possible methodological problems mentioned in the Ars article. In any case, the state of the evidence, always subject to revision of course, is that innate talent is largely not in play.
I think the idea here is that you aren't /forced/ into inversion of control. That is, if it is clearer to write things side by side, instead of separated into another callback function, you can keep them together.
Startup is the fuel for the idea economy, although you know most won’t make it but you jump init anyways. It has a rush, which normally is at all time high when you first come up with the idea but when you find out it is not a 100-meter race but a marathon, that’s when the reality starts to appear. When you lose contacts with your friends, don’t show up to family functions and talk to yourself in public, that’s when the reality sits in.

Will you want to do this when _____ happens?
No doubt
Yes,
twice on Sundays.
I'm uncomfortable with arguments that are equivalent to PerceivedBenefit(X)>RealBenefit(X) and RealBenefit(X)>0 but NegativeBenefit(Actions|PerceivedBenefit(X))>RealBenefit(X) so X should be banned.

Since PerceivedBenefit(X) and Actions will both vary by individual and are controllable through learning and discipline, I'd rather give individuals the right to choose.

Equivalent examples: Seatbelts are bad since people will drive recklessly; calculators are bad since people won't bother learning arithmetic; cars are bad since people will walk less. In each case, the negative does occur. I'd argue that as a whole society is better for all of those.
> It comes off as something being masked as a "feature," when in actuality it is just something that is trying to get me to spend money.

I dunno. Automatically identifying "Promotions" and sending them off to their own tab seems to be good for helping me avoid dealing with things trying to get me to spend money when I don't want to, just the same as doing the same thing for "Spam" does.

> It seems like it blurs the line between the "content" of my inbox and advertising.

Seems to me to be exactly the opposite: having a "Promotions" tab separate from the "Primary" inbox, and especially automatically routing promotional material to that "Promotions" tabl seems to draw the line between the normal content of my inbox and marketing/advertising material more clearly than it is without that feature.

(Which, if you think about it, makes sense from a purely self-interested point of view for Google-as-ad-seller; the easier it is for you to isolate and ignore email-based advertising, the more valuable the web-based advertising that Google sells is.)
And makes you reconsider what hard work is.
It's much more difficult than that. The biggest issue is finding where exactly to make the changes. Even then, we don't necessarily know what the phenotype, the eventual outcome, of making a change will be.

There are two versions of each gene (because there are two of each chromosome), what often happens is that even if one version of the gene is defective, the other version is enough to compensate.

Now, say you have two individuals, each one has one working and one defective version of a gene. If you cross those individuals 25% of the offspring will have two copies of the "good" version, 50% will have one good and one defective copy, and 25% will be unlucky and have two versions of the defective version. This is just regular Mendelian genetics so you might have heard all this before. However, it sets up why crossing two clones can be risky.

So, in the above example 75% of offspring will be fine. Sounds pretty good, right? But that's only when considering one gene. A mammoth likely has tens of thousands of genes. This particular one can be carrying any number of defective versions of each of those genes. Crossing it with an exact genetic copy would mean that the risk of having an offspring with a genetic defect is that much higher.

However, it might not be all that bad. Entire viable populations have likely descended from something like a pregnant female floating on a raft to a new island. If they can extract blood from even one other mammoth, that might be just enough to create healthy enough offspring. The main barrier is the gestation time and generation time. Two fertile rats stranded on an island with plenty of food can reproduce fast enough to quickly create a good population that might be able to overcome low genetic diversity through sheer numbers. Trying to raise enough mammoths will be much more expensive and much more time-consuming.
> Also inbreeding might work itself to produce a viable herd.

I didn't get the impression that they had DNA from more than a single animal (a female in this case), making breeding unlikely.
6 Free Tools for Creating Product and Promotional Videos
Top 7 Things You Want To Do In Windows Azure SQL Database, But Can't
It's not avoided, it just has a different syntax. (Monadic rather than callbacks, but since they are the same thing...)
That's weird. The authors are conflating "expert" with "success" and does not adequately distinguish the two terms.

Further, it's not merely 10,000 hours of "practice". It is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Your mind has to be on the practice as you are practicing. If you're simply going through the motions, and your mind is checked out, you're not actually getting anything out of it.

And yes, I know "10,000" is a nice round number. Five to seven years, two to three hours of intense, deliberate practice a day is about right.
Asteroid mining co. launches $1M Kickstarter drive for public space telescope
Except there's a huge difference: cable tv is a zero marginal cost business.
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9902.html#snakeoil

See "Warning Sign #9".
I have a strange hypothesis: sociopaths / psychopaths are not inherently evil (or good for that matter), just different... one of the many variations in human wiring that exist within our collective gene pool.

