skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the person who replied quoting the Economist about democracy in Japan, then deleted their comment - thanks for the link. Well yes, on a superficial level, I suppose democracy is kind of healthy in Japan. It sort of misses the point though.

Japanese Govt, like that in Singapore and South Korea, is characterised by the extreme strengths of their bureaucracies. It would be fair to say that the Japanese Diet, their government, is basically a peer to the JR railway company or MOFA. Imagine if in the USG, all the departments basically operated at the level of the DoD or Dept of State - frankly at the same level as congress. Congress can declare war on the DoD, sure, but would only do so under the most dire circumstances. In practise they cooperate.

Well, in Japan, that's how it is. Basically, the government could probably, if it came down to it, fire the heads of the bureaucracies, but it won't come to that and never has. They are peers for all practical purposes. They are like competing departments in a large corporation. You might think that is a recipe for wastefulness and corruption, and you would be absolutely right, but in a crazy sort of way they keep each other honest, somewhat, and it's better than Fox News making all your decisions.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not some fanatical Japanophile - I don't even live there anymore. But man, at least they can get at least some stuff done. In the west we could not even dream of having a 50-year high speed rail plan. Just think about that. What does that say about us? Look, we're not a dystopia, but we're still basically coasting on past success. The car is still moving, but it's slowing down. Maybe we ran out of gas, or maybe we're so caught up in fight about which way to drive we can't even put our foot on the accelerator.

Corporations that lose the ability to invest in or even think about the long term go out of business. I don't believe countries are any different. We are going to have to change, radically, or we'll simply be taken over - it's only a matter of time.
They're still at it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6217742 just had its title changed, as has https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6217968 (which lost the interesting $12m hook to boot).

This is doubly frustrating: it's a stupid policy, and when the changes are this significant it makes me re-read links I've already read. Argh.
Ink (YC S12) Releases New iOS Layer That Allows Apps to Interact, Share Data
The article is spot on when it observes the strong correlation between effective lawyers and sociopathic personalities.
On surface, 1500 bucks seems very expensive. But if I had 1500 private repos (supposedly that means 1500 or little bit less clients) I'm making so much money that 1500 bucks/month looks very cheap. And still much cheaper than paying for full time sys admin (which doesn't mean that you don't employ one or several).

Having said that, personally, I prefer BitBucket pricing scheme where I can have unlimited private repos and paying per number of users.
The high cost aside, which can make sense up to a point because it saves on operations costs at small scales, the other big problem with the cloud is that for many types of applications the virtualization, storage and network topology destroys the performance. Some types of server engines in particular do not play well with these cloud environments and it is not a defect in the server engine design.

This is the main reason we stopped using the cloud and built our own server infrastructure. We could get 2-3x performance out of the same hardware simply by taking control of the physical machines and the network topology. The combined performance loss and high markup made it difficult to justify the cloud price performance relative to our own clusters.

There is no panacea for infrastructure. Every company needs to consider their own requirements.
- Raising awareness of self-hosted alternatives

- Getting people to use BB instead

- Fake DDOS to get more companies to pay for github:enterprise

- Preventing a system upgrade in a company which has deployment relying on github

There are lots of potential ways to use it...
Every Second on the Internet
They got into an utterly pointless fight with Sparkfun Electronics[1] which took some minor Streislanding by The Internet to resolve.

I suspect even in-house legal depts think in terms of billable hours...

[1] https://www.sparkfun.com/news/300
On the contrary, the agency I work at now is almost purely a development agency. We usually get freelancers in to handle design, but I will pick up Photoshop whenever I can to do very basic things, such as to mock-up a form change.

However, I've worked with enough designers to know that even though I can create a design, that I am no designer, and that it would be offensive to a real designers ability for me to compare myself with them. I can cook a mean steak, but I'm no Gordon Ramsey.

I agree entirely that all designers should learn to handle basic code, and vice versa. In fact, any agency I've worked at has worked similarly, and was very keen to get each "side" working collaboratively and learning how the other half lives. It's a necessary part of getting an agency working in the same direction. However, putting a designer in front of an IDE doesn't make them a developer by title.
One big app I know that used Parse was Band Of The Day. It was featured on the iOS App Store prominently and was ranked very high in the charts.
Could someone people explain the appeal of Stripe? The APIs are nice, but so a most other payment providers.

The fee Stripe charges are pretty high. We would never agree to a percentage of the sale, only a fixed price. The fact that you can't change who process you credit card payments (can you?) excludes you from getting any good deals on fees. If you shop around you can save a lot of money.

