skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My opinions on this have evolved a lot over the past few years, to the point where my view matches the author's to a surprising (to me) degree. As someone who grew up white, middle class, and male, in America, it was very easy for me to believe that my intelligence (another front on which I was pretty lucky in the birth lottery) and my ambition were the entirety of what led to me having a pretty easy life, thus far.

But, over the past several years I've been involved in volunteering and activism in areas outside my comfort zone. In that time, I've met homeless folks who were bright and hard-working, but born into situations that prevented them from getting care for mental illness or from getting an education that would have helped lift them out of poverty. I've met people of color with university credentials that make my formal education look paltry, and who still struggle from paycheck to paycheck.

I don't have answers on how to solve the problem, but I do view it as a real problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of our time. The stratification of haves and have-nots is becoming more severe over time. The most disheartening element of it is how little awareness there is among white, middle and upper class, people about how their position in the world is as much luck of birth as it is their hard work and intelligence. The tech industry is particularly oblivious.
I believe it does compound but on a yearly basis instead of monthly.

Personally I was considering putting all my loan money into bitcoins but decided to be responsible. Sort of kicking myself in the ass for that decision.
Genius is pretty awesome.
Really impressive work, thank you. I intend taking an in-depth look later, but just at the moment I hope you'll indulge a more-or-less off topic question; What tool did you use to create the youtube demo on your blog ?
Here's a really good introduction to inheritance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMfcsYzj-9M -- a lot of people struggle unless they have a good understanding of how this works. Also, Douglass Crockford (the person who wrote "JavaScript: The Good Parts") has a number of videos that are very useful. Here's the first in a series of eight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg -- and if you find that useful, you can check out the rest in the list of related videos.
Free website hosting for your Open Source project's promotion pages
Assuming Google wants to get into the car business, all it has to do is add a button to google Maps/now. I don't think ther's anything special about the Uber platform, and Google already integrates journey planning through the Calendar and Google Now interfaces (eg telling you that you need to leave in 5 min to catch that train).

You're right on the car parking. I think the City of Chicago actually made a very shrewd decision to sell their street parking revenue to a private operator for a 75 year period in return for a fixed amount of cash up front (obviously I'm oversimplifying). It was excoriated as a terrible deal by most people, but none of them seem to have considered the probability that there just won't be the same sort of demand for parking in even 10 or 20 years.
In all honesty, Qt has come a long way since 2012 - QML is reasonably well documented nowadays. Controls (the widget library), while not a silver bullet, are good enough (at least on Android, haven't used iOS all that much) so normally you don't need to go as low as your own QPainter or even Rect-s.
> These are scientific endeavors.

They are absolutely not (well, except for ETI)! They are technological goals, some funded by private businesses with monetary interests (i.e., they are driven by values).

And besides, what is it that you're saying? That in order to increase our knowledge of the universe we must stop at nothing, but when it comes to sharing power and improving the lives of disenfranchised groups we must stop... well, right here would be good?
> Why are financial institution so _bad_ at password policies?

Legacy code written quickly in 1998 and not replaced yet?
also I think its harder to get financial aid (but not sure on that)
> A few months ago I finally moved my accounts to TD.

You'll be back to Schwab before you know it. TD are beyond awful. Schwab have pretty much the best customer service going.
/pedant mode

Death knell, not death nail. A 'knell' is the slow solemn tolling of a bell at a church funeral. This has been a public service announcement.
Yes, but the larger question is whether computers in NK "affect interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States". Since we don't conduct business with NK, I think it wouldn't meet the definition.
I used a Chrome extension - Screencastify ( https://www.screencastify.com/ )
It's kind of them to make sure that, despite the vast differences in income between India and the US, it's equally out of reach to poor people in both countries.
If people broke laws they should be prosecuted. But let's describe the situation honestly: not "why does the government defy the people and not prosecute?" But "why doesn't the government defy the people and prosecute?"
Tame the big-data deluge by devising a metadata strategy
Good article explaining the economics of gasoline prices...

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/12/like_low_gas_prices_so_does_...
You can't just say that it's a value statement...I mean, do you think there are concrete steps that should be taken to fix the problems you've identified?

