skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Empathy in the Education Machine
A short documentary about empathy and the private joys and lives of people at college.
That they attempted to verify and still came up with the wrong answer just reinforces their fault.

They did a great job of handling the subsequent emergency, but I see no way around blaming them for it happening in the first place.
My housemate is a regular user (not power user) and a known potterer. He loves figuring things out and patching things together, and wanted to try a linux desktop, so I set him up with one. He didn't want me to help him out, as he wanted to find things out for himself, to try it without me coming in and 'just fixing it'. I watched him struggle for months, then he admitted defeat and went back to Windows. He still (theatrically) shivers if we discuss the topic.

I've seen this experience is seen in the wider desktop space - the only time a free desktop is suitable for low support usage is when it's so locked down it's not really a proper desktop environment anymore; that locked down, it's more like an appliance. When something goes wrong with a free desktop, it's not just a matter of figuring out what went wrong, but which are the right steps to fix it. This error on Gnome, will this fix I found for Fedora work on Debian? Is the problem in Gnome desktop or in the distro?

My colleague once had a problem with something in Ubuntu, and found that there were four different solutions depending on which of the last four releases were in use. When your changing releases are years apart (Windows) this is less of a problem than when they're 6 months apart. I was pleasantly surprised when I loaded up ubuntu 14.04 and saw that it looked the same as before.

Note that I'm not in the enterprise environment, only that I've had to help a lot of people with changes from OS version to version, and understand the need for stability... which is a reason why the path Win8 took particularly puzzles me, given Microsoft's strong position in the business world. I think that the free desktops are getting there, but haven't quite arrived yet.
Company names, product names, code names...they are neither more nor less strange or meaningless in #bigdata than anywhere else.
> Everything Google does is done for our users. Your happiness is always the first priority, even above Ads ... You are not product; you are our customers!

Imagine a farmer who cares very much about his animals, so much so that he is willing to accept a lower profit margin for the sake of his animals' well-being. The animals' happiness is always his first priority. I'd probably buy milk and meat from such a farmer.

It's not necessarily a bad experience to be a product. When winter comes, being a product of an ethical company is probably much more convenient than being a free, wild animal. But that doesn't change the fact that you're a product. You're just a happy, well-fed product. Sooner or later, it's off to the butcher with you.

The only sense in which users of Google's free services might be construed as "customers" is that we're purchasing those services with our fingers, eyeballs and personal information. Maybe that's true. But even if it is, that doesn't change the fact that Google takes our payment (fingers and eyeballs) and uses it in turn to pay advertisers. As long as Ads are in the picture, we can never be 100% customers. We'll always be both product and customer, as @seizethecheese said in a different comment.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" has been repeated so much on the internet that it has become a sort of cliche. But just because it's a cliche doesn't mean that it doesn't contain any grains of truth.
If it's Showdown (which, given your description, it must be) then I love you. /dex was incredibly helpful when wending my way through Battle Maison.
For all of those that have asked the question, "Why don't you trust Google with your data?" Replace Google with Alibaba and you have your answer. Google has set a dangerous precedent in in how much data it has asked users to provide based on the assumption that their actions based their best intentions would be the rule and not the exception. It was a matter of time.
Why does one choice of default "destroy intent," while the other doesn't? Why do you assume the default setting of allowing tracking is the correct one?
"Tokutek claim to improve MongoDB performance 20x. Unclear if this also mean lose 20x as many documents." ... ahaha .

Can anyone elaborate why he said so?
From what I could tell, he made most of his money on an app that was using a trademarked name from a video game, I'm surprised no one went after him for that.
Exercise in the Morning Is Improving My Work Performance
Billions of text messages.
I can't tell if it's satire or not.
Inventor of a Smart Air Conditioner Will Get a Cool Half Million
You can get the same effect as goto without using the dreaded goto statement by combining a while loop and a large switch. Instead of 'goto nextstate', you just assign the state to the variable that controls the switch and fall through the loop one more time. A switch is basically syntactic sugar for a jump table.* This seems to be a fairly standard pattern when implementing, say, a virtual machine.

* Of course, with optimization, the switch may turn into something completely different.
I wouldn't say this drop in unique linking domains says a whole lot about the fall of valleywag - what domains dropped off, and at what rate? Is it just because of a certain story thread acquiring huge waves of links across other gawker networks or other blogs responding to topics and linking in the course of discussion?

My guess would be that gawker pushed some of their partners/syndicates toward other more profitable Gawker properties once VW got rolling and it was clear how much traffic/revenue they could expect from the current valleywag style & audience.

Were other gawker properties launched at the time of this drop?
> The original agreement was carefully hashed out between advertisers and browser vendors with the understanding that only a small percentage of users would be opting out.

