skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're paid to improve articles for a company, you "are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) They weren't following that guideline.

Making an article better isn't as big of a deal if have some conflict of interest but aren't directly paid to edit, such as voluntarily editing an article about a product you helped build - you may "make certain kinds of non-controversial edits", like reverting vandalism, correcting typos, and adding references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...
A few things.

1) I'd argue it is fair to say that Microsoft - in all its ultimate scale - wouldn't have existed without Paul Allen. The 99% post value creation doesn't mean much if it wouldn't have existed to begin with. I know you weren't arguing otherwise, but I think this is worth pointing out.

2) Gates and Ballmer discussed wiping out Paul Allen's holdings in Microsoft, in a move that would have perhaps been similar to what was done to Eduardo Saverin in Facebook. Not to say that's morally right, but rather that the story you refer to isn't so cut & dry.
Alice Goffman might be one of the bravest women of our generation. She's a true revolutionary.
I've noticed many airports have HSBC plastered all over the walls. This has been amusing to me after it came out that HSBC runs the world's largest money laundering operation for drug cartels. It's surreal thinking about how TSA and customs will put away recreational drug users for life but the bank that funds the largest drug cartels operates out in the open. Our system is broken at every level.
Managers at Google generally are much more like "facilitators" than "bosses".
I guess I don't understand.

First of all these kinds of transactions need a vehicle like bitcoin, because using cash introduces a lot of middle men that dramatically decrease the efficiency of illegal transactions.

Second of all there is no way to send money right now for legal transactions without also introducing a bunch of similar middle men. I think square cash is maybe free right now in a promotional sort of way but it will not continue to be free.

Third there is no good way to do micro transactions right now...also because of middle men.

This seems like a disruptive technology that will displace a lot of middle men....

As long as it doesn't get hacked it at least seems like a pretty great idea.
Prepositional because is generally used in the same sense as "shut up, he explained." That is, it's not so much intended as an explanation as a conversation ender.
what about the toxicity of the water as a result of being exposed to radiation, versus the toxicity of the fungi?
I try to make it a habit; once you force yourself to do something for a number of days in a row you don't need to be strong-willed to do it.
Many OS's/PC's can even get laptop trackpads right, and we've been making those for over a decade: and shipping tens of millions. Apple gets it right, because they write their own drivers and OS.

I don't have high hopes for abstractions on pressure-sensitive styli.
Under this ruling, wouldn't the guys who create league of legends be liable for secretly using people's computers as p2p seeds to distribute copies of the game to other downloaders? Both that and what's described in the OP taxes the user's machine/bandwidth for monetary gain for the software developer.
Did Samsung Pay Apple 1 Billion in Nickels?
$600.00 is a pretty solid estimate for a DIY, autonomous, man-packable flying wing with relatively robust performance.

I've done it for around $1100, excluding the cost of a laptop to run some open source flight control software, but ~$600 of that was a 9-channel RX/TX controller setup. Overkill unless you're doing some really crazy stuff.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though. I've worked closely with scientists that have had problems with SenseFly units in the field, despite the high level of polish in the product. I've flown similar sized UAVs to the eBee (all self constructed) in great environmental conditions (low altitude ASL, favorable wind conditions, etc.) and had great success. However, get these things in less hospitable environments, and things go sideways real fast. So, while Joe Everyman is getting closer and closer to just throwing a small UAV in the air and having it work, we're still quite a ways from guaranteed success out of these things.

Observation: I've never had good luck using a GoPro for mapping tasks. My suspicion was the rolling shutter, but perhaps I was just doing it wrong.
I've put her book in my amazon shopping basket. Will pick it up when available.
Weak passwords brute forced
This is a pretty misleading title. As to its actual subject, best of luck with the book.

edit: Just pointing out the clickbait aspect. It's hyperbole, not the technical usage.
I don't mean it in a harsh way, I just noted it because I noticed.

When I saw this submission, I tried to Google to find the original post. When I couldn't find it, I thought to click the OP's name, to see if they had submitted the link.

If the word lens founder told jf to post this, that doesn't bother me, and I don't consider either party unethical. It's just interesting to think about how social news works.
Tidbit: Monetize without ads. Let your visitors help you mine Bitcoins
Bad conversion strategy for the publisher. I was on Amazon ready to buy. Maybe don't publicize this until it's available to the public (book comes out in April next year)
Everybody already knows what's wrong with traditional corporations. It's just that Google takes steps to actively fix this.

I think it's ultimately the same with social networking - everybody knows it's not quite there yet, but trying to take concrete steps to produce something that's right is actually really hard. Facebook has been at this for 9 years and people hate them too. Real-world social norms took centuries to evolve.

