skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but even elsewhere (I live in Portland, OR), I'm starting to feel the "hussle" attitude infecting startups. I think it has a lot to do with investments: startups with a lot of cash are more likely to overhire and overwork their developers (in exchange for great pay), whereas bootstrapped startups that have less cash can't afford to pay huge salaries, so they instead need to make their company appealing by providing a better work schedule, etc. I don't know that there's a causal relationship there, but it's just an observation I've noticed.
Using PC Pursuit to packet switch your way to Milwaukee without a long-distance phone call.
That's a great example that you gave actually. The person who creates a site that allows people to do exactly that (construct outfits just like that sample shown) will have a possible winner on their hands. Not that I play it (I'm not into sports) but I'd imagine a site like that is a bit like fantasy football in appeal.
From an NYT article a few years back, the estimate for Manhattan was that 30% of new condo sales (admittedly a minority versus coops in NY) were foreign buyers. That would still be a material share of overall sales. In an already tight market that's a huge number of sales not tied to local income growth.
Perhaps I'm the only one that finds it odd that Pintrest, Imgur, and even Facebook are filled with photos of text, or text is the dominant theme, rather than images? A meme is really the utter destruction and decent of a meaningful image into a text-based cliche. The designers of the internet have created a world so poorly usable by the average joe that billionaires are made fixing and herding stupid.
A self-driving car never gets tired or drunk. It never gets bored. It never talks on the phone, and it's never distracted by passengers or music. With the right sensors, it can see better than any human. It can react faster and more accurately than a Formula 1 driver.

Even with all these advantages, some automated vehicles will crash and kill their occupants. Some will even kill pedestrians, and sometimes this will be due to software error.

But humans do this already, and we do it so often that it doesn't even get on the news. Around 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents each year. That's just over 2% of all deaths[1]. Unless the automated vehicles of the future are orders of magnitude worse than current ones, switching to them will save millions of lives and prevent tens of millions of injuries.

It's sad that bureaucracy and human irrationality cause so much unnecessary death and suffering.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_c...
if 90-97% people are unable to complete a signup process completely what do we call it?

it has been over 40 years since US reached moon, without modern computers and simulations

what you see is sheer incompetence and arrogance,

I dare the administration to release the numbers, they won't, but the president can talk about software glitches what apple iPhone had
> Basically, think of it this way: if Bitcoin exchanges were to disappear right now, what would happen to Bitcoin?

If Bitcoin doesn't replace all currencies (I don't expect it to do that anyway), it can be used as digital gold (in fact I think you can expect higher price increases from this use case, than from every day transactions). Currently I would love to be able to save in gold, but I can't for many reasons. My government banned it, so I can no longer buy it in a trusted bank (if such thing exists). I can't buy it from other individuals like me, because it's difficult to divide, so you can never get the amount you wanted. You can't import it from other countries because you can't hide it from customs. You can't buy it in the black market either, because they will sell you golden bars filled with tungsten. And all this is for buying. When you want to sell it you will have similar problems. Bitcoin fixes all this, and you don't really need exchanges for this. In fact I never used one (international wires are banned).

Let me think about the security definition. I don't promise you anything, but I'll give it a try when my mind is clear.
Personally, I remember when the Halloween Documents came out:

http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/

Amongst other things, they spelled out how Microsoft intended to 'embrace and extend' standards in order to break interoperability.

If you want to know why people don't trust Microsoft, years later, have a read of them.
At least 4 people on HN had the same instinct, myself among them. HN is definitely a more technical cross section of the internet population. Anyhow, yes, it was a .5 second instinct to interact with it and then I figured it out. Not sure if that constitutes a negative UI experience or not, but it IS an issue. Hell, maybe there's some psychology at work that makes me want to download it to get the ability to interact! Who knows!
Your main point seems to be that opening their source code will make it easier for someone else to clone their idea:

Zynga. Zynga has made a fortune profiting off of other smaller outfits, just merely by studying and copying. They didn't have source-code (to my best knowledge), but they knew how to make a game mass-appeal. This happens more often in gaming than you'd like to think.

But that's wrong because, as you say, if some company wants to clone an idea, they're not even going to bother reading the code, let alone steal the code. And I know of no one who's ever stolen code for a game since, say, 2003, and gotten away with it. Reddit changes the game. You can crucify a competitor for such behavior, and gamers will shun them.

My advice (I work at a gaming company) is to hold all your IP close as possible. Game design, art assets, source code, whatever. You have a right to own it so why not hold on to it for a while until you establish a solid competitive advantage.

