skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I bitched the lady out because thats not answer you give to a customer that just dropped $3000"

Was it her fault? Did she make the policy? You can be certain that she wasn't able to get it magically shipped, you'd be surprised at how little authority people int hat position actually have (for the most part they get to follow scripts, and that's basically it.)

If your stuff arrived on time, it would have anyway. That means you abused some poor woman with no more control than you had and likely ruined her day - but hey, I'm sure it made you feel better and much more in control.

" I fucking hate all customer supports, even the good ones."

THe best part is that this guarantees you likely never have a good customer support experience. And you'll continue to blame it on everyone else.
Letter Monsters – a Flash game I helped with
While I agree with the analysis, it appears to still be speculative . . .
Unless you need the limit to be that high. But I agree that it isn't ideal. However, PHP cleans up nicely once the process ends, and manually freeing memory space can slow PHP down. The only exception I would take to this, I believe, are resources. If is_resource($foo) returns true, you should probably free it (looking at you, JpGraph)
Awesome, so my city is still the only market they've ever pulled out of. Way to go Vancouver. welp :(
Ya. Exactly. I like that term.
It's not large corporations per se, but traditional government contracting where the implicit incentive is to deliver minimum value at maximum cost.
Doesn't the same situation also apply for most humanities PhDs? Here's a very quick Google result[1]:

Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into
an emotional trainwreck, not a professor.
...
I deeply regret going to graduate school
...
I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea
because the full-time, tenure-track literature
professorship is extinct.

That's just one anecdote. But, fundamentally, the payoff for a PhD just doesn't seem to be there any more. Too few tenure track jobs, too many non-tenured adjunct professors. So why does tuition keep rising, why are there so many administrators employed by universities? Why are grad students being misled about the prospects?

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/04/there_...
I may get some flack and down votes for saying this.

But, I have experienced something quite the opposite. Apple keeps pushing updates that cripple older devices.

In the last few years I have had a number of my devices and those of my friends rendered useless because of updates pushed by Apple.

I have seen a variety of issues the most common and annoying of those include:
1. Battery Failure - Immediately after an update (happened to my iPhone 4, my cousins and two friends in the same week, immediately after the update)
2. Extreme lag/slowdown when receiving calls/typing
3. Front camera stops working or more accurately hangs the application making use of it.

I am not a conspiracy theorists. But in all cases I have seen people including myself upgrade soon after, at times to android devices, but most often to iDevices.

Don't know if it is a deliberate goal. But it truly sucks.
I think I see it. TheVerge and I have vastly different definitions of "bulge".
Wealthy L.A. Schools' Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan's
See, this is how you make an argument in favor of NodeJS. I'm not convinced that it's a particularly good argument in general, but in a specific use case like this is makes sense, you're gaining some nice advantages to offset the inherit weaknesses of JS.

Nice job, this is the single best argument in favor of using NodeJS for something I think I've ever seen.
Voice Interfaces
Correlation vs Causation, yes.
? - are you on Chrome and what does not work?
According to the article, "Industry experts" say that is the safe bet (and I agree). However, nothing has been announced, yet.
Ah yep. I was mixing things up a bit.

The one that surprised me was that, in some cases:

Large + small + small + small =! small + small + small + = Large

Which is indeed associativity.

Really underscores how complex things are.
I don't really disagree with the reasoning, I just disagree with how Apple only is the recipient of such scrutiny. Same deal with payments stuff. And the reason basically boils down to, they have fancy ads and their products look really nice so they must be lying to us.
i can respect that, can't argue with honesty.
The relationship between two equals (as in a marriage) is a different dynamic than that of one between a parent and a child. A spouse is an adult who can take care of himself, while a child needs guidance to avoid dangerous situations. It's not tyranny, it's parenting.
WebIDE, Storage inspector, jQuery events, iframe switcher – Firefox Dev Tools
Yes, I've used Hover lately and been very happy.
I am running Win8.1 + VS2013 on a late-2013 rMBP 15". It works great with Parallels (9, though 10 is out now).

