skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was middle class(maybe lower middle class), and my entire education end up paid for. Not only that, but after work study, I actually made enough money to live on without having to get an outside job. Students taking out these huge loans should just consider a state school, or to put in for scholarships.
Do you know in which countries it's this way? The information I found about Germany I found says that they also don't have to pay tuition fees. I guess most countries don't need extra fees for foreigners because of the language barrier.
Yup. For this example in particular, 15 seconds is barely enough to read through the first paragraph, nevermind decide if I want to finish the article.

The writer would be better off treating the bounce rate as an indicator of users who are engaged enough to hit the archives after reading a post, rather than juking the stats.
Show NH: Ybot-0.3.4 erlang chat bot released with support for notifications
So wide of the mark that I almost feel faint. Selected highlights:

> This cult is insidious. Its two main tenant are: 1. The designer is always right. 2. If you don’t like what the designer is doing, you’re wrong, and you should go somewhere else. Doesn’t sound very friendly, does it?

1. Couple of fallacies here: you've set up a scenario in which your conclusion is supported (gosh, that doesn't sound friendly! This guy's a genius!), but it's also ignoratio elenchi: it doesn't fucking matter whether it's friendly or not, because who gives a shit whether the philosophy by which you design a product is friendly or not? It's like asking whether the philosophy is crunchy or gooey.

2. I would argue that if the designer is doing their job properly and working with and for users, then they will be usually right, and if you don't like it, you're wrong, and you should go somewhere else (because you're probably a neckbearded engineer trying to design something with zero user empathy).

> Steve Jobs made a zillion bucks cramming his design decisions down peoples’ throats.

1. In the same way as any designer, living or dead, who has shipped something to consumers, was "cramming [their] design decisions down peoples' throats."

2. In addition to the hugely biased language used, it's a gross oversimplification of design at Apple. A good example of Steve Jobs designing something is the iDVD anecdote. The iDVD team spend weeks working on a user interface that they think works. Jobs comes into the meeting, stops them halfway through, ignores their complicated workflows, and draws a simple rectangle which has a single "BURN" button on it. His great skill wasn't design, but editing and empathy.

> and now one of its founders spends his days custom-building and racing F1 cars.

Just another casual misrepresentation. DHH has not retired and is still working hard at 37signals.

> They did all this by being design dictators.

Yes. Forget the brilliant engineering, marketing, thought leadership, branding, etc. It was this cult thing you've conjured out of nowhere.

> Steve Jobs had a vision, and if you didn’t like his vision, you could go home.

Yes. But a vision is nothing to do with design. Example: Steve Jobs had the vision for MobileMe/iCloud. The vision was a cloud-based software product that allowed you to synchronise your devices and keep data across all of them. The design is terrible. Design being architecture and the implementation. Vision != design.

And what do you mean by "go home"? Isn't the same true of any product? If you don't like Android you can "go home". If you don't like Ferrari you can "go home". With "go home" you're implying that the consumer loses out. In reality because there IS ONLY ONE WAY A PRODUCT CAN POSSIBLY WORK, you're criticising them for not disrupting the space time continuum in order to offer two different products so you can not like Steve Jobs' vision and still like Steve Jobs' vision. Fuck me.

> 37 Signals made its products like it wanted to, and if you didn’t like it, you could suck it.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I'm giving up on the rest.
Tell HN: I renewed my Developer Account with Apple and They Pulled My Apps
I need your help hn! Three days ago I renewed my developer account with Apple by paying the $99 fee. Their checkout went a little weird, and so I called customer service just to make sure it went through. After being transferred 4 times, I got an email receipt.

Well, I woke up this morning with an email that all my apps were pulled from the App Store. In a panic, I called Apple again, and got transferred 5 times, finally in a business store saying they're closed on weekends.

I've paid the developer account fee again, but my apps are still down. Anyone know how to get my apps back up?

PS The reason I get that all my apps are down in iTunesConnect is:

iOS Developer Program Membership Expired
Your membership has expired and your apps have been removed from the App Store until you renew.
Kindle Worlds the next Syndicate Model
But the price is also given in $/GB-month, so you can at least figure it out using units that people will probably find more convenient. I couldn't see the quoted comment on the opening page, which is probably lucky, because it annoys me more than simply giving the prices in picodollars/byte. (Pricing it like that at least reveals that the pricing is actually per byte, rather than being, say, $0.30/GByte with some kind of rounding.)

