skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's exciting to walk around Stanford slack jawed, staring at the giant stone architecture, landscaping, never-ending expanse of learning, research, and sleaze-trepreneur while constantly exclaiming internally, "How much money do these fuckers have?! Haven't they heard of normal sized buildings? Every lecture hall here is a goddamn castle!"
In fact, the amount of code written can often be inversely proportional to the quality of your work in that day.

There simply is no meaningful correlation. It usually takes the talent of another skilled professional to measure the quality of your work, which is one of many reasons why management exists.
This is anecdata. And if we're being as rigorous about evidence against the claim that it's meritocratic, we need to be as rigorous as evidence affirming that it's meritocratic. This does not meet that standard.
This is ridiculous and you know it.

If vision correction surgery is too expensive for you, you can wear glasses or contacts instead and be totally fine. There is actually market pressure to drive prices down and quality up because there'd be less money to make otherwise.

Demand for treatment of a life-threatening, painful, or debilitating disease does not depend on the price or the quality. It's not free market at all because consumers have no choice but to buy at any price.
This seems like a complex version of focus group analysis, in other words we'll give you an opinion on what already exists.
I'm not sure I've ever seen an article that's so full of arbitrary assumptions and over-generalizations. Just a sampling:

- Hackers have difficulty communicating or staying on task.

- Hackers don't respect non-coders.

- Software engineers go home to their kids, but hackers don't. (Does someone come to your office and ask you to surrender your Hacker Guild Membership Card when your first kid is born?)

- Software engineers don't have many heroes.

In contrast, here's the definition of "hacker" from the Jargon File:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

Note that there's nothing in there that would preclude a hacker from also being a software engineer with a high degree of professionalism.
Introducing Pond: A New RSS+Atom Syncing Protocol
The secret guild of silicon valley
Google spent a few billion dollars to buy an office building: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/nyregion/03building.html?_... (they later expanded it for even more).

eBay's 6th Ave office costs $2-3 million per month (what's a million dollars between friends?).

(This isn't really relevant though. I just like reminding people huge sums of money are in play. Your little "$50k to $200k angel round" isn't as big a deal as you think.)
Cuttle, apartment based micro social network connected to a digital noticeboard.
When all you have is a slightly upgraded monkey brain, everything looks like a status play.

Edit: Apparently humour needs to come with captions now.

This is a play on the "hammer/nail" truism, observing that folk love to frame things as X vs Y zero-sum games. Possibly because of the human fondness for associating the status value of markers (places, brands) with the status value of our own selves. Thus arguments over NYC vs SF or iOS vs Android or Facebook vs Google or Node.js vs Go are not really about X vs Y at all. They are about establishing status in a troupe of great apes.

Indeed, this edited text is about status.
Objective-C: performSelectorOnMainThread vs. dispatch_async
Lots of media/content space companies from what I've gathered in the few months living here.
Developers who do stuff like this generally do it for themselves and people who are very similar to themselves. I've released quite a few products in a similar fashion requiring people to host and install it themselves and someone always makes this comment. I don't build software like this for other people, I build it for myself, I share it with everyone because someone else might want to build on top of it or use it, I don't really care if it "takes off" because it solves a personal problem in my own life.
Thank you. There is an instance running at www.reportr.io
This is a side project which is targeting only developers right now, the project is not yet ready for everybody and I'm not ready to host so critical data from a large number of users.
The plural of anecdote is not data, let alone the singular.
Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it!
Santa Monica to be exact. It's really quite a nice place I must admit, despite being a SV lifer.
I really like the idea behind the takeaways and can imagine some truth to these observations... but it's hard for me to know how true it really is based on the OP's one week trip. Maybe the OP was lucky and just walked into a welcoming and diverse co-working space.
Think of the children!

Give me a break with the theatrics. You're basically saying "doesn't my extraordinary case justify copyright infringement / theft?"

No, it doesn't.

