skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alarmist and self-congratulatory tripe to the max. And without much backup to boot.

Alarmist: Big corporations are run by sociopaths! What this means is never really defined (are we using the lay or clinical definition of sociopathy? If lay, then what definition?), but more tossed about as a straw man for why big companies are Bad(tm).

Self-congratulatory: Big companies are Bad(tm), but us feisty startups are so awesome. We're a force of good in this world! Us technical folk sure are more moral and just plain better than them durned "sociopaths"!

I find the constant overuse (and lack of definition or apparent understanding) of the word "sociopath" to be particularly stomach-churning, and it reads of alarmist hate-scribe not much unlike the racist, sexist, and other reprehensible things extremists tend to write about "them" (where "them" is a convenient, sometimes made up, demographic to blame). The consistent attempt to dehumanize these "sociopaths" (again, never defined) is really kind of sickening.
Pure CSS 3D effect
It's also supported in PHP preg_ functions, but instead (??{$regex}) you write (?R)
To an American, perhaps. Ask someone from China the same question.
why doesn't this surprise me
You could watch high quality streaming video from the internet in 2000, (and download and watch movies illegally), on internet connections comparable to the speed of today.

Compare that to the difference between 2000 and 1990, when the Commodore 64 and dot matrix printers still had some market share.
Thanks for the heads-up; I've responded.
I think you need to stop using google if you find this to be a problem.
Not condoning the crime, but does anyone else find it ironic that a black guy is accusing someone of robbery?

Yes, because ignorant stereotyping is fun! Remember kids, it's not racism if it's not targeted at a member of the List Of Races We Should Be Sensitive About!
other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors

Yahoo had links to Altavista, lycos, google, etc, at the bottom of its search results years ago. I'm not sure where he's coming from. If the internet was a book, the text would be companies like Disney and the index would be google. It would seem strange that the author would be paid less and be held in less esteem than the guy who compiled the index.
What you're noticing is that it takes longer than ten years for most technologies to go from their beginnings to ubiquity. Television, radio, automobiles and even antibiotics looked like curiosities within ten years of their discovery. It's hard to think of exceptions - the nuclear bomb is perhaps a good example. Birth control pills are close, although I believe even that took longer than ten years.
Come See James Cameron’s Avatar This Friday With TechCrunch
And who developed the 350+ mph train?

Silly article
Grains are low in Vitamin D, that's why native europeans are pale. Paleness allows you to absorb more vitamin D from sunlight.
I wish he'd speak more about what prompted him to get an office space. Is it because he's hiring more people? Did he consider virtual collaboration models instead of a 'real office?' Did he just want to get out of the house?
Ah good old fashioned tech-industry elitism. Our guys are brilliant engineers changing the world for the better. Everyone in every other industry is a mere sociopath exploiting customers for their own selfish gains.
Ask HN: Feedback to the project: Freeciv.net
Hacking university
Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google ever been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.

A total ban of an obvious competitor would clearly raise so much controversy that it is "almost unimaginable", I agree.

But Google's smaller-scale bans and reorderings, always for ostensibly legitimate purposes, have sometimes caused accusations about Google's real goals by the webmasters affected. That's not to say their paranoia is correct -- but "[n]ever been accused" and "unimaginable" is a bit strong given the real history.

And they are 'demoting' other content incrementally all the time -- whenever they promote their own content in the first few vertical positions. Tried any health-related search on Google recently? As of a couple months ago, 'Google Health', with an image, is almost always the top hit.

Do non-YouTube videos get as prominent placement as YouTube videos?
Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Integers
What I find someone charming/quaint about Joel's Posts on "Operations" over the last six years that I've been reading him, is that he is, slowly but surely, discovering the "Art of Operations" - albeit at a glacial pace.

Most People who work in Production Operations environments of any scale, discover what has taken Joel the better part of a decade, in the first two-three years of their career.

I almost feel like that Airplane passenger sitting beside Brooks Jr - Brooks saw him reading his book, "Mythical Man Month" - and asked the guy (who had no idea who he was sitting beside) what he thought of the book - The gentleman responded that it was basically a summary of things he knew already. Joel is a giant in the industry, but he does have a tendency to discover/restate the obvious.

"It's not backups, but the restores that matter" - is kind of the mantra of every single person who has ever been responsible for backups.

Then, you go to _any_ class on running a production environment, and you discover things like RPO, RTO, Dress-Rehearsals, etc.. and the whole "It's restores that matter" begins to look quaint.
Open source software is a different thing from closed source software. Code holds far greater value by virtue of being open: an infinite number of people can use it, bugs are more easily found, ways of improving the code are more easily discussed, etc. But in order to get these benefits, it must be non-excludable.

