skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No upsets is much more likely than any other prediction. Just because you know there will be upsets doesn't mean you know which specific upsets will occur. In fact, it's probably more likely that no upsets occur than one specific set of upsets occur. It's only because there so many ways for upsets to occur (think about combinatorics/entropy), that you're virtually guaranteed to get an upset.

If you're driving down the street, do you think you're more likely to see an ordered license plate (123456) or an unordered license plate (163542)? Obviously unordered plates are more common. But if I ask: are you more likely to see the specific plate 123456 or the specific plate 163542, they are equally likely (even though the second plate has more 'apparent' randomness).
It's not as good as the video implies... still quite easy to get it to glitch out. Notice in the demo video that they flip their hands pretty quickly. if you rotate them slowly things get a bit funky. I guess it's pretty hard to compensate for occluded fingers.
> This is a ridiculous statement. Only around 15% of the country is uninsured and only a small percentage of that number would be "dying" at any given time.

You ought to stop relying on your gut so often and look at actual data. 45k people[1] a year in this country die from lack of healthcare. The only thing ridiculous here is you.

> Central planning has been repeatedly tried and proven to be less successful than the market mechanism we trust with every other sector of our economy.

In regards to healthcare, absolutely false; socialized systems in the world work far better than market based systems, this is simply a fact.

> I'm advocating the government give people subsidies to help them get insurance in this proposed truly free market.

Subsidies are a shit solution to any problem, they don't work in free markets because markets simply raise prices to feed off the subsidies. See college tuition rates.

[1] http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-find...
When too much coding can kill you
Speaking in an established sociolect is not an instance of communication illiteracy. Valleyspeak has been around for decades, and isn't going anywhere.
Me three. Possibly for trying to keep the political pieces at bay. May be a wise move to avoid excessive user involvement.
You have to get a kick out of internet comments. Despite the fact that Amazon was founded in 1994 and did not go live until 1995. One of the comments confesses that "I’ve been an Amazon power shopper since around ’92 or ’93..."
I really liked slack but in the end we went for hipchat for a two main reasons.

1. It's 25% of the cost (although that has now shifted). This may not be a big deal for small teams but if you want to have 100 users on either service, the difference is between $2,400 a year or $9,600 a year. That's a big difference.
2. Hipchat has a self hosted option in the works which should be available within a month or two (per them). This is essential for any company that deals with potential PHI on their IM systems. Slack says they plan to offer a self hosted option but it's a long way out.

Those are two things slack just couldn't overcome, beyond the fact that I generally liked slack better (it's prettier, much better message searching, better integrations, etc). The fact that hipchat also has voice chat is a big plus too though we've not found it reliable. Presumably at some point it will get better though and make it a more valuable feature.
Amazon is a retailer that has used the fact that it doesn't have to pay taxes, and was first, to dominate the book distribution business, driving brick-and-mortar business to close all over the country. To dismiss the fact that it is openly abusing that position to pressure major publishers to conform to its business needs as trivial is, at the least, short-sighted.
It's not the same. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807003
To me, anti-competitive means Amazon colluding with or sabotaging a "competitor" such as Barnes&Noble[1] or Apple iBooks[2].

The dispute between Amazon and Hatchette is a fight between a retailer and a supplier. Same as Costco/Walmart and a manufacturer, or a broadcast network NBC with NFL football, or TV series production and an actor's contract renewal. All negotiating parties use whatever market leverage they have to get the most favorable terms possible.

Hatchette can still sell via B&N, iBooks, ebay, open their own e-commerce site, etc. Amazon's hardball tactics are not barring any of those options for the book publisher.

[1]http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/j-k-rowling?store=allproduct...
[2]http://www.apple.com/ibooks/
But it lacks a Slave, so it does not contains the same connotation.
> but we all know how it ends...

billion dollar companies?
Direct link to blog post: http://blog.avast.com/2014/05/26/avast-forum-offline-due-to-...
Snapshot feature is now available for all vultr.com accounts for free
Enough people are getting upset about this that I expect both sides to make apologetic noises and shuffle towards a resolution at an increased pace. As far as finding out what really went down, or what the resolution ends up being I am doubtful at best.
Inventing the Unix "sudo" command
Why Reporting On Scientific Research May Warp Findings
The User Testing Survival Guide for UI Designers
Strong and weakly typed don't mean what you think they do. Strong typing is not about the expressiveness of a type system, rather about it having type safety, being memory safe and having static type-checking, and not having unsafe type conversions (and to a lesser extent implicit type conversions) and unions. What you meant to say was Rust's type system is more expressive then that of Go's.
Blogspam with no link to the original.

Also, that was a lot of words with basically no content:

"We publish books. We think books are special. We have not yet reached
an agreement with Amazon to keep selling books to them, but we will
eventually.

