skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like background noise when I work, as long as it's nothing that I can focus on.

Just the wind blowing, birds making noises outside, or the clinking and chatter at a cafe. I find that I work about 50% faster in those environments.

When there's dead silence or music I am much slower and more easily distracted. Also far less creative for some reason.
Erase Yourself From the Internet
The secret to opening a store in China? Find a good landlord – Interview
But my point is still this. All of the new computing areas are ones that were big areas of development when I was there. Yet Microsoft still can't produce a product in these areas that people want to buy.

I think you are right that it goes to predatory behavior, but I think there is another aspect too. There is very little groundbreaking work in UI paradigms to come out of Microsoft. They didn't invent the WIMP approach. They did manage to invent Bob.... But it means that they had no expertise in the things that were needed to catch the trends they were trying to ride.

It took Apple to develop a really good touchscreen interface.

So I keep coming back to problems of execution. Yeah. Outlook(TM) not so good ;-)
Facebook was reported to be working on arm servers THREE YEARS AGO. http://semiaccurate.com/2010/08/23/facebook-first-jump-arm-s...

Also some reporting on Calxeda, who is ostensibly working on ARM servers: http://semiaccurate.com/2013/01/16/facebook-goes-arm-with-ca...
The strongest complaint you can make is presumably "I wouldn't have come if I knew a team like this could enter and even win, and I won't come to your next one, and I will be sure to let others know that I won't come and why". Saying it publicly with all the other entrants around lets others join in if this is something that is widely regarded as unpopular and lets the organisers know that there is some serious resentment. Not complaining at all is certainly one way to make sure nothing will be done.

I mean, nobody here can even say "wow, I won't go to their next one!" because you haven't even named them.
I find scrapy (python) to be more robust for large scale scraping. There are cases where you want/need the javascript action and that's when you need a real browser. Otherwise the rendering would just slow things down.
What network should I use to sign up. Cause...
If god came down out of heaven and told you you could only read a single programming book, that would be among the top five choices and arguably the #1 choice. Dense but well written, teaches you how to think.

And for someone new to programming, it's worth reading Paul Graham's explanation of the value of Lisp [1] if you haven't already.

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
I'm active in our area's Startup Weekend community, and we try to stamp out the pre-fab work ahead of time. We've never had a funded project come through before, but I know we wouldn't allow it.

I'm also the organizer of a local civic hackathon, where we have one caveat: Feel free to continue work on the project you started at our last hackathon. I'm curious how many will, or how many will start from scratch.
Grass is always greener on the other side. Living in Hong Kong right now I do miss living in a detached house in suburban Melbourne. A lot.

And no, we rarely see anyone else in the hallway, and even when we do we don't say hi to each other.
Borges is "hard" because of his ideas of the infinite, time and so on, not because it's hard to understand what he writes. His Spanish is quite plain and easy to follow. That doesn't mean one understands completely the message.

I don't think any native Spanish speaker would have trouble understanding what he writes.
I think what we can achieve with cryptography is to force the government to use proper courts and due process instead of mass surveillance.

I don't know why war metaphors are used for everything since 9/11. The Maginot Line is completely irrelevant, because this is not a war where one party wins and one loses. It's a complex and ongoing political and social process.

We can use technology to make long standing legal principles more effective and their violation more visible.
I went to my first hackathon a few weeks ago and it was very skeevy with all the idea people floating around looking for folks to build their idea for free while they watch.

Hackathons would be fun if it was all about everyone building what ever and having a good time instead a lot of them seem building a business focused.
Having used GC enabled systems languages already in the 90's, I am the opinion it is more a generation issue.

Technology changes fast, but humans take generations to be convinced of something.

Sometimes the only way for something to get adopted is when the luddites no longer have a word to say.
I'm currently involved in a crowdfunding startup, and Bitcoin support is in our icebox, but hasn't risen due to the usual various competing pressures any project has.

Posts like this help chance that balance of pressures and raise the importance of supporting Bitcoin.
> But they are not enforced loyalty.

I think you are playing with words. The government expects you to pay your taxes. It is counting on your money. On your loyalty to feed them constantly, until you die (and even after, actually). Since people don't wait until guys with guns and uniforms come to their door to pay their taxes, I would say everyone is pretty loyal to the State and do not wait for threats to comply. If that's not loyalty, then I don't know how you call it. And many citizens do think taxes (no matter the amount) are a GOOD thing, and will defend the Right of the State to steal your money in a significant manner. Isn't that loyalty ?
I use ubuntu for ARM everyday for 2 years already. There are 30k linux packages available for ARM. All of them installed via "apt-get install ...." I have not encounter an opensource package where I can't build from source for ARM. If you are just looking at console, vnc sessions, there are no different between ARM and x86 server, IMHO.
You can feel proud to be part of the American people, the American nation, and proud of certain long-standing American values.

