skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
not to make our users think like machines.

If differentiating between "file" and "File" is thinking like a machine, how isn't differentiating between "my files" and "myfiles" thinking like a machine?

Should "my files" and "myfiles" be collapsed to mean the same thing? What about "files"?
Don’t go to events as a startup founder
I wonder how much Adobe's incompatibility with case-sensitive filesystems affected Apple's decisions: https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case-sensiti...
I love that this is totally self contained. Best of the best would be an e-ink version of this (using something like this: http://www.pervasivedisplays.com/products/74 )
Or just leave the door open for the entirety of your trip.
I understand your point as it relates to the blog post. My comment was specific to the parent post about being contacted by Google recruiters.

I agree that being contacted by "Corp Dev" is shady if there is no intent on a potential acquisition. That said, I don't find it shady at all if a Google recruiter contacts talented technologists who happen to have some sort of side project.

If DHH gets a call from Google, they'd better have interest in Basecamp. If some Ruby dev who has a small product with 500 customers gets a call from Google recruiters (not corp dev), the dev shouldn't assume it's an acquihire situation. There is, as usual, some gray area of course.
They do a ton of small investments (hence the name) all over the world, via both an accelerator and a seed fund.

Differences:

* Their site says they've funded over 800 companies, which is absolutely absurd in the few short years they've been around. A lot of venture funds won't do that many deals in their entire lifetime, let alone in a few years.

* They do a lot of International deals (in 40+ countries). Most other VC funds are skeptical of (and often avoid) investments outside of Silicon Valley, let alone outside the United States.

* My own interpretation is that 500 Startups also focuses on things that generate revenue quickly, and not so much trying to find the next Facebook.

* And then there's Dave McClure. If you know who he is, this bullet point needs no explanation.
This line also makes me sad

> Stopping all other threads than the thread currently trying to allocate GC memory

This doesn't need to be the case, and is one of the strengths of garbage collected languages, IMO. Garbage collection can be performed by another cpu asynchronously, essentially making it free.
Logitech 2.4 GHz keyboards use 128-bit AES [1]

[1] http://www.logitech.com/images/pdf/roem/Logitech_Adv_24_Ghz_...
Good question. Unikernels need to be run inside VMs essentially because they use Xen for drivers. If you wanted to run a unikernel on bare metal, it would only run a single piece of hardware, or it would have to contain drivers for every piece of hardware out there like Linux, which would be impractical. It's also probably not very secure.

Xen has something called "dom0", which is the "domain" of the privileged management OS. It has the drivers for the ACTUAL hardware. dom0 in Xen must be Linux AFAIK, so you are using Linux drivers to communicate with paravirtualized guest OSes.

The guest OSes can be Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc. What paravirtualization means is that instead of communicating with real hardware like those OSes are meant to do, they are modified to communicate with a special, portable Xen interface. Xen abstracts away hardware for both guest OSes and unikernels.
Embassytown by China Mieville! :)
The expected value of $2m cash now is always going to be higher $2m spread out over 4 years (or however many) as you would expect to be able to get a return on the money, and there is a risk tied to whether or not you will receive the full $2m if it's spread out with attached conditions.
And yet, when they introduce a sandboxed store like Apple does, people throw a pitch fit :P (at least from what I remember, so pardon me if my memory is a bit fuzzy)
> Anyway, in you code the cost of malloc is a lot higher than the cost of zeroing out.

You can't possibly know that. The cost of malloc() is (roughly) independent of the size of the memory, and the cost of zeroing it is linear in the size of the memory. So there's an inflection point where zeroing the memory becomes more expensive than the malloc() itself.
manages via the fame of its name [. . .] What I experienced was less heinous but had the same elements- misrepresentation, name dropping

I think the original author should name everyone involved. I understand why he didn't, but people can only get away with this shit because they do it anonymously and no one talks to each other.

This is a much less extreme example, but years ago my former landlord threatened to kill me over a small claims court case (http://jakeseliger.com/2010/08/28/dont-rent-an-apartment-fro... if you're curious) and I wrote a post about what happened using his real name. Perhaps not surprisingly, since then I've gotten two emails thanking me for the story—one from someone who'd rented from him and had a bad experience and one from someone who avoided him.

In general it's a good idea to keep non-public conversations non-public, but when the people starting those conversations rely on them in order to do nasty stuff the principle should no longer apply.
Good question.

One reason is that I am not independently wealthy and haven't raised yet, so I just don't have a lot of disposable income for this. It's still too early to self-fund a large marketing push on its own, though if the graphs continue it might be able to in 6-12 months.

