skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 'sharing economy' described in the article is not so much about sharing as it is about making money. You don't share your apartment on AirBnb - you sell it.
Torvalds speaks Swedish, not Finnish. What's the Swedish equivalent?
You didn't address my points. Just another round of wild claims.
Both parties are clearly in the wrong here.

Fast Company should ensure the product selection doesn't reset to default when the form is submitted and returns an error.

The customer should double-check their order before hitting submit. Like it or not, they had the more expensive product selected when they submitted their order. How are Fast Company supposed to know the product you had selected is not the product you wanted?
I feel horribly cynical for saying this, but: if you like playing the long game, this is actually a great time to join the NSA. Their ability to source talent is probably at an all-time low. One way or another, their reputation will probably rebound within a decade, and you'll have it all.
Another link from this article also whets the appetite: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57596204-76/metas-meron-gr... - especially regarding Meta, which, I note, has Prof Steve Mann on-board.. in my opinion means they are people to take interest in, since Steve pretty much helped invent the entire idea.

This will be the Eye-Tap I've waited for.
He's talking about trivial proofs. Rephrase it like this:

If I dispute that the EFF are "the good guys", then the EFF are not indisputably "the good guys".

Or, more formally it is:

p →q

p is "I dispute that the EFF are good guys"
q is "the EFF are not indisputably the good guys"

A trivial proof can only be so if can be shown that q is true. As p is also true (he disputes this) then q is also true. Ergo, this is proven true, thus is a trivial proof.
This is the exact use case for why we built StoryApp.
Yes, that's the one. The paid version gives access to their file servers, where it becomes more like usenet than P2P.

They also allow you to stream the content on their servers instead of downloading to your local disk. You can then use torrents as a kind of 'bookmark' and use Thunder as a practically unlimited cloud storage + video streaming service. They also transcode all HD content to 'fast', 'HD', and 'ultra HD' versions for you to choose between when streaming.

It's really incredible the things you can do in a country unencumbered by copyright restrictions
I used to believe this - but once you reach a certain scale and number of users, they do not notice small things - especially if they are average everyday people.

We are all hyper-sensitive to design, functionality, behaviour because we build and make decisions about technology, but at the end of the day most people have 5-to-15 minutes to use your product during or between other work and conversations.

Investors will likely not be carefully analyzing your UI, unless they have a lot of time - most of their decision will be based on conversations with your top-level executive team and the information provided therein.

Star hires is a potential one - I can definitely imagine that a lot of very savvy designers and engineers might be put off by manipulative design decisions - but ultimately they may care more about the workplace environment that you claim as a company, the opportunity to be part of a growing business, etc.

I'm a touch on the pessimistic side with this one but these are my perceptions, partly based on experience and partly based on observing startup businesses evolve over time.
No, what he's saying is valid logic. Somewhat pedantic though!
OP here. They haven't refused of a refund per se, but since I am unable to reach them with the second request - it is comparable to "let's leave this be and maybe it will go away".
Graphic calculators are totally obsolete now.

You could run circles around it with a Nintendo DS with homebrew, Sony hand held consoles and of course the Ipad, Iphone or Android.

But don't expect to convince your 50-60 year old teachers in University to let you use it. In spite of showing the apps that I had done for structural analysis in my Nintendo DS, they could not let me use it, I had to buy one of those stupid, overpriced, obsolete graphic calculators.
A new LaTeX typesetting service for individuals and businesses
There will always be bad doctors. What's needed is transparency, but laws such as HIPAA protect them (as well as patient privacy), and many doctors now have you sign a NDA before treatment, to prevent disparaging remarks being posted online.
So funny. I can instantly recall that smell to this day.
That only really makes sense if you think that ads are providing information that's relevant to people's best interests and is going to be fed into fairly rational decision making, rather than exploiting cognitive biases as an attack vector.
To be fair the OP hit submit on a form that clearly showed what was going to be purchased. It was a shitty bug that reset an option after he incorrectly entered data, but the OP certainly had a chance to see what was being ordered. The right move would be for FC to just refund the $7 and fix the template.
Might be, but I swear to my story. Pretty sure the professor was a grad or phd student and all he ever liked to do was put hard ass equations on the board and toot his own horn when he solved it. I had a really hard time relating to the guy thats for sure.
Naturally the user is always responsible for the purchase he/she makes. However, if I (OP) make my selections and need to re-enter some information based on their request - I don't think that allows them to change my decisions from what I have chosen earlier, especially if you get an error message similar to "please check your credit card number".

