skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right out of the site guidelines, "would find interesting". Not "dropping out of my religion to make him my new guru"

Also a long list of things I like is boring and not worth talking about, and probably about the same list for most of us. For example I liked his graphics arts style/technique and the story pacing cannot be improved, and I suspect I'm not alone in those opinions. This guy certainly knows what he's doing WRT those topics. Wasn't that boring to read? I'm sure he would feel better if every post was "dude, love your font choice" fawning, but if he wants blind unconditional love, he should buy a dog, not get submitted to HN.

Somehow nobody has brought up ties to the classic Hasbro "Game of Life" which is the very first thing I thought of when I saw the article. Now that is an observation of something weird happening. I can't be the only HN reader to have played the hasbro game and gotten a mild nostalgia kick...
And a termite might think that an advanced civilization would never spend tons of valuable vegetable matter for purely aesthetic reasons.

It's all about the relative abilities. It's not completely unconcievable that some might transform planets the way we build funny houses, even if they are 'waste of precious building materials'.
It was great.hope they care about us.
But seriously, aren't all competitors just trying to destroy each other?
If Apple keeps curling up in their luxury niche it will be iOS that's going to be irrelevant in 5 years.

And Microsoft will start to decline if they don't go after SAP's and Oracle's enterprise applications business before their server-side stuff becomes a low cost cloud based commodity.

I think both Apple and Microsoft are going down. Linux will rule the server side and the client side in the shape of Android/Chrome OS.
What do you mean? It says in the article that it only works with the specific album.
Find another article to comment on with your fucking french bashing.

This article is about International Companies avoiding taxation in Europe, which is, believe it or not, a real problem in terms of finance and ethics.

They make money out of EU citizens and get out of it with 0% taxes when EU business have to pay between 15% and 35% of their benefits in tax.
Test Driven Development (TDD): Example Walkthrough
This is hypothetical. Irish people do have network infrastructures and French people do have a huge amount of redundant/useless bureaucrats.

But still, a country lowering taxes to a point where it would attract most of the income of companies operating throughout EU is acting like a parasite, the host being the EU, the blood being the income.

Lowering corporate taxes should be made at the EU level. Because the EU was not intended as a playing field with EU countries competing against eachothers but rather as something more symbiotic where countries specificities would help compete against the rest of the world.
Http://www.pown.it/5328
usually CXO level people ARE chosen because they have displayed a modicum of brilliance at something... It isn't exactly a lottery system. Plus - you can already look at what he's done with the Azure platform.
You had said that we should criticize decentralization at our own peril because power in the current finance system is being concentrated on a small set of corporations. The only difference between that and Bitcoin is the scale -- the amount of money involved with Bitcoin is nowhere close to the amount of money that multinational banks are dealing with.

The difference is that with Bitcoin, we are also pouring otherwise useful energy down the drain as part of the security model. The is purely because of a fantasy about an ideal kind of money that requires no central authority. If we were to drop that fantasy and accept the existence of authorities in the system, we could create a digital cash system that:

* Has the same kind of payment security properties as Bitcoin

* Actually allows for anonymous payments

* Supports offline transactions

* Requires many orders of magnitude less power than Bitcoin

Of course, as soon as you say "central authority," the Bitcoin crowd dismisses the idea entirely, regardless of its merits and regardless of the existence of concentrated authority in Bitcoin.
Did you even use Netscape in the 90's? While most of the non tech loved it's bloated and "friendly" interface, the tech crowd I ran in used IE because it was lean, fast and didn't try to be some sort of "suite" that took over your PC.

Sure MS leveraged their dominance in the OS world with brutal effectiveness, but Netscape was far from the ideal browser. In fact, Opera was our "Firefox" of the time as it could fit on a floppy disk (I'm dating myself here) and seemed lightweight in comparison to even IE.

Speaking of FF, Firefox was born out of Netscape's overall crappiness/bloated nature. IE didn't start sucking until after the US gov came down hard and MS essentially threw their hands up and abandoned innovation as a result of being pounded in the courts. Firefox re-lit the fire of web innovation (along with the whole web 2.0 movement and post dot com bubble rebuild) and then Google simply out Firefoxed Firefox with Chrome.
We building a more pluggable Docker for 1.0. The execution engine and a bunch of the components will be pluggable via API. You can then pop in an execution engine that runs on Windows and get the benefits of Docker.
BSD CloudInit – FreeBSD on OpenStack
There are also a lot console-exclusive games which you would otherwise play on a PlayStation.
Yes, this is exactly what I was alluding to. Scott Guthrie is the reason ASP.NET has so many Microsoft made open source components, so having him in a position of greater power can only be good for MS, the dev community, and OSS in general, I think.
Even when living outside Iran the issue is still with Iranians. Last year I worked as a freelancer for an american startup and they were not able to pay me my 6K because treasury department bans any kind of trade with Iranians due to the sanctions. I'm even not sure if I can ever settle that.
I sure screwed up my recollection on that one.

