skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except: it came right after Armstrong talking about not being bothered by "leaking information". And that according to Business Insider, this same employee "always" took photos during meetings/conference-calls, for internal publishing.

It's possible that in the stressful moment, with his mind on the "you're with the plan or should leave" theme, Armstrong misread or overreacted to the photo-taking. (Perhaps even, the "you're fired" was a reaction to a momentary facial expression from the photographer, in reaction to the first "put that camera down" command.)

Or maybe there's a history, and Armstrong already viewed the employee as insufficiently serious about Patch. Either way, an odd occurrence.
> I think what you're saying is quite stupid.

I'm assuming this is meant to be ironic and to try and prove something. But I challenge you to find a serious comment on HN that is this over the top negative and backs it up with as little as you do. It really doesn't bother me to be told I'm wrong, if I'm saying something stupid I want to be told that in no uncertain terms so that I don't repeat the same mistake again. But most of all, I want to know why what I said was wrong.

>The atmosphere on other online communities is more positive, which is a good thing. You can disagree without being negative.

I don't disagree that HN comments are different from places like reddit, but you haven't really explained why it's "a good thing". I personally don't find a lot of value in being praised, because I don't learn anything and the danger is I might get a big ego. However, I do find enormous value in constructive criticism. When I have a young student without a ton of self-confidence, then I am generous with giving praise; but when a colleague who I respect comes to me with a bad idea, I treat them with respect by telling them why I think they are wrong.
Yep. Whenever you work in an industry that involves churning out software as quickly as possible, it's easy to appreciate that commercial pressures are often too great to test properly. Whereas with start-ups (for example), they're usually well funded and have a strong focus on building great software.
Human senses are always used to make measurements, but yes, an individual human can agree with himself by repeating scientific experiments.
How about if you're a psychotic asshole looking to spread terror in order to quell opposition? Random violence is a staple of terrorist tactics, and random firings is certainly comparable.
It is supposed to be local news. As in stuff from your local small town.

I did use it once. There was a hostage situation in my small town and somehow a Patch page ended up with some coverage of the event.
Spy access to NZ used as bargaining tool
From the book "Learned Optimism": "There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser"

HN has a lot of smart people on it. It also highlights very different lives from the average person. Sometimes, HN is not much different from entertainment gossip magazines in that people read them and feel depressed that their lives aren't like famous people. On HN, it's possible that people read stories of "successful" entrepreneurs and get depressed because their lives aren't like that. I say "successful" in quotes because it's very easy to make anyone look successful if you just look at a tiny portion of their life.

Having dealt with this issue as well, I've developed a course that hopefully, helps hackers to deal with these issue. It's available at https://www.programmingspiritually.com I'm changing it to a freemium model later this week so there's no need to purchase it. If you want to be notified when it's available for free, just email me and I'll let you know.
Was just thinking about what to do for the upcoming Ludum Dare, and was looking at various js game frameworks so that my games could be played regardless of OS and libraries. This one looks like a real winner, thanks for posting.
I jumped into another thread and said this already - the guy that was fired was responsible for a poor UX that was hated amongst all and ended up failing.
If Aol is still making most of its revenue by charging monthly fees to people who have forgotten it exists, I find that more reprehensible than anything on this call... and I'd be happy to see them go out of business.
Not you, I take it. Thanks for sharing.
Exactly, Lynx is not an assistive UA. Keyword there is `render`. It makes very little use of tags' semantic meaning compared to a screen reader. Alt/title attributes are just a small part of the picture.

You are underestimating the damage bad markup does, and how deeply assistive software relies on semantics/metadata/structure. As I said, just fire up voiceover and try to browser HN. Actually, I'll quickly do that for you:

http://cl.ly/3l3E2C000419

I'm comparing table-based HN to one of it's alternative interfaces, not ideal but much better. It's a very shallow example, and I'm using only basic navigation commands - experienced users can use more complicated navigation schemes to discover content, out of necessity - but you get the idea. Lots of noise (row x of x, column xxx..), blank cells are "read", etc. Remember HN is a very simple and spartan website, now imagine what a slightly more complex nested table layout looks like.

Also, see WebAIM surveys for actual assistive tech usage data: http://webaim.org/projects/
It is political failure yet at the same time we have all these Open Gov initiatives, right? It's kind of a sick joke.

That makes a lot of sense from a demand perspective for b2b, but that is kind of part of the problem I see when it comes to the direction money is flowing in now. And which apparently hides the misallocation of capital/resources from the public pretty well.

