skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He is not broke
He hid his money, including giving control of Mega to his wife which is still worth millions.
branding is a form of pithy yet effective value assertion

honestly the tradition of thanksgiving is grounded in a a disgusting past that is branded as a beautiful time to give thanks

the story goes :: a group of immigrants came to a strange country they felt was empty enough to set up a home for themselves but when winter came they were wholly unprepared for life in this new environment

there they laid dying, starving, and the natives to the land came and shared all they had with these immigrants and showed them how and what to plant in winter soil

the immigrants survived that winter and we now give thanks,
but the following spring they used their regrown strengths to decimate the population of the natives in order to take their land

fuck honoring that

now if you want to say you like getting together with family and friends for big meals, but we are all so busy we need to designate at least once a year it must be on the third thursday of november i am all for it

just call it something else so we can leave behind the baggage of the long since skewed bullshit that is thanksgiving and keep the stuff that it's really about: interacting over food

friendsgiving? ok..?

some friends and i began to grow busy in different directions so we organised a big group meal once a week, we always just called it our 'sunday destiny'

.

also, fuck columbus day too:
"
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
".. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the US .. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
I think people are learning Betteridge's law of headlines [0]
so questioning title constructions are more obviously link-bait.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)
Ok, controversial opinion here: he made downloading/sharing files easy, Dropbox-style. Had his "startup" been in Silicon Valley, things would have turned out very differently; starting with less emphasis on copyrighted material piracy(maybe), but also more political weight (hello, VC connections), and probably not a raid at its house while its US competitors are safe.
I feel as a remote worker I do more work. I don't get distracted and will often pull off 6 hours of continual work which, yes, is less than the 8...but I'd never do 6hrs straight of continual work in an office. Too many distractions. What are your expectations?
Or, as onli suggested, you can provide the private keys for the emptied account(s).
Still, that's a strong connection between you and the address, which is a whole different story than "leaving no traces", and pretty far away from a perfect crime.
I used to dabble in the creation of naturalistic languages. As soon as you have a syllable structure you can start writing things that look like language but aren't.

Once you add grammar you get things that are language, but are still gibberish until you write a dictionary.

The most notable example of this would be Tolkien's Middle Earth. He created tens of languages to various degrees of completeness. Qenya, for instance, is so complete you can write books and poetry in it. It's even taught at Oxford. That's elvish.

But dark elvish, the writing on The One Ring, has only been constructed to the extent that he could write that inscription. Nothing else of it exists.

Or you can even go for a much simpler example - a markov chain. "trained" on an English corpus it will produce texts that look exactly like English. But because it doesn't adhere to any grammatical rules it produces nothing but gibberish.
Strikes me as a nice idea, but why not just build for/use an already built library for a pre-existing language?

It does look nice, I'm just not sure the tradeoffs of building in a unique language are worth it, since it doesn't seem to add all that much.
I want to know why they're violating the end-to-end principle in their switches.
Go for the PhD. It's where your heart is. Otherwise you'll be more likely to regret at least not trying, you'll always wonder what would have happened if you did. You have plenty of dev experience if it goes wrong to go back into another job. And you can always do it part time?
I teach SATs to foreigners.

The SATs are criticised for this within the US as well, but in truth I think they form better preparation for college. No international exam predicts university performance, but (as I recall) the SAT does no worse than any other.

In fact the US does a pretty good job of undergraduate studies. If 15 of the top 20 universities are in the US then something is working.

I will list a few reasons why I prefer the SAT system -

Foreign exams: "you have an chance of scoring a few points even if the final answer is incorrect". In this respect, the foreign exams are giving you credit for being wrong but well-intentioned. Is that a desirable quality? That you know what to do, but you can't do it in practice? IMO giving credit for partial answers to basic knowledge questions is a highly dubious practice.

Whereas, strategies for answering the multiple choice questions effectively require extremely quick and subtle logic. A lot of foreign students don't really understand why these multiple choice exams are difficult - until they realise they are failing. You have to be knowledgeable, and also logical about your knowledge, under significant time pressure.

The statistics of what happens to guessers in multiple-choice questions is very easy to examine (and they won't pass). The statistics of what happens to bullshitters in essays is not very easy to examine (they might pass with minimal knowledge, if they can fool the examiner successfully or hit upon a lucky essay).

The fact that the test is standardised and asks questions from a basic and fixed set of knowledge means that universities know exactly what set of things the arriving undergraduates will know, and can target the first year courses appropriately to first year students. This is something that other systems fail by a huge margin. I mean, it just doesn't happen correctly elsewhere - a majority of first year students are left struggling for a significantly wasteful period of time, because the universities have not understood what the core intersection of knowledge the intake have.

