skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you are genuinely skilled, you will succeed.

Some skilled people succeed, therefore all skilled people succeed eventually?

Alternatively, it's a tautological statement that defines "genuinely skilled" people as those who succeeded, therefore unsuccessful people must not be skilled.
Sounds interesting. I'll work about it
Question: why would school prestige correlate with quality of code?
If I understand the link's post correctly, the user is being logged out of his Google Chrome profile (which is used to save your browsing data across devices) and being redirected to the login page to accept some new ToS. Accepting that ToS for the browser setting set up his Google+ profile, it seems.

As far as I know, no other browser (IE,Firefox,Safari) has a social network (and very few actually nudge you into logging in to some profile when using it) and so this has a lot to do with what browser is used.

The author would likely not get this behaviour on any other browser (I'm on Firefox, I use some of Google's services and my Google+ account is still disabled), which is another reason to believe this has a lot to do with what browser is used.
So without reading the terms of agreement bad stuff happens and then you complain? They told you it would happen yet you agreed. If you are not happy with those "tricks", then don't agree with the terms of agreement which you are supposed to READ before you agree with them.

Or do you sign any contract presented to you without hesitation?
Yes, FastMail. I wrote a blog post a while ago about switching from Gmail: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/
The first (and second) crowdsourced credit card
There is no lucky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
> The tone of the letter was surprising to me. I wouldn't expect the FDA to go quite so far in explaining the why behind the desist letter.

Its fairly typical of formal regulatory notices (or even informal notices -- much of the language is very similar to the 2010 letter in which the FDA first raised issues with the product) -- because they are typically directed at corporations with substantial legal resources and they are designed to convince them that they should voluntarily comply with the agencies direction because if they fail to do so regulatory action will be initiated which will be costly and unlikely to be reversed by subsequent litigation, so they lay out all the facts and authorities necessary for the recipient (and the recipient's counsel) to come to the desired conclusion.
>> Working more hours does not directly produce more "product."

Exactly! I've always wondered why people are pushing the American death march way of work - long hours in an office and no work/life balance. I really hope we'll be able to change that and make remote work and other unusual work schedules more common in Europe. There is nothing better than going out for a walk in the middle of the day if you are stuck on a problem or starting your work day at 12. Lack of pressure and stress == higher productivity and better health.
You're overblowing things. All of this madness has really taken place after Schmidt left, because up until '10 or so, Google kind of still embraced the "don't be evil" philosophy.
Yep! FastMail is great. http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/
Whenever someone posts an article here about some exploit relating to a startup, or that it turns out they were never doing anything but storing passwords in plaintext, you'll get a small army of posters pointing out that it would be insane for them to focus on anything besides getting the product out the door working just well enough to start taking people's money as fast as possible.

So yeah, "fuck it, ship it" seems to be more or less the standard.
Hm, you may be onto something. It might just be the overall negative tone that TV brings into the home. Negative news, scare techniques, negative culture, negative morals. If people feel like TV is making them unhappy or destroying their family values they're obviously going to leave TV. Same thing goes for the internet.
Yep, that'd do it.

:(
I think you're overestimating the power used to determine your candy crush score by orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude.
Whether or not Waterloo is a self-fulfilling prophecy, after having professional experience with Waterloo graduates, I cannot help but pay attention when Waterloo vouches for somebodies merit.

Whether Waterloo is making merit, or merely distilling it out of the general population isn't really important in this case.
I am curious - how do you think that these large groups will be able to set bitcoin policy? Technologically, they don't have much influence over the algorithms or the distribution of bitcoins as a whole. What meaningful policy decisions can be made?
I live in San Francisco, and I can tell you that old houses here suck. Many door frames have shifted, so doors have trouble closing. Often, the door has been replaced with a smaller one, leaving giant air gaps. Ditto for windows. They don't seal well, or they jam easily. Floors aren't level. Pillars are noticeably crooked. It's crazy, but San Francisco makes it really hard to build new stuff.

Also, the bay area isn't nearly as geologically active as the Kanto region. If San Francisco had earthquakes of the frequency and scale of Tokyo, hardly any low-rise in the city would last more than 30 years.
Dont take my freedom to decide because of homeopathic weirdos like Jobs. I'm not one to usually complain about the nanny state, but this is deep into nanny statism here.
Favorites Links of the Week #1
The info that the company had lots of notice and apparently didn't do anything is very crucial to understanding this.

