skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I live in India and it's quite similar to Indonesia (have traveled to Indonesia before..) in the ways that you mention.

Many people in India operate under the same principles, small privately owned and financed businesses. However, the big banks do indeed deal with the major corporations. At this point of time, the reserve bank of India has published a report stating that the failure of ONE major corporation will prove catastrophic for our economy. [1] Sounds absolutely crazy but it seems to be true.

This is because banks have over extended credit (once more ?) and maintain very low liquidity. If one of their debtors defaults, the bank will be finished, thereby unleashing a domino effect on their creditors and debtors.. crash and burn. Add to this, the fact that the country runs on a major current account deficit (export/import imbalance) means that the government will not be able to do any massive bailouts. The foreign exchange reserves in the country are still small. Which means, we can't print more currency to hack our way out of the problem either because we'll see hyperinflation in a very bad way.

Of course, the regular joe here will be able to find a way to continue running his business because he may not have a big relationship with a big bank. But macroscopic factors like big banks failing and the economy collapsing will hit him and everyone else hard as well. There will be massive layoffs for folks who work in big corporations and while in absolute percentages of population this may not look like much, it'll still impact a few hundred million people easily in a country like India.

TLDR; Banks in India need to be reigned in, otherwise things are going to get very ugly sometime soon.

[1] - http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/economy/rbis-financial-stab...
> Because Google usually doesn't use its patents aggressively.

And that's probably because Google is incredibly weak when it comes to patents. This is kind of well-known in IP licensing circles, but it's also evident in their desperation to acquire patents (Motorola, Novell, Nortel... and other patent holding companies that nobody's never heard of).

It may not be in their nature to attack, but even if they wanted to, they are much more vulnerable to a counter-attack.
Ahh, yes I wasn't clear enough. There are two distinct issues here. I observed more than one reaction to the original news, where a tech journalist type was clearly experiencing "reasonably informed confusion" about RSA.

And then, the degree of "knowing what you're doing" is important too, because I'm pretty sure I have a better background in algebra than some professional cryptographers, but human blind spots can get pretty subtle.

The difference between a PRNG and an asymmetric cipher is easy to understand. The cognitive load of associating RSA the company with RSA the algorithm (and ECDRBG the PRNG with ECC the PKI for that matter) is difficult to overcome even when you're aware of the potential bias.
Wow the article map measures contamination in "cm"? I never knew contamination is measured in centimeters, what a discovery!
> Google certainly isn't going to let them use it for free.

Why not? They let them people use almost every other service they offer for free.
Indeed, even today there are good historical books being written about events as far away as WWII. And I'm not talking about new books that restate old research, often they'll have unique insight to provide from detailed historical study on topics that had been incorrectly assumed to be fully fleshed-out.
Is there a reason you haven't tried to get a proper diagnosis from a medical professional?
Well a good start would be to figure out why are they dying? Or better yet, which starfish are dying? Where are they at? What is the death rate? What other factors have changed in the habitat? Etc. etc.
From what I understand, owncloud is basically webdav on the backend. (or at least has a webdav interface)
I initially read this as boycotting RSA products like BSAFE, rather than the conference.

Aside from their secure ID products, do people use many RSA products?
In a seed round, you presumably don't have your investors on the board, so the answer is ultimately you set your salary. I might have an information right as an investor to certain financial docs which would let me figure out the number for founders I invested in, and I'm positive they'd just tell me if I asked nicely, but I don't recall any formalization in the docs about it. (Sample size: 2.)

Common practice is to pay oneself substantially below market, with higher salaries for entrepreneurs with higher personal expenses, which usually translates to "married plus kids plus house equals a lot more money." I'm unsure common practice is either fair, wise, or optimal, but not strongly committed to that that. (I do think strong pushback on any reasonable founder salary is a disqualifyier for investors that I'd take money from or advise taking it from.)

This answer is modestly more complicated after you have a board, presumably after series A.
Who needs a browser to track users when you have the whole Internet telling you what users do on their sites?

The means may be different, but the ends are the same: users are tracked all across the Internet.
This reminds me of a relevant quote from my AI Professor's slides: "An algorithm that forgets it's past is doomed to repeat it"
"Some versions of Chrome feature Safe Browsing technology that can identify potentially harmful sites and executable file downloads not already known by Google. Information regarding a potentially harmful site or executable file download (including the full URL of the site or executable file download) may be sent to Google to help determine whether the site or download is harmful. Google does not collect any account information or other personally identifying information as part of this contact, but does receive standard log information, including an IP address, URL visited and one or more cookies."

It's a bit confusing for me, it looks like they are collecting visited urls as they are not considered personal identifying information.