Source? How can those parties decide for users how many of them will opt out?
Just a nitpick but when mom&dad know about the sextorsion it is over - every kid should hear "Calm down, it's not your fault". The dangerous situation is when the kid comply because it is afraid/ashamed to go to mom/dad.

Also I am very skeptical about using "protect the children" as a policy justification.

If there is policy of not notifying the child abuse suspects then every request from the prosecution office made will also have - probably the person is also an online predator.

What is wrong with the concept of giving affirmative oath in front of the judge and make him sign warrant and if he deems necessary to sign also the temporary gag order.
In cases where Google can't find an ad that's relevant to the user, do they show no ads?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/dn265021(v=vs.85)...

Wonder if anyone used it.
The value of using third party recruiters is that most companies don't need a full time recruiter until they are fairly large. Most companies usually only have a few positions to fill, or go through short hiring sprints, both of which are more conducive to third party recruiters.

That being said, a lot companies will avoid recruiters if they can. That is why you will often find that companies have referral bonus programs.
We log into Apple's developer panel on your behalf in order to complete some of the required steps. Your credentials will not be stored.

Yaaaaa.....no. This is extremely dangerous and without knowing anything about your source code, there is no way in hell I'm putting my credentials in there. In fact, this is borderline phishing.
Often if you pay for the product, you are still the product. Your information is still being shipped off to all kinds of third parties and lots of ads still.
More importantly, why is "on by default" supposed to be "bad" when the entire system is designed to protect people's privacy?

Microsoft don't sound like the problem.
I wonder if they're identical from a binary point of view, or if this was being used as some form of steganography...
What's It Like to Consult for The Big Bang Theory?
Wait...people still use Yahoo? :)
Microsoft apparently made a deal with DEC after some Digital employees notified their senior management of how similar NT and VMS was. Microsoft paid them 65-100 million dollars (src: http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re... ).

As Steve Yegge says in "Done and Gets Things Smart," Cutler and Carmack are the types of engineers that companies file lawsuits over when they are hired away. This is because they generate a lot of extremely visible value -- most programmers are not perceived by legal departments to be worth suing over like that.
Replacement for Logitech UltraX: Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750
Or use them in the wrong alphabet! ピカ中とか。。。
Hamming, "You and Your Research" (1995) [video]
I am looking for someone to work with me on MASSOLIT (www.massolit.co.uk).

We're building the world's biggest library of video 'mini-lectures' in the arts.

The perfect co-founder (SALES) would be:

- based in London, UK
- a nice person
- obsessed with education
- really good at sales & marketing

Interested in hearing a bit more? Get in touch!
My experience with MongoDB (granted, this was five years ago) was with it losing half my dataset for no particular reason, so I can certainly relate with the quote (and found it very funny).
I was ready for someone to take that "If you're not paying..." line to task. As this was on google plus I just assumed it was by some opensource project member. They've got a convincing retort built in. It would take all of two sentences.

I edited my post to not be smarmy here, but this is just flat out wrong and I don't need to reiterate how google works. Brian, I believe you believe what you wrote. Until you and your privacy concerned co-workers get together to surface a "delete all stored data on me and opt out" button, I'm going to think you've let your close relationship with google warp your perspective and allow you to draw faulty conclusions on how far up your attitudes permeate.
It's a good concept, but posting using a third-party website is an inconvenience.

A simpler way of doing could be for the user to just add hashtags to their statuses (e.g. #12h or #7d), and have the service read and delete statuses accordingly.
Hi mbesto, author of this tool here. I definitely understand your concern. I would encourage people to change their password before/after using the tool if they want to play it safe -- but you do have my word that we don't store the credentials at all (not in our logs either).

Initially I started working on this to be used just by our customers. After chatting with other iOS devs, we saw that messing up Push Certificates was such a common problem that we decided to make it open to everyone.
...allow notification to happen or go to magistrate judges to seek either gag orders or search warrants, which typically are issued under seal for a fixed period of time, delaying notification

Yes, whine-away, when law enforcement is required to get an adult in the room before they go all Rambo, "obviously the terrorists have won".
I think you are falling into the trap of thinking you can usually recover from an exception. Exceptions are usually caused by one of two things:

1) system error (no more DB connections, hard drive full, etc)

2) a bug

neither of these are recoverable, you just need to stop the task at hand and notify someone that the situation needs to be fixed. Trying to handle it and recover is usually a fools errand that results in hiding the problem

There are cases that you do want to handle exceptions. In these cases, yes catch the exception and handle it. But these cases are the 10% case, hence the default behavior of making the caller handle the exception isn't desirable.

