skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well put. Also as <abalone> suggested nearby, the author of the linked article, Max Christian, fumbled the exchange and instead of a million-dollar exit ended up with... what?

Instead of the claim of "I can easily get to twice £X million" -- in revenue? profit? valuation? -- it looks like the author's RoomScan app is near-moribund. RoomScan Pro, which sells for $4.99, hasn't been updated in over half a year and is listed as "optimized for iPhone 5." It's been mentioned in only two articles indexed by Google News in the last eight months. The Roomscan Twitter account hasn't been updated since November. The free version of the app has been updated more recently, but free in this context isn't exactly going to pay the bills.

These are not the signs of an app that is getting to "twice £X million" anytime soon.

I do think it's an innovative idea and a good implementation, but as we see on HN all too frequently, not all innovative ideas and good implementations amount to a "twice £X million" valuation. Any company (or product) is only worth what the market will pay.

As for Google, I don't know how their corpdev team works, but my rule of thumb after working at some very large companies is: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by bureaucracy. It's not unusual for different teams not to know what the other is doing, even when they should. I don't see anything that justifies speculating about nonexistent employees named Maxine, and that kind of bizarre speculation likely poisoned the discussion.

Whoops.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=history+of+grep#!/story/forever/0/...
What happened with WhatsApp? I hadn't heard anything about this.
FCC urged to investigate Verizon’s statements on utility rules
this requirement:

"it also only need to work in Chrome – no IE testing necessary"

sounds like they had a preference for AngularJS. I guess your eventEmitter solution was too advanced for that company.
Others like who? Parents, say? My parents would probably be more concerned if I were unwilling to try something out of fear of failure than if I tried and failed.

Or others like investors? Tell them the truth about risk up front. Also, don't use people like parents as first-stage investors - it can get way too nasty if you fail.

People like spouses and children are a special case. If I chase a startup idea and fail, my spouse may share in the financial hit. I know, "For richer, for poorer", but she may not be comfortable with that risk, and is entitled to me being sensitive to how she feels about this. (If you're married, don't go into a startup without your spouse's full support.)
>>> This is actually a good example of how to fumble a decent exit for a struggling app.

Actually its a pretty good way to steer clear of a scam. If once I determined the people I was talking to were not interested in acquiring my company and only trying to lure me in for an interview, what's to say the rest of their story isn't all BS as well?

What are the odds he even gets the 2M to exit anyways? If you smell a scam, then everything is rotten, from the head down. No way I'd trust Google to pay up after sniffing out their scam.
It's almost impossible for me to resolve the cognitive dissonance of seeing an educated, by all means literate person completely devalue privacy to the point that it ceases to exist.

To say with a straight face, after the events of the 20th century (and the horrors of Russian and German domestic intelligence services, past abuses committed by the FBI, the current human rights clusterfuck in places like China, Iran, and Syria), that all communication should moderated and monitored by the government?

Can anyone support that idea in good faith? I agree with you that it's an almost unbelievable level of stupidity and one that betrays an ulterior motive. But normally I'd say something like this played into some industry or private-interest wish, but what bank or corporation (much less any commercial tech venture) is pushing for this? What group could this possibly serve in society other than the most high-ranking (and power-hungry) officials in the intelligence establishment?
We rolled our own proprietary version of what became known as S3 and scaled it up to several thousand nodes. At any given time, less than half a FTE spent any time on this, and I think we've had roughly equal (probably better) availability than that of S3, at a fraction of the cost.
Most people can learn to fly. It's a bit pricy but maybe not as bad as you think. Easier to do than drive a car, except for when you make a mistake. Look for a flight school nearby. The intro flight is usually at a steep discount.

There is absolutely nothing like flying a small plane. My first night solo (flew down the shore, over Atlantic City) is one of my best memories.
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Can you cite an example?
I agree. There is too much hype going on with JavaScript.

There are a few great features in JavaScript (seamless closures, asynchronism, etc). However, JavaScript has a few flaws as of today, and even though it's one of the most widely used out there, that doesn't mean it'll work for anything. There are other languages out there!

They may not be garbage-collected, the syntax may not be straightforward, you may need to declare your functions and define interfaces, but they also have great features when you learn to use them.