I didn't know about the 2009 Nobel stuff. Can you point me to a layman's summary by any chance?

I think you are overreaching when you say my scheme "is just as likely to lead to overfunding". Qualified economists could determine the budget. The money would be guided by intelligent judges toward worthy projects. Surely an imperfect solution is better than ignoring the problem.
> Any mutation that makes it "less troublesome" on average would be favoured.

That's correct, but, from my understanding, revolutionary mutations are orders of magnitude less likely to happen than evolutionary mutations.

Everyone has an appendix, so there's no natural selection pressure where non-appendix people are breeding to further the spread of non-appendix humans. Just thinking out loud here - I reckon the way it would have to go would be if the appendix was a significant disadvantage, and people with a less sensitive/smaller/less prominent/something-like-that appendix were able to survive more easily or have more children on average, then you might selection pressures moving towards a less prominent and eventually no appendix.

It could happen, but it'd take a long time. Actually, one that fascinates me is what effect modern medicine and technology will have on evolution. Greater mobility is seeing children with a more mixed and diverse hereditary mix. Beyond that though, longer life cycles and better medical treatment might mean both slower and less evolution. I'd expect a lot of positive effects from interbreeding of different peoples over the next 500 years, but I reckon, sadly, that things like aggression won't be genetically bred out of us any time soon by being selected for less. Interesting stuff to think about.
Paper by van Dijk, Gentry, Halevi, and Vaikuntanathan.

Abstract: "We construct a simple fully homomorphic encryption scheme, using only elementary modular arithmetic. We use Gentry's technique to construct fully homomorphic scheme from a "bootstrappable" somewhat homomorphic scheme. However, instead of using ideal lattices over a polynomial ring, our bootstrappable encryption scheme merely uses addition and multiplication over the integers. The main appeal of our scheme is the conceptual simplicity.

We reduce the security of our scheme to finding an approximate integer gcd -- i.e., given a list of integers that are near-multiples of a hidden integer, output that hidden integer. We investigate the hardness of this task, building on earlier work of Howgrave-Graham."
The post seems contrary to reality; there's a difference between 'expensive' and 'overpriced.' The Playstatiion 3 was overpriced -- great pyramids of them sat untouched in electronics stores at launch and after.

The iPhone was expensive, but not overpriced. The launch-day lines could be pout down to hype, but there was also a months-long scarcity where Apple was selling them as fast as they could build them.
Any real counter-forensics device should be at least as good as the door electromagnet in Cryptonomicon.
Could you quote the parts of the article that "throws out the evidence that indicates multiple assailants"?

Specifically parts of the article that discredit the body of evidence from the Judge's report (http://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php?/tjmk/comments/under...) that supports a multiple-assailant theory?
What you mention doesn't apply to 10 years ago. Maybe 20-50 years ago.
MySpace - the new Hollywood launchpad - covers premier of Avatar
When this becomes general-use, Analytics integration will be a no-brainer, and awe.sm will not be happy.
Have you considered that it doesn't matter how honest the discussion is if we don't share the same assumptions. What if the real problem isn't the problem you see?

There is no obvious reason why a woman would be paid less for the same work, for example a rule saying "pay a woman $5 less than a man", or even an actual conspiracy that may be slightly less obvious but is still a clear problem. So therefore, "women getting paid less than man for the same work" is not really a description of the problem, it's just a symptom.

Yet it still happens. Before we can fix it, we need to know why, otherwise there's a good chance we'll be creating more problems.
Coffee is supposed to be run before you shut down the pc. To be honest I don't imagine it would see much uptake: too much risk of making evidence inadmissable in court (uk guidelines are quite heavy about that)
Escaping examples and the worst test data
I am beginning to bring on part-time help and needed an office space so we could collaborate. Plus the business needed to feel more "real"—this is a hard concept to explain but what happens in your house can sometimes feel more like a hobby.
OK, the test data is impossible to insert here ...
Marketing genius (on iPhone)
grinich is actually a pretty well-regarded member of the HN community:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grinich
They'll pay handsomely for the disservice. It's a gold mine and positive press for Plurk. Don't feel too bad, you just won the Internet.
I'm going to do some more indepth research when I get home. I've read plenty of articles by people with PhDs in areas that focused particularly on things like how exercise and diet affects the body.

From what I've read there is evidence to show that the old thought "a calorie is a calorie" is not true. Dr. Novella points to a study where "low-carb" was 20% of the caloric intake, and uses this study to validate that statement, however, most places I read about define low carb as much lower than this (generally about 20g which probably works out to about 7-8% or so).

