skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, there may be people that actually think that way (that it's okay to profit from useless things, but not okay to profit from useful things), but I think there's a less-incomprehensible version, that has to do with entitlement, perceived entitlement, perceived social virtue, that sort of thing.

I see two major halves to this.

First: No one cares if InstaSnapWhatsYo goes bankrupt, and if they do, Jan Systrom (founder of ISWY) doesn't make a heartstrings appeal that he's entitled to make money. Live by the market, die by the market, all in the game, y'all, etc. But Lars Ulrich thinks he's _entitled_ to sell 50 million records (emphasis on "sell", as opposed to "give away"), and EMI thinks they're entitled to their cut of the same. So the claims of Ulrich and EMI earn a degree of legitimate skepticism: this thing you're saying is "fair" and "just" in return for your social contribution, we can't help but notice that it's making you very very rich. My point here is that if you're nothing but a mercenary, it's hard to knock you for being a mercenary; if you're claiming social value and also have a vested interest, then this tension gets you some sharp looks. Some of that is legitimate, some of it is just sloppy thinking.

(Aside: imo, this is the same type of sloppy thinking that claims that hypocrisy is a the one true sin; if Dahmer calls Manson a bad person, Dahmer is right, hypocrite or not.)

Second: Science in particular has another problem, and that is the questionable social value of each individual scientist. Read 40 randomly selected peer-reviewed journal publications, and you're going to read a lot of useless garbage. And yet the authors of the garbage are still getting paid, and they might be making above-median wages for an American (not above-median wages for an American with 10 years of education who works 60-hour weeks, but still). I'm a pretty big fan of the net output of science, and academia generally, and think that we should increase our social expenditure on science, but I can see a rational reason for people to be suspicious of requests from scientists to increase science funding.

Sort of accidentally, I note that the entire preceding paragraph also applies to your other example of things that matter, journalism. Every sentence, except the "10 years of education".
Sure, "people in their fifties" (and of all other ages) are doing a variety of things to promote social justice. But I don't think it is helpful to put down Aurora's effort -- including yelling at the police at protests. Besides, "getting things done" is not always an innocent or simple approach. And having nuanced views does (slowly) shape the world.

I don't think she intends to give up and renounce it all (in fact it sounds like she's looking for new spaces to take action. She (quite candidly) relates her struggle mixing maturing political views with the clichey activist scene in Montreal -- which as she correctly points out (I too live in Montreal) is like any subculture, ripe with dogmatism.

Just because she doesn't fall into your category of left doesn't mean she isn't a part of it. That is the very problem.
We Can't Trust Uber
Same here. It's like Ikea sending you a random box of do-it-yourself furniture every month. The "maker" mumbo-jumbo is about building things you actually want, not assembling stuff someone throws at you.
Ask HN: Why is PyQt (relatively) unpopular?
Hi! I am learning PyQt and it looks really awesome. I think that if you're developing a desktop or a mobile app - that's what you would want to use. But it seems like only very few people are using it, and very few jobs are available. Why is that?

I'm new to it, but my initial impression is that something that cool would be way more widely used.
How to Be Intoxicated
I've long had the belief that the very act of audio-recording, all the way back to Edison's wax-cylinders, would eventually be the end of making significant money for music makers. That and the fact that there is only 24-hours in a day.

My point being that it is a matter of scarcity - or the lack thereof. Music, to some degree, doesn't age. Regardless of what new pop album is due out in the near future, we will still listen to Louis Armstrong sing "What a Wonderful World" as it nears it's 50th anniversary.

Any newly produced music is competition with the back-catalog of all music ever recorded. And there is only so much time during the day one can spend listening to music, so individual "consumption" isn't going to change much as time goes one.

The only real future for professional musicians is ticket sales for live performances and licensing their songs for uses in other media (movies, commercials, "hasn't been thought of yet")
Lessons from the founder of Boston Dynamics
Aspiring programmer here. So, I've completed the following from that page and on the web:
- Google's Python course (https://developers.google.com/edu/python/)
- Learn Python the Hard Way (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book)
- ThinK Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
(http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf)

Also working on the O'Reilly Python book.

Three books later, I still don't really feel like an "expert" with Python. I mean, I know the syntax well enough, I know basic programming idioms, I just need something of intermediate complexity to work on, somewhere between "Learn Python From Scratch!" and the Python Standard Library. Coming from a C background, I don't need to be told what most of these concepts are, I just need to know how Python does them.

I also made the mistake of trying to learn several languages (e.g. Java, Javascript, and Python) simultaneously, and by poor choice or poor availability of free materials, nearly all of them ended up being along the lines of these "Learn X Language with no programming background!" The end result being if I have to hear someone tell me again what an "if" statement and a "for loop" are, my head is going to explode.

