skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why are diamonds more expensive than water, when the latter is far more useful? Because there’s a lot of water in the world but very few diamonds.

Diamonds are actually a great metaphor for overpriced executive "talent". Why? First, diamonds are not fucking rare. The price has been heavily manipulated. In executives, the manipulation pertains to the closed social network of entrenched parasites who can get those jobs: a similar cartel over high-echelon relationships (and owed favors, and extortions). The scarcity is illusory; there are a hundred times more people who are competent to fill their shoes. Second, many diamonds are junk. Third, diamonds are not really natural. Diamonds from the earth must be carved into a man-made shape through technical means, and (anyway) artificial diamonds are often superior in quantity. Similarly, "executive talent" is an artificial artifact, not some genetically-ordained rarity. Fourth, there's a lot of negativity and violence, even, involved in keeping this phony scarcity intact.

I guess the major difference is that few diamonds have negative value, while most corporate executives do.

The greatest trick these assholes (the upper class) ever played on society is convincing us that we need them, and that they are somehow so special that having connections to their stupid little club should be the #1 dominating factor in who makes the most money, gets to make important decisions, and works in the highest-level jobs.
True, when I think of a tipped job, I think of waitstaff and barstaff.
Why do you say that? (and please don't say you read it on w3fools)

In my own experience, w3schools is the quickest way of getting the information I want, which I guess is why it is at the top of google. I know it isn't cool to like w3schools, but then I'm not a cool programmer.
Well, you have the option to get in better shape, for one thing. And for another, even for big guys like Jim, 57 is a pretty early age to go.
So that's why you were surprised about the kangaroo.

Anyway, do you think other European capitals like Berlin or Paris are any less "monstrous"?
How does it not relate back to the point you were responding to?

You were trying to expand the GP's statement in a way that wasn't implied. The argument that parts of the financial sector doesn't really make products is somewhat valid, and can be argued either way. The argument that all service industries don't make products is wrong.
I still like that Occipital is planning to ship a standalone unit, and support people wanting to 3D print various housings.

I guess the positive interpretation is that crowdfunding seems to be putting some pressure on larger companies to go public with research projects earlier than they normally would.
Though it doesn't hold a candle to Tijuana!
Thus my question:

I wonder how much AIM and MSN Messenger's fights against third party clients messed up their user bases.
Are you idiot or kid? We are doing professional business and we were using namecheap DNS with registered domains (not free dns). The main point is protection, they provide this service FREE (with or without domain) yeah good but where is protection where is responsibility?

I just suggested something, if money important for me, I didn't move all of my domains from namecheap to another provider :)
It stops being an honest business when you can fail at it very badly, have your short-term losses covered by taxpayer bailouts and then just keep going as usual.
Most of the self-proclaimed libertarians I have spoken to typically resort to 'No True Scotsmans' whenever you bring up a counter to their utopia. I say "utopia" because to them, a libertarian future was an insulated fantasy in which they controlled how everyone behaves.
So you need a huge amount of capital, talent, and fresh faces, but will be plagued by launch delays... sounds like Clinkle to me. Maybe this is what they're up to?
I'm not advocating more government programs or central planning. I think it's more of a cultural issue and balancing social responsibility with profits.
So, just to bring the abstracts down to earth for a bit here, you're defending things like the Citizen's United decision here?

Let's get rid of the laws against outright bribery of congressmen while we're at it. That's just giving the government more power, with more laws, right?
As a born and raised Californian that has visited Seattle via car a few times, I agree completely about our driving habits. There is a reason we drive that way though, it's out of necessity. Our traffic is heavy and drivers are very self-centered so the only way to get anywhere is to be aggressive and take space and position or someone else will.

Personally I preferred the driver's mentality of the northwest and once I had been there a few days I drove much more like them since it was so refreshing to not have to not be in the take and defend mindset. Plus when you want to speed they get out of the way well in advance which is awesome when you're in a hurry.
ex-wife. 'nuf said.
Upon viewing more than 30 seconds of the video, it does appear to only deal with UI edits. The emphasis on "No coding required!![sic]" didn't make that obvious at a glance.
I'm seriously thinking about starting a bank. That's partly the end goal. A hedge fund is how I'm going to begin. If anyone's interested, let me know. I'm a few months from launching the fund. ricky@this_hackernews_account_name.com
Damn right! And good post!
I just closed my Simple account that I've had for a couple years now because of this. Call me crazy but I don't like the idea of contributing to social atrocity that is big banking. Really disappointed in Simple. Congrats to them though.
Google Glass: now with Spider-Sense!
Yesterday I was working with the built-in debugging and memory search tools in FCEUX to track down a memory location I wanted to script against(a game mode, for a Twitch Plays stream). There are some really great tools in emulators now that let you explore the code and memory in a more interactive fashion. I was even able to script my own tool to poll which code addresses accessed a specific memory location over a given timeframe.
I've never heard of a bank offering such a thing, and it sounds like a horrendous nightmare to manage.
Bottlr offers up a new, more beautiful way to browse Vine on the Web
If you think the definition of racism is about whether people say the n-word, you don't understand what racism is.

