skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft Has Big Plans For Bing’s Entity Engine
Surprise, surprise: my online metadata actually reveals where I’ve been
I lived in Oakland briefly. I can't speak to Oakland crime broadly, but I will say one of the big drivers of crime is gangs. In Baltimore city where I grew up, the crime is drug related so shootings are targeted and don't have collateral damage. In Oakland, the gang-related shootings tend to be spray-and-pray with innocent bystanders getting caught in the middle. I moved out of Oakland after one such shooting happened < 100ft from my nice $2k a month apartment.
Give it 5 years and agents will start calling those cube farms a "Retro and Quirky work environment"
That's about what I expected, as it matches the browser numbers reported by Wikimedia (a completely neutral party which runs a top 10 site whose audience is the general populace):

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera...

About 12% Linux!!! ... of which 11% is Android.
Agreed. Any "low margin" business that can do 30% price cuts in one day is not low margin.
More like Superclasses used incorrectly make your code brittle so don't use superclasses.

In so far as I have never found a use case for a class hierarchy 5 deep I agree with him. On the other hand the argument that because you can do it wrong means you shouldn't do it all isn't compelling. I don't think there is a language or language feature that you can't use incorrectly.
> But realistically, almost no big corps run that way (almost all engage in some charity, many have foundations, etc.)

Engaging in charity and supporting foundations is not related to the "generosity" of the a corporation (who runs it); charity and foundations can be PR and tax-saving strategies.

Drug cartels engage in charitable donations; that doesn't make them generous.

HSBC (just picked a random one) supports charities. It also launders money for the drug cartels and is generally involved in illegal money transactions.

I can pick virtually any big corporation involved in corruption/crime scandals and I'm pretty sure they routinely make charitable acts and/or have their foundations and as well.

I certainly don't say that any corporation is corrupt, but the link with foundation/charities and morality of a corporation just doesn't exist.
Exactly. Quoting Dropbox's terms of service:

> We need your permission to do things like hosting Your Stuff, backing it up, and sharing it when you ask us to. Our Services also provide you with features like photo thumbnails, document previews, email organization, easy sorting, editing, sharing and searching. These and other features may require our systems to access, store and scan Your Stuff. You give us permission to do those things, and this permission extends to trusted third parties we work with.

However congenial this sounds, they reserve the right to look at your stuff —— worth noting.
I really have a hard time understanding these arguments.

There are some good examples out there of difficult-to-understand buys and misunderstood valuations- there's no way the WhatsApp purchase is ever going to recoup its costs(the userbase is irrelevant, at a $1 per year price it just isn't gonna happen, especially considering the WhatsApp founders claimed they weren't going to be charging any more than that or for many other services they wanted to provide, AND that they wouldn't have ads), King.com is just this year's Zynga(news to the tech investment scene: The games industry is not nearly as simple as you seem to think it is), and there's no shortage of questionable investments in smaller companies, to be sure.

But then, you use examples like Airbnb and Oculus as an example of tech industry madness?

"Airbnb is like a hotel chain without the hotels." Yeah. That means they absolve themselves of costs, growth time, investment into that growth, location issues, the works. They hacked the concept of a hotel, and found the holy grail for that market space. Frankly, if you think $10 billion is a ridiculous number, with them being worth more than Hyatt- I'd be inclined to wonder what holds them back being worth 3 Hyatts. They've got momentum, they've got product, and they've got the community. Short of the possibility of some grand competitor actually coming in and doing a bangup job, I think Airbnb's potential is at least an order of magnitude higher than this.

And Oculus- so they have little revenue now? They have decent revenue at all for a product that has only been released to developers. You even admit that VR can completely change the world, but don't do the homework to understand they're probably less than 2 years from a product release with massive community and business support? What, did your deadline come up and you just had to submit?

Look, it's fine if you think either are overvalued. But trying to use either in your examples for how we're in a 1999-style bubble is laughable. You hand us two of the best reasons we're not in a bubble and wonder why everyone thinks we're not. Really now?
That brings up an interesting question. At what point does a modified file no longer fall under copyright?

If I had a copyrighted ebook and changed a single "o" to "0" I bet I could still be busted for distributing it (although it appears Dropbox would no longer automatically catch me). But what if I changed every single "o" to a "0"? Re-arranged words? Chapters? Upcased every lowercase letter?

My guess is that's it's based around "intent" which is hard to quantify, but it's still interesting to ponder.
Yet another reason not to use cloud services. For start dropbox is infrastructure provider and they have no right to snoop inside your files. If they start blocking stuff at their own will they are judge and executor.

Secondly there is lot of potential for abuse. Hacker could sneak hash collision into their database and essentially censor-ship any document he wants.

