skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your arguments against intellectual property don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in the world where other forms of property exist and give rise to power. An argument for or against intellectual property is an argument about who and what should be accorded power.

A corrupt court making a poor decision has nothing to do with the reasoning behind copyright and patents.
Penny Arcade is a marketing company
BTW, the Gartner analyst (Lydia Leong[1]) who's tweet was quoted is worth following. She tells it like it is, with no bullshit (read some of her stuff about the various OpenStack debacles for example).

[1] https://twitter.com/cloudpundit
Coinbase needs access to your WF account at all times?
I can't believe I didn't know about you. I'm devouring your blog posts now while listening to Session 22. Both are quite (very) enjoyable, thank you.
The Problem with Higher Education - An Unfortunate Email
You should take Zed up on his offer. If you want to be entrepreneurial again, you can be, after you’ve built up your bankroll. When you’re broke with dependents, you don’t have the emotional ability to make good decisions.
Until you make $30-$40k more or less than a colleague who is supposedly on the same level of you. That shit's awkward.

You and I know it's negotiating skill, expertise, tenure...and yet it's still awkward when it happens (as I've had happen).
Khoo, the CEO (generally less in the public eye), is actually the third asshole. Krahulik and Holkins are the artist asshole and writer, respectively.

no comparable foot-in-mouth public displays of assholery, but if you think the other two are, you are very likely to think he is too
> postgis isn't a good fit for the data we store in full fidelity, since it's not just geo data but also sensor data (heartrate, cadence, power in watts, temperature etc).

Dumb question: why not?
As jaded as I am on altruism and human nature, this post gives me a slight glimmer of hope.
What does he have to be embarrassed about? He was responding to a comment on the volatility of a currency. Hyperinflation and hyper-deflation are both forms of currency volatility.

The point of his response was that the extreme currency fluctuations led to prices constantly changing, as much as several times a day. (I had a client that once did business in Zimbabwe. On a trip to meet with local business partners in 2007, he purchased a meal outside the airport for roughly $1 billion Zimbabwean dollars. On his way back to the airport that afternoon, that same meal cost $10 million ZDs!)

The inevitable result of hyper-volatility in either direction is that market participants will simply resort to using alternative currencies that are more stable and more predictable. This is a problem for Bitcoin since it is an alternative currency.
You shouldn't sadden yourself with my outlook on the world; I'm doing quite fine, thank you :)

Don't forget that when you sign a work contract in California, it says explicitly that your employer can get rid of you at any time (and they are certainly happy to exercise that right, especially in startups). This is legally true for any company here, no matter how different they are from the ones I've experienced.

Also don't forget that we live in a city where entire teams frequently get cut because they're deemed unnecessary by the new CEO of the day. This is the same city where when people (albeit not in the tech industry) go on strike because they don't get certain benefits promised to them in the past, they become almost universally hated by everyone.

The US is not exactly a reference when it comes to siding with workers in those matters.

I'm not saying that I treat work as a dull, impersonal affair, far from that. As I've said in another comment, I've happily socialized and made life long friends and partaken in office outings and activities in my life as a tech employee.

But I prefer to not cloud my mind with ultimately useless romantic notions such as "your work is your family" (I already have a family, and it's filling its role quite well- don't need another one). When the bad times come, it makes dealing with things much easier. And when employers try to push this angle a bit too much, it's a sign to me that the workplace might not be too desirable to be at.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Here is a more in depth explanation in the form of a video of a talk called 'Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM'[1] from O'Reilly Con by Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian who leads the Applications Services group.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohHdZXnsNi8
Is there a Ruby Startup Edition? :)
Yep, one of my coding heroes.
> Doesn't seem like there is any fundamental reason for Ruby to run slower.

I think that all the metaprogramming magic that Ruby allows is at odds with speed. That is not to say that it's impossible to make it fast, but it's probably tricky.
"It made no claims which have been demonstrated to be false"

That is because no falsifiable claims were made.

(Edit: Strictly speaking, this is not true. Falsifiable claims were made; this, for example:

An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent.

This claim has already been falsified: an attacker who can control the block chain can also selectively deny transaction verifications and prevent miners from receiving the mining reward.)

"you're the one inventing criteria for it that it doesn't meet"

No, I am just stating the criteria that determine how well-researched a paper is. If a paper does not cite the relevant previous work, it is poorly researched -- that is the standard that every other paper is held to. If a cryptography paper does not have a well-formed or clearly articulated security definition, it is poorly researched -- that is the standard other cryptography papers are held to. If a security paper breaks from widely accepted notions of security but never bothers to justify that, it is poorly researched. These are not unheard-of criteria, these are standard fare.