Also, we think this is all Amazon's fault and we're not going to consider their
proposal to pay our authors in the meantime until after we resolve the
contract dispute."
Task automation with npm run
> How is having to re-write the abstraction layer a "cost of abstraction"?

Because in my experience, it's never as clean cut as "this abstraction doesn't work, lets go re-write it". The process typically goes more like:

* Identify that there's a problem, start trying to understand the code in the abstraction in order to identify the problem.

* Fork the abstraction code and make changes to it.

* Attempt to push changes upstream because "if I have the problem, other people have the problem as well", plus all the work that comes with pushing changes upstream.

* Repeat the previous three steps for a period of time ranging from months to years

* Find another implementation of the abstraction and repeat the previous four steps again.

* Finally give up and then re-write the whole abstraction in a way which actually works for your needs.

Land mines are also a leaky abstraction of the facilitation of forward movement as you have pointed out, but I have a hard time getting the "technical debt explosion in potentia" out of my mind.
It might be a good thing if university graduates from computer science programs could apply for software engineering positions... Consequently, most educated hiring managers don't hire for engineers, which brings us back to square one.
There are also plenty of American firms that won't give you a phone call or offer competitive wages. Silicon Valley strip mined its own local talent pool long ago, so they have to do well at courting potential relocation candidates if they aren't able to poach from the other valley companies.

Finding a job anywhere else is still a right pain in the ass. Entering through the back door using your personal network is still the best way. Otherwise, the process of resume submission to phone screen to technical screen to in-person interview to negotitations to at-will employee is horrible, and no company does it well from end to end. Being dropped without any further contact can happen at any stage in the process. I was flown out to Denver for a half-day, multipart interview ordeal and after I returned, it was as though I no longer existed to them, which was odd, because I thought I did rather well at the interview, at least enough for someone there to return an e-mail or tell me that I was cut.

It isn't being American that excepts SV from the rule, but the supply and demand for technical specialists. In that context, perhaps the Canadian program might not raise your pay directly, but it might make it easier for you to get hired in Canada.
> "No one owns a car" is not a nice transition, no matter how awesome you think it is in the latest novel you read about able-bodied and pretty 20-somethings. Public transportation really sucks in a lot of places precisely because making public transportation awesome gets less priority than a bunch of other things, like demanding that people get to bring their pets or bikes on board, or the homeless people using it as a place to sleep.

...

> Buses could be awesome, if they were managed like Google buses. I would love to take one of those to work. But look at all the grief they get from the left. Grand ideas for re-imagining society will face opposition from places you would never have imagined.

I think this is all a bit over the top. Many cities already exist that function very well substantially without private cars. Central London, although rather a pleasant place, is not a science fiction utopia exclusively filled with nubile twenty somethings, but nevertheless it functions overwhelmingly on other means of transport - buses, cycling, the underground, and taxis. I'm not aware of it being particularly unique, either. What you're suggesting as difficult or intractable problems are frankly rather minor. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've only ever come across the occasional over-chatty drunk.

Even taking into account the whole of London, including the much more suburban outer sections, where you really do need a car to get around, 40% of households do not own cars [1]

The real issue with public transport isn't the homeless, it's that it tends towards a hub and spokes model which works very well for commuting, but quickly becomes awkward for non-standard journeys. Driverless cars would add an excellent complementary element to the combined transport system. I expect that in a couple of decades the number of households that don't own cars will have gone up to 60%, meaning pretty much universal in the centre, and I don't anticipate that will create a dystopia.

[1] http://www.uncsbrp.org/driving.htm
That's smart. But still, it's crazy that something like multiple organizations would require you to do this on your end. There are better options out there :)
> position AGENCY MODEL

Google gives ten hits for "position agency model." Since you understand the concept so well can you explain it to me?
Pivot with PaaS: How PaaS Will Help Your Business Survive and Thrive
Enabling Cross-Lingual Conversations in Real Time
It seems there's no original online source? At least the current url includes the actual statement. We changed it from http://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2014/05/hachette-answ..., which weirdly inlines bits of it.
With the new Get Started page [1], you can change the class names for the grid columns. Here's an example. [2]

[1] http://purecss.io/start/
[2] http://purecss.io/start/?cols=12&prefix=.col-&sm=35.5em&md=4...
hey Mike

perfect - emailed you :)
.NINJA domains just become available for registration
Yep, that was fixed in Pure 0.4.2.
Any links to more info about Rust compiler plugins? That sounds really interesting.
Starting up outside of traditional tech hubs
Why Your Laundry Is Filthier Than You Think
My perspective is that Apple really cares about their users, and only cares about developers inasmuch as it affects their users.