Also more importantly, I don't think I can provide much value to the institutional folks, but I've been doing something similar for family and friends recently for free out of curiosity, and I figured maybe with a little work, I could convert pdfs of muni/bond data to text/html, extract things of value (using a key phrase dictionary for financial terms) and combine them with sources found in a more automated fashion online to make something that could help.
Building MVP, talking to advisors, how to pitch VC’s and Greylock
Where do I sign up? (/kickstart/gogo/paypal/greenlight/whatever)
To me this is just arrogance and probably even irresponsible. If I employed someone in my company and if I could fire the person at a moments notice, then I believe the employee and his skills were not leveraged to the benefit of the company in the first place. I agree company's shouldn't create exclusive dependencies with employees but if nothing is affected by letting an employee go suddenly or if the employer didn't have to think twice before doing so, then the employee probably wasn't needed in the first place. Both the company and the employee should be invested in each other in terms of skill, effort, time and compensation. Not to mention that you just burned a bridge that you didn't have to.
Physics: Places To Be, Places To Avoid
I really should start blogging - one of my many unfinished projects is a teardown and reverse engineering effort of a Philips BD player. Java isn't even the half of it.
Sure if it's about the client then sure but as soon as SpiderOak open sources their software they start competing on price because anyone can write a backend to use another storage provider.
If you're saying "people who matter" value the superficial over substance, then I'd further conclude that they literally don't matter.
Yeah, came here to say that. such a question is the perfect representation for why our healthcare is so broken.
Apple vs. Microsoft - What Makes them Different?
To be fair, I haven't used Julia, but I have heard it suggested as an open-source replacement for Matlab/Octave. To that end, I hope it turns out well. When I was looking to see where the project was at, I got nervous when I read a recent thread on the -dev mailing list: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia-dev/2JcZdFKisis/Ag9rBJ...

In particular, the line "[...] I suspect that isequal should be transitive (it has to be for hashing to work), while == will not be transitive. We still need some coherent theory of what == means." made me wince. If one of the benefits that the video makes for Julia over Python is a type system, then there ought to be a pretty well-developed sense of how promotion and equality between types is going to work. That seems like a piece of the language whose theoretical underpinnings should have been nailed down already.
That's a good question for his financial gain. But how about this one :

How many lives did Jonas Salk saved by not patenting the polio vaccine?
If you had face recognition and rewards cards, you wouldn't even need a MAC address to track someone.
> I don't see how providing antagonizing labels based on nationality helps your argument at all.

I completely understand what paganel said: nationality and culture play an important role here. There are cultures or subcultures that accept that we can be completely wrong in our assertions (are we just dreaming?), or they are based on mysticism, or they are relativists, or they are scientific.

There are prejudices against you in the scientific environment if you have doubts about things like God or consciousness.
Crossed my mind. I sure went and checked it out. I've used it once by accident and didn't know it as AOL. But, if anything, this just made it worse. Now it has a bloodstain on it.

So if it was meant to be a publicity stunt, it sure as hell backfired. But then again, if they were good at marketing and publicity stunts, they probably wouldn't be firing people on the spot or extolling how great it is for employees to sacrifice their nights and weekends for the cause even after their children break their legs falling off the stairs.
A quote from the Business Insider article linked to in this thread:

This source tells us that Lenz always took photos at Patch
all-hands meetings. He would later post them to Patch's
internal news site.

There isn't enough background to understand why this happened. AOL may have a clause in their employee contracts that makes picture taking at certain meetings a "firing offense". The source says that Lenz "always took photos", but it's possible that Lenz might have been warned not to take any more photos at meetings. Lenz's silence about the matter is also ambiguous.

Nevertheless it is odd that an employee was fired for taking pictures of a meeting when the audio was leaked to the media.
Update ActiveRecord Entries by Batch in Rails 3
That commit series doesn't actually appear to use the new class, besides initialising it.

Simply initialising it is insufficient, because you need to call addProvider() (cf. https://developer.android.com/reference/java/security/Securi... ) to actually have any effect.
How does your soul observe and affect your body? (I'm assuming you mean a two-way path there; "observing your body and being affected by it" would be one-way, and would be problematic. "A difference that makes no difference", and all.)

Can this connection be distorted or interrupted? What are the effects of doing so?

If you accept that a drug-induced solipsistic, out-of-body effect[1] is an alteration of subjective experience, are you then going to argue that "While your memories, feelings, and subjective experience are in the body, your X may not be." What would X be?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197315
This was considered normal behavior.
"We hear that Lenz, based in New York, would always take pictures of people talking on company-wide conference calls so that he could post them on Patch's internal news site."

http://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-audio-listen-to-aol-ce...
I don't know if you'll see this, but I've been wanting to contribute to Rust for a while now. I've checked through the Github issues, but it's not really clear to me what I should do if there's one I think I can do. How should I approach it?
I wonder if TechCrunch will post this story...
Sure, but it's clearly way too much hassle for everyone to encrypt email all the time. By moving to decentralized servers, we do a lot to mitigate the problem while preserving convenience.
That's why I made it so easily customizable. Generally, you'd probably want to have more of a label or some context for a control like this. In this case, if you're smart about the wording, it can serve as its own label.

