skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm now old and cynical enough to understand/believe that the world is run with laziness as the prime heuristic (with secondary heurisitc being "don't die/maintain current level of comfort").

I agree that it's trivial to exploit, but I choose to believe that, in the general case, people/entities are lazier than they are evil. That said, laziness can be in the form of "not taking into account the externalities", which can be indistinguishable from actual malice (which I define as knowingly and/or willfully causing harm).

I still think Lenovo's behaviour in this case is that form of laziness, though my comment above means I'm on the fence.
Though I agree with the general statements made by the author, on a tangent, I disagree with the 'solve a problem' advice which is constantly being touted.

I look at some of the largest start-ups or even companies, and they aren't solving problems so much as creating opportunities.

AirBnB didn't really solve a problem, they created an opportunity for you to rent your extra space, or find a place other than a hotel to stay.

This also applies to larger companies. Coca-cola didn't solve a problem, they just made something people really liked.

Apple and Microsoft didn't solve a problem people had. They didn't have computers, so what what problem could you have been solving by giving people an operating system. At the time, people didn't know what they would use a computer for, so what problem was being solved.
A study of on-demand startups and their greatest value add
Komodia SSL certificates are in many products
There is justified pessimism here about getting enterprise checks paid on time. An early colleague taught me to make relationships inside the accounting department, address invoices and questions to one or two people specifically and personally thank them for their time. For that small effort (15 minutes per month), I get direct reminders about deadlines and payout boundaries, and consistently good paper turnaround. Doesn't work universally, but holy cow when it does.
Unfortunately that is very possible, and of course I can't speak for other companies. I will say that Gemalto has internal access protection for these and other information.

Of course, there are lots of things I didn't have visibility on and it is possible that I am overly optimistic.
One can hope, currently as my next portable, I am looking at the Asus UX303LN (great memorable Asus names...) but haven't found much info on putting Linux on it yet.
looking at the solr downloads page, I can't seem to find the Solr 5 tarball... Clicking downloads: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/mirrors-solr-latest-redir.html redirects to the 4. tarball, i added 5.0.0.to the url and got the latest tarbal: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/5.0.0
> What about Windows 8 do you feel is copying Apple?

Well, they made it more touch friendly, so they were obviously copying Apple... /s
car/cdr also enables things like caar/cadr, which I personally find much clearer than "headHead" or "headOfHead".
Here is a previous HN discussion about splay trees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370986
What about private-jet-plane-flying-climate-scientists and (especially) worriers?
"BTO"[1] is a laptop brand originally from The Netherlands which allows you to configure your laptop before purchasing it. I own their "X-BOOK 13CL58"[2] model with a 13.3" IPS screen, 16 GB RAM and an i7-4700MQ processor. It works pretty well for me and the screen is beautiful. I think they also ship to other Benelux countries.

[1] http://www.bto.eu/contact

[2] http://www.bto.eu/bto-x-book-13cl58-ips.html (click on "Zelf Samenstellen" tab to see self-configuration options)
I wonder how many years with of jail time Aaron Schwartz's prosecutors would be talking about if this'd been done by a mouthy kid instead of the NSA?

I wonder which non-US country, where the NSA's actions aren't made "legal" by secret FISA courts or acts of (US) Congress, will be the first to start throwing that kind of legal threat at NSA staff responsible for this?</wishful-thinking>
You can specify amounts in USD and get the exact amount back regardless of BTC fluctuations, which seems close to his original premise.
IFTTT’s new ‘Do’ apps simplify everything – including its ridiculous name
> http://webglstats.com

Neat. What happened in the summer of 2013?
A Rant on VC in the Flyover States from an Arkansan that Raised $100 million
Agreed. I was really hesitant to buy Navicat Essentials when pgAdmin is available and free. But once I tried the trial I was converted - and it's only $10. It's well worth that for the increase in my productivity.
Wikipedia isn't clear, because many gay rights organizations prefer condoms to Truvada, but there are no examples of transmission while taking Truvada daily. Serious commentators no longer debate Truvada's efficacy.
SuperFish is based in Palo Alto and funded by DFJ.
The author seems to be trying to dissuade founders who are only in it for the money from starting startups solely for that reason.

On that note, I would suspect that a company whose primary interest is making the founders money wouldn't necessarily have their customer's best interests in mind and would probably never reach a $1B valuation.
Quick question as it seems I'm missing something here.. Why is joyent stewarding node.js? I mean, are the core devs working for the company?
"but the core purpose of these founders is clear – to make boatloads of money." This is false. If someone merely wanted to build wealth there are many options with a higher expected value and higher chance of producing life-changing results.

