skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For all the browbeating about erosion of privacy, I have yet to come across practical, consumer-proof solutions

Agreed. And with few technical options, the solutions must be legal.
Ok, but large corporations are supposed to be able to avoid human centric mistakes with good operations workflows that provide checks and balances in their pipeline.

I would assume MS is not shipping products directly from the engineering lab to the factory, so for something glaring to get all the way to the customer then there is something wrong in their process that failed to correct for human error.
It's just another step in a stochastic optimization algorithm.
Except it depends on that address being previously used. Otherwise people can attack it by entering a shorter prefix leading to another wallet. If I know you're gonna send to 1234567890, I'll go register 1234567899, so if you just type in 12345, it hits my account.
The way game input works compared to OS input is very _very_ different.

Games go through a more direct mode of user input (directX) whereas the OS has to take into account that where your clicking can do a million different things (basically games take -almost- exclusive use of your mouse/keyboard). This becomes even more problematic when it's in a drawing application and they're now running math over your input to figure out exactly what you meant.

I'm with you though. They really shouldn't have come this far with screwing up the latency on the pen again (this fixed it on the surface 2 after talking to gabe last time as well...)
I already have metal :(
The big question is: how do you discover and identify a good b2b problem that needs solving in the first place.
Meldium (YC W13) is hiring full-time and intern business ops
Meldium (YC W13) is hiring full-time employees and interns to help us scale our business operations. We are building a modern Identity Management platform for companies of all sizes, and we need your help to bring it to as many organizations as possible.

You will be Meldium's chief hustler. You will work directly with the CEO to grow and improve our sales pipeline: from lead generation to qualification to trial to conversion and retention. You’ll create deep and interesting content for our blog, work with our partners to feature Meldium’s 1,300+ app integrations, and seek out novel ways to spread the word about our new features.

You will not be a sleazy enterprise software sales bro - we build a low-touch, self-service product that people love to use.

We are looking for candidates to work from our offices in the Civic Center in beautiful San Francisco. We offer excellent compensation, generous health benefits, and substantial equity to full-time employees.

If you are hard-working, data-driven, and ready to rid the world of passwords and create the future of how identity works on the internet, we want to talk to you. Tell us why you’re amazing at jobs@meldium.com - every email will receive a response from one of the Meldium founders within 7 days.
Why General-Purpose Programming Languages Suck For Hardware Design
So when Apple lets people test out a new language, and the author notes important, but not universally demanded features, the tone is "It's amazing how awesome Apple is. Can't wait to see how it works out."

When MS does something not wholly different, there's a bunch of "HarrrrUMPH! They should have got this fixed already. It's such an obviously easy thing. If they were half the company or any open source community was, they would try to create something like a programming language!!"

Those contentious bones.
Interestingly they don't mention helmets and hair as one possible contributor of the gender gap in bicycle ridership (and motorcycles too).

Bicycling is an activity where you should be wearing a helmet for safety, and this is at odds with styling your hair in the morning since that helmet with mess up many styles of longer hair.

However, that being said, this data comes from city bikesharing services, which often don't involve helmet usage.

I also wonder how much clothing choices impact ridership. Unisex clothing choices (pants, shorts) are more convenient for bicycle riding than skirts and dresses.

I'm curious, if you normalize the data to discount women who spend a lot of time on their appearance (particularly their hair) and discount the percentage of women who are not wearing unisex clothes, do the numbers more closely hit a 50-50 distribution.

Lastly, I'd love to see what data Google has on bicycle ridership for Google Bikes on its Mountain View campus (relative to the ratio of men-to-women at Google of course)
Yeah, git's default config also corrupts files by playing with line endings. Meaning the hash of a file on my Windows disk is different than on Linux. Meaning my strings are now shorter/longer. It confuses me just as much in git.

I wonder what editors they're using on Windows that it matters. But good that you're listening to customers.
One hopes Box didn't acquire a company with only a beta-invite product for simply their ffmpeg one-liners...
If there was a new unix-y personality on top of NT, I'd be so happy. Win32 is saddled with such crazy baggage like MAX_PATH being 260 characters, even though the underlying OS supports 64kB paths. Arrrrgh.
Presumably the answer is corrupt officials? That seems to be the only thing that makes sense - they don't want the State to make the money they want their friends to make it and, of course, share it with them??
Exactly. It's the same. You throw up an idea and start pivoting. If you have a more staid business model some startup will eventually find your niche and out hustle you.
That assumes your vision is accurate, and that we have no control over our futures. Do only large computer industry companies get to decide the future?
Men perform physically dangerous work far more frequently than women.

Riding a bike in a large city is dangerous - I've never done in it New York, but in London altercations between bikes, pedestrians, taxis and buses are quite frequent. There are few real continental-Europe-style bike lanes.