The SAT is simple enough (in knowledge terms) that US schools are free to teach any extension courses in any direction that they like, allowing much more creativity in teaching and learning. Most schools internationally have become exam factories focussed only on the final exams, and the retaking of those final exams.

Having taught both systems, I prefer the SAT system and I think it does a far better educational job.
Re: "lack of resources"

The United States spends more per student on education than any other country in the world, by a large margin. See http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/48630868...., page 206.

Lack of resources has never been a problem with the US education system, it's been the management of them.
It feels like the old theory that all the elements are composed by water, fire, air, and earth.
Think of, uber, airbnb or dropbox. if they were non-SV and non-US they could face similar attacks of having illegal business practices and even end up in a raid of the founder's houses.

Silicon Valley is the strongest lobby for novelty and innovation. Even it struggles sometimes against the established laws and businesses.
You wonder, because you believe he is a criminal. Many others will disagree, and claim that file sharing site owner shall not be prosecuted for content people upload.
Nice article. I especially like the revolutionary idea that deworming pupils does not affect their school performance. Yes, human development is the thing that has to be fixed. But dreaming smaller is not going to fix that. Working harder - can, but it is not that much attractive.

Disclaimer: I have been involved in development projects feted by JICA.
He's popular because he's an ambiguous figure that triggers so many of the conventional narrative patterns that the mass media love to sell (because they work on the target audience as wish-fulfillment): he's a risk-taker, rags to riches (to rags?), robin hood type figure, everyman gone good/bad, how the mighty have fallen, sleaze-sex-money, fast cars and model girl-friends, boy next door, david vs goliath taking on the might of the US copyright industry, dawn raids by shady corrupt government procedures, extreme -- not only in girth, persecuted for helping the common man etc etc.

Journalists' dream come true. They/we can project upon him and his actions whatever fits their/our agenda.

There will eventually be a movie about him.
Data Breaches – Expect Things to Get Worse Before They Get Better
It depends on how you define tech companies.. Their main product is a transportation service, but there is obviously a lot of tech involved.

Similarly, there are websites which deal with selling clothes, so you could ask if they are in retail/fashion or in tech.

A couple of years ago, I worked in a startup which was involved in the local independent music scene. They organize events, did ticketing and have a online music magazine, with apps. Some people call it an entertainment/music company.. Some people call it a marketing/ad agency (because of what it offers its clients). And geeks like me called it a tech company.

It depends on your perspective.
The present day regime of standardized testing was pitched as a way to make school more like "business" by providing a numerical metric for driving things like funding and teacher promotions. But just like in business, we know that people will figure out how to game the metric.

Speaking out of fairly narrow self interest, the effect of the tests on my kids is that it dumbs down the curriculum, because drilling the test material becomes more important than moving on to more advanced topics or more complex types of assignments. They are both consistently in the 98th or 99th percentile on every test, and it seems like the testing is constant.

For my kids, more sophisticated and varied tests would mean a more sophisticated and varied curriculum.
Will do.

Talking to some people here, they think your DSSIM tool [1] isn't what I should use. Specifically, they said it runs blur and downscale steps aren't part of the SSIM metric. They suggested using Mehdi's C++ implementation [2], which I understand yours is a rewrite of.

Presumably you think I should use your tool instead? What makes the (D)SSIM numbers from yours a better match for human perception than those from Mehdi's? Or should they be giving the same numbers?

[1] https://pornel.net/dssim

[2] http://mehdi.rabah.free.fr/SSIM/
This is quite an interesting question. If you splat, you're effectively sharing some information between neighboring pixels, which is efficient. However you do introduce some variance at each pixel since you're not perfectly importance sampling the filter function. So it's a trade-off.
"There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!)
characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to
be 3."

HA!
Show HN: Facebook/Twitter style EmberJS example application
React.js Rethinking Best Practices
Wow you're right, it's shot up a huge amount in the last couple of years! Apple has traditionaly kept a very tight reign on R&D. Frankly it's hard to see how they can expand R&D spending that fast and keep it under tight management control. Interesting.
Had his "startup" been in Sillicon Valley, he had been in jail a long time ago. I don't see how there would have been less emphasis on copyrighted material, as that is and has always been the focus of megaupload and mega.