The stated billion dollar goal has several reasons behind it, the least of which is money. Diving into those reasons one by one could be very interesting; it could expose and analyze our core beliefs (both noble and less-so). Instead the author wasted the chance to do that and left us with something both simplistic and wrong.
I think the OP misunderstands the words "billion dollar company". Which is actually completely understandable, since money is in the title you assume it's about the money.

Typically founders are product people, they want to solve a problem that exists in the world. But, to solve that problem, they need to make a big impactful company, that grows to dominate a particular niche or industry and disrupt the current way of doing things.

To these founders, "billion dollar company" is a shorthand for all these ideals: to make a great and lasting company, to solve a real problem for a very large number of people, and to make a real impact in the world.

It's not coincidence that this phrase is also important to VCs, for whom "billion dollar company" may have a different meaning, that being "make back the fund for our LPs". I say "may" because that's a simplistic view: many VCs are looking to make the world a better place too, and in many cases they have more money than they need already.

And to journalists, these mean "companies which we have to pay attention to". And when you think about, they're not paying attention because of the value, but because of the impact. Which is why journalists are always talking about consumer companies, because they have much more impact in the world than more successful enterprise companies.

Of course, that's not to say there aren't people in it for the money. But we rarely need to worry about them, since they rarely succeed.
Purse.io provides 25% discounts to shop on Amazon with bitcoin. Pretty incredible - discount comes from liquidating Amazon gift cards ($15b in circulation).
It might be unencrypted http for all the target audience cares about. 20-30s youngsters using it to bat emoticons back and forth and discussing the merits of frills versus lace is probably a lot more concerned with how cute the stickers are versus how likely an adversarial party would high-jack a session cookie. On the other hand, if the girls and boys using Line are using it to negotiate drug deals, secret assassination plans, or naked selfies, security might be more important.
I hope this site, and others, serve to convince the community that Node isn't going to work, and to move forward with iojs instead. Even if the Node project fixed everything, I would still prefer iojs.
"there’s a disturbing trend developing of people deciding to found a company simply to get rich."

- ok I have to stop you there. This is not a new developing trend. It has always been a part of tech startup lore. If there is any current trend it's the democratization of startups. 10 years ago you needed $10 million in funding to build something real. 5 years ago $3 to $5 million. Today that's probably $1 -$2 million. The interesting thing about startups _today_ is that you can build real, decent, 10's or 100+ people startups without having to raise gazilions of $'s. Prior to very recently it was go big or go home entirely.

Which is a good point. Has anyone done any analysis on the YC/500 alums that fall in-between the Billion Startup Club and failing? My guess is there might be literally 100's of Olarks that are really great places to work with interesting teams doing millions in revenue that never needed to raise big dough. That option didn't really exist 5 or 10 years ago. The option to strike it rich though always has.
Not if you have access to the carrier's internal network...
Because open source guys value having more people using your code, and using AGPL discourages some people from using it because they can't keep their modifications private?
Yes, I got caught red-handed with my NoDB/gunDB marketing speak. Pretty embarrassing, but the point is that it is a distributed persisted cache, so you get the benefits of a DB without having to manage or maintain a DB.

You are right, most businesses that run that type of logic probably have the money to afford configuring master-slave based systems. They probably should not move over to GUN.

No, you do not have to use S3 for persistence, you can also use your disk. Persistence is a plugin in GUN, so you could build your own module that uses anything to store data.

However, there are lots of interesting advantages to distributed/decentralized master-master systems. And I'm trying to make those algorithms available to common man.

Thanks for the encouragement, I'll be adding more docs and blogs and stuff.

Edit: This person (in the comments below, please upvote him), and my reply, best addresses the most important questions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077969
By enabling BTC payments, does this mean that Stripe will change the list of "prohibited" uses?
That list is in line with what are usually high-risk card transactions, but by removing that risk (almost) entirely, it seems like this could finally enable a wave of new commerce on diverse and neglected categories.

I'm probably assuming a no as they'll want to keep the card AND bitcoin and not do jut BTC, but a man can dream.
Less bitcoin itself, but the blockchain technology that backs the currency has a number of novel uses. The idea of a public, cryptographically secure and verifiable ledger could be used in everything from voting to domain name registration.
Late. That's how :/

Invariably we have to spend a lot of time sending emails chasing late payments, and sometimes making phone calls. They always eventually pay, but it always takes a ridiculous amount of energy to get to that point.