Think of the light switches in your house. They do have a label (look closely), but there's also context: By switching it one way or the other, you'll immediately see the effect when the lights turn on or off.
His silence could easily have something to do with a non-disparagement clause in his severance. I'm sure they are giving him a decent one (assuming this whole situation can be taken at face value) in order to mitigate this wave of bad press.
It depends on the type and quality. If you purchase a can, then I would hope that it is mostly animal based ingredients. If it is dry food then it will be mostly cereals.
I definitely didn't make it to be draggable. When I made it, I wasn't even thinking that people actually did that.
iPhone 6 'Infinity'
I kinda wonder if the silence was a "shock and awe" one or if the call was muted or something on their end. I don't see why that wouldn't warrant at least a small reaction that would be audible over the call.
Shortly after acquiring, however, they shut down the product and cancel all plans of integration. All previous employees become assimilated.
Of course. That doesn't mean a service can't prove it's secure. The service can be as secure as it wants, if you're talking within earshot of your adversary, you're screwed.
It is not even possible here to "fire" someone at your will and immediately when this person has a job contract.

Also I almost forgot about AOL. What were they doing in the last 10 years? I only remember they threw their "AOL Internet CDs" in every mailbox.
The Art of the Phony
It's because when we say being observed in public, we assume it to be someone looking at us and then basically forgetting all about us. We don't think about security cameras watching us and having a single party aggregate all of that. And we don't know our cell phones are broadcasting a unique barcode to everything even if we do know the cell towers can triangulate and log our location. (By we I mean our family members, not us on HN.)

Adding technology to the observation makes it so much stronger that I think there should be a new discussion about it by our various governments.
I didn't come across the HN post when the original article was posted. I think the original article has many warning signs of "sophomoric" thinking to warrant rapid dismissal.

The first big bold warning sign is this -

"After reading and listening to David Chalmers, I came
to realize that there is an intelligent argument that
supports the idea that consciousness does not emerge
from the brain.

<big-n-bold>Quantum Mechanics</big-n-bold>"

Invoking the "magic" and "mysterious" quantum mechanics to understand and explain something that isn't even defined in the article is, indeed, "sophomoric philosophy".

In the original article, you'll also find this regarding the Schrodinger's cat "paradox" -

"Many physicists today think the many-worlds theory
resolves this paradox by stating that there are actually
infinitely many universes, some in which you are dead and
some in which you are living, and that once the quantum
trigger is measured/observed, a specific universe is
followed."

Plain wrong. The "many worlds" is not a "theory", but an interpretation of quantum mechanics. It does not add any new physical mechanisms over and above what we already have in quantum mechanics - i.e. there is no "once a quantum trigger is measured/observed" in the many worlds interpretation. All these universes exist. Period.

The problem of "observation" in quantum mechanics is being discussed here without even a mention of "decoherence". AFAIK, the unexplained part of quantum mechanics to date is the Born probabilities - i.e. why does the likelihood of observing an event correspond to the magnitude square of the amplitude we calculate for it. There are some recent insights into this, but I believe this is still unexplained.

The original thing that the article sought to explore is whether it is possible that consciousness does not come from the brain. If that is indeed the primary point to be explored in this essay, the question to be asked is what does "come from the brain" mean? When a current passes through a memory circuit, it toggles from 0 to 1. What does it mean to say this "comes from the circuit"? Does is not also "come from the current"?

We thus reach a point where all we can say is "shut up and compute", for we've fallen into the trappings of everyday language.

edit: typos.
The only sensible experiential definition I've heard for consciousness is the word "cognizance". Meaning, consciousness is the ability to be aware. This is the term many Buddhists use in translation, and it's by far the best fitting for me.

It fundamentally comes from asking the question, "What am I if you strip away everything that is impermanent?" Emotions are impermanent, thoughts are impermanent, sensations are impermanent... but cognizance -- if you take that away, there is no longer anything. It is the most fundamental.

I didn't notice the earlier post on this, but I think all people should think deeply on this. It is not just sophomoric philosophy, it's deeply practical, and few people bashing it understand it. That lack of understanding leads incredibly often to, well, suffering.

