skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that Sony "won" E3, or that Microsoft lost. Instead, Sony called Microsoft's bluff.

Stay with me here. All of the restrictions that Microsoft has put forth are enforced by software - they can all be pretty easily reverted. I'm willing to bet that Microsoft was really hoping that Sony would see this as the future of console gaming, and would follow their lead at E3. This way consumers would have been given two relatively equal choices, and both Microsoft and Sony would have higher revenue streams and control over their products.

Sony, though, decided to appeal to consumers instead of their own pocketbooks, and now I feel that in order to be successful, Microsoft will have to follow suit, and slowly back out all of these restrictions "after further consideration".

It was a good gamble, (let's face it, there was a time not so long ago that betting on Sony opting for more control over their devices was a sure thing) and Microsoft lost this time. But in a year, when the new consoles are out, and if Microsoft dials back the restrictions, nobody will care what was announced this year. They'll be playing Halo4, MGS (RDR style), and COD: Ghosts, and couldn't care less about where Microsoft's stance started.
I wouldn't be surprised if the request came from a user. I've seen a couple features get implemented after suggesting them via the contact form.
FBI Director Defends Surveillance Programs
One of the big reasons it got cheaper over time was because the early work made it easier refine and improve later designs. This is fundamental to most any technology.

A limiting factor was and remains compute power, but algorithmic improvements in bioinformatics outpaced Moore's Law.

Imagine what it'd be like if we were just starting to sequence the human genome now, still completely in the dark on these things. Yes, it might be less expensive, but you'd also be missing out on a decade of groundbreaking research.

The genome is like the worst program ever written, no comments, lots of duplicated code, full of bugs and hacks, and enormous in scale. We've spent the better part of a decade chipping away at understanding it and we're only just getting started.

It was absolutely the right time to do it. We could've started in the 1980s but the compute power wasn't there, but by the mid 1990s you had enough to get by. If you needed a gigabyte of memory you had to fork out, but it wasn't impossible like it would've been in the 1980s.
Homejoy is growing fast and hiring a full-stack engineer
Homejoy is a young and successful startup headquartered in the heart of San Francisco. We’re a platform for connecting homeowners with high-quality, trustworthy home service providers - starting with home cleaning. Currently serving tons of clients in over 18 major cities across the U.S, we’re still growing really, really fast! We’ve recently raised capital from the world’s top investors including First Round Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Max Levchin, Y Combinator, among many others.

Right now we’re now looking for a self-motivated individual to join our very small engineering team as we scale our site to millions of users. You’ll get to build simple and intuitive web product that solves real-world business problems -- everything from creating matching algorithms to connect clients with service providers to reacting to customer feedback with operational changes real-time

Requirements:
2+ Years of Python development experience. You will be able to contribute to our Python code base from your first day of work.
Built significant web applications in Python and can show us what you shipped and how you made critical product decisions.
Bachelors degree in computer science or computer engineering, or equivalent experience (2+ Years).
Agile. Hard-working. Intelligent. Creative. Problem-solver. Startup lover. You like making things happen.

Bonus Points:
Contributed to an open source software project; show us your Github account!
Experienced a Homejoy cleaning and already know how we work as a client.

Awesome benefits:
Very competitive pay, serious equity
Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
Catered breakfast, lunches and dinners
New machine and other needed hardware
Transit pass
Daily catered breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus a break room fully stocked with snacks 24/7!
Weekly personal group trainer to help stay fit and healthy
Fun team outings, including sporting events, happy hours, bowling competitions, BBQ’s and pizza parties
Relocation expenses (if outside of the Bay Area)
Relaxed working environment; we won’t judge if you want to come to work in your jammies!

Interested? Email engineering@homejoy.com. We're growing fast, come discover the joy of Homejoy!
It's not too hard to imagine a user group that is good at predictive modeling, but bad at setting up a reliable service (mathmaticians, statisticians, other similar disciplines). These users may be familiar with R or numpy, but unable to build a web API quickly.
Well they want to protect US data and get the data of other people...that is not exactly a conflict of interest.

Their trustworthiness on technical matters is a matter of public record--for example, as far as I know, Linux experts independently agree that SELinux is a very secure Linux configuration.
Wall Street Is Obsessed With Snapchat
Who got dirty this month? These guys (and gal)
Soylent Green was made from people. Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow were not. This is Soylent Grey if that makes you feel better. lol
play --show-progress -c 2 --null synth 01:00 brownnoise \
reverb 19 vol 0dB bass 6 treble -3 repeat 558

Adjust bass and treble to match your headphones.