How people treat you is way more important than what they call you (even if those words are unacceptable), and the way minorities get treated in the bay area is not particularly stellar...

EDIT: This poster said it better than I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7273077
I see your explanation in https://gitter.im/login/explain and it suggests a business solution that doesn't require me to believe the promises of someone I don't yet trust.

"In order to create a good first-time user experience that allows people to create and join chat rooms for public repositories and organisations... [the rest of the technical explanation]".

Stop doing this.

Make this feature optional. I don't even want a public chat room for my company's private repo.
I'm hoping as tech takes over and democratizes the capital allocation schemes, these fat cats will actually have some true competition.

VC is way worse than Wall Street. I wouldn't trust the Valley to manage a bag of rock salt.

Finance is a lot less classist and racist and sexist, by far, than VC-funded tech because it actually respects high-level talent. Once you prove that you're smart, people will take you seriously as, at the least, a quant or quant trader. Those may not be high-status roles (compared to banking and old-style, guts-and-glory, trading) but if you're good in them, you can make more than enough money to have a good life.

The VC-funded world, for all its pretenses to the contrary, doesn't really value talent beyond about 2-3 standard deviations because it has no way of recognizing it. There are really smart people in the Valley, but not in king-making roles. That is why mediocrities like Evan Spiegel and Lucas Duplan get their early backers and snowball into serious entities. You just have to be good at social proof arbitrage.
Show HN: Google Music for Mac – supports media keys and notifications
Good to know. That was definitely not an option at Ally. It was: fraud call, card blocked instantly, new card ordered later. Thanks for the tip!
Migrating an Apache HBase Table Between Different Clusters
Bellevue: "more than 40 percent of its population a minority race or ethnicity in 2010." (https://www.bellevuewa.gov/demographics.htm)

Redmond: 20% nonwhite (http://redmond.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm)

Blacks are certainly underrepresented, I'll give you that, but everybody's talking as if African Americans are the only minority that counts... because it is a convenient strawman for propping up their arguments about the "whiteness", I suppose.
probably good to also point out the difference between book keepers and accountants in the united states. A book keeper is pretty much a literal title they are experts at going through and organizing your accounting. They are a cheaper first step before eventually getting in front of an accountant. They will generally also point out things you should take to an accountant. A book keepers time is generally significantly cheaper than an accountants. To make another example think a SQL developer could get you started with a plan and a DBA would come in to do really deep low level work.
It isn't paranoia if they are actually watching you.
Just wanted to release it as quickly as possible. Referral codes coming soon.
He worked on the Kinect project at Microsoft as well. In fact he put up the prize money for the Open Kinect contest run by Adafruit to develop drivers for the Kinect.

http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows-drivers...
Thanks! Always nice to know someone reads them :)
The case for (and against) a mini-er Mac Mini
Met Zach at the ST holiday party through a mutual acquaintance. I found him to be quite upbeat and aware of the challenges that are omnipresent in infrastructure businesses (source: I'm deeply involved in an infrastructure business involving a horse of a different color). One must bet big to win when it comes to infrastructure games.

For standard treasury, I believe that becoming a bank is a logical step and one that I would welcome wholeheartedly. There are so many things about the current monoliths I deal with that I hate and I feel like it's entirely possible for almost anyone to deliver a better experience.

They're in a hard place right now though. I don't think ST has any revenues to speak of and they don't appear to have raised any money post-YC. This is a business I really want to succeed but it seems unlikely to do so without a major cash infusion. I really like zt but they're in a hard place with no shelter in sight.

To put this in perspective, you probably need about $50M to start a chartered bank and you probably need $20-30M to buy a distressed one. Those are not ridiculous numbers for the kinds of returns this could have, but a bank will never have 97% margins as a business and so I don't know if this is a venture backable business. Now, a fund with longer time horizons... That might be interesting.

Edit: For the sake of clarity, I want to be explicit when I say that I'm pulling for standard treasury. It's a hard business and I really want them to succeed because I think it would be a net-benefit to almost all of us.
I've heard that starting pay for ATP or cargo is somewhere in the low $20s and schooling is in the mid $100s. Is there any truth to that?
PR works better when you don't compete with competitors for attention. You either beat them to the headlines, or you wait a couple of days to find a clearing. This announcement is interesting, but not nearly the scale of WhatsApp/FB.

