skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not if Kearns was substantially justified in bringing a suit under the Equal Access to Justice Act, which would be hard to deny based on his having demonstrated the invention to Ford. Kearns could have still taken the $18 million awarded to him without additional risk. (His son could maybe not nowadays get away with putting his .45 automatic on the desk during negotiations, though)

What the bill would do is prevent Kearns from selling his invention to a shell company with Chrysler as parent and suing Ford drivers for using the intermittent-wiper invention, since Ford would now be able to act on behalf of the defendants in these cases, and Chrysler would be liable for paying fees if they had acted in bad faith.
Rant warning:

It really disturbs me that people on sites like Reddit and Hacker News, and young people in general, seem to idolize psychedelics so much. Whenever I see an article about hallucinogens pop up on my news feed, it's always some pseudo-scientific BS about how psychedelics can bring about powerful insights, cure PTSD, and open minds.

Psychedelics are extremely powerful drugs that can and will alter peoples' minds permanently. Speaking from experience, one does not simply experience ego death one day and then go on living their life as if it never happened. For better or for worse those intense experiences stay with a person forever.

I used to be a big believer in the psychedelic culture. I read books about Timothy Leary, practiced my own half-baked version of Buddhism, attended numerous festivals, and grew and consumed copious amounts of drugs. While I didn't take nearly as much as the author of this article, I can truthfully say that I tripped at least 50 times combined on LCD, mushrooms, DMT, dextromethorphan, MDMA, ecstacy, 2c-e, 2c-i, salvia, and DET.

I believed that these drugs were giving me valuable insights, making me more intelligent and observant, unlocking parts of my psyche that normal people would never understand. In my drugged out state of mind this was completely reasonable to believe. The world is like totally interconnected, man! Reality is just perceived in the mind!

It took me a least a year of hallucinogen-sobriety to realize that my insights were really quite banal and meaningless. I hadn't learned anything, and worse yet my mild social anxiety had transformed into a debilitating social anxiety that nearly gives me panic attacks even during 'safe' social encounters like visiting family friends. Even now that I've been sober of psychedelics and weed for years I still struggle with the damage that has been done to my mental health.

Fortunately everything turned out OK for me. I have a well paying job as a web dev, a great girlfriend, a loving family, and my financial house is in order. I can't say the same for some of friends though, two of which have gone completely psychotic after years of mushroom usage and one who became, for lack of a better word, completely retarded after one too many ecstasy rolls.

I understand that my current state is my own doing. I accept full responsibility for my life. All I'm trying to is be careful with your mind. Psychedelics can change your life forever.
How do you get people to pay you? The couple of times I've worked through oDesk the person disappeared after I delivered.
I see many points about not wanting to manage being mentioned, but if you read into it more you'll find Gayle is suggesting this is about developers who want to drive product. Product Management is much more than just management roles and I know many coders who do product management while maintaining their coding space. It's not for everyone, but Product Management is not project management.
Seriously fuck cancer.
Bank of America First Assessment of Bitcoin PDF
One would also need to weight the beliefs. Various denominations disagree about topics like predestination, but don't ultimately place a lot of value on those topics. There are often many people in the same denomination who don't necessarily agree with every official bit of low weighted doctrine.

Theology about the nature of Christ has significantly higher weight. Heresy, etc. This is where you see little diversion between denominations and more diversion between, say, Protestants and the LDS Church.
What selloff?
I used to be a dev who transitioned to a PM and now am the CTO in my own startup. My main reason for becoming a PM was to get more customer contact and be in a position to make customer-focused product decisions. Someone mentioned that PMs make more money than devs, this is incorrect at least in most top tech companies. Compensation bands for PMs and Devs are the same.

Obviously the day-to-day work of a PM is pretty different from that of a dev and the transition is not something that all devs would like or should even aspire to. For those who want to know more about what PMs are supposed to do (and no, it is not just project management :-) check out my blog on this topic - http://avilay.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/what-does-a-pm-do/
I work at Google (in Mountain View) and all of the buildings I've worked in here have "nap pods" scattered around. They look kinda like dentist chairs, with a egg-shaped cone that comes down over your head and torso to shield you from noise and distraction. See:

http://www.geek.com/news/google-uses-high-tech-nap-pods-to-k...

The pods can be reserved on a public calendar, same as conference rooms. The ones in my previous building were booked pretty solid every day from 11am-3pm.

I tried one out once but didn't find it particular comfortable or conducive to sleep. But some folks swear by them.
None of what you just said suggests that we're one step away from authoritarianism.
So... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XT-l-_3y0
> If the currency under consideration has wide spread adoption, deflation means a system-wide slowdown in investment (_averaged_).