I confused the CPD taking over from the League of Women Voters in '87 and greatly dumbing down the format with the CPD raising standards for party inclusion in the debates in 2000.
A Scrum Team’s Journey to High Quality: Day 1 (2012)
i almost broke out laughing after reading this :D THE ALIENS ARE MINING BITCOIN!

ok, now i see the ASIC story in the comments, that kinda helps this have some sense, provided we skip over the part of the text that says "if we estimate"...

but, i guess since i clicked, i loose.
That is a really interesting thought.

A counterpoint for consideration:

-complex life as we know it has taken 3.7 billion years to form. That doesn't mean it has to, conceivably it could have taken much less if it had of avoided some troughs and pitfalls along the way of its random walk; this also says nothing of life forms that come In conceptions we can't get our heads around.

I prefer to use this information to envisage a universe where protolife arose. And, since the universe was quite a bit smaller then, it was concievably possible for whatever arose (even simple chemical reactions that we would consider quasi-biological today) to spread throughout the universe.

Then, when proper galaxies formed and planets etc they were ready to be seeded by the cosmic leftovers of life's primal beginnings.

I feel this is more likely than the possibility of complex intelligent life because the universe at 15 million years would still have been deeply inhospitable: giant stars going supernova left right and centre laying down the foundations of US and everything we see, and not to forget average temperature when taken to universe-scale extremes still means areas hot as buggery and cold as empty void.

Still, it is fascinating to think that the precursors to all of us (you can probably tell that I was a fan of panspermia even before this news) was laid down so close to the beginning of time
I started a software company years ago with three friends. We had some good success. We then saw an opportunity to start another product that was adjacent to Photoshop - basically a tool to improve Photoshop productivity. We moved most of our engineering team to focus on this product. Then Adobe built the functionality we provided right into the product, and our entire installed base moved to that. Meanwhile, we had neglected our core product and customers had become frustrated with the lack of progress and were moving onto other tools.

I tell this story because I wonder if this is what happened with 37Signals/Basecamp.
Study: Private Schooling superior to Public (In India)
Are there truly random events at the sub-atomic level? Or could it be simply that we don't understand yet what's happening but everything is deterministic? If it's the former, then there is no destiny, it is not determined.

The effect of these tiny random events would propagate upwards and perhaps cause an apple to fall from a tree. A sub-atomic particle vibrating randomly in a certain way could fire a neuron, giving you a new thought.

Even if life isn't determined, can you really say there is free will? You can't control the way that sub-atomic particles will behave, you may have the illusion of control in your head but at the end of the day it would come down to physics and randomness.

Personally, I don't find this opinion a healthy one, so I tend not to dwell on it much.
That's the kind of wanna be phylosophical question that is based on disagreements about the meaning of words.

If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, eats like a duck and reproduces like a duck, does it matter that's solid state instead of packs of water inside membranes?
I guess I don't see the benefits of this over multiple feature specific named branches off the last node on staging that got merged. Then you simply merge those each into experimental, and if all is kosher, into staging. Personal preference I guess.
a SoC question, in Steve Jobs era before he cofounded Apple he was sourcing cpus an chips in small batches by forging through junkyards,etc.

Would not these small hardware firms benefit form forming a legal co-op that ordered the SoC in batches of 100,000 and than those batches would be shred among all co-op members?
I think its important to note their correction:

"An earlier version of a headline accompanying this article on the home page was incorrect. The health law is projected to result in a voluntary reduction in the work force equal to 2.5 million full-time workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office, not two million fewer jobs."
> you're assuming zero randomness in the universe

No, actually not. The current state of research in quantum physics makes it look like there is randomness. But the thing about randomness is: Nobody has any control over it. So again, life (and the universe) may not be fully deterministic, but we have no absolute responsibility for whatever happens (only a relative one, relative to our culture, that is).

> Also it assumes no social interaction with others

No, of course we have social interactions, which influence us. But they are themselves a function of 1) our genes (i.e. whom we approach or not) and 2) our initial location (with all its properties).
UEFI Secure Boot coming to FreeBSD
I would like to share my opinion on living life.

What is the main goal? Some may think that it's getting better at something to get a raise and more money. First there is a school, then there is the 1st job, the you try to get a better one and you are trying and trying and trying to get higher. In my opinion, that's not the main point and it's just a side-effect of the life.

Article suggests that 1st 15 years of life is a training or a tutorial, but I disagree. They are as much as important as any other time period. Person should do what makes he or she happy. If it's playing video-games or spending time with friends at a bar, it's okay. Of course, it won't affect your skills on getting a better job (so more money), but if it makes you a happier person, do it! Life is all about being happy and doing what you love to do.