It sounds like a big waterfall, or like a continuous wave crash. And it's stereo. :)

EDIT: Or this:

play --show-progress -c 2 --null synth brownnoise \
reverb bass 6 treble -3 echos 0.8 0.9 1000 0.3 1800 0.25

The one with echos is a bit softer and more natural-sounding.
NSA was long nicknamed "No Such Agency" for a reason - they were, and to an extent still are, notoriously secretive compared to other US intelligence agencies. I'd expect them to approach it via intermediaries.

Frankly it sounds more likely to me that this was a poor attempt at social engineering rather than a genuine contact from the NSA.
No problem. I've been quite happy with them so far. I was using BuyVM for my side projects, but was getting annoyed with dealing with constant downtime, and other issues. I was starting to consider Linode, but ended up going with DigitalOcean due to the price. I really hope they can keep up the reliability that I've been experiencing.
Thomson Reuters Gives Elite Traders Early Advantage
Making a fortune? 500k is crowdfunding for enhancing the product and paying for clinical trials. I guess crowdfunding isn't cool anymore?
> Unfortunately, the pollution caused by the production and disposal of personal computers has not only become an ecological disaster, it's destroying the health and habitat of human beings around the globe. The biggest challenge today is not in creating a new gadget, it is how to clean up the damage done by the industry and prevent it from continuing.

I am not a fan of the guy, and they don't focus on ecological damage, but I would assert that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone has more than offset that. You don't even need to get into how computers themselves have improved the world.
> General Electric is a model of how to implement an ERP. They followed the minimal customization model, and forced their workers to change their workflows to take advantage of the tool.

Yep, that's the model, but I contend it is a pretty poor model for everyone but the ERP vendor. It is basically saying the ERP or CRM vendor has a better grasp of a companies business process than the company. I have seen companies adopt a ERP and use its process, then anger customers because of the change. Since they follow a new path, many times it is IT telling the rest of the business how to run things[1] and much of the institutional knowledge is thrown out.

1) something as simple as what's on the invoice or payment voucher can have huge affects on customer experience in some industries.
I always thought a good compromise would be that you can sell genetically modified seeds (or eggs or whatever) but you shouldnt be able to own anything that is produced by those seeds. ie children, saplings etc

in other words, you own the process of genetically modifying an organism, not the genes.

I dont know how realistic or unrealistic this is, since ianal.

edit: someone else mentioned the monsanto ruling, which makes this idea sound unrealistic
There's a huge number of people that either don't understand or do not care about the difference between the search bar and the address bar. I've seen this many, many times already.

And since it gives them the right result anyway... why should they change anything?
> Interesting. But I'm not sure the value. How many homes have > 1 unit.

I don't see how that has any relevance to what you quoted. What you quoted says that there's a console license for the game (as well as an account-license for the whole play at a friend's house) and that anyone can play the game on the console it's licensed to, regardless of if you're signed in or not.
Performance/dollar:

Azure wins - 3.1:1 on demand

Azure wins - 3:1 on 1 year reserved (author is incorrect here - does not account for initial reserve payment)

Less noisy neighbors? I am not sure. Seems like a good deal though.
IBM reportedly cuts over 1,600 US jobs as part of billion-dollar restructuring
I suppose I could be happy about it since I'm a share holder in Amgen and Qiagen.
ActiveJsonEntity: Bridging the gap between Ruby and Java with Reflection
Typical consumer products are loaded with sugar, as most people are now accustomed to a large amount in the diet.

Looks like 4 bottles would be 204g total carbs, 80g of it sugar. Not as bad I was expecting, but not great. Soylent claims 200g carbs, but there is no further breakdown. From its positioning I'd guess it is lower, but I can't confirm it yet.
You can do anything if you stop trying to do everything
Get started with Mocha Raspberry Pi Hacking (video)
This reminds me that I'm due for the next post in my 'starting Stormpulse' blog series, wherein I cover how and why we raised significant money 6 years after we started.
yes?
I'm just surprised I'm not the only one.
One of the reasons we have consumer protection laws and the FDA is so that people _don't_ have to experiment on themselves in order to verify the more extravagant claims made by products.

People should have a reasonable expectation that when they buy a product, it will work as expected and as advertised. And they should have recourse if this turns out not to be the case.
How would just the area around the rocks freeze? Why doesent this happen in more places if this is the case?
> There are so many problems whose solutions are dead simple for hackers, but hackers aren't working on them!

Do you have any specific examples?

Perhaps the issue is that hackers are not good at perceiving social issues that their skill sets make them particularly well-suited to tackle.
4 Tips to Build Your Brand
I'm from Germany. Havn't read anything about this on news or tech sites for weeks.
YC has already funded some consumer oriented security startups, one already deals with surveilance issues, did you have anything specific in mind?
good catch -- precaution on my end for potentially later linking to home if we have a further release or something like that.