I'm definitely not an authority on this but I know I've seen some info that seemed really well backed (by science) that shows that there is validity to the low carb diets for fat loss (there is a difference between weight loss and fat loss).
Here's the CLU language home page:

http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/CLU.html
Personally I like that. The more google records for me, the closer to a true lifestream we get. Saves me some work.
I think he's on to something for education, too. There's an inherent sort of non-monotonicity in the admissions process: you want to admit the "best" students in order to make up the "best" class and give them all the "best" college experience, but even if you could somehow omnisciently rank the best 250 or 500 or 1000 applicants and accept from the top of the list, you would lose so much in heterogeneity (which is, I think, part of a good education) that it would no longer make up the "best" class or experience. (Of course you have problems if you admit too many from the low end, too, but that's why you put weights on the random process. :)
2020 will have more social media experts on hacker news to down vote me.
That's quite the REPL prompt...
I'm just using him as an example of an effective, minimal-bureaucracy provider of funding. A government funding organization wouldn't need to be a huge beast. Especially because the costs for OSS development are so low.
Ah - got it. Just curious, but are you basically getting most of your part time help from locals to Pittsburg? Any particular reason why you're not sticking to virtual? Also, did you consider a co-working facility (not even sure if they have any in Pittsburg, but they sure are cropping up everywhere)
2002: "Industry analysts know nothing about Apple, and given their record in the tech industry in the last few years, it’s a wonder anyone quotes them at all."

2009: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/11/10/apple-nokia-ipho...
Looks great, I'll give it a look then!
Smart move getting the early release and feedback.
More likely, it's just that someone's more likely to comment here if it gives them an opportunity to boast about looking young.

I predict that if you're still looking 7 years older than your age at 30, you won't be so happy about it :-).
I am in AU and have terrible coverage with my iphone, as do several of my friends/colleagues. However, just as in the US it seems that some of the other networks are much better. I wonder if there is actually some issue or incompatibility in the infrastructure that leads to some problems.
I have to tell myself "You are not the average user!" three times a day

Exactly. I generate an awful lot of HTML email - it goes to people who want to open their Outlook in the morning and have a bunch of stuff summarized in graphs and tables. It's trivial to generate reports this way. Weirdly some people prefer their reports as an email saying "please see attached report" and the content itself in a PDF! That's easy enough too tho' shrug
I'd really hate to belong to last mortal human generation.
I'm working at a fairly established small programming shop, and the boss basically set a budget and let us choose our own desks and chairs.

Because I wanted a fairly fancy chair and didn't really give a crap about having an "executive-looking" desk, I splurged on the chair a bit ($299 on sale for $249), got a fancy n-way adjustable keyboard tray second-hand ($100), and a Fredrik desk from Ikea ($149).

Chair: http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/510830/Realspace-PRO-9...

It's super comfortable and adjusts in height, seat depth, back height, armrest height and position, etc. The only downside is that it could use another half inch of seat height (and I'm not even six feet tall)

Desk:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60115989

I can't say enough good things about this desk. I've got the first of the two top shelves about six inches above the desktop with two 19" monitors on it. With bigger monitors I would take it down one notch, but there would be room for dual 27" screens. I did have to put a couple of spacers to mount the keyboard tray, as there's a cross-brace that's in the way.

Here's my setup: http://img39.yfrog.com/i/fobj.jpg/
Posters = clutter, and I'm already pretty cluttered:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/45585199@N07/4186099566/

It's a great idea, though.
Keep in mind this was written in 2002, when it pretty much WAS impossible to develop the iPhone as we know it, and as Gruber describes. Phones were basic bulky creations with antenna nubs. Smartphone OSes at the time were PalmOS and a version of PocketPC with phone capabilities retrofitted on.

I don't really get the point of this submission. Is it to poke fun at Gruber's observations?
I considered a co-working facility—I would have loved the collaboration, but this was a great deal for some private space.

Working at home makes you treat things differently than waking up and going to a space 100% dedicated to work. Maybe it's just me, but it seemed like the right time after 12 months.
Is that really possible?

Google "how to stop using Google" -> "Did you mean 'how to stop using Bing'?"
A referral upsale channel for Amazon's affiliate sales program -let's count them tricks of trade: misleading title (checked), inflammatory content (checked) targeted at a controversial topic (traditional pattern-matching makes people want to see google as the enemy by now); claims without proof, or evidence to back it up (checked), with a small hint of techno-superiority, that makes the target audience feel good (increased clickthrough&checkout of the book: checked). Deterministic geek-buzzing about content (triggering the network-reading effect): checked.