The computer industry is deflationary. All you have to do to be able to buy more computing power is wait. Yet, somehow, investment in computers keeps happening.

Just because money is increasing in value, doesn't mean that demand for money goes away. Just the opposite in fact. A money that increases in value is more valuable and thus more in demand.

Since the only (legitimate) way to get money is to earn it by labor or investment, it seems that either labor or investment or both will increase as money becomes more valuable.
Thanks for the advice, I think that's what I'm going to end up doing. Your point about him going to the friend is apt: it would just be too confrontational for me to tell him, but I don't mind if he knows the reason.
How we're using a sewing machine to design an iPad game
After School Matters Changed My Life
The 4 Biggest Barriers To Connecting Everything, And How To Tear Them Down
"23andMe will comply with the FDA’s directive and stop offering new consumers access to health-related genetic tests while the company moves forward with the agency’s regulatory review 23andMe_Logo_blogprocesses."

And that means 23andMe can't follow its business model of crowd-sourcing lots of personal genomic and medical history data to number-crunch its way into having actual information to offer consumers years after they have paid to send their DNA to 23andMe.[1] That plan looked clever to some investors just a while ago, but now investors are finding out that 23andMe is clueless at the top, and trying to make its way in a heavily regulated industry for which the regulator is not about to cave in to cute marketing campaigns.

After it announces its service changes, the company lets us know, "This is clearly a much different service than in the past, so we are offering customers who purchased kits on or after November 22, 2013 a full refund if they wish. Those customers will get an email from 23andMe with details on the refund policy. Eligible customers who do not receive an email are encouraged to check their spam email folders for the email with their personalized instructions or contact our Customer Care Team."

A funny detail is that the blog post on the company blog itself has an ad linking to signing up to send in DNA for $99 from the DNA donor, but following the link leads to an announcement that the company is out of that business for a while.

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-...
Would switching to part time at finishing your degree while you freelance as well be an option? That might you allow you to try out lots of different types of CS/programming/development work in different industries and build some history and contacts while school is finishing up.
> or just the actions of a jumbled congress/governing system.

Exactly.
great point avilay. thank you for helping clarify the difference between the two PM's. product vs project. i think this is an important differentiation and one which, when clarified, could help more developers excel in their careers without losing their coding edge.
Strange that this was downvoted given that it was proven true onto a couple of days later.
Nelson Mandela wasn’t removed from the US Terror List until 2008
This is not my experience. Companies with strong engineering organizations that are parallel with and equal to the product/business org structure would not have a product management bias. I would only work at a company where engineers are managed by other Engineers who are partners with the product and other business teams, not reporting to them. (I'm a Software Engineer).

I also think that engineers would be paid much better than product managers in such an organization, given the higher demand for engineering skills (there should be more engineers than product managers on any given team) and a smaller pool of potential hires.
Interviews with the Masters eBook (includes Paul Graham interview) now free.
In the article it mentions going after websites that were offering tainted browsers. if users had to signup to download perhaps their contact info could be obtained by subpoena.
By that logic, exposing a scam is also murder, since the scammer could go bankrupt, face jail, etc.

Not all things that cause financial hardship are attempted murder. Firing someone is even more likely to cause hardship, but a valid business decision. Financial hardship isn't the purpose, though, when you fire someone or expose a scam. It's a side effect. What you are really trying to do, in the scam case, is protect the public and, in the firing case, end an unprofitable business relationship. Once those goals are achieved, you generally don't go after that person to cause further financial difficulty.

Reporting a drunk driver is murder, since they may get arrested, lose their job, and be shunned.

Again, no. If anything, you're saving the world from more severe hardships (of the financial kind; but, more severely, injuries and deaths) by reporting him. Besides, when you report him, your goal isn't to ruin his life. It's to protect innocents from the danger he's causing. (If his life gets ruined, he's not exactly innocent, but that's probably not your goal in reporting him.)

See, blacklisting is done specifically to cause persistent and unreasonable financial hardship. Financial difficulties to another party are, in those other cases, side effects. With blacklisting, there is intent to ruin the person's life, and that intent is persistent, which generally means that there is no escape for that person. Different story altogether.
There's something to be said about the quality of programming API-kids do these days, if FuckIt.lang projects are so popular. Not to jab this project itself by any means, but hiding defects "on your way to doing that million dollar demo to investors" makes my skin crawl. How many con men are in this industry? This is damn sad. If you need a tool like this beyond your private debugging needs, you don't understand what you're doing and should step back and take the time to reason things out.
From an economic perspective, would it cost you less to
1) Stay in school (pay tuition) and continue doing part time work during the school year, and do a summer internship this summer, or
2) Leave school and work full time, but pay for living expenses?