And finally I do not understand why there has to be protection from working with copyrighted stuff. Most of work I created is copyrighted, nearly every open-source product have copyright.

Even if there would be a movie there, it does not strictly mean it is illegal. Most people have right to create backups of their DVDs. Many jurisdictions allow to create copy for personal use and so on.
I -guess- each $300 backer could've received $150,000 of stock/cash...

...if this kickstarter happened 6 months from now, as an equity kickstarter.

The 6 month number is sort of arbitrary, but the SEC is currently evaluating Regulation Crowdfunding. Title III of the JOBS act.

(for more info, here
https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2013/12/06/jobs-act-ti...)

Regulation Crowdfunding will allow "funding portals" (kickstarter/indiegogo/etc) to facilitate equity based crowdfunding, with a limit of up to $1,000,000.

We'll pretend that Oculus at $1mm KS has the same destiny as Oculus as a $2.4mm KS. [I think in an equity world, people would be less inclined to invest after that wall is hit.]

We'll ALSO pretend (here's the bigger stretch) that the subsequent rounds of financing at $16mm and $75mm somehow magically didn't affect the equity of the seed round. [Hahaha, hilarious.]

If the KS had stated that the $1mm was to own 25% of the company (I bet he'd've done more, but we'll go low) that means that each $300 backing is equivalent to %0.0003 of $1mm.

%0.0003 of 25% equity is %.000075 of Oculus.

%.000075 of 2 billion dollars is $150,000.

[I think. %50 chance I mucked this math up at some point.]
OT: is there a good HN like forum for discussing finance?

Old timers will remember newmogul.com, however, that's defunct.
I think it has to do with avoiding ambiguity.

Granted, the byte hasn't been redefined, but given how every architecture and language in the past had a different standard for each ADS, one might want to be proactive.

Also see the mess SI vs. binary prefixes created.

As a sidenote, early modem producers used the baud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud) which coincides with bps only in some cases.
very nice design!
French ire as Apple bans book over nude cover
Is "nasty tone" really the basis of silently banning people? Just because something offends a moderator, then all of their subsequent comments are censored?

Being offended shouldn't offer anyone any special rights. If something "offends" you, ignore it and move on.
How is something which needs a >700 MB runtime doomed to succeed. I think even Java is smaller than that. Not sure though.
> It is very confusing, because for everything else i.e file sizes the standard is bytes.

No, this isn't true. It was true once, but things have changed. Now there are two standards, one based on multiples of two, the other based on multiples of ten:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibit

And, more topically,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rate_units

1 kibibit = 1.024 kilobit

I'm not saying this is why ISPs use bits per second, but it certainly would serve as an explanation in the absence of a better one. Bits per second mean the same thing in all current schemes for describing a quantity of data or its velocity.
Drive your friends crazy - great iPhone prank :)
Posting a job for a freelancer .net framework dev?
how do i post a job for a freelancer developer? it's my first time. thanks for the help!
There's a big difference between the dot-com IPOs of the late 90s and the IPOs of today: revenues. Some may express surprise that Candy Crush generated $1 billion of revenue, or that Facebook generates $8 billion / yr; and some may not agree with the multiples assigned to these companies by the markets; but neither of those thoughts makes the current environment comparable to 1999, when pre-revenue companies with unworkable business plans IPO'ed at high valuations. What I don't see in this article is any analysis of the growth potential, long-term margins, and defensibility that these businesses possess. That kind of analysis is crucial to a valuation discussion.
I strongly agree. I found for myself that when I have a clear goal and a path toward it already figured out, I can just sit down and code like crazy for long hours[0], even if I'm tired or start sleeping less. But if I need to do conceptual work (or just didn't think enough about the problem), trying to do anything when not being well-rested (7+h of sleep) is a waste of time.

[0] - as long as it's not Work. I'm a sad case of extreme intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation issues; my best well-rested extrisincly motivated hours are about 25% as productive as sleep-deprived intrisinc-motivated ones. I have no clue how to fix this.
Purely private money doesn't really work so well, because you can't really believe it'll be worth anything tomorrow.

Now, what the Austrians have right is that overly out of whack money supply is pretty bad, and no central body can really do that good a job at guessing right. But instead of throwing the baby with the bathwater, what can be done is to give the fed a mandate that directly lines up with something we want.

For instance, we could have a fed that alters the money supply looking straight at NGDP. A stable NGDP growth is extremely valuable, as it's the best approximation we have of economic health. So if the Fed targetted NGDP growth, and used markets due to their forward looking nature, we'd get a better policy overall, without really risking the instability that comes from having money that can't really be trusted.
The thing is there is not a clear way to have a market control the creation of new money - the choice is between central control of the money supply and a fixed money supply.
A Tax Break to Anchor Tech Growth in San Francisco
This is not the first article talking about CoffeeScript's ambiguity and readability issues.

