skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it surprising that people are so desperate they beg the Dropbox company and still want to use the software after this.

1) You CAN live without Dropbox. There are alternatives (I personally use BTSync, which is great).
2) You shouldn't NOT be using an American service that holds and versions your data in first place. It is not new that all these services are wiretrapped, or at least easily accessible by the gov (not mentioning they sell/use your privacy to make money).
3) They won't kick out such an "extremely brilliant and accomplished individual".
4) Even if she gets kicked or leaves, this is yet another reason to not trust them, since they're blind/careless enough to hire her.
I might be inclined to agree, but doesn't the wild success of so many California companies where even these non-competes are unenforceable suggest the net value isn't high, maybe even negative?

Massachusetts has had one modern era wildly successful civilian high tech period, stretching from the minicomputer era to the early PC era (both Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 were done in the Boston area). But this part of its high tech scene died hard by 1990 (and I left the area, I was an eyewitness starting in 1979); non-competes were I believe part of the problem with Silicon Valley wildly out-competing the Boston area.

Since then I've heard things got better in the web era, but still nothing compared to the Bay Area.
You're making a deeply political claim here that individual morality should be secondary to business interests. Which unsurprisingly is a claim that will divide people. This attitude is a shining example of the consequences of the kind of liberalism that lets capitalism run amok, i.e. valuing individualism over any individual's actual values.

You seek to unite people, but for what purpose? I have yet to see business interests or _especially_ 'startup culture' tackle the real inequities and tragedies of our time. Startup culture is good at addressing the lifestyle issues of well off technophiles, not at preventing war, or justly distributing food or housing. (I am interested to see if Watsi can do anything better than Doctors Without Borders, or if it is just more focus on individuals rather than statistically significant outcomes). We ought to be looking for ways to transcend the limitations of business practices and reassert moral claims.

Note that people asking for Eich and Rice to get out of their lives aren't asking for government intervention or any formal rules set in place. If dropbox or mozilla want to lose their massive user base and keep profitable amoral corporate clients, that's fine, we'll leave them alone. If the economy eventually bifurcates and passionate progressive people replace large swaths of infrastructure with open, democratic organizations that seek to distance themselves from the corporate tradition I think it would be an enormous boon to the species.

Are we so adrift that we can't create a strong distinction between McCarthyism/Jewish persecution and asking our leaders to be cautious to war/pro-marriage? You actually see these positions as interchangeable and arbitrary? Should we simply abandon any moral or aesthetic position and let capitalism run its course?
Massachusetts is already pretty easy-going in terms of enforcing non-competes, leaning to benefit individual rights. I live and work in Mass, and have been on both ends of non-competes. At my shop we have all employees sign a non-disclosure agreement and assignment of invention, but we stop at the non-compete. Personally I think it's unreasonable to try to regulate a person's right to earn, and it seems like the way things are headed. I am unsure about the argument whether or not this is pro-labor or pro-business. As far as I am concerned this is pro-free market which is pro-everybody in the long run. Maybe a few big co's with deep pockets can't flex legal like they would have previously, but is that such a bad thing?
I disagree - it's a lot more powerful than that. If it becomes generally known that politicians unethical actions will limit their opportunities in the corporate world after they leave office, it produces a strong incentive to behave more ethically.
> But if the hardware still works fine, replacing it because of software issues isn't really justified. It's far less wasteful to do software upgrades.

Unless you're a hardware manufacturer who wants to sell new hardware.
Ads may be not suck, but fake clicks and overcharging for them seems like a common theme lately.
Ideally, you would have a parsing and validation routine which fills in a struct. Afterwards, you manipulate only the struct instead of raw byte representation.

> But there comes a point at which further complexity produces more confusion than safety.

Buffer is simply not the right abstraction for complex protocols, regardless of how "complex" operations you define.
I do not use Apple and Yahoo products and limiting my use of Google products. So what?
Thanks :) Yep ... I wrote it exactly out of frustration for reading post after post here on HN bashing Fb Ads because of Fake clicks ... people should stop caring about clicks and focus on real metrics. Then a platform may not be a good fit for you, but still you cannot know if you test with a $50 budget
just use http://kickofflabs.com/ and go back to building the product :)
Am I wrong that it's easier to get code into OpenSSL, and thus into pretty much every product that uses OpenSSL, than it is to get code into the branch of NSS that Firefox and Chromium use?
The doctor almost certainly didn't mean it when he said that it was possible the patient was practicing law somewhere, so I think it was sarcasm.
Donovan Strain Decodes Ice Cube's Official 'Good Day' as January 20th, 1992
Since several submitted articles remain on the front page, it appears that the downward movement is prompted by flagging from the community, not by explicit moderator action. I suspect that the flagging and any moderator action for each story is in response to the tenor and tone and scale and direction of the discussion in the comments, not for the story itself.