Acknowledging the nature of existence intellectually isn't enough, you need to experience it. I see this very often in people of any age. Fear of death, fear of loss, fear of love, fear of change. But at the root, no matter what happens if you are comfortable with the nature of your own existence, you know that no one can take that cognizance away. Buddhists monks manage to light themselves calmly on fire in the interest of helping others.

Anyway. I obviously have many thoughts on this. It's something I've been thinking about and meditating on a great deal for over a decade. I will just end with a famous quote by Pascal.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

EDIT: I also hate it when philosophers abuse physics. I'm a physicist, so every time I hear "quantum mechanics" in a philosophical context I put down the book to avoid throwing it. As a friend put it, as soon as Buddhist monks can derive the ground state of the hydrogen atom, I'll give them credit for understanding quantum mechanics. I think that people who suggest that Buddhism is related to these sorts of things know neither physics nor Buddhism.
This is exactly it for me as well. I'd use Jekyll/Pelican again if comments were somehow built-in. Disqus is still a good service for those who need it.
The problem is local news on a large scale means finding thousands of people who for some reason want to write for pennies about what's happening locally. On top of that advertising isn't exactly easy to get. When Patch first came around they also looked at gaining traffic from an SEO perspective for local queries but as algorithms changed their organic traffic plummeted.
This, for example, is basically a press release, although it doesn't say that. Instead, it claims that it's a contribution from a "community member":

AT&T Network Enhancements Strengthen Nation's Fastest, Most Reliable 4G LTE Network in St. Louis

http://chesterfield.patch.com/groups/stl-tech-news/p/att-net...
Designing For Your Mother
Sounds to me like a reason coughed up a few minutes later when he was trying to rationalize what he had done.
Even if that was the reason, if you fired the employee in front of the entire team suddenly without reasoning until asked for later, it wouldn't help in anyway, not even exemplifying the case.
OK, we'll buy it back, $1M, the seller can keep 20% for schmuck insurance.
I once had a friend who described a RPG scenario in a world in which "science doesn't work". My response was, "Wait, science is, by definition, figuring out, by whatever means, what works and what does not, whatever that means." Postulating that science doesn't work, or that "we can't study it", is going to result in a radically odd universe.
Actually the local patches seem to be useful and engaging. Brad Kava the principal at santacruz.patch.com actually makes an effort at journalism
Science is not an opinionated entity that "explains" things. Rather, it is a method for learning more about the world around us while attempting to minimize influence from bias and other sources of human error.

It's not that we can only discover things via science. It's just that we shouldn't trust discoveries made via flashes of insight, clairvoyance, intuition, guesswork, divine inspiration, etc.
Awesome! Yeah, I think it'll be a good choice for Ludum Dare.
The LinuxSecureRandom class has a 'static initializer' block, which will run as soon as the class is loaded. (That is, triggered by the reference and initialization call, but just before.)

It purports to install LinuxSecureRandom as a new systemwide default (LinuxSecureRandom, lines 56-57).
Firefox 23 on arch linux for me, same problem I think.

Just tested with chromium, works fine.

Could it be somekind of hidden option in the browser?
Incidentally, on the EBS durability thing, it's addressed here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=27590 - An fsync isn't a guarantee, or wasn't in 2013, but they estimate the risk of loss after fsync to be very low.

Can't find anything on whether their newer SSD-providing instances guarantee durability, though.
It look like you won. The theme is no longer on themeforest.
Have you considered pointing this out to them? Perhaps the people in the project are unaware that this is a solved problem.
Yeah, there is no way you'd be able to do that in the US without getting charged with wire fraud at least.
Hi Ryan, my name is Sean. I'm the GoDaddy product manager in charge of WordPress hosting. Thanks for including us and I'm glad we could surprise you with some fast speeds. In the past few months we've really made some huge strides in reducing page load times and are at some impressive speeds across the board right now. However, seeing your response times fall off a cliff surprised us too. There's been a big email thread going on this weekend to nail down exactly what happened so we can fix it :) I'd love to talk more and share some of the details around a new WordPress experience we're delivering in a few months. My email is in my HN profile.
This reminds me of a character…

"The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round."

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
The fail train pays and nobody gets hurt when it crashes.
Cheap compared to the service contract. If you sign up for things like paid training they'll basically give you the licenses for free. This is from experience, at least for new companies where they want to get lock-in.

I don't see how it being the open source model is relevant. I'm not judging the validity of the practice, this is literally what the representatives claimed the logic was.
I use A Small Orange for VPS, so I can't comment specifically on hosting Wordpress, however, their support is great. Their chat support is very responsive and helped me get nginx configured properly (I wasn't expecting them to go to such lengths to help me!).
The rewards card would be in one location, you could then know that person's identity at all stores via cell phone connections or cameras.