At you can, at the same time, be completely critical of certain aspects of US domestic and foreign policy -- and even certain aspects of US culture.
New report: NSA tapped into UN video conferences
Are there any plans to connect up to an SF mesh? I could see setting up some backbones across the bay, but I'm not sure what the technicalities are around this.
My understanding:

Situational irony involves expected outcomes, not just expectations. So, rain on your wedding day? That's not an outcome- you didn't cause the rain! Now on the other hand, if your boss tries to fire you and winds up fired himself instead of you, that would be situational irony, because the result of his actions are opposite what he expected.
Happened to me at two Microsoft events in Boston for Windows 8 and another one for Windows Phone 8.
Marissa Mayer Biography
If you live in Seattle and you're curious about mesh networking, I highly recommend checking out http://seattlewireless.net/

They've been at it since 2000, have various nodes throughout the city and some impressive long distance directional links. (Seattle's topography provides some interesting challenges.) When I lived there in about 2005 there were regular wireless hack nights. Find Matt Westervelt or Rob Flickenger.
“It’s not what Zune knows, but how Zune thinks,” stuck with Mayer as a sort of personal guiding proverb.
I've seen it happen on rare occasion when the original submission was content-free blogspam.
"U.S. says Iraq used nerve gas against Iran" -- March 30, 1984

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=cOEbAAAAIBAJ&pg=3398,80...

"Iraq May Get U.S. Aid To Prevent Iran Victory" -- May 21, 1984

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=xcQ_AAAAIBAJ&pg=2897,26...

Not much of a secret indeed.
Hmm, I thought the "they hate our freedom" line was from the "Axis of Evil" speech. Looks like I remembered wrong.
The darkest cynic in me says, competing fairly is for losers. Literally, not figuratively.
Thanks for sharing your experience with Firefox OS.
Ballmer's biggest mistake was killing Windows Mobile 7. Microsoft had a huge lead with Windows Mobile 5 in 2005; a decent OS with decent hardware and a huge app ecosystem. Leaked WM7 screenshots show that it would have been competitive with the iPhone if it had been released in 2007-08 as originally planned (http://pocketnow.com/smartphone-news/windows-mobile-7-exclus...). But they inexplicably killed the project and let Apple conquer the world. Microsoft didn't respond until 2011 with Windows Phone, which was a new OS written from scratch.
Go for Python Hackers
If he finally decided to take a flight because the plane proclaimed to be uncrashable, then it would be pretty ironic, no?
You're right, and I wish we had. Instead we were just sort of stunned by the underwhelming ending and the crowd filtered out very quickly (there was no "drinkathon", we were all too tired). It was Angelhack - I suppose, by the name, we should have known that investability comes first, hacking second.

Our team was tired out after all-night coding and really didn't possess the mental finesse at the time to walk the fine line between arguing "the results don't fit the spirit of the event" and "we are sore losers".
Those interested in the history of Yahoo's rather complex corporate governance issues should check out this HBS case (I assume this link has distribution rights; I'm not supposed to distribute my copy):

http://www.thedecisiongroup.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Ca...

That's a quick overview with some more quantitative data on how the whole thing went down. It shows you what one man can do with 5% of a company.
"Forgettable" is an ironic slap for the generation this flick defined…
Maybe if the person who planned it ever said something to the effect of, "We will never host our Thanksgiving dinner the day after Thanksgiving. That would just be absurd!"
hackers shouldn't go to a hackathons .. they should go to hack club.

the first rule of hack club is, you do not spea ...oh crap.
Having an open wifi should leave you free of any charges in the same way that an ISP is. Maybe it should be not culpable modulo keeping logs of everything for up to three months so that law enforcement can attempt to find anyone committing a crime once they have a warrant.
bell curve, nothing new
If you have type inference, this is usually not a problem. Also, it is much easier to parse, both for humans and compilers. Rust uses the former way, and it's extremely readable.

Even Herb Sutter, of C++ fame agrees:

> One of the things Go does that I would love C++ to do is a complete left-to-right declaration syntax. That is a good thing because the left-to-right makes you end up in a place where you have no ambiguities, you can read your code in a more strait-forward way, which also makes it more toolable.

(6:00) http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Herb-Sutter-C-Ques...
> Is it ironic that complaining about Facebook on Facebook is not ironic?

Only if you had just come into this knowledge for the first time, and only up until now having believed that complaining about Facebook on Facebook is the epitome of irony.
I actually appreciate that article. Yes, it is written a little heavy handedly, but the point is sound. Sure, there are some smart/informed people who knew the actual power of the gov't to snoop, but by and large the "carbon copy" metaphor is dead on.

Even here on Hacker News recently, there was an article about how the entire US nuclear armament is run through ancient computers and we chuckle. "Ha ha, you gov't people are stuck in the stone ages".

