skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just FYI, the first url in your profile is spelled wrong.

Great idea btw :)
We totally get what you're coming from, since we had to go through the process to get the project to work (and we're still in the process).

One of the motivating factors for Thinkerous was that in the beginning, I had an idea that I thought was interesting. But... I had no clue how to start. Would people laugh at me if I revealed my idea? What kind of people do I need to get started? Wtf is Node.js?

All in all, we're not going to solve hard problems for our users. But we'd really like to make it easier to start, to GO FOR IT instead of "nah it probably won't even work anyways."

Thanks for your feedback!

Edit: We've also upped the password max to 100 characters.
I don't think that's the whole consensus, though it's certainly part of it.

Silicon Valley's success is commonly attributed to being within proximity of two major schools (Stanford and Berkeley) fueling the talent funnel. But that is far from a sufficient explanation.

Massive government investment in R&D helped birth the first semiconductor and aerospace companies that helped create the first critical-mass concentration of tech industry and talent.

And those were just the baby steps. The current behemoth of the Silicon Valley machinery is sustained in large part by the enormous amount of investment, as well as ease of access to said investment. Modern startups go to/stay in the Bay Area largely for funding reasons.

> "They also would have sold to Yahoo IIRC but Yahoo didn't want to pay enough"

And therein lies the difference between Canadian tech and Silicon Valley tech. In Silicon Valley Google had enough funding to keep going and reject Yahoo's offer, and thereby growing by leaps and bounds into the giant company we see today.

If they were in Canada, they would almost certainly not have had the funding, and be pressured into an early sale for less, and Google today would probably be a sub-brand of some stodgy old behemoth of an enterprise-tech company.

Funding is, IMO, Canada's biggest problem. I've worked in the Toronto side of the software industry, and still know some people on that side. Canadian tech is dominated by either very large enterprise software firms, or slow-and-steady small businesses. There is no readily available investment source to perform the type of "grow fast, shoot for the moon" type of startups that the USA is known for (see: AirBnb, Square, etc, companies that took enormous amounts of funding very quickly and scaled just as quickly).

A startup in Canada means going for profitability very quickly, and being doomed to a slow-growth strategy, as large chunks of cash are nowhere to be found.

On a more sombre/cynical note: as a Canadian expat in the US tech industry, I basically have given up hope on Canadian tech. The first step is for the industry, government, and everyone to acknowledge that Canadian tech is fundamentally dysfunctional. And I just don't see this happening. Every opening of another satellite office that exploits the large salary gap is greeted with pomp and circumstance and speeches about how Canada's being recognized for its unique technological prowess.

Gag me with a spoon.
It's a hodge podge of loose notions, and is pretty well techno babble, especially considering the materials hyperbole.

The screen however is very reminiscent of Atmel's XSense touch sensor, which I'm keen to play with[1].

The wolf in sheeps clothes special pleading I'll leave alone.

http://www.atmel.com/microsite/xsense/default.aspx
There have been a number of attempts at that. Unfortunately, most of them seem to also try to solve the problems of "PHP based" and "forum".
Here's a native (non-flash) version that supposedly also works in Firefox and Safari

http://dabblet.com/gist/6046779

Made by Verou: https://twitter.com/LeaVerou/status/358726425454444545
IPython 1.0 Alpha is Available on Github
No kudos for picking the worst language around to run on hardware which may have mission critical requirements. When a device sensor heart rate stops reporting data, will your JS code return undefined, null, NaN, 0 or something else? Who needs mature error handling? Low memory requirements? No problem, v8 will have a reasonable memory footprint by 2024.
> "I suspect there is some sort of policy problem at work here rather than a lack of density, possibly as banal as drawing from a smaller talent pool."

I'm a Canadian who grew up, went to school in Canada, and am now in the US. The problem is very simple and can be summed as such:

A skilled software developer can make double to triple their salary easily by moving to the USA. And Canada and the Us have a legally porous border when it comes to exchanging workers.

Double to triple. I shit you not.

This is a huge part of what holds Canadian tech back. What kind of talent pool are you looking at when the US pays so much more, and there are relatively few legal barriers to taking these opportunities?
Force for what? For preventing contractually-prohibited uses of my property? That sounds like a fine application, even if it doesn't match your worldview.

I own a home (remote, long story). I hope my property manager monitors my realestate in this fashion. Legally, I'm on the hook for all sorts of eventualities and insurance related to the property (eg. fire and perhaps even injury). I'm not willing to foot the extra risk (or bills!) of having a tenant inviting itinerant AirBnB visitors -- that's why subleasing is not permitted by my contract with the leasee.

Would I be happy with an alternative that yields higher net returns than a property manager? Absolutely. Do I want it done on my property against my permission? Hell no.
Every opening of another satellite office that exploits the large salary gap...

