skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not familiar with Motorola but I used China Telecom's 3G dongle and was amazed by the amount of sneaky tracking they were doing. Frequently, I could see (in Chrome web inspector) that random pages were wrapped in iframes, with extra JavaScript for tracking. The JS was pinging Chinese servers and sending visited pages, clicked links, and who knows what.

Any Chinese software you install will do something similar. You install one software (for instance, a popular messenger like QQ or some online banking software) and get half a dozen processes and services running all the time with admin privileges (which they've asked during installation).

It's a mix of carelessness and greed, and there's no limit to it since consumers here don't have much power to change anything. That's why I'd be careful with a Chinese smart phone.
Boston Dynamics Cuts the Cord on Wildcat
The graphs are taken from google trend an so unfortunately the units are relative to each other. Sorry, I should have mentioned that. Fixed.
The End of High Roaming Fees?
You can do that with JRuby as well. I believe that's what you get with Github Enterprise.

But yeah, anytime we have ease of install, we all win.
Thats is true. Im no angel but I do not have pirated and unlicensed software on my computers, thats one of the reasons I only use Linux and pay for IntelliJ. At least with software we have an option.

I was saying that more in the context of oppressive regimes, sorry I mean safe democratic governments, that some programs are illegal to write.
(I'm not involved with YC, so take this with a grain of salt.)

I think the idea is really cool and I can see how useful it could be for companies, but do you have evidence that users actually give feedback via your method?

I'm trying to look at this product from that side of the equation, and I could see me getting frustrated that clicking "Sign up with Google+" doesn't actually do that. If you have evidence showing that users are willing to give feedback, or have some type of insight regarding that, I'd definitely include it in the application.

Goodluck!
Melatonin does NOT work as a remedy for jet lag. I don't find open access links to the relevant studies right now but http://www.nojetlag.com/melatonin.html might give you a first idea.
Twitter Files for IPO With Implied $12.8 Billion Value
I would guess that it set off the voting ring detectors (rather than people manually flagging it; that would be pretty fucked up).

Sometimes, for posts like this that seem beneficial for everyone, I wish PG could just manually disable them...but that's a slippery slope to say the least.
Actually, everyone was responsable for their own shipment. It was just through mail and they even caught one guy who had written his own address on the reply-package ;-)

It was the anonimity on the web that made it a big deal, not the shipment. That was easy :)
Adding to what others said, someone I know is planning to use this as a starting point for understanding version control systems. The reason stated was it's simplicity.
They have the easiest job in the world. They invest in a company, then have their deep-pocketed client buy services from that company.
> Can anyone think of other cases where science is used to predict the future of complex systems more than 2 years in advance?

Every empirically-based plan for business, long-term policy, etc., ever.
The forward-looking aspect of the science of cosmology.
Lots more.

> So far, the only ones I can think of are models that always spit out the same message... "The earth is dying and we're at fault."

That's more indicative of the biases through which you filter the available information (perhaps most importantly, the bias in the information sources from which you receive information -- e.g., if the main place you get information about "science used to predict the future of complex systems" is the mainstream commercial media, there's a pretty heavy bias in what predictions you are going to hear about.)
We used to get praise at my place every now and then for a job well done which kept the spirits up and the motivation high. Now that's stopped it is all about the pay. I ask for more money every 6 months or so (never had an unsolicited pay increase), if I get it I'll stick around otherwise I'm off to check the who's hiring posts.

So far I'm still here, but the last raise was a bit naff so the CV's getting polished up. Life's too short to be working a job you don't like anymore.
There are two different concerns here which I think your abstract setting is mixing, probably involuntarily:

a) Privacy and secrecy are part of normal personal relations. Any means of communication can be used to maintain secret conversations and this is something one should strive for because confidence and trust between individuals cannot exist in a never-private environment.

b) On the other hand, the need for society to regulate contracts is there. A contract is not (has never been, at least in the West) a secret affair: it is something which society recognizes and whose terms can only be enforced if the mutual agreement is in some sense "public" (i.e. if it can be naturally known by society). So secret contracts cannot be lawful and in this I agree with you that secrecy in "civil" matters makes no sense (you would need a "secret police" and/or "secret judges" to enforce contracts, that is a parallel society, which as mafias have proved time and again, is a problem, not a solution).

So privacy and secrecy are natural and necessary for interpersonal non-public (i.e. extra legal) relations. Not so for "public"/"civil"/"contractual"... ones.

Notice that buying and selling is a "contractual" relationship (i.e. a willful, free, interchange of benefits with possible adverse consequences. It is the adverse consequences that require the legal environment and their being "public"/"accountable for").
Non-Verbal Cues for Programmers to say "Leave me alone"
> I don't know. I haven't seen these financials. But it's a frigging database, and not a particularly good one. A billion dollars!?

