skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can send a private message to anyone on Google+ that way right now.

A limiting factor is that unless you are following that person, or they are following you, there might be too many matches to the name for Google+ to find the right John Smith, for example.
> fucknozzlery, mactard

Is this kind of thing really necessary? OK, you don't like them, we get it. But language like this does nothing to elevate the tone of the discussion. Sorry to nitpick on what may well be a valid point (I don't follow either of their writing enough to know), but come on - why not just to be a bit more civil?
I think that's a very insightful point, and I agree.

As a side observation, I think you can actually make "fellow" in particular a bit more cool/casual, especially since it is a rather ambiguous term anyway and there are many kinds of fellows working on many levels out there. All it reliably seems to connote a learning environment, some degree of selectivity in participation, and less structure than a traditional school program.
What's so bad about target="_blank"?
Gangs of social media
I'd be more worried, but Google has actively fought against spammers and abuse of their services in the past, and I doubt they've suddenly concluded that user experience doesn't matter.

It might be sensible to at least wait and see how bad the abuse gets before calling Google "sleazy" for opening the doors to massive abuse.
>> "... you, the driver, will have to be ready to take over should its operating system go all Microsoft 'blue screen of death' on you."

Driver re-engagement is a major problem we[1] are running into. Until cars can be fully autonomous on all roads (say 2025), the driver must keep the driver ready to re-engage as necessary. If the car sees (vision or radar) a problem at 200m that it doesn't want to handle autonomously, it has only a few seconds to get you to put down your tablet/coffee and take the wheel. Mercedes and Audi[2] are currently (2014 models) handling this by making you keep your hands physically on the wheel.

>> "...the head spins at the thought of being legally responsible for a car you’re not actually in..."

If your house explodes in your absence because you left the oven on, it's your fault. My uneducated guess it that you might see legal indemnity enacted or a variation on some U.S. states' "no-fault" laws.

>> "... if we want our cars to drive themselves ... you will never be exceeding 100 kilometres an hour again."

I repeatedly encounter this argument against self-driving cars: they will obey the law. If you want the legal speed limit to be higher, raise the limit.

>> "Why then, if autonomous cars offer little unchaining from everyday driving, are automakers pushing them so hard?"

Automakers make what they think people will buy. They see lots of valuable man-hours spent driving, hours partially recoverable by companies and individuals if the car is self-driving. Governments are pushing it because millions of people are dying annually. (WHO predicts 3% of fatalities will be automotive in 2030.) U.S. seems to be playing catch-up; EuroNCAP has a roadmap to require more autonomous safety features over the next several years to get 5-star safety rating.

[1] Automotive active safety engineers.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7027018
I was really hoping to see some Tesla Motors news during CES 2014. But I guess I'll just have to wait for the Tesla press conference at NAIAS on Jan 16.
I argue that any democracy today needs and can afford a platform to discuss local/regional/national issues by the advent of the Internet.
I think it's the "you get annoyed" step that people would prefer to avoid by default, rather than having it imposed on them by default.
I wouldn't use feature-completeness as the goal.

I was a Gmail user since it was released[0], and while it was certainly unique back then, I realized recently that almost none of the features I use nowadays are Google-specific[1].

In fact, the one major annoyance of Google's mail services for me is IMAP! Namely - Google provides an IMAP-like interface, but it isn't quite the same as IMAP, and it has a number of warts that make it not impossible to use, but certainly uncomfortable.

I have seen a number of mail/IMAP clients literally special-case Google's idiosyncrasies into their IMAP handling because of this.

[0] Now it's 2014, and it feels kind of weird to think that I've had my Gmail account for almost 10 years.