Oh, and US customers (we are based in the UK) most often still pay by cheque (or 'check', if you are American :), which take weeks to clear and usually involve high processing fees. On the occasions where US customers pay by bank/wire transfer, they sometimes do so while specifying that we also pay their side of the transaction fees. Bad practice, and very irritating :/
The seller has your mailing address. Mining is probably the most anonymous way to do it, and by far the least cost-effective. There are, however, ways to launder your bitcoins if you really want them to be anonymous, regardless of how you acquired them.
You mistake the point of SGX. The point of is a reincarnation of treacherous computing. Intel SGX requires remote attestation. This means that YOU, the owner of the device, is not trusted. To have 3rd party keys would mean they would have to trust you. With trust in you, how could it be marketed to the copyright owners? The answer is that it cannot. The point of Intel SGX is to deny ownership of the device to its owner.

But yes, any situation like this where you cannot be trusted means a hacker can gain a higher level of trust than you if they break the security.
Thanks Mark, I'll keep an eye on the docs page then. I'll also keep the thumbs up :)
I did, but as you said by yourself, it's short on info.

The conflict resolution is where the meat is, isn't it? And https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Conflict-Resolution-with-G... is incredibly hard to read and doesn't really answer questions.
Tax comes off before Apple take their 30%. So on a £10 spend, the government get £2, Apple get £2.40 and the developer gets £5.60.
This comment is entirely too wise and reasonable for me to endorse. I need things in black and white. Garbage collection bad! Technical debt bad! Modularity good!
From the editorial: In business and at every level of government, we hear how important it is to graduate more students majoring in science, technology, engineering and math, as our nation’s competitiveness depends on it.

Very good! You've given a reason, but it's based on an argument from authority: BUSINESS and GOVERNMENT say the nation needs more STEM people. I find that entire type of argument unconvincing. Businesses usually say they need more people with some quality when they find the existing people with that quality are too expensive. As an employee, if I had a quality in demand, I'd seek to keep the supply of people with that quality as low as possible. Lawyers and doctors do that (in the USA) why can't STEM people?

That's to say: I'm unconvinced.
I have a 2012 XPS 13. After a year there was only one working USB port remaining and the DVD drive was broken. I have no idea why people are gushing over Dell, every one I've had has been cheap rubbish.
Sony Hosting Project Morpheus Event During Game Developers Conference
Japan's flip-phone love affair continues, smartphone shipments fall
> As a buyer, why would I use bitcoin internationally when I can't reverse my transaction if they don't deliver?

Sometimes reversibility just doesn't matter. The merchant might be 100% trustworthy (like Amazon). Or as another example I once rented a VPS for a month from Russia. I paid in bitcoins because it was $3 or $4 so I simply didn't care if the VPS provider didn't deliver (submitting a chargeback request for such a low amount is not worth my time), but at the same time I didn't fully trust the merchant with my credit card info (how securely do they protect/encrypt it? could they be hacked? etc).

> Since we don't gift each other bitcoins, Example 3 isn't a problem.

You completely avoided the main point of my example #3. And that's very stupid for you to say this. I gave some to my family, I could say this proves you wrong. Even Coinbase set up a page to give bitcoins last Christmas because it's common for enthusiasts to give some to friends & family: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/105032873402/give-the-gift-of-...

> Example 4 is laughable because in the last week, four Bitcoin exchanges were hacked (or robbed by the owners - still TBD) and people who had their coins in those exchanges lost it all.

This is completely irrelevant to example #4. My point was that a Bitcoin transaction cryptographically authorizes only the transfer of a specific amount to a specific address, and nothing else. In contrast a CC transaction lets a fraudulent merchant place any charge for any amount at any time. This is a substantial undeniable security advantage that Bitcoin has over credit cards.

> Skimming CC numbers is for sure an issue for credit cards, but as someone who has had their credit card skimmed, my issuer locked my account within 2 hours of fraudulent activity, called me, and eventually gave me my money back.

You were lucky. But your cute story doesn't mean credit card fraud is a solved problem. In many cases the customer has NO RECOURSE for fraud. For example you cannot chargeback a transaction made more than 60 days ago. Some fraudulent merchants pretend to act legitimately but stall shipping (eg. claim delays, issues, etc) for 60 days specifically to exploit this fact and exploit the fact customers don't know about this condition. Or if your PIN code is stolen and a fraudulent transaction is made with the PIN code, you will typically be held liable (check your credit card issuer's fine print, for example: http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/common/pdf/borrowing/revolving_...)

> How many Mt. Gox users got their money back?

Give your money to a fraudster and he will run away with it, no matter if its bitcoins or dollars. How much money was permanently lost to the Bernard Madoff ponzi scheme?
Lenovo should just offer the unbiased, truthful and transparent choice between a clean image (with device drivers) and their usual crapware image. They can then easily gather metrics on what image is selected when customers order products. Just give customers a choice!
I think that's what what the term "inside job" suggests.
I would really love if this actually worked as promised. Way too much skepticism and not nearly enough proof. Kudos for actually putting this out there, though. It'd be great to prove everyone wrong, but I will not hold my breath.

