skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No worries for not adhering to the structure, it was just there because I wanted to urge more than "Yes"/"No" replies, I enjoyed reading your post. Very cool story.

I'm self taught at the moment, about to go to a dev bootcamp to really solidify my understanding of web-centric ideas (most of my stuff has been data crunching). Glad to see that so many people are happy in the field without a CS degree.
I've observed that systematic flagging as analogous to voting rings does not appear to be penalized, and to a degree that makes sense.

The other specific aspect of the JustFab stories was that the first one I saw was a complaint submitted as "Ask HN:..." based on what happened to an HN'ers girlfriend. The piece was long enough that it should have been a blog post. In my opinion, it seemed to record a remarkably high number of upvotes rather quickly.

Given the timing and those two other unusual features and the rather mediocre quality of the post, someone may have figured out how to game the HN software's voting ring detection. That would also possibly account for the rapid fall.

I ask myself how many stories about series B funding make the front page of HN? And what are the odds of multiple stories doing so?

To me, the story just didn't seem to have the legs to justify their position. Of course, others who felt similarly may have flagged them, and so the flagging theory for their fall remains a reasonable plausibility.
Those jobs suck bad for him.

We don't all like the same things or find the same things interesting or dull. Some of us like the variety, just working on whatever a day throws up, tinkering with whatever to solves a problem a person or an organisation might have and make things a little bit better. Code which is never going to amaze or astound anyone, code that may have been written under horribly compromised circumstances, can still make a big difference to people, and for some people that in itself is satisfying.

Programming is many things, at one end an end in itself at the other a tool for doing stuff. Programmers find different elements of what programming can be interesting and / or fulfilling.

Yes, there are a whole bunch of programming jobs which are wiring up CRUD apps, or writing jobs to parse data. They're not satisfying for some people but that makes them a bad match for those people, it doesn't make programming terrible.
I had just paid for a years subscription when they shut down - I had signed up because they cared about privacy, and boy was I not disappointed.

Join me in donating (even/especially you other non-US citizen HN'ers), to prove PRISM et al unconstitutional, and preserve all our rights!
That is good money, pays for 1-4 years of good living. Hard put to call that "FU money", though.

(Maybe it is in the UK with its high level of basic social services?)
From Microsoft to beer: Pair create home-brewing machine
A thought. I'm working on a virtual pet game (Firefox OS/Web based), and it's designed to be a mobile game. It's clear that I can't compete against, say, OMGPOP or Zynga. What I've chosen to do is target a very specific niche - "smart people". People like me, in other words, who aren't really very well served by the games on the market right now. I want my game to be intriguing and have depth of thought, if at all possible. I see this targeting as very different from a typical "Farmville" style game, and thus fairly lucrative.... if I can swing the business/sales/marketing side of it.

edit: Plug, plug - it will be alpha at some point in the next month or two, I hope. If my description intrigues you, email me, and I'll add your name to the tester list.
Ask HN: Upvote the comment thread rather than the article?
Dontcha ever wish you could upvote an excellent comment thread rather than the mediocre article that inspired it?
Sure we do, it's just that we only need them once every decade or three, when the government needs a new external enemy to invoke because the people have stopped taking the old one seriously for some reason.
Everyone who cares about control over their software should be using open-source. This is why pretty much any investment bank, hedge fund and proprietary trading firm runs Linux or BSD, uses open-source tools and rolls their own trading software...
Yes, the Daily Mail loves a bit of faux outrage and tabloid gossip, but they actually do employ journalists (sometimes). Here they cover expert evidence given to the coroner. Check out the pictures and videos.

>An escapology expert tried and failed 300 times to lock himself into an identical bag after being hired to try to crack the mystery of Gareth Williams' death.

...

He said: 'I just cannot do it. This case, I just cannot get it off my mind. It is very difficult. I am an escapologist, I am thinking outside the box here and trying everything I can to find a way.'

Dr Wilcox added: 'With all your trials and failures do you think it would be impossible to padlock this bag from the inside?'

Mr Faulding replied: 'I cannot say it was impossible, but even Houdini would struggle.'

He said Mr Williams could not have survived for more than 30 minutes as the temperature quickly rose and oxygen levels dropped. Mr Faulding said he only lasted five minutes before becoming 'delirious' after zipping himself inside with emergency oxygen and a paramedic outside.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2136118/Gareth-Willi...
It asks me to log in with Facebook (oh, the irony). I don't have an FB account, and I suppose I'm not alone among the potential supporters.
That's why 20 years later Linux and open source are still struggling to gain mainstream traction. Gnome vs KDE, 200 varieties of Linux, Open Office vs Libre Office, etc.

