skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I understand how it works, I just haven't seen examples that demonstrate why it is useful.
Team members spending too much time on Stackoverflow.
Where the heck is this list...
Based on the style of print statements (no parens), I'd say python2.
Some tools empower evil more than good or even just accidentally do more harm than good more often than not.

Land mines for example.
There's nothing really stopping people hosting GIFs from putting in advertising. Although it's true that I haven't seen examples of this happening.
This is what I was getting at. It's great if the Supreme Court overturns this stuff, however if the Federal Circuit goes on ignoring it, and every case has to be appealed to the Supreme Court thereafter, then the impact is considerably dampened.

And, I don't think there isn't anything anyone can do about it. Is there even a precedent for a lower court blatantly ignoring the decisions of a higher one, at this level? Is there anything that can be done about it short of an act of Congress (which we can safely assume would never ever happen)?
> When you program a computer, you are not changing the computer in any way, shape, or form. It was never limited.

But that is untrue, on two levels! Firstly, at the physical level: by programming the computer you are physically changing it. You are changing the electronic charges on a multitude of molecules arranged at very specific locations in a very specific manner. This, in turn, when activated by other specifically applied charges, controls changes to yet other charges on other molecules at other very specific locations as these charges are evaluated by the laws of physics and the arrangements of various conducting materials connecting these molecules.

Secondly, at the functional level: these patterns of charges can be evaluated, by humans or other machines, to represent useful information, and hence the exact same circuit with different patterns of charges can be used as a word processor, a gaming machine, a media player, a database...

Consider the converse: without any such charges lighting up any of its circuits, the computer can do literally nothing. It is wholly limited.

I completely agree that the computer's potential utility is never limited -- except maybe by our imaginations. However, that could be said for a hunk of metal or a slab of wood too.

> By programming it, you are doing exactly what it was built to do: Be programmable.

By fashioning steel into various shapes, I'm doing exactly what steel was created to do: be malleable when very hot but very rigid at room temperatures. Yet every new shape given to steel, from rods to blades to ball bearings to I-beams to frying pans, has enabled a new use.

By combining various atoms of elements in different configurations, I'm doing exactly what they were meant to do: bond with each other. Yet every new combination could result in a brand new compound.

What something could do has no bearing on what is inventive. Inanimate things do precisely nothing until we invent a use for them. All technological development is the creative use of things doing what they are meant to do, arranged to achieve things that we want them to do.

> Enlarging the center for spatial processing in cabbies is something the brain was meant to do. ... They did nothing but exercise their normal skill in spatial reasoning, and their brain did all the actual work.

True, but their brains have become physically different from ours, optimized for spatial reasoning. You could in fact say that, with the right programming, they became special-purpose brains.
I should have known that if I can imagine a language feature, it will already be implemented in the Lisps....
Ask HN: How do you handle auto renew for SaaS?
If you have an SaaS product (or any product with recurring billing), what is your auto renew policy? Obviously not all forms of payment support it, but for the ones that do, how do you ask the customer if he wants? The options as I see them:

- Checkbox at signup, checked by default

- Checkbox at signup, not checked by default

- Auto opt in, with a note at signup, and an opt-out in client dashboard

- No auto billing
I think if this can be extended to make the changes easy to apply (with real time checking of how the output will be) and understanding the code differences, then many of the wireframe companies out there may lose their appeal....
Personally I enjoy OOP, perhaps due to my own ignorance, but also in large part thanks to the namespacing it allows. The encapsulation of deeply related values and methods makes sense to my brain.
It's never perfectly neutral & accessible to companies of any size.

How is it fair when you have to pay money to develop apps for iOS? That's not equal-opportunity!

Answer: you're right, it isn't.
>"...cut through such dissimulation in the area of patents and to look at the reality by asking, in effect, "is this really inventive or is it simply a product of the draftsman's craft parading as being somehow inventive."

If only we could create an office that could somehow, you know, examine the patent before granting it and do just this. These so called "examiners" could then prevent it from going all the way through a court to a judge before we decide if it was a good idea to grant the patent in the first place.
So unless the solution is absolutely perfect you'd prefer no solution at all?

Streaming music is the single biggest use of bandwidth on my phone right now (T-Mobile, as it happens). This change gives me one less reason to care about my bandwidth usage. If they don't whitelist the particular service I use yet, that's not going to make me stop streaming music or force me to buy a more expensive plan, because T-Mobile doesn't cut you off when you reach your cap in the first place.
There are no ramifications for the USPTO.

In addition, approving a patent takes almost no work while not approving one takes significantly longer and can have more bouts of back and forth.