Of course, they let us laugh.
But that's the ENTIRE residential development block - NOT a single building as denoted in the original post. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Stu...
Exoclick | Join advertising network that pays weekly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi
I hate front lawns. With a passion. But, guess what, I had to fall in line and make mine "pretty", put in some sod and match the rest of the neighborhood. For now I have the greenest and neatest front lawn on the block.

Why? We have a culture where you lose value if you adopt arid climate landscape when people expect grass and flowers and that's what everything around you looks like. We had a nice arid climate front yard with rocks and plants that required zero water and maintenance. We refinanced and the bank actually objected to the look of the house. They said it looked unkept. Unbelievable. The arid landscaping cost me thousands. It just didn't match the rest of the homes on our street. So the friggin sod had to come in.

I find it beyond moronic that we are actually throwing water at the ground to grow grass. Then we come back a couple of times a month and use gasoline to cut, trim and blow it clean. The only thing worst is owning a swimming pool.

I refuse to be a weekend lawn-mower monkey. I've never had any interest in that and never will. I'd rather be doing a million other things than pushing a mower on a pointless patch of grass. Yup, that means we now have a gardener with the dreaded gas powered leaf-blower, mower and trimmer. I am not proud of this at all.

So, here's the plan: I planted fruit trees right smack in the middle of the lawn areas. Once they grow beyond a certain size they'll kill-off most of the grass. That's when I go back to practical landscaping. And, of course, I'll be producing some fruit as well which is neat.

If I absolutely have to I am going with plastic grass in the front and will learn to love it.

The back of the house is now 100% concrete, soon to be covered with solar panels for both shade and off-grid power. Great for entertaining and hanging out. Our local parks have plenty of grass if we feel the need.

My gardener is a few months away from being out of a job. I wish more people would wake up and realize what they are doing.
What's the context to this? It doesn't make sense to me in relation to the article, but maybe I'm missing something.
>This will not let you install privileged apps though since they have to be reviewed.

so even Firefox OS is a walled garden? Telcos controlled what can be on your phone, Apple was able to wrestle them and overtake that control - control means money. Google follows the suit, forcing their in-app billing etc... Why would Mozilla support that ugly ancient "tradition"?
What is the argument for utf-8 that doesn't also apply to utf-16, depending on what your common characters are? Applications that use Asian languages take a big hit from utf-8.
Improving Collaboration in Agile Projects with Retrospective of Retrospectives
Dear Marissa Mayer,Please support https
Redirecting to http://www.yahoo.com/?s=https is not supporting https.
When did RC planes and quadcopters become "drones"? They're nothing like the gas-powered, satellite-guided military drones.
I find this to be a strange sentiment and it certainly makes for strange bed fellows. The "love it or leave it" line was also a common refrain from the John Birch crowd and other reactionary groups during the 60s.

I think the US is a better place because of people like Mary Harris Jones and Joe Hill or Dr. King and Rep. Lewis. If they (and countless others) had adopted your philosophy things would be much worse for people living in the US who lacked the financial mobility to emigrate to another country.[1] If you think the US is on the wrong path now imagine how much worse the situation would be if the only people left were individuals who supported all of the policies and programs you find so heinous.

Can you imagine how much worse life would be for some people in South Africa if Nelson Mandela said "screw it, I am out of here"?

[1] I did not want to belabor the point anymore but suffice it to say I think there is a serious "class/privilege problem" with this philosophy.
My reasoning is this:

- It would be ironic to complain about a less famously terrible social network on said social network

- It wouldn't be ironic with Facebook because it's popular opinion that Facebook is terrible and that its users are prone to complaining on Facebook

- It would be ironic that it's not ironic to complain on Facebook about Facebook on Facebook because complaining about X social network on X social network would be ironic
PG: Is this going down this year?
"Don't go out of your way to optimize prematurely" does not mean "architect your software in the opposite direction to industry common sense". "We will optimize later if needed" does not work at architecture level. That's why you prototype before committing yourself.
One of the ways that British English and US English differ seems to be in the intentionality of 'irony'. In US English, it's perfectly acceptable for an intended situation to be ironic: "I put on a t-shirt with an ironic slogan, before heading out for coffee". In British English, the mere act of intending the result means that the result is expected... and therefore not ironic.

I first realised this when I heard some Americans say of a photo "The photographer has positioned the model's foot ironically". This phrase does not really scan in British English because the photographer intended the effect.

Note also that intention is different to awareness - the War on Drugs is intended to reduce crime, but a law enforcement participant can be fully aware of the irony that it actually increases crime. It remains ironic because it's not intended to increase crime, but to reduce it.