[1] Even in 2004, most of what Gmail provided was unique to web-based email, but had been around for a while on desktop mail clients. That, and the 1GB of storage, which felt excessive at the time (how things change!).
A rift with eye tracking would be ridiculous :)
Interesting, thanks for the feedback! Kind of confirms my suspicion it would be a waste of time.
I think this is why PG hits so many top posters (including myself) with rankban and slowban. PG gives us the story we want to believe: that highly intelligent people (I'm no PG fan, but the man wrote On Lisp; he's fucking sharp) succeed in the startup world.

The problem, under free exchange of information, is that for each of him, there are 49 equivalently smart, articulate people who had more average outcomes. And in the startup world, average == failure.

Many people listed in the Top 100 for Hacker News have been put on slowban and rankban, and I bet this is why. The worst thing that can happen for the startup world is for people to see people like me who are also smart and didn't make millions in the VC-funded startup game before 30. Even though my life's pretty good now, that's after I seceded (probably permanently; I doubt I'm fundable with the shit I said) from VC-istan.
Yes. I've been experimenting for about 8 months. You need to attend to it at least on a monthly basis. The payments start to add up and you either want to take them out for spending, or reinvest them to keep the interest coming.

The key metric for LendingClub is the predicted default rate. If they are accurate, you can have good predictability of results and good returns. If not, then it's a long term problem for them. One might assume that their algorithm should improve as they get more data, and I'd love to hear from their modeling statisticians how that works, though it seems pretty close to their core IP. So I am taking it on faith a bit that they will get that part right.

My experiment was to lend $25 to 100 people. I loaned to the same rated borrowers so I did not have to deal with too much tracking. All pay 17.6% and there was a 5% predicted default rate and about 0.65% fees. Net yeild to me was predicted to be 11.95%.
Fees are only paid on what is actually paid back to me.

At this time, 8 months in, I have
99 current
3 more than 31 days late
0 defaulted
0 charged off
2 repaid in full
11 sold at full price

The reason there are 115 total is that I loaned to more borrowers as payments came in.

I also put 15 up for sale on LendingClub's sister site to see how one might exit. 11 sold in a couple of days. The other 4 are still offered. Not sure why they have not sold yet, I put them up for sale last Friday.

The actual 'Net Annualized Return' as calculated by LendingCLub on my notes is 18.07%. That is expected to drop each time there is a charge-off.

I do expect some of the >31 day late to fall into charge off, but you can review the contact history between LendingClub and the borrower when LendingClub is trying to collect late payments. Checking one right now, I see that a payment is processing, so it looks like they are back on track.
Rank Hotness With Newton's Law of Cooling
The Oculus doesn't have gaze detection built in right now, but there are actually at least two consumer eye tracking products coming out (focused on gamers). One is the Tobii EyeX http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-experience/ and the other is the Eye Tribe Tracker: https://theeyetribe.com/

Both are about $100 and have dev kits/SDKs, although I haven't looked closely at either.
since the author himself has asked for downvoting/flagging, please consider doing it.
> So if this database is not kept up, it will be pretty much useless to answer this kind of question.

Umm, exactly my point. Maybe I wasn't too clear.
Edit. I read the article. It's white. I've seen a burgundy one before, so there are at least two.
Please, my email is firstname.lastname @ gmail. A lot of people do this. Email isn't private.

At worst, this is a mild G+ related annoyance...
So? When somebody messages me on FB, I also get an email in my inbox. What's the difference here? I'm equally annoyed.
Oh of course it was. But the director flipped at the thought of it being ported to the PS2 because of this.
Open URL Redirection vulnerability in Facebook
This goes both ways. When I (a man) was the target of some really pretty severe domestic violence (I was threatened with a knife, attacked with blunt objects and more several times a week), the reason why I eventually decided (quite deliberatively) to respond with physical force was that I looked at what my options were in the legal system and realized I didn't have any, that if I called the cops, they'd probably arrest me, not her. So I hit back with very measured force (except one time she hit me from behind with a blunt object and I hit back with full force once out of fear she might have knife in her other hand). Given the scale of what I was going through I don't think anyone would claim it wasn't self-defence.