The USPTO right now operates on a very loose definition of 'patentability' simply because it is more convenient to do so and the course will sort it out eventually anyways.. and there's absolutely no downside for them other than their own conscious.
I agree with your first part, but the last part is incorrect.

>If software can be patented then that patent would infringe itself.

To infringe a patent, you must make, use or sell a product incorporating the invention. A patent by itself does none of those and hence cannot infringe anything.
What an amazing feeling it must've been. I absolutely LOVE hearing these developer war stories from 80s and 90s, although 90s more because I am a 90s kid.

It definitely makes me feel that today's average devs are spoiled with all the innovations that have taken place...and still can't roll out a hit.
Will your Mac support Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (LE) for Handoff in OS X and iOS?
I dont know. I personally felt it was better to at least give the person an idea of my background and what I am up to.

It solves the issue of finding someone whos vision is aligned to yours.

A random note for coffee doesnt work that well for me tbh.
Cool stuff you've got going on. Why don't you create one specific for coding content?
I knew it was satire from the title, but a small sliver of me thought it might be true - that's worrying
Actually I've done it. Codingscriptures.com
Will be online in a couple of days!
It's on our roadmap. Thanks for the feedback!
I just felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of high school juniors suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Love the cows at the end, hanging there as if nothing was happening :-)
I came across Scrollback a few months back but I still wonder what problem is it trying to solve? IRC is not broken. And the IRC clients work just fine for everyone.

I would like to know more from the team about why they are building Scrollback?
Solution to what? Data caps being too low?

I think this is a perfectly reasonable implementation of a bad idea. It's good for the T-Mobile customer today, bad for everyone in the long run.

And which is it? Either you care that your streaming app is whitelisted or you don't. Since it's the single biggest usage of data on your phone (same for me, btw) I'd guess you probably care. If I had a 1GB cap on my data service, you'd have a very hard time convincing me to switch from a favored streaming service to a non-favored one.
It made me laugh.
Fair? It's a business partnership. Is it also not fair when Pixar toys get bundled into Happy Meals?

As already pointed out - both music streaming and mobile communications are highly competitive, so there's need for government regulation here.

Corporations always end up holding the leash of the government bodies that were meant to regulate them. There are perhaps valid reasons to consider network neutrality legislation, but this is not one of them.
There are no other dancers; there are only pigs.
Yeah the article seems stupid, while technically they aren't contributing to the scholarship they do pay tuition for the last 2 years.

I'm not the biggest fan of starbucks, mostly because their coffee doesn't taste that good, however, I don't why what they've done shouldn't be applauded.

It's kinda funny that I see more people upset about the business practices of Starbucks/Wal-Mart than Lockheed Martin.
Ah, I had not considered how this would affect downstream litigation procedures. Thanks for the explanation. I strongly believe we need more tools to dismiss frivolous litigation as early as possible, so in that light this seems more favorable.
Sounds like the Extensible Web Manifesto [0]!

[0] http://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/
I think I phrased that poorly. I'm not asking that they make it perfect, I'm saying it's just a plain bad idea. It would be impractical to implement in a fair way. So it has the (likely unintended) effect of reducing competition. It's a bad idea.

The world is not fair and this makes one tiny piece of it even less so.
I dunno. Preferential zero-rating of a specific service, whether it's Facebook or Spotify, is precisely the antithesis of net neutrality.

When I think of net neutrality, I think about what happened to ISPs in Canada -- bandwidth caps (albeit large ones, after many years of squabbling) and per-GB overage fees. But, while I'd rather that the ISP charge me a reasonable tariff for additional data usage than throttle me during peak hours for a fixed price, I can see that not everyone would like it that way.
Judge says concerned about Apple, Google hiring settlement
> Computers are the opposite. They're extremely limited -- they can't physically do anything, they can only perform calculations. Software is capable of nothing but specifying what calculations to perform.

I think this is the heart of your argument here. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

The problem is that in terms of calculation, computers are not limited. In fact, that was proven not once, but twice, in 1939. Any computation that can be performed can be done with any general-purpose computer. The Church-Turing Thesis proves that that computer need not even be specialized: it only requires the ability to manipulate symbols deterministically in some general manner.

What these patents cover is, in fact, only those computations with the aid of a general-purpose computer, and the only reason those patents have been allowed is by this fallacious argument that a general-purpose computer somehow becomes a special-purpose computer when it is programmed. This is not how computers work. A general-purpose computer does not become special-purpose merely by assigning some numbers to a pool of memory any more than an FPGA becomes an ASIC by uploading a ROM image. It is still a general-purpose computer, and its nature does not change.