The second reason is that yes, I did want to see if "natural demand" pulled at the product without me doing very much to promote it. I'd like to raise seed money, but I'm not excited about the prospect of raising a lot of other peoples' money and then finding out I have something nobody really wants. Good news is I've gotten enough signal to amount to a "yes, people do seem to want more of this."
$2M was mentioned as the max offer for these types of deals (read: acquihire). They didn't have to get to the point of making an offer; he rejected that maximum.

And $2M is definitely an acquisition.
If you get offended so easily by other people who get offended so easily, do you have a leg to stand on?
I had a product launch that went extremely successful, and then someone from Google approached me via an email with an ambiguous messaging; i.e., "We're from Google and we want to talk to you". I thought they wanted to buy me out, but instead they just wanted to convince me to apply for a job interview.
Not saying it can't work out. Some people are tougher than others. But not a great plan.
The "illegal guns" the terrorists used in France were brought from outside of the country. So now Cameron thinks he can stop a freaking app from entering the country? I mean he can't be that stupid, can he? I don't think he is, because I think this new proposed law has nothing to do with terrorism and has a completely different agenda behind it.
It exists. Check this out: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55145-0-90-Real-...

It's also a lot more difficult than the stock solar system.
I am old enough to remember when it wasn't even an option.
I just checked my records, and he didn't actually get as far as even paying for the service at the reduced rate. He just got a month or two free trial, which I would give to anyone. He lost out by pissing off his clients because they wanted to use my product.

I just looked him up on linkedin, and I see he's now got a job at the university of San Diego, so I guess his business ventures didn't work out.
The dealing with piracy part is brilliant: "when I come across a forum post where somebody is asking for a cracked version of Pinegrow, I reply that whoever needs a license but can’t afford it should contact us and we’ll help them out."

That's turning a negative situation into a positive, which is what a good entrepreneur does.
I can't imagine an idea that is worse than this. Yes, let's take a community approach to OS, fine. But relying on a language that is neither efficient nor designed with the core needs of an operating system is self defeating at best.
I don't find any of this surprising. From the point of view of an institutional investor, the arguments they've made in the article totally make sense.

One definition of a startup is that it's a high-growth, high-risk enterprise. While endowments and pension funds sometimes do carry some high-growth, high-risk capital, it's generally not the bulk of it. And I think that's perfectly sensible.

On a side note, the idea of a "index fund of startups" is interesting. I'm not sure I'd consider 500S, or even YC, quite like that, but it's a great line to use.
Kerbal Space Program has a good physics model for fun but not for study: it's very basic. Their drag and aerodynamic model for example is not accurate (if I remember correctly they assume drag to be constant)

Jet engine modeling and life support are not accurate either
Beat the Octopus
> "It's just from my experience you can't calculate displacement using an accelerometer that cheap "

I disagree. You clearly can - the app and the people who use it are proof positive of the sensor's capabilities. Having seen the raw output from these sensors a few times they're also startlingly accurate.

The problem is of course that it's not simple and there's real complexity in the solution. It's (of course) impossible if you blindly take the double integral of raw accelerometer readings.

In the same way we do all kinds of magical things with all kinds of sensors - but it's rarely as simple as plugging a pin into a ADC and reading the bits that come out.

Signal processing, in both hardware and software, is a gigantic field of study unto itself. I fully expect that the app is doing something non-trivial with its sensor readings to gain accuracy - but it's eminently possible, just difficult.

The intersection of "mobile app developer" with "skilled signals engineer" is pretty low. If someone capable wrote a library that did this, you'd bet that we'd see an explosion of apps that use this functionality.
The question you need the filesystem to answer in this case is, "If I save a file with name A, will it be accessible via name B?" You can't assume that the filesystem has one canonical name from which the file will be accessed.

EDIT: That actually isn't even enough, because the answer may vary by locale.

Even worse, to solve this for Git's case, you need to know the answer

1) For every locale

2) For every supported filesystem
> We ought to recognize the use cases, as much as humanly possible, for all languages or frameworks or platforms

I wouldn't exactly consider Operating Systems to be one of those use cases for Javascript. The flip side of knowing the use cases is knowing the limitations and understanding that "everything" isn't exactly a valid use case, which I believe is what larme was trying to say.
That, and the fact that $2 million over 4 years at ~10% in the stock market is approximately an extra $800k.

Taxes change all that and make things more complicated ($2 million lump sum is taxed more heavily than when it is split up over 4 years). I'm not sure how that works out though.
Yeah, we use S3 at the company I work for a little under a terabyte and we pay less than $25 a month.
I question the real world utility/practicality of this, but thanks for the explanation.

To elaborate: I start with (e.g.) a 2 cpu c4 instance. But my single thread performance isn't fast enough. So I'm going to spend a king's random to upgrade to a 36 cpu instance, just so I can disable 35 of those cpus? There are several other options I'd probably investigate first.
The Twiddler looks interesting, but I think that I'd need to radically rebind emacs in order to make it usable. Maybe not though.
Is this guy just going to ban everything?