So these things to some extent perpetuate eachother.
This is a good concept, and executed well. What is the backend and is this open source?
> The difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address is.

Now they need to know a different piece of pseudo-public information, your G+ username. Isn't this just a lateral shift?

I mean, there's still a "report spam" button, right?
I feel like you're already using the right term, just applied to the wrong group of people in your organization.

When I read your post, I thought about Resident Advisors in college and it seemed like an apt comparison. When I was an RA, I wouldn't say that my residents were my students. They learned things from me, but I also learned things from them too. I had some wisdom, but it didn't really come from a place of power. We were mostly peers, just I had the keys to their rooms when they were locked out and mediated disputes.

I feel like you should call your current residents advisors and your participants residents;residents of the hacker school
Looks like IBM might be trying to buy good press. Plus, it's just over a week till Q4 earnings report. I bet Rometty has seen the numbers.
If you have kids together, the restraining order is going to be very limited due to custody issues. A no contact order would be silly in that case.
Hush Mail – Hushmail is free email service with privacy and no ads. I haven’t used this personally but it’s a good option for the privacy-conscious.

It certainly is.

If you intend on getting fucked over.

Hushmail has a history of complying with arbitrary appeals, and has sent plaintext transcripts of messages many times in the past. Look it up. Jacob Appelbaum also explicitly warned to stay away from them at this year's 30c3 talk on Tor.

As for search engines, don't forget Startpage: https://startpage.com/
Don't get me wrong - I like(d) lots of google projects. However, the goal with this list was to diversify the different services you're use for different purposes. Like I stated in the post - I know a lot of people who have done something (out of malice or ignorance) and gotten on the wrong side of Google and had whole accounts shut down, eliminated or made inaccessible..

From a business perspective - that's a really bad position to be in. The goal here was to hopefully bring that to light a little & provide alternatives that are "as good as" and sometimes better than the google option.
https://prism-break.org/en/
I was thinking this exactly, it would be great to have it in node.js. I'd love to dedicate the time, but I've got my own open source project I'm trying to get going at the moment.

For anybody that does want to try this before the node-bindings are available, maybe package it with node-python? https://npmjs.org/package/node-python
Some possible reasons:

- "breaks" browser history
- obsolete with middle-click, open-in-new-tab
- doesn't work well on mobile?
- it's a coin toss whether or not the link you're opening will open in a new page or not on mobile
This discussion was already beyond redemption. I'm just playing down to its level. If you want to have a serious discussion about this Google product feature, let's start. These two clowns excerpting each others' fact-free rants hasn't started that discussion.
My definition of success for shadowcat doesn't require that level of growth. I'm sure many, many companies have a definition of success that doesn't require a 'rate of rate of growth' congruent with being 'part of YC'.

Given that, attempting to apply the same definition of success to a programming language just seems silly, especially given explosive growth usually ends up with a disastrous pop culture - think 1999-era Perl or 2003-era PHP or 2006-era Rails for examples where the majority of people using the language weren't necessarily adding noticeable value to the ecosystem, and in the long term have created a lot of hatred for the respective platforms as a result of code that was just plain bad.
Yeah, I seem to recall A5/1 was cracked quite a while a ago (by an Israeli team?)?

Hm, 1999? http://cryptome.org/a51-crack.htm
If that difference in price versus getting it early to tinker bothers you, then you're probably not that interested in the product to begin with ;)
> normalized to Unicode normalization form NFKC

I'm wondering why they chose NFKC (compatibility composed from) instead of NFC (canonically composed form).