Thanks for the info.
I have come here to kick ass and save lives. And I am all out of ass.
Actually, while the initial investigation of Path related to their poor information security and abusive use of user data to drive their viral coefficient, the fine specifically related to violations of COPPA. That law refers to extra privacy protections for children under 13, as well as parental approval. The regulations are onerous to the point that most online social networks filter out users under the age of 13 to avoid running afoul of COPPA. Path didn't filter out these users and we're found to have violated COPPA, resulting in their $800k fine.

Doesn't detract from your excellent piece or put Path in a better light, but that's the context you're referring to there.
I hate to be that guy, but why was this posted to hacker news, the site dedicated to news for hackers?
I think that's the general idea. Going to school - rather than getting a job right away - is considered a waste of resources, or elitist and therefore a rejection of one's community.

For some reason, education does not carry the stigma of sports or the arts or business in these communities.

It is trendy to talk about Women in technology, but we need to think about Race and technology. Everyone notices it nobody wants to talk about it.
Here some recommended reading from someone even more frustrated :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5553285
> The 23andme product explains explicitly how it should be used by a physician

Generally, for diagnostic tools, drugs, etc., it is not enough that the product labelling explains how it should be used, but it is required to demonstrate to the FDA that there is evidence that it works as marketed when used according to those directions. The FDA Warning Letter specifically calls out 23andMe's failure to either identify existing approved products on the market to which the product is equivalent (which wouldn't reduce the requirements for proving this) or to meet the requirements for demonstrating the effectiveness of their offering as a new product without existing, approved equivalents.
I'm surprised this is opt out rather than opt in.

Ok, surprised maybe isn't the word, but shouldn't the default be the greater privacy?
PG either failed to grasp or completely ignored the point the article made and immediately went on to reiterate how SV is nearly as much of a meritocracy as his perception of a near perfect meritocracy (math.)

By doing so he gave an almost painfully accurate example of the problem the article addressed, hence my use of the word "exemplifies."

As for the east-Asians and Indians; I've never heard anything but positive stereotypes about them when it comes to programming. It's worth considering that that itself might be contributing to their disproportionate presence to some degree (i.e. in which way does causality go in this case.)
No, it's not misplaced at all. At least in America, Food makers & their exec buddies and all kinds of other social-economic factors make it difficult to choose otherwise. I've already had this debate before... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6604104

Also, watch Food Inc. http://www.takepart.com/foodinc

The excuse that "Well, nobody forced them. It was their choice." is an elaborate illusion that needs to be done away with. There have been a couple of articles this year about how being poor causes bad decisions, not necessarily vice-versa. I'm glad those articles are being written because it shows at least a few people are starting to realize how the system traps people and others can be convinced it was they're own fault.

"Poor people, generally, make bad decisions—bad in the sense of their long-term physical, mental and financial welfare. But their bad decisions aren't the reason for their poverty. They're caused by it."

@http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decision...

Growing up poor is bad for your brain

@http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/growing-up-poor-is-bad-for-...
working on it. Thanks a lot for the bug report.
While Volvo didn't invent the first car safety belt, they invented the 3 point safety belt that everybody uses today. Lap belts would help keep you in the car, but the addition of a sash belt kept your face off the 50's era steel dash, and made seatbelts worth using.

Volvo patented it in the 50's and made it freely available for use.
(sorry for the late reply)

Perhaps somewhat, but not really. I read the word 'people' in the sense of 'some group' instead of 'any single person.' In other words, 'people now know that eggs aren't bad for you' doesn't mean that every single person has learned this, just that the knowledge is in the generally accepted body of knowledge and those with business or interest in nutrition know it. At least that's how I read it.
Are these most recent machines really incrementing the nonce? Is there an advantage over randomly picking them?
I do not use short Internet "slangs." I type as correct as I can --which can be difficult while using english, as it is not my mother tongue. The lack of proper capitalization and punctuation irks me, it does not matter the medium.

My teenager child follows my path.
This is false. "Little guys", think the guy mining with 1 or 2 USB thumbdrive-sized miners, make more relative profit than large scale miners. Whether you spend $50 to mine at 3 gigahash/sec, or $50,000 to mine at 3,000 gigahash/sec, in theory the relative profit is the same, but the extra costs associated to the 1000x scale become non-negligible.

For the little guy, space, power, and cooling are effectively free. He makes use of space that was already available and unused (eg. his desk), cooling is easy (a few watts can be passively cooled), and power is so small (2.5W per port) that he effectively writes it off as insignificant.

But a large scale miner like friedcat has to build or rent a data center facility, has to pay for air conditioning units, has a electricity bill he cannot ignore as insignificant, has to pay people to deploy and maintain the dozen of racks, etc.