One hiccup I did have was with Resharper. I had to update to v8.1 because v7 had serious scaling issues (the indicator at the bottom right was about 300x300px).

Otherwise, it's been fantastic to use.
Excerpt from a book:

In today's culture -- where our self-worth is tied to our net worth, and we base our worth on our level of productivity -- spending time doing purposeless activities is rare. In fact, for many of us it sounds like an anxiety attack waiting to happen.

That's from Guidepost #7 of Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection. That chapter is subtitled Letting Go of Exhaustion As A Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth.

The previous chapter on cultivating creativity is also worth a read.
Too Late to Start? Quarter Life Crisis and Late Bloomers
I actually would be fairly happy with that. At the moment, I think the space industry resembles very closely how the transistor market looked in the 50's. Very few immediate commercial prospects, but an eager government. I think more competition only helps the industry as a whole?

Though from my sideline uneducated perspective SpaceX has demonstrated more success then anyone else at this point.
That is a pretty powerful example - things like data importing are things that I often end up needing to queue to process in the background. Offloading the heavy parts to the client is a really awesome alternate solution. I'll be saving this for the future for sure. Thank you!
The other typically expected property that fails is distributivity.
In the real world, where there is no shortage of shitty people, not all mothers are deserving of respect.
Rails is not Django
> This is known to happen often in Apple products, maybe for the purpose of Development or Support, but it is still there.

Could you elaborate on this? Are you talking about the development tools that require your phone to be cabled to a laptop?
Agreed, which is why I am hoping for a joint contract.
I expect a port to the Raspberry Pi will happen. The supported boards are all ARM v7, but the Pi is v6 and that is probably the reason it's not supported right out of the gate.
You seem to imply there is something wrong with that.. As long as you bump the version number and support the old version for bug fixes, it ends up being the best way to move the world forward.
> How can we keep the Wozniaks and Notchs of the world involved in making decisions in a way that keeps them happy?

I think you come up with a publishing model. E.g., you front them money, provide staff, orchestrate delivery/maintenance, handle legal issues, but otherwise you leave the creative control in the hands of the author. This has worked in movies, music, literature, etc. The key is that creative control can never be challenged by business priorities (and if it is, the author needs to be able to take their IP and find another publisher).

Edit to add: at a certain point, a project ends and people like Notch need to move on to actually contribute (to society). No one complains when bands switch labels or directors stop making sequels.
Do they still get fined for the time they were operating under the ban? Or does it retroactively invalidate the fines?
Someone Should
So they spent so much time and effort on making older iOS devices to look like iOS7? Why? What is the return on investment there? And it only works on jailbroken devices (I am assuming). So how are they getting their money on this? I am being really cynical here but the first thing that came to mind is, are they peddling malware or syphoning off user information under the hood?
By whom? And for what purpose?

If Docker was about to be acquired, why would there be any interest in raising a round? That dilutes everyone for no purpose. That's not smart.
I don't know if it's funny but I once added a "This image is not required" in the alt text of the image. The src pointed to a non existent image. Haven't seen anyone else laugh at this but myself :)
What law and what is the purpose of said law?
I think it's a great idea actually. Build a small kernel with very few responsibilities so it's easier to prove safety

That already exists and was just open sourced! See seL4:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assu...
Yes! A very good overview of how to hire people remotely. Removing extra (often irrelevant) constraints such as location lets you focus on other more crucial things. Also, a remote team leads to more personal freedom, goal-oriented focus, and encourages that you work via a Asynchronous workflow and thus more efficiently.
Governments always create borders and politics that slow down the innovation. But we have great entrepreneurs disposed to fight against that.
Hours spent doing lot of controls and fallen into a stupid one.
Lessons learned.

