skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it's not even funny)

People are so good at rationalizing their preferences that they sometimes say really stupid stuff withour realizing it. This nightmare scenario of relying on boost, std::vector, or whatever - it's really basic stuff that's both open source and easy to understand/debug - e.g. https://github.com/graehl/boost/tree/object_pool-constant-ti... (reminds me - I should really get around to submitting this)

That said, avoiding libraries (especially avoiding templates and just using void*-like stuff) does keep binaries/libs smaller, but I'll gladly make the computer work slightly harder considering that the result is the same speed (C++ is often faster than C, in practice).

The downside I care about is compilation speed. Simple C projects compile/link faster than modern C++ ones, even though the code for the same functionality is far more brittle, unsafe, and opaque
> I don't see where color scheme, button text or carousel slide order will make a difference if you're selling something someone really needs, is informed about, etc

This is true if you are unique in the market of a lot better than competitors. But if you are only 5% better even people who know quite a lot about your services and niche will not always be able to tell.

Agree that "white hat" conversion rate optimisation should be about getting people to understand the product
The article mentions that this is a Bezos-only deal, no Amazon involvement.
it was unanticipated, I was happily doing a google search for the first guy in your testimonials and it came up
Creating a sense of Urgency
Haha no; am setting up VirtualBox.
Bitcoin starting to look a bit 'toppy' here...
Market may continue to grid North from here but traders should prepare themselves for a dip back to around $101-102 over the next 24-36 hrs.
I would expect it because corn subsidies cause way more corn to be grown than necessary.

Now, lots of corn is great and all (well, not really), but if you grow corn all the time you are going to kill your soil (for one, depleting the nitrogen in the soil). Soybeans have the neat property of putting atmospheric nitrogen back into the soil. So if you want to grow lots of corn without breaking the bank on fixing your soil all the time, then changes are you spend some of the time growing soybeans. (Usually two seasons of corn then one of soybean, or one of corn then one of soybean).

Since soybeans are not the primary crop but are grown relatively in proportion to massively overproduce corn, I would expect soybeans to be pretty damn cheap. I don't have the market breakdown but my understanding is that the bulk of soybeans are just used as cattle-feed. I would expect this to depress the price of soybeans leading to very cheap soy products, even with the large amount of processing that needs to be done to them to make them human edible.

The large amount of processing might be the cause of the high price of soy products, but with supply of soybeans so high my suspicion is that low demand causes soybean product prices to be high. Soybean based food is still relatively niche and there are not all that many companies in that field so prices stay high.
I've been doing some simulations with bandit algorithms. Early results make them look pretty good (http://www.eanalytica.com/blog/split-test-methodologies-prev...).

However, this result could also be explained by the bandit having a lot more variations to play with. I have a lot more work to do on this before I feel sure of an answer
I thought this would be about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome

> In the late 1970s, it was noted that nonspecific symptoms were reported by tenants in newly constructed homes, offices, and nurseries. In media it was called "office illness”. "The term "Sick Building Syndrome" was coined by WHO in 1986, when they also estimated that 10-30% of newly built office buildings in the West had indoor air problems.
I think it's all the embedded content and the huge banner (that somewhat unrelated to the headline) at the top, etc is not really meshing together.

The site design could use a bit of love.
I think this is a great idea. I want to offer some design feedback and advice. This is just my opinion, but I hope it can be of help in some way.

-The testimonial scroll is a little awkward and hard on the eyes as it moves. My suggestion would be to have a fade in/fade out, or a much quicker animation

-There is quite a lot going on in the navigation bar (many different options + sub-options). My suggestion would be to narrow it down significantly to maybe 3 - 4 of the most important menu items.

-I think the "satisfaction guaranteed" thing can go. There can probably be some better messaging or use of real estate here to establish trust.

-I think there could probably be a better way to present the large image with text on top on the home screen (for example, see airbnb.com or screenleap.com). Visual design thing so it's kind of subjective.

Otherwise, really strong work. If you'd like more design help see my contact info in my profile.
Hi Bruce, thx for suggesting Hyper-V, but I think I will try VirtualBox first. Appreciate your responses.
What do you think is bad about using jira at a startup? I'm not trying to be obnoxious, but I've only ever worked at two startups (~120 people - I'm 21) and both used jira for bug management.
Please understand me. No desire to sound negative. No wishes for anything but the best. I am just curious as to what your business model will be for this?
Foundry Group Closes $225M Foundry Select Fund
I can't believe they still use stack ranking. I've come into contact with over 50 Microsoft people through my job and each one has been very high caliber and hard working. Granted, it's a very biased sample, but these are not the kind of folks we'd want to fire where I work.
>>>>> The new building telegraphed to our employees, “We’ve arrived. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company.”