Honestly getting a merchant account, if that's the excuse for using Stripe, isn't that hard.
Electronic Cash Kings
Not to draw comparisons, but there's another rather large YC company that drew the same early critique
Given that Russia appears to be engaged in even broader surveillance and monitoring than the U.S., I find it odd that Snowden would be granted temporary asylum there for speaking out about a similar program in the U.S. It makes the whole situation look more like a political game.
It could be to cause a failure in an ancillary github service that results in opening up a new attack vector which could then allow the attackers to steal code from private repos.
I think she's a he.
The "excess capacity" is a pure myth.
When AWS started, it was using a set of Data Centers which had nothing to do with Amazon.com (the Retail part of it).
Now Amazon.com is just another (big) customer of AWS.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
They didn't pursue it further because they knew that they had no chance of prevailing in court: a trademark for a soft drink doesn't extend into a totally different domain, like books. If he would have replied "go ahead and sue me, you assholes", they would have reacted exactly the same way. Just like many of today's copyright trolls, Coca Cola was trying to intimidate Grove Press into capitulating without ever intending to take the matter to court.
I expect better writing from MIT Technology Review than to say something as vague as "stronger than diamond". I assume that they mean tensile strength, but it's important to actually say that.
TF2 is about soldiers repeatedly fighting over pieces of land. Not very "feminine".
She's a he.
The article brings up a great point. This tool is so esencial I wonder why is it that Apple and Android have not made this natively much simpler. Seems like a great venture to be a part of.
Fear not, truth is severely undervalued. If you want points tell feel good lies.
Without looking at it too closely, there's no synchronization on the point. The synchronized this (with an empty block - wtf -- that's meaningless) has nothing to do with the point...so the point is possibly stale. I haven't assessed the logic more than that to see if that's a possible state that would program exit, but it's the first thing I noticed. Also, this program, as others have pointed out, is weirdly complex -- and that's a euphemism.
I'm always amazed by how confidently people can propose a hiring "rule" or even guideline.

The article pays lip service to the fact "There's no way to A/B test hiring decisions" but then goes on to describe a handful of rules to "build an effective organization, regardless of size or resources." The thing is, there's no evidence that these are effective and definitely none to suggest they're generalizable to organizations of every size. There's an appeal to the author's authority as an Amazon VP (admittedly a hell of a credential), but that's not evidence of effectiveness.

The fact is, hiring is tough to learn. It's made especially difficult because your feedback comes at least 6 months after you make the decision. I've had the good fortune to be in an organization which grew from ~10 employees this time last year to ~80 now, so I've gotten to see how a few dozen hires panned out in a short period of time. I learned a lot through that. Even so, as a professional data geek, I couldn't say with a straight face that I "know" anything about hiring. I do my best day in and day out, but saying you've got hiring all figured out is the professional equivalent of knowing "What (wo)men want." It's a sign of confidence, but not necessarily knowledge.

Don't get me wrong, in the absence of quality data, I'll take the wise words of someone who has been there and done that. But I'd much rather some empirical proof or at least some "YMMV" humility from those who purport to know.
#define if(x) if ((x) && (rand() < RAND_MAX * 0.99))

its pretty awesome. I'm a fan of:

#define == =
Achieving commercial success often means managing delivery as well, but saying the two roles are equivalent is a mistake.

Someone who is a true product manager, can usually pickup project management duties. The inverse is not true. I have seen many times someone with a project management background trying to get into product management without shifting the attitude or thinking the two are one and the same, only to drive developers nuts and fail to deliver good products.
The comments at the bottom of the page are pretty funny.
Fine tuned maybe, but with the goal of "stay alive just about long enough to be useful", we're pretty awfully constructed. For example, we need ultraviolet light to not get rickets but it can also give us cancer. Our fine-tuned digestive tract contains an organ which occasionally bursts. My wisdom teeth have decided that they'd rather grow forwards than up.

Evolution gets you to functional, it doesn't get you to "good".

To suggest that what we've been doing in the past is optimal seems ridiculous to me. I'm not saying I think this gruel is a good idea, but the argument "it's not natural" holds no weight.
If the 451 code is returned by the web server because the site got a DMCA request, then HTTPS doesn't matter because the destination web server already decrypted the session to find the request that you're making before returning the code.
Does the law even need to be changed though? Their duty is to pursue non-licensed use of their trademark. Could they not grant the innocent book seller in this case a non-transferable license for a specific purpose for a paltry sum?

They would then reserve the right to pursue non-licensed infringement of the trademark.
In the old days of large civilizations, unpaid slaves did work. Then paid workers did work. Then unpaid machines did work..
So you'd expect a designer to be able to write concise mark-up that works on all required browsers, works well on modern mobile devices and writes clean code? If so, I'd like to meet someone that fits this description.