It justifies you getting off your rear and making resources for 12 year old kids to learn and play and experience FOR FREE. The existence of commercial products doesn't negate free stuff. So why not let the 12 year olds use any of the free and open source and widely available stuff? If you think that the stuff produced for free isn't as good as the copyrighted stuff, isn't that itself a useful observation of the effects of copyright?

Instead of using those 12 year olds as a prop piece for a bad argument, put your money where your mouth is and go out there and produce content for them that will inspire them, without forcing them to break copyright to be inspired.
I'm not sure if 23andme's management team is totally out of touch or if they have genuinely mislead the public about their product's effectiveness. I'd assume the latter. They could have easily done periodic check-ins with the FDA to throw them a bone while gathering longitudinal data to support their claims.
>Software engineers are smart, and get things done. Hackers are done, and get things smart.

What tripe.

Sounds like the author was really keen on using one of these comparisons but couldn't find a good one.
Patents were not allowed to exist for the good of humankind. They were supposed to be ways to expose smart ideas and then we may use them all much later. More importantly if patents were to help mankind, they should be public domain.
I have completely recoded my regex testing service. What do you think?
I visited a few weeks ago. It reminded me of Perth (where I currently live). The actual urban area is quite small and all the rest is spread out and connected by freeways. Palo Alto, Mountain View etc -- all 45 minutes to an hour's drive from SF in non-rush-hour conditions.

Edit: when you can, take the 280. It's a little less direct but it's a lot prettier.
Aussie devs design open source router to beat NSA snooping
Obviously it can't be about luck, because that would deflate a lot of egos.
Say what you will about Disney, but I can spend a few dollars to buy a Disney product on iTunes, and my kid can watch a beautifully made cartoon without being bombarded with advertisements for cheap crap. That's more than I can say for most of the rest of the tech industry.
That really doesn't matter. The responsibility for correct results falls on the Device Manufacturer (in this case 23&me), not on the physician that ordered the test.

I work for a large Medical Device manufacturer and questions like this come up all the time when we do Hazard Analysis. While the physician (or lab rules) may require a second confirmatory test, and that may give us warm fuzzies, it really can't be considered to be a hazard mitigation. It's still up to the manufacturer to not make the mistake in the first place.
Will online classes make professors extinct?
"Everything's a file!"

"No, everything's memory!"
The funny thing is that the lawyer tries to discredit Diffie by trying to present prior art. He was trying to shift focus away from the case and into attacking the witness by presenting prior art to the prior art. Kind of a moot move.
We are very sorry for not treating our users’ private information more carefully.

In QuizUp you are playing a human in real time in almost every game. In the off chance we cannot find an opponent (which is becoming very rare due to our popularity) you may be pitted against a bot as a fallback strategy. Matchmaking is a hard technical problem, and we have chosen to maximize gameplay experience and consistency. I’m happy to share that the ratio of ghost games to real ones is getting very small! Hopefully we will be able to phase them out completely in the future.
Good catch. Changed to "net proceeds."
Really need to put some social sharing options on that page.

Great idea though!
You're right. I shouldn't have done that but I just couldn't believe that that was the top/first comment. It was one of my first posts and if I wanted to comment I should have taken the time to write an useful response.
"Software engineer" is a role. Hacking is a posture of mind. You can be one or the other or both or neither.
Could see if voluntary adoption works out.
Or 3, he wanted others that searched on Google to suffer as he did.
"Steal" is probably not a word you want associated with a health information product, no?
This is amazing. I've been looking for a customizable personal dashboard[1], and this has a lot already.