Most people don't care in the least. They just want a good acceptable solution where they can get help if they ever have a problem. Why would most people choose the mess of open source? Gimp vs Photoshop? Time is money.

The Open Source community is its own worst enemy.
I'd buy a house for myself.

I'd buy 1 low-end rental property (dip my toes in with 1 before finding out I don't like land-lording).

With that much cash, inflation becomes a big issue. You don't want to let the money sit in a regular checking or savings account. I'd hire an adviser on where to park the rest of the money to protect against inflation with minimal risk.

I wouldn't try to convert all of the money to real assets. The liquidity of paper is nice.

I would continue to work. It's a lot of money but I wouldn't call it set for life.

I would avoid high risk investments. ie no start ups.

Disclaimer: I am risk averse.
I think even the most traditional programmer knows that swearing at code is A Thing That Happens. The question is not whether swearing at code is accepted at a company. The question is what kind of candidates they attract by putting it in their ads, and that seems to be putting things too far at one extreme.
Five Myths About the MacArthur ‘Genius Grants’
Give me your phone number and your credit card number
Combining Agile + Architecture to Rapidly Field Projects
Or IS IT?
Staples 3D Printing Challenge
I like how one random person writes a lighthearted script and suddenly Barack Obama and Adria Richards are teaming up to turn us into Iran or communist China. It's a shame Hugo Chavez is dead because he would make an excellent addition to the team.
are you sure you want that?!

Yes, because sometimes it's the lower-ranked articles that are interesting. Also: Is Ask HN included? It would be nice to see those as well.
Honestly, I can understand OP's frustration. I would be lying if I said I didn't think similar thoughts. But the truth is, you don't get do to what you want unless you're running your on company. Even if you are running your own company, you have to make sure you're doing the right thing in order to not go bankrupt.

I think having hobby projects can help provide a nice balance between doing whatever the hell you want and doing what is needed right now. It also gives you the opportunity to learn new things which you can maybe apply later to your actual job. As long as I have my favorite forever project, I won't be bored.
"People who pigeonhole JavaScript as a 'bad' language are typically just too close- or feeble-minded to grasp or command things like Prototyped objects, functional scoping, closures, etc... they are better left in the insular, strongly-typed environments they came from and leave the real problem-solving of the web to JS devs." ... See how ridiculous you sound when you make these kinds of statements...
The "fascist" element (I wouldn't have used that word, it's incendiary and counter-productive) is the undercurrent of an objective truth and the discounting of preferences (and, not least, the holders of such preferences) not in line with that truth.

If this tool had been written and "marketed" as a personal linter, in which you can taylor your own preferences, it would have been great. It could have had a pre-set "bro" profile that "fails" the lack of beer pong and a "cube" profile that fails mentions of any technology released in the past 15 years. That would have been both hilarious and actually useful.
That's like a mortician responding to a report about someone being found with dead bodies at their house and arrested.

"I have dead bodies in my home all the time; I'm fucked."

Context matters.
In marketing terms, 25% [1] is a great conversion rate for something with non-obvious and far off benefits.

[1] Probably closer to an ordinary 5-15% once page views are factored in
This is pretty much the way of the world, not just in India. The 'safe' route is to get a technical degree, work for a large corporation, and hopefully retire some day. Can't blame parents for wanting to shield their children from risk and potential failure...
Still, the subject here isn't the labeling and certainly not the emotional response to it, the subject is intentional manipulation of the articles where instead of using exact quotes of people and presenting the context something opposite is written as "interpretations" which are claimed to mean "the same" by the trolls who introduce them.

It's absurd that Neil DeGrasse Tyson's (or Einstein's) full exact sentences can't be quoted in the Wikipedia article about him exactly only when it's about the contested topics.
skim-read this headline as "Google to be Punched in Face..."
Super. I'll just neatly put my name next to a list of people (which the NSA has connected to) who oppose the surveillance state ... and hope I don't get black bagged to your fancy Cuban torture prisons if I ever cross into the USA.
It's the war for Western civilisation and it will be fought over the presence of beer and pizza in the office.
Their hearts are as cold and bleak as their country.. which is cold and bleak.
Wayback Machine is your friend, regarding the quote/article above:

http://web.archive.org/web/20121022174605/http://www.indepen...
What is the form of the asset? I assume you did not get $750k in cash, but likely it is in stocks, bonds, real estate, or ...?

First and foremost, if your goal? Is it to increase your wealth, to live large for short but fun time, etc?

Your situation and goals will impact what you can/should do.
Reviews are very, very tricky in my experience. A few things I have noticed on my own app:

1. Any negative review hurts. It doesn't matter if it's a legitimate negative review, someone you're pretty sure isn't even referencing your product in the review, or a positive review where they thought 1 star meant great rather than 5 stars.