What US competitors are safe? You mean I can easily share copyrighted movies with strangers on dropbox? I've never seen anyone do that.
You know committing crimes in the real world leave a lot of traces? And even the most corrupt regimes think of torture as state only prerogative?

As the Silk Road proceedings showed - getting someone for wet work even with a lot of money is hard.
Spooky, huh, this white silence.
> Foreign exams: "you have an chance of scoring a few points even if the final answer is incorrect". In this respect, the foreign exams are giving you credit for being wrong but well-intentioned. Is that a desirable quality?

This is definitely a desirable quality in math/physics/chemistry exams. If you make a very long calculation (some of the exam questions require a full sheet of paper to calculate) almost perfectly but make a mistake on the second-to-last row, you should get your 4 out of 6 points or so.

Good point about language barriers, though. There are lots of smart people who have to participate in a test that is not their native language, in the US and elsewhere. History exams should be about knowledge and understanding of history - if your language skills aren't that great, you'll inevitably lose a few points because of the poor quality essay you can produce.

> The fact that the test is standardised and asks questions from a basic and fixed set of knowledge means that universities know exactly what set of things the arriving undergraduates will know,

Our tests are standardized too (and same questions nationwide, changing every year). They're just not multiple choice questions.

You make a good point about flexibility too. Our education in the few years preceding the exam were a bit too focused on the finals. I guess in that respect the SAT has a small advantage if they allow a more flexible curriculum in the preceeding years.
Start picking up and putting down heavy objects and remember to do something with your hair in the morning.
I think you missed the journalist's jaded sarcasm embedded in "No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk."

I'm guessing TED has had 50+ presentations on "solutions" for Africa over the last 5 years. We'd expect that some of the ideas have failed to deliver. However, we can't expect TED organizers to give stage time to followup presentations explaining why they failed (or why the ideas at smaller scope didn't scale up to large one like they hoped.)

So yes, we would get more value out of hard-hitting TED talks explaining warts and difficulties but we can't expect TED themselves to highlight it. A similar concept is "publication bias" against negative or non-repeatable research results:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#Definition
So let's see. A company wants to sell its goods to people in the US at a higher price than elsewhere. So they want the people in the US to interpret a law in a way that would put people in the US at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. Can anything get more ridiculous than this?
According to them, they split. Shortly before, she was stripped of company control. Not sure how far she still is involved though.

http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/kim-dotcom-s-wife-left-compa...
> Foreign exams: "you have an chance of scoring a few points even if the final answer is incorrect". In this respect, the foreign exams are giving you credit for being wrong but well-intentioned. Is that a desirable quality? That you know what to do, but you can't do it in practice? IMO giving credit for partial answers to basic knowledge questions is a highly dubious practice.

None would give points for something that is wrong. They would, however, give points for using the correct technique in getting to the answer (but maybe something was missed, or miscalculated, etc).
This is not being given "partial credit for being wrong", it's being given credit for having the technique to get to the answers you seek. In an age where data retention is a much less desirable skill than adaptation and the ability to find answers (what with Google existing), I think it's an extremely important point.

I think you are seeing the SATs in a good light because they succeed at doing what they are set to do: have students retain a bunch of information for a while. What they most definitely don't do is teach students how to think outside the box, think for themselves, approach problems they haven't encountered before and approach problems nobody has encountered before.
Even if you think he's a criminal, he's still an interesting character.

But in any case, I think moral ambiguity is in the zeitgeist. Steve jobs, Walter White, Game of Thrones...
Dotcom claims he is broke, facing New Zealand jail
Direct link to the example app:
https://getstream.parseapp.com/#/

And github:
https://github.com/getstream/Stream-Example-Parse
> This is definitely a desirable quality in math/physics/chemistry exams. If you make a very long calculation (some of the exam questions require a full sheet of paper to calculate) almost perfectly but make a mistake on the second-to-last row, you should get your 4 out of 6 points or so.

I question this. (I have worked as a teacher and as a practitioner)

First of all, should we ask such long calculations in an exam situation without access to a computer? That's not real anyway.

Second of all, if we are asking the long calculation with the expectation that students won't be able to complete it, why are we asking that question? Why don't we ask shorter questions that match the expectations we have?

If we are asking the long calculation because we expect students should complete it, why should they get partial credit for failing to meet that expectation? That's what you're testing them on - and they haven't truthfully shown they were better than someone who wrote nothing. They've failed at completing the task, and/or at checking their work.

It really shows they were better (or better trained) at gaming the exam - knowing exactly what to write to satisfy the examiner and gain partial credit. This training is very well paid, by the way.