I think your advice is coming from a gut feeling or intuition rather than experience. But empirically it's mistaken. It's a natural reaction to be hesitant to release code powering your product, but I'm pretty sure it's never been a problem in practice. They will get major major PR and respect, both of which can only help a fledgeling startup.
I'm out of my depth here, but it seems to me one idea could be to help bacteria evolve rather than aim to kill them all. What I mean by this is that perhaps using bacteria against themselves could be an interesting approach. Much like over decades people bred dogs to encourage certain traits perhaps we can coax bacteria into developing traits that help us rather than help them when they come into our bodies. Maybe your run a fever for five or ten days and feel crummy but rather than have bacteria trying to destroy you they are, effectively, fighting and destroying themselves.

In other words, Aikido not Karate. Use their own energy against them.

Just a thought. Probably nonsense. Not a biologist.
I'm just posting to say thank you (@hdivider) for expressing your opinion here - if not for your exuberant praise I think it unlikely I would have clicked this link in the middle of a comment thread.

I'm very glad that I found your praise and clicked the link. :)
Why Our Privacy Problem is a Democracy Problem in Disguise
From the recent Penn Jillette AMA on reddit:

"I'm very very careful with my time. I try to do nothing that someone else could do. So, I write, I perform and I spend time with my family."

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1opzae/penn_jillette_h...

This doesn't answer the dichotomy of work vs. family, but puts it in a different context. What is the most effective way to spend your time?

The president's daughter scrapes her knee, but there's also a school shooting? I think Obama's gonna be giving a speech, and Michelle's on neosporin duty.

(West Wing spoiler alert 2003) The president's daughter is kidnapped? Well, I hope John Goodman is available, it's about to get Season 4 cliffhanger in here. Someone else can be president. Right now it's not the most effective use of Martin Sheen's time.
"...to the studs"

Even though I would have wanted a new kitchen as well I would have negotiated with my wife to allow me to spend some of the money from selling my company (you know what I'm referring to) on a fast car or other similar toy while she was distracted with the joy of the new kitchen. And before the bathroom is torn up down to the studs.
Keeping you alive is not the same as living. A few would like to stay in situation where you can't do 99% of the things other humans do.

Its very common in a lot of of places in the world to ask for euthanasia in case of such diseases.
The movie "Local Hero" tells the tale in a much less heavy-handed way. And great soundtrack.
The housing isn't vacant because it's not occupied. It's vacant because the owners have their primary residence elsewhere. Or have several homes. London has neighborhoods where full time residency runs around 30% as well, leading to "ghost towns" - supposedly much of that is Russian or eastern euro money being kept outside of their home countries less as an investment than a value store. I have a friend who is about to close on a condo in LA - all cash - and already owns homes in Asia and New York. She views them as investments but having paid cash she has no interest in renting them out.
How the Beirut Bombing Spawned the Modern Surveillance State
...and these are just the technical limitations of the autonomous car + driver system. There would appear to be immense potential liability in selling a product that is explicitly billed as being safer than human drivers, but which is a) different and b) going to fail, sometimes catastrophically.

I'd be surprised if autonomous cars become widespread before the last human train conductor is decruited. Driving a train is a simpler problem in a lot of ways, and yet we still feel the need for people in those jobs.
Well, a big text file isn't a documentary. Download this link for an actual documentary on the subject:

http://www.esva.net/~thom/arczip.wmv

The takeaway is that Katz optimized existing code, his mother ran the pkzip business, they defamed the arczip guys, and Katz himself died a paranoid, drunken wreck. The problem with the doc is that pretty much nobody is there to defend Katz. It's an old war, and really doesn't matter now.
Why Apple Is Gunning for Microsoft
- My workplace has strict office hours: I am formally expected by my colleagues/superior to show up by a certain time (for example, 9am).
- My workplace has loose office hours: I am expected to be present within a certain broad time range (for example between 9am and 11am)
- My workplace has no specific work hours: as long as I get my work done, I can work at whichever hours I want (for example, 5pm to 1am one day and 9am to 4pm another day).
The NSA Spies On Mekel's Phone
And something tells me that would be made very illegal assuming it isn't now (which it most likely is) very very quickly. It would be funny until it got someone killed. Then, not so much
> Wow, I had no idea the ARC source was open.

Of course, the ARC source wasn't really "open" in the sense we use the term today. Hence SEA's ability to file a lawsuit against Katz.

On the other hand, the .zip file format really was open in the sense we use the term today.
Yeah I've never heard of that, even retroactive tax in a given year is new and controversial. I'd have to think that a massive retroactive tax would be considered an unconstitutional takings.
It's not entirely irrational - One driver suddenly goes crazy -> One car crash. Broken software update for thousands of self driving cars -> hundreds of crashes.
This is basically debating semantics.

Bacteria don't 'want' anything in a purely technical sense. But they will eventually develop/are developing resistance to antibiotics anyway. You seem to be stuck in debating about the right sentences to describe that.