I didn't realize it could trigger something like that, and not sure if that is the cause, but perhaps it was.
It definitely didn't turn me off from learning more, it was just a little confusing. It looks like a neat platform!
Python Map-Reduce Engine (Target Elasticsearch Indices)
Google, CodeAcademy And Mozilla Back Launch Of Code Club World
What landed them in Federal Court was bundling a browser (the most advanced at the time) with their OS for free. Over a decade later, we all know that a consumer OS that ships without a browser is an incomplete product (as BillG testified in the case).

What Apple is doing now with dictatorial actions in its app stores is just as, if not more, overreaching IMHO. Does that make it OK? No.

But keep in mind why people were actually interested in what MS had to offer back then. Just as we still buy Apple products despite their anti-competitive behavior, people bought MSFT products in the largely because the product addressed their needs better than others and the price was right.
That's incorrect. Only one of your family members can play each of the games in your shared library at a given time.

So you can't have two people playing Halo 5, but you can have one person playing Halo 5 and one playing Forza 5.
> "they can all be pretty easily reverted"

Can they though? Sure, it's pretty trivial to remove the code that enforces these restrictions, but I don't think it's Microsoft enforcing it.

Think about it - used games (mostly) go through authorized retailers, can only be sold once, where said retailers collect a cut, and Microsoft collects none. This isn't about Microsoft's bottom line, this is about the bottom line of GameStop, EA, Activision, etc.

There's no way MS would enforce this kind of DRM scheme on their own - they don't stand to benefit at all. If this was promised to retailers/publishers, they cannot just unilaterally walk away from it. Knowing no secret information, it strikes me that they may have legally painted themselves into a corner.
Google Retiring Chrome Frame
> Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody links to you, you ain't getting no traffic.

You should read this as shorthand for "build your business the traditional way and the users will come." Don't just count on ranking highly for a competitive query for your business to succeed. Build a brand and customers, and people will seek you out. You will have no difficulty ranking for [the name of your company] and this is where most good sites get most of their traffic from Google.
"The Only Intuitive Interface Is The Nipple"
Code Club World
"Gawdammit Senator, our people actually have to get on the phone to ask these people for this kind of information, and frankly, its downright embarrassing!"
Father's Day Gifts For the Traveling Dad
Here's how you create a Soylent without losing the DIY aesthetic:

1) You make it an open source project under an open license, OpenSoylent

2) You leave any health claims to be made by the OpenSoylent community. If this is unsatisfactory, you put out a bounty for MetaMed to write an independent report on the OpenSoylent wiki with references.

3) You accept people's patches to OpenSoylent

4) You create a separate, unaffilliated company to provide Soylent(tm), an implementation of OpenSoylent, with zero health claims, in a commercial kitchen, and link back to the OpenSoylent wiki for more information

Whether the above is legal or not, I'm not certain, but A) it's a hell of a lot closer than the present situation, and B) it doesn't offend geeks who apply critical thought to businesses that blog.
Just curious - what is your disdain for pop music?
It's an honest approach: Windows VMs include a license.
But this one might. I've been thinking ...

One, it's almost a given these days that any secret program will eventually be rumored, revealed or detailed. So to rely on a program being secret (and how many contractors have access to all this?) is to design a security regime that is destined to fail.

Once a program is rumored, it's subject to possible question by Congress or others. In order to prolong the program's secrecy, security officials must lie. Yet the program will eventually out, revealing those lies, and further eroding our trust in government. If they lied about that, they're capable of lying about anything, by demonstration. The loss of trust is the most damaging result, since democracy depends on it.

Two, if a program is secret, generously funded, not subject to oversight (and if Congress can't talk about it, then there isn't any real oversight), that's a rich, fetid environment for the growth of sloppy procedures, illegal activity, and just plain waste. And remember, these are government contracts run by government contractors who lobby. The program will do anything it can to sustain itself.

Now that Prism et al. are out, the cover is blown. One of the justifications given for secrecy is so that targets are not aware of the surveillance, and are comfortable communicating in an insecure way. Are they going to disband the program and send everyone home? No. Notwithstanding any foiled terrorist plots (and how can we believe that, they're proven liars), the money has been largely wasted, and now the program that was designed to depend on secrecy will likely continue.

A better approach would be to assume the program will be revealed, and in fact reveal its existence openly in Congressional testimony. Keep secret what must be kept secret, like location of telecom vaults and other assets, but say what it is, what it does and what it's for.

This is much harder, because you have to design a program that will be effective even when known. But it's better, because its existence is acknowledged from the beginning, so citizens don't suffer from exposure eruptions and lies, and we know what's being done in our names to ourselves and everyone else. We even have some small chance of telling our representatives that we don't like it and to ask them to stop it. And if it's stopped, we have a small chance of believing that it really is stopped.

