skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Ad Hominem

Def.: Any attempt to discredit a view by calling attention to the character, actions or personal circumstances of those who hold it rather than the reasoning they provide in support of it.

"Ad hominem" is Latin for "against the person." Anything that involves an attack on a person's character we call an Abusive Ad Hominem. Anything that appeals to a person's unique circumstances we call a Circumstantial ad Hominem. These are both fallacious for the simple reason that the personal character and circumstances of the individual reasoner are logically irrelevant to the question whether the reasoning itself is any good.

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/criticalthinking/Six%20...
Tesla Motors, Software Development Group, Palo Alto
And you are a fool if you dismiss people/ideas simply because you don't feel they are practical. Sure, don't try to use them in your business. However, many many very useful and practical things have come out of these impractical theories and people who never try to practically prove anything or use their theories. It is a win for everybody to have at least some subset of people who do pure theoretics.

That being said, as already stated, you shouldn't be going into these types of programs if your end goal is to get a job in the industry.
This is a killer peripheral for Oculus.
That's what it's about, but their proposed remedy is mostly reducing the number of laws and reducing the number of criminal investigations against companies. You or I might see these out-of-court settlements as a symptom of a problem with companies that can get away with (sometimes literal) murder, whereas they seem to see them as a symptom of a system that punishes companies unjustly.
When that opinion is different from your own, apparently it's "bias".

Judging the agenda of a (very good, imho) publication (as if it could have one) based on an op-ed is ridiculous. Where is the critical thought? The Economist has been around for 150 years, and if you felt like it you could find individual articles that would indicate any such "bias" you desired.

Oh well.
An Exclusive First Look at the Upcoming Pixar Short 'Lava'
Companies have boards of directors who are supposed to be responsible for what the company does.

I find myself in the curious position of being vehemently anti-prison (it's expensive; it doesn't work for most of the people who find themselves in prison; it's unjust) but lobbying to imprison some company executives.
Cool!

Anyone know how I can add my own convention to SeatGeek?
130% every time. A stock option cert is a lottery ticket.
I'm at a loss as to how you can read that article as calling for deregulation, short of assuming that if it's from the Economist it can simply be assumed to be calling for those things. I see an article calling for existing regulations to be enforced openly and transparently, rather than criticizing any particular regulation.

Honestly, this sounds like something liberals ought to be lining up behind, not all standing around kicking dirt because they don't like who said it. In fact pretty much everyone who isn't in the government ought to asking for this.

Or is everyone else here really arguing that unknown accusations being settled behind closed doors for often poorly- or un-disclosed amounts of money between the government and big corporations is just peachy keen? Honestly the tone of the most of the replies being made here sort of boggle my mind.
I am so tired of this specious argument. Committing suicide is not the same as being murdered.
America’s Tech Guru Steps Down, But He’s Not Done Rebooting the Government
SeatGeek Raises $35M from Accel Partners, Nas
credit card, locked and loaded!
People in the anti-cannabis movement think that the slightest hint to a potential toxicity of cannabis is good enough to justify its interdiction. The concept of freedom is totally foreign to them.
It would be, we are still a startup. But we are already expecting that our solution would be twice or more the prices of what we pay now.
That's not true. GMail was always JS heavy and run fine back in IE 6 and Firebird 0.7 (now Firefox) in 2004/05.

Where as the Java 1.4 consumed too much memory and every now and then a lot of CPU cycles for its garbage collection cycle. 512MB RAM memory was the minimum for Java VM to execute a single Java app and consuming almost all memory resources.
>>At the end of the day, peoples' complaint about the financial prosecutions mentioned in the article is this: not enough people went to jail.

Not only that, but also the fact that the fees they paid were a drop in the bucket compared to the profit they made from the practices they were found guilty of.

It's the literal equivalent of a thief stealing $100 and being fined $5 for the crime. He gets to keep most of the money, which of course provides an excellent incentive to keep stealing.
One problem with this, is that probably most employees and business partners weren't involved in whatever was done wrong. And they'd be hurt just as much as the people who were involved.

Maybe instead say, the people most likely to have been involved need to be replaced? So fire the board and CxO level people, or the top 3 levels of management of whichever division, or something like that. You'd get a few people who probably weren't involved and miss a few who were, but the overall collateral damage would still be much less.
Gfycat is just a service that provides h.264 video versions of gifs. Yes, h.264 videos are embeddable. So is WebM, but native support for it is worse than h.264.

That said, embedded videos will limit your browser compatibility unless there is a fallback. On the other hand, older browsers are also likely to have problems with 150MB webpages heavy on javascript.
You know, once GMail was the web app. Now I don't use it in the web form anymore, but through native clients.
Some notes about the data, and in particular differences between how it's presented here and its raw form via Yelp:

1. Businesses can be in multiple neighborhoods in the original dataset. In this version businesses can only be in one (the more common of the neighborhoods the business was listed in). There's some nice presentation and analysis advantages to this.

