skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Economist has been all over this for many years. A few months ago they had another issue devoted to the subject. Try this search for marijuana from their site:

http://www.economist.com/search/search.cfm?google_rv=2&c...

There are many articles to wade through covering everything from addiction to crime to the economics of legalization. In all they are pro legalization, as am I. So what if addiction needles up? On balance, the pros outweighs the cons imho. We already have an issue in this country with addiction to controlled substances, why not add marijuana to the list and deal with it within the same framework as we do other addictions?
I can't help but wonder why the parent post, insightful and well-worded, is upvoted significantly less than the post starting with `I hate these sorts of things...'

It's not like I hate these sorts of things so much, but still...
I asked once and they offered me a job with a shorter period. I asked once again for another position and the feedback they gave me was really helpful. So, I totally would ask.
I'm going to coin this acronym: YACEP, as in, yet another chicken/egg problem.

But sometimes it's not even about having enough talent or enough gasoline. Sometimes, sociological reasons prohibits the growth of multiple fledgling startups in area.

One bit of data I want to offer is Pittsburgh, PA. Pittsburgh has both the distinction of having two top-notch universities (CMU and Pitt) and an emerging early-stage seed incubator. But they're having trouble getting the startup culture going because the talented engineers and developers just don't plain don't want to stay in the city, or they get hired for research/corporate work right away. Those college grads actually prefer _that_ rather than working in a startup. You can try to sell them the Silicon Valley dream without the Silicon Valley all you want but if the mentality isn't there it's going to take a lot more convincing than from just the school, the city, or the investors. The rest that do stay have to compete that much harder to deal with external factors affecting their success than they would get instead of just moving to Silicon Valley in the first place.

But you're definitely right: time is the only thing that will change this.
Complex Algorithm Research and Development: Harder Than Many Think
Most companies only write drivers for their own products...
Google App Engine Project Template
ah yes, here is a bit from the whois.

Registrant:
Marchost
664 14e rue
Quebec, Quebec G1J 2K7
Canada
From an objective point of view, why should this matter to Opera when they were trying to evaluating the best hardware for the large amount of money they were spending? It's an emotional reason rather than a rational one, which doesn't seem like a very good way to make a decision when spending gobs of money.

Also, is Opera unable to recognize that the vendor has limited engineering and support resources, and that supporting a browser with limited market share has ramifications for both those things? Wikipedia says Opera has less than 1% of browser market share. I have nothing against Opera, but from a neutral point of view, can they really say it makes sense for the vendor to spend time and money testing and supporting a platform that barely anyone uses?

I feel like Opera should be asking why the vendor feels the need to do this, rather than getting self-righteous about it.
Apollo 11 Live TV Coverage
Does Congress Need its Own Social Network? National Journal Thinks So
At Wikipedia, copyleft license fundamentalists rule the roost. We used to have fairly liberal "fair-use" policies about having photos, but that viewpoint lost out.

For similar reasons, all the audio content on Wikipedia is Ogg Vorbis.
It will be great info for everyone who decides to read it and pay attention. I bet you that over 80% of the applications will still be garbage.

Of course, I see this as a good thing for everyone who applies who has some clue as to what they're doing.
I must have missed the part where you said the API would only have one endpoint, ever. Roy's thoughts on the constraint is that there is only one well-known entry point, and my article was a little more lenient with "very few". Each one, however, is an additional maintenance burden on both the app writer and a client writer.

If your app only has a single resource, then there's no reason why it can't be the one well-known resource itself. There's no need to be snarky, these constraints apply perfectly to your application as it is. If you have any intentions of your app growing beyond that single resource, however, its not that complicated to add these constraints to make that future growth easier.
Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Platform Strategy, and Tom Hanrahan, Director of the Open Source Technology Center, discuss the release of this code under General Public License v2 and how both customer and community demand is driving better integration between Windows and Linux.

Looks like it's clearly spelled out right in the text on the page linked to. Better integration is likely to lead to more profit opportunities and their customers are demanding it. Last time I checked, ignoring your customers is a bad way to do business.

I don't see why Linux and Microsoft have to be completely separated. Open Source and closed source can peacefully coexist. If you can find a way to make money off of open source, then congratulations.
Microsoft unleashes 20,000 lines of Linux code
to quote from the paper's abstract, the improvement is We show how to solve this ubiquitous task in linear space
and O(nm(log log n)/(log n)3/2 +n+m) time where m is the length of the
expression and n the length of the string. This is the ﬁrst improvement for
the dominant O(nm/ log n) term in Myers’ O(nm/ log n + (n + m) log n)
bound [JACM 1992]. We also get improved bounds for external memory.
Yes.