[1] I want to get started with Quantified Self-type tools but it's been hard finding where to start.
While I'm a mere Kerbalnaut myself, here is some napkin math that almost checks out. For a GTO payload, the Falcon 9 http://www.spaceflight101.com/falcon-9-v11.html has:

S1 Mass full: 490,300kg (that's both stages, fuel in both, plus the fairing and payload)
S1 Mass empty: 100,300kg (S1 mass minus stage one fuel)
S1 ISP: 282s (sea level) to 311s (vacuum)

S2 Mass full: 82,300kg (second stage, fuel, fairing and payload)
S2 Mass empty: 11,500kg (S2 mass minus stage two fuel)
S2 ISP: 340s (unspecified)

According to this delta-v calculator http://www.strout.net/info/science/delta-v/, that would give delta-v values of:

S1 delta-v: 4388m/s to 4840m/s
S2 delta-v: 6562m/s

Total delta-v: 10.8km/s to 11.3km/s

For GTO, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v gives a delta-v value of 11.8km/s to 12.5km/s, so these numbers fall just under the low end of that range. However, maybe the highly elliptical orbit that this launch is aiming for is slightly more efficient than whatever orbit is assumed for that chart on Wikipedia.
As someone who lived in Palo Alto, yep. But if you're well-off and looking to start a family, Palo Alto is perfect.
Well, yes.

Well, no.

Many of us want government out of the way of our own informed decisions. Government is just other people, not deities.
I use a trick I learnt from a rotating shift worker. He didn't use the word 'hack' but that's what it is.

If you find it hard to fall asleep in order to wake up at the desired time, then just skip a sleep cycle. That is, stay awake until you are no more than 10 to 9 hours from when you have to wake up next. The extra hour or two compensates for the missed sleep. Make sure the bedroom is dark, cool and quiet. I need an alarm to wake me up, when it goes off, get up.

Same trick also works for me when adjusting for jet lag. Trying to sleep when you don't feel like it is hard. Staying awake an extra couple of hours when you getting groggy is a bit easier. But don't drink coffee, etc.
It is one example (of many) of access to a mathematics education not being a meritocracy. In the linked discussions on that paper, there are people arguing that this practice is ongoing in the US (although tweaked a bit to be less obvious).

Regardless, I think it is important to realize that access to a [mathematics] education not being a meritocracy is different from mathematics itself not being a meritocracy. It is related, so this is only a partial counterpoint, but I think it is interesting to consider nevertheless. Certainly one has to keep in mind that biases in our education system will influence what we see in industry, even if the industry really is a meritocracy.
> Can't I do what I want to the software on my own machine...

Yes you can, but we're going to have to fight hard to keep this right. Microsoft's Win7 EULA tried wrest control of your PC; Apple fully control what goes onto your Iphone; and although Android is currently still open, Google's intentions are telegraphed by it's lock down of the ChromeKey.

The same thing is happening to internet access. Legislation is forcing ISPs to control your packets in at least some countries, and unless we fight this it will become more and more pervasive.
only bloomberg thinks about competition with SF.
Hi Mike, I'm the writer. I totally agree-- one week is not enough time to make sweeping generalizations. Though I did spend a ton of time talking to everyone I met in tech about what they thought of the "scene" and our differences-- people from Stack Exchange, Skillshare, and a few other startups I admire. I just found the atmosphere so incredibly different from the get-go.

Also, yes, I was lucky to be in a great co-working space (New Work City). I'm sure they're not ALL like that. Just as in SF, there are "bright spots" and "meh spots".
Android Screen recording and coversion for using in pull requests
Elon Musk just clarified what happened: "Saw pressure fluctuations on Falcon boost stage liquid oxygen tank. Want to be super careful, so pushing launch to Thurs."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/405134552458620928
Indeed, there's a lot of misunderstanding around this aspect.

The strength of the eventually consistent systems doesn't lie in the fact that it guarantees consistency during network partitioning, but that it maintains availability in face of partitioning. Even parts of the cluster that have been cut-off from the quorum can operate, in various degrees of degradation, ranging from being able to respond to stale queries, or also accept writes whose consistency is later resolved (for example with vector clocks or Commutative Replicated Data Types, see http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/12/23/paper-crdts-consi... or http://basho.com/tag/crdt/)

If I understood it correctly, InfiniSQL isn't trying to solve the problem of providing backend capacity for parts of your cluster that are currently partitioned, assuming that you can minimise the likelihood of this event to happen. If a network partition happens in the cluster, it's also very likely that all services in that partition will not be able to serve transactions, hence there is no much to gain from a system that is able to accept writes or perform stale reads without quorum.