Unfortunately I'm a little jaded by some experiences I had with Apple developers at WWDC. Last year I tried working with a dev there to set up an XCode Bot to make Ad Hoc builds. He basically said we were doing it wrong and would have to use developer signed (not Ad Hoc) builds for QA. I asked him if they had ever talked anyone outside Apple about how they do CI or QA on apps before they came up with Bots... painful silence.
Interview with Alex Pentland: Can We Use Big Data to Make Society Better?
From September 2013, Amazon has 29% of consumer book spending while Barnes & Noble has 21%. Walmart also has a sizable share. We tend to fixate on online, but a lot of people still buy books in stores, and Amazon has 0% of that market.

Source: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailin...
How does this affect renewals? If I'm on autopilot with monthly credit card charges, I don't think much about a service from month to month.

But if, in the 11th month, I have to think about a renewal and its cash outlay, you are forcing me to think about the value of your service, and what your competitors have come up with in the last year.
The important thing to understand is that there is a difference between having a monopoly (which is not illegal) and abusing it (which is). That's what tying is about. If you have a monopoly, tying is an example of monopoly abuse. It's an attempt to leverage the monopoly in one market (e.g. operating systems) into a new market (e.g. web browsers).

> People who already own Apple iOS products can easily obtain apps from companies that aren't Apple. They just have to buy an Android device first.

The problem with claiming that Android apps are competition for iOS apps is that to get competition for a $1 app you have to replace a $500 device. That isn't reasonable. It's like claiming Google Fiber is competition for Comcast because you can move to Kansas.
I wrote a case about the Leap for my MIT Entrepreneurship class and interviewed a bunch of the founding team.

These guys are great -- but they still havent found their killer app. Thats partly because the tech is ahead of its time -- but the vision is clearly excellent.

David Holz the founder is the brains behind this, has been working on a better UI since he was literally a kid in Florida. See:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/david-holzs-...

Their CEO is the founder of Quattro Wireless founder, an ex-Apple exec Andy Miller who is a really smart guy. SO they do really have a good team, and lots of VC backing.

Perhaps this new skeletal tracking stuff will help this really catch on. Best of luck to LEAP!
UWaterloo grad in the US here - I'd go back in a heartbeat if the salaries were comparable and the market healthier (i.e., a substantial number of players paying US-comparable salaries, so you're not golden-handcuffed).
A little bit of explanation: <name>abad could be loosely translated as "a place founded by <name>". Abad is a popular suffix which makes place names from people's names. Ali, Mohammad, Hasan and Hoseyn are the most popular male first names in Iran. To put it in perspective, out of a population of ~76 million people (so ~38 million men), there are ~2.3 million people named Ali. It is not a new phenomenon, people have been playing it safe with their children's names for centuries. As a result, a lot of founders of towns and villages were named Ali or Mohammad. Having so many Aliabads and Mohammadabads is only a natural result.
> Same as Costco/Walmart and a manufacturer

Walmart, of course, being notorious for using its huge market position to force costs onto suppliers. That's part of how it gets the low prices: because if you sell at retail, and you don't agree your product should costs what Walmart thinks it should cost, you find yourself locked out of a giant part of the economy.
Red Hat at ISO C++ Standards Meeting 2014
I've never played with C# or Xamarin but this tool set is looking really good, specially the F# thing.

Anyone care to share their stories about F#? it appears to be a nice functional language.
Find something that runs a 'normal' distro like debian. Have a generic but tiny machine.

Why would you need a specific hardware community?
ظهرت الان نتيجة الشهادة الابتدائية محافظة كفر الشيخ ترم ثانى 2014
You need a smoothing library. I welcome our low level access, you can always pile what you need on top, the converse is not possible.

What would be nice is some intelligence pushed down into the Leap, like the ability to run Lua or JVM code directly so that realtime multidevice is possible.
As someone who works at a SaaS company, the annual prepay has one downside: it narrows the middle portion of the funnel (qualifying leads) compared to month-to-month.

Of course, the biggest selling point of SaaS over licensed software is service: not having to manage your software (and often hardware) is a huge pain reliever for the buyer.

The other selling point is lack of financial commitment (at least with month-to-month): you do not have to buy into the service for the next whole year. Instead, you can try and see how it fits into your business. If you see no fit or can't get value, you can cut the loss and move on. You cannot do this with the annual prepay model.

Time and again, I've been surprised how customers who were unwilling to commit to a year ended up prepaying for a year when the time for renewal came. If you are forcing the annual prepay model to your customers, you are kicking this type of "cautious at first but eventually valuable" customers off your sales funnel.

A popular way to combat this is free trials (anywhere between two week and ninety days). This is a decent solution, but I've seen first hand that whether one is paying for a SaaS strongly influences usage/penetration into the customer organization.

edit: minor edits for clarification
This isn't only a problem in the tech industry. There has always been a great interest in controlling people. As technology (in the more general sense of the term) advances, and as we learn more about humans and how they work, these mechanisms for control have become more insidious.