HN has implicit standards for discussions. There are many many places on the internet where this story can be discussed. Indeed, there are places which embrace opinions about the Bush Administrations, the Obama Administration, what is the proper nature of American patriotism, and what role the US and it's corporations should and do play in international affairs.

But for better or worse, HN is not really among them.
I assume this point of this is to catch apps that download and execute malicious dex bytecode at runtime via DexClassLoader?

There was an interesting paper about insecure use of DexClassloader by many top apps: http://blog.iseclab.org/2014/03/06/execute-this-looking-at-c...
Ah, I must have missed that entry in Gore's Wikipedia page where it states he was one of Bush's closet advisors on national security issues.
I don't think it's about Facebook Ads sucking or not sucking. That's the narrative but the underlying issue is people feel that Facebook Ads are a rip off.

I wonder how much of Facebook's ad revenue (and Google's for that Matter) consists of less savvy marketing efforts that don't understand or even care about the metrics which matter. The long tail?

I don't believe the argument in favor of Facebook Ads can be that you need to understand marketing better or differently.

The majority, I presume, of people using these platforms have little to mediocre experience. The disappointment in Facebook Ads comes from this large group.

I've talked to plenty of people and no one has been happy with Facebook Ads. The details of why don't necessarily matter - they've taken their $ elsewhere. Winning them back will be tough.
Or better yet, start seriously talking about moving to a language that doesn't make it so stupendously easy for trivial bugs like these to get so far out of hand.

Bounds checking incurs such a trivial amount of overhead, and the potential cost of straying out of bounds is so high. I understand we've got decades' worth of C culture built up around coding idioms that are incompatible with type safety and bounds checking. I understand that means that developing and migrating to a dialect of C or C++ that offers something in the way of a safety net is anything but trivial. But we've also got decades' worth of painful examples of just how catastrophic - and difficult to prevent - these kinds of errors can be, and that alone should justify the cost.

At the very least, consider the example set by C#: Be type safe and do bounds checks by default, but provide an `unsafe` keyword for those cases where it really is necessary to disable them.
Thanks! I'm a one-man show on Baremetrics (no team or outsourcing) and I get a relatively decent amount of sleep. :)

I put a big emphasis on shipping fast and frequently.

So, push small bits of larger things out the door. Incremental progress over huge features. That sort of thing.

"Shipped" is better than "perfect" for me and is the measure for progress. I ship something as quickly as possible, then iterate on top of that after it's in the wild and being used by paying customers.
Bc HN has a flamewar index, where if conversations begin a flamewar, then they disappear
The shirt would be better with nothing on the back. I would've reflexively clicked buy.
Why is it ok discuss the legality of Uber or Airbnb? Aren't those political issues? We all claim that HN is not a political forum, but in the end we have a subjective standard. That standard is probably just the gut feeling of the moderators. So... if the thread is still here then it's appropriate by definition.
>for CRUD app auto generation?

According to what I've read about, getting a CRUD app up and running in Rails is as easy as 1 line in the commandline.

Is this what you are referring to?
> I hope this extends to opposing the Obama administration, which has continued and extended war, torture, and the patriot act.

Of course it does. That's the logical conclusion. Why wouldn't it? There isn't any informed person in 2014 who is unable to realize Obama has been worse than Bush as far as torture and war go.
That's true but actually Facebook now try to charge for CPM not clicks so that soften the problem, and still, you should check your CPA ... if that makes sense some fake clicks are acceptable.
But not difficult to patch, which is a critical factor here.
Excellent. How did you know I wanted this? =)
This must be "comments", not "stories" I believe?
As a simple example though, assume you wanted to make a Shadow DOM widget to show a visual representation of an audio sample, or any other kind of detailed graph. Something you arguably don't want to build a giant SVG tree for. Those seem like great things to do with shadow dom widgets... but ... they seem S.O.L without a per element resize event.

I suppose that's being a little over the top. As long as you make them a fixed size or manually call some 'redraw' function when your app notices they've been resized then you're fine. It's just part of the point of Shadow DOM is you're not suppose to have to do that. They should "just work" just like normal HTML elements and size and redraw themselves. It would be nice if there was a way to do that for more interesting canvas based widgets.
Yes you should provide incentives. I'm not in favor of bad management or bad partnerships, I just think that the value of an employee who can bring new relationships to a new company should be more than the value that they have maintaining relationships at their existing company.
Mathematicians say that formula F is true in system S iff one can find a proof of F in the context S. So truthness is always considered with respect to some system.
Thus, there are no formula which is "true" but that one can't prove, by definition. (That's the kind of smartassery mathematicians like.)

