skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was time to leave, and the HR lady came to me and said I would have to sign a release letter and send it back within 2 work days (the following Monday was a holiday), otherwise I would not get any of the remaining pay, including my “stock options”. Apparently instead of full-time as stated in my offer letter, I was a “Contractor” and that the agreement was “terminated”. I guess that’s to protect them somehow. And the “stock options” that she said I would be paid amounted to $0 (as expected).*

That shit is highly illegal. Get a lawyer. Even now, after the fact, there are things an attorney can do for you, like negotiate a settlement. (If they pressured you into signing a release or non-disparagement agreement, they're afraid). The release should be voided by the threat of withholding wages. This reversion to consultant status is fishy, too. It seems like they're afraid of a constructive dismissal claim (essentially, the argument that the PM's horrible behavior constitutes wrongful termination).

I'm not saying that you should sue them. That's not my decision to make, and for a 9-week job it's rarely worth it. Given that they already broke the law, you don't much to lose, and there is something to gain, by getting an attorney involved. If nothing else, it'll make that horrible PM look bad to his superiors, and that's a small win.

You won't get stock options, of course. Typical vesting is 4/1, meaning you get zero if you leave in the first year. I don't know why they even mentioned that. Almost no one gets stock options (for obvious, legitimate reasons) who worked at a place for 9 weeks.
Thanks for this. I used to visit Canada a lot and if I ever used my laptop up there I'd have to contend with all my default search settings being switched to google.ca for a while.
Yes. This is true for all the other Ubuntu flavors, too. Either way will get you to the same system, since all the flavors share the same Ubuntu apt archive. Using a flavor directly just gets you your chosen desktop environment by default.
Nexus 5 camera has magnet ring built-in, for add-on lenses
I would have suggested Linux Mint/any distro that you can drop Cinnamon DE onto. Cinnamon has more updates, almost as much customization as XFCE, and doesn't look as old as Win95.
Does anyone know how this compares with other offerings?
I just installed 13.10 today, perfect!
Working fine for me!
Awesome product :D
For those few of us that don't have any device with a built-in capability of interpreting QR codes: http://zxing.org/w/decode?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.datagenetics.co...
The site is a periodical. The linked post is one article from the periodical. I get in it my inbox, it's always interesting.
i had to submit that link originally because the site wasn't mobile friendly, now it is
Read the letter published by Ars[1], they refer not only to the logo but to the "Ubuntu word" (trademark of Canonical) and "to use the Ubuntu trademarks and Ubuntu word in a domain name would require approval from Canonical".

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canoni...

Edit: formatting
I was going to post my take on this matter...but something struck me when reading the replies. The quality and thoughtfulness of the discussion here is so good compared to the utter crap that is regurgitated on TV and most newspapers. I'm happy that discussions of this level can be found on the internet, and that computer systems enable them.
I was wondering about this too when I read that... Is this an indirect admission that they actively use DPI?
While I'm sure many of us didn't see this coming, it makes perfect sense for someone like Amazon -- with their massive server farms and data structures -- to do something like this.

I wonder if they'll push for more developers to move to Android and their Kindle system somehow.
If you accept that small groups of people and individuals can control ridiculously disproportionate amounts of value in an economy, you also must accept that small groups of people and individuals can control disproportionate amounts of resources to the detriment of everyone else.

(See, for example, "too big to fail" banks.)

Society has a vested interest in preventing this from happening.
reminds me of the old days of google when I looked up "market penetration" and a condom add was shown in the right upper corner ..
First, it's a C codebase (assuming Quake 3).

Second, there's a lot of little fiddly bit-twiddling for certain parts of it, like the PVS sets and whatnot. I would be unsurprised if JS doesn't deal with that well.

Third, the level of play is such that stuttering, pauses, or hiccups, even if only on the order of tens or hundreds of milliseconds, can be unacceptable.
Aaron Swartz Hackathons This Weekend to Continue his Work
Metro makes more sense in this context.
Today I learned about http://www.fixubuntu.com.