2. We dropped categories with less than 50 businesses in them because of some limitations of Statwing (it slowed us down a lot without much benefit, for reasons I'm happy to explain but are pretty boring.

3. Instead of taking the number of stars typically presented on a business (1.0, 1.5, 2.0, etc.), we grabbed an average from Yelp's dataset of reviews for each of these businesses, so you end up having businesses with ratings like 1.37 or 3.22. There's spikes at 1, 1.5, 2, etc. because of businesses with very few reviews, so filtering to only include businesses with >25 reviews is pretty handy.

4. This is only one of several datasets Yelp provides (one for each business, one for each review, one for each user, etc.)
http://www.yelp.com/dataset_challenge

Final note is that we're of course always interested in feedback, so have at it.
I have no affiliation with the author, but I'd recommend this book to pretty much anyone trying to learn Rails, I own the second edition.

Before this book I'd never done any real web programming. My background is in compilers and trading systems/machine learning( those two are essentially one in the same), all C++ desktop software.

The book got me up and running, better than any of the online rails tutorials, and there are a lot of rails tutorials online.

One thing I really appreciated was that it didn't just build an app, it actually took you through the steps of deploying on Heroku and using git.

A Lot of other books and tutorials seem to assume you want to build an app and run it as localhost for the rest of its life.

The other nice touch was the chapter that teaches a Rails flavoured Ruby. As someone who had used Ruby for scripting, but never for Rails, I thought this was a nice touch.
> I seem to recall the budget at Google for food service
> was $15 per person per meal ...You could probably get
> the cost down to something like $5 per meal, but it
> would mean fast-food-grade meals.

If the $15/meal figure is accurate and includes all expenses related to serving the meals (incl. paying kitchen staff and everything) then the food would only be a fraction of those costs. Going from serving fresh food to serving the cheapest possible garbage might only take the cost from $15 down to $10 or something like that.
As noted in the announcement, I think this is the best edition yet. I'm planning to monitor the HN comments today, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.
The salary cut you take to join a startup ought to be worth that much equity. If the founder has put in $50k of his own savings, and you take a $50k pay cut to join, then after 1 year you have "put in" as much capital as he has.
The problem with misuse of antibiotics is not what it does to you but the risk it carries for the rest of society.

Speaking of anti-biotics: we really need clear easy to understand information for places that allow antibiotics over the counter, sometimes in single doses not full courses. This would tell people aboutthe harm they are doing to themselves and to the rest of society.
>This author wants to ignore changing economic and political environments and go back to a time where corporations had near limitless power.

Not really. Arguing for a graspable set of laws - some countries' laws are entirely contained in a textbook-size book - is not arguing against accountability.

Having managers be responsible for some behavior sounds like a good idea to keep and even expand, though. Maybe Intel anti-competitive behavior wouldn't have been an issue if the Intel CEO knew that 10 years down the road he might be jailed. As it is, it is impossible to punish those who did the misdeeds. If robbing a bank is punishable by jailing, then gross corporate douchebaggery should also be likewise punishable.
This is the real problem, you cannot have secret laws. Period. Wasting time wishing nations would just not spy is foolish.
The riff predates the song. According to the NPR piece it's been in use to signify oriental culture since at least 1930.
I find it terribly sad that the impetus for reforming the US "threaten and settle" criminal justice system might come from the onerous burden placed on corporations.

In the same way I find it very disappointing how much of the conversation around marijuana legalization is about the economic benefits. By this calculus, we ascribe a non-trivial negative cost to NOT putting people in jail.
> There are millions of programmers around the world who'll never write any code outside work, and they vastly outnumber the rest of us.

You mean the programmers with healthy work-life balance that have better things to do than waste their free time staring at a text editor? The implication that these "other programmers" are inferior in some way and require IFTTT to integrate services is quite offensive to me.
I do plenty of cold emailing, and this email is effective due to the counter-intuitive order of content in the email AND the brevity of the content.

Starting out with the question will result in MUCH higher response rates than if you dump a paragraph or two of fluff about you, your company, the amazing team you have, etc ,etc...and THEN ask the question to the contact.

As for brevity - the shorter the email the better.

I challenge any of you sending emails like this to immediately follow up with a phone call to the contact asking the same thing. Watch your conversions skyrocket.
Part of the point of the US economy being so burdened by laws and regulations, is that anyone can be found guilty at any time that it's convenient. Any company can be found to be in violation of numerous laws and regulations.

The same holds true of the criminal justice system. It's why the NSA was compiling histories on porn etc. viewing habits related to people they might want to shut up. The point for the government, is to have that power over people at all times, and then use it when it serves their purpose/s.