This differentiation is not something I've seen in the definitions, but something I've observed from usage. It seems also that a lot of people use 'irony' as a term when they should be using 'sarcasm'.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442244
Nah. She just screwed up and that's a post facto explanation for it.
Hackathons are events where ideas are born and are quickly laid to rest. I'm glad there's some encouragement to work on existing projects, especially on projects that have a civic focus.
> After years of living in a small house in Hong Kong’s countryside...

Hong Kong has countryside?!?
I don't think forcing potential users to compile a program is going lower the barrier much. A lot of the users could be biologists and they would likely not know how to compile the source. I do agree that the software should be open source.
Ask HN: Why did the BEEP protocol never get much traction?
I've always wondered why the BEEP protocol never did get much traction. It seems like a very well thought out specification (RFC-3080 / RFC-3081)
The term hack and its derivatives are trite. People use them because they perk ears. In Dallas, I've attended events where first place won with a 'business plan' consisting of buzzword-laden management-speak and a clever whiteboard diagram. This is a product of the community; the culture here is business-oriented.

A solution is to set expectations on having a good time and socializing, or not to attend. Instead, you may more satisfaction from working on real projects that survive the weekend. At a hackathon, or any event in general, you serve the host's purpose. Their game, their rules.
there are no surrogates in utf-8. that alone is reason to use it over utf-16
Also, let's face it. It's very difficult to reason about the interior of a building from pictures of its exterior. Who knows how nice these apartments are? I grant that many of them are not probably up to the standards Americans are used to, but the mildew from the tropical climate and various other factors conspire to make things look worse than they are, I bet.
i assure you, from personal experience, you are right that it's unpleasant to live in these conditions. and whatever hallway interactions you have with neighbors is either unpleasant, or neutral (as in, you smile and move on, no conversation).

and if you're used to living in a nice house in a suburban neighborhood, imagine a 3-bedroom apartment squeezed into a space that's approximately your living room. i once lived in one of these apartments, and the kitchen is literally only big enough for one person to stand inside and the bedrooms are basically dorm rooms. unless you're very wealthy, then you might be able to live in an apartment or condo that's actually spacious and nice but then you'd be looking to pay a ridiculous amount of rent money.
Whenever there's a significant monetary incentive to win any competition, there will always be participants who will do anything to win.
If you wanted to start a mesh network in your town, is there advice on how to protect yourself from legal liability in case someone does something clearly illegal with it?

Do mesh operators have the same "safe harbor" protections?

What if the FBI shows up on your doorstep and says "give us access or go to prison" ?
Loneliness is killing us, and now noise? What fragile creatures we are, how unfit and utterly unprepared for this world!

While Schopenhauer makes a great anecdote, I think the reality is some people think better with silence, and others think better with background noise. I think recorded music in particular has ushered in an age where productive thinking can even be enhanced through "noise" rather than diminished.

"Every time a siren shrieks on the street, our conscious minds might ignore it, but other brain regions behave as if that siren were a predator barreling straight for us. Given how many sirens city dwellers are subject to over the course of an average day, and the attention-fracturing tension induced by loud sounds of every sort, it’s easy to see how sensitivity to noise, once an early warning system for approaching threats, has become a threat in itself."

I see this come up over and over in these types of articles, on adrenal response to stimulus, like noise or driving or even conflict in the workplace. I think this is an extremely primitive way of thinking about the human brain. Yes, hearing evolved to be sensitive due to natural selection. Over-reacting to non-threatening stimulus? Hardly. The brain is not static. We are, in fact, highly adaptable to our environment. And I don't see any evidence suggesting a modern din is snuffing out our intellect.
Yes, Windows 8 has "evolved" to the level of Windows 3.1 - "it's great once add third party customization X"
Don't use bcrypt (2012)
So what is the "fair market value" of a mortgage? Consider that immediately on sale, the mortgage contract was bundled by the bank and sold as part of a bundle of similar mortgages, and the bundle has perhaps been split, recombined, and resold multiple times since, its relationship to the actual real property has become somewhat tenuous -- or rather, even more tenuous than it was when it was created in an inflated market.

So what's the "fair market value" of that piece of paper? You assume it "is on track to be repaid" but that is a highly optimistic evaluation. The note represents a net future value of payments multiplied by a probability P that it _will_ be repaid. P is considerably less than 1.0 for a note whose face value is more than the present value of the property, and it shrinks every time another house in the same neighborhood is foreclosed or abandoned. At best the value of the note is the sale value of the foreclosed home (less the not inconsiderable costs of performing a foreclosure and prepping the property for resale) -- and the sale value of an abandoned foreclosed house in a city full foreclosed houses is a fraction of the original purchase price.

Frankly if Wells Fargo can get $150K for a $200K mortgage in Richmond, they ought to take the money and run.
Relevant (and recent) tweet from John Carmack: "I wonder how much of the annoying sound of leaf blowers is fundamental to the high velocity airstream,and how much could be engineered away."
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/369487626035675136