> whole groups of people are allocated less power than some others

I'm not sure if you're using "allocated" in a technical way that I'm not familiar with, but to me the word "allocated" implies some level of top-down distribution of a limited resource. I don't think it's an accurate way to think about things (wealth is not a zero-sum game).
to each their own i guess. I myself would feel much better having 30,000$ in cash and 30,000$ in student debt than having 0$ either way. I know myself would be a lot more 'free' to do what I wanted more with the former than the later.
Good call, this does need better clarification. Thanks. I was aiming at the idea that a JS Dev will need to think through model relationships, views, security, performance, etc... (similar to what a "back-end" dev does)...but I could have phrased that better.
Marxists have all the evidence that Capitalism is brought into being by war and conquest, standing in stark contrast to every peaceful Marxist revolution that ended with such great results. If only Capitalists were as enlightened as Einstein, the highly regarded economist and anthropologist, who identified Capitalists as some primitive, predatory animal, we could finally evolve to see the socialist society of the future.
> There seems that people living under regimes with limited freedom often fail to comprehend that people living in other countries might produce something without the explicit approval of their government.

Ironically though, there are reports that this is exactly what happened: "U.S. government approved 'The Interview's' assassination scene, Sony emails allege" (http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/sony-hack-emails-the-i...)
First decide if it's truly worse it: http://wtfjs.com .. http://wtfjs.com/page/20
I completely understand for your neglect of Appointment Reminder. I've also had my share of projects I'd start but lose interest in it because, well, I was not consumed by the problem I was solving.

So during the years I worked sequentially (or sometimes at the same time) on a gift certificate template gallery, a travel insurance comparator, a body-mass-index calculator website, a file sharing solution for businesses targeted at the french market.

The reasoning behind all these projects was to make "passive income". And by running multiple websites I would make a nice income from them all combined.

After developing and marketing the last of these projects (file sharing one, post-mortem here: http://www.sparklewise.com/post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-wit... ) I realized that the most important thing is not to have a "good idea" but to work on a problem you want to solve and with people you can relate to or at least that you enjoy working with. That's why I now focus on serving SaaS businesses, because that's actually something I care about and will likely care about for years to come.

Thanks for all the transparency Patrick and for setting an example for the rest of the HN crowd. And good luck with the fatherhood :-)
I don't understand how people can stand the modern internet without ad blockers and javascript off by default.

azlyrics is a bliss if you browse like me. They serve static webpages with just the lyrics. The pages load in fractions of a second as they are so tiny (~10 kilobytes often).

Now I tried RapGenius without blocking. It loaded 37 Megabytes (not a typo). That is simply insane. That's 10 times the MP3 version of a song. I guess it was my first visit that was so very VERY bad. But loading another song was still 5 Megabytes. The same song on azlyrics? 13 Kilobytes.

SongMeanings is ok size wise, ~500 Kilobytes, sadly normal nowadays. But there it is coated in stuff I am not interested in, comments, etc.

azlyrics is perfect if you just want the lyrics and if you are a privacy and performance aware internet user.
I think that coming around to this point of view indeed has to do with life experience (and age). That places like SV have an ageism problem is a self-reinforcing mechanism that causes the opposite values (promoting meritocracy as a good thing) to abound, and serve to further isolate the leaders of technology from large groups in society.
Cool. Agreed.
Agreed. Mine is very rugged, has a super simple mechanism (less things to break), and the only consumables are regular litter and trash bags. The cat loves it! Crap... this reminds me I should empty it.
It's also the size of a Death Star and tragically expensive. I just picked up this thing, which sort of splits the difference: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000XSC8R2/ref=oh_aui_detai...
Ironically, Genius tried to game search results and now almost never shows up in them (for me at least).

An (anonymous) search for "shake hands with beef lyrics" turns up azlyrics.com, lyricsfreak.com as #1 and #2, followed by Wikipedia (which doesn't have lyrics) and then metrolyrics.com - probably the best of a bad bunch.

Tack "genius" onto the search and it'll show up, but right now it's hardly competing for first-page search results.
The HE's control the CC's by using ORD's as intermediaries.
While the discussion you want to have is a valid one, you're opening on a complete logical fallacy.

Market cap and technical sophistication, esp at large scale, tend to become divergent. In other words, it is generally assumed that big companies do things poorly. That's the entire notion of startups.

I will say this: Dyn can probably do a better job of hosting your DNS than Rackspace, Rackspace is not focused on DNS, and I'm not aware that they even really do anything special except for running lots of big DNS servers. Even when I worked at Rackspace 10y ago, the size of their customer base made them a constant target for DoS attacks. Do you need Dyn? Also probably not.

Rackspace has patented DDos prevention technology called RiverGuard, but since being patented only illustrates that it is novel, and not that it is of any quality, that is also meaningless.

I will say that, even though I prefer as a past employee to work with other companies, because the things Rackspace is bad at are things they don't give a fuck about solving, they run a damned fine network.

Further, as a replacement for / alternative to a colo, it is irrelevant whether a company can run a good DNS infrastructure, because that's not what I'm asking them to do. Rackspace DNS is there for convenience.