I've just learned that with the spellcheck feature they are basically receiving all the text I write on the Internet to their servers.

By the way are we really discussing about the privacy policy of a company that sent its data to NSA? I'm not condemning them, still we should be aware of this and never forget.
This is what I just heard you say: Regulation is needed because people might exercise free expression.

Do you have any idea how evil that sounds? If that is the argument, this is my answer: I will take up arms and die fighting to prevent the realization of such a goal.

Media ownership limits are justified only because of a resource scarcity. They do not apply to Internet publications, and with search engines, all I have to do is type in a different domain name. There's no spectrum to be monopolized.
It wouldn't even stop a kid. It would only stop the technically incompetent.

But that's the whole point. If you can stop the idiots from copying notes, you have a lot fewer potential counterfeiters to deal with.
Are you saying that you think perfect pitch and absolute pitch are different things? They are synonyms, cf. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch .

If you're saying that perfect pitch and relative pitch are different things in that it isn't as if perfect pitch is better than relative pitch, then yeah, I absolutely agree. The hacks that I mentioned involve perfect pitch specifically, but transcription ability like you mention is probably tied most to one's sense of relative pitch, even if one has perfect pitch.
The first thing you'll have to realize is that web development is learning multiple technologies.

HTML / CSS / a programming language / a framework to interface to the web / some basic system launching / databases / Javascript

Luckily you don't need to know 100% of them all just to get started.

I'd eliminate the first step -- deploying your code and build projects that run on heroku or appfog.com. The former allows small projects for free at the cost of some design decisions.

The second thing I'd eliminate is to start by learning Javascript. You necessarily don't have to use Node, but I'm assuming you have no programming background -- learning how basic programming works is important. I define programming as clear, step by step thinking expressed in any syntax. Programming is learning what to communicate to the computer, not just how to do it (the language). Coursera and others have javascript introductions.

From this point, I'd probably look at something like Parse.com as a backend for your web app -- this is an online database that you can access via Javascript.

Why am I recommending this route? You need the dopamine hits to keep going. Once you're building things, trust me, you'll find the language and framework you love and can "think in", be it ruby, python, javascript or anything else.

Get building, anything, and finish and ship it. Don't worry, it'll be ugly. Anything anyone writes today will be ugly in 5 years no matter their programming level. Your job is to build build build. Feel free to get in touch if you like, all the best :)
We can all argue about weather minimum wage hikes kill jobs, but the fact remains that there are not enough jobs, and a lot of the jobs that are around exist only because labor is cheaper than automation, which hurts efficiency and GDP. The real solution is to not worry about 1 job for every 1 person and guarantee citizens a basic income.
Your competitor enjoys hearing about the dysfunction in your org and some back slapping about how great a job Google is doing? Surprise surprise. :P
Here's a feature, let me add weight to my search results. I want to give preference to stackoverflow, HN, reddit, etc. I don't want to limit my search to only those sites, but I'd like to push them a little closer to the top. Also, let me setup a blacklist of sites to exclude. I don't want to see expertexchange... ever. I should be able to share my custom search setup with others, kind of like how AdBlock has subscriptions, I could select popular setups, or build my own.

And, what if I could select my settings in a dropdown when searching. So, maybe the people at HN setup a whitelist of 100 of the best sites for programming help. I add this list to my account. Now, anytime I want to search for a programming question, I type in the query, select my custom search type from the dropdown, 'programming questions', and then click search. I'll only get results from those 100 sites.

Google will never implement this for a variety of reasons, so it's room for competition.
I don't get the point of this post and I think that almost all the lessons the OP wrote down are wrong. Is this post an excuse why MS is performing that bad with Bing? Why is there no one from MS stepping forward and shouting, yes Bing is still behind but we will fight tooth and nail to crush Google -- no, instead some MS employee is writing a non-approved post where he gives 6 lessons why MS sucks and why life is so hard, wtf? Maybe this is the reason why MS falls behind year by year because people behind MS are too laid back and lack fighting spirit.

Nobody knows what MS is today, especially nowadays because MS doesn't have any CEO. We know that MS was the company which controlled the personal computer experience in large parts and we know that this experience was ruled by the web and by search for one decade and there is no excuse that MS totally forgot that search must be a integral part.
> While I've never seen it spelled out this way, I've always been under the assumption that the reason the NSA had so many outside contractors doing particularly dirty work was perhaps because they knew it was illegal and unconstitutional, and wanted it to happen outside the agency itself.

It has nothing to do with "doing the dirty work" as the contractors are still working as agents of the government and are therefore held to the same limitations.

Rather there's a ton of seemingly-good reasons.

