skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Welcome to the Laptop Machine - Installing Linux on 1725 laptops for students
It's interesting to see some history of web scraping and how much people protect their, well, i don't know what is being protected there.

Paychecks.
Incidentally, the only keyboard "innovation" I've used and liked is the Kinesis Advantage (which I wrote about here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/further-thoughts-on... ). But the Advantage is a standalone keyboard, which makes it inherently easy to ditch for anyone who doesn't like it. At $300 it's also a niche product only likely to appeal to people who type a lot—usually meaning programmers and writers.

Among laptops, I think Peter Bright is right: path dependence dictates that the more standardized a keyboard is, the better. I actually prefer the old-school Thinkpad keys to the newer Apple chiclet keys, but that difference is pretty small.
That sounds backwards. Shouldn't you ask for the $40k while you still have leverage (product isn't in production)?
A way to bypass is to search Google for that title and click on the WSJ link from the results. It seems the WSJ looks at the referrer and allows search engine sources.
Well, I wasn't trying to say it wasn't confusing. Just trying to reduce the confusion by picking a starter pack. It doesn't work if everyone else flinches and decides they have a better starter pack than me!
Story of CouchDB, Couchbase Server, BigCouch, Membase, Memcached and MemcacheDB
Anyone else think that price may have been a tad high?
Before the US invaded Iraq, when the President was talking about mushroom clouds [0] and the Secretary of State delivered a PowerPoint about bio-weapons to the United Nations [1], I gave our leaders the benefit of the doubt.

Surely the military, the CIA, the NSA, the NRO, and the President must have secret information they cannot share with the public to justify the horrors of war.

Turns out I was wrong. It was a pack of lies, half-truths and poorly-substantiated rumors to justify a predetermined agenda.

After the 2007-2008 financial meltdown, when the President and the Secretary of the Treasury threatened the end of the world as we know it if the richest corporations aren't given direct cash infusions [2], I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Surely our elected officials would never directly transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the richest of the rich unless the alternative was truly grave.

Turns out I was wrong. It was a pack of lies, half-truths and poorly-substantiated rumors to transfer wealth from working people to the ownership class on an unprecedented scale.

So when the President stands before us today and speaks for 45 minutes without saying anything of consequence, without providing any evidence that the threat is so dire, so imminent, so cataclysmic that we must relinquish our freedoms to preserve our freedoms, I can no longer give him the benefit of the doubt.

No more vague threats. No more fear. No more intimidation. No more secrecy. These are fatal to a political system that relies on an informed citizenry.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw9BJ_Kh7mE

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/business/26bailout.html?pa...
I agree that this era is one for the history books on the topics of civil rights and digital data.

But I doubt very much the context will be the fall of the U.S., because--can you name a nation that is not struggling with these issues? Both in government and in private life?

I think it remains to be seen where it all nets out for each nation. Human society in general is being changed by digital data. I would not bet against the U.S. because we have a history of being pretty good at adapting to social change.
Dropbox really needs to accelerate its enterprise sales to justify this valuation long term. Given the tight integration that Box has with so many enterprise software solutions and Box's focus on enterprise, it'll be interesting to see how these two firms fair against each other on the public markets eventually (inevitable at this point given their valuations). Maybe just being a household name will do it for Dropbox even if Box can close more/better enterprise deals.
President Regan pardoned Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat. It can be done, just not in the era of 'Hope and Change™'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Felt
Link without paywall: https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
I've seen this project before, it's been around and incomplete for a long time. Is someone still working on it?
> Any comments submitted here may be stored in for-profit corporate databases ran by the likes of Booz Allen Hamilton

...

> These comments may be used against you by any nation-state that pays, or entity that leaks information from the database

Uhm...HN comments are by design available to anyone in the world who wants to read them. What is the point of leaking something that is freely available from the original source?
Vim Plugin to highlight Words to Avoid in Tech Writing
> On another note regarding the price: What on earth merits that setup if you get new boxes every 2 years?

If your company has revenue and/or funding (we have both), an extra $500-$700/year is nothing if it makes your employees happy. Something I've learned from experience.
How to Increase Customer Loyalty and Create Raving Fans
Why? They all have equivalent products that have pretty much all the features. They should probably buy them for the talent and user base though.
GitHub + your iPhone = Gitty vs. iOctocat
Chrome Is The New C Runtime
>The law is supposed to reflect the morality of the country.

The law has always been reflecting the power balance and nothing more. It reflects morality only as a consequence of and to the extent to which moral people have power.
Why wouldn't they sell the app and userbase as well?
Per the linked article:

"User metadata is stored in the company’s data centers, while the actual files reside on Amazon’s S3 storage service."