`ª` would become `a`, losing its super type. `ᵤ` becomes `u`, losing its sub type? `Ⓐ` becomes `A`, losing its circle type. As for multi-codepoint mappings, `¼` would become three tokens `1⁄4`, where `⁄` (U+2044) doesn't map to `/` (U+002F).
Please do, please help Android users to be Play-Store-indipendent!
I thin the point of the post is, as Louis Pasteure said it:

"Luck favors the prepared mind"
I thought he might have meant that, but I never had too much difficulty doing this through the Django template API.
If we need to issue refunds beyond the 2 months we can contact our PayPal representative and have them take care of it, chances are you can do that too since it sounds like you have a fair amount of volume.
I would still expect the state to have to prove that he actually sent the invite. They can do this easily enough, issuing a subpoena for a criminal case to Google under the stored communications act or a search warrant under the same act if it is necessary. If Google doesn't have records to show that a link was actually clicked on, or the records don't show that, no violation.
ooh, is this like record subtyping? Have you seen ermine https://github.com/ermine-language or Ur/web? http://www.impredicative.com/ur/

[edit, on #rust it was explained to me that its only for pointers to structs, but thats fine by me]
Luck is required to achieve a certain level of mega-success. For example, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs just happened to be at the right point in time for a whole new industry to be born. If they were college-aged today, could they develop a successful business? Absolutely. Would it grow into one of the biggest and most well-known companies in the world? Doubtful.

They just happened to be at the right place and at the right time. That is luck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Evolutionar...

"Where the C allele indicated lactase non-persistence and the T allele indicated lactase persistence, the study found that women that were homozygous for the C allele exhibited worse health than women with a C and a T allele and women with two T alleles. Women who were CC reported more hip and wrist fractures, more osteoporosis, and more cataracts than the other groups.[13] They also were on average 4–6 mm shorter than the other women, as well as slightly lighter in weight"

For colder, European climate, bigger weight/size is preferable (and bigger body requires stronger bones). Not so for warmer/Asian areas where smaller body size is ok and thus more favorable, in particular because it requires less animal protein, etc... which is less available there than in Europe.
+1 to read only, fortunately databases are very good at enforcing this thing, unfortunately the users of databases generally less so.

RE: circumventing the blacklist, I think immediately of accessing a function with postgresql aka select my_destructive_function();
Marco knows his audience. If his goal was to publish a blog post that made it to the top of HN, he succeeded.
simple defence is "I didn't send it. I didn't know or could have known that Google would do this if I didn't act."

If the state doesn't produce records from Google, they lose. Simple.
Thats actually a lot less than i'd expect.

Kinda curious on the do N.times -> for foo in range(0, N) changes. I thought I remember a recent post from you about that. Any reason for the switch? (I ask as someone thats used ruby too much myself and is currently switching cold turkey to plain old C while rust gets a bit more mature)
If I had to guess, it would be since no longer w3c standard compliant or it hurts analytics. Probably the latter.
This is a silly post (I'm using a less incendiary word than I'm thinking) and is already discussed here in other comments.

Google is clearly relying on their very good anti-spam software and ownership of the socialnetwork to keep your inbox clean from spam.
Odd, cannot get the ball/bike to move on the second level at all.
Could be. The title doesn't lend itself toward that though. It could easily be saying "You won't succeed unless you're lucky" or it could be saying "Luck is just effort" ('Earn that luck') or it could be saying "It's equal parts effort and luck".
I don't have time to write my own framework and teach my team to use it, so I use Backbone and tell them to google it :)
All The Fun Of The Dare: Ludum Dare 28
This is why I think the mid-risk / mid-growth segment (that VCs don't like, because their career needs demand being early in the next Facebook) is a better match for top talent. We can grow things at 30% per year reliably up to a fairly respectable scale. (Certainly, the value of a programmer's skill set, with dedicated effort, can grow that fast-- whether salary will grow at that rate is another matter.) But no one can call the Facebooks or Googles reliably. That talent just doesn't exist.
This sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory.

I think the thing that you're missing is that success breeds success. PG was able to be successful with YC because there were a few successes from the first batch, which built the reputation. That lead to more applications, which meant more people to choose from. Being smart in the choices is part of it, but there are a LOT of successful businesses that weren't part of YC, and a lot who were part of YC and not successful.

