skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The issue is that the changes to the desktop were made in service of a use case (that is: a full screen, mono-tasking, touch-based mode) that doesn't really seem to exist on a desktop computer, and so the changes do not improve anything for people using traditional systems.

I think that's not entirely true. The Metro design language isn't really about monotasking and wasn't really about mobile, and I think the idea of adopting as a unified cross-platform experience -- though its a pretty big break from the traditional windowing interface -- had some very good reasons and makes sense even on the desktop. The overlapping windows of the traditional desktop approach are, IMO, a pretty bad UI thing that we've all gotten used to, but something like Metro could do better...

The particular way the implementation worked out in Win 8 originally -- and this has been mitigated somewhat in Win 8.1 -- is still way too mobile focussed, and the sharp break with traditional desktop apps in seperate environments was a horrible UX choice. But I think the problem there was trying as much about pushing vendors to produce Windows Store apps and support WinRT (and, supporting Microsoft's getting yet another cut of the application money, on top of what they get selling the essential dev tools for the platform), as optimizing the UI for mobile.

I suspect that something like Metro really is the interface of the future -- even on desktop-like systems -- but it may take someone other than Microsoft to first implement it right.
In 1999, I knew my new girlfriend was the right one for me when she was excited about one of those fancy "Airports" from Apple. That Christmas I bought her a Palm IIIx.

We've been married for a dozen years.
"Bitcoin the protocal, however, is freaking awesome. I expect to see a lot of startups taking advantage of some of the non-monetary uses, up to and including micropayments."

I agree with all of this except the implication that micropayments are a non-monetary use.
Nice nice nice! Let's remember that Balanced was also part of YC, along with Stripe. Not sure why the title was changed to remove that fact.
metrobasket.com helps indiviuals to own a virtual supermarket with out any investment.
How are many tech conferences "predominantly" aimed at men?By not saying they're specifically for women? So now not mentioning gender is women discrimination? Nice. Go, Equalia!
Yeah, I live in Southern California and I've never heard of 99% of these Hispanic first names.
This is by far the best comment on gender issues I've ever read!
While this may be a thing, what I have observed is that those most concerned with feminism in tech offer pretty consistent solidarity with their trans brothers and sisters. I don't believe this was invoked in good faith. Next level concern troll.

Thanks for discussing this issue and offering links, too.
Open Search Server - Open Source Search Engine
I had the need to geocode 10s to 100s of thousands of US addresses weekly, with the ability to accept slightly-reduced accuracy vs. the parcel-level accuracy of Google Maps.

I rewrote the geocommons geocoder in Java to speed up the loading and geocoding process, and wrapped a REST api around it. I used a minimal perfect hash function to map zips/streets (metaphone3'd and ngramfingerprint'd) to data stored in a key-value structure. The key-value structure is small enough to fit in memory of a decent sized EC2 instance, but I haven't tested the throughput except from a slow disk--which got me about 100-150 results/sec.

The results include parsed address, lat/lng in WGS84 datum, and associated US census region info (state, county, block group, block, msa, cbsa/csa, school district, legislative district, etc.).

I'd considered open sourcing it, and I was trying to architect it such that one could plug in various data sources beyond TIGER when higher-accuracy info is available (e.g., from SF's address parcels, Massachusetts has lots of E911 parcel data available, etc).
Cooperating with the police may engender good will.
So is this some sort of response to PG's comments about women?
I would think that gender equality would trump gender discrimination. Or are you saying that inequality is acceptable in the face of attempts to take corrective action?
Could it be that it's primarily the feeling of being stuck, of not being able to move ahead, that causes this self-pity and self-destructive behavior?

I've found in most of my interactions with people, including the very poor, the feeling of control, the feeling of being able to shape your destiny, is what differentiates those who remain poor from those who work their way out of it. It differentiates those who spiral into depression or addiction from those who don't.

Alcoholism, self-pity, and/or ridiculous amounts of television watching are a problem, but seem to be a symptom more than a cause.
...or go to networking events with cold pizza...

Harsh. It's bloody hard to feed a few hundred people let alone keep the pizza warm at the same time.

/s

On a serious note, the concept that the "good startups" don't go to networking events is categorically untrue. Name any of the top startups in London and I can guarantee you they have a regular, albeit unofficial, presence at most of the usual networking events.

Sorry to nitpick but I'm a big advocate of the tech networking scene in London and that minor point bothered me a bit.
Very cool, although it seems not to load long nodes when importing from FreeMind. That said, I was pretty impressed that I imported a .mm file and had it "just work" (besides the long nodes).
Grunt has really streamlined my workflow when developing WP plugins. Let me know if you have any WordPress-specific resources for Grunt that you think would be worth adding to the guide.
I did misunderstand - apologies.
"Contraception doesn't stop people being able to have kids, it allows them to have sex without having kids if they want to."

