skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well I guess my question to you would be, are you working currently as a software developer?

In my case, I'm working full-time and none of the Hacker Schools are close by and I wouldn't have the opportunity to take any of them on full-time as most of them require.

I think it would be a wonderful learning opportunity and would be really cool to do, but realistically having to leave my current job to go to one of them wouldn't be a good choice for me.

I applied to the Georgia Tech Masters program back in November/December and heard back from them in late December/early January.

I didn't end up getting into the first semester that started in January, but they did give me the option of starting in either the Summer or the Fall and I chose to start in the Summer, which means I should be taking my first classes in May.

To me, this works out a lot better because since it's online I'll have a bit more freedom to be located where I am and still hopefully get to learn a lot of cool new things. Plus there's that additional benefit of having a Masters degree at the end of the process (I work for a college and to teach any of the Computer Science courses you have to have a Masters degree so if I ever want to do a little teaching in that department I'd have that opportunity to do so, since my day job is in the IT Department).

If you have any questions on how applying for the Georgia Tech program has been I'd be happy to answer as many of those questions as I can as well!
No derivative works… Hmm…

Couldn't we just "reverse engineer" the thing, and rebuild a design "from scratch"? I mean, his work should allow us to go back to first principles, from which we can rebuild a new design.
People do want to benefit themselves, but nobody wants to thinks of themselves as the bad guy either. In the simplest case, they invent a justification where their actions are actually positive or they're a victim, in more complex cases they tell themselves they're doing something for an innocuous reason even though there is a huge moral hazard and self-interest ends up winning.
MIT tangible media group expands notion of interface
Is it just me or does it seem like the new cool thing to do is talk about how much of a prick Steve was and how amazing Woz is?

No one is perfect.
It's completely legal...as long as anyone who uses CozyMeal to run a food service business goes through the process of registering as a food service business. This largely means inspections to assess the cleanliness of the food preparation, storage, and delivery areas, and a liquor license if alcohol will be served.
And a lot of people are now using "k" for thousand and "M" for million.

Those are the SI prefixes after all. :)
What does "hacking" mean in"growth hacking"?
What does "hacking" mean in"growth hacking"?
What is the difference between normal growth and "hacked" growth?
Can the method be applied to other activities like "learning hacking", "sports hacking"?

How can I hack myself to be better or quicker at something?
Care to link to that comment? :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
How many humans could get a standing ovation for a TED talk on an arbitrary subject after 30 minutes preparation? I know I couldn't. It seems bizarre to create an AI challenge that most people couldn't meet.

I wonder how far you could get, though, with an AI that strung together phrases like a struggling beauty pageant contestant or politician: "I think world peace is important because uh education is the key to success and uh what really matters is the children and uh that's what makes America great!"
Explaining that he wanted a fake 50% would not cast the impression that he had on people (Reality Distortion Field, they called it). That as far as we know, might very well be a key factor in his success.
Looks like it's been back up for a while now.
(a) not a zero sum game / mutually exclusive

This is a very important aspect. Like many others, I have friends using different messaging apps and it costs me almost nothing to have all of then running alongside each other.
Well his internet domain was renewed so he ain't dead, just afk still.
Show HN: App Analytics Weekly
4x-8x speedup in scikit-learn random forests
But that would be a reason to show it, not hide it.
Why I'm burning my last bridge with Obama
You got a lot of questions in there, and I'm writing in a hurry, so sorry if some of the following doesn't make sense.

> Aren't the arrows all facing the wrong way?

Technically, commits are linked to their parent (you can see this in the git log), which is why the arrows point the "wrong" way. If you think about it, a child node has a fixed number of parents, but a parent can have an infinite number of children.

> What happens to a commit after 'git reset' abandons it; can the commit be accessed ever again?

The commit doesn't go anywhere (yet). What actually happens with `reset` is a touch complicated, but basically you are changing the label of the "thing" that you are resetting to point to a different commit . After you reset, you can still `git show <sha>`, ie. the commit is still accessible, it's just not part of the "tree".

> What's the difference between reset and revert?

Reset will change labels (tags, branch heads), whereas revert just takes the commit you've given it (say `C`), inverts it (so "add line X" becomes "delete line X"), and creates a new commit that undoes (reverts) the changes in `C`.

> How can merge and rebase be trusted?

... to do what exactly? One thing to note is that git will bail out when a merge/rebase causes a conflict, and leaves it up to you to fix it.

> What are the best practices for how many branches a project should have and how & when should they be merged?

This is close to a "Emacs vs Vim"-type question (Emacs, of course ;) ). We use feature branches in our 5-developer project quite successfully, sometimes we have 10 branches in flight, and sometimes we can collapse down to `master`.