Yes I would - it's not rocket science, though I'm not really interested in satisfying your demands for internet proof, sorry. If I were hiring a web designer I'd prefer one who was familiar with HTML and used it to design up to final templates over one who didn't, though of course I'm sure there'd be exceptions - there's no need for dogmatism about what makes a good designer.

Specialisation also has drawbacks, and it's quite possible to be a bad specialist, just as it's possible to be a mediocre generalist. That doesn't mean that all generalists are incapable of producing clean HTML or good code, or that good designer means that they don't do development, and they stick to photoshop.
On 04/22/2013 01:21 PM, Richard Cleis wrote:
> Recently I used it for estimating orientation parameters of
> telescopes. Inputs are the locations of stars, outputs are telescope
> coordinates, parameters describe the relationship of axes to each other
> and to the earth.

http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2013-April/057487...
Well, I think the designers of SIOP were fond of tripods. ;)

Two legs is obviously less secure than three, and we don't have a fourth because we haven't developed a fourth technology for delivering nuclear weapons.
Firebase Leaves Beta Today
> but they are usually told about it.

Ummm, no. If so, why would they persist in posting using their hellbanned accounts.

In any case, there are numerous threads where people have said that they had no idea they were hellbanned.
Uhh, did you even click the link?
The worst is ending a dispute by saying "Thank you for understanding."
Maybe the tone was a little off-the-cuff, but mjolk has a valid point. You can't implement the idea without some sort of coding. Design alone doesn't cut it, and I say that as someone that has a lot of respect for designers.
I'm trying to think of someone, other than Netflix, that has weathered cloud outages, and even THEY frequently have to deal with the weight of supporting a cloud topology. How many times has AWS's provisioning fabric gone out?
> A short time ago, i decided to try and build an API that would try to guess the gender of a first name.

Obviously you need to run a test that uses a list of real people's names and genders to measure the method's accuracy. But remember the following points:

* People might resent any effort to pin down their gender in a commercial or advertising context.

* The negative outcome for a gender misidentification may be much greater than the positive outcome for a correct one.

* Gender-neutral names are becoming increasingly fashionable among well-educated parents, i.e. people who have money.

On that basis and in my opinion, unless you can get above 90% accuracy, it's not worth doing.

Some popular gender-neutral names:

http://www.babynames1000.com/gender-neutral/

http://thestir.cafemom.com/pregnancy/157282/25_best_genderne...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name#English

A quote: "Unisex names have been enjoying a decent amount of popularity in English speaking countries in the past several decades."
see additional discussion on the other HN topic here, including comments from one of the founders

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218991
> It depends on what kind of socialist you're talking about, and at what scale. For example, the Mondragon corporation is a form of socialism

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

At the smaller scale; Intriguing stuff, but from reading this it sounds a whole lot like just another company with an interesting incentive scheme for employees and shareholders? From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant rather than some top down re-organisation of the entire market system itself.

On the subject of revolutionary catalonia, it sure does sound more like what my initial perception of socialism really is, people being forcibly compelled to toe the communist party line with threats of death, ad et al. Against that backdrop I suppose it is unsurprising that the anarchists and communists were squabbling, and this is what I was aiming at with my initial criticism of socialism as a necessarily "political" entity rather than just another voluntary participant subject to the same market forces as all the other voluntary participants. And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition and also the negative externalities of being focused on politics rather than actual material results.

> workers run things rather than capitalists.

Doesn't that once again reduce to "workers control the means of production" and then you're left with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property and all the political nonsense that goes along with that, munging the entire thing once again at scale into a necessarily authoritarian and political entity?
We already have redundancy - since git is distributed, Github going down does not impact our development or deployment.

Github provides a great user experience for discussion and managing branches/pull requests. Issue tracking is usable enough that some companies find it sufficient.

The cost is literally unnoticeable for pretty much any company.

"Many" service outages is an exaggeration, I think. It's just selection bias - if you don't use github, and the only time you hear about it is when they get attacked, you'll have an impression that they are under constant attack.

For the companies I have worked at, in short, there was no downside, and decent upside to using it.
Names matter, and you often wind up stuck with the one you started with. There's tons of examples of companies that found themselves there, and that's where you start getting acronyms ala HP, AMD, TI, AT&T, etc.

That said, names don't matter more than your product. Pick a good name, but remember to put your products first...
I'll comment here as well, the other one seemed to have gotten bumped
Actually, AFAIK, Stripe will export your card data to any other provider, if you ask them to.
Moving SSH to a different port does nothing if your system is being specifically targeted, but it stops 99% of drive-by bots. Not that they do much anyway but it at least stops them from showing up in your logs.
"Social Media Engagement for Dummies" Co-Authors Q&A
My sarcasm meter must've been on the fritz at the time.
In less technical language, "creation of the object is not atomic". You could switch threads in the middle of the creation.