There is no magic-prize at the end of the life, only memories. What will be the point of having much money and good CV in you will sacrifice your happiness on it.

In my opinion, this video[1] nicely shows what I'm talking about.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4
Thank you for your kind words. Were you a waiter from Paris by any change? I read the article is about France’s rumored €1 Billion Google Tax. Not a European Tax...
Even Jersey City isn't 15 minutes from Manhattan... Last I checked, almost takes an hour (45-60 minutes depending on congestion) just to get the path to take me to WTC.
Newark isn't THAT bad.. it's pretty bad, but not that bad.
Well, take a rice plantation. You need people to cultivate, maintenance, supplies, management. What would those people make on average in the US? 20k?

20k buys you 40t of rice a year on the current marker. How many people do you need on an exploitation to produce 40t/year? 3? 5? 10?

There's your number. With a year's work (doing the exact same thing), you can buy several people's yearly production. The reason for that are currencies.

Without them things would equalize over time (it's happening in EU right now, though only internally). It's a long and bumpy process, but eventually it removes the ability from a country to drain another for next to nothing.

Edit: deleted post said there was evidence a uniform supply pricing was actually bad for poor countries
Useful for launches - a space cable car instead of a space elevator.
> Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.

Yikes. If anyone can find Microsoft-sized margins and volume in that business, it will be more destructive than an OS monoculture ever was.

"Cloud" is a low-margin high-volume business, perfect for players like Amazon and Google, with little boutiquey heroku bits thrown in to vacuum up the value-add-at-any-price edge case customers.
Ad hominem in the first sentence and by a french person. So according to your logic american gift shops should pay tax to France also? Since they are making money from french citizens?
DPI love: find the DPI/PPI of any screen
I get annoyed by the lack of understanding.

Most of the anti-SV crowd want the VC funding and the same essential culture. They just want to move it to another place in the country. That would be a marginal improvement-- and massively beneficial to me as a 30-year-old who'd be able to get in on the ground level and buy housing-- but it wouldn't fix the underlying problem. It's like a revolution where the people revolting want the same damn system but with themselves on top.

You can't have it both ways. Silicon Valley is defective because of its culture. If you copy the VC feudalism and the California softie NIMBYism somewhere else, that place will become just as broken in a matter of a few years (assuming that copy operation is successful, which it almost certainly won't be).
My theory is that many of us (probably including myself :)) doesn't have much clue on the rules of the game. Imagine playing chess (something many of us are very good at!) and being unable to think one move ahead. The ability to visualize what will happen in the next move is not in your brain. No matter how much practice you put in or how many games you play, you still get beaten even by children because you make horrible blunders like placing your queen unprotected next to a pawn. Sounds frustrating doesn't it? Now imagine someone writes a short chess tutorial basically amounting to "Just practice and think logically!" It would rub you the wrong way, wouldn't it?
How do you know know they are not applied?
>The easiest way to get rid of them is to bring forward enough evidence to show they don't work as advertised.

Unfortunately I don't share your optimism. In 2012 SCOTUS wasn't impressed with any fancy notions about data or statistics regarding false positives in prior policework; although, they didn't seem to mind 'objective' measurements of dog qualification when they were favorable (controlled environment qualification trials).

>"We have rejected rigid rules, bright-line tests, and mechanistic inquiries in favor of a more flexible, all-things-considered approach. In Gates, for example, we abandoned our old test for assessing the reliability of informants' tips because it had devolved into a "complex superstructure of evidentiary and analytical rules," any one of which, if not complied with, would derail a finding of probable cause. 462 U. S., at 235. We lamented the development of a list of "inflexible, independent requirements applicable in every case." Id., at 230, n. 6. Probable cause, we emphasized, is "a fluid concept--turning on the assessment of probabilities in particular factual contexts--not readily, or even use-
fully, reduced to a neat set of legal rules." Id., at 232."[1]

[1] http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&na...

see also:

http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/27/how-even-a-well-trained-na...

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/publish/news/newsroom/4968
do the GCHQ agents involved really think Anonymous is worth their time

Anonymous are political agitators, of course they think that.

We're constantly inculcated with notions of spy agencies as supremely powerful, supremely competent cloak-and-dagger organizations that work in the shadows to guide world events. But this just makes them look like bratty kids with a rich uncle.

Self-important assholes that feel justified in being the biggest hardass possible towards anybody that rocks the boat? Sadly this is nothing new.
Well, I'm at the opposite scale of thinking.

I think that inherited genes and location only plays a smaller part - but it depends on the person. For a normal western person my personal belief is that it is less than 10%.

I am a strong believer in free will and it's what makes us so different than animals. Animals have insticts and very little free will.

