skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been to a couple of Uber house parties here in SF. The culture seems pretty pathetic - all the employees think they can do what they want because their CEO is aggressive and can run through brickwalls. Its funny how it percolates through to everyone.
NASDAQ != NYSE
It was NetBSD until Jordan made it FreeBSD.
You don't say things like this to an audience containing media members and not expect it to get out. Not only that, but by the same token this is in no way "attempted" blackmail. Are we supposed to assume Uber does not already buy 1MM PR spends?
Sorry, but can you point me to the place where Sarah Lacy and Pando investigated the "personal life of Uber"? I can't speak for all the other things in that Pando article you link to, but when I read the snippet about Uber, I see something about how the Uber's CEO bragged about "Boober" and I see that that brag was derived from a public interview that the CEO gave GQ:

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201403/uber-cab-c...

So are you equating ripping on a public interview with GQ Magazine with this allegation by Buzzfeed? -

> Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

What does "turnabout" mean to you exactly?
I am writing Python/Django professionally for two years now. I have also written some Node.js at work and Open Source. (https://github.com/vinitkumar/node-twitter). So, I think I would be able to give some advice.

Node.js is all cool to experiment with and build some projects but it gets incredibly tough when you want to write something complex. I am not saying that it is impossible to build something complex, but it would take a very experienced developer to do all of that in acceptable time.

Python/Django on other hand has a very mature ecosystem and the development is really fast as compared to Node.js which also has a fast start but you get stuck when you need to build something complex. There are many quality plugins for Python/Django which in IMHO much better in quality than npm packages.

Python on other hand is a better language than JS and you won't need to fight the language to write better code (The point is it is very easy to shoot yourself on foot while using JS).

If I were you at this stage of your career, I would suggest to start doing Python/Django and maybe learn some good Golang/C++.
>>OSX is based on it

I'm not sure about that. Have you any source?
You could also make an economic argument for filtering: the infant industry argument.

Protection from the west by the great firewall has made Chinese services flourish.

Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been practically destroyed by foreign competitors.
Not true at all. POTUS does a lot of off the record or background briefings. Its legit, mainstream media culture.

"White House background briefings: Good journalism or anonymous government spin?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/white-house-ba...

This is all 'don't quote me on this' stuff.

Attaching names to quotes in these situations is condisered unethical. Seems no different from an ethics perspectiv e than other types of "off the record" commenting (ie, "you can reveal X but not Y).

But maybe somebody can school us (all) on the finer points here if we're reading it wrong.
'I suspect that both Node and Django will be obsolete in roughly a year or two'
I don't see this happening for Django any soon. It is very mature and has a good adaptation rate.
Wow, I just read through the documentation for the Nix package manager and it's a breath of fresh air...Source based builds but with the convenience of pre-compiled binaries hashed with all the input parameters used to create those binaries:

https://nixos.org/nix

Has anyone tried using this for development?
> blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen

I'm not sure I follow. It's not like there's a huge demand to do business with local Chinese nationals. There's opportunity, sure, there's always opportunity, but don't confuse that with demand. Unfortunately, very few businesses outside of China could even compete with domestic companies anyways. They're literally working for pennies on the dollar. That's also ignoring the cultural and language barriers, not to mention governmental red-tape you would have to go through.

It would be like me trying to set up an customer service business here in Maine and trying to sell my services to a lower-middle sized company in India. I wouldn't be able to compete with local Indian companies since their overhead and costs are significantly less than mine. Obviously there are exceptions depending on the industry, but they are just that, exceptions.
Here's a counter example:

A island nation with highly accessible fisheries populated by 100 people in the middle of the ocean could spend their labor on building a CDN or fishing.

If they use other's CDNs, the money they sent would be used by foreigners to buy their fish, which could be produced very cheaply. Building their CDN means forgoing their fishing opportunity. Building a CDN means they can now sell their CDN services cheaper than it would have cost them to run a website to sell their fish, but the benefit is marginal compared to the income they would have received by focusing their labor in an industry where they have comparative advantage.

They must choose only one because they have limited labor.

...Land, labor, capital and technology is wealth, and money only represent a claim on that wealth.
But it wasn't publicly. That's why I said that everyone needs some privacy and it certainly is also an aspect why the notion of "off the record" exists.

And while I wouldn't call it "dictator shit" since a CEO is not a government official with direct power over his targets, it would certainly be a smear campaign which I wouldn't condone.

I'm operating on the assumption that people say many things that they do not intend to follow up with deeds, especially when they think they are not talking publicly.
Are journalists who dig up dirt without making threats a "small step" from people who use violence against people without making threats first?