Branching is so cheap in Git that you can just use them as much as you want.

> And what are remote tracking branches?

A remote tracking branch (as far as I know) is just a setting for git saying local branch `A` will automatically use remote branch `B` for updates (push/pull) without having to tell git every time to update from `B`.
Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE)
HN PSA : Check your ruby gem signatures
First, props to shops that are deploying this correctly.

So I've downloaded several gems and noticed a pattern... appearance of signing without gems containing valid signatures.

A gem is basically just a tarball with no directory structure.

A signed gem looks like this:

checksums.yaml.gz data.tar.gz metadata.gz
checksums.yaml.gz.sig data.tar.gz.sig metadata.gz.sig

An unsigned gem looks like this:

checksums.yaml.gz data.tar.gz metadata.gz

Please check them before pushing to rubygems.

Thanks.

Postscriptum: Although it's not really a 0day, I've privately reported what I've found and gave ample opp'y to correct issues discovered.
Imo the default search shouldn't return hidden comments and stories. While it might sometimes be useful to do so, I'm finding it mostly results in spam showing up. As much as I do appreciate the opportunity to buy https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cheap+nike+shoes ...
I've come across about 5 of them: I mainly discover them by vending machines rejecting them. They circulate around small businesses which deal mainly in cash very easily.
People are saying that Jobs was being an asshole. I don't know much about the man, but what he's doing here is intelligent negotiation, plain and simple. The bravado of shredding the paper and loudly announcing the desired figure is a dead giveaway that (1) the other details of the contract don't mean much to him, and (2) the 50% figure means an awful lot to whoever else was supposed to hear it.

You have to keep in mind what Jobs is trying to accomplish here. It's like a kid loudly putting stuff away when their mom walks by, "yea mom, just cleaning my room!"

The ruthless part is that Jobs would have no problem if she didn't pick up on that and came back with the same contract and the 50% rate. I think that the lessons in this post are valuable for negotiating with intelligent people.
Thanks a lot for the advice, I may just do this!

Cheers!
"Growth hacking" simply means proactively making growth happen, instead of passively watching growth take place.

> How can I hack myself to be better or quicker at something?

Growth hacking is more often applied to a project or a company than an individual.
People have different standards of what levels of detail are worth debating about, and on more than one occasion, I've found myself going down what I thought was a rathole with someone who insisted on arguing trivial details, only to realize that those trivial details were key elements of a chain of reasoning that led to an important point which hadn't occurred to me, and which substantively changed the direction of the conversation.

I think a tagging system is a fantastic idea, especially if users can assign different weights to different tags for sorting and filtering purposes. I haven't seen a discussion system, apart from Slashdot's very limited implementation, that allows comment tagging, and a broader implementation might be wildly successful. You could have a voting mechanic that assigns a score to the comment, then allow users to assign different coefficient values to each qualitative modifier to build their own view. No need to limit it to a small set of predefined tags, either; users could define their own tags a la Delicious.
NSA infiltrates servers of China telecom giant Huawei
Sure, but that's done on a case-by-case basis, when things actually do get out of hand; it's not a universal, preemptive moderation system that's built right into the structure of the site.
> can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else

This is one reason why I try to limit myself to working with companies that are on a mission that I believe in.

A side effect is that it also seems to be easier to find a job there because these companies love hiring people who are passionate about the same thing as them. Cold emailing is fine if you can show good reasons why, and even more so when you come bearing gifts.
You need to visit this page: http://www.sfdph.org/dph/eh/Food/Permits/default.asp. Then you need to talk to a lawyer and have a serious discussion about your liability issues (and the liability issues for your "hosts") and come up with a plan for helping your hosts understand just what they're getting into when they use your site to run a "one table restaurant."

You've created a cute site, but now that you're running it as a business that interacts with the real world you need to step up to the plate and treat it like a real business. And that means dealing with the unsexy stuff like licensing (for yourself or your hosts).

In two weeks, if you haven't added something to your site about this, I'm going to personally call the SF Department of Public Health myself.
Could be that his provider auto renewed and his card happened to still work. But more likely he's alive :)
Without judging if it's a good thing or a bad thing, some of these services (e.g. Lyft in some cities) use "suggested donations" instead of payment. It changes the legal & tax consequences.
I think the asshole part might be necessary but not sufficient for that level of success. He had greatness too. One of the downsides of his legacy is cargo-cult asshole-ness where people think that if they act like the kind of uber-jerk Steve was, they'll be successful like Steve.
yes, as a package, there could be some stickiness here.

in which case, i'd suggest you offer markdown as well,
since you want to attract as many people as possible.