That should be least of our worries.
Google Chrome adds parental controls to browser
Firstly, there's a real difference between rates of MRSA colonisation and rates of MRSA infection, which implies a pathological process at work.

Secondly, what on earth do you mean when you say we lost the fight against viruses a decade ago'?

We have only got better at treating viruses; we had almost no treatment for viruses a decade ago and we have some treatments now; for example we are now much better at treating chronic hepatitis c infection which is a leading cause of liver failure and cancer; we have good HIV drugs which can lead to long term management without significant comorbidities (although many of the pieces were in place a decade ago), and your illustrated case, rabies, has long been a problem child like many significant viral illnesses that are discovered close to the end of their course, has caused so much pathology by tr time they present that the course is terminal.

But there have only been a handful of cases of fulminant rabies in the developed world in the last decade, so it's hardly a thing that we are getting experience in treating.
Show HN: Random Album Art Generator
Ask HN: How to come out of this situation?
Hello entrepreneurs and hackers. I have screwed my career big time. I am in mid 30s and I am penniless literally. After completing bachelors degree in CS from university, I started masters. Had to drop out due to illness. Joined a company after a year. Company paid low salary. And lot of politics in the company. After 2 years just when things were improving, mainly the salary, I left as I hated that political environment. Started consulting and did that for many years. I earned enough to pay bills but nothing at all for medical and retirement so far. I believe I didn't have necessary (business) skills for running successful business so I couldn't make good money though I made clients happy. Now my gf left me as her company offered her a good role and huge salary. She thinks I am a loser. And may be she is right. All my fault. So, here I am - no money, no house, no car, no wife, no savings. Totally f4d. As you guys are among the most intelligent ones on the planet, I thought you guys could help me with a bit of your wisdom. If you were in my shoes, what would you have done to fix things? I don't have ego problem. So, even if you are half my age, please don't hesitate to post your advice. Thank you all in advance.
Can you please link to what you're referring to?
But I don't think people are arguing that total demand has skyrocketed, as I'm sure there are plenty of cheap and affordable houses in places such as Flint and other rust belt cities. The problem is the locations with jobs have seen an increase in demand without an increase in supply and those same locations are the ones that are attractive to foreign investors and immigrants. So you end up with all the demand in a few concentrated areas vs spread equally around the country.
In contrast to the far overused sugary definition, Phil Katz really was a rock star programmer. He also died a rock star's tragic and pathetic death.

There is probably no line between self and business for a guy like PK. At that time you could build a significant program or even a game singlehandedly. Most likely he obsessively made his better ARC program for its own reward (you could use it for free) and he was surprised both by the commercial success and the subsequent legal attack. Very personal indeed, and if he wasn't already a completely tortured soul, that would be more than enough to take away any shred of sense he had made of the world. Give enough cash and free time to someone who has been cracked like that and he quite easily can end up dead from an existential crisis with no practical boundaries.

Considering this was some 25 years ago now, if he thought about intellectual property issues at all, the mindset at that time was very reasonable in that your source code and executable was considered copyrightable like a book - it didn't matter if it provided the same functionality as someone else's program as long as you wrote the code. Just consider the fate of the original spreadsheet for confirmation of this.

To summarize, before you take any stand against the tragedy that is the life of PK, consider that there is probably a huge concentration of people very much like the early Phil Katz right here on HN. The man simply needed help, and he didn't get it.
One approach is stubbing out the services you don't need. This article by a Heroku engineer describes how to do this at the Rack level:

https://brandur.org/service-stubs

Another approach is creating a set of shared services that developers can use rather than deploying their own instances. This article by a LinkedIn engineer describes their internal Quick Deploy system:

http://engineering.linkedin.com/developer-productivity/quick...

Personally, though, I'd go the route of creating a self-contained Vagrant setup if possible. This helps folks become familiar with the entire system and fix bugs anywhere in it, rather than drawing strict lines of ownership around specific services.
You know what's peculiar? Thom Henderson wrote that after Katz's death in 2000. At what point in the last thirteen years would anyone think that distributing source code is strange?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH brilliant! Let's break this dumb idea down shall we.

> These rules could reinvent the way companies raise money by allowing them to bypass the traditional costs of going public, which usually involves hiring costly investment bankers and accountants.

So instead of breaking the seat belt monopoly to reduce costs (work with me here), we'll just make it so that kids no longer have to wear seat belts anymore. It's absolutely brilliant in its sheer audacity. You get to keep your campaign contributions from the rent-seeking financial cartels, whilst simultaneously providing VCs with their retail lambs for the slaughter. The fact that they do this, whilst selling the idea as a positive act for the public has me slack jawed. That takes balls.

> Congress is looking for a loophole to allow smaller companies to get an exemption from the strict rules controlling the sale of securities to individuals. Congress is hoping that by using Internet crowdfunding, small and promising companies could gather capital needed to grow and expand from a wide pool of investors.