There is a core difference between threats of violence (such as what is done by oppressive regimes) and threats of telling the truth. And it's a bit silly to call Pando and Sarah Lacy an "independent 3rd party bystander". The entire enterprise is an extremely opinionated anti-tech enterprise - kind of like what the Uber execs proposed building, just with a slightly different target.

It sounds like you are saying the people who call themselves independent media deserve special privileges that the rest of us don't get. Is that correct?
Maybe it's about shedding light on the pyschopaths that are running Uber?
So why aren't there photos of your final 1x scale prototype? The evolution pic is a render, which leads me to believe that engineering challenges will prevent you going from breadboard to 2x to 1x scale, making this project dead in the water.
Know how Medical Jeopardy affects your life
>Patents stop them (JPEG2000 is not a free format).

Oh please, stop with this FUD. JPEG2000 is no different to Ogg or VP8 in that regard, both of which Mozilla is happy to ship. It was designed to be usable without having to licence any patents. Any known patents have been waived. The possibility of unknown patents remains but is vanishingly small by this point (other organisations much larger than Mozilla have been shipping JPEG2000 code for years).

http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg2000/index.html

>Furthermore, it includes guidelines and examples, a bibliography of technical references, and a list of companies from whom patent statements have been received by ISO. JPEG 2000 was developed with the intention that Part 1 could be implemented without the payment of licence fees or royalties, and identified patent holders have waived their rights toward this end. However, the JPEG committee cannot make a formal guarantee, and it remains the responsibility of the implementer to ensure that no patents are infringed.

What the fuck does Mozilla even mean by "free format" these days? It's an ISO standard, it was designed to be usable without paying any fees, there is a waiver of any known patents, it's been used across the industry for years without legal problems. I can't think of a single way that it could be made "more free". The only possible reason I can see is that it wasn't invented by Mozilla/Xiph. And really that is just pathetic and very much a "nasty attitude".
Just to add to the charming profile of the paragons of virtue that is senior management at Uber[1]:

"...In fact, the general manager of Uber NYC accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed News reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, to make points in the course of a discussion of Uber policies. At no point in the email exchanges did she give him permission to do so."

- So the CEO has publicly admitted to Calling it Boob-er [2]

- Laughable disregard for Customer Privacy [1]

- Thuggish/Predatory tactics towards Competitors [3]

- Hit pieces & Misogynistic Statements about Journalists who cover them unfavorably

Why are investors falling all over themselves to give this grab-bag of egomaniacal, frat-boy thugs more money?

This is the real question for VCs and investors...is turning a profit the ONLY thing?
then stop Bloviating about trying to change the world, about trying to attract more women into CS, etc. etc.

Actions speak louder than words.

[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-dig...

[2]http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201403/uber-cab-c...

[3]http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6067663/this-is-ubers-play...
They also acquired Basis (http://www.mybasis.com)
Sarah Lacy would be skewered by the public if she said her goal was digging up dirt against a specific individual.

Similarly, she'd probably catch some negative press if she made questionable statements in a GQ article.

So no, she doesn't get special privileges.

If Uber wants to open a newspaper to advance their political agenda, they at least have to go through the pretense of reporting on everything, a la Rupert Murdoch.
Aeron is a messaging system built standing on the shoulders of Kafka and Zeromq.
Yeah, if this is the shit they do and talk about in public, WTF do they do and talk about in private?

EDIT: Oh my God, they also have the location data of the comings and goings of lots of politicians and industry regulators, don't they? Late night trips from locations some of those people might not want made public? If they'll so casually threaten a mother's kids, threaten journalists with $1M smear campaigns, what else have they already done?
Foobar with Google: Peculiar Balance
Facebook's Mcrouter
Ryan Singel here from Contextly (my co-founder wrote the blog post).

I think you are absolutely right on with the insight that stellar content is missed by readers for many reasons.

We are part of a solution for publishers that want to have a re-purposing program. Some of that can and should be very editorial, but it can also be complemented or informed by a service like ours that works on a publisher's own domain.

Our definition of "evergreen" for the purposes of the study of the HN archive differs from the one we use for our publishing clients.

That said, I do think it would be interesting to see what stories continually get re-submitted, as that may well show off the most unchanging evergreen.