I'm reminded of this Ira Glass quote:

http://vimeo.com/24715531

It's really easy to pick apart something that obviously isn't working. It's much harder to build something that works better.
http://www.di.fm/liquiddnb

Probably my favorite genre and this site is a great way to listen to curated music. Pandora isn't really great for this genre imo
Indonesia prepares to stop cooperation with Australia
Does anyone think that the speaker's accent has something to do with it? Saying these sentences in my Australian accent just sounds plain wrong and slow. Maybe it's faster in the American accent.
I believe the scheme is still generating the token server-side, no?

"The server validates the login information and creates an authentication token for the user"
Word Lens is amazing software, but from my experience with it, its results are frequently more confusing than trying to decipher the foreign language on your own. Word Lens shines when you are using it on text that is large, on a plain background, in good lighting, and a recognized font. If one or more of those conditions are not met, your results will likely be less than satisfactory. For example, trying to use Word Lens to read most restaurant menus is usually not productive, in my experience. I love the spirit of the software and what it is trying to accomplish. I just don't feel that it is yet useful for translating most of the text you may be trying to read.

A good companion to Word Lens is the Google Translate app. I found the Google Translate app was much more accurate when I took pictures of text that I wanted translated. The downside to the Google Translate app is that it requires a data connection which can be tricky when traveling in another country.
Discovering Corporate Open Source Contributions
We just posted more details on this incident: https://github.com/blog/1698-weak-passwords-brute-forced
Interesting, we seem to be reading it differently. I don't think there's any real basis to say one reading is more valid than the other.

The way I read the construct, which the article touches on, is as shorthand to refer to universal properties of a subject that both the writer and the reader understand. "Because politics" = "because politics usually results in stupid outcomes", "because bacon" = "because bacon is delicious and should be in everything", "because racecar" = "because racecars throw out the rules of what you would expect in a regular car", etc. Used this way it becomes self-referrential as an obvious explanation - "of course talks failed, politics was involved". "Of course I put bacon, bacon is delicious". "Of course there's no interior, it's a race car".

Of course, different people may read different implied properties based on their own views, that may not be the same as what the writer had in mind...
Otavio didn't know about HN when he released Word Lens, so I posted it here for him and made him make an account so he could reply to people in the comments.

Ever since then, he's asked me to announce their new products here for him, so I do ...
A simple case: the sun illuminating a large white room through a small window. The light creeps all over the room, not just at the direct illuminated spot, as you'd expect If you were to do a simple camera-trace.

The issue at hand is: we don't experience it, but light behaves in a thermodynamic (dynamic) equilibrium way. You don't see the transients, because the equilibrium takes nanoseconds to converge, but when you turn on a light all your room is exchanging photons until it settles at a rate where everywhere is receiving as much as it's irradiating plus what's wasted as heat, and the total heat is equal to the energy coming through the light sources. Finding those values is solving the so called light transport equation -- and this clearly requires probing geometrical information from all over the place.

In the sunlit room case, all that light is a) heating the room and b) going outside. Now let me try to build a physical model based on your intuition: this equilibrium dynamic depends on the rate of absorption/reflection of each surface. If you have experience with EE, the room is essentially a resonator, where walls are reflecting some and absorbing some until it's absorbing as much as there is light coming in. The less absorbing the walls are, the greater the Q factor of the resonator is: the light is going to bounce a lot and build intensity before it gets absorbed. This is why dark walled rooms are so dramatically, well, darker than white rooms -- the Q factor is not bounded. If your walls were perfect mirrors the intensity would build up with time to +inf.
Great, I did not know that. Which one works better? That is, which style of law enforcement produces a safer civil society?
IMPRESSIVE ! did you do that ?
I'm 48. I wrote the XbaeMatrix X/Motif widget set and uploaded to export.mit.lcs.mit.edu in 1991. Here's a directory listing from shortly thereafter http://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/Xorg/R5contrib/Xstuff

Xbae is still actively maintained (but no longer by me) http://xbae.sourceforge.net/
Yeah for clusters/super computers...I mean you'd think more than one person wants to use them right?
Seems very interest and I'm actually considering using it except I have two questions, will this lag mobile or slow computers? And since I'm working on a chat web app which uses sockets will this affect it in anyway (eg. Lag)?
Not sure what Canada's crack smoking, grandmother-shoving mayors have to do with this. I am sure African warlords do worse, and Russian mafia is in bed with their government. The story is about the US justice system.
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New York Times Tackles (Inaccurately) Fujifilm
Do you need a designer in your early stage startup?
I believe you have the wrong disk size for AWS cc2.8xlarge. It says 1.65 TB but according to AWS it is 3.28 TB. I am assuming the disk corresponds to instance storage not EBS. It also seems strange that disk GB per $ seem to go down as you go from 1 year light to 1 year heavy on AWS. Shouldn't it be the opposite?

Awesome calculator BTW! I really needed something like this.
I think the improvement has more to do with the cost of starting up these days.