Anybody intent on breaking the law will just [continue to] use steganography and side-step the issue completely. If anything, a cryptographic ban would most likely result in an easier life for terrorists (especially but not exclusively cyber terrorism). One honestly wonders if that's what he wants because it has to be impossible to be this stupid.
It's a pity politicians don't need to show even a basic understanding of the material they wish to create laws for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8299523

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061338

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8275426

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7877777
Simple playlists for learning
To continue the mostly-irrelevant story time, I've installed it a few times and generally it works OK now but it is still quite slow for what it is. My main computer is no dog either (i7, 16GB RAM, SSD, yadda yadda) and compared to other media player/managers it really is a poor performer.

I can almost understand this on the newer versions since they've made it a sort of one-stop-shop for playing media, managing iOS devices, shopping for media and software, and sorting your content databases.

But the older versions I used back when I had a "classic" iPod were just terrible and all I did with that was load music onto the iPod. I seem to remember installing some custom firmware on the iPod specifically so I could just treat it like an external drive and manage the media on it via Winamp or Mediamonkey or some other program that had no business doing a better job at handling an iPod than something straight from Apple.

Even now I just use it maybe once or twice a year to back up and update my old iPad 2. I haven't found a way to disable all of the various iTunes helper processes that want to run in the background (short of turning them off in services.msc) so it only gets updated and run when absolutely necessary.

Maybe I'm just doing something wrong and it will run better if I open it more often and let it do its thing but there's just a point where it doesn't do anything (other than iOS backups) that I can't do more easily with other software.

...but I also admit that like many things, my previous bad experiences may be causing confirmation bias and leading me to take note of iTunes issues more than I would with other software.
> Name inequality represents clear evidence against the existence of a meritocracy.

Meritocracy in what sense?

Coming from wealthier background, you're more likely to be well educated.

While we may dislike that it is so, it doesn't mean there's no meritocracy in the sense that employers don't hire people based on their qualifications alone. Only that they don't care where these qualifications come from.
Code and Pepper
Local Discovery Is Broken, Here’s Why
slashdot.com

lemonde.fr

faz.de

spiegel.de

nyt.com

reddit.com

guardian.co.uk

aljazeera.com

bbc.co.uk
You obviously don't understand how a lot of people actually use their computer: http://xkcd.com/1459/

(please note the tongue firmly planted in cheek, even if a lot of people actually DO work like this. which is terrifying)
In the context of the University hierarchy, that is lowly status. There is absolutely no power associated with the position.
Here's the NPR story on that research: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/18/236211811/brains-...
One thing we're seeing here is a clash of business cultures. Most developers and businesspeople that would hang around Hacker News are the sort of people who think business is about delivering the most value you can and getting paid for it. But globally that's really a minority point of view. Most global business focuses exclusively on the getting paid part, and tries to deliver the least possible value required to get money as quickly as possible. If you can get paid by delivering no value or even negative value, that's a big win. The ideal product is a vapid "pet rock" fad or an addictive drug like heroin or cigarettes.

The sort of software you see profiled in this article is the result of those kinds of quick-buck hustlers trying to game the software market. That's the majority of global business culture, which is why outside walled gardens with quality control it's the majority of software.

Ultimately I think this is the case because human beings are wired for scarcity and conflict. Get while the getting's good, because the next famine or raiding army is always coming. No point in building any real value in that world. It'll just get stolen or destroyed. HN is full of people who subscribe to the futurist/enlightenment notion of progress and the idea that we might be almost post-scarcity enough to entertain the decadent luxury of benevolence.
MacAdam.doc might be about the American physicist and color scientist David MacAdam.

macadam.doc might be about a type of road construction.
Spotify’s Spotty API Security
Linux is made by programmers, for programmers. If someone can't understand it, maybe it's not Linux's fault.
or "tus ficheros"
> Clearly this was all my own fault and poor decision making.

Don't blame the victim!
Hey! Yeah, unfortunately it's just me writing code and it's enough work keeping up/improving the iOS version.
An "f" is not a different character from an "F". To most people, it's the same letter with special formatting applied. They don't see it and think, "Oh, that's ASCII character 102." An F is an f, no matter how you type it.

On the other hand, "myfiles" and "my files" have different numbers of characters. They sound different in your head, and you can easily point to the difference. It's the same as typing "alien" versus "a lien".
Redirects to login form.
Ask HN: How brand name usernames are handled?
Lo folks,

I've been wondering what are the common strategies used by software companies with regards to handling brand name usernames. For example if we look at Google, Airbnb, Dropbox, IBM, and Microsoft they each have their exact company names as their username on GitHub, Facebook and Twitter. I would be surprised if they were lucky enough to acquire their username on each service by being the first to get there.