So we invent seat belts, and people stop dying. After a while people forget why we had seat belts in the first place. Let's take away the seat belts, because look, no one has died in a really long time.

Furthermore, why on earth would MORE risky companies need LESS disclosure. That makes no sense. If you were thinking halfway straight, you'd realize that it's the small ones that are the most subject to corruption, pump and dump scams and extensive stock promotion. Penny stocks CLEARLY indicate that this is the case. We need MORE disclosure not less. Costs are entirely derived from the IPO cartel. Break that you morons. Oh wait, you can't, because 20% of next year's campaign contributions come from your financial bosses.

> With the new rules, the SEC is looking to open the concept of crowdfunding to the public, while still offering investor protection. The new elements of the rules would cap any company's ability to raise money through crowdfunding to $1 million every 12 months. For investors with an annual net income or net worth of less than $100,000, every 12 months they can invest up to 5% of that, or $2,000, whichever is more. Those with an annual income or net worth exceeding $100,000 can invest up to 10% of that every 12 months. Securities bought through portals would have to be held a year before being sold.

Good luck regulating this. Capital limits are always exceeded by the determinedly stupid.
As a .Net (work) and FOSS* (free time) developer, I find that the ecosystem just doesn't require the use of the CLI nearly as much. Sure, you can interact with TFS from the CLI (and maybe it's better, I don't know) but the first exposure most have to it is GUI so you learn that way. That's just one example but Visual Studio et. al. tend to take care of many things I use the CLI for on OS X/Linux systems, via a GUI. I'm certainly not saying it's better but it is better than most CLI-gone-GUI tools I've used in the FOSS world. I think this is because Windows dev tools are built for the GUI first (and often have a complete lack of, or a lacking support for, CLI UX) first as opposed to many FOSS tools that assume an understanding of the CLI and are built for that first. Personally I enjoy CLI and, while it has a steeper learning curve, I am more productive with my definition of a "proper" CLI (bash, zsh, etc.) than without. So I am attempting to learn Powershell in order to regain some of lost productivity on Windows. But, that's just me. I know many .Net devs that don't feel that productivity loss without a CLI.

* I use Ruby, Python, and Javascript/Node.JS on a Mac for side projects.
Looks like those would sink into mud. The suggested wheel seems more like a combination of those and dysons ballbarell http://content.dyson.co.uk/insideDyson/article.asp?aID=ballb...
Perhaps those specific examples aren't corruption, but this could also include PAC donations, insider market info and fancy dinners and junkets. I don't see why this be an all or nothing affair. It seems it is only this way because the beneficiaries are the ones who make the rules.
It's somewhat shortsighted, however. What if, by showing compassion to your family / children, you inspired them to benefit the world? If you inspire three of your children to do what you would have done yourself, you potentially get 3x the output of world-saviness.

Slightly trolly, I know, but just being devil's advocate.
Why is it used for telecommuting?

Because it can protect the sensitive (internal corporate network) information while its travelling over untrusted networks, with the destination being none the wiser.

Bridging two networks (or a host and a network) together securely over the internet has far more applications than merely telecommuting and is so effective and easy to apply, why not use it to protect your Facebook session while you're at the coffee shop?
Why don't they? It seems like local municipalities would be incentivized to seize them for unpaid taxes then.

Are they permitted to rent them out and not pay? If so it seems like it would be a great loophole for a bank to mutate into a quasi real estate management company. You could easily undercut any other local rents by the cost of property taxes.
Not as memorable as .com.
Especially of the poor rip offs and time sinks that Zynga produced...
Merely having a foreign buyer doesn't imply that the apartment will remain empty. And if the apartment is rented, it doesn't really make a difference if the owner is foreign or not.

So the real issue is how many apartments are being left vacant by the owners, or only used rarely by the owners.
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>>but only after unfathomably huge amounts of time, and trillions and trillions of attempts.

What's really huge and what no is really a limit and perception of our brains, no?

For a evolutionary process that has started at the earliest stars after the Big Bang. Those species are currently so powerful, that we are very likely to them the same as bacteria are to us. Might as well perceive that to be a very reasonably efficient process.
Coursera reaches 100 partners worldwide
Putting this in to context, at the time Thom had to basically go under the radar because of all the hate mail and threats he got because of the ARC / PKWare legal battle, supposedly these email threats were prompted in part by Phil himself.

It definitely doesn't make it OK to say "this person deserved to die," but I think it's worth considering it in context, as these people weren't strangers to each other and their actions both had powerful effects on one another.
You gotta solve these problems one by one. Can you still code? Get a job at the highest salary you can find.
Then get a nexus 4 and compile and flash b2g on it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/...