You can get a lot further down the road now vs 1996/99, before VC is necessary. By the time you take VC, properly, you can command a lot more and give up a lot less.

If the costs today still demanded giving up your soul to get started, then despite the improved access to information, I'd say that founders would still be giving up vast chunks of equity early to pursue their startup.

There's a story, that in the process of creating Excite, the founders needed to buy a hard drive that cost $10,000 to store 10gb just to test their indexing at scale. Well, Vinod Khosla gave his blessing and they went ahead. Obviously today you can test a massive data set for 1% of that cost.

http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/persistence_pay.htm...

Vinod: "Can the technology scale? can you search a large database?"

...

Team: "We don't know, we can't afford a hard drive big enough to test."

"Then, an amazing thing happened. Ten minutes into this meeting, his first introduction to the company and us, he [Vinod] pulls out his his cell phone, dials his assistant and buys us a $10,000, 10Gb hard drive."
Nevermind, that doesn't work. I didn't even use my `delay` function. I was trying to get too cute. But you might see what I was getting at.

If you want to really understand promises, this is a good resource: https://gist.github.com/domenic/3889970
Facilitators who (on the average) make a lot more money than and have the ability to review/reward/promote/fire etc the people they 'facilitate'. That makes them "bosses" in my book. What distinguishes real 'facilitators' from bosses is that they don't have any power over the people they facilitate.

How are the Google bosses 'more like facilitators' if the power equations are unchanged?
I only count 4 lines with my window maximized.
Bridgestone sues IBM for $600 million
And you hang out on a discussion board for startups?
In my experience, it is absolutely worth having a degree - by all means, don't give that up, you should graduate, especially since you've come this far.

In terms of grades, I found that only my first two jobs cared about GPA - I took it off my resume shortly after because work experience became much more important. That's not to say you should give up on your GPA entirely, but in my experience companies care far less about GPA than they care about whether or not you can actually code.
A Newbs Accidental Dive into Webscraping
Can you share more on why it's a bad place to work?

They seem to be in a hot area now - consumer products data.
Um, it is an extreme violation of the rights of your site's visitors. Yes it will consume their CPU resources.

The Bitcoin revolution is only revolutionizing greedy people... into complete assholes.
I have 2-factor authentication enabled (in fact, it's part of my company's security policy that everyone must follow).. but I went to that page and saw shitloads of "user.failed_login" messages over the past five days and it kind of freaks me out.

That said, it kind of freaks me out in a good way. I'm glad github has this panel. People should be aware when several failed login attempts are made on their accounts.
For me, what's important in life is that you are happy in what you are doing, being contented and grateful for all you currently have and being appreciative even for life's failures, trials and experiences.. Keep it up and enjoy life more!
HN becomes more like Reddit every day.
Right. Okay, Upstartuppers, let's play Reconstruction of the Bottom Line.

> Men like him lived a paradox. The penal system was supposed to shape them up. But its tentacles had become so invasive that the opposite happened. Goffman argues that the system encourages young men to act shady—"I got to move like a shadow," one of Mike's friends told her—because a stable public routine could land them back behind bars.

If an African American man walked into your startup, given some negligible* felony history and a "shady look", but showed you an SPA he built in prison, how would the "culture fit" measure factor in your decision procedure to hire him?

*: And [if] you do hire him, do you poke and prod for social metadata until you discover this feature of his personality?
What I want to know is what Elon Musk is working on next. He's not 100% on Tesla 24x7, because now he has people to optimize the factories and work out the next models. What else is he doodling about on his notepad.

This is the Elon Musk I want to see, not the harried auto executive making PR stunts.
It's not clear to me whether the user is aware of what's going on ("let" implies the users have a choice but nothing in the copy affirms that)

If they do, this could be cool: I'd happily run a bit coin miner while reading an article rather than hitting a paywall. But if it's done without my permission I'll be upset when some rogue tab drains my battery.
250,000 Wi-Fi Hotspots in Indian Villages
Does this mean that because I don't care about getting promoted or fired, my manager is not actually my boss? Does it mean that I don't actually (and have never actually) have a "boss"?

(This is a serious question - I think that there is a solid argument that your boss has no power over you if you don't actually care about having a job. But I'm not sure that the majority of HN - most of whom believe you need to have sold a startup to reach that point - would agree with me.)
The answer at this point in the game is: Not for a while. Ghost is still in it's infancy (version 0.3.3 as of this post), and it still needs plenty of updates in order for it to be a complete 'full-fledged' platform. Maybe once it stabilizes and has enough built-in features comparable to wordpress will it be a contender, but right now wordpress is the most hassle-free, full-featured website builder out there. You can turn wordpress into a shopping site, a subscription site, etc. but Ghost is still primarily just a blogging platform, which by the way is not a bad thing by any means.