So are usernames reserved from the beginning? Are they appropriated from normal users once a high value user wants it? Or do big companies just have people and tools they leverage to protect their brand name as new products and technologies come out?

It looks to me that it is in the interest of both the service provider and the business customer to allow big brands have the username that is their exact, or near exact, name. On the other hand it isn't obvious as to what the general approach to doing this is.
The 80's already had Mesa and Modula-2, but then those guys at Berkley had to create a few successful startups.
well actually Ubuntu bundled spyware

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do

Ubuntu uses the information about searches
to show the user ads to buy various things
from Amazon. Amazon commits many wrongs
(see http://stallman.org/amazon.html); by
promoting Amazon, Canonical contributes to
them. However, the ads are not the core of
the problem. The main issue is the spying.
Canonical says it does not tell Amazon who
searched for what. However, it is just as
bad for Canonical to collect your personal
information as it would have been for Amazon
to collect it.

More info, plus a script to fix:

https://fixubuntu.com/
Ask HN: Besides coffee, what could help me focus when I need to work?
When I drink coffee I can focus for hours easily. Maybe for an entire day. The caveat is that I get nauseous if I drink too much, so I try to drink very little. I also get really stressed and my mood will get pretty bad, especially at the end of the day.

I was looking for other ways to get focused.
The most interesting thing about this story is that almost no-one is talking about what else Cameron said in his speech [0]:

Mr Cameron also said that a Tory Government would pass a new law to ensure that the intelligence agencies would be able to track phone calls and internet messages.

He said that this power to track “who made which call, to which person, and when” was “absolutely crucial not just in terrorism but finding missing people, murder investigations, almost every single serious crime.

“What matters is that we can access this communications data whether people are using fixed phones, mobile phones or more modern ways of communicating via the internet.”

I refuse to believe our PM is so technologically ignorant that he believes the 'banning encryption' policy will ever fly. The most plausible explanation to me seems to be that he is trying to rebalance the public's expectations of privacy towards greater surveillance to the extent that slightly less egregious (but still objectionable) laws can be passed in their place. I have a feeling that this kind of rhetoric has been used before and probably has a name.

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-security/1134...
But the assertion was that aluminum itself is toxic, so the presence of impurities is irrelevant.
Politically I've never thought that highly of Cameron. But that speech was pretty shockingly ignorant and idiotic even for him. The UK's expectation of "freedom" and "privacy" has never been as high as the US's, and in fact a large chunk of the UK population somewhat support spying for security, but even relative to that these ideas are pretty bonkers.

He really wants to go back to an era when we had those disastrous and ineffective encryption export restrictions that held technology back several years. It is just unworkable. And pretending like you can put the encryption genie back into the bottle is also dumb.
> Race is an immutable characteristic.

Actually, its not. The term "race" refers to two things (which people often fail to recognize are two different things) -- self-identity with a particular group -- which can change -- or an external, social perceived association with a particular group -- which can also change.

> You are responsible for the memes you host and propagate

Group identity (both self-identification and which buckets you put other people in) is a set of memes as much as any religion is (in fact, historically, its often been a set of memes tied to religion.)
Mock server for BDDs
You clarified for me the misgivings I've had with Invision. I've used it a few times on projects (as more of a stakeholder than core team member), and it just never seemed to live up to its promise. I think it was because there were some people who were not "all in" with it, and some of the key feedback was coming outside the app.

Rather than the sense of dread you mentioned, I just let other things take higher priority than the emails with Invision links. I thought it did work well when a designer led a small group through a prototype live.
Examples would be great. Replacing vim with something more efficient on touch pads etc would also be interesting in my eyes (flow programming is something I would think about)
> If differentiating between "file" and "File" is thinking like a machine, how isn't differentiating between "my files" and "myfiles" thinking like a machine?

Spaces are lexically significant in the English language because they indicate the breaks between words. "My files" are two English words that convey meaning to English speakers; "myfiles" is not a word at all and is meaningful only if we charitably insert the spacing necessary to make them meaningful.

Capitalization does not impact meaning to English speakers in the same manner; "my files" and "My files" are understood to mean the same thing. Capitalization is in this case merely an artifact of sentence positioning and the like. It's orthographic convention and nothing more.

Thus, to make the user have to understand that what is a meaningless distinction in English is a meaningful distinction to the user is, by definition, forcing the user to think like a machine.
While I'd agree that it's not a good idea for a lot of purposes, that doesn't mean it's simply not a good idea. People will either be interested in playing with it or they wont, in which case it will simply cease to be developed, and the code will float around the Internet as an example of a cool little experiment. Either way, Node OS is not going to hurt anyone.
Kurt and Jessica just had a lot of time on their hands.
Why avoid ACPI on ARM (and everywhere else, too)