So I'm assuming they have determined that S3 is cheaper than their own metal for actual file storage?
What if natural products came with a list of ingredients?
Dropbox stores all user data in S3:

Once a file is added to your Dropbox, the file is then synced to Dropbox's secure online servers. All files stored online by Dropbox are encrypted and kept securely on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) in multiple data centers located across the United States.

You can find more information about Amazon S3 or learn about Amazon S3’s security measures on the Amazon website.

https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en
Exchanging and syncing files is very tricky service to get right. Because no one has managed to do it painlessly so far. It is much more than just users and hardware.

While dropbox are of the better services out there it is still open for innovation - there are still pain points to be eliminated. So squashing them may require another startup and not big behemoth.

As with the case of Origin and Windows 8 learned recently - creating something people like is just hard.
It is suppose to be an approximation of it, but it is important to recognize that it is not itself it. It should be the case that the law and morality align, but if we want to ensure that they do align and continue to align in the future, then recognition that the law is an approximation of morality rather that the definition of it is vital.

If we mistake the law for a definition of morality, then it becomes impossible by definition for the law to be wrong.

The President must realize that the law does not define morality. And of course he does; born in 1961 he is beyond doubt keenly aware that US laws do not define morality. He is conflating the concepts for political reasons.
I think someone just created the coin as a response to DogeCoin. There are supposed to be 100billion dogecoins and this hacker went the opposite way to create 42 ( limited) number of coins.
Yep, that's a questionable choice of framework, all right.
One thing I asked about in the original HN thread that went unanswered was the test code. Do they have any? Unit, integration, performance, etc. and what does the coverage look like?

$50k seems unjustifiable without tests and benchmarks.
They're selling 9k lines of code, with only a week's worth of support, plus another week if you pay more for it. That's probably interesting, but what are the odds of it being $50k worth of interesting?
You can also not fund stripe to do ACH payments. So if you have your own merchant account with much lower rates, you cannot use Stripe to pay out.

You can with Balanced, which is awesome (in theory).
The closest comparable I can think of is Salesforce which has a $34B valuation right now as a public company. Totally different sector, but a software company that focuses on doing one thing really well and generates over $3Bn yearly revenue.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:CRM&sa=X&ei=Gq_ZUvPkF5...
actually the thing that surprises me more is the conflict in interest between AWS and Amazon Cloud Drive... I wonder how easily Dropbox could migrate.
At least in the UK, they've been partnering with mobile carriers (at least Three) to pre-install their app. They sold my dad on Dropbox through Three about 3-4 years ago now, it's pretty genius because mobile sales people love to talk about special extras and an actually useful preinstalled app is pretty rare. It's some great user acquisition, but he's not a customer and actually I don't know anybody who is.
If you are going to look at revenue you need to look at expenses as well. Revenue by itself means nothing.
This argument can equally be used to protest the saying of anything good about the language, since obviously people who try the language will discover this good thing quickly if it's useful. This is not a compelling argument to me.
Kind of like pre-crime.
The web has outgrown the browser (A web-lover's web-loving rant)
If you google the article title and go from there you can bypass the paywall for now.
Java currently only stores primitives inline (in arrays or in objects). However, the memory allocation scheme (at least in HotSpot) places objects that are created one after another by the same thread consecutively in memory.

Nevertheless, cache-friendly data structures are still very much possible on the JVM. Consider something like a B-Tree node, with an array of references to the children and an array of keys. The node object and the arrays will be stored together in memory, so the only cache-missing pointer following you'd do is when you jump from one node to another, just as would happen in C/C++. So the memory placement is certainly not as flexible as in C/C++, but you can certainly be pretty cache friendly. In fact, this is a very active topic, as a lot of people are starting to use Java in low latency applications. For example, look at the discussions here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy

There is work being done to support value types in Java, that are immutable, cannot be referenced (hence only compared by value), and stored inline in arrays (well, the latter is an implementation issue and up to the particular JVM to decide). This may be included in Java 9.
Here's an off-the-cuff counterpoint to consider: Will a computer fire you?

(Actually, they already do this all the time. Including via ubiquitous and poorly vetted Excel spreadsheets.)

If you don't like the counterpoint, you may not like the point implied in the OP title, either.

Actually, in this same sense, they already do hire you. Are you young and "cheap" and statistically likely to put in ungodly hours?

Or, this year, are you young and "inexperienced" and not worth the overhead of a permanent headcount?

Computers are already hiring you. Businesses are full of more or less competent people crunching employment data in Excel, if nothing better.