HR because you can't hire enough of the types of geniuses you need from the free market on government pay (it's hard, though not impossible, to justify paying a civil servant gobs and gobs of extra cash).

Additionally though there's the political reason: NSA can seem "smaller" by shifting headcount from government employees to contractors. It's not true, of course, but it doesn't have to be true for most of the people who would care.

Plus, it's just hard to scale government org. structure up and down as needed. Where you need to be flexible and the mission is not "inherently governmental" then turning to contractors is a popular way to adapt to changing situations.

But in no case are contractors held to more lax rules. In fact it's the opposite: they legally must comply with all restrictions on government action since they are (contractual) agents of the government, but they also have to comply with government ethics rules pertaining to the fact that they are not civil servants.

These rules are often annoying in their own right (e.g. a contractor is technically required to include the fact that they are a contractor and their company in any email signatures, must announce on the phone that they are a contractor and don't speak for the government, on and on).
It took me about 2 years, starting at age 25, to acquire perfect pitch. I didn't try the Vai trick, instead I ran an exercise at last once every few days that challenged me to name the note associated with a tone (out of all 12 equal-temperament tones). At first I got right about 20% of the time, but I was able to get to 100% over those two years.

But long before I could complete the exercise, I was able to tune my guitar perfectly, and I can still tune it fine in a very loud environment, or on stage without the full ability to hear it myself. After playing it for long enough a good guitar made from good tone-woods will resonate like a bell around the "home" frequencies you play a lot. For me, in DADGAD tuning that's a "D" that makes the rosewood echo, but the "A"'s are plenty strong too. If it's out by even a few cents, the guitar just plain doesn't feel right.
The linux kernel source is objectively bad. It's fast and efficient, but I wonder how many man months are wasted every year by kernel hackers trying to keep all of these arcanely-named functions and structurez and variables in their head, or how many more bugs could be caught and squashed if the barrier to entry wasn't so high. A better code climate benefits everyone, and it's surprising that I haven't heard of any projects to make the source more accessible. We have all the RAM we could ever dream of, let's put some noobworthy comments in those files...
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Also, the key detection in Traktor (and Torq, tho it's a little better) isn't perfect either, so it helps to have the ability yourself.
And you must be a college student.
You're not meant to keep your hands under running water when washing, so the automatic cut-off makes sense. Five seconds is rather generous, actually.

1. Wet hands

2. Apply soap
[ water stops ]

3. Lather well into crevasses

4. Rinse-off
It's mainly prescribed a mood stabilizer. They'll commonly give it to you with lithium or such things.

The list of side effects is rather long, just like most of these psych meds. There's a reason bipolar folks tend to not want to take their meds or go off them.
> I recall another programmer being irritated by the letter and writing his own basic interpreter and asking $5 for it (which was far less than what Gates was asking).

What price was Gates asking for?

I did a quick calculation using:

http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php

$5 in 1976 works out as just over $20 in 2013.

HNer wmf has left a comment below:

> Yes, today there are open source versions of pretty much all developer tools (and that's something to celebrate, since I remember when a "cheap" C compiler was $500).

If this was in 1976 - $2000 for a cheap C compiler. I had a quick look at the price of the Intel C/C++ compiler - $699, but the annual renewal fee is $249. In 1976, that would be roughly $175.

Her is an article with estimates of the development cost of the Linux kernel.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications...

I had a quick peek for an estimation of the cost of a compiler, but no luck.
Its unconventional and tackles tough topics so its bound to split opinion. When those situations arise, IMHO the best advice is to give it a go and form your own opinion.

Is the core thesis outdated? Well we still don't have a meaningful grasp on what consciousness is. We know a lot more about physical processes but little more about how the physical world gives rise to consciousness. We are stuck in roughly the same place pondering whether its just a non-causal phenomena of the brain or a different type of stuff entirely.

GEB is about the spine-tinglingly freaky consequences of feedback and self-reference. It gives rise to mind blowing mathematical results of Goedel, hypnotic images in Escher, the beauty of Bach but its not really about them, they are just demonstrations of the phenomena, the real message is that self-referential rules and information processing are the essence of computation, the core of language and most likely, the underlying mechanism of consciousness itself.

I think he is right. I predict a revolution in our understanding of consciousness will not come from a philosopher, or a neuro-scientist or a psychologist but from a computer-scientist who once read GEB...
Agreed. Having an actual project in mind, and not just throwaway code, is extra motivation.
Keep in mind that the details surrounding copyrighting of software weren't solidified until the Copyright Act of 1976, which didn't go into law until 1978.