-bowerbird
I actually think a lot of media has both sets of problems at the same time. They will take press releases or whatever and reprint them coated in identical thin layers of snark and generic cynicism, without providing any real criticism or context.
I'm sure people have been successful. But per link#2 above, "Being able to walk with them doesn’t change the fact that as of right now, MongoDB is clown shoes."
Relevant reading for those that are interested:

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work - http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0061147893?pc_redir=1395239748...
It's definitely staying open! Even though it's not making much, it's not costing much to run either and is profitable, so there's no reason to shut it down.

Also, it hasn't been harrowing! I've saved up enough money to live comfortably in Madrid, which is a lot cheaper than my old home of London. I'm learning a lot and really enjoying building this site, which I still think could have a bright future.

tl;dr Despite the lack of revenue, Readlang and I are doing just fine :-)
The world is full of assholes and yet there is only one Steve Jobs. If you are thinking of emulating him, I say stick to his better sides: understanding the industry, positioning, marketing, branding, public speaking and of course product design.
> Under the basic principles of criminal constitutional law, all crimes for the same act must be charged at the same time

You're just referencing double jeopardy, and mean that you have to simultaneously present all charges that you ever want to charge them with, right?

In your hypothetical, just ignore the larceny. In the event that they're found guilty of rape and murder, you can't really say that justice wasn't done. In the event they can beat the serious charges, you shouldn't think that getting them on the larceny would have been actual justice.

To the extent you may be right that it's a fundamentally bad idea, then the fact that one minor act can be turned into so many "independent" charges demonstrates the problem with a proliferation of laws that cover any possibly wrong action five times over.
> As the CEO of the only smartphone messenger more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S.

This is quite misleading when smartphone messengers aren't popular in the US.
Still working on masters. Current income is from being a TA, I help teach and grade undergrad computer classes. I still have time to work on my own projects and have a salaried job lined up at one of the main big tech companies out west. Though I want to branch off and do independent work and start company in a few years.
When To Quit Your Job
I wonder why HN is a target for spam links like this? All URLs have nofollow so it's not for SEO. And most accounts that submit them are usually dead on arrival (or shortly after). So what's the upside here? People like you? Will you buy Nike shoes now?
Yep, will be easier :) Just opened a feature-request about it. (https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/25)
No, it really doesn't, especially not for tax purposes.

The law (and especially tax law) looks at the substance of the transaction, not its form. Calling a payment for commercial services a "donation" doesn't make it a donation. If it did, every business would ask for "donations" instead of payment. Indeed, as a matter of tax law, calling the Lyft fees "donations" actually makes it worse for the drivers--they can't offset the "donation" income with their Lyft-related expenses. (Lyft can't recharacterize the donations it receives on behalf of the drivers as fee compensation when it remits payment to the drivers because it takes the position that they're independent contractors and it is merely acting as a collection agent.)
Facebook's Messenger for Android is pretty good and when I write messages with it, people reply. This is why I think the Whatsapp acquisition makes no sense, unless it was a defensive move.
"can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else."

Background - employed software developer for 15 years.

I really don't see a problem with building other people's dreams. In fact, I enjoy it and have been rewarded for it well over the last 15 years. I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from some amazing developers and to build some very cool products. At the moment, I don't have an entrepreneurial dream and I may never have one. I am content to make a living doing what I love to do - which is simply to write software.

I don't think the issue is risk aversion or not following your dream. I just think that different people have different dreams and desires. At the risk of sounding like a Disney firework show - follow your dream. If you have a dream of owning your own business, you can make a plan to do that. That might involve striking out on your own early or later in life. I think you just have to ask yourself what you want.
Please switch the default option from "story" to "all".

The legacy style screen has a minor rendering error in Firefox 31:

http://imgur.com/tkqCRGh

My comment from a previous story is still relevant:

The search results for stories show both the long (and useless) news.ycombinator URL and a link to the comments. Both links lead to the same location. The news.ycombinator URL displayed is redundant and adds visual noise. I've highlighted both links in the image linked to below.

I'd like it if the results showed "link", "parent", and "on $News_Story", like the old site did.

http://imgur.com/asHzSb1
Right, we've still some issues with some dead/deleted comments/stories being indexed. A full-reindexing is scheduled in the next few days and should fix it.
I AM IN!!!!

This is amazing, and my wife and I cant wait to try it.

We need to book a sitter and plan a date night around this.

They site should include the option to "book and Uber to and from"
Sure, but it does likely mean that hosts should expect some surprise visits from the local health department and likely fines, because it certainly does require at least a temporary food permit. Here are the relevant San Francisco requirements: http://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/Permits/PopUps.asp
Spyder (https://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/) is python's answer to Rstudio and the Matlab IDE
I don't think spammers think much before they act. Or they're just bots.
> A bunch of people here are saying that Jobs was being an asshole.