Any programmer should be able to understand basic C programs and reason with pointers, know how to write simple Java classes (without an IDE) and most of all, use UNIX tools (echo/cat/grep/less at least, pipes being a plus, sed/awk/cut/diff would be perfect). These are basic skills which are taught in CS courses, but many fail to have one of these, yet blabber about Node.js all the time.
Internet of Things: There’s now a US congressional committee for that
All right I'll bite. How, exactly, does an engineer make $250-500k a year at Google as an engineer? What examples are there of this happening?
This is exactly the sort of wishy-washy point of view that is as culpable as the extremist one.

Here is a fact: there is no reason -- none -- to think that there exists an invisible, magic being in the sky that concerns itself with things going on here on earth.

Unfortunately, for reasons that are hard for me to understand, it has become pro forma to pretend that it's just fine if adults talk and act as if it is, even if they only "kinda-sorta" believe it.

Well I say that it's time to start saying out loud that it's not fine, and that the judgement of anyone who says they believe it in any sense at all might need to be questioned. Just like you would question the judgement of someone who "kinda-sorta" believed anything that's obviously nonsense, like astrology or numerology or fairy tales.

And the reason that it's important to question the judgement of people who believe things that are obviously false is because they might have guns, and they might decide that it's time for someone to be shot in the head because they have offended their magic deity in the sky. And there are worse possibilities that I don't need to enumerate here.

These absurd, magical points of view won't go away until they are laughed out of the room, so let's start. Comfort and community don't trump safety.
It's already happening on OSX. The other day a non-tech-savvy co-worker of mine wanted to install some kind of Samsung Sync software for his mobile (KIES or something?) - instead of the official site he went with the first Google result. That colorful and large download button inspired confidence after all. The downloaded app installed...something, but it wasn't Kies. It hijacked the browser, installed MacKeeper and changed all kinds of settings and preferences.

He told me after the fact and since the machine was just freshed setup with few things changed (apart from the crapware) I told him to do a clean install since you never know what you missed when you try to clean it up manually.
But half the time, I'm having to deal with file access and creation in the terminal. That's as an important user experience to me (a power user) as anything in the GUI. Does Unix change the way the terminal handles files depending on the locale? My understanding is that it does not. (If it did, maybe that would be the best solution for everyone, but I imagine a lot of geeks would be up in arms about how the terminal experience is not consistent...)
Get an off the shelf GPS watch from Garmin or TomTom. The bundled software doesn't do Linux and apt has nothing much..
Besides my database servers, all of my machines are ephemeral[1]. I can lose machines and spin up new ones automatically (and therefore scale elastically).

EBS adds an unnecessary additional point of failure that I want to avoid at all costs.

Having run production systems in EC2 since 2010, I've survived numerous EBS outages as other services have crashed and burned by sticking to this philosophy.

[1]: I don't use EBS for my database servers either. I use a replicated DB that can lose multiple machines simultaneously without loss of data (and is backed up to S3 in case of a catastrophic event).
I spent zero FTEs on S3 and average around twenty-five bucks, or under a third of an FTE's hourly amortized rate, per terabyte.

You might not be in "almost everyone", but almost everyone else is.
I already drink hot water, Chinese habits :)

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm often doing intensive and effective work while I'm drinking hot water! Don't know if there is a real correlation here.
"Meritocracy" will always be my favorite.
I think this argument is depressingly uncharitable.

One of Rust's goals was to remove the "feature" of null pointers. In its place rose the feature of tagged unions, to support the `Option` type. This is strictly trading one feature for another. Once this necessary task was completed, Rust was happily able to reap all the benefits of tagged unions elsewhere, such as with the `Result` type. It is not greater language complexity, it is merely the reuse of simple language features to empower developers to create more robust software.

Now, I am not among those saying that Go needs tagged unions, or any other feature for that matter (no, not even that one). I think Go is a good language, sometimes to the surprise of my peers. But what's disheartening to me is seeing a Go core developer imply that Go is literally the baseline for programming language simplicity, in effect papering over all the various tradeoffs that programming language design entails.
https://iqtainment.wordpress.com/acoustic-ruler/

I've played with it - with some calibration, it seems to work. But YMMV, and I got it mostly just in an appreciation of the author's clever idea.
Seems that, though the posted article is new, the research in question is actually a couple of years old -- http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2354
Kim- Police officer? The only Kim I can imagine is Kim Kardishan.
> To most people, an "a" and an "A" are not different symbols; they're the same letter with "uppercase" formatting applied, much like bold or italics.

So, what you are saying, is that there is no semantic difference between "1 mm" and "1 Mm"? Or between "my next computer" and "my NeXT computer"? Or between "acorn" and "ACORN"?
I used to re-install windows to my family like once a year, but then I refused to doing it anymore but I offered to install ubuntu on their machines. It's being like 4 years so far and they hardly need any maintenance from me.