Danny
That's true. Maybe it would work, but I wonder if anyone has attempted it before...
Apple Watch (1995)
Well, the thing is that you can test whether a fixed point is an attracting fixed point; per Wikipedia (which I am relying on for the details of the test because I haven't used this for years, but the test looks correct), any fixed point x of a function f which has an open neighborhood where f is continuously differentiable and f'(x) < 1 is attracting.
I disagree. If things go south (meaning they do what they claimed they couldn't, and then get caught) people will surely remember it, and in that case it would be negative PR-points, doubled.
That doesn't mean he's not lying, it just makes it less likely.
Trying not to be a curmudgeon - but I really don't see what the big fuss is about, or how docker is fundamentally changing anything.

Not to take anything away from docker being a decent tool in some circumstances - but really this methodology has been around in one implementation for ages on Unix platforms.
I have a list there near the end. it's not all just "blah blah blah". Do I need to honestly do all the legwork here for illustrating the plain and obvious?

This is kinda becoming a huge waste of my time, sorry.
I prefer your version by far over the overly verbose and overly simple new haberman guide.
Knuth and Goldberg made fantastic and precise overviews, and there is a need to terse it down for programmers, but not too much, down to ground school level.
China creates cell phone lane for 'zombie pedestrians' who want to text and walk
How does a hippo end up in the Chicago river?
How to migrate your apps from iOS7 to iOS8
Those are both chosen-prefix attacks. They're impressive, but not relevant to this case where one file is completely out of the attacker's control.
I'm trying to think of a single language of which this is not true. It's certainly not Java. That dude is drinking all your beer.
I set up Nagios alerts to send a YO! to a very senior engineer anytime there was a warning
"Your first course of action is to increase your memory limit" - No. First thing you do is baseline your server and figure out how much max memory you want to allocate to PHP given the maximum that can be used from the other processes. OP's advice is a recipe for oom'ing your VPS. Also if there are more developers, hiding the memory allocation in code instead of setting file is going to be fun.
Governments protect the people by banning dangerous, profit-driven practices. As they should.
A Thank You Note to HuffPost Readers (Crowdsourced Journalism)
Thank you for writing a detailed guide about your best practices. It is a long-term struggle to convince managers that good remote work environment can be done (and good for both their budget and their employees well-being), and such stories definitely help this effort.
I worked with nickc before he was terminated (I am no longer an employee of PHMGMT, DF, or GN. I left but Imn sure the company doesnt have a very high opinion of myself), and I can attest that he is one weird dude. When I first started working there it was suggested to get Nick to start talking about all of his conspiracy theories in order to pass the time at night... I did not get the chance (nor did I have the desire). I am absolutely not surprised by this.
Master Google Apps at GCON – Online Conference
Great work guys , it would be cool if it was for the 3gs too :D
Many years ago, I watched a TV interview with an Austin startup who said things like, "We can't tell anyone what we are actually doing, because some larger company will jump in and take over our market." That was the moment when I said, "We're done here."

I'm suddenly having that same feeling. If you had solid examples, I'd probably have more than just a feeling.
The Apple store price for the iPhone 5c 16GB for the period in question was US$650. But Amazon sellers were asking and frequently getting, according to the chart, US$670 and seldom less than US$650.

But you could just get on from Apple at the store or with free shipping for US$650. Why would the buyers pay more? Maybe the Amazon sellers making a profit by not paying sales taxes.

I thought that Apple sold iPhones at a wholesale discount to retailers, so shouldn't they be able to make a profit at even lower prices? Competition doesn't appear to have brought prices down to marginal cost here.
Less money going to Russia the better, now if only they would do the same for the middle-east.
When I left late last year, Mikedoug was still at DF.
Note: IANA medieval scholar nor particularly versed in medieval translation, but here would be my explanation:

A medieval translator tackling Aristotle would face several challenges, some insurmountable, but Boethius had many unique advantages.