An exception might be if you have a very similar announcement. Doing so would get you included in the same articles as your competitor.
Although he tries not to, the author seems to make the argument for fundamental analysis here. While he acknowledges that current drivers for the prices of social media companies are based on users and their level of engagement, he essentially concludes by saying that this is a fad.

Basically, some companies are "in fashion" the same way bellbottoms or baggy pants were, and the only way to explain why is to say, "because it's cool... for now."
Seems a little disingenuous to paint the entire country of Canada as racist based on one incident.
As of Today, I'm very uncertain of my Career. At least if I stay here in Italy.
Here is why your Internet is so pathetic and so expensive
> That wall street occasionally invests in companies that actually do create wealth and allocate capital to the betterment of society is more a case of broken clock sometimes being right.

I don't think the two goals—greed and making society better—are necessarily orthogonal, as you seem to be asserting. The incentive structure just isn't set up correctly.
I fully agree that Frost's UI/UX is nowhere near Simple's, but it lets me do what I need to do online, and I can deposit checks via my Android phone now. Good enough.
WordPress Συμπεράσματα – Para Marketing Blog :
Good old SwitchTower. Thank you.
I don't know how well it reflects upon our society that our largest institutions exist only to mitigate taking risks.
I have lived in the bay area, south bay specifically, for 2 years now and I dont remember the last stranger who spoke to me beyond the general politeness. I meet people through a common activity, like playing a sport, tech meetups etc. but that is the same for Seattle. So what really is the freeze and how does it affect you?

P.S. - I have lived in Seattle and would move back in a heartbeat if I had the same professional opportunities as I have here.
I don't think it's a coincidence that every new product announced by Google involves surrendering more and more personal information to them.

Just once I would love to be proven wrong. But Google just seems like the neediest, clingiest, nosiest spouse one could ever have.
I doubt the US is involved. What would be the point? It's been obvious for years eventually the government would run out of other peoples' money and fail to deliver basic services. Once you start in with price controls the end is near.
MPORTANT: CVE-2014-0053 Information Disclosure in Grails applications
I think we ought to go back to listening to the concerns on the proper balance between the people, states, and federal government. We have done a poor job of it in the 1900's and 2000's.
>With this data, they can tell if you are regularly more impaired (fine motor control) at some times than at others, or if you're growing more impaired over time and match that against the content of your queries, etc.

Not that this does them much good when Google Now (or, as I affectionately refer to it, Google Later) grinds my phone to a screeching halt and plays mercilessly with touch input.
Please explain this theory of filtering results out some more.
eevilspock: Actually, most people in Seattle are recent arrivals, irrespective of national origin.

"Of the people living Seattle itself, only 37% were born in WA, 44% another state, and 19% another country according to the 2006 census."
http://www.city-data.com/forum/seattle-area/281766-transplan...

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/NPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=1...
That's great you found good auditors, and that will probably work out just fine.

Another idea is that real attackers are your only hope (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7238750) maybe. Auditors are supposed to simulate real attackers, and maybe these serious auditors are identical to attackers except you don't pay them as much as they could get some other way like publishing your exploits on the black market. Speaking of market, Schneier said you really need a mass market to test things (from the above link).
if your natural response to something like embedded php is "Oh how convenient, I can use my main language!" then that would imply the answer is "yes", since, if you do know other languages your natural impulse would be to use pretty much any other language if you have a choice.
I own one of the affected repositories, and submitted the original link to HN the moment I got an email notification about it from Github [1]. It's a shame we didn't get the discussion going earlier.

IANAL, but what the hell does a security POC (and an unofficial API derived from it) have to do copyrights? On what grounds did a repo get chosen for takedown? Is it the "whatsapp" in the name? What about a simple "x.whatsapp.net" connection string in the code? Is that infringement?

Either way, shitty move by WhatsApp.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7230041
CVE-2014-0053 – Grails 2.x Information Disclosure Vulnerability
Trying to make illegal the paying off of politicians only skates the root problem that you have a society where enough wealth is concentrated to enable the buying of legislation from supposedly democratically elected representatives.

Even if you managed it, you still have an absurd over concentration of power and wealth you aren't doing anything about, that just continues to corrupt at all levels of society.
Not really, your odds do change as a non drinker but age is far less important than you might think. Your hypotetical driver that owns a motorcycle for 30 years is more likely to die over 25 than under it.

http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsMotorcycleSafety/

A significant reason for this is your far less likely to survive an accident as an older rider than a young one.

Note: The death rate statistics they quote include non motorcycle owners.
What sorts of services did you have in mind for your idealized bank? Is it just taking deposits and making loans? Maybe automated payments? Any corporate finance stuff?
That really depends on the type of the app and the target device. BTW "the web" is native on Firefox OS.
I'm in exactly the same boat. Very early invitee; basically have no use for it without joint accounts.