IMOE the main issue are software-suites

Cad and 3D: my dad is really used to windows, and learning the linux environment was an easy step for him. He could never do the switch to open source cad alternatives. We tried using wine, but for performance we ended up keeping windows as a 2nd bootable for him to draw.

Photoshop, and Corel: I installed ubuntu to a friend who works as graphical designer. She is currently using gimp, and inkscape but she had a hard time making the switch.

Games: my son really was the most resilient to the change. He played every blizzard game, and since there aren't (wasn't ?) linux support it was a big non-stop for him. Then he moved to minecraft, and that made him reconsider the switch. He's been using linux for about 2 years already -- no windows partition at all
Retro is where it's at for lone developers.

Systems are small, expectations low, challenges firm.

I very seriously enjoy the retro scene today. It's possible for ordinary people to participate, even make games others will play and pay for. Homebrew.

Completing that experience was one of those life checklist things. I had a great time and have learned a lot and was able to explore games on a technical level in an achievable way.

Personally, I see this being cyclic. The big names and players will always be there. But little scenes pop up regularly, and those are a treat for those who go looking.
Randomly Generated CSS Buttons, generate and hold the bits you like
The Morning Paper: an interesting/influential/important CS paper every weekday
Profanity encompasses some of the most colorful parts of the English language. They're just another tool in the toolbox for communication.
> I've studied Quran too and a bit of comparative religion and nowhere did I find any instance where it preaches violence

Then you didn't read the actual Quran. I will not claim that the Quran is more violent than other holy books, but it certainly has its share of calls to violence.
Religion is a collection of ideas.

And bad ideas deserve to be criticized.

It's as simple as that.
Because you might need the low-level, reasoning about memory/cpu/etc capabilities of C -- which Haskell doesn't offer -- but don't want all the undefined behavior and extra unneeded complexity.

As of Rust, it's not even 1.0-stable out yet. Even if it was, it would take 4-5 years to mature, get enough support, tooling etc to be something you'd use instead of C/C++ for everything.
>There is no compelling evidence

Compelling, of course, is a subjective word. So, you mean to say that there is no evidence that compels you. But, certainly, you are aware of eyewitness accounts of, say, Jesus' life and work, as well as archaeological evidence. You can choose not to be compelled by the evidence, but you cannot say it doesn't exist. And, you obviously cannot claim that it fails to compel others.

>I fully believe that unicorns could exist. But if you claim they do exist, I will call you on your bullshit, and demand you present a proof.

It's pretty stunning that, to your mind, nothing exists unless it can be proven. Again, I take you back to that trite and cliche notion that you cannot prove your own existence.

Alone, that statement would be pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo, but I say this here only because the utter paucity in what any of us knows should undermine your confidence in imposing your own beliefs at least somewhat?

But, keeping it to the physical world, you are arguing, essentially, that you can explain (or prove) each and every thing that you observe.

>No, you don't understand science. There is not faith. There are only measurements.

Measurements are mere interpretations of what is "demonstrated". There is faith in science the moment we draw a conclusion predicated upon something that we cannot fully explain, but can only observe. In fact, religion itself has served this very role for millennia.

Some of our most accepted and consequential theories (e.g. Big Bang itself) are predicated on things that we cannot yet explain. In fact, we make "allowances" for some of these things that are themselves yet proven.

Yeah, it's the best scientific explanation we have so far. But, I think it's a bit presumptuous to go bashing people over the head with it.

>This is the other part of my argument; even if we assume that the universe and everything in it was created by God, the question is, which God?

Well, I wonder, if you allow that any God created the universe, whether the discussion about which God dissolve into pure meaninglessness? That is, if you acknowledge the existence of a God that created the Universe (and you), then are you really in a position to quibble about God's nature if you're not willing to consider the "evidence" from those who claim to know?

But, any one of these, all of these, or none of these could be correct. There could be some truth that reconciles all of these, as much as some unknown about dark matter or gravity or time could unify physics.

>Occam's Razor, a mental trick commonly applied in science, suggests that all religions are false.

Yeah, I think I may have come across one of the most famous "mental tricks" in the world from time-to-time! Seriously, it actually has an interesting history with regard to religion and its namesake, who was actually a Christian. You should look it up.
The rise of robot waiter
Both. And low portfolio concentration.
Does anyone know how this work (Society of Mind in Hypertext) was able to be published on the web?