I was under the impression that the satellite offices aren't just to exploit the wage gap, it's also to set up a pipeline to get more foreign engineers to the SV based motherships through the TN-1 visa.
I don't disagree.

Tell me something: Suppose you go in to get your left kidney removed, but the doc removes the right one by accident. What are your options? Law suit? What would you expect to get in settlement?
That's weird. He has that dead comment, then a live comment 5 days ago, and then several comments before that which are all dead.

Wouldn't a hell ban kill all comments from some point forward?
Perhaps you could raise them on gourmet coffee beans or genetically engineer them to taste like blueberries or something.
Take the term "locust" (and Venkatesh's writing style in general) with a grain of salt.

Long-time Ribbon Farm readers know that he tends to declare "local variables" with his terminology, pegging down certain metaphors for the purposes a specific discussion. That need not collide with or invalidate other uses of the same word or idea.
APL would be a better choice.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, I think your comment is relevant when OP is asking for feedback.

You're not just nitpicking some blog template or something.
So of course, everything becomes a "meeting"... ><
This is true. Some are there are glorified waiting rooms. Others are "legit" an employ actual Canadians - the latter type tend to pay dramatically less than their American counterparts, and exist largely to "insourcing" tasks to a cheaper locale.

I worked for one of them, was not fun. Everything we did was basically something management didn't want to pay a $120K Californian to do. Without the giant salary gap these satellite offices simply would stop existing.
The more interesting story there is the sort of corruption which allows for a) government-controlled/connected baby formula plant to get away with selling poison while b) being sufficiently protected by import regulations and government interference such that black market importation of baby formula one box at a time is cheaper than Johnson and Johnson hitting them with a container ship full of the stuff to take advantage of the market opportunity.

See this for example of interference:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/business/global/2-companie...
"A startup in Canada means going for profitability very quickly, and being doomed to a slow-growth strategy, as large chunks of cash are nowhere to be found."
- This is dead on! That's for sharing!
Well they're both arthropods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod
It's entirely plausible they still profit from your couponed purchases, just not as much as if you had paid full price. Price discrimination is generally the motive behind issuing coupons (which still have marginal profits), as a "loss leader" strategy can be more effectively done through means other than coupons

Which, incidentally, is one reason why you shouldn't be offering things at a loss on groupon.
So your issue with Friedman is that he's aggregating, popularizing, and improving the accessibility of new ideas that he himself didn't create?

Sounds like any number of journalists/writers to me.

Do you really feel that he has an attribution issue? He seems to always put the focus on people at the forefront of the change he describes (for example, in this article the focus is on Chesky.) It's not like his articles are some TED like exercise, where he portrays himself as being at the center of making all of these new things happen.
Microsoft shipped development tools with it's OS for as long as I can remember using them. Typically tools with very low barriers to entry too, they just worked out of the box and usually came with sample code.

DOS shipped with QBasic, Windows 98+ shipped with VBScript. Win 98 even included a small web server with ASP support and databases via Access.

Not to mention Visual Basic, which yes was technically not free but I don't remember it having meaningful copy protection and pirate copies were handed around in geek circles like photoshop is today.

There were also a bunch of third party drag and drop game creation tools available, many of which were scriptable in some capacity.
Thanks for helping me prove my point.
Here's another bit of crossword coincidence. http://mindhacks.com/2007/01/16/waking-life-crossword-experi...

And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
It's not a problem that is seen only with old people, but it really does seem to me that old people are over-represented. Almost all of the truthers I know "in real life" are over 50.
Well, labeling people as stupid is shaming. Instead of containing your anger and frustration about their behavior, you're putting them down with shame. The world would also be much better off if people didn't shame each other.

I think the answer is not simply more rationality but more self-awareness. Awareness of one's thoughts, one's emotions, one's past and present experience, one's hopes for the future, and the interplay between these things. So the real challenge is encouraging people to embark on a quest for self-awareness. People generally don't do this unless life's circumstances force them to.

I think you didn't get any upvotes because it's essentially a philosophy essay (i.e. it's kind of off-topic) and because we've all encountered ideas about closed mindedness and assumptions before.
I would half agree with this in that military contractors and engineering firms are in fact centred in the National Capital Region (Ottawa-Gatineau) instead of Toronto. This has a lot to do with the fact that Toronto is the financial hub of the country, but the military and military deals are done in Ottawa with the government. So even though the Greater Toronto Area has a number of engineering schools within a couple of hours drive, it's not conducive towards building an engineering culture the same way Ottawa, Montreal, or Silicon Valley is.
Chicago and Philadelphia are two of the ten most populous US cities. The other eight on that list have increased their population in the same period:

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

(See the Demographics section of each city's article.)
'They' is fine as a singular, for instance the person that you have just replied to, they say that you are completely wrong, and I agree with them. See?