Source: I have been mining since 2010, at some point I was mining with 20 killowatt of GPUs (ten racks or so).
We work in the clouds
It's just a trivial statement of cause and effect. If the causes in operation are in operation, then ceteris paribus the effect will occur.
> It's possible 23andme has been sloppy with its compliance practices.

Then no one should be surprised that they are in trouble with a regulatory agency responsible for holding participants in the market they are in to compliance standards.
It's important to be able to tell the difference between something you earned and something you were given without earning it.

If someone fails, does that necessarily mean they didn't deserve success? Or is it possible that external forces took from them something they had, "with moral certainty", earned?

The article points out that white males are overrepresented in SV success stories. Are you going to argue that they are dozens of times more productive than women, or non-white people?

Let me make the point in a way that does not pit groups of people against each other. If you do the same thing over and over, hustling and making pitches, and then one day you get someone to fund you, does that make you inherently better on that day? Do you have more "virtue" on that day than you did the day before?

Let's say someone founds a company and it fails. This person feels like they didn't deserve to fail, so they start another company and it succeeds. This person will take the success as s true measure of what they deserve, and will ignore the failure as a fluke. But they will look at failed companies around them and feel superior, even though they also failed once.

There are lots of people founding similar companies, making similar pitches to the same investors. I can't see an argument that they "deserve" wildly different valuations.

Holding wealth creation as a virtue devolves very quickly into worshiping money. Anyone with money is to be respected, and anyone who doesn't have money has nothing interesting to say.
How long did something like that take you to do?
Very helpful, thanks. Been looking for an email alternative.
1-Click Dokku Image on DigitalOcean
That's a very good point. An other comment points out that the computation has to be tied to previous blocks to maintain integrity but it would be great if once the hardware is decommissioned (newer hardware came out/bitcoin crashed) it could be repurposed to do something else.
Me. I've been making a list. I've got as far as 'kittens'.
What could have happened on rest of life, if this guy just believed their result ? This is how you can ruin life of some one by coding !
Was he though? This is someone speaking from the outside, with fuzzy memories of release dates, but I'm pretty sure Windows (excepting NT) didn't have preemptive multitasking until 2000, and I think OS/2 was out before NT. I still have fond memories from the late 90's of a friend who adminned Windows and had a CD for when someone would set the password on the screensaver on the Windows boxes: the CD had an autorun that would pluck the password out of the registry and put it in the clipboard so you could paste it into the password box (no memory protection). That and the memory shotgunner: a program that would write random data to random memory addresses. No Windows machine would stay up for more than about 5 minutes running that, while Linux would kill the program and merrily continue on its way. Or the packet of doom to lock up Windows remotely.
I vote for more explicit. You're implying that the NSA is somehow utilizing the SETI@Home volunteer network for some nefarious purpose, and I don't see anything other than "they both like big computing power" that connects them.

Also, do you really think the NSA would put any information on a distributed network like that for processing?

The NSA has a huge budget and nearly limitless control of the pliers squeezing the ${BODYPART}s of congress. They don't need your home PC to crunch numbers for them.
This is the kind of rubbish that actually perpetuates sexism in the name of fighting it. "Leader" is a male-gendered word, are you kidding me?
The Kickstarter campaign for 'Learn Ruby on Rails' is here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/909377477/learn-ruby-on-...
(sorry for the late reply)

I didn't take it that way. In fact, you could argue for more outrage: "There are certain groups who knew about this behavior all along and for them to pretend that this is news to them is bullshit" is how I read it.

So if you are going to be outraged, you should be outraged at the groups "in the know" as well.
Exactly what I was wondering.

As much as I would love to be both (or either) rich and in NYC, I don't see how this is relevant to the community.
I agree. Although the question isn't really why is it posted (anyone can post anything) but more "why is it being upvoted"?

Separately why do people when stating an opinion need to say "I hate to be that guy"?

To me that equates to "I'm not sure of my opinion and treading lightly".

(I really do want to know your thoughts on my question btw.)
If you hate being that guy, don't be that guy.
...only gets to the FP by upvotes. just sayin.
Call for Submissions: The D Programming Language Conference 2014
Input data could come from the protein database, which has catalogs of thousands of protein structures. The issue being is when is a protein folded? Do we have some known ending structure and we just need to get within an acceptable Root Mean Square Deviation? The other issue would be there need to be some sort of centralized server used to collect the resulting data, and create the Markov State Model.
Ask HN: How long before bitcoin bubble collapses?
https://coinbase.com/charts
In the past 20 days, the value of bitcoin spiked up 3x +. No currency can appreciate or depreciate that quickly, it is usually a clear sign of bubble building up. The question is when will this bubble burst ?
My Guess: Around 15 days ~ 10th December
10 minutes of trust is a lot faster than the days and weeks of trust required for the current payment's systems with chargebacks and so on. I think coffee shops, etc will just accept transfers as soon as they see it on the network, just like how with small food purchases you don't need signatures.