2. One negative review hurts worse than zero reviews. One or more negative reviews will consistenly drop my daily sales by around 30%.

3. People will almost never read beyond the current reviews. Those that do will ignore the date the review was posted, and often the top reviews shown are from years prior in the All Versions tab. Apparently Apple knew this too because that tab no longer shows the date on the iPad/iPhone App Store apps (iTunes still shows it).

4. Gaming the review system by submitting a new version works. This clears the reviews from the default tab (Current Version) and is the only way to "remove" abusive reviews. Flagging a reviews does absolutely nothing.
> And if we can put a nucleus of 10,000 people on Mars, to start that colony, then we'll have developed Earth-to-orbit technologies a lot better than we have now.

If your argument depends on this, it is already flawed.

> The explanation you gave - "based on energy/transportation costs" - has not a good predictor of industrial control in world history.

Actually, it was quite a good predictor up to the earlier part of the industrial revolution. It does a nice job of explaining where the industrial centers of the northeastern US appeared. Technologies developed in the industrial revolution are the very ones that changed this situation.

> ...the answer is obviously weighted in favor of Mars

Read The Case for Mars. I don't have the time or desire to discuss this with you in particular.
It makes even more sense when your country isn't the home country of the NSA... !
If the 40% figure is accurate, this is a BIG win for the Linux desktop (and Canonical in particular), because the TCO (total cost of ownership) of an enterprise desktop can be as much as four to five times greater than the cost of its hardware and software licenses.[1] At most corporations, training, support, maintenance, security, and other ongoing costs together vastly exceed the cost of just hardware and software.

For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.)

The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year.

--

[1] http://www.gartner.com/id=2371417
"Domain names have been actually been available for 28 years – yes, before you even knew what a computer looked like."

Guess I'm not part of domainholdings's target audience. I've been programming computers for 33 years. So no, not before I even knew what a computer looked like.

But man, how much money would I have, had I snapped up as many www.<fortune500companyname>.com domains as I could, and sold them to the companies as they became internet-aware!
You're right, I forgot to write it explicitly in the article but if someone will follow istructions (extract all <a> tags and add them to the index) that method is tacit.
This is not confined to India; this is - broadly and generally speaking - also a condition in lower class USA, particularly if the individuals aren't hustlers or have contact with people who understand money.

Source: Anecdotes and reading lots of news articles.
> So you're saying that Apple and Google are providing most of the value here. Maybe they "should" be getting 90% of the revenue instead of 30%.

Maybe they already are. Another way to think about this might be, apps might nominally cost $20 or so, and Apple/Google do take 90% -- but they also choose to give an (invisible, constant) 80% discount to encourage purchases. Developers then get paid from net, rather than gross, profits.
Buy a rental property. 4 sublets paying $1800 per month is $7200 per month. Minus expenses, and that should net a $5000 or so a month. Enough to quit the job and hack on my ideas :)
My answer to the main question here is related to yours, since your a testing fanatic ;)

My company does web dev and consulting, but we struggled with how to manage long-term support. So we developed an automated html5 testing platform and started writing custom UX tests for our clients' applications. This way, if they continue to develop new features or whatever, they have a way of quickly checking for breakages. It works so well that we've now opened it up as a service we offer outside of our development projects.

We get a little bit of cash for writing the tests, and a little bit of cash for hosting/maintenance/updates.

Here's a link: http://html5testing.co/
A murder can be used eliminate someone, but also to send a message.

For it to be a message to others it has to be visible and it has to be obvious who did it without it actually holding up in court.

The Litvinenko case comes to mind. He didn't "trip" down the stairs, the way he was killed made it clear who killed him and sent a message out.
Introducing CoVim – Real-Time Collaboration for Vim
How developers reimagined user experience for Windows 8
Sometimes things are multidimensional. And sometimes the truth isn't in the middle.
I was thinking about this too, and I'm guessing that dumb 20 year old me would have sold those domains in the late 90's for thousands thinking I was making a huge profit instead of waiting a few more years until those Coca Cola people got desperate.
Sinatra in Rust
Top 5 Best Payday Loan Alternatives In Financial Difficulties
Not all humanities topics are badly covered. You just need to apply common sense.
No Microsoft.com? Late to the party?
"Internet was a luxury in our struggling country"

Based on this, though nothing can be assumed, I can't help but wonder if the author was doing outsourced/offshored development work for another country?

I can only imagine that doing outsourced/offshored work brings with it an extra level of dehumanized drudgery.

I am a software engineer who typically works with small teams and/or small businesses. While the code-writing itself can be mindless CRUD work, and is almost never interesting on a theoretical level, solving actual problems for my users makes it worthwhile to a large extent. I am solving real problems for people trying to get through their days -- people I get to work with face-to-face. That's rewarding.