I can't agree. I'm not saying it physically and literally stops them. But it does create an artificial separation that makes it more alluring to choose sex sans children.
The harm that a FOO only conference does in directly proportional to the representation of FOOs in that industry, in terms of lost opportunities for networking. And the benefits to FOOs in terms of being able to compare experiences with other people like them that they might not be able to do otherwise is inversely proportional to their representation. It might annoy you and that's understandable, but it's still a reasonable thing to be doing despite the exclusion it causes. If half of all founders were female maybe thing would be different, and I honestly think that male only conferences for nurses or educators might be a good idea.
That report does not have data about individual manufacturers. Perhaps Google considered that to be lawsuit bait, or perhaps they considered it to be proprietary. Either way Backblaze's post has actionable information about which manufacturer to buy with respect to reliability trade-offs. Google's report does not.
What's on my blackboard
"They had a system that looked for phones moving towards each other, turned off and then turned on when they are turning away from each other. Looking for secret meetings."

And that probably wouldn't require a lot of computation either, since very few people would turn their phones off while going somewhere and then turn them on again. So the people who are doing this are smart enough to know that they can be tracked by their cell phones, but not smart enough to know that turning them off and on again calls a lot of attention to themselves.

So if you're going to a secret meeting that you don't want the NSA to know about, leave your phone at home.
I referred to the RadFem2012 conference[1].

>I seriously doubt GP actually cares about transpeople at all.

That's very offending.

1. http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/05/23/radfem2012-excludi...
This has helped me many a time to generate test data-set.
Great post, as you get bigger populations of drives you can get a lot more visibility into their overall reliability. If there was one thing I could add to the analysis would be to split out the drives by serial number and split them out by firmware. Sometimes you find that all of the 'problem' in a set of problem drives is a single range of serial numbers.

We've had similar experiences with replacement drives, they are, by and large, significantly less reliable than "new" drives.

And last bit, we've got Western Digital drives here (a mix of 2.0 and 3.0 TB ones) They have been pretty solid performers for us.
Great! In my experience, the most inspiring talks by female tech entrepreneurs were ones where you would have had no idea whether they were female or male based on the content of their speeches/talks (e.g. "This is how we got our first 1000 users" rather than "This is how I navigated being in an all male board room"). This conference is a great opportunity to hear the experiences and perspectives of female entrepreneurs-- I hope that its content focus is more on their achievements and strategies rather than their gender. Actionable insights like how these entrepreneurs navigated their Series A or hired their first employees give a less explicit, but (in my opinion) more resounding affirmation that women have just as much credibility to succeed and achieve in the tech space. Excited to tune in!
Time for an international convention on government access to data
The Next Big Thing You Missed: Email’s About to Die, Argues Facebook Co-Founder
It's discrimination by definition. Some may claim that certain kind of discrimination is positive (e.g. positive discrimination itself). I'm personally objected to all kinds of discrimination, "positive" or not.
All right, then I suppose that what you are saying is that Intel should leave the genuine Intel chips detection out, and let customers implement specialized paths for AMD products, if the automatically selected path happens to underperform (for a certain performance expectation level), which might be less likely to occur if all the generated paths are available. Did I get this right?

And for people looking to extract every last bit of power from their chips (AMD or not), they might have to implement the path by hand anyway.

> rather than falling back to the worst possible code.

Note that (I think it might have been said elsewhere), it's not the worst possible code, but the least efficient one generated by the compiler (which happens to be quite good already). /pedantic mode

Edit: clarifications.
Future email systems and social networks could refuse to accept incoming messages unless they were accompanied with tiny amounts of Bitcoin – tiny enough to not matter to the sender, but large enough to deter spammers, who today can send uncounted billions of spam messages for free with impunity.

Heh. Talk about historically backward:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash#Bitcoin
It sounds to me like what we need is a single place where I can deposit my credit card info, which I trust is secure, and then all the merchants transact with me by doing some version of auth against that web service/api without ever exchanging any credit card numbers. For consumers this is great, since they never have to update their credit card info on 10 million places. It's good for businesses, too. That kind of service would undercut one of the main premises behind bitcoin usefullness.
I'm pretty sure there's room for that as well.

Perhaps Jessica could even use this as a spring-board to putting together an all-women line-up for a future event.
The Random Amazon Product Generator brings in enough for a small book purchase every few weeks. It's still mostly for my own amusement. (http://thanland.com/projects/random-amazon/)
Is there a similar service for reverse geocoding? US and international?
> How are many tech conferences "predominantly" aimed at men? By not saying they're specifically for women?

One common argument is that conferences that are organized predominantly by men also tend to target men, even without conscious intent, because their planning, structure, and communication reflects the different ways that men are socialized in our society.
Thanks!