The thing is that if you believe in free will you have more free will as you will change your way of thinking. At least I believe that.

Back in 2007 I wrote an essay "Life As a Game of Chess":
http://www.jimwestergren.com/life-as-a-game-of-chess/
What did the US really do to Iranians?

Well. The CIA overthrew their democratically elected leader in 1953 (Mosaddegh), because he dared think that the Iranian people had a right to Iranian oil revenues, and then backed a nice chap called Pahlavī (or "the Shah") to be dictator, so long as he toed the line. This wasn't just about the US getting the oil revenues, but also about preventing Iran from becoming a stabilising hegemonistic influence in the area, as a strong middle east with sound governance is against the US's interests. Juntas and corruption = cheap resources.

His bloody regime lead to the '79 coup, which lead to the ongoing political mess we see today, which is kept destabilised by trade sanctions and constant belligerence by the west, for the same old reasons. Iran could be great. Iran could be another "pole" of the world.

But as long as we perpetuate their current setup, through sanctions and close-mindedness through propaganda, the Iranian people will continue to suffer and their government will continue to benefit.
Essential Reading On The State Of Tech Startups
Firefox Adds New Social Partners
Web and internet are not the same thing. Web generally refers to a browser client.
This was already addressed by the research comminuty:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.105...

In other words, you can set things up so that no single authority can fail in a way that would cause the entire system to fail. You can have N authorities such that a minimum of K are needed to keep the system working.
I think you are remembering it a little more rosy tinted than it really was.

You could use any programming language you wanted - as long as you ported the headers and import libs to it. The Windows SDK and other Microsoft SDKs supported only C (Microsoft's, not Borland's or Watcom's, nor GCC) and Visual Basic. Wanted to use Delhi and Borland didn't create import units yet? Too bad, you had that to do for yourself.

Which is similar situation today. Both iOS and Android have well defined ABIs. Do you want to use something, that is not oficially supported by respective vendors? You can create the bindings for yourself. Nobody is preventing you. For some languages it was done, for some it was not. Android by its nature supports anything that compiles into Java bytecode, so even the bindings problem is a less of an importance. (Yes, there could be problem with Clojure, because of different assumptions on the part of Clojure and the constrains on Android devices. Due to that, it will run, but very slowly).

You can install any apk on Android device, without any intermediary. On the other hand, Microsoft got Apple envy and does prevent you from installing any application on WP handset.
I think it all depends. What 37signals have done makes sense because outside of the tech arena "37signals" is perhaps a confusing and difficult name/identity. I guess also because Basecamp has eventually become their flagship product they are primarily identified by it. You can trace this evolution in the blog post:

"37signals was founded back in 1999 as a web design firm. With the release of Basecamp in 2004, we began our journey to become a software company. Once Basecamp revenue surpassed web design revenue in 2005, the transition was complete."

"However, because we've released so many products over the years, we've become a bit scattered, a bit diluted."

"So with that in mind, last August we conducted a thorough review of our products, our customer base, our passions, and our visions of the company for the next 20 years. When we put it all on the table, everything lined up and pointed at one clear conclusion. We all got excited. We knew it was right."

"Moving forward, we will be a one product company. That product will be Basecamp. Our entire company will rally around Basecamp."

"From now on, we are Basecamp. Basecamp the company, Basecamp the product. We're one and the same."

This makes total sense. Even if in the future they launch another barnstorming product, if it's under the Basecamp brand/umbrella it will have a stronger brand identity than being launched as a 37signals product.

The same works for 10gen's rename to MongoDB Inc (even if as a UK citizen I find "Mongo" to be a difficult name to sell due to certain negative connotations associated with "mong").

Take a look at Oracle's history [1]:

"Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979 SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc. (RSI).[8] In 1982, RSI renamed itself Oracle Systems Corporation [9] to align itself more closely with its flagship product Oracle Database. At this stage Bob Miner served as the company's senior programmer. In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation."

Again, this makes total sense.

Apple and Microsoft were lucky from the moment of their inception to incorporate with cleverly simple names.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation
It is interesting that, Nadella is from Manipal Institute and not a product of "elite" IIT/IIM system. It is rare to see an Indian born techie, doing well abroad, not from the IIT/IIM system.
Let me revise my statement: actually in the 10ks of units.
Kicking The Habit: CVS To Stop Selling Tobacco
I know we're used to reimplmenting PONG at 0.5 fps on an 8088 vm shoehorned into pure CSS around here... (you know you would click)

but this is ridiculous. Personal computers are 3 ghz * 2-4 cores * a billion devices.[1] It is huge!

That's why we can work at layers that are 10 layers above what we're actually doing. Such as a style sheet interpreted by a browser.

Try dropping down to C sometime. These machines are not toys.

[1] random lazy link: http://www.ask.com/question/how-many-computers-are-there-in-...