skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience with both engineers and code monkeys is that they are largely less empathic than the rest of the world. This is probably due in no small part that they tend to be from middle and upper middle class families and have been told their entire lives about how special they are. They then move directly into jobs with middle and upper middle class wages and are largely shielded from social injustice, partly because most of them are white and male, and partly because they are able to afford to live in areas where exposure to the justice system is largely a thing you hear about on the news.

If you want to talk about justice or lack thereof, talk to a criminal defense attorney. I know several who went to law school determined to become prosecutors, and changed their minds when they realized how screwed up the system is. When I asked one about a specific case, he said that the guy was guilty as all hell, but the police department and the DA had violated the defendant's rights. His reasoning is that if the justice system is corrupt, then it's better for the guilty to go free until society makes the necessary changes. The system needs to be better than the people it condemns in order for there to be any justice.
I fully imagine the descent will even more rapid than the rise.

When people congregate; advertisers follow seeking the staggering ROI of the early marketers on the platform.

The platform, under shareholder pressure, will accept as many ads as it can until the platform is so saturated the customers leave and the ad ROI plummets. Advertisers are normally last to arrive at the party and also late to leave...

I recently saw a photo that demonstrated Facebook has an 8/1 content ratio. For every 1 meaningful piece of content a user is subjected to 8 ads including sidebar + newsfeed. If you include the horizontal scrolling for mobile adverts it rises to 13/1.

I think this party just hit it's peak. I deleted my FB a month ago, have not really missed it and a few of my friends have followed. Anecdotal evidence admittedly but no one did it in the usual "I am out!". The deletions were more of a shrug. Personally I find that the most emphatic indictment; when people have just grown bored of your platform.
Nature of the business. Amazon is a growing company and invests heavily in itself to stay relevant, to grow, to achieve long-term success in a very competitive environment. Amazon's customers care mainly about price. Apple has been successful in high-quality innovation and has created a remarkably valuable brand. Apple's customers care mainly about quality and are willing to pay a high price for it. Also, geographies: Apple has achieved far greater economies of scale than Amazon, and Apple will continue to enjoy the benefits of global scale combined with high margins so long as its products stay ahead of the competition.
GitHub changes JavaScript language color (and others..)
The menu I was talking about wasn't the typical channel listing. That's even worse to the point where I never use it. When I goto my friend's house where he has a ton of premium channels you can literally spend 3 hours just looking through that list to find something.

I hope that market segment with half a dozen choices never becomes fully main stream. I like choice in moderation (ie. web frameworks with opinions) but movies are just entirely different.

There's just too many interesting genres and type of movies to filter a list of 100,000 movies down to a handful. It's a very complicated problem to solve and might be unsolvable until we have huge break throughs in how machines process human input.

Example, how would you solve this problem:
Customer A watches 5 comedies in a row then is proposed a choice of 3 movies. 1 comedy, 1 sci-fi and 1 romance.

If customer A picks the sci-fi movie you cannot conclude that he didn't like the comedy or romance choices. He just happened to prefer watching a sci-fi movie that night. You don't even know the outside conditions too. Maybe his friend is over sitting in the room while they pick the movie, you simply cannot know.
Earnings call clearly says ad impressions decreased 17%, but price to advertise has doubled.
What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell 2.0
What do you think: one should buy now or after the split?
For a slightly more antagonistic view, check out this post by Fred Wilson about his...let's say disinclination? - towards the corporates.

Has any one had particularly positive or negative experiences?
What kind of potential do you think Telegram and other mobile messaging apps that encrypt data have?

Specifically, do you think this sort of thing has potentially to provide a virtual form of assembly? To communicate information to the Russian or other censored masses?

What might this kind of technology's shortcomings be?
I don't really get how it's different. It probably would be more effective to make a video or at least some more screenshots to show how it's different.
There are all sorts of policy-based resolution methods in the ACH world. But there is nothing technologically restricting arbitrary debits/credits to arbitrary accounts in arbitrary amounts.

One policy meant to deal with this is called "Velocity limits" which is basically a rate-limit of how much the OFDI will underwrite your account for. i.e. You can debit up to $50,000/day and then your OFDI will cut off further ACH transactions until some of your outstanding ones have settled.

Another policy is that (for Check21 checks processed via ACH anyway) the checking account owner has up to 60 days from the statement date to dispute the charge, meaning the ACH transaction can be reversed up to 90 days after it was initiated.

It's straight out of the 60's. And on one hand, it's cool that everybody uses this system and nobody notices how old it is. On the other hand, it's freaky when you realize that every time you swipe a debit card or write a check, you've basically handed over all the credentials needed for that person to debit your account as much as they like (until they're discovered).