It is also a de facto standard in general that sites do not change once set selections when fixing errors in the original form and once you differ from this you're bound to increase burden on your customer support.
Is this not a shameless land grab for the term "sharing economy"? I've always associated the term with actual grassroots things like Freecycle, LETS systems etc. Or maybe people have actually started to think AirBnB is part of the "sharing economy" and I just missed it.
We tailor the interview to the applicant: so someone coming from (GOOD!) Uni should be able to verbally explain a sorting algorithm. We don't ask them to code - it will take too long and a discussion is much more valuable (and almost impossible to pass by memorizing a couple of algorithms).

Heck, I passed a harder version of the test (including the theory, I'm a senior/lead/old-fart so I was expected to implement everything on top of the discussions) and I left formal education at 17 :)

They don't have to implement a working version, just give a good outline and be able to answer questions about it :)

For experienced people we go further, and do ask for some coding.

You've got 5 years experience in SQL? Then solve this simple problem which requires using JOINs and aggregates.

You're a javascript expert? Great, then demonstrate that you know the syntax and know what a closure is.

Java expert with a focus on patterns? Then you should be able to implement one of: Singleton/Factory/Command.

We get more people who have 10 years of experience with C# are are self proclaimed experts, but who don't know the difference between the heap and the stack then we do CS students applying for the wrong job.. but that's for a different thread :)
To be fair from his point of view he would still be correct - there are not enough developers available to push the price below his threshold.
How Teachers Make a Difference
Actually it would be fraudulent to not charge what was selected to be ordered. It was a bug that didn't save the selection properly (possibly just in Firefox too, the template didn't look that bad), but it was perfectly visible what was selected when the OP made the order.
Great, my accent is already turning british!
Better than Instagram?  You decide?
Agreed. Certainly there'd need to be some other metrics to judge a dept on - service feedback, goals hit, timelines, etc, in addition to budget. However, we seem to be so far off the other end of the spectrum with this line of thinking that wasteful spending is encouraged, or one might even say required.

I've done work for state and city agencies over the years and it's generally the same thing. "Well, if our budget is $4m, but we only spend $3.85m this year, we won't be able to get $4m in next year's budget, and we know we'll need it then, so we have to spend the other $150k now so we can get more next year." Again, it simply boggles my mind that a budget process would not only take in to account a department's requests, but also their track record.

I've had to deal with it even with app hosting for some clients. "What do we need?". "Well, right now, we only need one server, but if demand goes up, we'll need 3 servers in 6 months, and we'll need them for about 2 months." "Well, we'll need to order 3 servers and pay for a year to get it in the budget". Huh? Variable pricing has been something foreign to most govt depts I've worked with over the years.
IP v4 or v6 still need routers between you and whoever you're talking to. It's a network, there will always be other parties involved.
Thanks for that.

I have no special theme right in mind, I usually speak english only when I travel, so it's mainly general purpose language. This could be as well asking for menu in restaurant, discussing tech with other developers or debating politics with foreign friends.

On the other hand, the idea of isolating words that are especially often wrongly pronounced for a given native language you mentioned in an other comment sounds really awesome : I'm less interested in getting a specific word right than getting right specific sounds used in a lot of words (but I guess this does not help you to select your first words, sorry about that).
I remember when dis-intermediation was the big buzz-word. Nowadays it seems to be all about business schemes with intermediaries at the core who make the process less efficient than it has to be in order to extract profits for themselves.
India Wants To Ban US-Based Email Systems For Govt Comms Over NSA Concerns
I think that's kind of the point. If radical is looking for (3), they will probably know the information because it is interesting.
The Inﬂuence of Unix on the Development of Games (LucasFilm)
It's always been odd to me that freedom of religion is so frequently interpreted as denial of its existence. At some point, the extent to which public society goes to avoid acknowledging it becomes kind of silly. And, of course, when taken too far, it actually infringes on true freedom for those who practice.
(Obligatory: OMG, I'm talking to Paul Lutus!)

Yeah, the Apple II era seems to have been particularly destructive with removing copyright notices in favor of "crack screens" and other drivel. Bleah.

More recently, I've been working on my own Apple II game (really). I'd like to release it fully open source, which makes it particularly challenging to use third-party libraries since open source wasn't really a "thing" when they were written. Some of them (notably old Beagle Bros. disks) have since been explicitly placed in the public domain.

So... I would very much like to have some Electric-Duet-based music and sound effects in my upcoming open source Apple II game. (Yes, I just typed that.) Would you be willing to relicense your amazing player routine under an open source license, or to place it in the public domain? I would, of course, give you full copyright attribution in the scrolling credits screen or wherever you'd like.
Maximum Awesome (Square's vim)
Precisely. It's bad practice on the part of the retailer, and if I were in their shoes I'd refund the customer immediately as a gesture of goodwill.