If, perhaps, by programming a computer, the program magically became a new, immutable physical wiring, your argument might have merit. But we do not live in a world of magic.
But what if it makes T-Mobile more competitive, thus making the wireless carrier industry more fair? Could we see a net increase in total fairness?
You should try this as a poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Cute Windproof Sun&Rain Umbrella
I think you should keep in mind this site is visited largely by people starting their own business, most of the time, on the internet.

So what does this mean to them then?

That its fading, its going from being able to serve people all around the world and build and challenge the companies at the top with your new and revolutionary idea (and get very very rich) that would be ditched by the big companies corporate branch (do you imagine what cable companies would've said if someone from the inside tried to build a netflix at first?, or what was the reason that didn't happen before since they had rights to the content already?).

And that that's it, there's a new better X service? oh but it isn't free on my carrier, I guess I'll stick with Y.
Couple thoughts. First, Congress could swear in Obama's nominees. I haven't checked but a few years ago, basically he'd nominated hundreds of judges, and congress was refusing to approve any of them. This happened with Bush, too, so it's a bi-partisan thing.

It also means that, if you have a patent case, you must be ready to go to the supreme court. That's a shit ton of money...
A perennial HN favorite

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Fibonacci+Flim-Flam#!/all/forever/...

What's fascinating about this topic is that the reposts come at intervals that approximates the Fibonacci sequence.
Come on!Sunshine guy.
How to Use Auth0 for Single-Sign-On (SSO) to New Relic
[1401.6444] Android Anti-forensics: Modifying CyanogenMod
EFF Statement on Passage of Massie-Lofgren Amendment Regarding NSA Backdoors
I spent 3 hours on this Vulnerable website...
But they were offering you to change the world dude! Like social and big data and cloud!

This issue was discussed quite a lot on HN over past couple of years. Not sure what those so called CEOs are thinking but it's their lose.

There must be some significant personal benefit for me, above money, that I would consider an offer like that. Influential position in a startup working in an area which I find exciting and proof that founders know what they are doing? Yeah something like that.
Maybe. But Cap'n Proto implements a capability-based model which is more web-of-trust than PKI, so arguably a lot of what's in TLS (and a lot of what makes TLS complicated) is irrelevant to it. I agree that people who actually want traditional PKI should use TLS; we're certainly not going to reinvent that. But there's an opportunity to do something much simpler.

There's also the issue that Cap'n Proto wants to implement a distributed capability fabric in which machine A may have a capability to an object on machine B and may send that capability to machine C, after which machine C should form a direct connection to machine B in order to make calls on that capability. How to accomplish this (without PKI) is well-known, but it may prove convoluted to build it with TLS as the basic building block. I have to do more research, though.
Bell Labs Prize
Congrats to Joey and team! This is great news for music.
Can everyone write tests instead? We have enough people blindly writing implementation code without adequate testing. I fear for what the world will be like in 20 years if kids are being told to write as much code as they can without spending the time to verify their logic and assumptions.
Cool! Are you working with Kapeli on the Linux version? Is there a site I can keep track of progress? I'd love to check it out once it's available.
Solar Roadways Are BULLSHIT [video]
Bitgo Raises $12 Million Series A Promising Better Bitcoin Security
It doesn't say that it's over of conversation, we either meet right now or forget. Feel free to continue conversation online, it's just call to action, showing initiative. It's easier to respond to initiative, rather than initiate. And it's easier to convince someone to accept an offer face-to-face rather by messaging. We are social creatures after all.
It's unfortunate the sound still doesn't work in Firefox. I thought Firefox was supposed to have support for the Web Audio API by now?

(Firefox 30, Linux, official Mozilla build)
Ask HN: How do startups restrict employees from accessing private user data?
How do startups which hold private user data deal with restricting access to that data to employees?

I'm not talking about data that's sensitive enough that it falls under a specific jurisdiction (credit cards, SSNs, etc.) - more data like private messages between friends, photos, and so on, which users consider to be private.

In the very early days of a startup, you don't really worry about this because you don't have the time, and you trust your cofounders enough to not snoop around on messages/documents/etc. that the few users you have consider to be private.

But as the employee count hits the double digits and keeps going up, you probably shouldn't trust everyone to that level? Yet in most early stage startups, all employees have command line access to production application, admin panels, databases, etc.

How do you solve this problem? Do you add restrictions to which trusted employees can access production services? Do you encrypt the user data you store?

If there are any insights about how larger companies have handled this, I'd love to hear it. Surely at Instagram, OkCupid, Facebook, etc. the average employee can't read the private messages of their ex-partner?
I was really split on the issue. On one side it's a good thing, and a really cool thing for the t-mobile customers. However, this is a bad thing for progress. Here is why:

1. Music is a pusher, it get's people to buy bigger data plans, it gets companies to provide bigger data plans. No that music is unlimited on T-Mobile, it's less likely that we are going to see cheeper data plans. Instead, it's just going to be unlimited music, and same old data plan for everything else.