To reiterate, where does one look for an Intermediate level Python book?
Uber India driver was already a rape accused, did not have a driving license
I seem to have struck a chord with this post. A lot more comments than I expected, and sixty points added to my karma.

Thank you for helping me reach an important decision. For some time now I've been puzzling over the idea of offering a consulting service in which I would screen resumes for a fee. After a chat with a friend who is a manager with an eCommerce startup, I've decided to pursue it.

I didn't have a clue as to how to get started. He suggested I do it for free for a little while, to build my reputation. That's what I'm going to do.

I expect it would help to register a domain for this specific service, rather than use the rather eccentric website I presently have. I don't know yet what the domain will be. I need to catch some ZZZs, so I'll deal with it tomorrow.

I mentioned this in one of my comments below. Someone pointed out that background check services already do this. Actually I would be quite different from a background check, in that I would screen resumes _before_ the interviews, so you don't have to interview clearly unqualified candidates.

Also I'd be looking into their technical qualifications, not their criminal record or record histories.

This is just what headhunters are supposed to do. It's not that they couldn't screen resumes - but they don't.

-- Mike
Detroit is the perfect microcosm of the US wealth polarity trend. Only a few miles from the "ruin porn" live suburbs like Bloomfield Hills - which has the fourth highest income out of any suburb in the US (1).

I'm hopeful that the Retroit movement (2) finds traction with young entrepeneurs. There's certainly a cachet that the city has within the popular imagination. Just look at what foreign vodka companies are doing to cash in on Detroit's "authenticity" (3).

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_places_i....

(2) https://re-urbanization.squarespace.com/

(3) http://www.mlive.com/business/detroit/index.ssf/2014/08/ourv....
Because it has a restrictive license.
Actually, I do think it's sort of OK because it's preferable to nations pursuing their interests by straight-up warfare. I'm for self-determination, but not to the point of disengagement or passivity. Incidentally I grew up in a former colonial country, so I'm not offering a reflexive America-first perspective.
This article from a couple days ago offer some additional background and different (opinionated) perspective:

Facebook Prince Purges The New Republic: Inside the
Destruction of a 100-Year-Old Magazine

Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes and his lieutenant from
Yahoo gut one of journalism's great publications, setting
off waves of resignations and tears...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/05/the-new-rep...

Discussion of that article (under the more pedestrian title "Chris Hughes Purges The New Republic") took place here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8705410
As an economics major, thanks!
Stop Making Web Surveillance Bugs by Mistake
As I live in Australia, to see a city like this in such a state is saddening. Of course, everyone has heard stories of Detroit's issues but to see them so starkly pictured is pretty confronting. What's the current economic state of Detroit? Is it still in decline or is there reason to be optimistic?
"I didn’t buy the New Republic to be the conservator of a small print magazine whose long-term influence and survival were at risk."

Except TNR existed for a century as a subsidized, money-losing magazine. Buying the magazine without understanding that may have been a mistake.

(Source for that is Jonathan Chait's rebuttal to those that equate earning a profit with social utility: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/new-republic-an... )
I didn't read anything here that indicates that you don't deserve what you have.
In SV, it's less about color, and more about education. Yes, that's IMO, not fact, OK? But, seriously, I've worked with 1,000+ people in Silicon Valley, and >50% of them are not white. So, Indian, Chinese, and other "colors" can be extremely prosperous here. The market doesn't care about "color", as much as their education, passion, and collaboration. To raise people out of poverty, it is more about attitude than physics. The attitudes in Detroit are far more toxic than the minor class warfare in SV.
I agree that a government issued identifier is a bad idea, but that debate is long over and SSNs won.

The government can still stop corporations from using it by passing a law and enforcing it (and they have for some things), but that doesn't seem likely given the history and evolution of SSNs. It seems more likely that the government continues to require SSNs on more and more reporting, and continues to not punish other uses by corporations.
Interesting. Is there a market for shut-down services? Clearly they had "something" if people are still signing up. Might not be a $100mm exit but I'm sure someone would enjoy running this for a few million in cash each year?
Games are not a good example because -
1. Most games now have online activation and require continuous online checks to work - for example, none of my Mass Effect 3 DLCs work if Origin cannot verify the status of the DLC online every time I try to play them.
2. Something similar to above implemented for music will mean that you will be able to listen to a song only when an online service authorizes it - everytime you want to listen to it.
Then people will start complaining how DRM is evil, and the big companies are ripping them off.
I don't have a solution for this, but I don't think games is a good analogy.