Look for some applications your code needs to be as fast as possible. When your company is writing the software and spending 50million / year on HW taking a slight speed hit to use your favorite tool is not always an option.

PS: Consider how much money Honda spends on processing power for their engines and how much a 5% speed hit would cost them to fix by buying better HW.
Slightly off topic, but I just read an article regarding how Nissan Plants used MS's Hyper V visualization to consolidate 159 servers down to 28 via combining apps & stacking multiple VM's per rack server (avg of 8 VM's per server).

Tangentially related to the release of the drivers I suppose, but the article was fresh in my mind.
We have a very similar situation. After talking with our accounting company, and our attorney, the consensus was to go with an LLC incorporated in our home state. It was easy, and so far has worked out very well.

Only advice beyond that is to hire an accountant/accounting co to handle your books and make sure your business tax, quarterlies, etc... are all handled correctly. Well worth the investment.
See other comments here and elsewhere - deletionists are a major problem on wikipedia, and especially so when it comes to photos. The photo problem really is mostly a wikipedia problem.
They are fighting with VMWare in the virtualization market. They need this to have a better support of HyperV in Linux. That means work with the kernel developers and their rules.
I'm amused that some commenters (here and at TechCrunch) are accusing Google as the primary fault. I would say the opposite. Gmail is not perfect, but it has plenty of security measures compared to other mail services.

For most users, the idea of that kind of password reset is convenient. And it's not easy as you claim nor practical to regularly check the existence of alternate emails, especially with the amount of users Gmail have. And by the way, they already have a new feature wherein you can use your mobile number to retrieve a password reset code.

There is a feature in Gmail where you can see other currently and some previously logged in sessions. Perhaps it can be made more visible to the user, but it worked for me and had actually used it once to halt an intrusion (not really hacked, my password was automatically saved from another computer's Firefox).

Lastly, another feature that makes me feel safer with Gmail is HTTPS and the ability to force your session to HTTPS whenever you log in.
This isn't a first for MS:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569283.aspx

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

The entire spec for .NET including the CLR and C# are under ECMA's control, rather than Microsoft's. And MS is actively supporting the Mono project.

I'm not claiming that they're doing it out of altruism, but rather that they're seeing the value in supporting open source. It just took them longer than it did for others ;)
"Legalization advocates note that pot addiction is not nearly as destructive as, say, abuse of alcohol."

Interesting that the word "addiction" isn't used with alcohol, which is physically addictive, but is used with pot, which isn't physically addictive. Seems like a better writer would've gone with the simple and straightforward "... as destructive as alcoholism." Adding the "say," in there, and using the more detached "abuse of alcohol", seems like an intentional weighting of the comparison.
That was interesting, thanks for posting that. But (going slightly off-topic), it left me with a question:

"Because there are no further agreed-upon promises, no reciprocal obligations. It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you half of all the fish I catch. In that scenario, each of us has voluntarily entered into a kind of promise. We each give the other something of value, so if I get the license and then I don't give over half of all my catch of the day, the pond owner can sue me for not living up to the terms of the contract."

This makes no sense to me. Why is it "It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you half of all the fish I catch." and not "It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you ten bucks." ??
Every single one of these concerns can be solved wuth digest auth over javascript: http://www.peej.co.uk/articles/http-auth-with-html-forms.htm... and http://www.berenddeboer.net/rest/authentication.html
Embrace, extend, extinguish. That should enough reason to keep out even an otherwise perfectly functional contribution.
soooooooooooooo glad i quit!
It's very telling that the US is losing technology leadership in so many areas, and instead of opening our eyes as a group and trying to improve, we're just going down the same road of putting in long hours.

I guess when you're raised in a culture that rate the number of hours you put in ahead of how much you get done and how high the quality of your work is, you end up being a butt-in-seat staffer rather than someone who just gets things done.

Sigh.
working on exactly that...
Still with the "just a watermark", your "rights" to the audio file are burned into the audio file. If your file leaks into the internet, the RIAA will be at your door in no time.
> Whereas if we can see obstacles to your idea that you don't seem to have considered, that's a bad sign.

If I listed the top 10 actual obstacles for a given project I'd bet half of them would seem totally unintuitive. I'm skeptical of anyone (even other hackers) trying to judge the specific technical or business obstacles of something they don't know much about.
Agreed. I'm sorry I gave this guy more traffic than he deserves, if i could down rate this i would.

its just a standard email and that image could probably be easily found by just google image searching
It seems to me that there is some very useful advice here for someone trying to write a resume, even if that wasn't the intended purpose of the posting.
Went a few times - last one I went to was probably ~2001. It's a fun party in Vegas with some bright//interesting people.