Chief among their differences are an indifference to shame and a high tolerance for social deviancy.

Sometimes this makes them criminals and exploiters, it is true, since without shame and with little respect for tradition or custom it becomes very easy to lie, cheat, and steal. But I wonder... ever heard of the Milgram experiment?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

I wonder how a pathological sociopath would fare? Would a sociopath actually find it easier to ignore the voice urging them to administer escalating shocks to the subject? Would he or she actually find it easier to disregard the experimenters' claims of authority, instead substituting their own judgement in its place?

Adolf Hitler is our era's most famous example of evil incarnate. But he probably never killed anyone. I bet he rarely, if ever, even committed an act of violence. All his evils were in fact carried out by his subordinates under his command, and under the command of those whom he appointed.

But what was in it for these subordinates, really? What was in it for a German soldier to risk their lives for Hitler's dreams? What was in it for a concentration camp guard to listen to the horrified gasps of the dying? Yet their authorities told them to do it, and they were good loyal servants of the state. They succumbed to shame, herd mentalities, peer pressure, and social reward mechanisms.

Would it take a sociopath to desert such an army? Would it take a sociopath to do this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_July_plot ?? Oskar Schindler was probably a sociopath given the ease with which he deceived the Nazi brass and his fellow industrialists.

Are sociopaths simply moral individualists, with all that implies? Are they as capable of deviant good as they are of deviant evil?

There's been a trend lately of sociopath/psychopath "awareness" and blame, even calls to pre-emptively surveil or treat people who exhibit these traits. I think this is just more scapegoating and shadow projection. People don't want to face the fact that anyone can do evil -- even them -- and that the evils of the world have many causes that often include the actions of the well-intentioned. I also think that there are more dangerous personality types than the sociopath, chief among them the selfless and fanatical "true believer." Small evils might be committed in the name of self-interest, but grand historical-scale evil requires a cause greater than oneself.
> I know nothing about the piano but this sounds exactly the same like reading any language.

That's because it is the same. Music is effectively just another language; it's been theorized to be a neurological prototype for language, in fact.
I don't know how a new podcasting app would work in today's market. It would be competing against entrenched products on the high-end side, and a free offering from Apple on the low-end side. And it doesn't have any recurring revenue, which is not great.
Rebrand you Macbook
The complexity that SCSS and Sass are demanding seems to point to a need to abstract design elements of CSS from the complex layout engine its becoming.

Hunting through this to set fonts and colors (the original intent of CSS) is a bit of a nightmare now. Could we solve this by creating a design only CSS style sheet that defines the variables that plug into this more complex system?

This way designers can tweak live code without hunting through long and difficult to read stylesheets that point to 50?! nested objects.
Me too, I did a project for grad school using FRP. https://github.com/jcurbo/functionally-reactive-solar-system
"On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't try."

On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't worry about it. At what point did I say don't try?

"Other folks in your society should have no opinion on what you spend time on."

Other folks will have an opinion on what you spend your time on whether you like it or not. They'll talk and talk about how YOU (not they) should do such and such. It's easy to opine when you're not the one actually doing the work. So don't worry too much about what they think.

"Don't try to change people's opinions because you can't."

It's not that you can't per se, but rather that on average they won't. So don't worry if it doesn't work out.

"Stop bringing up morality because it makes people think, not act."

Don't let other peoples' moral platitudes paralyze you with the fear of acting.
glad to see this still helps folks =)
Gmail wages war on inbox clutter with new design for mobile and desktop
> That is a nakedly emotionally manipulative reply with no substance.

That is the effect I wanted to achieve in order to better parody and criticize parent's own manipulative wording: "some" people, "sometimes", veiled attempt to accuse opponents of being "religious", etc. I thought it was more obvious, sorry.

Next time I'll just state it plainly like you did (no irony).

For what it's worth I couldn't find any numbers regarding the 70% loss and what it really refers to.
Yet another exploitive article. The majority of laymen do not understand that "possible" and "practically impossible" are not opposites.
A downloadable client that doesn't bootstrap its own crypto every time it runs from your server.

Can I have my $1000 now? Actually: I'd prefer if you just sent it to Partners in Health; they're great.
If you changed it globally, you might be noticed next time someone did an audit, which I suspect would be rare.

If you added a backdoor on the server that said "If userid == e1ven{crypto.js = plaintext.js}" it would be much harder to detect.