(Defined in that case as a story that continually has a fairly high value for a substantial number of people over a steady amount of time. Compare that to say David Sedari's SantaLand Diaries, which is also an "evergreen," but I would strongly suspect a highly seasonal time of interest.)
I linked to Sarah Lacy reporting on Evan Spiegel's private life. Why is it acceptable to expose his private emails, but not Sarah Lacy's private life?

If the opposition researchers dug up unpleasant things Sarah Lacy said publicly (but are now forgotten), would that be acceptable to you? (This is normally a big part of what such researchers do.)
Modelling nondeterminism with monads is a fairly standard use of monads. Specifically, you can model multiple possible results with a (lazy) list, and list is a monad. That's about it.

Sleep well!
The chunking is done using parameters generated from a secret key, and I haven't been able to see any way for it to be computationally feasible to extract meaningful information from the resulting block sizes.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible, of course; just that it would require someone smarter than me. ;-)
A caching layer for random reads where the dataset is 10x larger tham memory isn't hugely useful. If you get a hit, great, but you can't count on it.

For memory mapping to make sense you need to fetch a big chunk of data, whereas read() gets a page's worth. For the data size and read pattern described in the post, the latter is much more desirable.
The OS X userland and some other parts are derived from FreeBSD. One of the project initiators (Jordan Hubbard[1]) went to Apple and ported it for the initial version of OS X. He now left.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_OS_X_Without_...

> The two operating systems do share a lot of code, for example most userland utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD versions.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...

> The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard
68 Katy – 68000 Linux on a Solderless Breadboard
I... I'm confused but I just don't know. There's a bit more info on the product in the video (note, the comments for the video are disabled, which is telling) [1], but the use cases aren't very compelling. It provides slightly less functionality than other smart watches, but does so in a 'pretty' package (I admit I can't tell if people would find this aesthetically pleasing or not).

The device comes with AT&T mobile service "for free" with purchase and this might be a slightly more seamless experience for people (e.g. leave your phone at home). However... I don't know if people really would leave their phone at home unless they're out of the house for a brief time, like for a run.

I guess I get the philosophy: stop making smart watches look dorky, but I feel like the this goal is impossible because the phone has a display which feels... dorky.

Sidenote, what does the app development look like for this? Is someone like Yelp using specific internal resources to get the graphics to look right on the screen? Is the company just approving an app that someone else develops?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr9vLoK0_w0
The link in the headline should be changed to the original reporting from Ben Smith at Buzzfeed instead of Gigaom's commentary about the story.

[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-dig...
It worries me that this thread could get our beloved Hacker News blocked. I cross my fingers, as you might see, I'm from inside the w@ll.
Private expression is fine in your own home. When you spout off about attacking journalists, in front of journalists, you are asking for it.
But the article we are talking about are about something which is actually damaging and appalling. As for the truth or source, well, that is sth we always have to go with the journalist's integrity and then rely on analysis and discussion which we contribute to.
Balance Sheet Statement Preparation Checklist
Apart from their prices went up $5/m for new servers are are currently sold out.
markcerqueira, you, sir, are hellbanned.
They've made a preliminary response here: http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/32575-multiple-massive-sec...
Does anyone know if Cache Databases are blocked? I made a chrome extension called WebCache that views the cached version of a webpage which would be helpful if Google Cache, Wayback Machine, or Coral CDN isn't blocked. Here is the source: https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache
BuzzFeedBen was very careful about noting that the organizers failed to indicate that the evening's remarks would be off the record, and that's a point Uber has (wisely) chosen not to dispute. Meaning everything said was fair game.

In other words, Ben was clearly signaling that his other sources could remain confident that he respects the known and accepted rules of engagement, and that he will continue to do so.

However, he will not let a genuine scoop slide by if some high-profile idiot gets up in front of a room with heavy duty media people in it and (drunkenly?) talks — in excruciating detail — about how he'd spend $1 million in company funds to go about personally violating journalists who wrote negative things about his company.

I say "drunkenly" because I have no other explanation for a compound failure of judgement this cosmically bad.
Yeah, but you're pretty much guaranteed 2,000 hours of your time will be paid.

I can see how specialists, available for short-term gigs, are worth more per hour than generalists. Companies prefer generalists, since that gives them the flexibility to assign them to another project, should the priorities change, but specialists are good for removing specific roadblocks and then moving on.
So the act of digging up dirt is acceptable. It's only doing it in a targeted manner, rather than opportunistically, that's the problem.

I'm sure she might catch negative press - lots of harmless behavior creates negative press. I'm not asking how to manage the media, I have no interest in being a PR flack. I'm asking whether reporting on her questionable statements (the sort of thing opposition researchers do) would be "abhorrent".