No clue if//how it has changed.
I don't think this is entirely true.

Great companies have been started, funded and grown outside the valley. Microsoft, MySQl, Skype, 37Signals, etc. There are more examples than you might think.

Also, while I'm sure there is a lot of engineering talent in the valley it isn't unique. Finland, Denmark, India and the baltic states have awesome programmers and engineers. And they're a lot cheaper, especially in the former eastern bloc.
exactly.

I wouldn't touch any code contributed by microsoft with a 10 foot pole. There is bound to be some catch or strategic trick here.
In every area where people can create something that can be digitalized the creator will attempt to slap drm it in the vain hope of extracting a little more money out of it. Items that are classified as entertainment are simply the most public.

- Video Games
- Movies
- TV Shows
- Books
- Newspapers
- Software
- Technical articles (pdf)
- Music
- Radio or really audio of any form including telephone

There is drm for video of photos or articles with photos, but is there drm for only photos?
If the guy that swears he is your enemy starts to give you gifts it is wise to be cautious.
Your Photos Now Featured in Facebook Ads
Not to be mean, but that's like saying "Since Obama was elected president, racism is no more." You can't point to exception cases and be like "all done". You have to look at things in aggregate and at the trend lines. And those things show a preponderance of the necessities for a startup culture in the Valley and in few other places.
This isn't feudal China, Renaissance Italy, or the Mafia. I'm sure the actions of Microsoft are purely with the view of future profit in mind.
Why charging for access to news sites won't work
Code itself has no agenda. You would reject code solely on the basis of its submitter even if it adds desired functionality (which seems to be the case here)? That's an extremely slippery slope.
Having a more specific error code/description in the body of the response is fine, it's using yours instead of HTTP's that's a problem. In the Posterous example that was linked, "Invalid site id" sounds a lot like 404, "User does not have access to this site" sounds a lot like 401 or 403, etc.
Yes, and in fact we look for that. We love it when people tell us things that are non-obvious. That's a sign they really understand the problem.
I had a similar experience that alienated me to contributing. (Geeky confession) I posted a comic book cover to an article about a derivative character of a comic book character. The usage of a comic book cover for demonstrative purposes was covered in their hard-coded fair use Q&A for posting images. A few months later, a page was created as a blanket article about all alternate versions of said character. The article I'd donated to was excerpted to that page, along with the image.

So what happened? The image was deleted from Wiki because the fair use notice wasn't updated to explain how the image's use on the new page was covered.

I was notified about this before it was deleted, and replied to the person who set it in motion, asking them why a redundant disclaimer was necessary for an excerpt. In return I got a link to the fair use page. I thought about deleting the image link with the excerpt. I thought about copy/pasting the original fair use text so it was in there twice. I thought about punching that guy.

Instead, I quit editing articles at WikiPedia. Just wasn't worth the frustration. I'll fix spelling occasionally, but that's it.
MSFT have certainly matured a lot in recent years. Windows 7 is looking good and now they are contributing to open source projects. I think we can thank Apple for forcing them to adapt.
MTV To Launch New Track Upload Program For 'Rock Band'
If anyone has any questions I didn't answer, please ask them on this thread. I still consider this essay a draft; if anything important comes up here, I'll incorporate it in the next version.
The track production program will be based on http://www.reaper.fm/ -- from Justin Frankel! (Winamp, Gnutella, WASTE, etc.)
The most radical proponent of English spelling reform was, of all people, Noah Webster.

In 1789, he wrote "An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation" (reprinted at http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/DKitchen/new_655/webster_langua...).

The problem with all such attempts at spelling reform is that language is not "top down" but rather "bottom up."

From ancient Saxon/Germanic words that defined much of the Old English to Latin words that flooded in via the various Romance languages such as French to Greek words that often came in via academic roots to scientific words that were coined as new developments occurred, English has absorbed all manner of word forms over many centuries - word forms that are ingrained in real-world usages that define how people speak, think, and write, not just in learned circles but in the street. Such words have taken on spelling characteristics connected with their origins (e.g., words of French origin that have many silent letters) and hence may vary significantly from one type to another.

It is a desirable goal to make English spelling more consistent but, if the very guy who came up with the leading American dictionary used for over 200 years could not even made a dent in the system, what chance does anyone else have?
you might also be too young, these days.
Oh, we agree on that. It's just the method that I'm worried about.
Are you privy to the applications ? 80% would seem to be a fairly high number.