Cloud providers like AWS use their own cloud infrastructure (we think) to host services like Route53, which are also not infallible, but tend not to _entirely_ go down like this. Rackspace, while being somewhat competetive in the cloud space, doesn't operate anything like Amazon, doesn't do anything in a very distributed manner, and is backing those cloud offerings with what I expect to be vertically scaled DNS servers on top-end Dell hardware behind some kind of load balancers.

Money doesn't make you good at things, rather it helps you to not have to worry about the details, so it is inversely true that a company with a substantial market share should be expected not to make the same mistakes as the little guys. They're operating all day, all week, all year under the fallacy that their scale is proof of the quality of their work, and following this logic, they don't have to do any work at all. ;)
Why did you decide to use Cassandra and in what areas are you using it?
Do we not have official communications with NK (really not sure about this, it might be diplomatically and legally we do not, but someone more informed could correct me)?

The CFAA is so vague. It almost always is interpreted in a manner supportive of the USG's prosecution, go figure.
I would say javascript is by far the best, not because of the language itself, but because it lets them work and modify something they're already using a lot : the web and a browser.

A close second could be swift for the same reason ( and also because you can start smoothly with just drag n dropping on a storyboard, then slowly add dynamic behavior with code).
> China is publicly backing away from North Korea

It seems to be quite the opposite actually:

> Any civilized world will oppose hacker attacks or terror threats. But a movie like ‘The Interview,’ which makes fun of the leader of an enemy of the U.S., is nothing to be proud of for Hollywood and U.S. society,” an editorial in the newspaper said. “No matter how the U.S. society looks at North Korea and Kim Jong-un, Kim is still the leader of the country. The vicious mocking of Kim is only a result of senseless cultural arrogance.[1]

[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/sony-hack-triggers-diplomatic-tightwa...
tx ldap active directory http://www.richardhyland.com/diary/2009/05/06/8-bit-characte...
39% of Households in the City of Detroit Cannot Read This Post
I'm guessing that if they had a major breach because of this kind of idiocy, they'd find a way to fix it after the fact.

Which sort of implies to me that they should find a way to fix it before they have a big breach.

If nothing else, the fact that they've been warned repeatedly and done nothing could be pretty compelling if there was ever litigation over losses.

For example, I could imagine someone successfully disavowing a trade at Schwab because they don't enforce the password authentication they claim to, and thus can't convincingly claim that the trader was in fact the account owner.
This is also a prime opportunity to question the idea of traveling at 85 mph in 4,000 lb. metal boxes that get 13 mpg.

In my town, many parents put their newly-licensed teenage children behind the wheels of enormous SUVs in the name of safety, simultaneously reducing the safety of everyone around them. If tanks were street legal, we'd probably have 16 year old kids barreling down the road in them.
Well, if you are a well-connected MIT/Stanford student, then you will definitely be judged based on your merits.
Citizenfour producers sued
They make a lot more assumptions than that, neoclassical economists at least. How do you think they manage to aggregate the preferences of millions of people to provide "microfoundations" to their models? See the aggregation problem on wikipedia.
What's wonderful about Tokyo?

5x price increase, small apartments (instead of houses), higher babysitter costs -- these are all downsides.

What is better in Tokyo than in, say, Austin, TX?
Popular Myths about C++, Part 3
VR still lacks good tactile, kinesthetic representations. Not to say it's not a step in the right direction, but it is arguably taking a deeper step into visual-only representation.

(edit: relevant link, Victor's rant on hands in interaction design. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...)
mine is case-insensitive

It is possible there are more than one schwab interfaces that behave differently. I have two entry points. One for just 401k (https://www.schwabplan.com). That one has long case-sensitive passwords.

The brokerage account(https://client.schwab.com) is short and case-insentive
This is obvious next step. Google knows where you are. It knows where you work. It knows where you shop and it knows your shopping list.

They could easily not only do what you're suggesting, but also completely eliminate the need for ridesharing, for needing one-off transport to a grocery store.

I mean, why even have UPS or FedEx. Ship to centrally located places and have the autonomous cars make the pick ups most optimally on the way home from work.
Discussing politics with people on the other side of the isle and finding common ground is frankly more important than voting today.
Top Tech Books of 2014, Part I
No way. In the city, yes. But in the somewhat wealthier suburbs many people will spring for the "self-driving" package. It might only be a ~$10k add on or less by my estimates.

Most people will want to be able get in the car without having to request and wait for a ride (most people already have this luxury).
> I mean, do you think there are concrete steps that should be taken to fix the problems you've identified?

Of course! But choosing to emphasize this value and to identify the exact nature of the problem (let alone acknowledge its undesired existence) are prerequisites. This[1] is a nice recent article showing the problem (and, by extension, suggesting solutions).