"The white paper is also remarkably readable"

What is your point? Readability is orthogonal to how well-researched a paper is.
Most would likely fall into a "speculator" definition, as they don't actually use bitcoins for transactions - therefore they aren't really "adopting" bitcoin, but rather are just stock piling something in hopes it goes up in value in the future.

I.e. if I buy 20 new xboxes but leave them sealed for resale before Christmas, I'm not really an early adopter, instead i'm just a speculating opportunist, even though I did purchase the consoles the day they were released - the same time the "early adopters" did.
I don't presume to know what is going to happen to bitcoin, but just dismissing it as "meh tulips" is pretty closed-minded.
People won't remember Snapchat's fall from grace or Groupon's mediocre twilight. They'll be talking about Bitcoin (and however it busts) in 2050, 2100 even. Not because it will be worth a damn. It won't go to zero. It will be a neat novelty "good" that is fully electronic. It will hold some value, just like Black Lotuses would still be a part of gaming history if no one played Magic anymore.

Still, I expect it to tank. It might have enough relic power (as the first, if not the best) to hold a value around $50 million in toto (or $6/BTC). Why? Because the forced deflation is a Dick Move of epic proportions: favoring early adopters for no good reason. As it turns out, Dick Moves damage your reputation in the long run, and all Bitcoin has is a brand. What stops someone else from creating a new cryptocurrency without the hard upper limit?

There is something interesting about it, which is it reminds us that we truly really have no fucking clue where value comes from. Nation-states? Companies? Total abstractions, many fraudulent or flimsy. Bitcoin has some transient value because some smart people solved a hard problem, but there's no long-term brand advantage or natural monopoly. But it's still pretty fascinating that smart people can create so much value (often "of out nothing", but sometimes genuine). Or take Magic: cardboard probably worth a billion dollars in totality. The first trillion-dollar business is going to be one that recognizes the value of the time of high-talent people and somehow provides direct access in a scalable way (independent of social networks, because well-connected, talented people are already in-place). I've had a rough idea of how that might work-- a call option exchange on high-talent peoples' time, see http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employ...: -- but I admit I have no idea how to scale it (or even deal with the ethical assurance issues).
I wish I had something more helpful to say. But I appreciate this post very much. I appreciate first of all the strength and courage it takes to admit a difficult situation. And secondly, I appreciate your willingness to stand up to the confirmation and survivorship bias that, by definition, permeates the new-business world. Thank you. I wish you the very best and sincerely hope you quickly find your feet again.
Yes, from utility point of view it's still just a protocol and an experiment. Many iterations of applications will be built on it before it becomes mainstream. As an investment, early adopter days are over.
This is exactly right. The parent is right that it doesn't represent the world of many Americans, but for most of them, it is their own fault. i'm sorry if that that offends anyone, but stop living beyond your means and you can save up 20k. It doesn't really matter how much you make. The key is to simply spend less than that number.

FWIW, 20k is still a big number to me, but not that big and I'm a 20 something that quit my job a few years ago to start my own business. I didn't ask any family or friends for money, instead I saved for 2 years to give myself a > 12 month emergency fund / runway[1]. I can't imagine how people would ask for a loan/gift from family rather than simply live frugally for a year or two.

[1] - my wife and i paid off ~30k in student loans, and saved a ~30k emergency fund in about 22 months making ~80k combined a year. We lived frugally so that I could quit my job and start my own business.
Thanks for this, it's a pretty useful comparison chart.

I don't know why the Rails community gets their panties in a bunch every time someone brings up the poor performance of rails. It is a a slow bloated framework that requires you throw hardware at your scaling problem instead of writing decent code. In the end, there is only so much hardware you can buy before your app stops scaling and you need a complete rewrite, the way Twitter did.
Yes, but everything I'd read indicates that is only MINOR updates (e.g. 1.x), not major updates (2.0)
This is absolutely the norm for the creative industry. They pour themselves into their work, and they expect you to too.

The reason is that creative work is incredibly hard in a way that's not possible to make up for with experience or training. It's hard on day one, year one, and hard on day one year twenty.

The thing that gets you through it all is the very nature of the work. It's like you're giving birth to a baby and seeing it grow and thrive, only this baby can make you shitloads of money. It's incredibly rewarding.

Penny Arcade wants the type of employee that can not only handle this, but who can thrive off of it the same way they do. That's why they're so in-your-face about how shitty the job is.

The entertainment industry is driven by big names. It's relentlessly competitive, the successful enjoy a never-ending crush of people who want to be a part of something they've been seeing on TV or the Internet and at cons for years. The unsuccessful have to fight for every minor victory. It's winner takes all, there's only so much public mindshare to go around.