>Our tests are standardized too (and same questions nationwide, changing every year). They're just not multiple choice questions.

Even if the questions are consistent nationwide, if the pass mark is low enough (or with partial credits), students can arrive at university with wildly different knowledge, having passed via different sections of the course, if not via luck. The university will naturally assume that the student knows all of those sections well, which many students will not. This creates an obvious problem of services being inadequate for first year undergraduates. Where I live this is readily apparent, but few people have noticed and nobody is dealing with it.
> The biggest factors in predicting long-term success are intelligence, knowledge, and conscientiousness

I wouldn't dispute that those are important factors, but what about:

- initiative and/or risk-taking (which is very different from conscientiousness)

- attractiveness (either physical or non-physical things like charm or schmoozing)

- starting capital (it's easier turn $1 million into $2 million than starting with $0 and getting to $1 million)

- general health and fitness (successful people are rarely sickly or unfit)

- leadership

- number and quality of connections

Looking at the tech sector, it seems that a high level of intelligence, knowledge, and conscientiousness will get you a good job. But the most successful people in tech are not those with even higher levels of intelligence, knowledge, and conscientiousness -- for those people it's the other factors that dominate.
> You mean I can easily share copyrighted movies with strangers on dropbox? I've never seen anyone do that.

Actually, this is very common. It works in exactly the same way as MegaUpload did - Señora Pirata uploads her ripped movies to Dropbox, and distributes the public link to strangers.
Show HN: Clappr, an extensible and open source media player for the web
Teespring (YC W13) Is Looking for Senior UI/Front-end Engineers
Overview
Teespring, an innovative web-based crowdfunding platform and tech startup, is seeking a Sr. UI/Front End Engineer for its San Francisco office. A graduate of the Winter 2013 class Y-Combinator, Teespring launched in 2011 and has helped its users sell over 2 million shirts to date. We are hunting for engineers to work on problems that contribute directly to our two main goals: growing the company and making our users happy. We are among the fastest growing new companies in the country and are always on the lookout for engineering talent to help sustain our growth and product.

Description
We are looking for a Sr. UI Engineer that has extensive experience with object-oriented JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3. You will be responsible for building out our next-generation mobile applications. We encourage innovation, creativity, and a think outside of the box attitude when solving complex problems and implementing new solutions. You should have a strong passion for design and product development with solid communication skills as you will be interacting with all teams, in particular the product and creative teams.

The front-end engineer will help us push the boundaries of what is possible. You'll work side by side with outstanding designers. You should be proficient in HTML, CSS
and Javascript. You should appreciate the details that make a front-end user experience memorable, and demonstrate enthusiasm for new front-end technologies.

We offer a highly competitive benefits package including base salary, full benefits, annual and spot bonuses, and a great work environment.

What the UI Engineer will need:
5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer with a focus on UI and firm understanding of Front End best practices.
Expert experience with object-oriented JavaScript and frameworks such as Backbone.js, NodeJS, Knockout, AngularJS, batman.js, Closure
Experience with HTML5, CSS3, SASS (we use SCSS), jQuery as well as comfortable writing native Javascript.
Proficient with Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop mainly)
Ability to own and execute complex projects
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience is required

Nice to have as a UI engineer:
High Traffic Social Network, Gaming or Web Experience
Experience with Agile/Scrum
Experience with Front-End performance testing and optimization.
Experience working with Rails and Grunt/Gulp JS
Experience with OOCSS
Experience with HAML/Slim templating engines
Experience with Javascript Testing Frameworks like Jasmine, Mocha, QUnit a plus!

What’s in it for the UI Engineer:
Competitive base salary
Relaxed work environment (Kegerator, ping-pong table, lounge areas)
Flexible work schedule
Company sponsored events

Email resume to ashley.hearn@teespring.com to learn more
What are some of the books in the far top left? I'm interested in translations of very old scriptures.
> Had his "startup" been in Sillicon Valley, he had been in jail a long time ago.

I'm hoping the founders of Napster get early release from jail. They've done their time, surely.
> I'm wondering how people can compare these terminals mentioning speed, considering the actual performance is bound by libvte, and thus will be equally the same between roxterm, sakura, tilda, etc. What are they measuring?

Not sure about others, but the first thing I test: dmesg; ps auxww; ls /dev

I only really care about apparent speed and, like I said, sakura was the only one that was comparable to xterm.

None of the other terminals I have tried (and only now I realize that they have libvte in common, thanks for that) have managed to perform acceptably (for me, at least).