More generally, I've always found it to be a good idea to be at least somewhat circumspect if you're going to have some kind of an asocial relationship with somebody (e.g., getting them to give you money). It's impossible to foretell what people will get annoyed by, so you might as well give them as few things to get annoyed by as possible. (I suppose this is the "better to keep quiet and be thought a fool..." principle, in a way, though obviously foolishness is not the precise issue here. Oh well. I don't claim to be original.)
The history of the Internet of things includes a Swedish hockey team and Legos
Achieving paid order fulfillment bottleneck in 10 weeks
Maybe I'm being naive, but what's preventing Google or Facebook from using their resources to launch a PR campaign against these requests from the FBI, or at the very least be a bit more outspoken about them?
if you have another string type that has a limited character set then it is not a subclass of string because it breaks the liskov substitution principal. in java land allowing user code to subclass string would create massive security issues in the sandbox. i think there is a good case for having different types of strings and providing runtime support so this is cheap but this is not subclassing.
"At the present time, pre-built binaries are not available for Tarsnap — it must be compiled from the source code." https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html
You could store the signatures on one server, and import them in bulk. Then you still just need to write down the one signature.
This makes a number of assumptions that I think (based on historical trends) will end up proving false.

The first is that the services we use today (Yelp, Facebook, Google, etc.) will continue to be the dominate services of the future. Of course, the author probably just used these names for convenience instead of inventing new companies, but I have a feeling that the apps and services we'll be using 10 years from now don't exist today.

A more pressing false assumption is that all of these services (or whatever services are being used) will harmoniously work together. Though we have pretty strong inter-service collaboration currently (such Yelp telling us which restaurants our Facebook friends like), it is not that often that these platform relationships exist and even less common that everyone will be using the same interconnected services.

Finally, the assumption that is both the most necessary for this reality to be our future yet is also the most dubious is that with the dawn of quantum computing, algorithms will be able to properly interpret and predict human behavior. Thus far, algorithms fail pretty miserably at this (when was the last time you actually wanted to buy something suggested to you by Amazon?) and although the future resources available will have the capacity to interpret human behavior, it will be much farther in the future before we really will be able to utilize these available resources.

I still believe that always-on wearable computers with a constant information stream is where the consumer technology industry is heading (I've been saying this for years, and I don't necessarily think that Google will be the ones to perfect this formula). However, before we reach a society like the one predicted by this article, we (as computer scientists and mathematicians) need to become much better at interpreting and predicting human behavior. I think the first step in this is to understand how the brain works, which is probably going to be the most exciting facit of biomedical research in the coming decades.
Getting a job in San Francisco
Why not simply stay home, eat Doritos, drink Mountain Dew, and surf IRC?

Sounds like you want all of the social without the part where you interact with society.
Integers are also rarely "just integers" -- checksums, hashes, bitmasks, counters, numbers -- you name it.
Ask HN: Digital Valley Graphics?
I recently read an article (I think it was on wired or techcrunch) which had some really amazing graphical artwork of SV geography, showing the locations of companies etc. I can't seem to dig it up though, does anyone have the link to it? The graphics were kind of like a modern version of this: http://www.grow-california.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/siliconvalley.jpg
Are there any video chat clients with end-to-end encryption?

I was trying to do this by piping the output of my webcam to openssl and then to netcat, which sends the packets to a publicly addressable server (Amazon instance) that relays the encrypted packets to another computer behind a firewall, that decrypts the video stream and plays it in MPlayer. It works, but the latency is about 10 seconds. To reduce the latency, I could delta-encode the video stream, leverage the GPU somehow, but I'm not sure how to get the latency down to the 200ms required for seamless conversation. Also, it should be noted that there is little code behind this, mainly just unix utilities and pipes.

PS: Also I could remove the Amazon piece and forge a direct P2P connection using NAT hole punching if the routers on both ends permit, but this is not always reliable and isn't a huge source of latency.
the us government?
It'll be like the email everyone knows and loves, but social!
Freedom is power. Power need not be something wielded over others in some cartoony-villian way. In this case it is a kind of countervailing force to prevent others from coercing you into doing things you disagree with solely because they are the source of your income and you need said income to keep all the "balls in the air", so to speak. Not falling into the debt trap, or at least keeping debt reasonable, is simply a way to retain the inherent power you have as an autonomous being.
The Hipster: Entrepreneur 2.0
You don't need such a long argument to prove FBI's stunning incompetence, an example like failing to prevent the Boston bombing where they couldn't find their assess with two hands would suffice.
You guys are arguing past each other. Your core disagreement revolves around the use of the term bounce, and is driven by the author's selection of title, implying that using adjusted bounce rate is the same as fixing your bounce rate. Hopefully we're all smart enough to see the difference.
Google already makes noise about it. They have a project to report on requests. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/
Ask HN: What is the best open, social ad-hoc team management platform?
I've wanted something like this for a while now:

An open, social team management platform where you can propose a project (or join a project someone else has proposed) that is staffed on an ad-hoc basis.