Such perversions of justice are about power, greed, and control. It always has been, and always will be.
I hope you will think differently in the future :-)
Ha, that's interesting. I wrote a very similar "sniping" app (for myself not for others) back in 1999. Back then I had a Motorola pager (one of the large-screen fancy ones) and I could receive short messages via email. I wrote a (horribly constructed) Visual Basic app to check the course enrollments and report to me, in near real-time, when a class opened up.
Not eminently. There's a few key feature sets I still need before I'm happy with the model. I'll be sure to make a Show HN post when I get something up.
I will bet you $100 to the charity of the winners selection, that they won't.
Are brain changes an inherently bad thing?
Agreed, although I think the article is half-right about one thing - out-of-court settlements satisfy nobody. Corporate cheerleaders see them as shakedowns, corporate foes see them as a mere slap on the wrist. Trials would be better, although that will result in the peanut gallery putting the blame on judges and juries, as well as years' worth of motion work designed to slow the process down.

I notice many of the settlements are ultimately sought by the defendants, and suspect they also seek the secrecy provisions. Reading into the BofA settlement recently, it transpired that they the DoJ, unsatisfied with the bank's offer, walked away and said it would file papers in court the following morning. Soon after, the bank called and agreed to a sum close to what the DoJ were seeking. Presumably if they didn't feel the request was justified they could have taken it to court.
A Billion Dollar Venture?
Hi everyone, I'm delighted to share my latest little venture just in the nick of time which I've really enjoyed coming up with it. Been working away on the MVP for most of the last month, so it's awesome to be able to keep working on it having got the "launch" out of the way. I've been lucky to have some great friends trying it out for weeks now and helping me shape it, so this doesn't feel like a huge event, just another step in iterating to keep improving the product. Please check it out and let me know your feedback, you're always awesome - http://vironow.com
I've used the leap motion, and so far the accuracy is nowhere near what they show in the video. simply forming the index finger and thumb into an O-shape was enough for them to disappear from existence.

If this is an active demo of their next generation software, I'm very impressed with the improvements, but I suspect its a mock-up.
Ask HN: How to overcome the compulsion to comment?
I know it is useless (xkcd 386 says it all), but I can't seem to stop. Some topics just push my buttons and I have to dive into a useless discussion. Reading news is often a waste of time, but commenting makes it a huge waste of time.

I have cut out some push channels (like Facebook and Twitter), but I find difficult to block HN because it is my only news source.

I have already tried blocking my HN account and it worked for a while, but eventually I relapsed and started discussing again with a new account.
I hope we get multi-process Firefox soon. Or that Mozilla ships a lightweight browser using their new "Servo" web render engine (Rust based).

It's so annoying that a single tab can crash the whole browser, and it's also a security risk on Windows. The common "sandbox" model there is to spawn child processes with very limited user rights (like IE 8+, Chrome, Safari+Webkit2).
The point isn't that the outcome was wrong, but that it should have been achieved in court, not in settlement.
Detroit Is America’s Emerging Market
These (somewhat) reasonable points are lodged in between a bunch of horribly biased wording, words like "shakedown", "supposed misdeeds", etc.

If people are having a hard time getting past that to the author's point, I'd put the blame on the author.
Sorry, my original point must have been very unclear.

In a typical startup, the ratio of equity between founder and employee #1 might be 50:1 or even much more. I am always surprised that people sign up to be employees given how fast equity grants drop for every subsequent hire. And, I wonder if any company has tried more gradual equity drop-offs. For example, where the ratio between founder and early employee grants is < 2:1, for example.
Nobody ever tried to hide anything. Stellar was rebranded because it was launched as a forked collaboration with additional people and additional code. Look at the front page of stellar.org:

Stellar Development is led by Jed McCaleb (resuming development of the open-source technology he created at Ripple) and Professor David Mazières (head of Stanford’s Secure Computer Systems group, creator of SFS and bcrypt).
> PCI audits used to just check for "encrypted passwords.

PCI is a joke. The self-fill audit: "Are you secure?" -- Uh... sure?

The various scanning companies are of differing quality too, adding to the difficulty in getting any real security improvements from the standard across all ecommerce shops.
As far as I know, all of these companies have the option to have their day in open court.

I think the likes of JPMorgan can handle defending themselves legally without falling into commercial ruin.

Usually, with extortion, these kinds of options are not available.
The sponsored tiles are defaults, and they're replaced by sites you actually use over time. This is a good, unobtrusive way for Firefox to get funding.
"Scenario 3: What are the trains near me?" is great feature.

Even better would be "Where do trains/buses go from where I am?"

It would be very useful to see all route lines radiating out from my location, with next times and freq.

This would help understand the multiple ways to get to another location.

One route might get me directly to location, but leave in 15 min.