My recent favorite example, which I read about in The Willpower Instinct, is companies like ScentAir [0] that create "engineered" smells intended to subconsciously entice people into going into stores or buying products.

[0] http://www.scentair.com
Fwd: HipChat is now free for unlimited users. Awesome.
What do you consider a "real-time" transaction?
I believe that both Reading Rainbow and Book-it (and of course my parents' support of the programs and of reading in general) were extremely influential to my viewing reading as a socially normal and desirable thing, a viewpoint that was critical to my continued reading through the socially tumultuous years between childhood and adulthood. It rings true to me that I didn't love books until much later when I was able to read really good ones (with the possible exception of Animorphs, which was a great series...), but I really think the goal doesn't have to be to get kids to love books, but rather to get them to avoid following their peers in hating or fearing them.
Here we go again.

What apps have you developed on Android lately?

Or your opinion is just based on what you read on the internet?
You're welcome to post your own analysis of the situation, supported by verifiable facts.
I don't think the parent was talking about traffic signals, just a side road with a give way/yield.

If both roads are congested then "always let everybody in" and "never let anybody in" will both result in deadlock.

Another example is the pedestrian crossing outside my house. There's no traffic lights. Usually cars will drive right past and you (as a pedestrian) have to wait for a gap in the traffic, but sometimes they'll be nice and stop (especially for children).
Introducing Socket.io 1.0
There is a better model. I'm personally partial to Slashdot's old system. Only randomly selected people get upvote / downvote privileges on a given day, and the rating mechanism has a brief explanation attached: "funny", "insightful" etc. or "offtopic", "troll" etc. so high ranking, or downvoted, comments can be sorted or filtered by type.

Metafilter also has a great system where posts and comments can be marked as a "favorite", which is an upvote-only system. To show disagreement, the reader actually has to participate in the thread rather than just making a lazy downvote. And participation for all users is treated equally by the software, no matter how many favorites you have or don't. Even though Metafilter skews heavily to the left, there are still some conservative users who regularly comment because they know their posts will not be downvoted to oblivion without any response.

I think downvotes overall are a terrible idea, though HN has a much better implementation* than Reddit. If a site is going to have them, there should be a way to force the downvoter to give a reason. Otherwise, the site is just subtly creating a certain level of circlejerks and groupthink. There will always be trolls and assholes but a "report to moderator" button can handle those.

* -- HN is better in most ways, but I do dislike the semi-hiding, faint grey text, of unpopular comments, especially when the grey comment has responses. Someone's opinion may be wrong or may be unpopular, but if this comment leads to dialogue, then the comment should be presented in the same format as the others. If one of the goals of your site is to encourage conversation, then the people who create unpopular or inaccurate comments should be somewhat valued as this is one of the better ways to get a conversation started online.
You mean this one? Or are you talking about something else?
http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/
I'd be behind a 3-2-1 Contact kickstarter... figure out who owns the rights and lets make it happen :)
It's difficult for me to empathize with publishers in the same way that the author has done. Wasn't this entire situation created by book publisher's love for walled gardens and DRM?

Concentrated power seems to me to be the logical result of that kind of strategy.
Only "underprivileged" schools will get the content for free, which implies they intend to sell the software to schools, which implies business.

You're not supposed to be able to kickstart a business. You shouldn't get a pass just because you're Reading Rainbow and levar burton.
I think you parsed that wrong. I don't think it was "(abuse of) (position agency model)" but "(abuse of position) (agency model)". The lack of punctuation isn't helpful, and the exact argument being made is unclear, though.
I consider myself to be an above-average software developer, but I found the hiring processes at many start-ups (Wave, Freshbooks, Tophat, etc) in Toronto would reject me to weird reasons. E.g.:

- I had never used the functools library in Python before, so because I couldn't answer trivia questions about it, my Python skills were low. (FYI: You can read the entire documentation on the functools library in ~3 minutes). And this was after an initial interview where I apparently got the trivia question that 'no one' gets (which I'll note was actually more relevant to general Python knowledge as it was about keyword args).

- I had 'amazing technical skill' but because I didn't have enough side-projects to prove that I "love the web" enough to work with them.

I eventually ended up in my current position of lead developer at an early-stage startup, but it frustrates me a bit when I hear about a lack of talent while at the same time feeling like my own experience is that startups are being very picky in their hiring practices (i.e. looking for any chink in the armor, no matter how small, and then flat-out rejecting someone because of it). If they were rejecting me for such those kinds of reasons, then either:

1. They had someone better than me that they decided to hire instead.

2. They really aren't that hard up to talent, and decided to wait for someone "better"[1] to come along.

[1] For various definitions of "better," as in this case it just means jumps through the hiring hoops correctly.