A proposed project could either be limited in scope, where the goal is to do something cool and at the same time prove you can deliver within the context of a community based ad-hoc team; or it could be a more ambitious project which would involve trying to get your ad-hoc team funded by an angel or perhaps crowdfunded by an Indiegogo, Kickstarter, or even AngelList.

The platform could have features such as:

- participation ratings (done socially) for identifying credible leads and credible followers to staff projects

- integrating LinkedIn to leverage your network for recruiting

- HR functionality like org charts for teams

- badges to be used on crowdfunding sites to show historical experience in delivering

- help with managing remuneration and profit-sharing (tricky, but definitely useful)

- open source legal documents / workflow management for forming ad-hoc (or perhaps longer term) LLCs

Of course, these features could already be implemented by other platforms.

In fact, I can imagine this being a meta platform which accomplishes many of these stories by leveraging a service-oriented architecture and partnering / integrating other open platforms via standardized APIs anyone can implement to. That spirit of open, transparent co-operation with the community at large would optimally be in the DNA of the platform.

Another important part of the DNA, would be a mission to not only enable anyone anywhere in the world to help cool projects succeed, but perhaps more critically - to provide a clear path for those starting out to follow in order to 'level up' / grow into the person who can help cool projects succeed.

Is something out there that does this (or is trying to do this) well?
Just to clarify: it wasn't Chomsky that wrote the ridiculous book about the Holocaust. Chomsky was disagreeing with the book thesis, but he defended the right of the author to publish it.
Because they are?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577958-38/google-fights-...
I'm not convinced that Ruby on Rail's popularity has to do with the factors you describe.

I think it comes down to two other factors: community and hype.

Technologically, it wasn't anything special, and still isn't. Many of us who'd been doing web development for years at that time had either used or created similar or better frameworks in languages like Perl, Tcl, Python and even Java. These frameworks were usually kept internal to the organization that developed them, however, so they were obviously nowhere near as widely used.

DHH was of minimal importance, too. Yes, he was somewhat of a visible figure head and spokesman for the project, but that was about it. For the average Ruby on Rails user, DHH didn't have much of an impact.

In my opinion, Ruby on Rails brought together several distinct groups of young men (women are still very rare in the Ruby on Rails community) who'd typically been outcasts within the computing industry. They included:

1) Less-talented UI, web and graphic designers. These people, unable to find work in more traditional software development, print media, and other fields, ended up moving toward web development, where the bar to entry was set much lower.

2) Less-talented software developers. These people, either due to age, a lack of experience, a lack of education, or a lack of natural ability, were inherently drawn to Rails. It provided the rigid structure ("convention over configuration") that they needed in order to get anything done. It also allowed them to continue to avoid learning SQL and proper database design techniques, while creating something that partially worked (even if the result lacked severely in terms of performance and reliability).

3) Attention-seeking youth. We all know who these people are. They're the ones who repeatedly wrote loud, profanity-ridden "articles" full of anger. Or they created absurd, cryptic writings and art, and then spontaneously vanished, creating much unnecessary drama. Many of them were also self-styled "hipsters", who just went out of their way to be different merely for the sake of being different.

Ruby on Rails provided something these people could all rally around. It gave them a common cause, if you will. And they rallied around this cause quite loudly, which generated an immense amount of hype relative to what they were able to accomplish, or what their software provided. This helped draw in more and more of these outcasts, making the community larger and larger.

I think that GNOME 3, for instance, is a result of spillover from this newly-formed community into existing, established open source communities. Members of a community formed solely around a lack of merit forced their way en masse into what was once a near-total meritocracy, and as would be expected, disaster was the result.
quick question here: is there a delay in Recent Activity?

I just signed up and used it on two servers like 30 minutes ago, but I don't see anything in the account activity except the payment info.
I'm quite sure my servers sent stuff because I monitored b/w usage
> Maybe I'm being naive, but what's preventing Google or Facebook from using their resources to launch a PR campaign against these requests from the FBI

The fact that they do not give a shit about you and your data (and why should they?).

If you want your data to be encrypted, you have to do it at your end. PGP has shown exactly how much people really care about keeping their communication private if it requires even a minuscule amount of effort.
Our beta is actually coming this weekend, our alpha is live currently though. http://alpha.soundkeep.com. It works great for us because we can keep server memory low since we can process and transcode audio as it passes through our server without having to buffer the entire file at once.
Curious what you've done to drive traffic/demand thus far? Pretty sure most startups would like to get to this "problem" :)
It's how your data is actually stored that protects it, not whether you've paid for the storage in tinfoil shekels or picodollars.
Thanks for the google ref - seems to definitely say it's valid in some cases (e.g., when you expect them to generally stay on the page they come to).
How awful.