I transferred a few hundred bucks to Simple when I signed up and finally moved that money back out just last week. I'm done waiting. :(
Facilities at POSH Stow and Go
I've always felt like I have excellent career prospects, but I'm just not sure that I want to be a programmer. I love programming, and I'm good at it, but it seems... unnatural. Sometimes I think that humanity has taken a disastrous turn: we've modified our environment so much, but we haven't modified ourselves to match yet. Humanity is like legacy software that implements behavior that doesn't really make sense anymore.

The question that dominates my career prospects: is life spent in front of a keyboard really "good"?
almost all of France's carrier offer ulimited SMS as default. then comes MMS then voice.

I'd venture and propose that one of the biggest reason WhatsApp (and before that BB and why the blackberry platform had an appeal to mass consumers) worked so well is for a simple reason yet none is going to easily admit willingly:

WhatsApp lets you see if the person you texted to has read your text or not in a non intrusive way.

Also not to forget, WhatsApp started when iMessage didn't exist and Facebook messenger either, it wasn't even giving a delivery confirmation. Only BBM did, only on blackberries.
And here comes WhatsApp who does the exact same thing only much simpler ("are you on whatsApp? yeah! give me your phone number, i'll add you" instead of BBM pushing their PIN system...) and it comes working for almost all platforms. when it launched, it sure worked on Blackberry and iphone.
If the market is "stupid", what testable results do we expect? Here's one: smart people who figure out better ways to allocate money should be able to consistently beat the market performance.

Markets behaving irrationally/stupidly != Markets behaving predictably

So I disagree that if markets are stupid (irrational is a better word, but stupid would do) other people in the know could take advantage of them. Just because a given person cannot predict the movements of the market, that doesn't mean the market encodes some special unknown information or is in some aggregate sense smarter or more informed than that person. If the market moves essentially randomly in the short term, the most informed person would not have much chance of beating it.

The market doesn't need to be clever to beat you, on the contrary, often it beats people by persisting in stupidity for much longer than they thought possible, or longer than they have time for, until they give in and invest, and then perhaps soon after it reverts to something resembling rational for a short while. That's not to mention the many ways in which our stock markets and other markets are rigged and stacked by insiders (insider trading, market manipulation, LIBOR, forex etc). So your contention that you'd need to be incredibly talented to 'beat the market' as you put it isn't very convincing - there is another explanation for the studies you cite - almost no-one is able to consistently beat the market, except by luck.

I suspect (though it is just supposition), that markets are the average of all the uninformed and panicky humans who make them up, and that in those crowds of investors and speculators you'll find a madding mill of people all looking for the main chance which oscillates in a chaotic manner, not a huge collective wisdom which outshines everyone on the planet.
5/5, as a MySQL user.

I'm a bit ashamed by how bad MySQL users performed at this test.
I think you meant dystopian. And those are all logical conclusions, based on the information we've learned in the last 8 months.
This looks to be great. But is there anything to set this apart from so many desktop-version assembler?
And yet, it seems not to matter. The only people who are going to notice that "uncanny valley" are app developers.
Pretty awesome to see what he's been up too.
Some of these applications sound more promising than the user input applications Leap Motion has been touting. I bet there are massive commercial opportunities for technology like this.
Visual Studio Clojure extension
This is wishful thinking. You could also get hit by a truck (or a scooter), live in the present. My wife recently got cancer she's in great physical condition. And you'll say "on average" blah blah blah and I'll say only the present is guaranteed.
This already exists for the 3DS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Camera:_The_Cursed_Memoi...
I am aware of that quote. And that is precisely my point, he is talking about premature optimization, not optimization. What could possibly make you think that the questions in this quiz are examples of premature optimization?
I think the automated fridge/pantry will be sort of useless right up until the point where it becomes seamless.

Then it will just be a nice convenience, not a big deal.

But that describes huge swaths of technology, so go figure.
Thanks - Not just me then.
Yeah, and laws like that are unfortunate (and likely to get overturned).

Franchise agreements exist specifically because the buildout costs are so high. Many locales place regulations on telecom companies (such as the aforementioned requirement that a company serve an entire city and not just the wealthy neighborhoods) but in order for companies to be able to be profitable under those regulations, they ask for a franchise agreement in return.

Google Fiber has so far been able to avoid these complications because they're picking and choosing their markets. They go after unencumbered markets where they can deliver service to only the wealthy parts of town (Austin being a great example -- anything inside the city limits is relatively wealthy while the less wealthy folks live in the far-flung suburbs. Kansas City is another; the poor part of town is in Kansas and the wealthy part is in MO and governed by a different authority.) I'm not convinced they'll ever go nationwide exactly because they don't want to deal with these complications.
Michael,

Would you mind clarifying what strategies VCs execute that would be illegal if the stocks in question were public?