I want to stay away from anything on Balanced v. Stripe though. We're trying to move the market forward and innovate.
>So, I understand your intent, I suppose, but a think a more pragmatic viewpoint could be beneficial. Sure, this conference is aimed at women, but many tech conferences are predominantly aimed at men, simply because that's the largest demographic who attend.

I'm not necessarily against a conference aimed at women, I'm against a conference which is only for women (which this seems to be according to it's homepage). (The rules for this conference apparently are not available at this moment).

>This may be true in some rare, extreme cases, but is frankly hard to imagine. Can you cite any sources on this? My experience (though I am neither trans nor a woman) is that people involved in the feminist movement or gender-queer community try to treat a trans person as much as possible as any other person of that gender.

Sure: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/05/23/radfem2012-excludi...
720 hours in a month is always a good back of the envelope number to remember.
Now they just need a parallel library to visualize those logs in a way a human can actually make meaning from.
> I'm against these

It's not a football team. It's a conference that someone else organizes. Leave it alone if you don't like it.
I don't know about immigrant founders conference, but the most prominent push between immigrants and tech sector would be FWD.us movement. (edit: it should be .us not .org)
Yeah, the breaking changes that accumulate over the years is the main nagging thing I have to keep up with. Since I use my apps myself, and tend to use beta iOS releases, I can usually catch these pretty early, but not always.

As an aside, I find it a lot easier to bring in consulting gigs if I aggressively open source tools that I make, and then promote those OSS projects. I find it more pleasant to tell people about free tools than to just promote myself alone, but they end up feeding into each other. Just my two cents.
Most people concerned about population are ignorant and cruel. Ignorant because they hold opinions based on vacuous news media accounts, and cruel because the underlying assumption is that us middle class western folk with our 2.2 kids are just peachy.

I remember my grandmother talking about these issues, because they were real to her in rural Ireland. She was one of 11 children. 2 siblings died before adulthood. Poor nutrition and no meaningful medical care led to all sorts of chronic health problems for folks in those days. (1910's)
> this extreme inequality is blocking the progress of poor

How so?
I didn't say it was discrimination, in the same way that the conference under discussion is not discrimination. However, have you ever been to a tech conference where, say, a quarter of the attendees were women? I haven't. What I am saying is that creating at least one conference in which a woman is not unusual is not a "wrong" in the way that someone up the thread said.

I don't think it's too far-fetched to claim that conference organizers try to tailor their conference to the demographic who attends. While the vast majority of topics apply equally to men and women, there may be some topics that women will be more interested in, given their minority status in the tech world. I'm saying that it is laudable to create a conference where such topics can more easily be discussed.
I think it's important to distinguish between having an audience and having a market. As is fairly well understood, it's possible to have very small audiences that monetise effectively, and very large ones with next to no spending.

One more subtle problem is that products aimed at highly internet savvy westerners seem less likely to stand a chance of making money, as those people are precisely the least likely to spend anything. Reddit has a similar disparity between audience size and ability to get money from them, but aiming at the 4chan crowd strikes me as a recipe for pain. Hopefully eventually he'll find an actual market.
For someone who's running the garbage bin of the Internet, Chris is really down to earth.
Sorry to hear this moot
Which means if you place a buy ad at $819, you will have the best buy offer, and you will be the first one the sellers will go to.
anyone has experience with remittance from US to countries that don't have a local bitcoin exchange? How would it work in such case since the receiver can't convert the money to the local currency?
Making $2-300/month off Android apps (AdMob). Despite best efforts, this is dominated by a soundboard app. Not what I expected, but we'll take it!

Internet yellow pages, www.ablocal.com, doing quite well. Can't disclose metrics, but it makes more than you probably would guess.

Domain sales - again can't disclose specifics, but in the $xx,xxx range this year from domains. Not a huge portfolio, but some good ones.

And we just launched Gold Plugins (last Friday), a membership club for our premium WordPress plugins. Hoping it will become a good vehicle, although we do pride ourselves on awesome support, so not that passive. Previously, we were selling these plugins separately, for about $1k/month. No stats on the membership system yet.

Gold Plugins: http://goldplugins.com/

I have some others, but nothing that's making enough money to be interesting! I'll add more if I think of them; we have a bunch of random properties.
Bitcoin matters, but it won't survive "as is" ("thanks" to hoarders and speculators). It just brought attention to a problem, which will get solved more elegantly.
I'm against many things that should be legal and that I don't organize. Just because someone has the legal right to hold a discriminatory conference, that doesn't mean I don't have the right to criticize it.
OK, so if I follow what you're saying, since RadFem2012 excluded transwomen, the Female Founders Conference probably will too? Perhaps, nawitus. Perhaps.
Ask HN: Process for immigration (US / Aus)
I've asked a question previously on whether to apply for a h-1b visa first or a job first (US specifically), and it had no replies.