Also, remember that automatic deposit implies automatic withdrawal.

ACH systems are by far the craziest API integrations I've ever had to do.
Amanda here, Grand St. co-founder. Jason's story is factually incorrect on a few things. To be clear: no threats were ever made or implied in deal meetings. Etsy is one of the most genuine and good-natured companies I have ever encountered.
Not really.

Intel has been dominating the Windows-compatible desktop computer space and recently made significant progress in the server space but if you lump together mobile and embedded processors and units sold, you'll see is nowhere near a leadership position in overall processor sales.
I don't know what "laundering tax" you're referring to but the whole point of laundering money is to make it seem like real profit from a legitimate business, and thus, regular corporate and/or income taxes must be paid.
Apple doesn't want to sell the most amount of phones, the leave that to Android. What Apple wants is to make the most amount of money off of phone sales. I'm sure they've looked at different price levels and determined that a 10% lower price would not increase units sold by more than 10% ( or more accurately 11.11%.)
In other news Tim Cook officially saluted Peter Oppenheimer today. Apple's CFO of TEN years, Oppenheimer is retiring at the end of semptember.
Cook: "He never missed a guidance in ten years. This must be a record among CFOs". :)
I have lost count of the number of jobs with 6 figure paychecks I turned down because there was no scope of programming in Scala. Sometimes being comfortable with your tools is important.
Silicon Valley heavyweights are helping underprivileged teens make iOS games
You can trampoline without generating a temporary function. See http://taylodl.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/functional-javascrip... for details.
It's because upper-middle class white people need to see an upper-middle class white person doing something in order to reflect on their previous thoughtless condemnation of it.

Of course the problem with that is that a large percentage of those readers will leave the article with the message that "not all drug dealers are bad, some of them are like me." That's how you end up with cocaine/crack sentencing disparities.
how would someone know if it's work-induced? Depression is commonly attributed to things that weren't actually the cause.
Every single week that I sit down and stare at my newrelic monitor, I think the exact same thing: "This is all going to collapse soon."

After almost two years of staring at six figure weekly revenue values on the analytics and tracking applications I've built (I obviously am not making this much), I begin to question my inherent concerns on FB's long game.
Exactly! I had the curiosity to check JAH's github profile too, and it raised more suspicious towards her than I had previously imagined. For a fair comparison, let's see a couple of female github repos (both frontend and backend):

https://github.com/pamelafox?tab=repositories

https://github.com/kellabyte?tab=repositories

https://github.com/gwenshap?tab=repositories

See? Any of those smart women above has much more quality code in their repos with regular activity, even though not any of them works at github, that is, they push code on their free time.

Finally, let's see a repo by another harassed geek girl: https://github.com/adriarichards?tab=repositories

Um... I definitely see a pattern here screaming too loud not to take notice.
Nodster (Napster + Node-webkit)
Do you mean the 5c?

I'm pretty sure that the margins are high on that phone. It's still expensive for what you get.
The 5c was a case of a missed fashion trend, not price.
One should not try to time the market. Dollar cost average into it.
We created One Month Rails to address specifically this problem.

It's all online and here are some of the lessons we teach: The command line, Setting up Github, Going online with Heroku, Registering a custom domain.

The idea is to show people how to build a simple Pinterest-like photosharing web app. We're going to be expanding that to include other web apps (like Airbnb and Reddit).

If you're interested @austenallred I can give you access and I'd love to hear your feedback. Email mattan at onemonth dot com
I used a lot of MDMA 20+ years ago. I was immediately aware, on trying it, that it was neurotoxic. I don't know how I knew that, but I did. However, after I quit I saw no evidence of permanent damage. As a fairly high-level software developer, I'm pretty sensitive to the state of my brain, and I don't recall ever experiencing difficulty working more than 2 or 3 weeks after taking MDMA.

Also, I only heard about this right before I quit, but a lot of the toxicity can be averted by taking 20mg of fluoxetine 3 to 4 hours into the experience. (It diminishes the drug effect, so you don't want to take it too soon.) The theory I heard is that MDMA or, more likely, one of its metabolites, binds to serotonin receptors and damages them. Taking something else that binds to the receptors, then, can help protect them. I tried it once and it seemed to help. St. John's Wort might work too, and is easier to get.