That said, it does not appear to be malicious, and ultimately the customer bears some responsibility for submitting their order without checking it.
It's "lightweight" because the heavy lifting is done by JDK's HttpURLConnection. Furthermore, it has dependencies on two other libraries.
The original play was by George Bernard Shaw. Any commentary on the absurdities and arrogance of the British class system is deliberate. Though by "the Bible" he's equally referring to the King James translation, which was regarded as a major literary influence, on par with Shakespeare.
Agent Orange was not intentionally used to kill and maim children.

Yes it was. Because, as you wrote yourself:

Its intended use was crop destruction.[...]

And from WP:

The goal was to defoliate rural/forested land, depriving guerrillas of food and cover and clearing sensitive areas such as around base perimeters.[49] The program was also a part of a general policy of forced draft urbanization, which aimed to destroy the ability of peasants to support themselves in the countryside, forcing them to flee to the U.S. dominated cities, depriving the guerrillas of their rural support base.[8][9]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_warfare:

Defoliants are used to quickly kill vegetation and deny its use for cover and concealment. It can also be used against agriculture and livestock to promote hunger and starvation.

How the hell was that policy supposed not to hurt children or farmers not participating in the war ?

"We destroyed their country and burned it but we didn't think it would starve anyone or people would die as a result". Do you use nuclear weapon to destroy infrastructure and when asked about human casualties then declare "Our intention was only to speed up the neutralization of city infrastructure, not to kill anyone." ?

> Agent Orange was definitely used to gain the upper hand in the war.

The point of fighting in a war is to gain the upper hand.

So... agent orange was used to win the war, which is my point. And yes forced and global defoliation qualify as warfare tactics. And so agent orange was used because of the warfare advantage it would give. It was used as a weapon against a resource (crop) without a care for the people on it. So yes it was used against people.

PS: My main point is that Agent Orange was used as a weapon on the ground of its intended consequences. That at that time they didn't fully consider the chemical effects on humans is highly convenient and suspect to me. Hence my reaction to the "it wasn't an anti-personnel weapon".

And to support that, from the first WP page:

Many experts at the time, including Arthur Galston, the biologist who developed and intensively studied 2,4,5-T and TCDD, opposed herbicidal warfare, due to concerns about the side effects to humans and the environment by indiscriminately spraying the chemical over a wide area. As early as 1966, resolutions were introduced to the United Nations charging that the U.S. was violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which regulated the use of chemical and biological weapons.[46][55]
Stagnating at 50% returns is a strange kind of problem. Even Reed has admitted streaming will never get there. And it's stagnating because Netflix has no interest in growing that side of the business. They don't advertise it, they bury the sign up option on their page, they've tried to split it off, they've arbitrarily raised its prices... I mean, easy, drop to 30% margins and buy an ad, you'll get growth again.

Some people think that being a tech guy is exactly what's blinding Reed to the fact that the licensing problem is a far bigger problem than the shipping costs..
I believe that is exactly what he said:

> "The sharing economy is not an alternative to capitalism, it’s the ultimate end point of capitalism in which we are all reduced to temporary labourers and expected to smile about it because we are interested in the experience not the money."

The term "sharing economy" is an oxymoron as it stands, firmly rooted in the Smithean notion of a greater good being advanced through individual and ultimately selfish actions. Either somebody shares, or somebody sells, but you cannot have both. The dichotomy of sharing and selling is essentially that between (pre-capitalist?) trade (quid pro quo) and sale, where the first one is based on utility value while the later is based on abstract commodity value.
MESS multiple machine emulation in a browser
Who's driven furthest on another world?
Beautiful - but I'd like to also see all the pictures before photoshop.
> I'm less interested in getting a specific word right than getting right specific sounds used in a lot of words

Actually this is the long term goal. If I ever have the chance to work on SayAfter.me full time, I will map phonetic sounds to words, and find out which nationalities have trouble with which sounds.

More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_number#Letters
He called using SKYPE which belongs to Microsoft. We know of both companies to partner with the NSA.

So they have at least

- all chats and most certainly

- all calls converted to text

at their disposal.

So it looks like an intimidation attempt.
Show HN: Post animated GIFs to Tumblr | GIFblr
Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons
I'm not an airline transport pilot, but in my personal flying, I've declared emergencies twice and asked for priority handling due to minimum fuel concerns once. No paperwork on any of them.

I also spend significant time on aviation/pilot forums, and I've literally never heard of "lots of paperwork" for any emergency that resulted in a safe, no injuries landing. The topic comes up regularly in the "should I have declared an emergency or not?" discussions, the common argument against is "I don't want the paperwork" (a strange trade off against a life-safety question in any case), and the most I've heard as routine followup is a phone call from an inspector.