Boethius was one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the Latin Empire (the "magister officiorum"), so he had the influence and access to manuscripts that few others could match. He was classically trained in his youth and could speak, read and write in both classical Greek and Latin, a skill that was becoming rare among his contemporaries, a good thing for him but also a problem since there weren't many colleagues he could confer with.

If a word or phrase was unfamiliar --and in a technical work like Aristotle's there could be plenty of vocabulary that wasn't common-- Boethius would need to research and document it. That wasn't as simple as it would be today, there were no real dictionaries or reference books to assist in translation. So he would have to access other manuscripts, which might involve a painstaking copying process by hand, travel over large distances, and other numerous challenges the modern translator rarely needs to face. Fortunately Boethius had the power, influence and wealth to do this.

Making things even more difficult is that the Aristotelian corpus was fragmentary even in Boethius' time, much of what survives from Aristotle aren't anything close to completed manuscripts but more like class notes, compiled and edited by students and later scholars. This meant that Boethius wasn't able to do just a word-for-word translation or a paraphrase, he needed to analyze and comment on each section so that nuances weren't lost. Without a large body of existing scholarship, Boethius had to do a lot of the work on his own.

Given that translation wasn't his day job, each document could take years or even decades of work.
Right, but what shovels are you going to sell during the solar gold rush?

> That produced an oversupply, which meant less profits

No idea honestly. My assumption was that the energy efficiency of solar (i.e. how much it costs to R&D + implement) has been so poor that many people/organizations ditched it.
The set of transcendental but computable numbers is also countable, however: there is a countable number of algorithms. Therefore, the majority of the reals are uncomputable, like Chaintin's constant (the probability that a random algorithm halts). This can in turn be made stronger by noticing that the definition of Chaitin's constant is finite, and by the same argument, definable real numbers are countable. It follows that the majority of the reals are indefinable.
Many customers sell their iPhone around the time the new one comes out (using services like iCracked and Gazelle). Basic economics dictates that as supply increases, prices will go down. This is a guess as to what could cause the prices to go decrease so rapidly.
Probably the truth lies somewhere in between.
So, basically, what she says is, if you earn in US, healthcare is affordable in India. She seems to think $4,300 is cheap and affordable for all Indians. Only the upper middle class and the rich in India can spend that kind of money. (Only about 25% of Indians have health insurance).
In Germany, the taxi market is strictly regulated and enforced.

Cities have uniform tariffs, calibrated meters and forced availability (i.e. a taxi driver is obliged to take everyone everywhere, unless the guest is a danger to the safety of the taxi like drunk or agressive) to avoid the horror stories of other cities like wildly varying prices for the same route (hello Uber surge pricing!), cabs not responding to a hail (multiple accounts of this on HN e.g. for New York)... and the drivers have to undergo a rigorous testing of location knowledge, which usually takes into account not just the streets, but also basic history and points of interest.

Also, in most cities the number of available medaillions usually represents the amount of taxis needed, so there is no unhealthy competition and enough taxis on the road to serve the demand.

Edit: Yep, the cars also are mandatory checked once every year and the cars are commercially insured. Rigorous checks also make sure every driver is appropriately registered and no "illegal" workers drive. The downside of the system, though, is that the fares are seen to high from customers' POV and too low from the company POV (because the prices are often adjusted only once every couple of years and in the meantime, gas and insurance costs only go up).

Another thing which will be massively disrupting the German taxi space will be the mandatory minimum wage of €8.70/h - while now a huge lot of the taxi drivers are paid a percentage of their income, everyone will have to shift to hour-based payments, which will definitely affect the companies.
Do you have any easy-to-grok real world examples/libraries you would recommend? Genuinely curious and want to learn more. The JS code I end up writing is always in a more traditional object-oriented style but I'm usually not entirely satisfied with the end results.
HN community...these are all great suggestions and the feedback has been really positive. Thank you!
> We should perhaps call them approximate pseudo numbers or something.