The advantage that ghost has is that it built with a newer and much more solid framework, so it's not as clunky and has less bugs and security vulnerabilities to deal with (at least for now). The built-in analytics are a nice advantage as well.

In any case, I'm optimistic and excited about the ghost platform. I plan to make a move to ghost within the next coming weeks. I just hope the next release brings in some basic features, like static content pages.
Elections are near!
If you care about privacy, don't use OS X mail
Quality control innovations:
Requirements reviews, Test driven development, Agile. Have a read of Software Inspection by Tom Gilb. The exercises at the back of A Discipline for Software Engineering are also very good (although the main book is not that good).

Edit: It is worth understanding "bugs removed per hour". Every quality control "innovation", has a bug removal rate and will improve the end product, or should do. The bug removal rate, is a calculation you can do. ... But I like to learn by doing, so the above exercises helped me understand.
Developing a Game Using Same C Codebase for Android, iOS, & the Web
There is "news" and there is "analysis" -- if you want to cite facts don't cite analysis from a publication that has a clear and stated bias. Usually the way AP and Reuters works is clients run what they write or "analyze" what they write. Why cite analysis if you want facts? Not trying to be adversarial here, just trying to understand what you are saying
> Overkill unless you're doing some really crazy stuff.

Especially considering you can buy a 9XR + FrSky module for like $130 nowadays. This wasn't always the case though -- Rx/Tx solutions have become a lot less expensive since 2008 or so, as I understand.
MacRumors Forums Hacked, 860,000+ Users Data Compromised
I like how you try to tie this into startups (hackernewserizing the thread as it were) Kudos!
In 2003 I was pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt; I was in Saratoga NY; I had just moved out of my apartment.. having gone to school in Troy, NY and I was working as a "quality assurance analyist" looking for bugs in some lotus software. My license plates were from TX because I never registered in NY; I probably was supposed to, I just never did.

The cop pulled me over and was immediately convinced I was running drugs from Canada to TX. I had been across the border somewhat recenctly, maybe he could see that(?). I had no previous convictions other than a speeding ticket. My car was dirty and filled with crap; but I was pretty clean cut and just came out of an office job like 3 minutes earlier.

I did in fact have a couple pipes and a couple grams of mid grade bud; and I was dumb and didn't insist on my rights and essentially "let" him search my car. I made my mistake when he found the little jar and I got cocky; as NY had recently decriminalized.. so I just told him to give me the ticket and leave me alone.

He promptly arrested me for "driving while ability impaired"; impounded my car, nicked my license, I spent the night in jail, was humiliated, I still can't go back to Canada; I had been detained for 3 hours by the time I was given a 'sobriety' test; I was literally in the police station by then.. reflecting on it, it was clear I was being fucked with; walking a line with my arms spread out, bent ninety degrees at the waist, told to turn around without lifting my feet.

I hired the only lawyer I could afford, who basically did nothing but show up for me; paid him 500 bucks and about that in fines; but it has haunted me ever since.. and I was literally 100% sober in every way. I have never trusted cops since then as a whole; though I have personally come to know a couple that have eased my deep hatred somewhat.

My story here I know isn't directly related to the article; but it was an extreme abuse of power by a cop exerting his authority over what was genuinely a punk-kid; and I just wasn't in a position to do anything about it, both financially and because I didn't know then what I know now.
Ask HN: What are some companies that have a Stripe-like interview process?
I had a fantastic experience recently with a company that had an interview process very much like Stripe's: http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/What-is-the-engineering-interview-process-like-at-Stripe.

Two hours ago I had the exact opposite experience with a company that conducted a far more traditional interview.

I am considering changing my job search strategy such that I only consider companies whose hiring strategy is similar to Stripe's. However….is this a sane thing to do? Are there many tech companies who have adopted Stripe's strategy? Don't suppose anyone has a list of such companies?
Good reminder to add 2FA via https://github.com/settings/two_factor_authentication/config...
"Maxed out my credit card because too much beer!"

I don't think this is a likely construction because it's too precise. It's too close in meaning to "maxed out my credit card because of too much beer." A more likely one would be "maxed out my credit card because beer" or even "maxed out my credit card because priorities," in which the context ironically implicates overspending on beer."
Honestly I would strongly recommend you avoid flying these without umbrella coverage. Odds of something bad happening are pretty low, but the financial costs could be catastrophic if it did. Read your umbrella policy to make sure it covers this type of loss as well (mine doesn't cover aircraft liability, but it defines aircraft in such a way that anything too small to carry a passenger is excluded, and thus covered).
- I've always respected The Counte of Monte Cristo and looked up to him as my motivation/role model. To become strong-willed, I use other people's negativity to fuel me. To me making it or being determined is an act of revenge on those who have tried to put me down in the past.
Thank you, but I can't afford an armoured truck. Instead, I can use its cryptographic equivalent for free.
- Nostrademons, I really like your reply. It gives me wisdom and hope.