skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're a sack of shit:

>I'm not here to argue for or against the drones.

Congrats on being a mediocre person who doesn't believe in anything or have any opinions. This is the most offensive thing I think, even more than me disagreeing with you. Just picking middle of the road bland boring contrariness.

>We all know war is hell.

Apparently "we" don't because people continue to wage war.

>We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm.

No, making it into a game complete with an Xbox controller abstracts the realness from it.

> So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.

It isn't about drones, its about killing people. Who gives a fuck if it is a drone or a spoon. It is clearly an article about shitty wars being pursued by shitty people, not about how technologically advanced drones are.

>Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village.

What a false fucking dichotomy. How about not bombing fucking anyone? And who the fuck is "we"? I didn't bomb anyone and will continue to not bomb anyone.

>"The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?

Again, false dichotomy. It does not have to be grainy drone feeds or confused soldiers on the ground. There are more options than A or B.

>The military is aware of the impact on these operators.

That doesn't mean they give a shit. I am aware of the drug addict a few houses down. I don't care.

>Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys".

I wouldn't care. I don't care about "American lives" and I don't care about insurgency lives. I care about people regardless of nationality. I feel bad for the jack asses on both sides that eat up the lies of their leaders and kill each other in the name of nothing.

>What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.

Its amazing how redefining anyone that is an adult male who dies as an enemy combatant reduces civilian deaths as well.

>War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.

Being a boring middle of the road stick in the mud does more damage than anything.
Your entire comment was sarcasm. Sarcasm is not a constructive or compelling way of making an argument.
I'm of the opinion that the "launch" is a highly overrated concept. Unless you have lots of existing traffic or a press embargo, your launch will consist of turning on the product, then watching as nothing happens. Later on, if you're lucky enough to get press somewhere, you'll get a spike of traffic that will be gone the next day.

As an experiment to this end we developed Omniref [1] entirely in public, just to see what would happen. We never hid the thing, even when it was horribly broken (we even had organic search traffic before we were ready!) It made no difference. What works is getting users, one at a time.

The bottom line is that product/market fit trumps everything. Better to just put the product out there and try to get one daily user as soon as possible than to worry about "launching". It's not as gratifying to the ego, but you learn more, and that's the whole game.

[1] http://www.omniref.com
That is, until they intercept the motherboard you ordered and flash a custom BIOS onto it...
Google is reportedly over 30% women, too. I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure. The startup world compares well to the original California gold rush - a risk for a small shot at a high reward - and that was mostly male, too.

Also, keep in mind that it's a zero-sum game. If Google and IBM each hire 1,000 female engineers from top schools, that means that startups get less diverse.
When I hear about this being a cultural thing, an important aspect people leave out is that men aren't exactly encouraged to be coders either. Writing code has pretty much no social cred until you're out of school, and pretty much automatically gets you tagged as a nerd. No coder I know started coding because it was cool, they just sort of enjoyed it and accepted the social consequences.

I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Same goes for elementary school teachers. Why is that?

Just because there's a gender imbalance doesn't necessarily mean anyone is keeping anyone out. And if a few insensitive comments can keep you from doing what you want to do in life, maybe that's something you have to deal with -- there's always going to be haters no matter what you want to do.
Not true. Bitcoin did two things that I am aware of: 1) Create a universal currency which can be easily exchanged and that appreciates rather than depreciates (over the long run I mean, I am not referring to short term market fluctuations). 2) It created a mode where many underground (eg: gray or black market dealings) can take place without the need for laundering money. [Note: I don't condone, just pointing out the facts]
Possibly the hurdle of creating an entire IDE. Why not just make a plugin for an existing IDE.
>What is sad now in the USA is that there are very few politicians who speak the truth and very few news outlets that don't just cooperate in the propaganda.

There never were any. Name this mystical time when he U.S. government was some benevolent force for good and not constantly lying to the civilian population to push them to unwanted wars.
No one seems to talk about where these girls are being pulled from, as if labor shifts don't have two sides. What often seems to happen in initiatives like this is that all the sectors which decide they need higher female participation end up fighting over the same pool of "high-achieving" (high IQ, upper class, family connections) individuals. "We need to shift women from MBA programs into comp sci master's programs" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
Providing a counter point to the Guardian piece doesn't mean he's being misleading. New technology applications, military or otherwise often go through a pretty searing gauntlet of fear. To that end, pointing out the alternative pros and cons of the alternative scenario which is usually troops on the ground is helpful- not manipulative or misleading.
Indiegogo: LinuxOnAndroid
>Fewer drone strikes are not necessarily in the national interest.