What does this mean? Does the author not think successful large companies work just as hard and put in just as many hours as a startup? I just finished a contract with a large public company and during the release cycles we were putting in 11 and 14 hour days.
"But the most significant missing evidence was the absence of any skid marks—even though the car made a 60-degree turn into a palm tree.

Research of this topic reveals a new angle to this story, namely —Boston Brakes.

This theory was explained by a former Marine Gordon Duff who refers to the “Boston Brakes” technique, in which “drive by wire” cars, specifically a Mercedes Benz, can be manipulated remotely to simulate an out-of-control accident, according to his Veterans Today story (The 2010 story is a must read). The story details are eerily similar to Hastings fiery accident scene as there were no skid marks.

Adding credence to the possible car-hacking scenario is former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard Clarke. After news broke on the Hastings car accident, he confirmed the “drive by wire” concept.

Clarke told The Huffington Post that a single-vehicle crash is “consistent with a car cyber attack. There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers — including the United States — know how to remotely seize control of a car.”

Another significant detail pointed out by some members of law enforcement, is the intensity of the fire inside the car. It’s highly unusual since gasoline generally doesn’t burn that hot. Reviewing video footage from the scene, the intensity of the fire resembles a “thermite” burn.

Despite the LAPD’s categorization of the Hasting fatal accident as a “no (evidence of) foul play” accident, LAPD refuses to release the accident and toxicology reports, or make the Mercedes available for inspection which only fuels speculation.

LAPD on the case as usual."

from this:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-09/elusive-details-mic...
Jira works, but then you meet people who created their "careers" around using Jira. Then it all goes to hell. The VCs are going to lose a lot of money to them.
The relation to the article isn't just tenuous, it directly contradicts the story. The civil forfeiture examples mentioned in the story are all examples of state and local governments abusing their powers. And historically, it's been state and local governments that most abused peoples' rights, whether it be their due process rights or their property rights.
Apologies. I thought you were objecting to "proprietary". I think we've just a semantic issue. How about "he knowingly caused proprietary source code to leave the control of its owner"? Although, as he did post to a public server, I think I can defend "released" if I need to. The word "encrypted" does not occur in the linked story, nor does it seem to be implied.
What are you saying? That WaPo does not have strategic leverage or that the demographics of the owner-class is changing?
It means reading and writing into an encrypted storage without decrypting it. Is that right?
Awesome idea! Looks lovely.
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It’s important to us that everyone at OrderAhead shares our intensity, grit and passion for fulfilling our mission.

As our Recruiter, you will lead our recruiting efforts. You will create a comprehensive strategy, develop recruiting channels, create compelling interview experiences and drive candidate offers and negotiations.

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You should check out this http://www.teachhub.meliordevelopment.com/. We built it in a weekend exploring exactly that problem in schools.
Please. It's far more likely an alternative related to Tor will arise than a complete collapse of the undernet.
Seriously, how expensive is $250 million to control the most important and influential voice coming out of Washington? Regardless of what motives Bezos may have, that's not a bad deal.
You should check us out[1]. We're haven't quite got to the full ETL stage as we've focused on individual databases first. If you've got a decent imagination though then you can figure out what we're trying to get to.

[1]: http://www.jackdb.com/
Quantum cryptography requires quantum correlation as far as I know. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and there is no mention of it here. I think this is not exactly a scoop, to say the least.
maybe he was onto the story that broke over the weekend about the DEA spying on people:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/08/05/more-survei...
Please state the salary range you offer, your metro area, and whether you pay all interviewing expenses for the candidate (economy airfare and accommodation in your city), and full relocation expenses. Only then can we begin the process of evaluating whether your inability to hire is due to lack of talent availability, or if it is due to other factors.
Call me crazy, but I've never been able to taste the difference in any sort of bird. Duck, turkey, chicken.. it all tastes the same to me.

Probably makes it a great candidate for vat growth.
The problem here is easy to fix without having to restructure our entire political system. Just remove the profit motive from policing.
(It's really just a lot of influential people meeting annually(?) in private to have some insightful discussions.)

Which ultimately means that the conspiracy theory is correct, except that reality sounds less flashy.

After all, a democratic society has all sorts of proper channels to have such discussions in. Meeting in such an invite-only club that is not part of the official checks and balances is somewhat problematic, because it leads to decisions being pushed through that did not emerge from democratic processes.
Ballmer likes stack ranking. I don't know why...
Thanks man.. :)
>A primary challenge is unlikely, since the person's career within the Democratic party would come to a swift end.

Not if they win.