Hushmail did something similar with a modified version of it's Java applet, back a few years ago-

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/hushmail-to-war/

My point isn't that you should never trust webapps - It's that doing the processing in JS, or on the server, doesn't CHANGE the threat-model.
In both scenerios, I need to trust you an identical amount, so there's no security advantage do doing the crypto on the client side.
is there any theoretical limitation?
This isn't a product launch. It's a demonstration to focus discussion.
Apple TV mainly used for Netflix/Hulu. Amazon mainly for Prime bundling. So even the online players are going with bundling.
This is a really great set of analogies that pokes holes in a lot of arguments you often see. There is another one I'd like to add that's very relevant for tech: women come into the lobby of the engineering school building, see the pack of men on the up escalator, see the room full of men who have already made it, and head straight back out the door and over to the med school or law school building, where they don't have to deal with the headwinds that come from being a minority. A lot of the women who see the situation and leave are the most talented and ambitious, because lets face it: if you're gunning for the top, isn't it rational to give yourself the best possible shot by choosing a field where you won't have the challenge of fitting into a male-dominated culture in addition to all the challenges you'll already have?
It may look the same, but I think you are missing a bigger picture.

Google is at the forefront of machine learning. They have been doing it for a long time, and lately, they have taken it to a different level with new features rolled out across their various services.

For example, and you'd probably know, in Google Plus, now you can search pictures by the subject which can purely analyzes the data (without meta-data) and give you all the pictures of your cat.

I guess this new Inbox works in the same vein - I don't think it's just a big table of senders and their classifications - this seems to be more intelligent than that.

But it's okay to blindly criticize Google - in fact, it happens automatically if you are using a Macbook Air.
Strawman argument alert: "Talent plus ten years of work equals success? Sure!"

Actually, what the data shows is that becoming a world-class expert requires 10k hours of practice. Not that said practice will magically make you world-class. It's a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

The 10k hour figure is probably inflated, based on self-reports of total practice time.
I don't understand why Linux users want Win8- or WinRT Pads.

Not only are they pretty expensive but there already are many cheap good Android Pads running a Linux kernel. There are also plain Linux pads on the market, and even Ubuntu plans to sell a Ubuntu pad soon.

So, what's the gain?
How about those newsletters you're happy to read occasionally, but you don't want to interrupt you with notifications etc.?

I've got into the habit of marking all email with "unsubscribe" in it as read by default. I'll still see it when I open up my inbox, but it avoids me ever seeing a notification for something useless.
X, Y, and Z in this example would all have complete copies of the data, so s and t are stored on all three nodes. Client B shouldn't be blocked, but rather told that an error occurred and that client B is trying to modify data that is in flight. In other words writes may fail, but they fail atomically, and in such a way that the client may retry without fear of leaving data in an inconsistent state.

I suppose this method is somewhat similar in philosophy to Software Transactional Memory, but is distributed. The hard part here seems to be things like replication and garbage collection. What if client A fails before it commits? How long should the cluster lock the values of s and t before client B is able to modify them? I suppose some type of heartbeat from client to server would be good. Since there would be a strong guarantee that if a transaction fails, just retry it and nothing bad happens, then client A can come back online and try again once connectivity is restored.
OpenOffice has to support OOXML because they have always positioned themselves as supporting everything under the sun. They supported .doc from the start.

Microsoft has traditionally supported only their own formats, so their decision to adopt an open source format is much more meaningful than OpenOffice's decision to support OOXML.
I think they are just running a really cool scam.
First of all why do they care if public is interested in space? Aren't they after all, looking to run a successful and profitable business?
Second, don't they have investors that could sponsor this Arkyd Telescope and launch it without need for a Kickstarter. What if for some reason the kickstarter campaign doesn't work? What if they can't deliver? Are they willing to risk everything just to get 1mln$?
Unless they are already out of money.
I have a BS in CS, Math and Stat, and a MS in CS. I've been a developer for a long time and worked with a lot of other developers. The biggest determinant IMHO to becoming a good, competent developer is the desire to become an even better developer from reading, experimentation on your own time, and an open mind.

If you have that kind of passion for software development, you'll do fine, regardless of your original degree (or lack thereof). Having said that, I'm skeptical of the value of a MS in CS without a BS in CS. In my MS program, the assumption was that you had the basics - algorithms, data structures, language theory, basic hardware design & logic, compiler design. You can certainly gain that knowledge with enough reading on your own, or taking some courses at a local community college to get the basics.