Oh no. Not the national interest. How about human interest?
Because web usage statistics are hard to get right, and hard to interpret even if you do a good job on data collection.

To get a reliable sample of web traffic as a whole you'll need to recruit most of the larger websites (Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, etc.), and a sampling of second and third tier sites and then process the data taking into account that browsers lie and that all of your sites that you are sampling are going to be biased in one direction or another. Google for instance probably sees a higher share of chrome than similar sized sites. Add to which there is no standard way of distinguishing browsers other than by looking at the User-Agent string which is error prone and not guaranteed to be an accurate representation.
Thanks! Does HN have any ideas about how to open the web in a modern way?
Why not? Rap Genius ignored Google's rules
Wait, what? There's no way that's a valid legal argument. That's insane.
+1, that's inspiring! Totally helped me understand on how all this innovation came about here.
I'd love to hear/see more about the social product recommendation product.
ironically google trends shows a massive increase in interest
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=rapgenius.com
Best PHP Frameworks for 2014
Firefox 28 restricts the enumeration of navigator.plugins[] to reduce the impact of plugin fingerprinting. A website can directly query navigator.plugins["Some Plugin Name"] to check for a plugin, but no website should need to enumerate all installed plugins just to look for one particular plugin. Unfortunately, many major websites do, so enumerating Firefox's navigator.plugins[] will reveal QuickTime, Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Shockwave Player, and Java to avoid breaking those websites.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=757726
I wonder what kind of dirt the executive branch has on the judicial branch..
What if you don't have any money to invest because you are out of work or disabled?
Has Google specified when the penalty will end?
Newly erected DVI receives 150m to invest in late stage startups
Google can, and Google will.
Without context and purely based on technicality you are correct, yet in the frame of this conversation your comment doesn't make any sense.

Clearly there is a difference between a benign website and a site that hosts code that knowingly takes control of the user's computer (regardless of the programmer's intentions).
I didn't at all get the impression he was okay with the napalm bombings
I'll try to condense it as much as possible, and add the caveat that our process is imperfect:

1. Build outreach programs that are open-enrollment and broadly targeted (for instance, the crypto challenges aren't targeted at security industry events).

2. Explicitly overcommunicate the whole hiring process to candidates up front and sell the job, before attempting to screen. Actively try to correct for the adversarial nature of the process.

3. Drastically reduce the impact of phone screen interviews.

4. Administer standardized work-sample tests to all candidates regardless of previous experience; those tests have quantifiable outcomes (which we record).

5. Administer standardized on-site interviews with quantifiable outcomes (right now, they're "exercises", but their form might change over the long term).

The only point in our process where interviewers have a lot of flexibility in terms of what they do is the phone screens. We use the phone screens to generate predictions for how candidates will do on the rest of the interview, but we don't screen with them. (We would if the phone screen revealed a candidate to be a crazy person or a jerk, but I don't think that has ever happened).

So far, the things that have been most noticeably successful for us:

* Standardized, quantifiable results that allow us to generate a model of what a successful candidate actually does, rather than a gut feeling based on how well they answer questions, or how "confident" they are, or how "well spoken", or how impressive their resume.

* Outreach to the industry as a whole, not just to the small sectors of the industry we believed a-priori would generate the best candidates. Some of our best people have come essentially "out of nowhere", and recognizing that fact I'm especially interested in optimizing for that.

It is thrilling --- best word I have for it --- to find someone who's had no relevant job experience, hire them because they do unexpectedly well on a series of quantifiable metrics, and then see 6-9 months later that they are, say, showing us how to use BKZ lattice reduction and fourier transforms to exploit elliptic curve nonce biases.
Abstraction can be dangerous
It's ridiculous because breaking the rules and not getting caught is the only way to win the game.
This has moved from an interesting case study in SEO to unadulterated schadenfreude.
Which is really a shame, because RapGenius is a better lyrics site than all the rest by leaps and bounds. Google is acting like a cartel here and it's absolutely ridiculous. I hope they can beat this thing.
I think he was referring to a different time frame (1960s-1980s). But he didn't provide evidence so your objection may still be valid.
Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male.
I'm so sick of this claim. The NSA fucked up based on what we know, there's no need to wildly speculate that actual blackmail is occurring too.