Also, "reading of the data is not atomic" - you can switch threads in the middle of reading the data.

In order to program THREADED CODE sanely with that in mind, you need to minimize the amount of shared data, and be sure to lock / synchronize around the writing AND READING of any shared data.

If you're not writing threaded code then there is no shared data, and you don't care about these rules. Writing threaded code isn't like dusting crops, but it's not impossible.

EDIT: you also said "the println statement [...] is synchronized" but it doesn't look like that's true - there's nothing in the synchronized(this) {} block, and even if there was, all it would do is keep "this" from entering that block twice; it has no effect on other threads in this code.
There are services that specialize in handling DDOS attacks with distributed data centers and large pipes. It is very hard to do it on a shared infrastructure (e.g. AWS) w/o affecting other customers thus hosting providers will be more interested in protecting other clients.
This is pretty cool - nice work! Can't say I've seen a trie-based construction like this, but it's clever and looks like a near-perfect fit.
True. And my belief is that "successful" "happy" and "satisfied" are all things which she wants to signal (just like most of non-"sociopaths"). So using her testimony as evidence for living her lifestyle is silly.
Well, the Avenger/Predator drones can't engage in A2A combat; they lack radar for tracking and targeting another aircraft. They could use an infrared missile like the AIM9, but that is often cued via radar as well. Plus, the Predators maneuver like crap. I don't have the specs at hand, but I think they're g limited to under 3g. A single F-35 would have no trouble defeating 10 Predators.
>It might be possible to argue though, that its too big to succeed

On the one hand it's already succeeded - second largest economy in the world and all that.

But from an economic development point of view, that's a very interesting question. Can China solve its development problems, which are numerous - development of the entire country not just the 30% of the population on the coast, governance of that unprecedented mass of people, and rapidly ramping environmental problems?
If you have a situation, which I believe we do now, where the number of engineers who fit the "best and brightest" category as defined by the companies looking is less than the number required by these companies, somebody is going to have to either "settle" or work with a hole. It will also make some of these engineers overpaid. I don't see how this benefits your company. Yes, in this system some companies will be "winners" in the sense that they get an awesome team for a good price, but most will lose. I would not be surprised if the high rate of failure in the startup community is related to this.

For the record, I do not see hiring the "best available" as settling unless they do not meet some minimum requirements of the business. The purpose of hiring people is to help execute a product, service, or whatever else your business is trying to make money off of. Anyone who can increase your chances of succeeding or increase your level of success is a good hire. Yes, that includes looking at intangibles like team and culture fit, work ethic, etc. But this person does not need to be the "best" to provide this boost to your business. In fact, it is effectively impossible to hire the best, because there will always be someone better.
Google is Either Lying to The Court or to The Public
See also the small cafe "Harrods" which faced legal action from the well known English shop "Harrods".

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otorohanga)

> In 1986, the town briefly changed its name to "Harrodsville". This was a protest in support of a restaurateur, Henry Harrod of Palmerston North, who was being forced to change the name of his restaurant following threatening lawsuits from Mohammed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrod's department store in London.

> As a show of solidarity for Henry Harrod and in anticipation of actions against other similar sounding businesses, it was proposed that every business in Otorohanga should change its name to "Harrods". With support of the District Council, Otorohanga temporarily changed the town's name to Harrodsville.
Not as disturbing as finding this attitude in hospital construction projects.
man git-daemon #ftfy
True, but the article is talking about a startup building from scratch.
I wonder if this would have been as effective today. In 1970 this communication was delivered and responded to via regular mail. So this correspondence likely took a week or more for the round trip, which doesn't require, but does I think encourage a more deliberate thoughtful approach to these kind of discussions.

Today this communication might be delivered via email or some other near instantaneous form of communication which I think it more likely to lead to escalation. It's so easy to respond without thoroughly considering your response. While it certainly isn't prudent to act emotionally with legal matters, that certainly doesn't mean that people don't do it.

I guess I just think it's interesting how technology has in some ways gotten ahead of people in terms of having healthy social interactions with other people.
It's always a good sign when the sentiment shared is "why didn't I think of that?" I agree Apple should've created something like this, but I'm glad their inaction has benefited an innovative crew. Go Ink!
Return to base automatically didn't work so well for the drone the Iranians managed to capture.

Drones seem sexy and safe, but I'd be very surprised if we didn't keep pilots in the plane for a long time.