Salesforce is a frigging CRM tool; SAP is a frigging ERP system; Oracle is a frigging database. And not particularly good ones at that, in the estimation of many of their users. Their market caps are $30 billion, $90 billion, and $150 billion, respectively.

I'm disappointed that yours is the top-voted comment. We can do better than this.
Future of the London Underground? Next generation Tube train concept unveiled
Intra-legal violence is violence otherwise captured by the legal system. Your domestic abuse, your bar fights, most muggings - your clear-cut and attributable crimes that happen within the legal framework of society. The "workflow" here is: commit a crime -> crime is reported or discovered -> perp is charged -> due process -> conviction/acquittal.

Extra-legal violence is violence that exists outside of the law's traditional reach. Your mob hits on other mobsters, your drug dealer getting robbed, gang warfare, etc. This stuff almost never goes through the legal system; how would a drug dealer report what was stolen? This workflow is more like: commit a crime -> get away with crime. Or, commit a crime -> beget more crime as retaliation of previous crime, repeat ad nauseam.

So what the writer is saying is that with black markets come a lot of violence that takes place in that second category listed above, mostly because reporting the violence incriminates the victim.
> That one function would get enormously complex, its exact definition hard to decide but very influential on policy, and instead of debating specific policies we'd have vicious debates on the right formula to use, mostly driven by self-interested actors attempting to gain advantage, with even more obscurity than we have now.

I don't think it would be even more obscure. In the current system, we mingle incestuously goals and means to the point where we can't even tell the difference. Forcing a separation is going to be helpful.
Yeah, still works for me. It was only gone for a few days IIRC.
Presumably the flywheel axis can be rotated internally.
But the Oracle database engine is arguably a pretty small part of that value.
Is Quantopian The Next Bloomberg?
"We also found out that they were able to extend spikes from their bodies. We don't know how they--urrrrrrk!"
Great overall concept. I think it's something my company could use.

One concern I'd have if using this product, is that often the customer says what they think they want, but don't actually need. So I'd expect there to be some decent "management" tools for working through all the feedback. Maybe some sort of internal scoring or feedback system within the company or something.
Ask HN: How did Ross William Ulbricht get caught?
On the off chance that you are not just trolling...

You seem to have this retrospective view of technology creation where anything that didn't pan out or doesn't connect to current technology was therefore a waste of time and effort. The problem is that at the present nobody knows what's going to work out- you just have to try. Some ideas will work, some will not, some ideas will be lost and then re-discovered. It's a messy process. I'm sure there are robotics researchers who are wasting their time in dead end technologies. But I don't know which ones they are, and neither do you. I have opinions, but I'm not prescient.
Irrational exuberance
I still don't get it. If you start with an Asimov robot, then take away the anthropomorphism and the sentience, what remains that isn't found in a modern car factory?
The issue here is that it does not matter if you like the current state of the product. The vision here is about the potential of the company. If they need to improve the product, hire/fire people to be there, they will (assuming competence).
There is a longstanding tradition of pseudonymous public communication. The Internet didn't invent anonymity (though that's unfairly dismissive of your point). Anonymity probably goes back as far as our ability to communicate in written language and probably before then (not that we could have any such record).
iCloud Alternative Loom (YC W12) Raises $1.4 Million Seed Round
> but who says they wouldn't be fighting anyway?

This is a totally fair question. So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that Al Capone's level of violence had nothing to do with his criminal syndicate. He just liked shooting people.

However, shooting people is expensive, especially given that they employed reasonably advanced weapons (sub-machine guns). So, he's not going to get as many bullets when liquor is legal. Also, though Capone is believed to have killed people, far more people were killed on his orders[0]. Without an unregulated and lucrative source of income, it's hard to see him having the money to hire people to kill others.

No one is saying that, absent the drug war, the cartel's enforcers would be in the peace corps. However, the extremely high street price of drugs finances a level of violence that would not exist otherwise. If you want an example, look at the history of Mexico in the last 20 years and compare it to any other nearby country.

[0]http://history1900s.about.com/od/people/a/Al-Capone.htm
It encourages me to be disappointed when I actually read the article, which is not exactly the best state to put me in if you want me to appreciate your article.
My sense is people generally separate their work into, "Tasks I like to do" and "Administrative overhead". For small companies, being nimble is more important than scale or coordination, so the overhead takes a back seat. To use Lean Startup lingo, until you have product-market fit, scale and coordination isn't a concern.

Once you have product-market fit, then coordination and scale matters. Understanding how people are spending their time is important for service companies to understand billing, and product companies to understand if people are working on the right priorities. It also helps estimation.