Then comes the network effect which further builds on previous successes. A YC start-up needs a hand, PG's network is best able to provide it.

The '49 equivelantly smart, articulate people who had more average outcomes' sadly, didn't have the first success, which lead to more.

This isn't only a factor with YC. Lots of YC companies have built on the success of just getting into YC. Do one thing really well, and people take notice. They offer you the opportunity to do other things really well, and your reputation grows. It's an exponential effect.
Love these design and tech trend articles. Such an invaluable way to know where the crowd is going, so we can break away and go somewhere else.
If one staple food disappears, the country won't just starve; that would be stupid. It will start eating something else. If Norway entirely stopped producing food, it would still eat just fine, and if it entirely stopped eating dairy, it would still have plenty of food.
Of course not, but I'm pretty sure the battery lasted longer.
Mainstream marketing has already happened. Look closely at commercials for "active safety", "lane departure prevention", "collision prevention assistance", "lateral collision avoidance". They are phrased around the event that is prevented (lane departure, forward collision, lateral collision), not the mechanism of prevention (autonomous steering, autonomous braking).
The first part of that article - the discussion of culture / counter-culture sounded like it could have come from the pen of Thomas Frank:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consu...
That's assuming we're only looking at the card mix for a given month. Generally, we're looking at a trailing 3-month period -- and if a user wants to email us every three months to ask if we can lower their rates, we welcome them to do so.

We've certainly thought about how we can be more open with our pricing, as Patrick mentioned, and for customers that want details about why their rate is the way it is, we'll definitely dial-in to the details. We optimize for simplicity though, as we know that many of our users don't want to read an excel spreadsheet detailing the variety of charges we incur from card networks and other parties, which factor into their overall rate. Many of our users have chosen Stripe because we abstract away all the complexity involving pricing.
Will add startpage to the list. Thanks!
I think this article misunderstands 'lean' principles in their effect on startups. A lean/agile model isn't supposed to guarantee success, it's supposed to make you realize what ISN'T successful, and move away from that.

Find an unsuccessful business isn't a guarantee of one day finding a successful one, it's a bet of not throwing a bunch of time and money away on a bad business.
So there's a tendency towards a Pareto distribution? Quelle surprise.
I was almost upvoting this due to the use of creative language, but you're right. Best not to promote this sort of behaviour before all of HN descents into clever cursing.
The argument is the same as applied to governance, you don't want to give one person or entity too much power.

I find the crusade against Google ridiculous for the most part, they're one of the few entities who are doing actual, quantifiable good in this world whilst demanding surprisingly little of me. Compare with for instance Facebook which is really just Zuckerberg's boyish stalker-fetish turned billion-dollar industry.
I'd recommend Piwik (http://piwik.org/) as a decent self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics that is quick to set up on any PHP based hosting.
Well, I am new to the (HN) scene here.

I agree the language was uncalled for but I've followed these two (bloggers) in the past. And trust me on this, original commenter (OC) is spot on. These two bloggers (and the elk) unabashedly post in this disgusting manner, all the time - so much that me and many people suspect, from time to time, they are on Apple's payroll. It's like a blind fanaticism, one which doesn't retain even basic logic and self respect. It's not "Apple does right", but they rather like "It's only Apple that does it right". It goes beyond fanboyism.

Maybe OC should have tried harder looking for civilised words to convey his emotions.
It's pretty impressive the Decoy Effect practically doubled choice selection. Thank you for this.

Two questions:

(1) would trying this with products that don't include anything physical alter the effect?

(2) how ethical is it to use the Decoy Effect?
It's not bad, but the Jinja2 language is more expressive, and the API is a bit better. Not enough we would migrate away from Django templates to it, but enough to not migrate away from Jinja.
Startups work because they usually treat their employees with respect .. the one i'm at lets me come in late and watch porn at work .. top that google
So,

Where can I buy one?
"Programmer" seems as good a word as any.