skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could someone still buy some Teslas, leave them in the lot, then sell them on Craigslist?
I like that their minutes are irc logs

http://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/IrcLogs/
Very cute.

I am not familiar with all of those, but hydrochloric acid, ethylene glycol, and isopropyl alcohol will decompose to basic elements within days if not hours.

The are only dangerous if you actually ate the concentrated solution. Put them in the ground, and they'll be harmless within days - really, days - hours even for some of them.

I looked up the other two.

Polyacrylamide is used in water treatment. Yes, the water you drink, and it's used in soft contact lenses, and mixed into soil on farms. The concern is from the potential 0.05% contamination, and in the small amounts used, plus the dilution underground 0.05% is nothing.

Oh, and on top of that acrylamide decomposes rapidly in soil so there will be none left by the time it reaches the surface.

I looked up glutaraldehyde and it decomposes within 48 hours in the presence of oxygen, and 24 hours to a week without oxygen.

I guess I should thank you for posting this, because if this is the extent of the worrisome chemicals used then there is nothing to worry about - all them are completely harmless within days. For some reason I thought they were using dangerous chemicals, but I guess not.
Gross oversimplification of the "Mac" consumer. I use Macs and PCs every day and have worked in the computer hardware business with a specific focus on gaming (Newegg) and it's not that people who buy Macs don't realize they're paying a premium, it's that they value more than "equivalent" speed.

When I have a notebook, I don't want it to weight 10lbs because I'll be walking around with it. What's the point in having a fast notebook when you dread taking it around with you? I also appreciate the design aesthetic and the "it just works" feeling I get when I use OS X. The battery life is great, the laptop is portable, the design is beautiful, I get the job done. That's why I use my Mac notebook and that's what I'm paying for.
See my comment above. A little bit of history as to why Kimble is a marked man: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266309
Do you know of any specific actions that Ballmer took to "make money"? My understanding/perception is that all the increase is in part result of inflation over last 13 years and in part of enterprise contract strategy that was already in place since Gates era. I don't understand when people say Ballmer helped Microsoft produce .net/C#/XBox. These products were envisioned, created and delivered by few smart people in Microsoft and I personally don't know of any specific contribution from Ballmer in to these products either technical or otherwise.
C++ is a tool for power users, not a popularity contest.

Changes to the language should not be done just to attract more users. This is especially true if these new users would be today's PHP, JavaScript and Ruby users. The C++ community is much better off without these kinds of programmers.

It's much better for people to use C++ when they realize that they need the powerful functionality it offers, rather than dumbing down C++ in a way that'll make it attractive to less-skilled developers.
Luma.io (YC W12) Acquired By Facebook
I've always wondered - at what level is a person contributing to the Tuna shortage? I rarely eat fish to begin with, have yet to go to a sushi place. But I do have a can of Tuna on Pizza about every month. Is that already too much?
Should Fukushima's radioactive water be dumped at sea?
>we should be encouraging mislabeling.

Not the explosive diarrhea fish. That's cruel, and wrong. Maybe we should just encourage people to eat the fish we have, but be honest about the label.
My original IBM PC won't boot anymore.

I recently tried my PC AT clone, the first time I applied power to it in probably 25 years. All I got was a loud beeping and a smell of burning electronics.
I absolutely love chickpea salad (just ate it for dinner, in fact), but it bears essentially no resemblance to either chicken or tuna salad. Both the taste and texture are radically different.
i don't really agree. other than some deregulation (power, cable, etc), for the most part i'd say the government today is more intertwined with lobbyists/big corporations' interests at heart than they used to be...
Thanks for pointing this out. It's useful.
I know that some of these code bootcamps basically have deals with larger companies and get paid to serve as a filter mechanism for them. Not sure if that would work with the entertainment aspect of the audio world as a reliable hook toward an education business. I say that because the level of indifference culturally in the industry (in my experience) is too great. The WWE/Full Sail example is within a broader context of full AV setup work, and of course Full Sail has a lot of resources to play with as well as partnerships already in place etc.
Power quotes on living for yourself and others: Steve Jobs & Yogananda
"10000 year old lamp shows mesolithic man used quantum mechanics"
You know 100 000 people are employed there right? And its blue chip stock for probably millions? Just checking to confirm you don't care at all about any of these people...
Umm, are you being blatantly ignorant? Tesla can't sell cars directly in California either.
Why Steve Ballmer Failed
Topsy appears to offer a data deletion service at accountremoval@topsy.com. Try asking them to delete their online archive of a defunct G+ account. (Defunct means that the G+ account and its content is deleted.) The service autoresponds to your email entreaty, but nothing is deleted. I have been emailing them for two weeks. The reply is the same:

Re: Please delete my G+ content. I have deleted my G+ account

Topsy Support | AUG 18, 2013 | 09:22PM UTC
Thank you for submitting your request. We have received
your request and are working on responding to you as
soon as possible. If you have any additional information
to add to this case, please reply to this email.
Ted Nelson is the guy who would like to have global hypertext system that he closely controls and is able to monetize.