If you want to know what the poor hapless sap who does get hired on to be their resident nerd is getting out of the arrangement, it's being part of this crush of attention. It's seriously life-changing. The social perks defy enumeration. After a few years of shoveling Penny Arcade's shit, they will be able to write their own salary at any number of massive media franchises who need every vetted hand they can get and are willing to pay top dollar. That's what's unsaid in that job ad, but if you've spent any time around that industry, you'd be salivating at the mouth at the opportunity.
Lets hope not!
You're creating a false dichotomy. There are certainly more important factors than money, but a developer at the level of PA's listing doesn't have to settle for low pay or a crappy work environment. You should be excited to go to work and be adequately compensated for the extremely valuable work you do.

You may not be in it for the money, but any for-profit venture certainly is. Imo, if you're going to work for below market pay, you should do it for a non-profit that really is trying to make the world better with limited resources, not a company that is capable of paying what you're worth, but would rather make a slightly higher margin off your hard work.
Maybe they are building a blacklist from the applicants and will post the real job description later.

If this were true I would be more at peace with the world than I presently am.
I'm kind of glad PNaCl is being researched, and it's really impressive engineering. I personally won't invest in it, but it will be very interesting if they pull it off, especially if other other browser get interested in it. There has been zero interest so far so I'm not betting on it.

The thing that bothers me about PNaCl is the potential for Chrome to become silo'ed and for Google to start pushing it's own ecosystem over the web, if they can't get other browsers to join in. I don't think they'll actually do that, but the chance is still kind of scary.
> however, a lot of data like "number of teachers in school A" is aggregated and too difficult to run in real time when we render paged results.

Does this mean you're using MongoDB as a kind of query cache? Was there a compelling reason to prefer it to other common caches? Or even building an ETL/DW into your existing database infrastructure?
1.2 trillion in physical currency. You want the M2 number (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m...) which is about 11 trillion.

So about another order of magnitude there.
Cowardly Attack On Marc Benioff's Philanthropy
Totally. I get it. All I'm saying is that it's not out of the question that there are people out there that would be absolutely happy to treat their work just like family.

And that there's an organization/group out there that treats it just like that.

It's sort of like jaded lovers. Certainly there are people that poo-poo the notion of "soul mates" or "love at first sight." Fair enough. But it's always a little bit sad when that dampens the mood for people who are caught up within potential romance, no?
Hang in there. At this time is important for you to get back on your feet as soon as possible. Find a job and be there for your family.
About the foreclosure: did you talk to a lawyer? can you delay the process a little longer?.
About your company: can you share some information about your visions?. What do you think went wrong?.
My best regards for you and your family.
I have some "over printed" bank notes and postage stamps from the Weimar Republic. The money would be worthless by the time they got it printed, so they just ran it through another press to add more zeros. My grandparents lived through that.
Well, if you take his comment literally then yes, but it would not be a very interesting question because it's quite easy to install bash on windows and use its nice features. And there's powershell which fits better in the Windows ecosystem.

I read it as the question that has a much more interesting answer: Why doesn't Windows have a good terminal? And the answer is, it's no use making one because the Windows console subsystem, the one that is the de facto standard, is so badly designed that it's near impossible to write a good terminal for it.
lz 加油
Gold and BitCoin don't compare well. Here's why. Sure, gold is "useless", except for the fact that its value is historically verified (over centuries) and culture-independent. If nothing else, it's used in jewelry (and drugs, and electronics).

There aren't many elements on the periodic table, and even fewer are viable as metallic currencies: rare enough to have value in small weight, not so rare as to be foreign (historically) to many cultures. Gold has a visceral, visual advantage, too: it's the only yellow metal.

On the other hand, anyone can launch a new cryptocurrency. There's no natural monopoly there. The idea is valid, but all Bitcoin has to defend itself against competition is the brand/reputation. And people hate Bitcoin because it was clearly set up to favor early adopters for no good reason.
Thank you for this. By the way, I found this topic to be a difficult one to google for. Is there a magic search string or term of art that I'm missing?
Gold is volatile too.
Gold is inherently valuable because you can use it to do things like protect circuit contacts from corrosion, or protect astronauts from solar radiation.

Government-backed currency isn't inherently valuable, per se, but for residents of many countries it's useful stuff to have because you need it to pay your taxes, and there's often a statutory obligation to accept it as a form of payment for settling debts.