I am a CS Junior as well, but I wasn't in the Marine Infantry. I agree with pradn about the social signal of having a degree, but how do the costs play out? And do you already have any full time offers?
I'm so jaded that I wont click a superlative filled headline by default, even if it is an edu URL. I'm sure this will change all things forever, will be a *-killer and fix the upcoming antibiotic-less armageddon. Here are 10 reasons why this article is wrong about everything.
That's a pretty clever feature. I'm liking that, and the new statistics module.
Teaching with video
It's not so simple in real life. I use this style of error-handling for only one type of project: a library with unknown users. In that case, as I can't make assumptions about the existence of better error handling systems, it gives the most flexible result. But at a price, I know have to document the error codes, and I had damned well better also provide APIs that allow my client to meaningfully recover from the error.

In most I have worked on, this type of error handling is completely inadequate. Think multithreaded applications. The code that needs to handle the error your code just generated isn't in the call stack. This happens very often in my experience, and I have found that the best solution is to post some kind of notification message rather than returning an error code. This creates a dependency on the notification system though, so it's not always the correct solution.

The thing that I dislike the most in your example was when you propagated the error from function a out of function b. my most robust code mostly uses void functions. Error codes are only used in cases where the user can actually do some meaningful action in response to the error, and feNkly this is rarely the case. Instead I try as much as possible to correctly handle errors without propagation. It frees up the user of my APIs from having to worry about errors, and in my opinion thus should be a design goal of any API.
I think because it trains you in skills that are relevant for a CEO or founder, whereas being a dev very often doesn't
Android 4.4.1 now rolling out with camera improvements for the Nexus 5
Ok. If it's not a policy, then I don't think there's any way you can expect a potential contributor to know that a particular pull request must be preceded by discussion. In which case, I think the burden falls on the person reviewing the requests. In this case, Noordhuis. The submitter did their bit by making a positive change and offering the patch.
Go errors are machine-readable data.

Most modules expose variables with the naming convention Err... that represent the errors that they can return. The errors can be compared with those values (eg. err == os.ErrPermission). Some modules also define error types that provide additional error data, such as net.OpError; a type-cast can be used to check if the error is of that type, and then access the data within. As a fallback, all errors implement the Error interface which allows you to display them as a string if you can't handle them based upon their type.

It's not unlike exception handling by exception type, although it's definitely more of a manual process because Go doesn't give you specialized syntax for it.
Someone’s Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet
010100100100100101010000
Yes, I believe that's more smokescreen. As I said, I'm done engaging with you in this forum about this.
Hmmm...I must be missing something. It is, at least, as useful as chargebacks, because a chargeback is a subset of m-of-n. I suspect companies will spring up to provide the service (and probably instant payments and other stuff) for cheaper than credit card companies currently charge, and with less intrusive credit history checks and such.
There is a difference between contextual self-promotion and irrelevant spamming. What you are doing is the latter. Please limit the advertising, it only hurts the PR with not much to gain.
> And what I am saying is that Mexico would have a much easier time controlling its crime if there were not billions of dollars flowing southward from the United States into the hands of the cartels.

This is totally fucking irrelevant in the given discussion. You just have an axe to grind and want to bring up some stupid anti-drug rant, however tragically true it may be, at any given moment, even when it's not appropriate. This discussion is not about why. It's not about it.
Back in the 90s I worked in a fast-food pizza joint. I washed dishes and also took delivery orders on the phone. Normally we'd stand up while taking the phone orders, but one time I sat down on a chair there and the manager berated me for it. As if it was somehow lazy to be sitting, even though it had absolutely no effect on how well I did that work.
I think this means I can scalp my pre-Nov 22nd, unused kit.

All kidding aside, this is pretty disappointing. I bought one for myself a year ago and it was a life altering experience. I know that 23andMe have come under scrutiny with regards to not only the accuracy of their findings but the manner in how they communicate it but I have not had problems with either.

I hope the FDA allows this company to continue what they are doing. It's rare that such an opportunity exists for the layman to understand their genetics.

EDIT: I've verified the more dramatic findings outside of 23andMe. I never saw 23andMe as an authoritative source, but it is a great guide.
You'll also have the opportunity to try new classes and fields within CS. It's hard to get a wide view of CS otherwise. A solid foundation will open up more options in your career.
I'm so angry with this. Good work.
> "the test suite actually found a bug holy crap"

I'm sad to say I say this every time this happens to me as well.
What the Fluck
I don't think this is so much a tool as a "because I can and it's funny" project. Like Edison -> Serial "adapters" and various other hilariously, uselessly malicious things it's possible to create.
MRI machines don't actually use liquid cryogens, do they? Surely some kind of cryocooler would be simpler and cheaper?
For me that is normally true. However, I find that naps are also beneficial when I am doing something that is extremely demanding mentally. Of course, I would probably get the same benefit from just slacking of and browsing HN for a while.
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I don't think pride always enters into it, sometimes you just need diversity of thought around a problem.