I have the hardcopy at home and have for years. It provides a unique perspective on some ideas about our minds.
It's completely necessary. Otherwise the words wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be talking about it.
Epic Pinball?
This is pretty weird, I just tried it for a short period and now I hear weird sounds in my ears. I don't know if I should keep going on...
Wow, what a great site. Thanks for this link!
You might use this instead of a simple IFTTT alert exactly because IFTTT is so simple. In other words, ifWeather.com is designed to be more of a weather alert management console for people that would like to setup and manage multiple alerts for multiple locations. I think that we in the technology industry forget that for so many other industries the weather really matters, and not just the weather where you or your phone are.

A couple examples:
- a surprising percentage of people that have signed up so far are photographers that want to be alerted to ideal forecast conditions for several locations.
- My wife is a hydro-geologist, so a lot of her sampling needs to be done after specific weather conditions. Her sample locations are spread all over a large region and it's a real pain for her to check weather conditions for so many locations daily.

Thanks for checking out the site.
As far as this dude, with his aging eyeballs is concerned, the colour's meaning, if any was irrelevant.

I mean, the information was interesting enough to me to try to read it, but I frankly can not parse what looks like #FFFFFF text on #FEFFFE background.

For the love of god, If you want to present data like this, ensure at least a little contrast exists between the text and background
The main rule I'm trying to follow is "as random a tiling as possible". So unless absolutely necessary, no picking certain pieces just because it's easier.

The max area I'm having to tile is fairly small (maybe 100x100 at most) so an actual solution could be fairly easily brute-forced in the last step of the process. I just want to avoid having to backtrack as much as possible since it increases the cost substantially.
Why you're saying is that you don't mean "stable", you mean "bug-free". You listed them as two separate points originally - there is a difference between them, conflating stable to mean bug-free isn't useful.

You did literally claim that TeX was "bug free". It's entirely unremarkable that with no new features added to TeX in 26 years that eventually most of the bugs have been fixed - and theres been at least one bug almost every year since 1977. If anything, the lesson here is that TeX almost certainly still contains bugs.

TeX's slowness can be measured by measuring how much time TeX spends making I/O syscalls. You can pass debugging arguments to TeX so that it will log more information about which phase of the processing it is at - TeX spends very little time typesetting and most of its time reading and writing auxiliary files. Because a document with cross-references must be re typeset 3 times, and most of TeX's running time doesn't consist of typesetting, we can be fairly sure that TeX is almost 3 times slower than it needs to be in this case.

The I/O situation is difficult if not impossible to resolve without completely rebuilding and redesigning the TeX program the ground up - it's a macro processing system, and it has many thousands of lines of macros which need to be processed for even a simple document. When TeX was designed it was impossible to do most of this in-memory, so the entire design of TeX is built around processing streams of data with as little state as possible. TeX processes one page at a time, and all its global state is based on that assumption - certainly not low-hanging fruit.

d) Pascal is a great little language, once popular for teaching students. But TeX is written in WEB, which adds a fairly complex macro layer which is then utilised by Knuth in a very non-linear manner (with respect to the code - the narrative is linear). But it's not just the language which makes TeX tricy to read - it's how it was used, the entire program is one giant global state which is manipulated by a handful of giant functions which perform most of their logic using GOTOs - that was normal for the 1970s but it's unquestioably very difficult to wrap ones head around. At least with git I can skim through the source code and understand it's structure as a piece of code - even if the meaning is still difficult to comprehend.
> Just last week Victoria Lease resigned after months of sexual harassment without any consequence for the perpetrators.

I find this hard to believe because if you are smart enough to work at Google then you should be smart enough to know your rights. If the harassment is persistent and comes from multiple perpetrators then she can build a timeline to show HR, a lawyer, or the EEOC.
OneDrive data automatically scanned for child porn
"The difference in sizes between Apple and Google’s stores has a lot to do with the ways the two companies choose to manage their mobile app marketplaces. Apple puts developers’ apps through a more extensive review process, while Google allows its developers to publish directly, only stepping in after the fact to deal with things like Terms of Service violations or mobile malware distributions."

Which they do in a harsh and unapologetic way.
The net is filled with accounts by developers who have had their apps removed or developer accounts closed with very little explanations or support on how to restore their account.

http://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/2jw9cj/as_an_and...
Where on earth would $40k/year be a reasonable salary for a "senior software engineer"?
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