It's just plain unnecessary.
It is reassuring to see that the US is not falling behind in the spy vs spy arms race. Technology is making it easier and easier to conceal conspiracies or national security initiatives. If applied judiciously, this is a valuable asset. There is the danger of misuse, as with many US government assets: nukes, chemical weapons, and guns, to name a few.
Hmm...

"This site reaches over 24 million monthly people, of which 12 million (48%) are in the U.S.The typical visitor watches Nickelodeon, visits pbskids.org, and listens to National Public Radio."
I'm not sure if it's right or wrong what Google did, but it was certainly a shit business decision. It's Google's job to be a proper search tool for anyone to get the best possible results when searching something as simple as "rapgenius". If I search "rapgenius" and don't get the hugely popular website http://rapgenius.com as the first result, then that's bad service on Google's end.
What motivation would he have to lie about documents also possessed by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman? I'm sure Glenn would gleefully point out misinformation. And Ed Snowden is in constant contact with them.
You need lots of daily interaction with coworkers. Ideally, everyday someone should be waiting on the things you are supposed to deliver, to incorporate them into his own work or at least test or review them.
Yeah, because when discussing a failure of a UI feature, the solution is keyboard shortcuts. Why even have a window manager or desktop environment? Why even have a keyboard? Clearly the most metal thing to do is to take two wires and communicate with the computer in binary by touching the ends together.
Seems to be wildly misleading numbers. Why not use something like gs.statcounter.com to get more correct numbers.
If there was the shared use of all this intelligence that everyone believes there is then the War On some Drugs would be over and done with overnight. But then maybe that's still in the staging phase.
You don't connect new microcrontrolers (from unkown procedence) into a main I/O bus every time you get data from somebody in optical disks. You always use the same set.
I am telling you that after watching the Nth person go through an on-site interview process that we had already actively tried to program as positive and encouraging, and seeing them physically shaking in the conference room, and then thinking back on the last time I had needed to endure a job interview and how I felt, that yes, the process is inhumane. It demands of candidates that they endure a deeply uncomfortable process of being judged in 45 minute snapshots by strangers who often by all appearances seem to have rejection as an overt goal.

Your last question presents a false dichotomy and so I won't answer it.

I am, incidentally, a fan of your comments on HN. I'm just not interested in an argument where we're both going to be talking past each other.
You provide # of visits and revenue--how about # impressions, clicks, uniques, etc?

edit: actually i shouldn't have ignored the pictures, thats my bad... one ad per page, 480k page views. 201k uniques. still curious about performance on that ad unit.
Thanks again for all this advice, very helpful!
I agree, if I'm reading this correctly.

From the article: "Pauley is essentially saying that the targets of the order have no recourse to challenge the collection of their personal data because Congress never intended for targets to ever know that they were subject to this sort of spying."

I don't think that's true...I think the judge is saying that the targets of the order have no recourse to challenge the collection of their personal data because there's nothing to challenge (it's legal), regardless of whether or not Congress intended for the targets to know about it.

Am I misreading it?
Pointing out an opposing view, or the downside of the alternative to drones (boots on the ground) does not make the author a sack of shit.

War will be around until humans work harder to understand each others perspectives and evolve socially as quickly as we have with technology. You can help us all to that end by not being name calling anonymously on the internet.
Google's mission is to make the world's information universally accessible. If rapgenius contains information that other sites do not, and people want that information, it is Google's mission to bring those people to rapgenius.
> Is this really YC's problem to solve?

I think it's up to everyone to do their part. This problem, like all big problems, is made up of lots of little problems.
Universal Audio's UAD satellite boxes and the Apollo range of interfaces don't support Windows. Focusrite's discontinued Liquid Mix DSP box didn't support Windows. All of Metric Halo's audio interfaces are Mac only. I believe some of MOTU's audio interfaces used to be Mac specific, since their Digital Performer DAW software was Mac specific. If memory serves DP went multi-platform with version 8, and their audio interfaces have also become increasingly Windows friendly.