P.S Most modern games requires GBs rather than an old-fashioned 700MB CD. For example, Far Cry 4 requires 28GB of disk space to be installed.
Uber cab driver was arrested in 2011 rape case, spent 7 months in prison
I don't see what the big deal is. Measurement is handled perfectly well by the stochastic master equation, which can be obtained through bayesian inference. Quantum mechanics is still thermodynamicish because we don't really know what a wavefunction IS... I think that's still kind of an issue, but measurement is something we understand just fine.
Or watching your loved one's paycheck be taxed higher because they married you (high income households.) See that they no longer are eligible for certain government programs that they depended on because your combined incomes are just high enough (lower incomes.) Certain low income homes we looked when I was younger looked at households income. No surprise that there were mostly single mothers who lived there.
The Gospel of Weird Machines?
What excellent style the alchemist owls have! Simple website, strong language, and a careful selection of titles: "the right reverend preacher pastor."
But why is a raven like a writing desk?
I still prefer visual basic 6 as a tool for learning programming. It is simply easier to Get Stuff Done(TM) on that language than any other. You don't have to worry about things like OOB etc. when you are just learning to program. I always fail to understand why people would gladly accept non-oob languages such as Go but yet condemn vb6 for being a terrible language because it is event-driven, too simple, no OOB etc. GUI creation is so easy, you don't have to worry about gtk bindings etc. No need to bother to print out a single line as a first program when you can skip directly to building a calculator app with a few seconds of drag and dropping. Can't afford VS? Just fire up a Microsoft office's macro editor and you are good to go.
SCP Plugin for Sublime Text
I've developed a plugin for Sublime Text (3) that supports uploading files to a remote Linux, or BSD server via SCP.

It supports the following:
Single keystroke uploading of current file.
Selectable remote targets.
Authentication with SSH keys or using passwords (via Expect)

Works on Linux, OSx, and FreeBSD.

I'm interested in finding out if people would be interested in purchasing this, and what potential features they'd like.
I liked this article. Yes, it was a bit repetitive and had lots of examples. Which is why I like it.
After reading this page, I can kind of see why your old man wouldn't bother telling you about it.

http://elblancosretroworld.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-magnavox...

I've got a similar Christmas Story-esque story about getting ghe SNES… my dad said "there's no more Nintendos coming into this house!" Turns out that meant they had already bought it. And yes, I've already put the same exact thing into motion with my kid and the Xbox One.
A picture is perhaps worth at least a few hundred words...

http://i.imgur.com/VOlbMoy.png

icdiff seems to have the best defaults for me.
Retroit
And even if you could(1), the background process typically has the terminal open - and screen uses a separate pseudo terminal aka pty -- As suggested by the name - rePTYr

(1) ^Z sends SIGSTOP; to continue you can signal SIGCONT. But then what?!
A great warning for founders considering a subscription-based freemium model.
The line height is a little tight. The column width and typeface are fine.
> Does anyone have any other reading recommendations on this topic, or advertising recommendation in general?

Sure. What's being discussed in this article is Real Time Bidding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding . You can read up about the specifics of different Real Time Bidding exchanges, for example here's Google's AdExchange protocol: https://developers.google.com/ad-exchange/rtb/

> How are different websites able to know what content you are interested- who is storing this data on people?

The websites that host the actual content don't usually care about what ads are being shown to you. They just put code in from an ad exchange and let them handle the rest. The buyers (the ones who run the bidders) are the ones that are interested in figuring out what to show you. For example, many bidders are interested in doing what's called Behavioural Retargeting ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting ). Say you visit a shoes website. Then later you go on Facebook. The moment you go on Facebook, their ad exchange FBX will send a bid request to all the bidders. If the shoes website has partnered with that ad exchange, when they receive the bid request, they can identify you by your cookie, and they can bid and try to show you an ad to get you to come back to their site. Typically a shoes website wouldn't have the infrastructure to do real time bidding so they get a third party to do the bidding on their behalf, e.g. AdRoll ( https://www.adroll.com/retargeting ).
Use HTTrack, this tool can grab a webpage and the links in that page.

http://www.httrack.com
We don't do PHP. If you are so great, why don't you do a Pull Request.
Geoffrey Hinton (a notable deep learning researcher) did a coursera course on neural networks awhile ago. It's over but you can still see the lectures which are very good: https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets

Metacademy is also a very useful resource for anything machine learning: http://www.metacademy.org/
When exactly did the record labels ask for a bail out? They complain about people taking their products for free, which is a totally legitimate thing to complain about. If people were getting into ISWY's systems and putting their databases on the Internet for free access, bypassing the revenue-generating ad mechanisms, those companies would be complaining too about it too.
Isn't working in a Faraday cage unhealthy?
Unless I am missing something - it looks like quill.js still has more features:

http://quilljs.com/
Doesn't everybody market themselves as a "bastion of credibility?"