Thanks Mark!
Can someone provide some analysis and numbers to support this? Creating a gaming hardware console is naturally capital intensive, but has the PlayStation always generated losses for Sony? How about the Wii for Nintendo? What is the breakdown on the Xbox P/L statement? (I realize this doesn't exist in the wild, but someone knowledgeable feel free to hazard a guess, case-study style ...)
I wish to see Popcorn on Android. I think it's cool idea.
> we also need to structure our society to reduce suffering and improve the general quality of life

More concretely, people who are really passionate about inequality could invest in nonprofits to help exactly the people who need it through things like targeted scholarship funds, charter schools, food banks, foster care charities, mentorship programs, addiction recovery organizations, and the like.

I believe that we've already been restructuring society to ill effect. Let's start with restructuring our Thursdays. I'm sure our crossfit friends or trivia night at the pub will manage without us.

In other words, I would like us to "restructure society" not through programs, laws, and schemes but by personalizing the problem by taking care of our actual neighbors who have actual needs.
I'm not really sure how. Most web pages don't have dynamic lighting. I suspect that the amount of information to encode the flat image plus the normal map is going to be more than the amount of information to encode the pre-rendered effect.

Now, if you were planning on doing some kind of dyanmic lighting in a web page, then sure, this would help. But I can't think of much use for dynamic lighting outside of games or other physical simulations, which is likely overkill for most webapps.
Over the Edge: Hundreds voluntarily jump off one of America's largest bridges
So Canonical started abusing trademark law to silence critics, by claiming they could only use the name Ubuntu with permission and in specific contexts. Debian, being the distro of freedom, is preemptively removing the trademarked name in order to make it impossible for Canonical to do the same to them.

While it is extremely unlikely that Canonical ever would, the point stands that they've done this at least once to others. By taking this action Debian is protecting their users from what they perceive as an IP threat.

While it may seem a little silly, I am very glad they're doing this if only because it's drawing attention to how far Canonical has gone with some of their whacky and controlling decisions.

Context, for those who want it- http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canoni...
Love objc.io and their consistent quality iOS articles. I learn at least a few new things with every newsletter.
OCaml - Performance and Profiling
OP said all platforms. It would make waiting for the microwave to finish less tedious.
She throws enough tofu to her constituents to appear liberal (women's and LGBT rights), but is otherwise a DINO.
No, it's sad that they don't take a holistic view of how they make money: They serve enterprise users and help create Ubuntu-based products for a fee, which business they would not have if Ubuntu was not the leading Linux distro, which it won't be if they screw up privacy issues.

Ubuntu has lost quite a bit of share to Mint. I have not been cranky enough about Unity to switch, but if I do find search data leaking despite the "privacy" settings that would about do it.
This is exactly what we're trying to fix with IgnitionDeck (shameless plug: http://IgnitionDeck.com). Kickstarter fails in a lot of areas, but this is a failure they should be ashamed of.

'Read the FAQ' is not good enough, but that's the same vibe I got from them when applying for my first project many years ago, and why I never went with their platform.

At some point, this will unravel and significantly damage the industry. They need to step up and back their creators, without whom they wouldn't have a platform.
I'm no Canonical apologist, but they do have a "intellectual property" document and are quite clear about what they deem acceptable and what they don't.