Well ... he was.

> I don't know much about the man, but what he's doing here is intelligent negotiation, plain and simple.

Jobs had the destructive habit of tearing people down for no reason, preventing them from liking either themselves or him. I knew him personally and I saw this behavior any number of times, behavior that had no possible positive outcome.

In this case, Jobs could simply have said, "This is completely unacceptable, but I'm sure you'll find a way to meet my legitimate requirements. I'm available next Thursday if you think we can come to an agreement." You know -- like a normal person.

In the Isaacson book, Jobs is accurately described as a clinical narcissist, and I can confirm than from personal experience.

To those who think Jobs accomplished what he did because of his behavior, I say he accomplished what he did in spite of his behavior. Obviously we will never know, this cannot be science, but Jobs went through life burning everyone down, filtering out everyone who wasn't a born narcissistic enabler.
Anon works in IT
To be clear, this was content moderation and not some kind of hot or not thing. They were basically there to prevent porn or pictures of dismembered penises from going up.

There were a handful of people who had multiple points per vote who could swing it drastically away from the 'consensus' if it was wrong, and doing so also penalized the people who voted for it.
Look at the growth rates of their cash hoards -- none of that is being spent on R&D.
Although this one example might not be a very practical way of doing it, anything that keeps old hardware out of the trash and still in useful service is a big positive in my opinion.

One thing the software industry has been very good at doing is driving the sales of hardware, by requiring more and more resources --- only to do much of the same things as before, maybe with some improvement in specific areas. Many users have no need for the latest hardware nor software, yet they're constantly encouraged to upgrade for security, "new features" they'll never use, etc. (I'll admit that some of these, like security, could be valid concerns.) Upgrading to newer software with higher resource consumption, they wonder "why is it so slow?", and that eventually leads to perfectly fine hardware going to waste. In particular, the extremely fast upgrade cycles of browsers makes their contribution to this gross waste a bigger part than a lot of other software.

> The people who use this unmaintained software are inherently less safe.

A lot of exploits today won't even run on older systems. Older browsers also having less features is also a reduction in attack area - e.g. if there was something vulnerable in HTML5 video or CSS3 animation, a browser that didn't support those features would be inherently immune.
I think that the investors may not just be looking to solidify infrustructure for other investments. The majority of start ups have little income and relatively few customers. Npm has a huge number of customers and whether it can generate a huge amount of income through private registries or whatever services, the fact that it is a core piece of infrastructure is a huge advantage in launching services. So a VC has good reason to expect a useful amount of income. That isn't actually the case for many investments. I don't see how anyone could suggest that this is a large investment for such a core piece of infrastructure.
Rookie mistake. Read Venture Deals: http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitalis...
This sounds like a ground loop or otherwise interference from the power input. Have you tried these on a power conditioner or a UPS?
Can I say "thank you" about his point on reusable code? Re-editable code as he puts it is far more useful.

Witness in puppet: their 'go to' module for example purposes is for ntp. Yet, last I looked, their ntp module contained a couple thousand lines of complex puppet logic to handle every configuration option under the sun. In making a meta configuration language, they have made a hydra of maintain-ability, in the name of re usability.

Far better in my view is a straightforward example that interested parties can take and tweak to their needs. Some need an iteratable list of ntp servers, some need a local clock skew.

Almost all ntp server environments can get by with a 20-30 line config file. Don't maintain a thousand+ line monster to maintain it in a reusable manner.

And now up the complexity to, say, tomcat. How complex would a fully flexible tomcat module have to be? Now do the same for Nginx. It's a pipe dream of combinatorial explosion.
By what you're saying, someone who is lifting and taking adequate rest between sessions, ensuring that they get enough rest, won't benefit from taking steroids if they don't change their schedule?
I'm saying steroids reduce recovery time, AND build muscle more easily. You're saying it's just the former.
Sure, but even bots and spammers costs money. Seems like spamming HN is throwing money away.
Experimenting with Gremlins.js and the canvas tag
What matters most at Ad:TECH SF 2014
Firewalls or Cool Horizons?
> I wonder how far you could get, though, with an AI that strung together phrases like a struggling beauty pageant contestant or politician: "I think world peace is important because uh education is the key to success and uh what really matters is the children and uh that's what makes America great!"

Hmm -- you clearly haven't listened to many TED talks, because lots of them sound just like that. Having listened to about 100 of them over the years, I eventually came to the conclusion that the most popular ones acquired their acclaim by being as formulaic as possible -- say positive things, don't mystify your audience, build your talk out of a series of verbal bumperstickers.
Old cars are far more dangerous in a crash than modern ones. Old browsers at least won't kill you when they fail.
Google Gadgets For Your Webpage (2008)