> I'm not sure if you're using "allocated" in a technical way that I'm not familiar with, but to me the word "allocated" implies some level of top-down distribution of a limited resource. I don't think it's an accurate way to think about things (wealth is not a zero-sum game).

I was not referring to a centralized distribution (and neither was I talking about wealth alone, though wealth, and probably power, while not quite "zero-sum" are probably quite finite), but to a property, a snapshot if you will, of our society as it currently exists.

[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wom...
Access to family?
I don't know why they don't just use Netbeans. It is so easy to use and it already comes bundled with the JDK if you want.
congrats - I agree with your approach of getting a real business working before worrying about solving every possible problem that will arise.

It took my startup 6 years of hustling to become profitable (we're around 50k users now) and we did it basically just as you are doing it - creating a product that people wanted, and then just adding features and solving problems as they became known to us rather than trying to anticipate things that may never wind up being important. It feels a bit like flying by the seat of your pants unfortunately but I think it's always going to be that way.
512 bit primes lead to an RSA key length of 1024 bits, since the key length is the length of the product of two primes.
> You said it. You know, NK claims that the movie was USG propaganda. And, to the average American ear, that notion probably sounds completely nuts on its face.

As it should. There's no need for propaganda against the PDRK, they've done a pretty good job of making themselves look bad on their own.
Reminds me of the Cozy Coupe [1] I had as a child. Perhaps that's not by accident. The fear is that these machines will be unsafe, either to their passengers or to other cards on the road. Making it cute my reduce the perceived threat level.

[1]: http://www.littletikes.com/content/ebiz/shop/invt/612060/612...
The paper itself provides much more insight into the actual physics behind this [1]. The article doesn't really do the paper justice in my mind, based on my knowledge of the subject matter (although I appreciate the intent of providing an accessible means to introduce the topic).

I wrote my MSc thesis on weak capture trajectories and the concept of the Weak Stability Boundary [2] that was introduced by Ed Belbruno. It's a fantastic aspect of the gravitational 3-body problem and has been probed from a number of different perspectives over the last two decades, including tying in the phenomenon of weak/ballistic capture into our understanding of the structure of invariant manifolds and the periodic orbits about the Lagrange libration points.

Disclaimer: Francesco is my boss but I haven't spoken to him yet about the paper.

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.8856v1.pdf

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-energy_transfer
North Korea's Internet collapses; U.S. declines to say if it's responsible
TL;DR
Go has its own version of make in the toolset now.
Definitely! Getting to that first customer signup ASAP gives you a TON of motivation right out of the gate.
thanks for listening. I'm already totally geeking out with a Fitbit flex and have given several other apps permission to its data. So I would love the opportunity to play with your stuff on Android
s/google/microsoft

s/search/windows

I'm almost certain MSFT's counsel used a very similar argument to you in the case! But eveningcoffee's point still stands - better user experience or not, it's still arguably anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps Google's counting on the lyrics aggregators not having licenses to the lyrics, and therefore not wanting to go to the courts?
I found mine doesn't take up much more room than the old large litter box + tray. I also have the "roomier" bubble unit. They do offer refurbished models for $60 less.
Fantastic write up! A couple of nice take aways from this:

1) Give away the product -- I love how you started up a GoToMeeting and got the product running on a site right there. I know you mention that conventional wisdom says to get the customer to validate by paying first, but that seems like a brilliant move.

2) Don't give away the farm -- I would have stopped right there, I imagine. "Hey, they loaded up my stuff on their site. I'll get 'payment' from them in the form of a testimonial for the site. That's validation enough." Nope, you turned them into a paying customer. Even better, and you can still get the validation.

3) Don't over think everything -- Even though I have been successful in the past, I often over think things. I have to figure out all of the models before I can launch. The actual model rarely looks anything like what I thought up because in reality, it takes running the business/product to really understand the model.

I'll be watching for the future updates!
> The non-religious are the only group of which a majority opposes torture.

Notice how all the "religious" groups aren't defined by religion alone, but also by the qualifier "White". That's important, because if you go to the source [0], you see that the Race/Religion combination suggests the conclusion you describe because of its blend of race and religion together in some of its categories, but if you look at the Race breakdown, you see that Whites have large majority support for torture (66/25), while Non-Whites do not. Which makes the fact that the Race/Religion breakdown shows that the identified "religious" groups it breaks out all have majority support -- when those "religious" groups are White evangelical protestant (69/20), White non-evangelical Protestant (75/22), and White Catholic (66/23)-- somewhat less significant in religious terms than it seems at first.

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/...