The fraud risk of zero confirmation bitcoin transfers is a lot smaller than the current fraud risk that we have with the current payments system. If it's actually a large purchase, like a car then you can afford to wait until it's confirmed, and with things like laptops, wait a couple minutes for a couple of confirmations.
LG says it will push out firmware update for spy TVs, but no apologies
Japanese Precut Timber Construction
Thanks for the links, Google Translate did enough :-)

I find this fascinating: "The rules around the market are different, too. For example, in California most houses are sold and bought as-is. In Japan, the seller is on the hook for up to an year for problems that weren't discovered at the point of sale."

In California there are many rules, permits, and processes that must be followed before building a new house. This comes from voters (residents) seeking to limit the rate of change in their neighborhood, and restrict change they would find objectionable (like multi-floor houses in a neighbor with all single floor houses). So buying an existing house is always "easier" than building a new one. Buyers are not responsible for any problems that were disclosed at the time of purchase and signed off on by the buyers. The buyer has the option (and should) to get a thorough home inspection prior to the purchase.

Contrast that to Las Vegas were my I spent my formative years where new houses were the norm and 'old' houses were depreciating because why buy an 'old' house when a 'new' one was the same price? This continued for a long time and pretty much covered the valley floor there with very similar looking houses. That has slowed some now that land to build on is quite far away from the rest of town. But I could see that tearing down houses on land closer to town and rebuilding them might improve the value of those houses.

The bottom line for me is that clearly municipal regulation has a lot more influence on home 'value' than a nominally open market would suggest. I always knew it had a some effect but it seems possible that it is perhaps the dominant effect.
To be fair, if you accept the premise that Silicon Valley is driven by power and prejudice rather than merit (for the record, I reject it), then clearly, pg is part of the problem. That doesn't mean you reject his argument, it means you ignore it as an irrelevant analogy.

I think it's a lot more interesting to take pg's argument in a different direction. If you accept the premise that intellect is evenly distributed regardless of race or gender (for the record, I accept it), then why is mathematics dominated by white males? Because it's an observable fact.

Start applying Five Whys and see what happens.
Funny. Haven't you just proved the point you were arguing against? I said that being able to choose the right tool for the job is not something that happens in practice,you disagreed and then later you say the "the clients get to choose the technology not we".
Well, of course it's fickle to define what exactly constitutes changing the world. As per the butterfly effect, anything could be said to change the world, but let me attempt a definition: I'm thinking it has to be major (substantially different from what was before and affecting a lot of people, most of whom are and remains perfect strangers to you), deterministic (ie. what you did caused the change) and lasting (still identified as a change by strangers at least a few years after the fact).

Making that kind of change is really quite difficult and requires both luck and financial success (which in itself requires luck).

That said, I think it's perfectly honourable to be a good guy and do a good job without changing the world. My argument is merely that in my view, changing the world is a quite higher bar than "just" being successful.
Spacemaker VR: Walk Inside Your 3d Designs
I put some thought into how to do this. I think it would be hard to get right. One way, which is total vaporware and probably riddled with security flaws:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3qaT-ZL6aeKOHNEQWdpZEtRYWc/...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64421.5
seems, anecdotally speaking of course, that most of the people I know who are self taught create way better (for some nebulous definition of better) software than the purely school-taught folks. maybe we just enjoy it more who knows...

btw, combination of both is probably better
Firebase + Zapier to Power Your App's Integrations
What if they're powered by leaded gasoline generators?
Just booted up my A1000 with Workbench 1.3. This machine is so beautiful and I think the Amiga were the only computers which stay responsive when accessing floppy disks.

Maybe some day I'll upgrade this A1000 to a G. Braun "Super 1000".

http://www.illuwatar.se/project_pages/gba1000/gba1000.htm
I will take four guesses.

1) Written by Philip Greenspun: "Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"

2) Published under harvard.edu domain.

3) Money

4) NYC
ImageSwaps - Swap images with random people
Why shouldn't it? Prestige presumably had to be earned at some point. If prestigious schools are producing sub-par developers at a rate equal to other schools, what is the value of that prestige?