On the other hand there are other workloads, like batch processing, that might benefit of being able to continue operating during a network partition without loosing big parts of processing capacity.
Articles that assign labels to groups of people and proceed to give arbitrary definitions to judge whether one falls under a certain label or another should only be interpreted as "What the author of the article sees in himself, and what label he'd like to be assigned to him"- nothing more.
I don't understand how that's false advertising at all. I definitely have played with friends in real time, many times. That's just not the ONLY case.

I think most users with half of a brain can figure out that not all matches are real time. If you challenge a friend, it clearly tells you that you can play the match without them and they can play against "you" when they get around to it.

A really acknowledging response was given -- would those words really make that much of a difference?
> First, there was far less elitism. This was surprising to me given that the East Coast is home to finance giants and "old money".

Immediately reminded of "Money talks, wealth whispers."
The Apple IIGS is/was nothing like an Amiga 500 in terms of capabilities.

The CPU was pretty much intentionally underpowered to avoid eating into Mac sales. It was ludicrously priced. Graphics wise it lacked hardware sprites, as well as support functionality equivalent to the copper and blitter. Add in a primitive OS, and it was DOA everywhere but the US

(while the Amiga, ironically, was DOA in the US largely because Commodore had a decade of mismanaging their US distribution chain and marketing; Commodore US didn't think any of that was important to selling computers).
It is TriBeCa. Triangle Beneath Canal.

edit : Below not beneath (as the below comment points out )
> " I dare you to find me a great song or a great poem where the messages of eternal and unending love for our brothers and sisters are not at the root of their creation!"

I am guessing he is not sincere, unless he has something against instrumental pieces...
I'm making comparable salary in NYC, and rent is pretty much in line with San Francisco area standards: $2300/mo studios in desirable areas... the difference in the housing market are these. First, there are more medium-awesome areas to choose from close to town (head to Astoria or East Williamsburg and you might shave $500-1000 off that studio, but you can still catch the N train to get to work and the neighborhood's reasonably cool). And second, if you want the apartment, there's a good chance you can get the apartment (whereas last time I went apartment-shopping in San Francisco, there would be 20+ people in line for the open house, including many couples who were new-hires at technology companies. it was insane.)
If I was to walk for the first time into your kitchen and tell you that your hotplate was turned on, would you not believe me until I'd also experienced your hotplate turned off? You would discount my previous experiences with hotplates, because maybe, just maybe, your hotplate is hot enough to boil water when it's unpowered?

The idea that the null hypothesis is the only source of information needs to die.
Not everything posted to Hacker News is about becoming a startup or gaining early adopters or quick traction.

This is a cool project from a developer... hosted on github... and made available freely for all. They decided to share it here. That's great.

Your blanket is entirely unwelcome.
it depends what is meant by "tech."
Shunning Digital Downloads, A Record Store Opens In New York
What is your counter-argument to the fact that he turned "on us" in the past when he gave all information on users of the House of Coolness BBS to the authorities, the lawyer Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, and just about anyone who would pay?

How can "we" be sure he won't just cave in again?
The moment we start maintaining a list of blacklisted/tainted/marked coins that are not accepted everywhere is when bitcoin will start failing. The list will start off innocent enough but when(not if) it starts being abused, it'll be all over. It'll start with blatant thefts like this, but the blacklist-maintainers, whoever they are, will eventually attract the attention of the law enforcement. The definition of theft will expand and expand. Eventually these blacklist-maintainers and/or GOV will decide which coins are valid are which are not. Coins will be seized just because of some random political agenda and bitcoin will just be a mess. The only way to stay off the blacklist will be to register with some authority and basically bitcoin will be no different from a regular bank. Then everyone will abandon it and go to Litecoin.