More importantly, we just shouldn't make them the default types used for decimal literals (or, a fortiori, for all numbers in your language -- yes, JavaScript, I'm looking at you.)

Premature optimization is the root of all kinds of evil -- or at least errors -- in programming, and "treat decimal literals as floating point because that's the most processor-friendly way of dealing with non-integer numbers" is the most pervasive premature optimization in computing.
BLAS uses it, and Excel of course also uses floating point.

On the first look, it appears a dubious presentation anyway. The examples don't have much sense too: you can't actually calculate properly sin( 10e22 ) in binary floating point format because both exponent and mantissa are binary: the exponent is 2^76 and in 4-bytes floats you have 23 bits, in 8-byte doubles 53 bits, so you can't even represent the starting number with the enough bits to calculate meaningful sin. You'd need a two parameter function to be even able to pass what you actually want to pass. So calling sin( 10e22 ) in the languages with 4 or 8-bytes binary FP of course can't be expected to produce any meaningful result.

But maybe all this was spoken, not written, and it's just misleading to read it without knowing the comments.

"Who is NOT using: Excel, BLAS" could maybe then mean that author wanted to say "Excel, BLAS, they use them too"? (If we want to believe that he had any idea what he wrote about). Definitely not good to give this presentation to somebody who doesn't already know more. Confusion guaranteed.
What is a minimum YC application?
A friend and I are submitting a YC application and are starting to discuss things like equity, governance and so on.

What is the minimum we need to figure out before applying?

If accepted, we'd like to get as much input as possible about those decisions from the mentors at YC.. but we don't want to get dismissed because our corporate structure is half-baked.

We're not hopeless to the point that we can't figure out things like founder equity, but we're interested about things like alternate advisory boards, and don't want to make a misstep.

As a bonus question, it's unclear if our startup would be best positioned as a for or non-profit company. Is this a decision we could delay until after acceptance?
They could just let ios 6 continue to be installed on the iPhone 4, or let you restore from your own back-ups. I think this was actually possible for the first few weeks of ios 7 release, but then they "unsigned" the older versions.
New Printable General Competency Test (GCT)
1. Who's responsible for actions that affect other people?

1a - If kids misbehave badly enough, can't the parents get in trouble instead / as well?

1b - But, aren't married couples (sometimes?) responsible for eachother's debts?

.

2. Who's responsible if [the person being watched] gets hurt?

2a - Parents are definitely responsible for keeping kids safe, and I've heard they can sometime get in trouble for not watching closely enough even if nothing happens.

2b - Married people tend to be adults, and considered responsible for their own safety and wellbeing.

.

I'm guessing the different standards have something to do with (2).
Half entrepreneur, half investor: interview with François Derbaix
I guess the problem with that approach is that most modern phones are useless without the app ecosystem. So you're stuck with whatever set of apps run on that particular handset/os version. You'll need an appstore that serves LTS software.
Even with a "bulge", it's thinner than the iPhone 5s. But I don't think thickness was the problem. I'm sure that, given the choice of a thinner 4.7" phone and an even thicker 4.0" phone with improved battery life, quite a few people would choose the improved battery life.

I'm surrounded by people who complain about running out of battery. I've never once heard anyone say anything like "this phone is too thick, if only it were 0.7 mm thinner!".

I do agree that many people wanted a larger screen. And having a 4.7" phone that kept thickness at 7.6 mm would have probably made the new phone too heavy. Oh well, life is full of compromises.
Here's an example to understand why revenue lowers your valuation. Twitter grows like crazy, adds millions and millions of users. Great, maybe it's worth billions.

But if Twitter had started charging for premium accounts, as an experiment, their revenue during the same period could have grown from $1M to $5M. Can a billion-dollar company have revenue of $5M? No. So the valuation of Twitter would have come back to earth, maybe $100M, maybe a bit more, but not "the sky is the limit" number.