Good luck!
Have you looked at the Wiki?

https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Conflict-Resolution-with-G...

https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/How-to-Create-GUN

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VIOJc0bdzUNs7yXMLKCc...

No snake oil. It is a state machine operating over a boundary function. However words like that sound super jargony which sounds vague, despite the fact that people spend their entire lives working on just these problems sets and their nuances.

I'm happy to discuss the workings, and I'd encourage you to try and use GUN and see if it can withstand your concurrency attacks. Challenge accepted?

Edit: This person (in the comments below, please upvote him), and my reply, best addresses the most important questions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077969
Sadly this would be an excellent application for the CFAA except that they agencies involved are immune from its prosecution.
As someone who uses PHP (yep, heard it all before, don't care) a great deal, the core devs could really do with a competent BDFL.
Yes, but which of "karpeles" or "employee" was it?
Easy Achiever
Ask HN: Have any Mexicans ever been accepted into Y Combinator?
I was talking with this schoolmate, somehow we started talking about Mexico City. I remembered about his trip one and a half years ago, so I asked about CETIN (Centro de Tecnología e Innovación Telmex). He told me about how awesome it was, that there we're all this programmers doing their own thing. So I asked him if he had ever heard of Y Combinator, I told him what first came to my mind. "It's an accelerator", "The best accelerator in the world", "Dropbox, Airbnb", "$6,000 USD years ago", "$100,000 USD now", "USA three months", "$500,000 USD Azure", "$100,000 USD Google Cloud", "10% Equity", "Very selective", "Demo day", etc. Well you get my point. On the way home while I was reflecting about our chat, I got really curious about my question, so I thought I'd ask!
What the author is implying is that entrepreneurs seek those nice round X billion valuations, and the VCs are fine giving it to them as long as they can write the term sheet.

Remember, these valuations are not cash paid for common equity like in the stock market. It's an extrapolated total equity value based on a smaller amount of cash given for a smaller amount of preferred equity that comes with a lot of conditions such as liquidation preference and maybe even preferred dividends or, god forbid, personal founder liability.

The valuation number is really just a bullshit number and meaningless to anyone who doesn't know the entire term sheet.
Fine. You do know about availability sets right?

Plus we were on AWS before and that went down. We had our own racks in a DC on Linux+Java before and that went down.

Shit happens. Architectural decisions are the way around it.

Bar one unusually large fuck up, most of the whinging about Azure comes from not RTFM and assuming it's a magic unicorn poo launcher and not a bunch of servers in a building somewhere with a light abstraction over the top.
Because legal oversight and traceability are often bugs, not features. The middlemen required to deal with those two things are often bloated, slow to react, corrupt, expensive, and in some cases, all of the above.

The idea that "I want to send some value to someone else" requires jumping through so many hoops, and having so many bites taken out of it, in 2015, is a bit silly.

How do chargebacks work with cash? Exactly. Yet we still use it.

This honestly smells like the government anti-encryption argument. "You have nothing to hide, so why do so?"
While certainly a step in the right direction, the lack of an open baseband remains a huge problem, even with TextSecure. Any smartphone has a whole separate OS running, with access to the system bus and memory, that we generally have zero visibility into. There could be exploitable bugs, there could be actual backdoors, and we just have no idea. If you truly want to secure data, you need to use an airgapped system with hardware that is much more open.
There's a very good reason why this argument comes up again and again.

STEM disciplines are in the analytic philosophy tradition (at least the ones that are any good).
For the most part, liberal arts are in the continental philosophy tradition (this wasn't always the case).

There can be no peace, or even understanding between the two schools of thought.
> unless the RAM is soldered

Is is according to ifixit's teardown:

"Buyer beware: Just like in the MacBooks Air and Retina, the RAM in the XPS 13 is soldered to the motherboard, and cannot be replaced. When you're picking out your new laptop, configure what you think it'll need...forever." - https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Dell+XPS+13+Teardown/36157#s...

I'm not a fan of this trend.
No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

Why give up on something because we can't do it right now.
Yeah. I have a ThinkPad T530 and a Yoga Pro 3 and while it's not a fair comparison (mobile workstation vs. strange laptop/hybrid...thing) the software on the ThinkPad feels more sparse and out of the way while the stuff on the Yoga is pretty terrible and invasive.
Recently bought a Dell e7440 14" machine with i7, 16GB and then added a 1TB SSD. As developer machines go, it's pretty decent. Not as much battery life as I'd like (3-4 hours) but I haven't actually run it out yet. It's small and light enough that I can take it anywhere, but big enough that I don't need external monitors to get proper work done. Only real downside is that the video is a little underpowered (HD 4000) so no gaming.