2. Forget about discriminating one company over another. What about discriminating one type of content over another. What makes music better then spoken word podcasts, or online video, or netflix. You have to remember, nothing in this life is free. By promoting music content, t-mobile is necessarily demoting other types of content.
Jet engines are still best designed by a roomful of PhD's. And those cost lots of money.

Possibly the wrong example for your argument :) Jet engines can now be designed by a team at SpaceX rather than at NASA, and the team can 3D-print them. That seems like reduced-cost innovation compared to decades past.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/elon-musk-m...

(PS - I definitely don't disagree with your general point, but it might be becoming harder to know which areas need patents and which don't.)
I've never used that particular feature, but Livescript lets you use default arguments on curried functions by calling with no arguments.

http://livescript.net/#functions
Great link, thanks.
I found this venn diagram of the statement here:

http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/25016190500/batsandbones-...
Those are two of the biggest reasons I don't comment on many such sites, ever. Of course, I must be one of the last three technical people who has never had a Facebook account, despite having known about them since the days you needed a .EDU address to sign up.
That the problem with the recent "DevOps" trend. Lots of people coming from a "Dev" background, but no real "Ops".

And now that spinning up a couple of servers on AWS and creating snapshots on-the-fly are so easy, it gives the false impression that you don't need much to act as a sysadmin.
how is that for satire:

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/fb/financials/bal...
>>> Don't be bashful, just say your company is hiring.

While I haven't received this (yet), I strongly agree. Everyone knows a guy who messages you after years of not being in touch, asking how are you doing and all that crap while we both know he doesn't care and it's just a foreplay before asking for some favour. I won't say yes just because of that, so let's stop wasting time and looking silly.
I meant the kitchen knife analogy as more of a general illustration that actual use of something is more important than straightforward interpretation of that object's purported purpose, rather than as a case of patentability :-) I fully agree that the use of kitchen knife as a murder weapon would be non-novel, given that sharp objects have been used to cause death since prehistoric times, as well as obvious, given that sharp objects are known to cause bodily harm, which is known to cause death.
Yes, and in fact Gordon was still Chairman of Intel, but the thing about exponentials is they are always S curves. The trick is knowing when they are going to taper off and go flat :-)
One thing that annoys me with subtitles is that when they even have all the sound effects. [SCREAMS LOUDLY], [OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYS] etc. So something like the Total Recall silence thing probably won't work to a great degree of accuracy in those cases.
BLOODSTREAM : Lugansk Ukraine Hotspot militia defeated 
BLOODSTREAM : Lugansk Ukraine Hotspot militia defeated a detachment of the National Guard EXCLUSIVE
BLOODSTREAM : Lugansk Ukraine Hotspot militia defeated a detachment of the National Guard EXCLUSIVE
This is a lot of what bothers me about docker too. It's worrisome that so many people are using it with unsigned third-party images.
Android Yaşam Şehri
Although Impala is still a fairly new product, my team has been using it internally at Cloudera in production for over a year for real-time log analysis to our support engineers (http://bit.ly/USFQdh), among other ad-hoc BI analytics. We also have a bunch of customers who are using Impala to power very critical interactive workloads. What about Impala makes you feel like it's not production ready?

Good question about HBase, I didn't mention HBase because although it's a super fast NoSQL database, it's a lousy analytical database. Sure it's great at doing really fast scans over small slices of data (and/or updating data), but full table scans are extremely slow when compared to analyzing flat files in HDFS. For doing analytics in Hadoop, the format you almost always want is Parquet. Not only is reading files directly from HDFS faster, but Parquet is a true columnar store, so you pay a minimal IO penalty for queries since you only read necessary data. Also, Parquet uses some really efficient column encoding formats like (dictionary, delta, run length, ..) to reduce both IO and to increase the effectiveness of compression.
In ancient times before plugins, animated gifs or any sort of video, we would painstakingly screen cap individual frames from movie clips and use "push" via CGI to force feed the browser a series of images that gave the illusion of animation. It was just a hi-tech spin on flip cards.
Is it safe taking commercial flight over Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan?
With the Snowden releases PJ realized she couldn't protect the anonymity of her sources, so she shut down to keep them safe.
Yes! This!

Please also add a small paragraph to the top of your blog post with who the actual heck you are.

"Earbits is an online music streaming service without any ads or subscription fees" or something tied into the first sentence goes a massive way.... not everyone knows who your startup is!
Are they "underpaid"? What do you suggest a barista at Starbucks make? Regardless of the details, their workers get a discount on a college education. Seems like a nice perk for doing a job that the majority of people can do.