And I don't see why you need a party insider in any event. What you need is someone who can fund their own primary campaign, or who can get enough donations from real people to do it, i.e. someone who is famous or rich or both.

>Schwarznegger could possibly have beaten her, but a) he had a sleazy sex scandal and b) CA Republicans seem to dislike him even more than democrats because he has the temerity to take things like global warming seriously.

Schwarzenneger could possibly have beaten her because he's rich and famous, but he's not the only one with those characteristics.
Seems to be happening to Apple?

Since the focus on that huge UFO shaped building, they been having all sorts of problems like the developer site breech, the iPad sales coming down, the stock price receding.

Purely anecdotal I know. But gotta wonder.
You can already buy animal-free synthetic fur coats, and if you pay even $1,000 you're getting ripped off in a big way.
Murdoch's papers supported Rudd in Australia when he won in 2007.

Was that undermining democracy?
I was assuming Python 3, but yes, you are correct.
I bet he puts up a paywall, but offers free access to Prime members. Combined with instant video and other benefits, Prime starts to look pretty attractive, even without the free shipping. But once you've got the free fast shipping, it's much easier to justify buying stuff from Amazon instead.
Media outlets are naturally biased in favor of their owners for obvious reasons.

Major newspapers have been systemically biased for decades but many people still take them seriously.
masthead/call to action is too tall (occupies too much of the above-the-fold on my laptop)

#header-banner { height: 125px; overflow: hidden; /* just for quick test */ }

sidebar is too wide, relative to the width of the content.

#side { width: 210px; }
#main { width: 745px; }

these adjustments obviously require other adjustments, but try them out to see how it feels less claustrophobic.

edit: here's the result of doing that in chrome's console http://cl.ly/image/3f3D1m3s1h2U
LinuxMint has been delivering a good alternative to Ubuntu for a while now.

But I feel a lot of LinuxMint users are using it for the simple fact that it isn't Ubuntu, because running Ubuntu isn't hip anymore.
Another way to look at the bootstrapping vs fundraising model. A bit light on content and opinion. I prefer this article by Laura Roeder better.

http://pandodaily.com/2013/05/30/the-amount-of-money-a-start...
+1 for natural language detection and transcription. Current systems are too fragile or completely closed. The ones available aren't better than what we had in 2004.
Harvard students build new recommendation engine
Why I hate implementing Linq
Just posted some equipment on there. Keep up the great work!
I took the class a few months ago so I thought I would offer my unvarnished opinion of One Month Rails.

I've always loved technology but never had any coding skills whatsoever. To be honest, I didn't know where to begin. I would run a few searches and play around with a hello world tutorial and pretty much drop it from there.

Then I found this awesome speech by a guy named Mattan Griffel. He was speaking at an NYU event (pretty sure) and discussing how he learned to code in one month. I was blown away. It was like I was lost in the jungle blindfolded and someone handed me a map and a light. I finally had a way that all of this was accessible.

Griffel used a combination of a Lynda course, a Stanford course and Hartl's Rails tutorial to teach himself but in the meantime he had put together this course to learn Rails in a month.

Disclaimer: I didn't learn Rails in a month. I completed the course but I still can't build the next Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/Pinterest on my own if it didn't have the exact same features that Griffel's tutorial had.

Here's what it did do for me. For a person coming from a completely non-technical background, I had a roadmap. Terms, technologies, languages, databases are all things that are obvious to any CS/EE major but totally baffling to an outsider. Griffel's tutorial brought me into the coding world. Eventually, I was so blown away by what I learned that I wanted to do this as a profession which led me to the Flatiron School and I hope to pursue a new career as a web developer.

The One Month Rails course gave me the confidence to see that it really isn't all that difficult to learn this stuff. Time, dedication and perseverance are your friends. If you're completely new to programming, want to know the lay of the land, and have no idea what Ruby, Rails, Git, Heroku and jQuery is, this course is exactly what you need.

Mattan, thank you.
Yep, my bad. Didn't really think before I posted. And yes, I was assuming Python 3, so use xrange on Python 2.
the mint interface is a lot like ubuntu before unity...i think that's why most flock to it from ubuntu
Sounds interesting. What do you do differently than traditional algos?
This is incorrect. You need more than a third of all Tor nodes to be able to have a decent probability of working out which user originated which requests. Just running or observing the exit node is not enough (the exit node has no idea of who originated the traffic).

Either that, or you have to be able to observe the traffic from most/all exit nodes as well as observe all the traffic coming from a user's Internet connection to be able to correlate with some probability what sites that user is visiting through Tor.