He has patented zzStructure (the underlaying data model in his vision) and when smart hackers started to build their own open version of it he asked them to stop it and sod off. http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/
I only worked there for about 3.5 years starting in 2006, but from my perspective, dead wood was a bigger problem than the stack rank, and the stack rank was the main force keeping dead wood from being an even bigger problem.

Are there better mechanisms to systematically force managers to make the tough calls to let people go or counsel them out?
The most obvious question: Does Microsoft annually fire the X% lowest "performing" as some other shops do?

But more importantly, there are much bigger problems at Microsoft than gaming performance reviews: product strategy, how people are treated and relations between divisions.

MSFT may need to let go of some legacy in order to move forward faster. (Risk enterprise customer hate, but whatevs.)
Number of deaths caused by contaminated groundwater due to fracking: ____?
The credulous initial stories about his "retirement" were funny. Ballmer was 100% fired. In the long term, the company seriously failed on many fronts. In the short term, Ballmer posted poor quarterly results and sent out a rambling 1400-page email about reorganizing the company, a last ditch effort to show the board he was trying to right the ship. How often does a CEO announce a major reorganization and then quit? And MSFT's official statement says Ballmer is out as soon as they find a successor.

It was kind of the board not to cap him execution-style, since he'd put in 30 years of loyal service, but let's be honest about what this "retirement" really is.
I always thought that their angle was going to be that they would sell (the product ecosystem) to content providers as a trusted platform, same to businesses; who might want that to some degree. If they could do that, and get the trust of the copyright mafia, then they might have been able to sort of monopolize distribution of movies and music. Maybe even keep their monopoly on office productivity apps (I hear that people use those on their tablets?).

I agree that there can't be enough geeks willing to buy one just to install Linux on it for MS to worry.
I've always done data migrations like that, by hand, with straight up SQL. It would seem to me that there'd be way too many combinations of changes to properly implement in a generic way.

Although, after reading your comment, I'd never taken 3rd party libraries into account. Adding/changing timezone support to a datetime field is a really good example of when that might be necessary.

The groundwork has been laid with an API and supporting infrastructure for schema migrations though. It looks like it should be possible to implement data migrations by adding Operations to django.db.migrations.operations, and suitable sql and methods to each of the backends. You could then hand-craft the migration files.

I'm assuming that the logic behind migrations wouldn't verify the database/model structure before running such a data migration which is probably flat out wrong though.
These farmers are exploiting the higher margins of rare species, not scale, otherwise they would be looking after the highly productive species. Regulation would be enough to change the industry.

It's no different than cattle. We're used to red meat but it's actually a wasteful industry that has a huge impact on ecology. We only keep raising cattle because it sells for a premium (red meat is the most expensive source of protein).

The impact of fish farmers that grow carnivore fish is comparable to the impact of destroying native land to farm soy/corn used to feed cattle. We just got used to it. There are other ways though.
South didn't (really) support Oracle, which is a django officially supported backend. I know there aren't many django users using Oracle - comparatively - but south wasn't a perfect solution.
> Every person generally thinks they're doing good in the world.

I think we mostly know who's harmless. We know for
kitty cats and puppy dogs: In my neighborhood,
cats are free to wander but dogs are not.

> See, this is the exact opposite of the truth - it's quite possible to publish data online and employ access methods to control who can access it.

Wrong, fundamentally technically and practically. I told
you it can't be done, and you just didn't believe me.

Once that toothpaste is out of the tube, it
can't be put back in.

Once a secret is out, can't pull it back.

Once some data is sent over the Internet,
the person who receives it has it, all of it,
and can technically can do essentially anything
with it. E.g., when a Web site sends a Web page,
it's gone, the whole thing, HTTP header lines,
HTML mark-up 'elements', CSS 'properties' and
values, software in JavaScript,
text, files in JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, WAV,
etc. The computer receiving this data
is free to store it on hard disk, manipulate
it many ways, back it up, send it, etc.
Net, that data's gone, out'a there, out in
the public, beyond control, with no
self destruct mechanism, no time out
clock, no string to pull it back. Can't
track it; mostly can't trace it;
in practical terms can't say where it
came from, can't claim ownership of it,
in no practical terms can enforce
copyright for it. Etc.

Sure, can embed a secret 'watermark'
in a PNG file, but that doesn't do much good,
e.g., as the file passes from person
to person. Besides, such a watermark
might get lost if the image is resized.

Yes, can put some carefully constructed
errors in text and numerical data, but
maybe only parts of the data get used
or copied, and, again, after the data
passed through many hands tough to say
who originally 'stole' it, and for the
rest they had no knowledge that the
data was stolen.