Look up the "epicene they".
Location was important some years ago, but I think it's less and less relevant now. I think you can create amazing technology anywhere (in Latin America, in Europe, in Asia etc.)

Skype is a great example of this: they created a billion dollar company in Europe; and most of the development was done in Estonia (a country of about 1.3 million people, much less than most bigger cities).

Asia, especially Taiwan and South Korea, have some amazing examples as well (like HTC, Samsung, Asus etc.)
Have you guys considered a career with the CIA?
Reaping* - sorry for the typo. Thanks for the joke. :)
What are the big data opportunities for the automotive industry?
This is the most epic thing going down on Google+ EVER
I demand to be formally addressed as the Wizard of Speed and Time.
I love the design. It seems incredibly well polished for an MVP. How many people are you using Thinkerous currently?
The economist generally has 1 page "summary" articles at the front of the newspaper, and more in depth articles in the dedicated sections. Both are available online. Trying to put every point into the summary would defeat the entire purpose.
Crime actually went up slightly in suburban and rural areas during 2000-2010. The suburban homicide rate actually increased by about the same percentage as the urban rate went down.
Thanks!
We're currently 3 people, with Chris and me being engineers and Cheeyoon being the designer.
Is success genetic?
I used to believe and repeat this rhetoric 10 years ago. But then I went into finance and started noticing that BLS data resembles a work of fiction at least as much as it models reality; That CPI has been redefined through the years, and is basically not reproducibly measurable (hedonic adjustment and owner equivalent rent are both measured in a non-verifiable non reproducible way) and numbers are constantly revised in the least favorable direction when markets aren't looking (that is, numbers look better than they are when originally published, and then revised after most have already stopped looking at them)

And this got me wondering - did crime rate indeed go down? Or is it just that numbers are measured differently and thus look better?
The Texas sharpshooter fallacy strikes back.

And with government getting and parsing all personal data, that fallacy will have a lot of victims.
Well, if we are playing that game, I think it was a plot to hide the fact that we were being invaded by a race of alien dwarves and having a common dress for everyone below a certain height was their method of avoiding detection... knowing nothing about the subject.
>good browser extension

http://www.mailvelope.com/

https://github.com/crised/SafeGmail

No good (edit: stable and drop-in) Firefox tool yet.
Reminds me of Prisecolinensinenciousol: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZXcRqFmFa8
I think a bigger design leap is from the existing Mac Pro range to the new Mac Pro. From this: http://bit.ly/13VYioH [1] to this: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

[1] Apple store is currently down, this is a link to an image.
This is complete bullshit. The logic is: create entrepreneur culture to create huge companies. This is not how huge companies arise, rather a healthy small business culture is created. As it turns out, tech in Canada at this scale is vibrant. A single example: the number of mobile development companies in Toronto is staggering (a huge number of iOS apps are developed in Toronto).
Thanks, that's interesting, I've only seen the "active users when counting Google properties with Google+ features" type numbers but nice to see a number (135m) for actually using G+ (probably higher now since that link is a few months old). Though I disagree with your [original] statement that Google is "defining activity" much more so than Facebook http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22
Goldman's Moto: Don't NOT be evil.
Reviews Garcinia Cambogia: Does It Work? | Pure Garcinia Cambogia Review
Ask HN: How do get people to sign up for mailing list before launch?
What is the best way to get people to sign up for the mailing list for my app, which is not launched yet?-- here is the landing page thus far: oopsmessenger.com
I can't wait until mono implements WPF...
If a man's crude bits have gone blue then they should probably seek urgent medical attention.
UART or Serial Port is the first thing that you need when developing embedded systems. It is simple, easy to hook up to your Laptop (via USB Serial convertors). With terminal emulators like Teraterm, Putty (or the nefarious Hyperterminal) or Minicom, you can get to see what's happening on the device.

1. All devices running linux will have /dev/console tied to UART.

2. For others, typically a printf routine would write to UART.

The problem the article talks about occurs when the OEM "forgets" to turn off the UART (either in software or just by breaking the pins during manufacturing).
I've been seeing a few disneyresearch links on HN and wondered if someone who works there has been submitting them?
If you don't pay, it's not encrypted. https://lavabit.com/secure.html
My girlfriend is Canadian but this is exactly what prevents us from moving there, I love Canada as a country.

But something's missing from this equation.

If wages are low in Canada because there is a glut of workers relative to the number of jobs, then why doesn't the sector expand to take advantage of the low wages?

Contrarily, if the sector is small because high wages attract workers to the states, why can't Canadian companies pay as much as the American companies? There's nothing magical about America that allows its startups and companies to pay so much; Canada isn't particularly poor itself and its companies don't even have to pay for workers' health care.