It's interesting how CoffeeScript fans almost always decide to blame the programmers for these problems. They said good developers should use common sense and use best practices to make code readable, for example by always using parentheses when calling functions. I hear exactly the same argument in the Perl community.

But reality is that if a language allows you to write bad code easily, people will write bad code, and you will have to read bad code. This is very easy to verify: most CS project on GitHub, starting with the CS code itself (http://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script) contain a lot of bad ambuigous uses of the language. A very similar thing happens with Perl code.

Programming language design is not only about making it easy to write good code, but also about making it hard to write bad one.
And the people who deliver data (the CDC in this case) clearly are highly concerned about alarming the public. The single word "However" in the bullet point here (http://www.cdc.gov/media/DPK/2014/dpk-autism.html) is a fairly obvious indicator of the CDC's agenda not to cause concern even with these high numbers, as it infers that the problem isn't as bad as it used to be (because IQs are higher). That the CDC chose to frame the data in this way is troubling.
Interesting you think this. From my point of view techno bubble people have very little reason to care about yet another text chat app that they don't use being bought by facebook. On the other hand, all the normal people who had left facebook which is no longer cool for whatsapp because it's cooler (and I've overheard these normal people saying exactly that to each other) are going to be pretty upset at the idea that anything from whatsapp might start showing up on someones facebook wall.
Almost all the recent news and tweets sidestep around the main question, which should be answered in a FAQ somewhere:

If I have copyrighted data on my Dropbox folder, and the system detects it, what happens? If I sync the copyrighted data with several of my computers, does that count as sharing?

Yes, I know what hashing is and yes, it seems the original reporter of the DMCA may have shared the file link through email or a website. Still, I need assurance that my data (including the copyrighted ones) will be backed up at Dropbox and available for my use at my leisure, indefinitely -- provided I don't "share" them in any public way.

Side note: all of my data on Dropbox is encrypted by a separate system, so it's unlikely that I'll be affected, but I still am interested in the issue.
I can't help of thinking that Google's and Microsoft's cloud offerings have a more honest EULA.
CoffeeScript is putting lipstick on a pig. It's pretty damn good lipstick, but still being applied to a pig.
Bravo sir, that was a fantastic and succinct explanation of the difference between inheritance in the real world vs in OOP.
Well, that was quite interesting, thank you!
It would fall under the same rules as fair use. If the modified file is close enough to the original that it could deprive the creator of a sale, then it is certainly infringement. If you made it so different that it would not deprive the creator of a sale (for example, if you re-arranged every single word so that the words in the book were in an entirely random order), that would most likely be fair use.
Video 2 Horny Elephant
Central banks do control interest rates and the reason this is done is to try to dampen boom and bust cycles.

However, there's no right or wrong price of money. A price that's good for most of the "real" economy (seen in unemployment rates) is not so good for deflating speculative investments. Similarly, a price that's good for Germany is not good for Spain.

Letting the market decide the price will choose a price. Whether it's the right price depends on your perspective. There's no reason it has to be the right price or even a stable price; see Bitcoin for example.
Sharing private state is not fundamental to inheritance. That's my point. It's a bad idea and people who use inheritance (should) know better than to do that.

That's why I said it was a strawman argument. (It's also a bit hypocritical: raganwald says, "JavaScript does not enforce private state, but it’s easy to write well-encapsulated programs: simply avoid having one object directly manipulate another object’s properties." Somehow he fails to apply the equivalent principle to inheritance.)
In Haskell you don't need to express this with type classes as it is trivially covered by sum types. Type classes are mostly syntactic sugar providing for ad-hoc polymorphism. The real power is provided by the underlying algebraic data types.
It's an interesting philosophical question, but intent is something that judges are much better at deciding than computer programs. And laws are generally written to be executed by judges (or, by extension, the threat of litigation).

Fun to think about, though. Especially if you start thinking about writing alternate endings, etc.
I thought the same. It reads like a well crafted press release. It's factually accurate and fair game, sure, yet it doesn't sit quite right with me.
I believe they stopped doing multi-user deduplication a while ago.
Wait for the monthly hiring post. The next one's on 1st April. See past ones here - https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

Edit: Out of interest, what type of work do you have to offer?
Ask HN: I need your help. Trying to develop secure and anonymous email
http://securmail.launchrock.com/

Hi guys, I have a problem and I need your help: me and a couple of my friends decided to create a web service for free anonymous and secure mail after hearing about the NSA debacle(Lavabit closing his doors). We created a launch page to get email for people to try out the service as beta tester. Just go check it out and if your are interested, signup.

If you have suggestions, don't hesitate. We are working hard to build something great and useful for everyone. If you could share the service to help us out too, it would be awesome. Thanks

Really, it all comes down to how you want to protect your data. Now that we know Google's been working with the NSA and other email services. There aren't many options left for secure email.