All that said -- I agree that people should be more careful with it. It's a potent psychoactive drug that's harder on the body than most of them, dehydration being a real risk.
A lot of this money have been funelled through tax havens and have never been taxed at all. There is no need to feel sorry for Apple and Google. They are abusing the tax system far more than they are hindered by it.
Intuitively this seems plausible. In particular, I'm guessing that return-oriented programming is more difficult in a build with fewer libraries. And just having a custom build based on musl libc, as opposed to the omnipresent Debian and Ubuntu images, might throw off some attackers. I'd appreciate input from a real security expert though.
Nope. It's only a sure bet if these products will beat expectations, and using your comment as an example, I think it's hard to imagine that expectations are not high.
Actually, elecengin said that.

I'm far more optimistic on these problems, as I've seen many of them solved.

Lettuce picking (and other ground crops shortly) thinned and picked by machine? Check.

Strawberry sorting for plant quality? Check.

Strawberry harvesting? Check.

Harvesting of tree crops? Check.

Orange grove navigation by tractors? Check.

Ex:
http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/usda/
http://farmofthefuture.net/#/slideshow/autonomous-tractors-t...
http://farmindustrynews.com/precision-guidance/new-driverles...
http://www.agprofessional.com/news/JD-autonomous-tractors-ar...
https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/robotics/sm...
If we are really talking about free and open-source software, the ISA is irrelevant. Over the years, I've used Emacs on Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, MIPS, ARM and x86 under at least six different operating systems and it works flawlessly on all of them. I never had the chance to confirm that, but I suspect it works very well on IBM zSeries mainframes too.
As with Skype, I wait for the day when another Facebook competitor becomes ubiquitous enough to warrant switching. I am waiting for pretty much anything, so long as it has the market share with friends and family.
I doubt you are the first one ;) .. I was shocked when I discovered this myself.
As the stock has languished at $540? Hardly.
It sounds like your interests and focuses differ from others in this area. I'm not sure why you feel it justifies so much snark.
Google Stars – Upcoming Feature of Chrome
> Nothing seems to prevent the Internet Archive from providing additional backbone, possibly outlasting this web presence[1]. (Odd, archive.org has no separate category for images.)

Working on it. Already have the first collection before the additional images were added.
That's patently wrong. Corporation-level double taxation only applies in the extremely rare instances where the US does not have an income tax treaty with the other country.

We have tax treaties with all nations worth doing business with. Nobody is going to pay China's corporate income tax then U.S. income tax again at the corporate level for a 45-60% bill before it even gets to the shareholders.
Dollar cost averaging only suits to lower volatility a bit, but has nothing to do with returns. This can help you as much as it can hurt you. If you're plunking down significant cash into a single tech stock then I don't think volatility is your main concern.
Ah ha. Thanks for the heads up!

(Looking over the application again now...)
So there's no risk in committing tens of years and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a business owner, Wall Street trader, quant, or a very good engineer?
Project: Highways of the United States of America | Cameron Booth
They're selling the fruits of design and engineering work that happens in the US, and so this is arguably where most of the value creation happens, and that that should be taxed despite the fact that the nominal sale and creation is happening overseas.
I've read quite a few articles about that incident but I still don't get it. One said that it was people who had been promoted then demoted but kept their stock? Here it says they 'negotiated' to keep some stock? Isn't that what a vesting schedule is for?

In the worst case scenario it appears that Pincus and the board saw the writing on the wall that their earnings would (and did) drop after the ipo. Rather than make drastic changes or pursue new strategies rather than farmville clones (which, to be fair, while profitable, apparently have a shelf-life of around 5 years, after which the audience got tired of them and left), they decided to focus on avoiding a bad story. Their priority became stopping a google chef story from happening at the same time their earnings failed to meet expectations.

That still doesn't explain it, however. Google chef and microsoft secretarey becoming millionares is a story. Sub-par engineer/business analyst/game designer becomes millionare after ipo is not. Looking at the small number of people affected and assuming they didn't clawback much more than half the stock, there's no way they got much more than 50m back.

Then the only explanation becomes that they REALLY wanted to give the stock to attract new talent. "Come work for stock we clawed back from the last guy who already vested" is the least appealing job offer I've heard of that doesn't involve poisonous snakes.

Then the only explanation becomes that they were vindictive and did not want someone to profit a lot when they thought they contributed a little and in reality probably did a medium-quality job. Looking at some rants on quora, it seems like they spend a lot of money on a lot of unnecessary things and are just looking to scapegoat at this point.

I still don't really understand, though, and that bothers me.
What about you, IBM?
Well, the most obvious candidate was recently acquired by Facebook, so it might be a few more years.
Maybe. Here's a slightly different perspective. First take the case of ftp'ing/sftp'ing files to a bank.