They very specifically say you need permission in domains:

"You will require Canonical’s permission to use ... any Trademark in a domain name or URL or for merchandising purposes."

http://www.canonical.com/intellectual-property-policy
Yeah, it's quite sad to me, I thought I would never move on from Ubuntu, it was really great until Unity and all this other crap they started piling on it. And now with the corporate fear-mongering over their trademark, that's the last straw for me, I'm going to try moving upstream to Debian and recommend companies I work to do the same.
Bingo. Everyone is replaceable over a long enough timeframe.
Mint is based off of Ubuntu, but also has a version based off of Debian, as zx2c4 has pointed out. The biggest difference is that Mint uses the Cinnamon desktop environment, as opposed to Unity, which was forked from Gnome 2. Also, they use Nemo, which was forked from Nautilus, which has more functionality and features as opposed to Nautilus.
how does this compare to mixpanel or kissmetrics?
A world with high inequality but low suffering would still be undesirable, as wealthy people would set the rules. They have the money to spend on lobbying and advertising. The poor would be fed, but still be powerless.
For companies that make "creative" QR codes, aren't they already giving up the 20% error correction?
targeted advertising and selling annonymized data are two ways that make sense
Did you miss the recent news about the NSA tapping Google's internal server-to-server communications in real time? They don't have to ask anymore.

Edit: this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6680763
echo "alias 'chromium'='chromium --incognito'" >> ~/.bash_aliases
Ballmer was at Microsoft when they were sub 50 people. Maybe he's not a visionary founder but potentially a visionary foundational employee? Considering how long he's been at the company, I'm not sure how one separates Microsoft's high in the 90s from Ballmer.
Proud user of Trisquel[1] since 2010. It's a fork of Ubuntu that adheres to GNU's Guidelines for Free System Distributions[2].

While I'm aware that the general opinion of the free software movement ranges from "extreme" to "considered harmful," it is a nice feeling knowing that the creators of the distro have some ethical guidelines in place to prevent things like this - as it turns out, the free software types also tend to be some of the louder privacy advocate types as well.

Mint is probably a better option unless you know your system does not require proprietary drivers, as GNU/FSF kosher distros use a version of the kernel that lacks those proprietary drivers.

[1] http://trisquel.info/

[2] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli...
Bzzt, capitalism fallacy. I fondly remember Ubuntu being a charity of Mark Shuttleworth. Not everything needs a business model.

The mindset of the time is reflected in an announcement [1] of the /Ubuntu Foundation/:

"""
"It's important for us to distinguish the philanthropic and
non-commercial work that is at the heart of the Ubuntu project, from
the commercial support and certification programs that are the focus
of Canonical Ltd." said Mark Shuttleworth"""

These new pushes to monetize the home user is what is really annoying.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2005-July/...
Paid professional phone support.
GOTCHA Challenge: can you break CMU's scheme to tell computers and humans apart?
All that stuff is not surveillance. The NSA/FBI/TSA etc. can do all that with or without information about you.
"Frog Fractions" creator Jim Crawford on what separates the good from the great.
I think we are in agreement here. I had assumed one of the reasons it's "not done like that" is "blowing up the stack" but only half of that was given at the time. Maybe I misunderstood altogether.

I just appreciated that there are real reasons for things, especially when they make sense.
In your experimentation, have you ever come across cases where certain content strategies improve metrics but you ultimately felt they didn't improve the quality of the content?
I'm not too sure about that. A lot of Microsofts dominance in business comes from the ubiquity of its operating system, while IBM has _always_ been big in enterprise / mainframe computing and research regardless of their "foray" into PCs.

Giving up the consumer market to focus on business puts this dominance in danger (even more so than the mobile/tablet threat), because someone might very well and up doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to the minicomputer makers, and eat their business "from the bottom up".

So I think the interesting question is whether Microsoft could survive and thrive on enterprise software/services in an environment where neither Windows nor Office were dominant.
Young hackers love Lob. These guys will have no problem hiring.
Once you factor in genetic selection (Gattaca style -- many aspects of which we are ALREADY capable of), inequality will not just become a matter of knowledge/education/motivation as this article states, but BIOLOGICAL - and that will really be the turning point in global inequality.

This is-- from a scientific perspective-- not far off at all, and we haven't figured out the ethical system that can help us navigate this coming phenomenon.