My experience is exclusively US, so perhaps it's different in other areas of the world.
That post was on topic. He explained why it is so hard to be made understood when English is your second language, which was what pg was talking about!
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Elements of Successful eCommerce Product Pages
they are used in speech recognition systems "for smartphones", not "on smartphones." Quite a big difference. None of these systems will work if your phone is not connected to a server that does the decoding work.
Wow this is good and fast!
Mr Speaker: what a great game! By the end I lol'd. Cheers.
Companies should not need to store data. They would instead make a connection to your data custodian or even your own machine and then use a 'personal data api' to fetch only the data they need.

That way you know what was given out and when and it's always up to date. They wouldn't be allowed to store it either. ( https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#92-personal-data-api )
PGPfone (1995)
I see what he's trying to do, but it seems to me like this amounts to no more than a childish prank, a joke which essentially just uses a receptionist or switchboard person as the butt.

If you really have an issue with what the NSA is doing, playing pranks like this isn't going to get results.

If you could get through the head of the NSA, or somebody who is more obviously in a decision-making position and them questions like this then you'd maybe be doing some good by grilling them like that.

I feel like this actually cheapens the issue a little.
Updated with the letter as people requested.
> you're losing cache-ability of that CSS. On the next pageview, your browser will have to download that font/CSS again.

That is completely false. A CSS file isn't less cacheable if it embeds inline fonts or images.
Google and Microsoft have agreed WITH government consent, that the only way to save face is to blame the government and pretend like they're suing and making a big fuss over it. Microsoft and Google do not give a single fuck about your privacy, they were happy selling you out to the feds until Snodewn outed them while they had their pants down. Google's reaction has been especially ridiculous. Acting like a cheating husband, OMG who the fuck put this spying thing in here, get this woman off my bed NOW!
Apple seems to be still around. You can google it to check. Apple's problem with PC was initially simply that IBM sold the PC. For many years PCs were more or comparably expensive and much less useful than Macs, but sold because they were backed by IBM. And Apple did very well despite its lower market share until John Sculley started listening to pundits and lowered prices in the early 90s. Even so that worked Ok until Spindler listened to more pundits and started allowing clones.
Tao mentions in the post that H=16 has already been proven [1].

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0508185
What public debate are you talking about? Look around you. Do you see anyone besides techies and the libertarian fringe talking about eternal and perpetual surveillance? I sure as hell don't.
No problem! Found it here on HN, it didn't stay in the front page for too long but it seems some people missed it.
I cannot note that I gave that as an example of security antipattern a few days ago when we were discussing the xkcd style passwords.

This is one of the things that become worse the more people use them. Having any correlation between different passwords is BAD idea.

At least use bcrypt/PBKDF2 instead of plain SHA-3
Didn't know that! How so?
Some of us are on a SFW internet connection which filters such things. Better safe than sorry.
Sometimes those of us so ingrained in the world of HackerNews forget what life of people in other fields of work is like.

I highly doubt this was a jedi-level intimidation tactic from the handbook they provide to the switchboard operator after training them to respond in sophisticated ways to people calling in.

Rather, I'm more convinced this was the train-of-thought:
Someone's calling, the call is weird, lets get their name.
Fan, jävlar, satan.

But I'm pretty sure that, while Torvalds' mother tongue is Swedish, he also speaks Finnish, not having been born in a Swedish-speaking part of Finland.
Ah, but keeping track of cost/benefit is a solemn duty in a capitalist economy. The only power you as an individual consumer have against vendors and producers is the power of choice - the choice to buy which product at what price at which location. No matter whether you have plenty of money or have to turn each currency-unit twice before spending it, if you forget about this you will get pilfered. You will lose track of current market prices for commodities and end up paying through the nose because the vendor in your location has noticed he can increase prices without losing business, thus increasing profits. Others who have less to spend will take their business elsewhere and before you know it you'll have created yourself the groceries-equivalent of an Apple store.

So if you happen to see fewer and fewer people swapping products in their baskets because they are not on sale or using coupons or hands of small change or whatnot, take heed and do some comparison shopping.
An aside: I wonder if an Australian accent is a plus or a minus in the States?

P.S. I spoke to someone from Apple support last night, she was from Connecticut (I asked). greatest accent ever. She basically told me to do a hard reset on my iPad and I thought it was the greatest tech support I've ever received :-)
I am going to challenge you to find a single peer reviewed study that concludes what you just said. Almost all recent claims about how paying less is somehow better come from some random HR person's anecdotes. Studies either do not exist or are flawed in some obviuos way.
Love the design of that logo.
I owned Sinclair's programmable scientific calculator from a few years later which was similarly "interesting". It had 36 program steps (vs. 72 for the HP65 iirc), so storage system, and only one memory. Each constant in a program counted as N+1 steps where N was the number of button presses were needed. So it taught me about multiply re-entrant code.

I also owned a Sinclair ZX-80 (aka Timex) computer, later upgraded to a ZX-81 ROM with 16kB of memory.

Overall, Sinclair's problem seems to have been going a little too far in the "worse is better" direction with every product.