Another route me get me 2 blocks from location, but leave in 2 min.
Yes. All that stuff about "creatives" will age poorly, I think.
Restructuring your Sales Commissions
Largest Kickstarter campaign ever "Coolest" failed to fund first time
Nope, it's not a mockup, that's what the new SDK looks like. They really improved it.

Source: I have a Leap.
One apartment’s Wi-Fi dead zones, mapped with a physics equation
> In what way?

Slower. Network-bound.

> Nope.

Require internet connections. Require vendors to stay in business indefinitely.

The other is a matter of taste.
Mac OS X has done this since the Mac App Store was introduced. Doesn't Windows 8 do it for Market apps?
Yeah, my neighbor has one... and she's nice enough to keep it in stock with childrens books for my daughter.
New iPhones coming Sept 9
The article says that they are working on new hardware that will have a much larger fov and higher image quality. This current tech demo is using the existing hardware.
cool, but I'm the only coder here...and don't use emacs (I like where you're head is at though)
I find these even more bothersome than the standard "previously visited" tiles. At least in FF you can turn the tiles off -- Chrome... nope! The thumbnail can even be a security problem in some settings.
I made a python script to do the similar thing(it actually register the course for user when there is spot) against University of Manitoba's Aurora student system. With modern browser automation tool this can be done easily :)
No one is pointing out that software today is doing more. Did any apps in the old days run spellchequers constantly in every window? No. Did apps in the old days automatically gentle, genevieve, generate typeahead suggestions in nearly every window? No. Did apps in the old days check for new versions on startup and in the background? No. (well okay one or two of them did).

I'm a cranky EE with a background in routers and even I don't blame "teh web" for making apps clunky. It's just that we're doing more, more colors, more background stuff, more compositing, more buttons on GUIs, more simultaneous file formats - it used to be every program had approximately ONE file format it supported, maybe two. What about running with many different library stacks/APIs underneath? All that shit takes time and memory.

And we are in a transitional period. We're maximalists with respect to amount of features and compatibility we cram into every app (and platform), but maybe soon hopefully eventually evolution will cool a bit and things will start to run as tightly again as Deluxe Paint III on the Amiga 500.
I don't think it's a close cousin at all. Making you pay a fee to take a class that they spent resources putting together and administering is quite different than the private companies in the article who are just shafting the poor and using that as a sales tactic to implant themselves deeper into local governments.

Also note that you can get away with taking the anti-speeding class only once. It's a one-time deal they offer you, mostly as a warning. It's not a continuous stream of revenue for the party administering the fee.
>Web apps aren't fundamentally slow

Computers aren't fundamentally slow, either. The point is that they are slow in practice.
What, you think every business in the US is General Electric?

It's exactly the opposite. GE can deal with the burden that comes with an overbearing State.

There are 23 million businesses in the US, 95% of which are very small businesses run by individuals. They suffer from the burden of too many laws and regulations as well - and a lot more so than the giant corporations.
> 3. Instead of taking the number of stars typically presented on a business (1.0, 1.5, 2.0, etc.), we grabbed an average from Yelp's dataset of reviews for each of these businesses, so you end up having businesses with ratings like 1.37 or 3.22.

I don't believe that derivation is equivalent.

From my own tabulation of the data:

# of reviews in Yelp's reviews dataset: 1,125,458 reviews

# sum reviews among all reviews for businesses in Yelp's business dataset: 1,236,445 reviews

So the aggregate will fail to account for about 10% of the rating data.
Apache Storm and Kafka Cluster with Docker
Uber API for developers
Steve Goldberg tells you about how to build a million dollar startup
Well, some of the browsers are open source, so in theory, we don't have to be passive; we can help make them great. So I guess I should find an area of Gecko, Blink, or WebKit that needs work, and dive in.
I play music with a lot of old hippies (55-75, which to me isn't truly decrepitly old, but I'm 36 so these aren't folks I consider to be "my" age group). I gave up smoking about the time I turned 30.

The guys who smoke don't seem any less sharp than the other folks I know in those age groups, and they seem on par with the other folks I know of all age groups when they are smoking. So yah, I know plenty of wise old guys who regularly smoke.
There is a lot of anger in response to my comment, but it is all legitimate points too. Here are the facts as I know them:

1. Poor software can be written using either web or native technology.
2. It is possible to write fast, responsive applications that run in the browser (up to a certain level of complexity.) I know because this is what I do for a living, and I am pretty good at it. Sadly, many web developers are not very good at it or simply don't care enough about preventing a slow, clunky experience.
3. Some cutting-edge web tech (WebGL is the best example I can think of) is not yet ready for prime time. I love proof-of-concepts that demonstrate the possibilities of canvas, but commercial software should not be relying it yet.
4. The barrier of entry is lower for web. The double edge of this sword is web applications are more likely to be built by inexperienced amateurs.

These are real problems, but they do not indicate that small applications will inherently run slowly in a browser. That is caused by poor design and architecture.