Perhaps same gender differences in appetite for risk also affects one's decision to ride a bike in a large city?
There's already a doctrine of laches that limits past damages.

From http://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandnewsdetail.as...

> Laches defenses have been successful in cases in which a patent owner knows about an infringement and then delays many years before bringing suit. Laches typically bars the recovery of any past damages but allows for the recovery of damages arising after the filing of the lawsuit
Great, I look forward to taking a look. By the way, what do you mean by "3-P theft"? The sentence seems to be missing a word or else there's a typo. But I can't quite figure out what that might be.
VLC's stream handling isn't the best, though.

(VLC uses a fixed-length buffer, and requires the buffer to be full before it starts playing. Not the best for an iffy connection.)

That being said, worth a shot! (Not to mention that a plugin could redirect to an arbitrary application without too too much hassle)
Hi mtrimpe, we measure NPS for exactly this reason, to find out how well we're delivering exceptional value and a memorable experience. The NPS absolutely does take dissatisfied customers into account. Dissatisfied customers are some of the quickest to rate :)

In your specific case, it's likely you chose the option for the experts to do everything they can to help you save. The challenge of our business is that some people want more trickery, then some like you want less trickery. It's our job to segment customers early, understand what each wants, then provide the right result. We've made a lot of improvement with this.

For example, you mentioned a few things that don't exist anymore:

- We do not have contests
- We do not have winners
- Experts also do support

We made a lot of these changes to make sure customers like you receive a more personalized service. We realized this is the key to creating consistent value. You can read about those changes here: https://flightfox.com/business/why-we-abandoned-crowdsourcin...
And now I suddenly feel the need to stand up on behalf of people four years younger than myself and say: drunk college douchebags are people, too. They have equal rights and an equal stake in governance, too.
Good to know! I'll try it for a while, see how I like it.
Arguably the state should care about who gets the licenses, but even if it didn't, the state can easily ensure that licenses go to the people or organizations that value them most by auctioning them on an annual basis (and offering incumbent licence-holders first option to renew the licence at the market determined lease rates) whilst collecting the licenses' appreciation in value
> Why are they so hung up and being The Ones Who Deliver The Software And The Hardware?

For the same reason that Ubuntu and Firefox are?
Replacing JSX in React.js with vanilla CoffeeScript
The difference is the analytics. If it's a good startup it's going to learn so much from the shit on the wall that the next pivot will be much more informed and likely to be succesful.
We use hamlc and knockout: this seems like a wonderful improvement. If only we weren't 80% of the way to cljs+om.
Thank you for generous well-positioned citations to OpenStreetMap -- the community thanks you!
I don't much like this article either, despite being its author, but I don't see how you've managed to refute its applicability to the application being discussed on the thread. The mutual exclusion referenced up thread is real.
If memory serves, he was sent a Surface Pro 2 by Microsoft. And a Surface Pro 3. I don't recall if he was given the original Pro or if he bought that one himself.

Either way, I would view his endorsement and any other interaction with Microsoft with a shaker of salt; this is not at all dissimilar from the multitude of celebrities whom Samsung sends the latest Galaxy phone in a swag bag in order to get a "I wasn't paid off, I just really like it!" endorsement. His celebrity status commands him a certain amount of influence for whatever judgment he proclaims on the Surface (note, for instance, how every post he makes about it ends up on the front page of HN). I can guarantee if the same points were raised by a normal person who paid for the thing on their tumblr blog, there would not be a team of Microsoft engineers rushing to fix them.
Well yes, but as Serious Businesspeople, we need a Serious Business Word to describe the shit-throwing process.

Like "pivot."
My start-up currently uses the method of a paid b2b wall right up front. To help people trust the product more, the website has a guest account which allows users to test drive the system without committing.
They should have took my naming suggestion and called it Jon Hamm.
I always use django-crispy-forms for my projects, and it has support for bootstrap3 too.
Some days I just think my world, B2B but governments and multilaterals rather than businesses, is just too slow moving. Other days I think that it is really quite interesting to see that quite simple tech can be hard to implement in organisations that haven't understood tech to be important until recently.

It is nice though to move people from paper processes to mobile/SaaS/cloud and near-real time data collection and see the lightbulb go up. Feels decidedly light-side.
>and they have a mean assortment.