Given any random person in any country can run a Tor node (exit or non-exit), both are quite difficult.
The theconnectivist article doesn't mention it, but the quantum network being discussed is a trusted node network. If two users on the network communicate, the central trusted hubs have access to the plain-text (There would have to be multiple interconnected trusted hubs to overcome distance limitations). Other, far better documented networks of this kind already exist (e.g. SECOQ).

Trusted node networks are a viable option for corporations. Indeed, several European banks are already using IDQuantique turnkey systems, as mentioned in the article. These networks are not viable for private individuals, especially those who are not comfortable with entrusting their plaintext to the operator(s) of the trusted nodes.

There are ways to build quantum repeater networks that do not require the use of trusted nodes, but these remain experimental because some of the underlying technologies needed to overcome distance limitations in such networks (e.g. Quantum memories) are still in their infancy. The quantum smart cards in this article do not even attempt to address this.

Corporations interested in building a private trusted node quantum network similar to IDQuantique's offerings may want to look into these quantum smart cards. They are wildly inappropriate for civilian use however. Even plugging in directly to your local bank would require you to have a direct fiber link to a node under the control of that bank. This would be prohibitively expensive.
WAT? Is someone trolling Fox news, or does that guy just have a crazy sense of humor?
I would argue history disagrees with you that "state and local governments [...] most abused peoples' rights." See the American Revolution / British Empire, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, etc... etc...

Also, sorry, my pro-state musings in my edit were not meant to characterize my anti-government criticism regarding the abuse of government power as pro-state. In retrospect, it was misguided for me to include that there.
This is indistinguishable from selection bias.

If you want to write the opposite article, pick any three wildly successful companies. They've all grown enough that they've had to move into a new building. Pick a project that went well around the time of the move; they're big enough that there must be at least one. Now, attribute causation and come up with some pithy bullet points. Ta-da! You've got yourself a wsj article.
Pretty sure this action runs afoul of DMCA..
I thought it wouldn't happen for cynical reasons. I assumed that government agencies would want to guard their powers jealously, and given the potent justification of national security, the NSA could easily do so.

Also, because they're smart people who understand the danger of revealing their programs to too many people.

Maybe I misjudge how many favors bureaucracies are willing to do for one another.

Or perhaps the higher-ups in the NSA are true believers in the drug war. I guess I'm not and I assume people in the NSA wouldn't be either.

That said, I think I've made it abundantly clear that nobody should listen to my speculations.
You should restate the main point of the article and then explain why the top comment is a quibble about an unrelated detail. If the readers aren't as knowledgeable as yourself, then you have an opportunity to change that rather than complain about it.
It's quite obvious that the child porn aspect of the case is just an excuse to take down/tap what was probably a communication hub for all sorts of fun stuff the NSA would like to hear about.
The cover is not replaceable, so once youve made the design, thats it.

(you could still get a case that covers the back i spose)
I think the issue is that we disagree, probably very very strongly, about the relative likelihood of vulnerabilities in Google Mail versus vulnerabilities in any other mail service provider.

It's O.K. to disagree! We don't have to agree on anything, let alone this. Just know that my opinion is a professional one in this specific case. There are extremely smart people working on Google Mail's security, and on the security of every component in the stack that Google Mail depends on, and that is an arrangement (in both degree and kind) that is pretty much unique to Google Mail.
Add Social Sharing Links to your Blog without widget JavaScript
I'm a UW grad as well working for another behemoth of a software company.

We have the same common evils of legacy software where weeks are spent triaging bugs and shipping stable code.

But I guess what I dislike the most is the stack ranking system.

Do all large software shops have stack ranking?
I ask HN this as I'll honestly skip any company now that uses stack ranking as a measure of performance.

Not sure about the rest of you but I find it to be incredibly detrimental to team work, people start hoarding techniques and skills in order to get ahead. The bus factor of the team shoots up. The work place environment just feels adversarial. Its just quite sickening, but maybe I'm just very naive.
It's almost like Linkedin is complete and absolute garbage in general. Almost like it was a venereal disease that no one asked for nor wanted, more than an actual website.
Isn't YC moving into a new building? cue dramatic music

Edit: Now I remember where I read that: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/332975930962239488
awesome. thanks again for reminding us!
I'm thankful for Steve's wisdom. I know that it's not a popular stance but let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
It baffles me how people are not puzzled how the "extra virgin" olive oil they use doesn't taste anything like olives. I mean, c'mon people, have you never tasted olives? How do you expect the "unadulterated" extract to have none of that flavor at all?
If you want a quick start without taking a class, install the Apache Mahout project - one of the Hadoop map-reduce examples is a recommendation system. You can hack away, and run on Elastic MapReduce if you need to scale. (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Recommend...)