Oh, yes, someone's going to have a marry christmas.
awesome suggestions
Ben Jonson agrees with you:
>"Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous;"

On a similar note, programming is not typing, it's thinking.
Agreed. I don't really understand people's mindless adulation of Google, which is at heart an advertising company. I find Google tremendously useful and I admire them as a business, but the reality is that we've swapped one barrier to entry (publishing, tv, cable, etc) for another (Google). As the author pointed out, if you get yanked from Google, you're dead. Is this really a better situation than what we had before? Instead of power being consolidated in a handful of powerful companies, it's now consolidated into one very young and very unproven company whose sole motivation in life appears to be selling ads against other people's original content. Terrific.

Of course the vanguard of the media industry doesn't like Google. They've spent billions creating content and Google's entire business model is to lower the value of that content to free so they can sell more ads against it. And we cheer Google on because we want shit for free, meanwhile complaining about how Demand Media and Aol and TechCrunch are pumping out incredible quantities of shitty content to get more ad views.

The middle of media is dying, and it's partly thanks to Google. You can go niche / high quality and produce artisanal content that small groups are willing to pay for, or you can mass produce piles of shit and make pennies at scale. But I'm not sure you can produce good content for a large audience anymore.

/rant

To be clear, I'm not really blaming Google, or Demand or anyone. This is what the market wants, and I'm not sure it's evil to give it to them. If they hadn't done it, someone else would have. My point is just that Google isn't some altruistic genie.
I know the web world is different, but a couple of years back nobody from my product group was allowed to install a competitor product and play with it as it would cause IP prior art issues. Most of the developers did it anyhow, they just would not admit to it. However, I did not know of a single manager who really did it. So I would not be surprised if the managers had an executive policy which did not allow them to see other products. This was at a three lettered big company and not MS though.
We did this too and I advise against it. There are desks that people will find that will screw up your space in unpredictable ways. Get everyone the same desk.

(For what it's worth, we eventually standardized on the same Ikea Frederick desk you like).
I've never once seen a website owner complaining about Google that wasn't operating an obvious (to me) spam, or otherwise nefarious, site of some sort. I've even seen a few HN users commenting on such Google evils, and when I looked at the "innocent" site they were talking about, it was inarguably blog spam, content spam, used black hat SEO techniques, or some other nasty type of thing that provided no or negative value for users, and was carefully engineered to maximize ad or referral revenue at the expense of all else. I'm sure somewhere, sometime, some actually innocent website has moved downward in the search rankings, but I've never once seen a complaint about it that was legitimate (it's probably just lost in the noise of all the black hats that complain loudest, since I've never looked for innocent site owners with stories to tell...I just come upon the assholes who scream loudest).
The last name "Chartrand" is pretty close to the start of the alphabet. If you subscribe to Malcolm Gladwell's theories (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3294546/Is-y...), the first letter of your name is a big factor in your success.
Ok, here's my first person experience. Anecdotal, take it with whatever grain of salt you wish. I want to state up front that I love living in the US, I love the outdoors here in particular, and I'm happy to be back. But...

---

After over a decade in Asia my wife and I moved back to the US to have our second child.

Our first child was born in Hong Kong. There we had weekly ultrasounds by one of the most experienced doctors there (a real master of both the machine and reading of the results). Minimal cost which we paid for ourselves (about USD80 per session). This was, notably, a private clinic, not public.

For our second baby, in the US, we've had precisely two. They cost over USD400 each.

The ultrasounds we had in HK were spitting out 3D imaging for us, detailed sonograms, etc. In the US we got a couple of standard ultrasound printouts and a "thumbs up".

(note: I don't care whether we need a weekly or not, the point is that the basic level of attention and care was much higher in HK... the ultrasounds are just one of many examples of this.)

And the US airports? Not third world yet, but they are often decrepit (LA) and invariably inefficient compared to the majority I've been in elsewhere (HK easily has a better airport than anywhere in the US).

Cell phone coverage still sucks here. The whole subsidized mobile phone industry is a drag on the market.

---

What is better about the US? Try ordering anything online... easy, delivery is fast, no customs hang-ups. I love logistics in the US. The US iTunes store has a better selection of movies, tv, music than any international iTunes store. Same for most media sales online.

---

It's not so much one thing (airports, health care, etc.) as all these little things combined. Where did the US that believes in excellence go? It was here when I left, I swear. I want the US to be better than this. I want us to excel in our transportation and communications infrastructure, our health care.

Sure, we're not the third world, but our first world systems and services are looking pretty shoddy lately.

---

(edit: I wanted to add that most of the examples in the article are ridiculous and for the most part poor comparison for the us... the taxis in singapore are cool but you can do a lot of cool stuff if you entire country is a small, paved city controlled by a small cabal of efficient, commerce minded technocrats. The health care, airport and telecoms examples I find more relevant.)