Even start-ups like Counsyl, which are doing great work with respect to genetics and family planning, are a part of this movement towards genetic variation between the rich and poor.
How to make money affiliate marketing.
I thought this is something that competes with Google Analytics. Apparently it's for mobile apps and games only.
whoopsie doesn't send anything without your permission.
Wow, very cool indeed. We worked on an open-source community[1] tool using Datomic/Codeq[2], and the ops portion was/has been pretty unpleasant. I'd love to see Datomic-as-a-Service popup, even as a only-meant-for-starter-projects, just so that experimenting with it could be that much easier. That might be possible with the new license, depending on how the Cognitect team sees it.

[1] The service is a frontend to Codeq, having imported many Clojure repos: http://www.jidaexplorer.com/

[2] http://blog.datomic.com/2012/10/codeq.html

EDIT: Added links.
I'm not very familiar with how car component software is developed, so I can't speak to that.

In avionics, the software requirements are only one part of the system. There's requirements for how the hardware is to behave, and tolerances for acceptable behavior. All of these pieces are tested. The software is tested by itself in a pure software environment, and it's tested running on the specific piece of hardware that it needs to run on, and that software+hardware combination is tested in various stages of increasingly complete avionics systems, culminating in testing the entire airplane.

But I was just talking about the software, where we do employ requirements, verification, testing, and "software engineering". That's only one piece of the system of course, but still a valuable piece. If the software doesn't work right by itself in an idealized environment, then it has little hope of working right when the hardware is going bonkers. And even in the idealized pure software environment, we simulate various system failures to do initial testing on how the software responds.
Using it on the recent public feed of data from JCDecaux on the latest iteration of my project [1], hope I am referencing the license accordingly! On the source I am referencing the link to the JCDecaux website, but could to etalab easily :)

[1]: http://staging.citybik.es/networks/velib

EDIT: Forgot to add, I should also release my data under a license and have contemplated using the "Open Licence", but I am not yet sure on what will suit best.
Suggest you buy humanity-toothers.com too.
Except that policies like that are completely meaningless in the face of the law. They are like the rules you used to make up as a kid.
I actually thought this was from the Confederate Express team, the example at https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/001/232/470/76a69a703ac8... seemed so similar to the examples on the Sprite Lamp page.

Kudos to both, dynamic lighting on 2D art looks great.
This service is free at any usage level according to their faq.
There are a couple of concrete worries I'd have:

* If you malloc something very large, on Linux at least (I don't know about the BSDs), it doesn't necessarily get allocated, and only requests memory from the system when you actually access it. It's a valid pattern to, say, malloc a large amount of memory, pass it to your own allocator as a pool, and use what you need from it. If you go and zero all that memory, then you've accessed it all, resulting in much increased memory usage and maybe OOM kills. (You can argue this is an issue with the Linux overcommit system, not with malloc, but that's the system we have today and we'd need to account for it.)

* Slow code is a deterrent for people deploying crypto. If it takes 5 milliseconds for an HTTP response and 50 for an HTTPS handshake, people are going to be hesitant about deploying HTTPS, or do something silly like use it to protect only the initial login. So you do need to worry about the time that your crypto takes as an operational concern for deployment, and balance that off against hardening and paranoia. Favoring either extreme too much results in less overall security.

* There are very few languages that are truly "appropriate" for crypto algorithms. Even C only kind of counts, and you have to be very careful about how you write it. You ideally need promises from the language that certain operations are constant-time and that the optimizer is going to do what you want and neither more nor less. Most of the languages I can think of that only allocate you zeroed memory also include risks on the order of garbage collection being triggered in the middle of your algorithm depending on what your secret data is, so that makes them definitely unsuitable. And most of the non-toy crypto libraries in higher-level languages end up being bindings of carefully-tuned C libraries, and in that sense _do_ quasi-unintentionally expose a way to allocate uninitialized memory, by going through the C allocation routines.
That's pretty much where I was going with my comment. The tractor displaced people from the work they knew, but it allowed them to find new forms of productivity over the long term and do things well beyond what ever could have accomplished while guiding horses around the farm. I imagine individuals felt some big pains during the transition though.