Now, they're just mixing "personality" metrics into the mix, on the spreadsheet as opposed to via human evaluation.
I think the GP has the idea that a cop needs a reason to pull anyone over. Unfortunately no such requirement exists anymore, IIRC the Supreme Court said that cops can lie about it. They keep up the pretense so as to not rub it in our faces how much of a police state we've become.
Are they worth 10 instagrams or 5 tumblrs? Currently the valuations seem to be somewhat detached from the numbers while the investors are adapting to the huge risk/pay off PG wrote about a few months back.

http://paulgraham.com/swan.html
Amazon once sent me the wrong parcel by mistake. I expected a long convoluted returns process, but instead Amazon just said I could keep all the items and that anything I didn't want, I should give to friends or a local charity.

It's probably cheaper & more time-efficient for Amazon to write off the cost of the item than to deal with reshipping & restocking an item that can't be sold as new anymore.
yeah once the open source cloud release happens I think that my view would change. But as it stands you do currently need to use their cloud to connect to the device.
However, at current difficulty 42coin is 10 times more profitable than Bitcoin.
RSA encrypt initial handshake message to cloud:
https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/...

Return message from cloud is decrypted with an RSA private key on the Core:
https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/...

An HMAC signature is verified:
https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/...

If everything checks out, AES-128-CBC session key is saved and IV is rotated with every message exchanged:

encrypt: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/...

decrypt: https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib/blob/master/...

Cheers,
Zachary Crockett
Spark CTO
;)
I loved my advantage(s), but eventually dropped it for a happy hacker pro for two reasons: (1) the brackets and arrow keys on the advantage are painfully bad; (2) I fell in love with Topre key switches.

The Lenovos have just been getting worse keyboards with every generation. I don't think the people they're going after care about the changes, but I've actively been looking for a new laptop vendor since they started fiddling about with the layouts.
It is an individual freedom to be able to use, modify and share new version of a program. The right to do so and be left alone is not an anti-libertarian view.

If the program comes obfuscated through a binary only release, such act would simply be a technical means to create a restriction. The restriction still infringe on peoples right to be left alone.

This is nothing new. Debt bondage tried to create a technical mean to recreate slavery, and it also infringed on peoples right to be left alone (freedom from slavery).

A key aspect of GPL is that you automatically find yourself at compliance with the license if you leave people alone who want to use, modify and share the program. Problems only arrive when one start to select which parts of the program to withhold, or when one start to use legal or hardware restrictions to interfere with peoples rights. Compliance is thus easy, and the only hard part is to avoid the urge to exploit people rights for profit.
Could we stop posting this please? It is a fantastic idea, but is incomplete and not worked on much at all.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7078660
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=900865
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1425203
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843719
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701414
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4112852
Don't go a get a false sense of security now. Your diet cola and microwave pizza pocket still contain some nasty sh*t. Good food is good food and crappy food is crappy food regardless of the "scary names" of their ingredients.
I disagree with #1. Did you see how much they spent per month on AWS? If a normal bootstrapped startup was spending that much, they wouldn't last more than a couple of months.
Anthropic Bias
This is impossible and incorrect. Firstly, there's no such thing a "morality of a country" and in any case the law does not represent it. For example, abortion is legal, yet considered immoral by a lot of people. Secondly, the law must by definition come after what is perceived as right by a majority of voters and thus it always represents an "old version" of it.
Internship in Bay Area?
Hey everyone -

This is a shot in the dark but I'm hoping to learn how to code over the summer and would love to work at a start up. I'm currently enrolled in Stanford Class and am very eager to pick up real world experience. I'm open to doing any sort of coding and am based in MV. Does anyone have any suggestions on where I could find an internship (I'm open to unpaid) or know anyone who might be looking for a hard working, though inexperienced, intern?
> Wow, this is a whole lot of nothing. Instead of recognizing the problem of having secret Star Chamber-ish courts in the first place

What specific problems do you see with the FISA courts that would not also be present if these cases were heard in regular Federal district courts?
Homes with radiant electric heat have many more thermostats, yes.
This is not shipping before you buy. This is online interface for a brick-and-mortar store (such that many overheads of traditional stores are gone). Call it a distributed warehouse if you like.

Patents Office got fooled into seeing this as an invention. The violation could happen only if they could predict what I specifically want to buy and ship it for me specifically. If all they do is optimise distribution, well that's happening since the dawn of trade may I guess.
What could actually be a neat expirement would be going the other way: building some software, and then selling it off (like this) but at a really low bid (like, starting off at $5). You could probably use it to slightly guage how much your code+support might be worth. Would at least make an interesting serie of blog posts.
Yup! Here ya go:

// Sort a slice of structs with first class functions.
type Album struct {
Title string
Year int
}
albums := []Album{
{"Born to Run", 1975},
{"WIESS", 1973},
{"Darkness", 1978},
{"Greetings", 1973},
}

less := func(a, b Album) bool { return a.Year < b.Year },
sorted := QuickSort(less, albums).([]Album)

For more fun things, see: http://godoc.org/github.com/BurntSushi/ty/fun
But other people (in some federal organisations) where pardoned for tormenting people and other felonies. So, as your statement holds: In the US tormenting and breaking basic human rights will be tolerated also in the future?