But the Godel's incompleteness theorem states that for all system that includes (Peano's) arithmetic, one can find a formula in this system that has cannot be proved and whose contrary cannot be proved either. And to answer your question, Godel's proof explicitly shows such a formula.
If you are advertising FB ad services, your conversion would obviously be higher in FB. The fact that it is only 63% better that Google Ads seems poor.

My experience with FB is that the conversion rate is essentially zero and limited by your ability to donate to FB.
Using R to model the classic 60/40 investing rule
My degree included a "Computer Music" option, which were a few classes that were half music students and half computer science ones. We used Max/MSP quite a bit.

For anyone that wants to play around with a very similar language, PureData is an open-source application that is a relative of Max/MSP (they share a creator, and are quite similar). Not wanting to come in to do the homework or purchase the software myself, I used it quite a bit.

http://puredata.info/
It's funny in the way that farts and people tripping on bananas is funny.
"Facebook Ads Are OK, but supporting them on HN is great!" You have just followed suit and created backlinks, conversions, ad views, etc. Don't worry, we all do it! It's the cycle of internet flow these days.

I'm with you. There are far too many variables ranging from audience, timing, ad setup, money, etc to even begin measuring in any scenario. The million dollar per month investment may see a better conversion rate than the ten million dollar per month investment. There are just far too many variables at play.

While American Idol was becoming a thing, I acquired #1 ad placement on the keyword 'dance' for 2 cents per click through Adwords. I was getting 100,000 impressions an hour. For me, Adwords was the greatest thing known to humans. Then, I attacked more keywords for other sites. Horrid conversion/CTR. Just different sides of the spectrum. You win some, you lose some.
I'm quite surprised to have this pointed out as a problem: it never came in my mind to go for CPC on Facebook ads (and pay per Fake Clicks) this is not AdWords :)
As a huge Mozilla fan, I really do hope that Firefox OS takes off at least in a small way. I hear that the Firefox browser isn't being used so much on Android (people are tending to stick to the default Chrome browser). Mozilla really do need to get into the mobile market.
Databricks and MapR partner up
5 Life Hacks To Become A Productivity Star
Yes, I'm aware of the show's mockery of good intentions. Few (or no) actual startups actually use language so wildly specific; when they say they want to make the world a better place, they generally cite the intent of the startup rather than specifics of the technology — which makes this attempt at satire fall flat on its face.
LOL.

I was just hilariously accused of being a racist for tweeting the #dropdropbox hash tag.
It's not new for hacks.mozilla.org to display write-ups about external projects that relate to the web.
That's a problem with the comments, not the story itself. If it's upvoted and legitimate content (in this case it is closely about startup world) , shouldn't it be staying where it is? Something with hundreds of upvotes probably should not go to the second page just because a few flagged the story.
Almost. See: http://i.imgur.com/qymKtS3.png (see http://hnrankings.info/ for actual page)
No one cares about "stopped reading" pronouncements. Spare us and tell your goldfish instead.
> "the HN community" doesn't have unified beliefs about nearly anything

We don't need unanimity. We don't have to agree on every issue.

But we do have incredible power, because we're the ones who know how to build things and make them work. Those who would do evil depend on us to do our part.

I won't participate. I will deploy my talents and money against wars of choice, the police state and institutional theft.

We may not all agree, but the HN community is disproportionately interested in these issues, and has the ability to do something about them.
Whether we started them or not is mostly irrelevant. We've joined and extended plenty of wars, and given 9/11 I'd say we didn't "start" Iraq and Afghanistan out of the blue. We just didn't know exactly who we were supposed to be fighting.

According to this [1] the US has been in ~117 wars (if I counted right) in 238 years.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Unit...
As of May 2013, Y Combinator had funded over 500 startups.[20][21] The number of startups funded in each cycle has been gradually increasing. The first cycle, in summer 2005, had eight startups. In the summer 2012 cycle, there were more than 80. Y Combinator has since reduced their class size down to less than 50 with their winter 2013 batch, but they expect to grow it again.[22]

Some of the better-known funded companies include Scribd, reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, Disqus and Heroku.[20]
I flagged it, and I presume many others did as well. I also flagged several other overtly political boycott stories recently, but that didn't seem to have as much effect.
>Not sure why it's so really.

FWIW I think it's because the debate over the occupation of Palestine usually devolves into name-calling and accusations of anti-semitism etc within the space of.. well minutes at best, usually. Many people flip their "froth at the mouth" bit pretty quickly under those circumstances, be they reasonable people or not.. and so we see little reasoned debate on the subject.
I'm saying very few high level politicians in western countries are guilty of things of comparable badness.
Double U, Double U, Double U: The Scourge of the URL
What technical details should be considered before making a site public?
A simple "Next" button on the caption popover would have made the UX a million times better. It's painful when UX designers don't grab low-hanging fruit like this.
Argh, I know. I think it needs two things: A giant "NEXT" button on every page (especially the first; where do you click?) and then the author composed content needs to be bigger. That tiny box just does not suffice.
But dremel doesn't support incremental updates. Dremel is designed for read-only data. All its columns are indexed. The whole table needs to be re-built after update.
I don't think so.