What exactly is the purpose of being here if all you are doing is somewhat stochastically deciding between a few sterile choices presented to you by a computer? Why bother interacting with people who's life experience is basically just ads and the most agreeable-seeming things they elected to participate in from their preferred social network?

How utterly fucking boring.

It's enough to make me want to live in a cabin in the woods with nothing but a 28.8 and some old Irix box to keep me and my dogs company. >:(
The avatar idea has been a staple of sci-fi for a long time, at least since Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992). Personally I don't find it creepy at all. Ever used SecondLife?

Nothing about the scenario in the article actually suggests a loss of free will - if anything it suggests a gain of super-free will in which people are more able to have their desires fulfilled by accentuating and enhancing what the real world can offer.
Tried and failed, unfortunately:
http://support.google.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=108...
I get how it could seem too self-induldgent, but I think that was mostly meant tongue-in-cheek. The real reasons are right below:

If prices were listed in dollars per GB instead of picodollars per byte, it would be harder to avoid the what-is-a-GB confusion (a GB is 10^9 bytes, but some people don't understand SI prefixes). Picodollars are perfectly clear — nobody is going to think that a picodollar is 2^(-40) dollars.

Specifying prices in picodollars reinforces the point that if you have very small backups, you can pay very small amounts. Unlike some people, I don't believe in rounding up to $0.01 — the Tarsnap accounting code keeps track of everything in attodollars and when it internally converts storage prices from picodollars per month to attodollars per day it rounds the prices down.

Plus, as others have pointed out, prices are listed in standard units (dollars per GB) just below the oddball ones.
GIF doesn't have RLE. It only has dictionary built from "previous pattern + 1 new pixel", so even transparent areas are wasteful (1+2+3+4+5+6px etc in optimal case and you have to restart when 4K-entry dictionary fills up).
def flatmap(f, items):
return itertools.chain(*map(f, items))

1. in Python 2 `map` is eager which — as with the previous `even` filter — may lead to unnecessary work if you only need part of the list (or a dead process if the input is infinite...). itertools.imap (or a generator comprehension) would be better. This is "fixed" in Python 3 (where the `map` builtin has become lazy and `itertools.imap` has been removed) but

2. it's being eagerly unpacked through *, itertools.chain also provides a from_iterable method which doesn't have that issue (and can be used to flatten infinite streams), introduced in 2.6

So `flatmap` would probably be better as:

def flatmap(f, items):
return itertools.chain.from_iterable(
itertools.imap(
f, items))
I assume he wanted the readers to now think negatively about this future. I kind of like it. Plus, that's not just the "Google world". It's the Internet. Do you think you can just unplug from the Internet 10 years from now? Can you do it now? It's only going to get harder, especially for new generations that are born with it.

What does worry me about the future, is governments having total knowledge about every single person, no matter what they are doing, who they are, and what service they are using. Do you really think they will need Google for this? Sure, in a way companies like Facebook and Google are making their jobs a lot easier. But do you think this will matter when they will have quantum computers? They will be able to get signals from a billion actions you've done on the Internet, regardless of what service you used. Gmail and Facebook usage will just be some of the signals.

And what happens when governments have total knowledge about everyone, whether it's legal or not? What happens when the governments can predict with quantum computers the potential of committing every type of crime for every single person? Maybe you have a 0.0000001% to be a terrorist. Maybe a 1% chance to beat someone, and maybe a 5% chance to smoke pot. Do they arrest you now, or do they wait until the quantum computers predict it's 10%?

These discussions about privacy breaches from companies seem like mainly a distraction from the real issues to me. It reminds me of the outrage of gun owners who "want to defend against an oppressive government" and "protect the 2nd amendment", but don't make a sound when the government cancels the 4th, 5th or even the 1st amendment. Or the 6 months outrage of the media over Benghazi, while covering the AP spying story for like 3 days.

Google can't physically harm you or destroy your life. Governments can. I would worry more about that. A lot more.
"Requirements... netscape 2.0+"

Made me chuckle, but probably quite accurate.
How To Get Your Conference Talk Accepted
What? That's the opposite of what I take from the story (although the author was clearly intending it as dystopian). The Glass in the story is not removing options, it's adding them. It's just layering information over the real world to provide a deeper, not shallower, experience. Why do people feel that the boundaries of their limited un-enhanced experience are somehow desirable?