Seriously, the moment I hear about a blacklist of coins on bitcoin is the same day I buy $5,000USD of Litecoin. I'll be a millionaire within 8 months.
Yahoo sends rambling memo demanding employees start using its webmail
The only way to make money is to be able to mine more than your costs. A small USB ASIC miner is now around $30-40 for 330 Mhash/sec and the 2-3Ghash/sec USB models are ~$200 on ebay. You'd have to make more than that much money with your mining. At current exchange rates, you can make about 50-75 cents a week with a 330 Mhash/sec miner. That would require 40-60 weeks to pay back the costs. And that's not counting the electricity that you're using, which is small, but is probably more than 50 cents a week in some areas of the country. And that also doesn't then into account the expected drops in mining rewards.

At some point when you are scaling, your costs are lower than your expected income. You have to be doing this at scale in order to break even, let alone make money. And, if you have a sufficiently large setup, you aren't talking about mining in pools, you have your own pool, where you keep the rewards for each mined block.

Little guys mining get minuscule rewards for negligible costs. You aren't going to make any significant money with it.

Source: I've been running a 330Mhash/sec USB ASIC miner for the past two weeks :) I'm a total newbie, but the economics of it aren't good.
The letter is dated November 22, and gives 23AM 15 business days to respond/react. This is probably a nonstory.
Click bait. 23andMe hasn't had time to respond yet. That is all.
"None of those products are Google's core competency." - I agree but so is the product we are discussing.

(+)

The probability of this shutting down given the history of Google shutting down non-core products before.

(+)

The lack of customer support if something were to go wrong.

(=s) (understandably)

The lack of interest and skepticism shown by grandparent poster.

However, other companies, namely Microsoft and Yahoo might only have to deal with one or two of the above and can be said to be given a free pass at skepticism.
I wanted to build this exact same thing. I track all kinds of data using: myfitnesspal, fitbit, resucetime, a caffeine tracker, foursquare, etc.

I'd really be interested in contributing to this. I'd be able to hackup something for myfitnesspal.
I never played Shadow of the Beast much (honestly, it was not very well balanced in terms of difficulty in particular), but the intro got played endlessly - it was a fantastic effort for the time.
Below. Beneath Canal is the subway.
AppFlood Announces: 3 Easy Steps to Monetization with Android Apps
Damn, what if the 200k angel round leads to a billion or two dollars? I feel like your last line is totally irrelevant.
Kim's story is interesting and I enjoyed that part of the article but I think the analysis of the music industry and Kim's new venture is very wrong.

Firstly: his monetization strategy is a browser extension that strips ads out of sites and places his own. This is appalling and I'm shocked the Guardian, a site that undoubtedly relies on internet advertising, doesn't realize that his monetization strategy would prevent even them from monetizing users who used both services.

Getting past the grossly immoral monetization, the article casts the music industry as, once again, some unchanging monolith that refuses to change in light of modern ideas.

Last time I checked, I can buy mp3's one by one, without DRM, and load them on any device I want, from any number of online stores. Last time I checked, I can use Spotify or another service and listen to the vast majority of popular music free with ads, or for $5/mo.

I don't get it, I can go to bandcamp or soundcloud right now and see thousands of indies who aren't signing labels and who are putting their music out there, selling it and giving it away.

It's not 2001 like that article desperately pretends, and our music reality is not what it was. (And if they think Kim or any web music site can upend the entertainment business of nationally popular celebrity/artists, then I charge that they don't even understand the basics of why it's successful).
I find that smoking pot after a few days of intense but sober learning/thinking does wonders as it allows you to look at the problem at a different angle. I've regularly solved or gotten great insights doing this.

I've literally had million dollar ideas while high.
Yahoo staff slow to switch to Yahoo email
I got a used 20MB hard drive. After about 6 months it refused to spin up. My solution was to open it up(!), and manually help the motor spin up the platter - after that it'd keep running until I powered the machine down. So I'd keep it running most of the day. It lasted probably about another year after that, with me spinning up the drive by hand first time I booted every day...