Ever since news of PRISM broke, there's been a lot of confusion and denial about exactly how the NSA is getting the data from the companies that have been collecting it. Now Google's fessed up to the details, and it's unsurprisingly simple: by FTP or even by hand.

With what we are building, it would be basically impossible to do. Built on AES-256 Encryption and Host Proof Hosting, ensuring that your sensitive data is never accessible to anyone but you. We never have your un-encrypted data. Even if our servers were hacked your emails would be safe and when you delete an email, it is not recoverable(US DOD, 7 passes). We do not log any traffic or session data. For this reason, we’re unable to identify any user of our service.

Here is the launch page: http://securmail.launchrock.com/
Yes, it is sketchy. The architecture of Dropbox is sketchy. The only acceptable solution is end-to-end encryption with an open protocol. I've moved from Dropbox to btsync and started contributing to the ClearSkies project.
> The reason is (or should be) to protect any investment that went into the invention; for the benefit of society as a whole - to make sure expensive research is still going to happen.

This is critical. Not just to enable expensive investment, but to create an incentive structure that encourages scientific research that remains in the public domain. This is a critical point that people often miss in these arguments.

In computerland, we don't come up with new computer science every time we program an application. In pharmaceutical land, you literally have to come up with new science to make a new drug.

Let's not forget that, as software developers, our perspective and opinions on patents are not fungible across all domains.

The patent system in the pharmaceutical industry enables a healthy drug research and design market with proper incentive structures. Abolishing patents in the pharmaceutical industry would retard research, skew incentives, and encourage trade secrets.

A patent free system would most likely result in a system of trade secrecy. Companies would not share their results, they would keep the secret formula to themselves. It would result in perpetual proprietary lockdowns.

After all, why make public the concept that you just spent billions of dollars and years of opportunity cost on? So that competitors can manufacture the drug at essentially zero cost? Nah, we'll just keep that to ourselves, thank you very much.

Trade secrets are a threat to science.

You cannot build a foundation of science on a platform eaten away by trade secrecy. Trade secrecy will deprive humanity of the positive externalities of a significant chunk of pharmaceutical research.

As developers, we see patents as a threat. A sharp implement of the greedy. In the pharmaceutical world, patents are a necessary rung in the ladder of human advancement. Yes, it doesn't always feel good to climb this ladder (consumer drug prices) but without it- there would just be a scrum of companies scrambling to climb up the research pole, each trampling each other's investment returns (incentive) to zero. They'd get bruised and go find easier poles to climb up.

Yes, the patent system in the pharmaceutical industry has flaws. But it is the best thing we have given the alternatives.

If you are interested, please see see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7497872
It gets even more interesting if you use right to "quote" small parts of books.
I didn't. I just completed the first phase in which we produce assembly code and will be finishing the project up this month. I hope to put the code up on Github. Perhaps someone else will find it curious and/or learn from my mistakes.

This project has been the most learning-filled project of my college career. I wouldn't trade that for any easy A. :)
WiseBanyan is hiring front end developers
WiseBanyan is the first free online financial advisor. Our mission is to help everyone achieve their financial goals, and this starts with investing as early as possible. In order to create the next-generation consumer finance company, we’ve built a multidisciplinary team bringing together deep financial expertise, data-driven consumer internet capabilities, and world-class design and development knowledge.

We are looking for someone who can:

•	Build the face of our company, sculpt a beautiful dashboard that integrates useful, clean, and intuitive features
•	Constantly innovate and improve our products, learning from clients and building an experience that we are proud of.

•	Be self-directed, confident, able to work in a fast-paced, team-oriented environment
•	Write code in a MVC environment with complex moving parts. We are a small, agile team and we need all team members to fully understand design constraints. We ship early and often, and are product-focused.

Qualifications

•	Possess expertise in JavaScript, jQuery, PHP in addition to full-stack web development skills (HTML and CSS)

•	BS or MS in Computer Science or relevant technical field and at least 3-5 years’ experience building rich UI, AJAX-y, browser-based products and dashboards

•	Team player who creates products that draws oohs and ahhs

Plusses

•	Experience with Java, C++, and other coding modailities

•	Experience with version control systems (Git, SVN, Mercurial, etc.)

•	Any experience with iOS, Android, or OSX
Perks

•	The opportunity to build a company with the founding team

•	Competitive salary (75K – 100K depending on experience) + stock options – you will have a stake in the future success of WiseBanyan

•	Awesome location – heart of Midtown, next to Bryant Park

•	Dream big, and be part of a company that will change the future of finance

BONUS POINTS: Show us what you do! Include links to things you’ve created and online portfolios

Apply: jobs@wisebanyan.com