There are multiple layers of security in sftp - not just the username and password. Source IP is checkec in a stateful way so spoofing is hard even if one somehow manages to get the credentials. Furthermore the files will not be processed unless there is an out-of-band message (typically an email, could be a phone call too ) with certain info also required in very specific format which must match the contents of the file. So there you go. 3 layers of security with one layer being completely out-of-band with the other two is reasonable enough for the risk involved. (There are other measures hard coded e.g. a dollar limit which basically "cap" any fraud but I won't go into those)

Now for the missing (or atleast MIA) transaction you allude to on your blog: Just because you were not told how the money ended up where it did doesn't mean people didn't know. Bankers are steeped in "social engineering" and trained from day one to only give out information required by law and really nothing else.
Whether you use Fedwire or Swift (or really any other RTGS = real-time gross settlement network ) there is always a trail. Always. In your case it was probably Fedwire - and the bank I'm guessing was BofA or maybe Chase. Regardless if the sender's account is an individual account (not business) they are still protected by Reg E (as well as FDIC insurance). Reg E as you may know basically puts the onus of returning the funds to the sender's account on the bank. The problem is the timelines or the lack of it. Since banks are generally allowed upto 30 days (I don't know if 30 days is hardcoded ) in law they take their sweet time in tracing. And when they find out - they almost always do - they deliberately will not share details with you to protect themselves from liability.

The bottom line is ACH/FedWire moves trillions of dollars - hundreds of billions a day - and barring a very small percentage they all work.
My Clojure app originally written to run on EB worked with no issues. The problem was with an old, sprawling "monorail" Rails app that needed a very specific system configuration, including running a daemon or two in addition to the web app itself. I can't remember all the individual issues, but the .ebextensions directory was getting pretty big and complicated.

I finally gave up when I ran into bugs in the Rails provisioning scripts that only appeared on initial deploy (or re-deploy; I forget). I had to patch and overwrite them, which was very brittle, and it was just easier to use Chef to spin custom AMIs exactly as I wanted them.

Having Docker be the common "configure a system to your app's needs" mechanism shields me from all these details about how EB works, and that's exactly what was needed.
Yes, I know. My point is that if they're just going to give the money back in dividends, maybe they're better off trying to gain market share. At some point, having a global market share of 20% means that a lot of software will be written for the other platform first. More eyes means more ad revenue.
The corporate foreign tax credit is even more generous than the FTC available to individuals. They get credit for taxes paid on the dividends (i.e., withholding taxes) and in some cases for the foreign taxes the dividend-paying company paid on its income.
Nope. Try again. They're making higher CPCs and CPMs.
If you deploy a Dockerfile, EB will re-build the image.

Also, by default, EB will do a `docker pull your-image` on each app version deploy. To disable that, include a Dockerrun.aws.json file with the following:

{
"AWSEBDockerrunVersion": "1",
"Image": {
"Update": "false"
}
}

And some more color here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create...

EDIT: Also would point out that EB is using Docker's layer/image caching, so a rebuild does use the local cache (but does do the `docker pull` to check remote for any updates)
I definitely think there is a lot of pump and dump action going on in the software startup world, but then again a huge amount of software engineers are guilty of riding this money wave by association. It might be an artificial economy, which is morally bankrupt, but I can't help but think at times that anything that keeps the blood pumping is good for the overall economy (could very well be wrong there).

Of course, once I go down that rabbit hole I have to start patting government contractors on the back for circulating money at the expense of taxpayers. I guess the overall question is: is an artificial economy better than a stagnant economy?
Obama DOJ prepares to release thousands of those caught up in War on Drugs
> Really, is there such a big difference between a 5" and 4"?

Yes! 5" is enough to watch videos or read on (though 6" would be better). 4" isn't.

/happy Note 2 user.
From a quantitative perspective I cannot fault them right now but from a qualitative perspective...something is rotten in Denmark.

Facebook is not the platform we need, it's the one we deserve right now ;-)
No, traditional milking systems allow more intensive cattle stables than robotic systems. Which doesn't matter in Europe, because the space requirements per cow are a lot higher than the minimum possible. If anything, the robot allows for a less stressful milking and probably "happier" cows.

I can't see any connection between increased use of antibiotics and autonomous milking....
It's actually not unique. More than a dozen countries, including China (see, e.g., http://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-Austria/Local%20Assets/D...), tax worldwide income, and at higher effective rates than the U.S.
The apathy is not a cigarette/e-cig problem, sounds more like a personality trait. A little mindfulness would do our culture good(real practice, not the Time magazine version).

I posit the militancy is a possible result of persecution.

Yes, I am a 2nd class smoking citizen.
We'll carve out ~15 minutes for a brief overview + Q&A during tomorrow's Office Hours: https://plus.google.com/events/ceoe036ugsu6hndr6ncl616gr3k
I miss being able to type "from:X to:Y" to get directions.