I think that there is a nice benefit from applying to YC for many small start-up companies, which is that for the first time (on that level of funding I'm assuming it's the first time) you have to get precise about stuff. So even if you do not get selected you're still going to be a big step further.
It seems to me that to have people make videos and then discard a lot of them without ever looking at them (which the text suggests is the case) would be a lot of wasted effort ?
Microsoft can't put thousands of contributors out of business if there is no business to begin with. A lot of these people contribute their free time.
There is a proverb that goes something to the effect of "A soft answer turns away wrath, but harsh words provoke anger."

Seems like useful info for this fella.
Yeah, I'm not sure if this is completely relevant, but we have a product that we're going to launch soon, and I was wondering whether you would prefer your applicants have products/demos not yet launched as that might be better for PR purposes, etc.
I'm convinced one of the most valuable tricks Joel picked up in his long career is that of producing "truly engaging writing."

Vision statements are common sources of yawns, but Joel doesn't ever let that happen.
I'm not worried about contributors being put out of business. These guys now contributing to a kernel that they claimed not that long ago contains numerous patent violations seems a little weird, if not downright suspicious.

But, let's give it some time and see how it plays out.

Maybe next week they'll open source excel, who knows :)
It could be practically anything; sometimes it's a little less pretty, sometimes it's a lot less pretty, sometimes a few little parts of the UI don't work as intended (maybe changing field X doesn't update field Y like it should, maybe button Z doesn't do what it should when you click it), and sometimes it just starts throwing exceptions like crazy and completely blows up. CSS is kind of sort of standardized, so you sort of have some hope there that all standards compliant browsers (not that any of them really are 100% compliant) will render the page about the same way, but once you get into Javascript land the myth of standardization quickly disappears, and multi-browser support becomes a never-ending nightmare.

Unfortunately, you don't know which of those end results you're going to get until you actually try the thing out, and the answer could be wildly different on different pages of your app.

It's still generally poor form to straight up disable a particular browser unless you know for a fact that it doesn't work properly (generally in the sense of you-can't-use-the-site, not things-look-kind-of-funny), but perhaps in this case they did in fact know that their app didn't work with Opera.
It scales better than only requesting videos from teams that are interesting. The latency involved with doing that would make the application selection process take a lot longer than it does to just ask everyone to send in a video to begin with.
This is the money quote:

"Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depends upon the scale and scope of the organization. The potential revenue does not appear to be of the magnitude that will support the massive operations of existing news organizations. What works in today’s web landscape are lean and mean organizations with little or no management bureaucracy — operations where nearly every employee is working on producing actual content."
Sure, ask, but ask right -- and "why was I rejected" is probably wrong.

In all likelihood, you weren't 'rejected' as much as someone else was 'selected' as being better matched to their needs.

So the proper, non-neurotic way to ask would be something like: "Thanks for your consideration. I was very enthusiastic about your position and it's still the kind of job I'd like to find. Can you share with me any ways I could be a better candidate for similar positions in the future?"

This gives the best chance they'll mention a couple things important in their evaluation where you could improve. (If you're really lucky, they may mention the exact things that caused them to prefer someone else.)

Also: don't take it personally if they say little, if at all. A sentence or two may be the most to hope for unless you have a strong relationship with an insider. Most organizations are risk-averse in hiring and being too detailed in a "sorry, you're not hired" explanation risks triggering resentment, argument, possibly even a lawsuit.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=714687
Yeah, I'd definitely be interested in hearing how much a demo matters when it comes to choosing. I felt like that was a major weakness my group had the one time we applied in the past.
Dryad and DryadLINQ Released - Microsoft distributed computing engine
I have a close friend who fucked up his first year of college royally by becoming a habitual pot user. After the realization that he was actually going to get kicked out of school for academic probation, he quit cold turkey. Multiple tokes daily to zero, overnight. He turned his grades around and graduated with distinction.

After he graduated, three years later, he started smoking again. He says he only smokes once or twice a month and even then only on weekends. I honestly believe him when he says he just enjoys it and feels no real addiction. It seems no different than how I am with alcohol: mmmm beer.

That's just one anecdote. I don't know if that is common at all.
Probably easier than caffeine, a highly-addictive psychoactive drug.
Timr, I fully agree with you. However, what I wrote is not written for everyone. It was an opinion piece written for myself, and many in the same situation. I think that due to the ever changing nature of the internet technology industry, it is very hard for many to justify going after what their gut tells them. Because it is a lot more tangible to see and understand what you're working for when you choose to pursue a J.D. program or go into investment banking, my mind (and others I've spoken with) tends to ask "what if," during times of doubt. The times when I am most productive are times when I am working with a team and am really confident. If I could silence those reservations or "what ifs," I am positive that I would be more productive.