I've seen very talented people that are loath to enter time reports. I've seen companies lose money because talented expensive consultants didn't bother getting it in on time.

My suspicion is there are a subset of people who just don't want to be bothered. The best seats for them are small non-consulting firms that are focused more on market response than scaling or coordinating. It's not a judgment call, it's more about going where their mentality fits best. (It took me a long time to realize this in my own career)
Meet WildCat, The Galloping Robot Animal And Future Soldier's Companion
Have you tried taking it earlier in the evening? Half an hour before bed seems very late.

My professor in psychology grad school presented it's functioning and said it's best taken not later than ninety minutes before bed.
There are a lot of things to do that have value that aren't web. There are a lot of things to do that you can be paid for that aren't web. There is some overlap. If it's hard to justify working on any of these things, the parent is going to have to explain why.
Here's some feedback on the last questions about something surprising you've found. Instead of putting something any middle schooler could find on google, you should but a unique insight instead. For example, what features (out of the many you claimed to have built), have had surprising results? Perhaps this could be something nobody thought would move the needle, but ended up as a breakout success. This would provide a much more powerful insight, and also help justify the product you want to build.
Site appears to be suffering under the load. Here's links to google cache for a few of the pages:

concept: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:el5m9JG...

process: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9ItuTOZ...

gallery: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TekvDuj...

blog: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ir6N8bK...
Of course it stinks. It's "only" weakness is a "global, passive adversary" + It was built by the US Government.
Yeah. Although I happen to be in Russia, and WakerUpper only works with US and Canada.
I'd add a 5th. "Maxing the value of a mature or declining business." Many companies overinvest on #4, when the business has moved to step 5. IBM played this very well. Blackberry, perhaps not so well.
This sounds very interesting even to those of us who don't need a promises library. If you or anyone else would like to go into detail, I bet a lot of people here would care (including me).
I think you, GP, and the author are in violent agreement. All three of you, in my understanding, have made the same point.
For a functional programming analogy, JS promises are more like monads than about lazy evaluations. I don't know if there is a good Scheme analogy because in Scheme you can use call/cc and friends while in JS you are forced to write your async code in explicit continuation passing style (promises are just a way to make this a bit more manageable).
If they built a Star Trek bridge replica to sell the idea of the NSA to the congress, they can do this too

http://americablog.com/2013/09/nsa-outrage-star-trek-bridge....
Show HN: Using semantic tagging to improve hotel reviews
The entire point is to go fast; denormalization is a tool, not an end in itself. If, hypothetically (ahem), a database could scale and support joins, why not?
nobody ever got fired for choosing:

1. Oracle

2. SQL Server

3. MongoDB
Botnet fraud is, umm, fraudulent? You're creating false information in order to get paid for a product (conversions) you did not deliver.

Algorithmic trading doesn't do anything like that.
Yes. For most projects, having the "Whatever it takes to get it done" is most important. For long term skill development, and some key hard projects, the deeper understanding is valuable. The 10xers whom I call first with hard problems have both.
Did you read the article? Have you ever been in a data center?
I'm not doubting, but why?
6thSigma: Thanks for your feedback :). To answer your question, with our beta customers, we have shown the feedback overlay more than 1K times and have gotten a 60% feedback rate.

We think this is because we ask the right person, the right question at the right time. Its the right person, because this person clicked on the feature, its the right question because the question is about the feature they clicked on and not their age, gender etc. and its the right time because they are in the app, just clicked on the feature and at the height of their curiosity when it comes to that feature.

In regards to frustration, we believe this is a valid theoretical concern, but in practicality with our 27 beta customers, we haven't yet had anyone complain.

We think this is because our customers are using this in a "logged-in" product, leveraging our rules engine to control how often the feature experiment is shown and to who.
I don't really get the resistance to DRM in the Netflix case. I'm against DRM on any media that is represented as a purchase. But you're not buying movies from them, you're renting them, and it's never represented as anything else. DRM seems not only acceptable in the rental case, but probably necessary.
Nope, the flag link disappears when you flag "badly".
Thanks. You're right that it's not just what users say. You have to observe what they do, too. In the next version of our product, we want to provide a "confidence score" for a person's feedback, which is based on what we've observed them doing in the application (e.g., are they a power user? are they freemium or enterprise user? did they leave yes/no feedback + commentary?).

As for the internal scoring system, we integrate with JIRA so you can send your data to your existing prod-dev mgmt tools. We hear KANO analysis is really powerful when it comes to scoring your prod roadmap.
Redhat is the perfect example. Compare their market cap. to OS vendors which are closed source: VMWare, Microsoft, and Apple. It's a pittance. Profit is only $150M a year depite the dominance of Linux in the server market. Oracle itself is valued at $150 billion. And for every Redhat, there's a Mandriva or a VA Linux.