Yes, can set up strong authentication
for users and use strong encryption
when sending the data, but eventually
some user gets the data as 'plain
text', that is, not encrypted, and now
can redistribute it to friends, family,
etc. It's just bits and can be
stored, copied, transmitted, modified,
etc. So, one 'authorized' user leaks
the data and it's gone and essentially
out to the public.

For a Web site trying to block a user,
it is essentially impossible to know
if the user returned -- with a different
IP address, MAC address, ISP, Web browser
string
HTTP_USER_AGENT, etc. Searching the
user's house or office also is unpromising
since the data could be on DVD
below the insulation on the floor of the
attic, stored in the cloud, etc.

Again, yet again, as a practical matter,
now and over the horizon, if a Web site
doesn't want their data out in the
public and usable by every Tom, Dick,
and Harry for whatever, then they should
just never have their Web site send that
data. And, really, there's nothing
laws or lawyers can do about this except
cause a lot of trouble.

Again, more generally, lawyers should just
f'get about the Internet.
The stack rank is the _reason_ there's so much dead wood: managers have to keep mediocre performers on the payroll so that star performers don't get bad reviews and leave. You need star performance to get anything done, since Microsoft is not somehow exempt from the power-law distribution of programmer productivity. The accumulation of mediocre performers makes the organization "trust sparse" (the average employee is a low-net-value robot who exists only to absorb the bad reviews in place of the few who get stuff done), which seriously damages long-distance collaboration, since you can't tell in advance which employees are the bozos. The review system also creates a culture of extreme risk avoidance, as you can't trust the bozos you have on your team to actually code features properly, but you still have to give them work.
What Erik describes in this paragraph is painfully apparent to me whenever I see someone interact with such a stacked desktop:

"[W]indowing was to emulate the familiar, comforting desktop, a cluttered one at that. But it is extremely difficult to use efficiently a system that displays bits and pieces of documents . . . with just their edges sticking out here and there to identify them."

Using e.g. StumpWM's windowlist, I can unambiguously navigate to some desired window without guessing from partial information.

If it is the case, furthermore, that "windowing was to emulate the familiar, comforting desktop;" I think it's a skeuomorphism that we can profitably abandon.
it sucks but there's a difficult balancing act here. How do you prevent griefing or pranks , while also making it pain free for legitimate users to cancel service?
Meet: The Lion The Bear The Fox
The numbers were from 1979; air travel has gotten considerable safer since then. Then again, so have automobiles.
And GitHub is all about fit and culture. What makes GitHub so valuable is more than just making a lot of code available. It allows me to interact with many developers, discuss reasoning behind changes and learn from mistakes and successes. Being able to interact helps prepare developers for working on a team anywhere. I know many developers work in isolation even at companies and GitHub allows them to get that team experience.

And my evidence is personal experience. I do not need a study to know that interacting more with people makes me a better team player. I know that I have benefitted greatly by cutting back on time reading articles and attending meetups and more time with GitHub activities.
Lightning Farm
Comparing Apple's smartphone business to Microsoft does not appreciate the position that Microsoft was in during the 1990's. They essentially owned personal computing. They could put you out of business with a single announcement. Apple (or Google) does not hold that power. Microsoft's diminishing consumer market leadership has more to do with a changing world, and their inability to react, then competitors catching up.
“Clearly, any case of noncompliance is unacceptable, but these small numbers of cases do not change my view that NSA takes significant care to prevent any abuses and that there is a substantial oversight system in place,” - Dianne Feinstein.
Good choice California.
As I have put it, the problem with Microsoft is that they have this huge HR bureaucracy which seems intent primarily on ensuring that people do not advance their careers too fast. The review process is one part of it, but also consider that when I worked at Product Support Services, I worked with people who should have been coding Microsoft software but weren't due to the tyranny of the levels system. Those who were A- eventually were hired to do this. Those who were FTE's either left to pursue technical work or ended up left to rot as things were moved overseas. I knew very talented people who never got a chance because to get a chance they would have had to quit first.

I think the fundamental problem has always been bureaucracy and a mentality of loyalty to one's department over loyalty to the users. I could tell you stories about rules I broke in order to take care of users in line with what I saw as the interests of the company as a whole.
Loved your responses.
I ate bluefin salad sandwiches every day for over a year. You are allowed to catch one per year for recreational purposes. You can't sell the meat though. What the hell else are you going to do with 300lbs of frozen tuna in a chest freezer? Bluefin doesn't even taste very good.

If you want a shit ton of bluefin tuna, go to north carolina in the winter. For about $1000, you can hire a boat and catch one. You'll have 200-400lbs of tuna, and and entire belly of o-toro. A year later, you will never want to eat tuna again.
"... the consumer space and enterprise space are connected and become more so. Microsoft needs to be strong in the consumer space to remain strong in the enterprise."