Either way, there has to be a deeper reason.
Speaking the language of data
Interested to hear your thoughts about that. Could you elaborate?
100 char passwords woot!
Looks to me that likely candidates are population size and age of the country.

Having only 35 million people spread across one of the largest countries in the world makes it difficult to spawn consumer and retail conglomerates. Nintendo and Sony excelled in part because Japan was a perfect playground for testing personal technologies. Walmart had 300 million customers, 90% of which live in extremely developed locations, which allowed for retail stores to spread quickly and profitably across the states.

Further, having a history of less than 50 years means that less sustained activity has likely been driven from within Canada as opposed to from overseas. Given the choice of where to locate, a tycoon from Toronto had the choice of working out of London.
This is how much effort it takes to have a BCrypt (strong, slow, salted hash) database user system in Spring (not that they used Spring):

<http auto-config='true'>
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
</http>

<beans:bean class="org.springframework.security.crypto.bcrypt.BCryptPasswordEncoder" id="passwordEncoder" />

<authentication-manager>
<authentication-provider>
<jdbc-user-service data-source-ref="dataSource" />
<password-encoder ref="passwordEncoder" />
</authentication-provider>
</authentication-manager>

StackExchange's AskUbuntu.com is pretty good, as you can use OpenId, and if someone (illegally) hacks Google we are all fucked anways.
This is designed around 2004 I guess when 800x600 resolution is not that uncommon.
Word of mouth from respectable people who have seen something.

A blog about your progress with coding/design tips.
This year's Le Web London was enjoyed the theme "The Sharing Economy". We showcased something like 15+ startups that are innovating in this space -- and even then we never claimed it was a brand new idea we had created, more it was an emerging trend Le Web Founder Loic Le Meur really tapped into during last year's Burning Man.

Point is in support of parent comment here - this isn't brand new thinking and so anyone writing it as such is bandwagon jumping.
One would suspect she wasn't doing it for the money...
1) "Join Mailing List!" is not a good call to action. Promise value to them, such as e.g. learning when it launches.

2) I question the wisdom of calling a messenger whose sole purpose is to cut down on communication mistakes Oops! Messenger.

3) The word "autocorrect" is not present on this page anywhere, but "Damn you, autocorrect!" is such a common phenomenon as to be a meme among many potential customers of this.

4) Try something like a competition for the most embarrassing typo you've ever made in an SMS, which would give reason for this page to spread independent of Yet Another Messaging App Which Hasn't Launched Yet, then give people options to socially spread the embarrassing stories which they enjoy. You're in the communication business, so having a bit of social savvy seems to be a hard requirement.
Yep. Apologists. Don't mind the facts or the details, just look for the favorite scapegoat and blame it on liberal bias.

Did you even read the article?

There are no problems in locating and moving any specific load of metal within a day. A quarter-billion in profit a year and you think they just can't keep track of some metal? This is just another scheme set up by commodity players designed to skim bits of profit off of massive numbers of activities and to play each move in the game for a nice little benefit.

This is the vertical integration of the commodities market. They are playing a game based around skimming profits out of everyday business activities where there is any surface area that investors and speculators might be playing. In "lubricating" the trading (where they pay kickbacks to maintain their leases), they are just finding a way to make a cut on action they aren't likely directly playing in. Speculators and investors end up sitting on their "chips" so JP is saying, "hey, we'll give you some cash so you are liquid and OK while you wait to get your bigger gains..." Thing is... it's that 1/10th of a cent per can that consumers pay which is fronting the waiting game for the speculator so they can cash in. Once again, we capitalize the schemes that make douche-bags rich.

JP makes money no matter which way aluminum goes, but can net more the higher it goes since their primary partners and customers are traders. The more action in the market, the more need there is to hold chips.

A warehouse makes money by staying full. Their incentive is to hold it as long as they can. They are not commodity suppliers. They are middle-men. They don't need to maintain an inventory in case prices rise and they want to cash in. They need owners to be stuck holding massive amounts that have to sit somewhere or find a bunch of traders who are shuffling paper representing the metal that basically just sits there. The warehouse would profit more without the regulation as they wouldn't have to pay to shuffle it around.

In free market terms, the industrial consumers ARE going directly to sources instead of using the distribution network because the network is playing games and costing them a fortune. The problem is the drag in supply by the warehouse game increases costs overall.

There are people playing games with different commodities and your interests are in protecting the game instead of making efficient markets. Regulations and subsidies are important and effective for managing commodity markets. You are a historically ignorant fool if you think your Libertarian hard-on for anti-regulation and anti-media zeal makes sense here.
Thank you, I was really disappointed to be told I could only find out what I was looking at if I installed chrome.
Google must just love having fanboys like this running around doing free advertising for them. Either that or he is desperate for a job at Google.

It's not the first time I had heard of him:

http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-blocks-google-ad-michael-lee...