This link from 2003 articulates the point better than I can:
http://www.artima.com/intv/handcuffs.html
> Even J2ME is more compatible with its big brother than Android.

Are you serious?

J2ME is even more crippled than Android's Java (no reflection, no Swing, no AWT and stuck in Java 1.4).

J2ME has been dead for more than half a decade and we have Android to thank for that. Good riddance.
I am consulio heh heh
> whether the population declined precipitously (no dispute here either)

No, that is definitely one of the items under dispute. Lipo claims the population never reached that high a peak and did not substantially decline until after outsiders came.

> I can't see any support for the idea that the island was doing fine until outsiders bought war, disease, and slavery. As far as I can see, the war, disease, and slavery period followed European contact, but the initial population decline from a peak of around 15,000 down to 2-3,000 happened before European contact.

Lipo says that the claim that the population followed that sort of trajectory was essentially an early rough guess not based on actual data. A popular one, so you might find it in multiple sources, but a guess nonetheless. In response, quoting from that last link I gave before:

> Finally, Diamond ignores field research reporting dated domestic habitation sites (see Hunt and Lipo 2009 for discussion). When the habitations are plotted in fifty-year intervals, the number of those occupied clearly shows that the first and only sustained decline, as a relative measure of the population, began only in the first interval following European contact. Before contact the data show a population that is growing and stabilizing, as reflected in their habitations across the landscape. There is no evidence of population decline, let alone “collapse” until after European contact. Indeed, there is direct, abundant evidence that population numbers grew, stabilized, and then fell only after European contact beginning in 1722.

(source: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-m... )

> Even if it was external, though, why is "land which isn't being overrun by invaders" different from any other resource?

That story would lead to a very different conclusion, especially if you want to turn the story into an analogy for how we should treat the earth as a whole. Should we worry more about building a Space Defense network to protect us from aliens and not so much about preserving forests? :-)
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote

Need to have working experience with:

Node.js + Express

Sequelize + MySQL

Amazon AWS - Elastic Beanstalk (worker & web server) + SQS (Simple Queue Service) + SES (Simple Email Service)

I am founding a startup in Brazil that provides a system for restaurants to create a loyalty program through Facebook’s checkin feature. Basically it is a Facebook App that the end user sign up and we monitor their check-ins, creating vouchers so they can claim small prizes on the restaurants.

A developer created the MVP and will continue to manage the development (as CTO), but he can no longer work as many hours as necessary. So we decided to hire a freelancer to create all the code (from small front-end changes, to whole new features, and all in between).

We want to hire someone per hour, giving at first small projects, then, with time and trust, bigger tasks. This is intendend to be a longtime professional relationship. As we are an unfunded startup, we can't afford expensive rates.

email at profile
Very few users adjust the default settings of their software regardless of what they are.
Mongo got a bad rap a few years ago about taking somewhat liberal stance about the integrity of the data stored inside and during sharding/replication.

There were personal accounts about lots of lost/corrupted data.
Ambient Proximity Is The Next Phase Of Location Sharing
Sell in May
I can't believe this is (currently) the top post.

You've made an egregious false equivalency here. I don't care if the people I interact with individually or personally know that I am pregnant. I care that some company I've never heard of is deducing I am pregnant from information I'd like to be private, and then subsequently selling and doing who-knows-what with that knowledge.

>If you think it's easy for people to find out that someone is pregnant now, it was absolutely effortless in 1714.

Was it "absolutely effortless" in 1714 for an employee at a company in China to find out a woman in France was pregnant? Because THAT would be equivalent to what the author of the article is discussing. Or even to make it local: would the sellers in the town market know my personal interest if I didn't tell them? No, they would not. At least, not without espionage, which is essentially what a lot of the "big data" surrounding targeted advertising amounts to.

>In the past there was almost no privacy for anyone.

This is a massive canard. You are taking privacy to mean "not being spotted/recognized/tracked by people around you in daily life" but that is not "privacy" as the author or almost anyone defines it because the privacy issues of today are unique to today. Not only is privacy of the present fundamentally different from the past because of technology, but privacy in this context is about the privacy between individuals and corporations.

>The only thing stopping us is our own desire to participate in services and online communities designed specifically to collect and broadcast information about ourselves.

As others have pointed out, it seems like you didn't read the article. You cannot opt out without becoming Other.
In case anyone goes searching the source for this comment right away before reading it the whole way through on Hacker News, it says at the bottom that it will only show up 50% of the time, so if you don't see it the first time, keep refreshing the page until it shows up in the source.
The forced menu fade is a poor design choice in Windows too. They completely ignore the Windows appearance/performance settings, where you can disable pointless menu effects that are just a waste of time.
Second only to Google in terms of desktop web traffic, if you believe Comscore: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/3/comS...