Not at all true. Cisco, Juniper, Oracle, EMC, Netapp are strong in the enterprise with virtually zero consumer presence. Or am I missing something?
All hail the destroyer of Nokia.
I was a fan of IQ Engines work. They had some class researchers from UC Berkeley working on their team. However, I always felt that theirs was a solution in search of a problem. Looks like that killed their venture. That said, Yahoo has acquired some legit team that was working on some hard problems of image recognition and CV.
I am not dodging the question; my answer is yes. Applying a LNT model to alcohol exposure is silly.

Do you really think that a Mormon drinking 3 glasses of wine in his life has a one in a million chance of losing his liver?
Do you agree that we are very bad at evaluating very low probabilities (below .1%)?

Then how much would you bet on the hope that insurance companies are not taking advantage of this psychological weakness for their benefit?
Yeah I never really understood luvit. Callbacks make sense in JavaScript because it doesn't have coroutines. But Lua has coroutines! So why does luvit use callbacks? It does seem like a step backward.
Can't comment on it being the best but https://learn.thoughtbot.com/trails has a fairly good consolidated list of resources for learning various topics.
How to Completely Anonymize Your BitTorrent Traffic with a Proxy
I mentioned on Reddit that the Ask digital signature shows in the UAC dialog.
tl;dr: The IA site could use a redesign. (Anybody who's ever visited the site knows that. It doesn't mean the IA sucks.)

Edit: It's also not clear to me why the author suggests starting the redesign with the home page. I would assume most people who land on the IA pages do so through third-party search engine results, not through the IA home page.
Also a big fan of IQ Engines. They have a very smart team. Only alternative I know of @ the moment w/ something similar along the lines of an API is Rekognition @ http://rekognition.com
"70 = You're an average Joe. You're not a bozo, and you're not a rock star, and you're not going to get a promotion soon"

And then they offered you a promotion to stay when you threatened to leave ?
Show HN: Cralert - Crowd sourced alerts for WP8 and Android
Cralert uses crowd sourcing to answer questions about when events take place.

This is my first app and I am looking for feedback on usability/design and anything else that could be better.

http://windowsphone.com/s?appId=e5c10dad-7dbd-4bef-87ec-317ffc1145a4

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.enk.cralert

You can subscribe to events posted by others. The app notifies you when events take place.

Features
- Search for events
- Ask to be notified for a particular event
- Browse questions asked by other users
- Post answers, up vote correct answers
- Create event groups to post related events
- subscribe to a group to get reminded for all events in the group

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.enk.cralert
My bet is that MSFT buys Nokia and Stephen Elop becomes CEO.
There is already a myriad of mini keyboards on ebay, although I haven't used any but some of them look sufficiently good to use along side a smartphone. In the future I think they will improve to the point where people who want a physical keyboard will just buy it separately.
What cromwellian said, but I'd also add that, as an outsider at least, the zeitgeist amongst people I've spoken to is that stack ranking is hurting Google.

The poisonous effects of stack ranking may take time to manifest in a notable way at Google. Maybe if Google's products stopped being as cool as they are now, or their compensation is no longer as generous as it is now (see: becoming Microsoft), this would be accelerated.
Imagine a more open Google Now with a developer API
And Office ribbons. I used to work almost entirely with keyboard shortcuts in the menu/toolbar days for word processing (I used vi for coding). I actually liked the riboons.
Pretty surprised nobody mentioned the $6 billion writedown of AQuantive. MS bought them as a (crazily impulsive) reaction to Google's DoubleClick purchase. That was also under Ballmer's watch.

You could argue $900M isn't much, but $6B has got to be one of the bigger failed acquisitions in business history.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/microsoft-will-writ...
The more baskets he gets the more likely it is that it's not random. The chance of him shooting a single basket, if he's predicted to get them 60% of the time and you have evidence justifying that confidence level, is .6

The chance of him shooting two such baskets in a row is 0.36

The chance of him shooting 13 such baskets in a row is 0.0013

It seems unfair to suggest that crowd are behaving irrationally when dealing with such a distribution. In probability you compare against other probabilities to determine what's most rational to believe. So - what's more likely:

A cumulative probability that will occur very rarely?

or

That he's cheating?

The more shots he makes the more likely that explanation becomes by comparison.... If people cheat more commonly than the odds of that distribution of shots would happen by chance....
How I would run Microsoft
The NoFlo team is coders designing this for our own work first. We are free to put as much code in a black box as we like. We'll be running tests with ourselves and our early community to make some best practices, but there is no rule that keeps you from writing most of your logic in one block. Our theory is that the graph-based view will encourage encapsulation in different ways that make sense for the different domains that adopt the tool.

One of the big design differences (vs Quartz Composer, Lab View, Pure Data) is that it will be easy to dive in and edit component code and make new components when needed.