These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. That's before we even get into software.
I think it's absolutely worth considering what power the NSA has that could be abused. Considering what we now know to be true that none of us suspected a few months ago, I think it's more irresponsible to unilaterally shut down speculation of this kind than it is to indulge in it.
From my experience with flash, uC operating current is at least an order of magnitude below flash write current. If you are going for seriously low power in (for example) a uC logging values from a sensor, the thing to do is buffer readings in memory until memory is full and then in one burst, commit to flash. (rinse repeat) Any write smaller than the blocksize is extremely wasteful, and simply preparing the flash for write burns a lot of juice too.
When I'm on the last page and try to flick forwards, it turns the page back. (Similarly, when I'm on the first page and try to flick backwards, it turns the page forwards.) iIn these situations it should indicate somehow that there are no more pages in that direction, but it is confusing and unsettling for it to turn the page in the opposite direction to the one I indicated.

I don't know whether it's the fault of your software or your original pdf, but the fixed width font is badly pixelated and inconsistently rendered from line to line.
All I can glean from that is that the typical visitor to RapGenius can't be bothered to set up a separate user account for his/her children.

This brings up an important point: hardly anyone knows how to configure or troubleshoot their computer. This is by far a more important point than some arbitrary "learn to code" movement that doesn't teach CS, and does NOT teach programming – it's like giving somebody a hammer and telling them to nail a nail into a board of wood, without teaching them how to build anything with that hammer. Instead, we should be teaching people how to maintain the furniture they already own first. I just have zero respect for Code.org at this point, it's their own agenda they're trying to fulfill. They don't care about the future of the U.S., it's just self-aggrandizement as usual.

Sorry for the OT.
So I get the idea is that Apple is returning cash because shareholders can likely earn more than what Apple is earning on its cash.

But doesn't that also read: Apple doesn't have any major new (ipod-level or iphone-level) thing in its pipeline, so it is unlikely to make use of a war chest effectively?
GeoShangai 2014 - Conferência Internacional de Engenharia Geotécnica
This is taken wildly out of context. The sentence right after the quoted text is just wrong. The quote is in response to a statutory argument. Statutory arguments are evaluated by reference to the text of the statute and Congress's intent in drafting the statute. The court is not saying that the ACLU has no claim because Congress did not intend the targets to find out, but rather that Section 215 doesn't create that claim because it would be inconsistent for Congress to intend to create such a claim when Congress did not intend for targets to find out. The court is rejecting one possible basis for the ACLU's claim, which is that Congress intended to create an avenue recourse in the statute. Its not a general point applicable to other possible bases for the ACLU's claim. In particular, the court is not saying that the ACLU cannot mount a Constitutional challenge for that reason, which is what the article implies. That would be Kafkaesque, but that's not at all what the opinion says. The Constitutional basis is separate from the statutory one, and does not depend on Congress's intent.

It helps to think about this analogously to other kinds of suits. Say you feel like a school district is discriminating against African Americans. There's a constitutional dimension to that case, but also a statutory dimension. Congress has created legislation that people can rely on to address such discrimination. To defend a suit under such a statute, a state might argue that a particular suit does not fall within the scope of the statute: that Congress did not intend for the statute to serve as recourse in this situation. But that sill leaves the broader Constitutional issue on the table. Whether Congress intended for a statute to serve as recourse is irrelevant to the Constitutional argument. There are two separate bases.
This reminds me of the Miley Cirus insanity of past months. She gained more popularity than ever before by acting erotic and capitalizing on peoples' disgust. People were promoting her name in insults and jokes around the world.

Here, the term "Rap Genius" is being popularized by controversy.
Comments on TFA indicate that most of Caltech is indifferent towards the cannon. This is apparently the totem of some particular dorm.
Or they do use them just not much because it's not the heavy users who buy them?
> but it was certainly a shit business decision

Not really, because they're using this kind of punishment to make an example of them in order to prevent future SEO abuse by others. It's probably for the better.
I do think that RapGenius' punishment is pretty harsh, but I don't think Google's behavior is "absolutely ridiculous". RapGenius did some shady stuff and they should be penalized for it so that this stuff doesn't pervade the web. I also don't think Google is acting like a cartel, in that they aren't extorting RapGenius or killing family members. But maybe Google should've laid off the crusade after a week or so.