"We have to reinvent the wheel every once in a while, not because we need a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors."
- Bruce Joyce
"anything vaguely resembling trinitarianism"

Heresy! This conflict isn't over yet… True Christians would never believe in your phony, incestuous three-God-in-one theory. :)

/Sarc, sort of, as this was actually a people-were-killed-over-it "big" problem back before Constantine, and probably a bit afterwards, too. It just goes to show that these definitions are harder than they look.
Nah, the big black box thing only works if you haven't left a bunch if other less mysterious crap lying around. If we colonise the Moon, we'll have to leave the monolith elsewhere. Callisto or Ganymede look like likely customers... Though quite frankly we're starting to get to the point where we've left enough stuff lying around that our entire solar system's mystery quotient has been seriously compromised...
As a curiosity:

Are you really stuck in meetings and infantile email disputes as long as it looks like from a devs POV? This is coming from personal observation of my work environment, not any sort of dig at you.

I've always assumed that a single PM is good, but as soon as you put two together, work grinds to a halt.

note: our PM's make about 30k more than the highest paid dev.
Mystery 'alien-like creature' seen in Bristol harbour
Well, that's ridiculous. I just bought a kit two days ago. I wonder if I should send the kit back then ask for the refund, or just send the kit back unused.
Help fund world-class education for high-potential Peruvian kids
Ask HN: In my situation, how good would it to work on oDesk?
I'm a pretty good frontend developer with almost 8 years of experience although most of it was as a freelance.

Right now I'm working at a web agency making US$10000/year (a bit below the market locally but it'd be hard to find another job in the area from what I've seen due to my lack of a CS degree).

The late hours and unrealistic deadlines are starting to wear on me, specially considering most of what I make disappears after a couple of months because it's basically advertising. I wouldn't mind working late if my work had even a bit of meaning.

I'd love to work remotely but I haven't had much luck sending resumes (maybe because I don't live in the US or my portfolio is lacking due to the vanishing nature of my work). My major weakness is that I haven't used Backbone and Angular which are very prominent in most frontend job postings around here and other sites. I really want to learn how to use them but I don't have time due to the aforementioned agency job.

I have read a bit about oDesk and while most people have bad experiences I feel that maybe it would be the best way to escape the agency grind. But maybe I would be sacrificing my job security (I need to pay rent after all) for nothing.

I feel lost and a bit disheartened and I'd really appreciate any advice you may have.
"Still getting errors? Chain fuckit calls. This module is like violence: if it doesn't work, you just need more of it."

I feel like writing some Python now.
Doesn't look free to me
So I want to use this app on my phone with no backup, I just want to start making a journal. In this use case, I have 0 reason to make an account -- the whole point of the use case is avoiding making an account.

I just want to use this beautiful app, and making an account is getting in my way.

It doesn't matter to me that I can go to the settings and turn off syncing, because that feels like work I shouldn't have to do. I don't want to set up an account, which is to enable me to sink, when my goal is to turn off syncing and use the app in isolation on my phone.

Sorry for kind of lecturing on, this is meant to be a point to the greater maker community, not you specifically blader. One of the things that drives me nuts with ubuntu for instance, is that I have to do work to get to the barebones setup.

I guess I need to write a blog post about this, but the TL;DR is GIVE ME THE CORE PRODUCT AND LET ME SET UP THE FEATURES THAT I WANT. DON'T GIVE ME A GIANT AMOEBA AND MAKE ME DO WORK TO GET TO A NICE CLEAN CORE PRODUCT.

edit: just want to reinforce that that is not yelling at you, this discussion just managed to touch on an increasing frustration I have with the landscape of new products -- from companies big and small -- I hope I'm not alone in thinking a very core fundamental is being stepped on to the detriment of the user.
Maybe you haven't seen what "clueless at the top" looks like.

It doesn't look like a successful company that's torn down by heavy handed regulators.
This article is RAGE-fuel for anyone with > 101 experience with analytic philosophy of language. It's the theory of reference equivalent of

"Your epistemology is bad because an evil demon might be fooling you."
"Whoa."
The rise of the -dens:

http://names.yafla.com/#n=Aiden,Jaden,Braden,Jayden,Kayden&s...
Context: Mitch Hill, former Opscode CEO, died of cancer.