You can chalk up the current administration with 4 out of 5 of those same facts.

>>> Now she wants you to trust her with you data.

So does Facebook, so does Google, so do a shit ton of other tech companies. Are you railing against them as well?? Somehow I don't think so. This is the double standard I'm talking about.

Bush has been out of office for almost 6 years and nobody treads at all on the myriad of things Obama has done which mirrors almost to a tee the stuff Bush did. All you want to see is people who were aligned with him are somehow worse than what the current administration is doing.

Give me a break.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that if you want to change something big, it's a good idea to start out with achievable steps and build up from there.

As to 'Apple supporting Foxconn' - Apple have done more to improve working conditions at Foxconn than any other organization. If you want to boycott someone, it should be all of the other Foxconn customers who are doing nothing.
For worse, surely. As a startup employee and HN reader, I'm disgusted with the amoral money chasing culture we've grown. The attitude towards politics here reminds me of a child plugging his ears, squinting hard and shouting "la la la la la I can't hear you". For all the talk of disruption, the domain of problems we are allowed to apply that to is horribly small.
Agreed but doesn't this apply to every Advertising platform? Are you going to get much better results if you spend $50 with no expertise on Google AdWords or display advertising ?

Would be really interesting to know how much the long tail account for :) But guess we'll never know!

For sure both Facebook and Google should do a better job training users with 0 expertise to better use their platform. I don't think in the long term they have much space to grow more in the enterprise, SMBs, the long tail are the segment where the future growth is ... and if they loose them after the first $50 it will be tough!
If you've gone to a dev school, please help share your experience with others who are looking:

http://schools.techendo.co/
Kind of reminds me of:

Customer: "But using it, I'm loosing money on every purchase."
Vendor: "Don't worry, buy more, you'll make it up on volume."
I would have enjoyed it more if the text boxes containing the annotations were larger than business cards. Honestly, I would have enjoyed it the most if it were a standard long-form article. But even allowing the annotation boxes to be 'maximized' would have been a big improvement.
You're, of course, correct for the reason that you state.
The Cabinet Office has disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act that those who drafted the dossier were immediately asked to compare British claims against the US president's speech. The next day the dossier's timescale was halved to claim Iraq could get the bomb in a year.

A Foreign Office official who helped draft the dossier, Tim Dowse, told the Chilcot inquiry that disputed claims that Iraq had acquired special aluminium tubes for a nuclear programme were included because the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, had publicly referred to them.

Both changes to the weapons dossier were part of a detailed process of comparing the British claims with US statements and those in a forthcoming CIA dossier. The comparisons were made on the express instructions of Campbell. He told the joint intelligence committee (JIC) chairman, John Scarlett, in a memo on 9 September 2002, that the British dossier should be "one that complements rather than conflicts with" US claims.

Documents that the information commissioner ordered to be released last year show that the drafters of the UK dossier compared its claims closely with the CIA dossier and raised possible contradictions over estimates of Iraq's capabilities.

The commissioner also accidentally released a secret list of documents that he allowed the government to withhold on national security grounds. These included an email dated 13 September 2002 "covering a copy of a Bush speech to compare with UK dossier claims". The Cabinet Office has confirmed the speech was the one Bush gave to the UN the day before.

A new draft of the British weapons dossier virtually eliminated the difference between the US and UK positions. When Blair presented the dossier to parliament 11 days later, he said that Iraq might get the bomb in "a year or two".

The JIC, which prepares formal intelligence assessments, considered the scenario so unlikely that it did not estimate how long it might take.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/10/alastair-campbell-...
And yet Bush is universally hated and Obama was elected to a second term. I think we are in agreement as to our feelings about this, but your snark is subtle if we are :-)
Wow the HN anti flamewar algo (as someone mentioned)...

As Dropbox is a YC alumi it puts also a bad light on HN.
If this question is penalized, it's rightly so:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com.
How to Outsource Coming up W/ Business Ideas
It won't have an immediate effect. But once the network effect takes hold these things pick up steam fast. Bitcoin spent 3 years in obscurity before it took off.

Also if you think about it are choices of browsers are actually quite limited. You have Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari. Our choices in cloud storage provides are unlimited. Even my ISP provides the service now.
Thanks for sharing what you could. It was certainly interesting for me.
Is there any likelihood that FFOS will ever be more than a niche player? From where I'm sitting it looks like Android & iOS are the big players, Windows Phone is the plucky upstart, and then there's dark horses and complementary products like Tizen and so on. With all of the big brands out there, where does FFOS propose to carve out a niche?