The US gov. is applying double standards.

Seems to be widespread today in so called "free western countries".
It is not only not against ToS, it is behavior which is specifically recommended by Google. The term of art is "first click free." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/74536?hl=en

First click free is a multilayered Faustian bargain with the traditional print media. It preserves Google's ability to give their users what they want, which is searches which show high-quality, free information, like NYT or WSJ articles. It allows the NYT/WSJ/etc to remain on the only Internet which matters, which is the Internet you find at google.com.

Also, the not-so-subtle threat is that if you fail to implement first-click-free, perhaps because you believe your information is worth paying for, then Google will send navigational searches for your articles to scraper sites.
Ethereum “Dagger” PoW function is flawed
If the other party agrees to it, any contract is possible.
However, in this case you get more money if somehow the project is delayed over the three month period; so you have an incentive to work slowly or to have the project creep up in scope. That's not a good basis for a contract for your client may complain that you should've worked faster, even if you've put in all-nighters.
Given a fixed price, it's easier on the relationship to have the fixed price be renegotiated on basis of objective measurements that you used to arrive at the fixed price in the first place. Examples are the number of pages in a site or screens in an app, the number of revisions of the visual design, or the number of function points [1] if you have data available for that. Mention in the contract that if a client wants more than X screens, Y pages, or Z revisions, the fixed price is to be recalculated.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_point
Check out these two articles:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/04/...

http://www.footballstudyhall.com/2013/9/11/4718442/college-f...
I don't really know how these numbers are generated, so I really have no idea what I'm talking about - but just back-of-the-napkin:

100*($200 million / $10 Billion) = 2%

So assuming no growth, the investors are back getting 2% a year? So basically matching inflation...

So does this indicate that the market is split on whether they'll continue to grow or not?
The first thing I'd say in response to your overall comment is that what other people think is a red herring. You'll never do anything interesting at any age if you decide to take on big challenges based on others opinions, and there are naysayers at every age. But also, the fact is that if someone says they're going to do some amazing huge thing I will be polite but I will probably not believe they can actually pull it off until they do so. This has nothing to do with my life experience, but just that talk is cheap and people like to dream. It's just a statistical fact that on average there's a lot more talk than execution, or perhaps a better way to look at it is that one ambitious idea might take 10 years of full-time dedication to execute successfully during which time who knows how many more lightbulbs would come on.

But perhaps more to your point, what does my experience tell me about bold ambitions? Well, mostly I've learned that making big predictions is foolish. The older I get the more I discover how extremely subjective life is, and how dependent everything we know and take for granted is based on personal experience and perspective. I'm much less likely today at 35 to predict the outcome of a project than I would have at 25. My experience comes in at a smaller scale on more specific issues. Engineering choices for instance, I have a much finer tuned sense of where to balance hackery and YAGNI, or how to manage different kinds of business relationships. But I certainly am loathe to sit around making armchair prognostications about the medium to distant future. In short, experience does not make me think I know more, it makes me aware of how little I actually do know.
I always assumed that the reason that iTunes was a necessity and mp3 file transfers were so slow was that the files were being converted during transit. I may be wrong. If I am wrong, though, that would make the necessity of iTunes purely anti-consumer.
I don't know why posters can even change the title if we aren't allowed to.
Most monads for which you can implement a monad transformer are implemented by wrapping the monad transformer around Identity, but that's simply because you would otherwise be implementing basically the same thing twice. My impression has been that they were originally implemented directly and only transformer-ified later. Certainly, there is no reason that couldn't have been done. Identity doesn't involve any particular voodoo:

newtype Identity a = Identity { runIdentity :: a }

instance Monad Identity where
return a = Identity a
m >>= k = k (runIdentity m)

Haskell originally didn't include monadic IO - it was introduced in version 1.3, IIRC. IO looked like lazy streams of events, but it was pretty messy and pretty possible to deadlock, from what I hear. Writing modern Haskell, doing IO without any use of the IO type isn't possible, but you can - in principle - avoid ever using the fact that it's a monad by simply calling unsafePerformIO immediately on any IO action. Good luck actually ordering your IO operations, though.
My home has 7 thermostats. I don't see $1,750 in value in Nest.

I could buy a new fridge, a new stove, and a new water heater for that kind of money. Nice ones, too.