This is one of those ridiculous lies that Swedes like to tell themselves. There are single stores in France and Germany with a larger assortment than the entire beställningssortiment. Anything even slightly obscure requires ordering from abroad, with all the crap that entails.
Consumer internet startups are like Hollywood entertainment. No one knows what TV shows or movies will be successful. The industry tries to make smart bets: invest in big name directors or actors, or sequels or copycats or cheap reality shows, but it's still a gamble. Successful shows come out of nowhere. So they keep trying random shows every season and see which ones stick. Doesn't this sound like Silicon Valley?
Got this JS alert: "This website abuses rawgit.com. You should complain to its owner."
Seattle reaches deal to legalize Uber, Lyft and Sidecar; no driver limits
Looks like it's because it's vulnerable to the OpenSSL CCS exploit. http://ccsinjection.lepidum.co.jp/

A system bragging about security leaving a known, patched hole like this open isn't a great sign.
IE also shipped for Unix and Mac OS. So I doubt the entanglement claim.
You work in that industry until you understand it intimately and develop connections.
Could you give a few examples of these transaction costs?
Some sort of reproducible version control chain is essential for any kind of privacy- or security-related application. It makes auditing about a hundred times easier.
Oh, shoot, I googled for the Haskell one, and saw the other one on the way. I should have read about two more lines, and I would have got it.

In my defence, I always thought the main feature of Hamlet is the static checking of everything, and solving the escaping problem (at compile time!), so I didn't even entertain the idea that someone would port it to Ruby.
US SENDS IN BIG SHIPS,WW3 ISIS OUTSKIRTS OF BAGDAD
TechCrunch dreams
The issue of temp files is covered by the author's approach of having a dev and a live folder. This is probably primarily useful for static sites html sites which wouldn't need to worry about that.

I work with a largely non technical team on a site that is 95% built with a static site generator. They needed versioning but I couldn't convince them to take on the overhead of SVN or Git.

We sync the project using Dropbox, than deploy the build folder via FTP. We use folders for branches and Dropbox has limited versioning.

The biggest problem is that the people this is useful for probably aren't going to have a VPS or know how to install the btsync daemon. There are a couple of services that offer hosting for dropbox static sites like site44[1]. I could see a Btsync equivalent being a popular service.t

1. http://www.site44.com/
This is why I do on premise deployments for my ML stuff. A lot of money is being left on the table with SAAS in this space I think. I'm of the opinion models should come to the data not the other way around.
> if you have already gone that far, what would you gain by implementing browser based crypto when you have already solved the problem?

This is indeed the point made by Matasano, but I don't think it's valid. Sometimes you want to segment the trust, or maybe your software provider doesn't even want to be in the data storage game. So I might trust one entity to provide me with software to manage my inbox, particularly if I can inspect that software at will, and have seen it pass through a security review, however I might not want to trust them with actually storing the contents of my inbox. In that case, it's nice to be able to encrypt the inbox (and the index, to allow for nice searching) in my browser, and then actually store them on a commodity storage provider (s3 or dropbox). And yes, I'd use modern web standards to give the user control over when a new version was downloaded too.

So, I need to get the software over SSL, and be able to verify within reason that it does what it is supposed to, and then use that trusted software to work with data which I can store on untrusted services.
Yeah, eventually. In the meantime (so the argument goes), the oversupply of taxis can make it really unpleasant.
No, not really. In our (Justworks) case, our founder had to setup payroll, benefits and compliance for multiple companies (Adtuitive and Etsy) and so was intimately familiar with the problem when he started it.
Serious question here, but what is meant by "secret"? The patent database is public and after clicking through three listed patents, I see it quite clearly indicated that the Original Assignee is Microsoft.

Also, in the linked article by Brad Smith, uSoft wrote: We pledge that by April 1 of this year, we will publish on the web information that enables anyone to determine which patents we own.

How was it impossible to determine prior to April 1st? Did they update the patent database or something?

Thank you.
I really like this comment since it really hits at what technical people could potentially do to address the difficulty of meeting new friends. Like you, I've always kinda looked at the social apps as stupid/flooded/artificial.

Reading this thread though really emphasizes to me that there is huge demand for an easy "friend finder". I'm now thoroughly convinced this is a space just waiting to be occupied.
What the Theory of “Disruptive Innovation” Gets Wrong
I dislike fasterisking.
A lot of the "throw it up there and see what happens" movement comes from young engineers who literally lack the life experience to know what problems to solve. Given that scenario, and the intense pressure that comes from SV for young people to succeed, the approach makes sense, but there is a longer term, more considered approach to things. Especially for B2B startups, the best way to come up with an idea is to work at larger businesses and see what problems they are facing. Of course, if you are a young person who knows they want to start a startup, this seems like a roundabout approach, and one that requires a lot of faith. It's hard, and I see why people are attracted to "release, iterate, release," but I don't think it's the best approach.