Any such program would likely be less sweeping than what's being revealed, and so less subject to abuse, and less potentially wasteful. People in the program will have to work harder and more creatively to get results, and they'll probably get better results.

If nothing else, the trend is not our friend, and if this kind of carte blanche isn't stopped then we eventually will look more like East Germany and less like the myths we learned in civics class.
"Vile" is a pretty strong term, especially to use in a political context.
Grey on grey text on the FAQ page is hard to read (for me, at least).
interesting side effect - prokaryotic genes are basically unpatentable!!
I don't think "overselling" is the right word in this, it implies degradation of performance because of too many VMs. My understanding, is that all VMs allow sharing resources, even KVM. But to my understanding, you can share memory on KVM, but not diskspace (at least not easily), which is why every single KVM offers out there have very small disk allocation. This works great for DO, because they are offering SSD, and SSD VPS (regardless the type of VM) are small in size, so it fits perfectly.

I think the whole idea with VPS, is that you can share resources, so there is nothing wrong with that, its the overselling part that should be of concern and I have no reason to believe that DO is overselling. Their performance is pretty good.

The point I was trying to make referring to the OP, that VPS like DO can be profitable even at such a low price, because of the way VPS work. Even with very small revenue, if you have enough customer you can make good money. That's why the math works. Most other KVM offerings are so expensive because they don't have that tipping point scale to make them profitable with the same price. But other hosts like Linode gets away with charging more, because of reputation. They already have a good thing going, unless they starts losing customers drastically, they don't have to change their pricing model.
Some people prefer a few other things in their eggs. So if you need to chop some onion or peppers or meat that will add to the prep and the clean up.
I'm pretty sure prior art doesn't work that way.
Another advantage of using environment rather than a config file for configuration is not leaving a file full of secrets lying around in your environment. And why is loading your environment so difficult? If I can put foo=bar in a config file, I can put export FOO='bar' in a startup script, and delete the startup script once the application has started.
I should make a distinction between the data itself and the processes through which the data is collected and used. I'm not saying that the data related to every case should be made public. I'm just wondering why the processes to collect and use the data need to be secret. I think the process should be transparent without the data itself being public.
How to get more Facebook likes.
I think you can extend this to any other type of media :)
can you link to this previous decision?
What would you rather have? Ownership over the living-room / home entertainment center, or ownership of the waning console game market that's being swallowed up by mobile games? I think Microsoft is making a calculated choice that they'd rather widen their audience to market themselves to users looking to control their TV/movie experience more-so than they're hoping to sell their console just to gamers. It's why their console (and Playstation's for that matter) look like they'll blend in with more-traditional home-entertainment components.
> None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party, and we've never participated in link swapping or anything like that.

The people sending out the e-mails don't necessarily know that though. Google won't tell sites which links are triggering penalties against them for obvious reasons, and there are a lot of spammy sites posing as user-generated content, far too many to manually review all the backlinks.

Worse, many of those sites aren't attempts at blackhat SEO for the pages they link but are actually trying to rank for particular terms themselves, but as far as I can tell Google doesn't make that distinction - if you're linked from a whole bunch of spammy sites you will now be penalized.
Consulting, not so much, but they have an integrated, whole-enterprise stack that includes:

Office (especially Word / Excel / Outlook trifecta which practically everyone uses at work for documents, scheduling, e-mail)

Lync (text, voice, video chat that is integrated w/ Outlook contacts)

Sharepoint for intranet portals, content management, collaborative documents with version control

Dynamics ERP & CRM for accounting and sales

SQL Server, which has a sophisticated BI stack for reporting & analytics

Visual Studio for developing custom applications that can interface with the APIs of all above products

Now they have or are working on cloud versions of basically all of these products so you don't even need any hardware if you want to go that route.

Personally I am not a huge fan of Microsoft for a lot of reasons, but no other company, including IBM, comes even close to offering such a comprehensive enterprise stack. They're the only company that has a product for everything (except hardware).
> Developers with a 20% time window?

We like to call it 100% time. Work on what you're interested in.

In this case, Ben — who handles a lot of our outreach to government agencies — knew that GeoJSON is something that could be a big deal for open data in government, so he built the feature. There's not much more to it than that.
Saves the world?

Saves the fucking world?

How? People in this world suffer malnutrition because of socio-political and logistical problems. A maybe shelf stable maybe meal-replacement isn't going to solve any problems, because as is kind of a theme in this version of the soylent thread WE ALREADY HAVE THIS.
I suppose that they could break into any system and have stockpiled a lot of exploits. The problem is that it is usually a one shot thing. The moment it goes public this means it cannot be used anymore. So it is a bit like the Martin Fury - one hit kill but only limited charges.