Roughly the size of Facebook and LinkedIn combined.
governments are guaranteed to break their own laws whenever it's most convenient for them...It needs security so pointlessly difficult to break through that it'd be cheaper and easier to do analog surveillance.

In that case, you also need "altruistic DRM" -- otherwise private data gets into the wrong hands and bad actors do with it what they will. You're sounding like a loud disagreement in tone, but the words themselves actually spell out strong support for my idea.
I used to feel that blocking online ads was freeloading, but I am increasingly convinced that the online ads are a failed experiment and it's our duty to kill them -- especially when the industry can't even follow through on watered-down self-regulation like DNT.

The crazy thing is that major websites like Yahoo don't even know what ads they are serving. And increasingly online ads are an attack vector for viruses and malware. In January Yahoo was serving malware via their online ads.[1] And in February Google did the same.[2]

And of course there are the major privacy issues with companies tracking us online. I understand that online publishing is important and we clearly need a strong press, but publishing really needs to find a new business model. Online ads are not the solution.

[1]: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/05/tech/yahoo-malware-attack/inde....

[2]: http://labs.bromium.com/2014/02/21/the-wild-wild-web-youtube....
They might face devastating consequences like fines of hundreds of millions of dollars.
My kids recently created a few hugelkultur gardens at home. It's a great project because you get to see both the growth and decomposition occur simultaneously.
thanks! this is a great explanation.
Awesome, this is exactly what I was too lazy to Google and dig up on my own. The plan pretty much shoots itself in the foot before it even leaves the gates.
It's just another instance of the Supreme Court shaving the (fairly clear and simple) wording of the 4th Amendment even thinner.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

So, now your roomie (or whatever) can tell a cop that they can search. The reasonably clear 4th Amendment has come to mean something entirely different in the hands of the legal profession. Who does this benefit? Lawyers and law enforcement, mostly. It's unmannerly for me to search my wife's purse without asking her and getting consent. Why should the cops have this special dispensation from mannerliness, and reasonable behavior?
Edit the comment once or twice then delete it? They may keep full history though, who knows.
800 million credit cards on file.
Meanwhile, all emails older than 180 days are still considered "legally abandoned" and any government agency can look at them with a simple statement saying they are relevant to an investigation.

Does anyone know if user notifications are being sent when those emails are accessed too?
The GZ file is only 1.7GB, I imagine a densely-packed model would almost fit on a machine with 8GB of RAM, which is surprising.

http://www.statmt.org/lm-benchmark/
FYI, if you don't want Yahoo ads to track you, they offer an opt-out. https://info.yahoo.com/privacy/asia/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/...

You can opt-out of pretty much all the major ad networks at once, in fact: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/?partnerId=1

It's been like that for years. I'd submit that as evidence that the ad industry is willing and able to accommodate people who don't want to be tracked on an opt-out basis.
Robocoin announces Bitcoin bank
I think that the author is saying that the actors appeared 'blandly unaware' to Truman, not that they were , in fact, 'blandly unaware'.
This is by far the strangest way I've ever been quoted in a published story. I still vote aliens.
I think the simple answer is that Valleywag's primary domain is now valleywag.gawker.com instead of valleywag.com. Here's a screenshot from the same tool that shows the new primary domain trending upwards: http://i.imgur.com/dLpcEZP.png
Its a good idea to first find where your customers hang out. Generally this would be at a handful of forums. The next step is to hang at those forums and mingle with the community. After a while you can approach people directly or start a forum thread talking about your idea and to get feedback on whether people would find it useful.
Solid analysis.

What I want to know is... what exactly is enforceable, in this specific case?

The reason that I ask is that, Carmack has stated that nothing he has worked on has been patented ("No work I have ever done has been patented." [1]), so, presumably, there is nothing to enforce in that area with regard to code or algorithms.

Also, Carmack has publicly discussed many VR details in technical blog posts and demonstrations, but to my knowledge, we have not seen ZeniMax attempt to prevent these discussions from occurring (i.e., Cease and Desist). Presumably, those details were not viewed as critical to this discussion, but it is an interesting point to note.

I suspect that concepts and processes could be covered under trade secret IP law, but in the case of software in specific, it would seem the safer bet to have patents in place if possible (but again, according to Carmack, he has not worked on patentable work.) The question here is, "If ZeniMax saw potential IP to enforce, then why didn't they attempt to protect it via patents?"

I am officially raising the grellas [2] Bat Signal. I would love to read his thoughts on this topic in general.

[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/461918500307472384

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas
SpaceX wins court injunction to block US Air Force buying Russian rockets