This doesn't mean you don't iterate. A lot of the lean startup stuff is still useful to us (a/b testing for more focused UI etc.). But generally speaking, we know where the product is going, and our customers' needs, often better than them.
Two ways I can think of. 1. You do a real job for a while. Work in a large organisation, see what pain points they have, which ones are probably similar to other businesses and which ones probably don't involve terabytes of proprietary data that they would never be able to shift to an SaaS solution (by never I mean politically not technically). And I don't mean working for tech firm. Be on an IT team for a pharmaceutical company, a food company, packaging company, logistics etc. Be open and offer to help people (outside of IT) and you'll be amazed what ideas they give you.

Way 2. Mix with people in the real world that work in the companies above. Listen to their problems, offer solutions, offer to pop in after work one day or on a weekend and look at their problems.
>>The upside is that they're doing something innovative but if Bing really wants to steal marketshare from Google they have to improve on their quality, not on their speed.

Well, there are two ways to increase bottom-line profits. One is to increase revenue by stealing market share. The other is to decrease costs.

This would apparently help cut costs by decreasing the number of servers and saving on electricity.
This exists: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/testing/mobile-testing

I've used it fairly extensively, it can be a bit buggy and slow, but it was instrumental in tracking down a bug just after launching an Android app.

People were leaving 1-star reviews, saying the app simply hard crashed at launch. We couldn't replicate the issue in any way on any of our ~10 physical devices we used for testing, or in any VM, but, with the service, we were able to isolate it exclusively to a handful of Android 2.3.3 devices with less than 512mb of memory. After that it was much easier to track down the source of the bug, fix it, and stem the flow of bad reviews.

Android is so fragmented among versions and devices that in the future I'd always want to use a service like this to at the very least make sure the app opens and runs across a slew of devices before launching.
A lean method for hiring a chef for startups not too lean for a chef
> Feels decidedly light-side.

Possibly, but doesn't quite have the ring to it :)
Show HN: I’m working on a book about Meteor. You can read it online for free.
In the US, an account + routing number pair is basically the keys to the kingdom. Yes, it is kind of scary.
The idea of infinite randomness expansion really fascinates me, it's like watching Münchhausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair.
I wanted this to be an edit to the original post, but it looks like that post is locked into stone for now.

I wanted to expand on the robbery incident and illustrate how something like that is potentially even worse than you'd expect.

The reason he was walking through the neighborhood is because he doesn't have (and can't afford) a car, and he was walking back from work.

They made the "mistake" of calling 911 to report the incident. He was mildly beaten up, and they were worried about potential injuries, so they sent an ambulance. It turns out he was completely okay, and they put on a few bandages and that was it. Then he was hit with a $3k bill.

Her brother works part time at a minimum wage job while going to school. A random $3k bill out of the blue is really not affordable to him, so now he's on a payment plan paying off that debt.

This is on top of the items that were actually stolen from him, like his phone, which he had to replace, and the general trauma of having been robbed.
A system that takes a free-form text query for places and tries all possible interpretations to find a match based (somehow) on a history of places for that user (history in the general term, the way I read it, it can be places the user has been, places the user has searched, places whose shape look like the user's face, etc) and a global geospatial database.

So, a fancy parser, a per-user list of places of potential interest and a Solr collection with geospatial data.

P.S. the irony is that at no point in that overly verbose spec, is there anything that in any way tells you how to build that system. It's like patenting a device for enabling one to force a resistance against achieving minimum possible potential energy in a gravity field upon a mass of fluid, i.e. the concept of a bucket (or a glass, or the act of cupping your palms). And while that is surely only the preface of the patent, I seriously doubt the body is any more illuminating. Maybe while completely abolishing software patents remains impossible, we should try to enact reform that forces them to be specific enough that just by reading the patent one would be able to write a program that performs the actions described therein. Even if it's just "take a solr server, configure it like this, take this particular natural language parser, generate the possible forms of the query like so...". At least then they would be useful in a decade or so.
The secret was which ~300 of Microsoft and Rockstar's thousands of patents were part of the Android licensing scheme, not that they were actually owned by Microsoft.
It's somewhat the opposite in the US. With your bank routing and account number someone can make out bad checks or EFT pull from your account. Halting or reversing this can be quite difficult and in some cases it isn't possible to get your money back.

With credit cards the liability is on the merchant that accepts the card to verify that the person presenting the card is authorized to use it. Card issuers will reverse charges and leave the merchant out the money in the event of fraud.
The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility -- if you've got the skills and work ethic, you can be born into the lower class and quickly rise above that.
To fold Julia fractal you only need to treat it like something simple and two-dimensional, project it onto a square grid, transform that grid, and then interpolate every cell using simple affine transformations.

EDIT: Removed unneeded emotional junk

EDIT 2: Affine transformations are just simple arithmetic operations between complex and dual numbers but nevertherless matrices are simpler!