Similarly, would exposing and reporting on her personal emails and other parts of her private life (as Pando has done to Evan Spiegel) be "abhorrent"?
They should. It would make Lyft a lot more popular all of the sudden.
Until they forked Blink, Google was the top contributor to WebKit:
http://blog.bitergia.com/2013/02/06/report-on-the-activity-o...
Alcatel-Lucent Pins Its Future on a ‘Reverse Takeover’
Then you should

a) start re-developing, or

b) open up your wallet and pay someone else to do it, while

c) accepting greatly decreased web reliability and bandwidth and

d) preparing for enormous legal and polictical shenanigans of upsetting the status quo of traffic monitoring and the shape of telecommunications bandwidth.
Python was designed to be a glue language. It does a terrific job at connecting together different pieces of C code. The more I use it, the more I realize that this is Python's calling. I envision a future where I code numerical stuff in Julia, and use Python to connect it to my main application, my GUI, web frontends and file juggling code.
"an overwhelming sense of love and comfort"

Funny, I would describe my experiences with meditation using exactly the same words. Combined with really wonky visual effects.

(with meditation in the zen-buddhist context I think this perception alteration is probably just considered a potentially harmfull side-effect.)

I see no harm in chemically induced warmth and comfort but chemicals are not the only thing that can make us experience altered states of perception and relaxation.

I would definetly understand why this would be beneficial in a therapeutic setting.

We are probably still laking in proper terminology but this anxiety reduction caused by these techniques is something that really should become part of the general medical practice. I think some people become substance abusers because they seek this release from their inner turmoil and loose themselves in excess or desperation.

I would definetly understand why this would be beneficial in a therapeutic setting.
Yep, I got a debit card when I was about 13. I distinctly remember going to the bank with my mom to open a checking account, and explaining to the teller that I needed a debit card because I wanted to sign up for an account with this new company called Paypal.
A VPN provider won't protect your MAC address from being physically tracked.
Like I said, I don't know much off the top of my head about all the other things Pando could have possibly reported on, but to humor you, I looked up the stuff about Evan Spiegel.

It looks like it's sourced to a Valleywag article here:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/fuck-bitches-get-leid-the-sleazy...

So to answer your question, no, I would not have an issue with researchers digging up things that Sarah Lacy has said publicly, especially if they pertain to the quality and integrity of her reporting. So I guess we're left to interpret whether her journalistic credentials is what BuzzFeed is claiming to be targeted here:

> They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life

And the last graf of BuzzFeed's piece doesn't entice us to give Uber's exec the benefit of the doubt:

> At the Waverly Inn dinner, it was suggested that a plan like the one Michael floated could become a problem for Uber. Michael responded: “Nobody would know it was us.”

I've worked in investigative journalism for a few years and have worked on projects that dug up things about people. But never have my colleagues nor I did such work under surreptitious means. We made our identities clear during the reporting, and we printed our findings and allegations under our own names, and we took the criticism that came toward us. As far as I can tell, Lacy operates under the same rules of the game. So again, I ask, where do you see the fair turnabout between what Lacy does as a journalist and what BuzzFeed reports to have heard from the dinner?
That's extreme. This is just a swing toward turning internet access into utilities like electricity and water which are available without being tied to your residence. You still have public street lights and public water fountains outside your home. Likewise, internet is slowly moving away form this "thing" you always have to pay for to stay connected.

Verizon, TWC, Optimum, Comcast et al require that you have an account with them to use their hotspots. But you don't need an account with ConEd to be able to read your newspaper or book out on the street. This is where internet is headed.
If this was in a a different context, maybe. But private dinner, and expressed in the hypothetical, it a bit of a stretch. This story is media hype for two reasons: (1) greed and ego of the press; and (2) greed and ego of the press. Buzzfeed looks good for breaking the story, and the comment is an existential threat to other journalists and their business models. Ego, here we are.

I'd be more worried about this if their were some evidence that this was a view (1) meant to be expressed in public (or actually articulated to the public); or (2) articulated in confidence internally in a professional context (which means the intent was real, not just rhetorical; or (3) if other eye-witness testimony comes forth that unequivically supports that this was an actual threat mean to intimidate those actually present (seems unlikely...but lets see).

Without that, this is just another internet shitstorm, manufactured by people who have something to gain financially or who are emotionally invested in maligning this individual or the company.

I don't think you need to give anone the benefit of the doubt here, its more that the evidence doesn't really support the conclusions that are implied by the reporting (at least, yet).