Even if the computer can give rise to certain groups today, is there any reason to believe things will not even out again? The people losing their farms back in the day probably felt much like those being devalued by computers feel today.
Love objc.io
Best iOS articles ever
Filter bubble.

Use DDG: http://dontbubble.us/
Who gives a crap about what they deem acceptable. That's definitely non-enforceable in cases like "ubuntusucks.com"
It's too bad Amazon doesn't have any analytics for publishers of books on Kindle. The only information you get is the # of copies sold and how much people paid for them on a monthly basis. (You can get daily sales, but those are only available for "month-to-date" so you have to go in every single day to record those value).

It would be nice to know how people found the book, demographics of who's reading them, etc.
The features that doom Reddit to perpetual mutiny
Just Created a Facebook Page? Here are 4 Brand Blunders to Avoid
The Internet does not require "Data on lots of people in one place" it would be just as happy with data on lots of people in lots of places, places that aren't always online too.
The true size of Africa: http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/18/true-size-of-africa/

The historian Marshall Hodgson referred to the Mercator projection as the "Jim Crow projection." This is why.
> You are certainly lucky that your natural interests lead you to something lucrative

There is certainly luck involved, but chalking all success up to fortunate nerd-dom is a simplification. Also consider the importance of avoiding pitfalls like drug abuse, crippling debt, and unexpected pregnancies. Also, millions of students do boring and pointless schoolwork every day to improve their grades so they can get into a good college, not because they were born with the "I like dioramas" gene. Calling success luck diminishes that brand of responsibility and hard work.
If I understand it right, Unstable doesn't get security fixes:

http://www.debian.org/security/faq#unstable

And Testing doesn't get fixes for contrib and non-free:

http://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing
Poor soul you are stuck in the implementation model. Continue to use your drop-down, yes...
It's not about who has the money, it's about who is owed money. A chargeback means that you legally owe them the money.
I'm sure this has been said a million times elsewhere, but boy do I feel like Amazon would benefit from better designers like Google has.
It doesn't matter, trademark law requires you to pro-actively prosecute violators if you want to keep your trademark.

Although I still wish Canonical was more transparent about who gets to use its trademarks and who doesn't: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-community/+bug/394328

sp332: You're right, although it's not clear to me that this definitely is not a violation. I hope it isn't for the sake of free speech.
Why does the HN mob downvote this, but upvote anything related to transparency? I thought transparency, especially amongst our elected officials, was a good idea?

If a candidate for major office pays for sex, does the public have the right to know?
I guess it's getting time to move upstream. Which is fine, I've never given a dime to Canonical, they can do what they want. But it's too bad, they were one of the best things to happen to Linux.
I was going to say this.

A good book on the policies that helped kill unions and weaken the middle class is Who Stole the American Dream by Hedrick Smith.

http://www.amazon.com/Stole-American-Dream-Hedrick-Smith-ebo...
I don't see the tech angle here....
>Selling Xbox and Bing will only seal MS's faith as another IBM. Windows Phone and Surface will stagnate (even more) and eventually they will have to be let go too.

These types of comments sealing the fate of MS comes up at any post relating to Microsoft. However its far from the truth, Microsoft isn't going anywhere as much as Adobe, whether someone likes it or not. Xbox is one of the major revenue earning division for MS (not from console but from games, digital rights and live) and it is going thrive despite their PR clusterf*ck with Xbox One. Windows Phone and Surface slowing gaining momentum and WP is starting to see large market shares outside of U.S.
Fear of the name increases fear of the thing itself.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is full of praise little device Raspberry Pi.
Yes:
http://www.starrcompanies.com/WhatWeCover/KidnapRansomExtort...
I just don't use Unity
US loses Unesco voting rights after failing to pay its dues