So at the time this letter was written, Micro-Soft's software didn't receive the automatic copyright protection we know of today.
You are correct that Marx is important in the HISTORY of economics (and it's idealogical cousin, political economy) but he has contributed almost nothing to modern economics. When he wrote a 150 years ago he understood little of what you would learn in a freshman intro to economics class. For example, his most famous belief that all value is derived from labor is so simplistic and clearly wrong as to be absurd (try responding to this post without capital).

The UMass Amherst economics department describes itself as a center for "heterodox" economics[1]. Look up the definition of that word and tell me again how they are mainstream.

BTW - I found Engles to be much more lucid than Marx's rather archaic prose. He is still almost completely wrong but at least his meaning is clearer.

[1] http://www.umass.edu/economics/facjobs.html
> it's a social one of how to get all the library authors on a language to agree on a convention of how to handle encoding.

Ok, but the solution isn't to make everyone rewrite their libraries by holding the future ransom if they do not.

It could have been real simple: let python track encoding when it's known and throw an exception if they mix oldstr(unknown) with newstr(py3).

In py3 modules newstr is str, and in py2 modules oldstr is str. Now you only have to fix the bits where they mix and the programmer can always choose to fix it in the new code.
The board of directors decides.
I read a quote from Joseph Hoffman about perfect pitch. I can't recall the exact quote, but it was a Q&A in his book on piano playing. It went a bit like this:

Q: Is it necessary for a musician to have perfect pitch?

A: No. I don't think I have perfect pitch, but my father did. It appears to be a double-edged sword. He couldn't recognize a Mozart tune if it was played in a different key.

(I recall the part about how he "thought" he had perfect pitch in particular because I found it odd that he didn't even know, despite his incredible talent

For those not aware, Rachmaninoff dedicated his 3rd concerto to Hoffman, though Hoffman never played it.)
Paying with a Tweet from an account with a large number of followers (which definitely has value) instead of money is still paying. At best, it's basically a link exchange, which is also not allowed.
Oops! I clearly need to read better. I thought I read relative pitch vs absolute/perfect pitch. Sorry about that.
I seem to recall that getting started in BSD kernels looked easier, at least 10-12 years ago. More organized, plenty of literature, and (Theo notwithstanding) a friendly community.
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> I won't work with USG IT

This may be none of anyone's business, but I'm curious enough to try asking anyway: is this a moral objection of some sort, or something more mundane (i.e. inconvenient regulatory burden)?
I am not 100% sure but I believe that Google has some of this ground covered. If I do a search for "Java" (for example, not sure this particular term will produce distinct results) while logged into my Google account, I will get different results than if my non-programming friends searched for "Java." Again, not totally certain that this is the case but I have seen some evidence before that search results are customized based on past behavior and other models of my preferences.
Actually Google did implement something like this: you could "personalize" your search by moving results up and down the page. They discontinued it some time (just a few months?) later... I'm guessing because it created more noise than signal. This was some years ago.
Couldn't "discovery" be abused to get a peek inside other companies' systems?
> Where does it say he needed to go to the network closet to regain net access? It sounds like the admins didn't have him on their radar until after he had planted his download box. It just seems like a convenient place to leave a computer downloading things for a long time.

You should go study the whole thing again.

Basically he started off leeching off of Wifi only.

At some point JSTOR noticed and complained to MIT so they blocked (get this), his IP address.

So Aaron picked a different IP.

Then they blocked his MAC (this is all on Wifi, still).

So Aaron changed his MAC.

Eventually MIT and JSTOR figured out how to block him off of their wireless completely (or at least, to rate-limit the JSTOR access over Wifi).

It was only at this point that Aaron changed strategies into trying to hookup with a wired connection directly to the MIT switches, by finding and utilizing the network closet.
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Is radiation caused by Fukushima being found in fish sold in the US? Yes. Is it a cause for concern? Probably not.

Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/may/tuna-radioactive-mate...
The only time it happened to me, I was too busy enjoying the experience to feel superior to anyone else.
Looks like they disabled their faulty alternative trust manager, and are back to using the built in one:

https://github.com/guardianproject/ChatSecureAndroid/blob/50...
> As a search engine user, I don't care whether the search engine firm is "fair", whether their rules apply equally to everyone or not. It's not a country, it's a search engine.

Google wants its results to be the most relevant, not contain the best cheaters. Allowing cheating would set a bad precedent eventually leading to deterioration of search quality.
There's a strange preoccupation with being able to fly through willpower. It's not very useful today since there are (relatively) inexpensive devices that let you fly anywhere in the world.

Perfect pitch is a real-life superpower for musicians. I'll grant, like another commenter said, that if I had child-like neuroplasticity, attaining perfect pitch would just be icing on the cake.