If you're doing mindless CRUD work for somebody five thousand miles and several levels of management away, though, that kind of rewarding feeling must rarely be possible. I don't know if I could do it.
Is "dilute" really what happens? I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding was that you cannot do any harm by feeding predictable data into your entropy pool. The absolute worst case is no improvement over what you had before. In other words, keyboard/mouse/HD/IO/etc. timings plus GPS data is at least no LESS secure than just keyboard/mouse/HD/IO/etc. timings. Is that wrong?
> And I'm kind of sick of the US-centric view that all college degrees cost $100,000+ -- many high quality degrees in other western countries cost as little as 10-20% of this figure

It doesn't seem out of line to me. The average high school graduate in Canada will earn about $30,000 per year during the typical age one goes to university. Assuming a degree takes four years, that is a cost of $120,000 right there, ignoring any other fees that may be associated with enrolment.
Moore's law doesn't apply to batteries. There's nothing stopping you from putting the MBA chip in a phone... except energy consumption.

If your program in javascript takes 14 times as long to run than the equivalent C version and yet still manages to be performant from a user experience perspective, then you'd better be close to an outlet because we're talking about a beefy and energy hungry processor.

There's a sweet spot related to programming effort and power consumption. I don't think Javascript can hit that sweet spot yet for most devices.

I'd argue that the same problem, but to a lesser degree, is present in other non-mobile devices. I'll buy the one that costs $20 more but costs me $20 less per year on my energy bill.

I think we may even see a bit of a reversal in the current trend of programmer productivity over program efficiency. Clusters of cheap multi-core servers consume significant energy.
Interaction designing
If only we had some place we could find an entrepreneur who could do something with this idea...
So the article is saying go be sys admin?
Review: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
The #1 Skill Of Extremely Likable (And Successful) People
If I may suggest something, add an exclusion filter too. Removing things like NSA, Hiring might be extremely useful.
Let's see... virtual systems:

- Amazon, jenkins, corporate vpn, ssh connection, virtual machine

... and forums...

- stackoverflow, hackernews, corporate board

... and money flowing ...

yep, lots of money flowing out... it's rent time.

didn't realize it before just now, but I'm a hacker just like this kid.
protip: every job is like this. I went into journalism because i LOVED reading and writing. Making it a career sapped the fun out of it. Now i'm coding professionally. It's much more fun than the pressures of journalism, but I do find myself sometimes thinking "this was more fun when I did it just for the heck of it"
I'm not qualified to answer that.
Interesting, I can expect a post on your findings then?
Britain's new cyberarmy could reshape the laws of war
yes the internet if things is going to need very low power devices ala PIC based systems/ gumstix, Auduinos or even raspbery pi's
Well, you're already beating the cup of coffee if they're worth $0.50 to 5 people.
My USB microphone agrees
Apple is now the most Valuable Company
Word2vec seemed intuitively obvious me, but I really have a hard time believing that it works in only 1000 dimensions, generating results beyond cherry picked demo examples.

Are there really only 1000 independent concepts in the English language?
That's not a fair comparison. A ton of the apps on your phone (at least on my phone) aren't even designed to be paid for -- Chrome, Kindle, VLC, CitiBike, Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. And a bunch of "dumb" apps that only make sense as free and ad-supported. (I'm not going to pay for someone to turn the NYC Bikemap PDF into an app, but I'll use it if it's free.)

I will happily pay $20 for an app, but only if it's one of the 4-6 that are worth it. I'm talking a ~$100 budget total. The ones I listed, are worth it for me. (Dark Sky is worth it for me, it might not be for you.) Other people will have their own list. But of course nobody's going to be spending $20 a pop on 100 different apps. The point is, those 100 apps are of wildly differing value.
A $5 coffee also buys you a place to sit down and use WiFi, and a bit of social interaction or "lifestyle". Nobody pays $5 per cup of coffee at a supermarket.

No app developers include "installed by a human" and the permission to go sit on a couch at their office for half an hour in the price!
Introducing Qxt
Yes, there's a kernel interface (an IOCTL called RNDADDENTROPY) specifically for this purpose, it allows userspace (root user only as far as I know) to give the kernel random data samples along with an estimate of how much actual entropy the data contains.

Here's a bit of python code I wrote that could be adapted to do what you're asking for. It's designed to source random data from smartcards (via PKCS#11 libraries) at the moment but changing the data source to the output of another program would be trivial: https://github.com/infincia/TokenTools/blob/master/token-rng...

There are also a few mature projects designed to do this job (rngd and another one I cant remember the name of at the moment) that could also probably be made to work from arbitrary sources if they don't already, but if you wanted to do-it-yourself on the software side along with the hardware, that python up there would get you started.