I'm reading the Australian skills assessment requirements [1] on the Aus Computer Society and I'm not going to be able to get some of these documents for my job history: I quote

"Employment References

Each employment reference must contain:
• Start and Finish Dates of Employment
• Description of Duties Performed
• Hours worked - Full time or Part time
• Country where Employment was completed
• Company Letterhead and signed by the author

Please Note:
 Employment references MUST contain an end date or the work episode will be assessed as not suitable.
 Employment references can only be calculated until the date of submission. The “To Date” will be taken
from the employment reference date or the submission date of your application – whichever comes first.
 If there is no date indicating when the employment reference was written, the reference will be assessed
as not suitable.
 If your employment reference is “Current”, it MUST be dated and the “To Date” will be noted as the date
of the submission of the skills assessment.
 Only month and year will be counted for employment duration, not individual days.
 The relevance to your nominated occupation will be determined by the description of duties in your work
reference.
 If dates or duties are unclear or open to misinterpretation, the work episode will be assessed as not
suitable.
"

Why? because some of the companies i've worked for have literally closed down and I have no means of getting any of these documents as specified.

So can i just apply for jobs at big Co and hope someone will sponsor? or am i in a spot of bother?

[1]http://www.acs.org.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/7319/Skills-Assessment-Guidelines-for-Applicants.pdf
Sony's model numbers in your example mean something, though (if only to Sony themselves), and tech isn't the only place you'll find this.

Take BMW for example. I could buy a BMW 328i or a BMW 760Li. What the hell does that mean? Well the first number is the series of the car (the 3 series). The next two numbers are the engine displacement (2.8L). The i means it's fuel-injected. The 700 series has a 6.0L engine, the L means it's a long wheelbase, and the i again means it's fuel-injected (d would indicate diesel, x indicated all-wheel-drive, etc). But BMW, like Apple, has a line-up of simple names that hold very premium status over their complicated line of consumer models: the M Series. Simple names like the M3, M5, or M7.

Is it confusing to people trying to find a BMW to buy? Perhaps. Does it make for more informed consumers? Sure, because the consumer has to know exactly what they're looking for. If you're looking for all wheel drive, you're going to ignore anything without an X in the name. And by mentioning the name to other informed consumers, people will instantly know what you have. It's not just a BMW 3 series, it's a BMW 328si. It's not just a Lenovo Thinkpad, it's a Lenovo Thinkpad T530 (T series, 15" screen, model number 30). To anyone who knows the name, that instantly conveys a lot more information in a more succinct phrasing. It's not a 14" (that would be the T430). It's the newest generation, because it's not the T520.

Confusing? Yep. Useful? If you're willing to put the time in to research it.
spoiler: prayers.
That's a great idea! People are always really pleased to see their sound turned into something they can look at. It never gets old to me...
The micropayments claim is a red herring. If Bitcoin were to actually take off for micropayments, it would no longer scale, and/or the operation of Bitcoin nodes would be limited to people with very serious hardware. At that point, we're back to the game that is currently being played by banks, just with different players in charge.

So it's understandable that many people hope that such a transition will happen and that they will end up in charge after that transition.

For the society as a whole, however, Bitcoin does not have an inherent advantage that is sustainably scalable.
I don't understand how a company could operate for a few months without publicly acknowledging who is really the CEO.

I hope they use a "fork the CEO role" button.
Why You Don't Need an ESB
Does dollar have an intrinsic value?

Actually, can you even define "intrinsic value" without going in circles or defining it simply as current value?
erm, what does APT stand for?
Words have multiple meanings. Yes "to discriminate" does mean to treat one thing differently than another, to discern among various alternatives. That's not the context discrimination is being used in here. In that sense, having separate bathrooms is also "gender discrimination". Are you against that as well?

In this context discrimination refers to a systemic tendency to undervalue a particular class of people for reasons unrelated to their ability to contribute. That is a situation worth reversing. Don't deliberately interpret words in the wrong context just to be a pedant.
"A child who grows up in that sort of circumstance is not kept safe, may succumb to disease, may spread disease, will not be educated, and will have difficulty providing for themselves."

A person's life is far more than just how they start out. Many people have started in situations like this and have gone on to have wonderful lives. Many have even changed the world. This alone isn't enough to convince me that we should give in to short-sightedness by allowing people to prevent or destroy future human lives.

"In any case, if people can choose whether they want to have a child or not, then contraception just helps them make that choice."

In the same way that it's smart to invest money long-term, I think it's smart to invest in long-term human potential. I think that's really our greatest resource.

EDIT: added a little tact
Is that number before or after deducing electricity costs?