The problem with selling service and support is that you have no incentive to make the product better or easier to use, and every incentive to make it usable only by experts, with a support contract. It's a bad business all around. And if the product is open source, it's easy enough to not pay for even if a need for support is baked into the product.

Open source can be a business. It's a viable strategy if you need a differentiator to compete with more established competitors, and the total addressable market you're looking to disrupt is ginormous. However, it's not a particularly good one in relative terms. The revenue generated per dollar of R&D is so small that it's difficult to fund innovation.
Mob Programming with the MobProgramming Team
"Cues"
Twitch rides video game streaming wave to global success
Check out the criminal indictment if you are interested, they explain it a bit.

From memory (which may be wrong), it sounded like he had something like 11 internal hot wallets, but while the coins were in escrow he used a database to link what user had what amount of coins. The government seized those 11 wallets, and based on the average daily holdings, now have like $3mm worth of BTC which they transferred to a single wallet (if you google, you can find the public record of that govt controlled wallet).

The indictment also explains that Silk Road used a "tumbler", which would route the BTC's through a series of random wallets so that it was not possible to match a user's initial sending of BTC to Silk Road with the eventual withdrawal by a seller of BTC's to another wallet or exchange.
Honestly, I think it's a cool widget! It doesn't sound nearly big enough to get a 10x return on VC though. How big is the market really? I watched your intro video and came away a bit underwhelmed: Can't someone just replace this with an analytics event of "clicked" and extrapolate that only people who want a feature are clicking on that feature?

Have either of you worked on product teams before? Do you have feedback from product teams? Usually this isn't a problem of competing features, but usually of "will people use this" at an entire product or project level. MVP is how most people I know attack these things.
And a good thing too. That way prisoners wouldn't get the vote, we'd be able to deport terrorists etc etc.

I can't see any additional rights that I have that I didn't have before it became part of British law. All I see are dis-benefits.
Lessons Learned While Crawling the Web
Using a meta-study that showed tiny changes (statistical significance is irrelevant here, virtually any intervention could have had that kind of impact) to bolster a handful of anecdotes is pretty silly.

I don't argue that this doesn't help a fraction of people, but the case is pretty weak and the long-term results of tampering with a critical hormone are unknown.

No offense to the author but I've read at least 3 of his articles posted here and they all follow a similar pattern.
This is a very valid question and one worth thinking about. For one side, I would submit the following points for discussion.

Accountability is indeed important for society, but lately it seems governments have been immune to accountability.

It would be nice if we were able to sustain a happy medium on the internet where identity could be known and also have no need to be afraid of persecution for legal actions (aka, being placed on a "watch list").

However, I don't see the world governments heading in that direction. With interest in wide scale surveillance, they are building the framework for a minority-report style pre-crime system.

So it seems we may need to protect ourselves from this using anonymity. I won't mind being accountable for my opinions when the governments themselves become accountable for ignoring "innocent until proven guilty".
Webinar on Git Workflows and Q&A
"A Corporate Trojan Horse": Obama Pushes Secretive TPP Trade Pact
I found some of the resources in this article very helpful, such as Stylate, which looks like it can quickly provide value for a specific aspect of your startup. In terms of making mockups before diving into making the actual product, the author is advocating doing that for gauging customer interest in the product. You wouldn't sell mockups of a product in place of the actual product itself.
Was that intended to be a serious response? "I know what people really want even if they say they want something else"? People being forced into cities quantitatively proves they want to be in cities?
Ex-NSA chief jokes about putting Edward Snowden on kill list
I disagree with your argument that antagonistic learning becomes self-destructive. For some, it might, but for those who can deal with it, the lesson that researching a topic before asking about that topic is a valuable one.

Also, no one ever said, "come back when you're a Rails-powered millionaire, and by the way if you're not one already you'll never amount to anything". That's not what's happening above, at all. I agree, if that were the case, that's boring and unhelpful, but that's not at all what happened. That's too specific. The above took place because of the obvious and unnecessary trickery in the submission - people don't like to be taken as fools.
The new Safari is coming to 10.7/8 also
How our brain makes mistakes and how to prevent it.
Highly idiomatic phrases are always going to be problems for natural language processing. Further, people aren't 100% accurate in language processing either.

I'd say that if you posed that statement to 1000 English speakers from around the world, at least 1% of them would be baffled by it.

All that is to say non-conventional uses of language are always going to be a problem for natural language processing. If a certain kind of innuendo and sarcasm is represented often in its training data, then the model SHOULD be able to understand it when it sees it again.
Not really. Those data points are independent. A lot of people use Angular and Rails together. Rails still provides a nice controller and model layer for an API.
Love this product and the team! Go guys!