Neither of those uses necessarily accounts for 100% of the value of either gold or fiat currency. (Arguably, not even close.) But they do place a kind of floor under their values. For gold it's a fairly absolute floor - there'll always be uses for gold, so it'll always have at least some value. For a national currency that isn't necessarily the case, as the case of the Zimbabwean dollar famously illustrates. However, when the currency is backed by a nation with a strong, stable economy then in theory (and, so far, in practice) that provides sufficient protection against the worst extremes of volatility.

Bitcoin, by contrast, is working without a net. Naturally that isn't a problem if it doesn't need a net. But there's an argument to be made that every currency is primarily fueled by human psychology, and every Dumbo likes to have his feather to hold.
Hey tenderlove, just wanted to say thanks for all you do for ruby and rails. Your a legend mate.
Is it possible to predict the increasing rate of difficulty?
People bearish on Bitcoin's future price are usually the same people who are pissed that they didn't buy any bitcoins.

But often, something happens - they realize how incredible the technology is. Then they buy it, and suddenly they're bullish because they want the price to go up.

The price of gold is probably going to be killed to a very low ($50-100/oz?) price because the only thing keeping its value so high is how convenient it is as a store of manipulation-free value. However, bitcoins are far, far more convenient. And they will be even less subject to manipulation.
I've upgraded several Rails apps from ~>2.3.0 through to 4.0. I saw performance regressions around Rails 3, and they've subsequently disappeared when upgrading to 3.2 and 4.0 - the latter in general being much faster.

I have to wonder what you're doing that's giving you an average of 480ms? Have you stripped out middleware you're not using? Have you looked into exactly where the time is going? There are so many places to start, it's hard to offer much concrete advice.
Stay strong. Another statistic - in favor of the world's need for talented engineers! Maybe not bound to be a self-made man, that's all.
I'm mobile now so excuse the brevity.

If you're in the Twin Cities I'd like to extend a hand in you running on two legs. I'd also like to help out giving your little ones a memorable Christmas. No strings attached.

I can get you in front of some bigger names here and get you interviews, depending on what you do. tbese

Email is josh@josh.mn
I feel like I have been living in a cave. I have never heard of Penny Arcade but people are referring to them as legendary. Visiting their site feels like going back to 2006. What am I missing?
While the ad is not the kind of job I would want, I have to say, I appreciated its... bluntness.

The fact that there are red flags means that the few candidates who actually apply know full well what they're getting into and that nobody's time is wasted.
Once I noticed that Comcast was IPv6 enabled in my area switching it on was as easy as checking a couple of boxes in my airport express. One was to enable IPv6 and the other was to block incoming IPv6 connections.

I have not noticed any issues since enabling it. Dual stack seems to work well. As browsers seem to choose whichever is faster I have seen some behaviour where Google thought I was accessing gmail from multiple locations at the same time when infact I had switched from IPv4 to IPv6.
That some naive person "volunteers" to be exploited and abused doesn't make it any less exploitative or abusive.
Pretty common at startups where your actual job is often "everyone does everything". It's quite common to only have a business person and a set of one or more developers, for example. Then the developers start having to do IT and sys admin that can't be outsourced or clouded out like in the linked job ad. I think the ad is honest and it gives the impression that the PA biz guy seems like a straight shooter, personally. :)
how/where did you met them at NYC?
Do you want corporations in control or government? You can't vote corporations out. You can vote government out.
> I am just saying that I understand that MongoDB has much more sophisticated updates capability than Postgres.

How many isolation levels does MongoDB support?
Get interviews. Get offers. Talk with other devs. Talk with recruiters.

As a dev in Portland, I can tell you with your skill set, if you have at least 3 - 4 years experience, you can get 6 figures. But you have to market yourself as a dev, not a generalist. Especially if you emphasize Angular and Node.
Hey bud,

Hitting the bottom after a long fall is the hardest thing you can go through in life. A year ago I was working on my own stupid startup, ran out of money, ran out of credit, wasn't sure there would be another blue sky in my life. Everyone has ups and downs, its the hardest thing to go through.

However, life is not over. It may feel like it, and you may even want it to be. But YOU are still writing YOUR story -- do you want to be the guy who fell and didn't get back up? Fuck no. You want to be the guy who had nothing left and no matter how far down the rabbit hole you go, you find a way back out. You want to be a success. You want it all. You'll have it all someday. Is that day today? No. But because you're still alive you have the chance to make it a reality.

So get back up, find work, pay off bills, and you'll be back in the game before you know it. You're intelligent, smart, driven. Remember -- do not let failure dictate who you are. You're not a failure, failure is simply something that happens to all of us. Learn from failure and let it compliment your decision making in the future. You'll be wiser and you'll learn from this mistake.

Good luck and I'll see you around,
Tiger