From their website: "Techstars provides [...] intensive mentorship, and an amazing network of mentors [...]"

Seems like they are all about credibility.
If i understand you correctly, you just valuated this business at 'a few million'? What makes you think its worth more than 5k?
Thank you.

And, they can identify you through other methods if you have cookies thoroughly disabled, as mentioned in the article?

If they have no data on you, I assume ad exchanges supply default advertisements, or there are bidders on default ads?
i'm just waiting for a sun spot to fry half our tech infrastructure (again!), perhaps then we will see the value of alternative channels for education, information and social function.
They both have inky quills.
Scientists Analyze Public Leaders’ Voices to Discover the Basis for Charisma
If anything these X box a month services pop up so frequently I'm surprised there is not a startup to help people make their own x box a month companies.
> 1.

"Most" is a massive exxageration. Origin is a small sampling of all that's on the market.

> 2.

Steam has solved this, and so has Google Play Music: Cached authorization. I'm not entirely sure how they do it, but on both services i've been able to access the games and music even when i was entirely without service for long periods of time.

Plus, there's always GoG.

> P.S

I said on average. Even in this day and age you'll have games that are around 50 MB and less.

Maybe you need to stop focusing on AAA titles so much. :)
Core Java Interview Questions Podcast 1: 5 actions to improve your job chances
I for one am tired of people ripping the medium, whether it be cellphones or instagram or the internet, people need to realize that it's the message, not the medium.

Wait, OP said that. Ironically, that very statement is a fantastic counterargument to everything s/he says. Saying that the internet is unreliable is like saying books are unreliable. It's such a general statement that it can't be taken seriously.
> So, in short, it's people's minds that are killing Detroit.

Or it's people like you who grew up there and decided to abandon it.
Could you go a little bit more into detail what exactly you are looking for? As in, what don't you know right now that you expect to learn from the book?
The city government is just beginning to emerge from bankruptcy, so there is some hope there. But they still have a chicken and egg problem: the city has to provide a reasonable level of services to attract businesses and their workers, but they need the tax base to provide those services. What the solution to that will end up being is anyone's guess.
Uber in Trouble: Driver in India Accused of Rape
Uber's rapist driver was arrested in 2011 rape case, spent 7 months in prison
I saw Alex MacLean (the photographer) give a talk about his aerial photography in at the lincoln library last century. It was great, not only are the images great, but he takes time to explain why they are significant. From the air is an interesting way to analyze.

He's got more on his website:

http://www.alexmaclean.com
while I think you probably have a point when you describe unauthorized copying of music as "taking [music businesses'] products for free," I also think it's hard to describe the mechanism of copyright (a government-granted monopoly on your goods) as something completely unlike a bailout. At least it seems a lot like a subsidy.
That's certainly true. I keep the quote, as a conversation starter if for no other reason. And I can't claim to have proven Dijkstra wrong. ;-)
Knuth's TAOCP is an indepth encyclopedia on algorithms. It analyses algorithms that Knuth has learned from the field, but it's purpose was never to develop the "intuition" on development.

Algorithm Design by Jon Kleinberg is an expensive book, but this one teaches algorithm design methodologies. Instead of learning "Linked Lists" or various "Sorting" or "Seminumerical" Algorithms... Algorithm Design teaches approaches to algorithm design.

--------------

Personally speaking, I have more hope in smaller books such as "Effective C++" or "Exceptional C++", which stands head-over-heals over the best "Web Advice" on C++. (IE: The C++ FAQ, which is very good at C++ Advice but doesn't stand up to books).

That said, major discussion of deep programming features and debates are now conducted online. Scott Meyers notes internet discussions on C++11 / C++14 as a major source of material on Effective Modern C++ (his new C++14 book).

Similarly, "Exceptional C++" is basically a collection of Herb Sutter's blog posts... updated based on the comments from the internet. Herb Sutter basically wrote "Exceptional C++", opened himself to internet criticism / discussion of his ideas... and then released the distilled work as a book. The book is a higher quality than his original blog of course (Guru of the Week).

Books will always be superior than the internet, by nature that I'm generally willing to pay authors $30+ to $100+ for their in-depth knowledge. (While the Internet is free). But the internet has forever changed how even bookwriting is conducted.

That said, the majority of books are crap. So its best to preview the author's writing style before buying. Blogs are actually one of the best ways to preview an author.
https://soundcloud.com/ramdass/soma-guided-meditation-with-r...
I don't know if anyone is still reading this, but the Uber driver has been jailed for rape before, and so a background check (which is mandated by law for all cab drivers, but Uber doesn't do) would have uncovered this.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/arrested-uber-driver-was-...