jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Dropbox really is a great example of invites done well. Google's "limited invite" comes with a sense of smugness as you get something others don't.

Dropbox's referral program is on the spammy side of things though, I've seen people complained about it on Twitter.

I think the key in referral program is to reward your loyal customers who went out to sell your product for you. Make them part of your business, give them the power to give out freebies, but put a limit on it to create prestige... (a mix of Dropbox & Google)

The other thing is viral pressure... and nobody does it better (or worst depending the way you spin it) than Zynga. There's a public Google Doc named "What I learned from Farmville so you don't have to play it", really good read on its viral pressure mechanism! Not sure if it applies to your business but will probably get you thinking nevertheless.
My big question/looking for suggestions is how to address this issue? People would definitely pay for this kind of service, and (I would imagine) authors would love to earn some revenue.

Is it because of language barriers?
Outdated "legacy" practices?

What are practical solutions? I can't even imagine what a good way to monetize this would be (grooveshark style?)

if link is tl;dr: read below

Manga Artist Park Jin-Hwan Speaking:
[...] But I saw 'the breaker' uploaded on a foreign website. It's being uploaded with only a few days delay. What's more surprising is that everything has been translated (even these notes from myself). So, I'm now speaking to that group. Please stop... Why are you selling and profit off our work? If you have any conscience, shouldn't you have emailed... Or written an apology, or shown some show of support for us? All our works that are on your site are up there without our permission. So please stop. Take them down before it becomes a bigger problem!!

#From the scanlation group
We'd like to respond to this as follows:

To Park Jin-Hwan,
We greatly appreciate the work and effort required by you to bring this great manwha to us, and we apologize if our actions have caused you offence. We would like to clarify that we actually make no profit from your work. We do this in our free time for fun, and we have always bought your books. We, like countless thousands of other people from around the world, love your work, and always look forward with anticipation to the next chapter. We would love to continue doing work on this series, and hope that we can work out an arrangement with yourself towards this purpose. If you would like to contact us, [...]
I like the watching over you idea a lot. I've tried various methods to cut back on my web surfing at work (modify hosts file, noprocratinate setting on HN, etc.), none worked, since in all cases I reverted.

However, it absolutely cannot be done by watching my desktop, you've got to think of a more innovative way around this problem. Maybe just monitor my ports, etc.

Also, the reinforcement should not be in a freaky way (e.g. the movie The Game). Sending messages is OK, but there could also be a site where the aliases of best and worst are displayed and people can track their progress, like a version of Nike's running site. I would pay marginally for such a service, ~$2-3/month.
I think they gave up on that a while ago.
How about this: let's let the states decide how much to tax gains from startup companies. Then we could see if the states that don't tax startups have a boom in startup companies and economic growth, while states that tax startups don't.

Hey, we already do this: some states have corporate income tax, and some don't, and guess which states have more corporations registered?

If you break people into groups and say that group A won't have to pay taxes on startup company gains but group B does, then group A gets a significant economic advantage over group B which wouldn't exist if you weren't doing the test. You're discriminating against group B and if the test goes on long enough to produce results, you've probably given group A a permanent unjust advantage.
When the first deposit from a paying customer hits your bank account, or the first serious investor opens their wallet to validate you, or you convince some innocent wide-eyed soul to quit their job and join you, then you can call it a business. Before that, I'd just call it an expensive hobby.
Yes: trivial. Have the user type in an area outside the page.
Thanks. Wordman is fantastic.
I've often wondered how companies such as the ones listed in another comment (MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, SendGrind) avoid being banned, or any company that sends a large amount of mail. Is something that just requires you to build up reputation over time?
'... Have you heard of XNA? It's a popular C# framework amongst game developers that allows anyone interested in game development to bring their creations to life on PC and XBOX 360. ...'

Now that's more like what I meant & more usable. Why didn't/don't they ... [looks up XNA on google] ... ahh so they have thought of this ~ http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/default.aspx

Looks like you can run your code on the XB360 via the XNA creators club ~ http://creators.xna.com

'... the XNA Creators Club opens up video game development to untapped creative minds, enabling anyone to affordably build and play amazing game ideas on Xbox 360™ systems for the first time ever ...'

Thanks for the heads up. That's why I do not discount MS doing some interesting technology. This is superior to Sony who will not allow you access to key sound & graphics API's without forking out the $200K developers license.

'... As a matter of fact, one of the projects I developed in university is now being transferred to XNA by a friend of mine...some people from the XBOX Live group saw our game and encouraged that it be ported to XNA so they can look into making it available on XBOX Live Arcade. ...'

Good stuff. Just out of interest how is it licensed?
Clearly I'm missing something - in BadKarma, why does the compiler not baulk at sk_filter being passed a struct amp_mgr* instead of a struct sock* as expected? A type confusion like that ought to be prevented during typecheck, no?
"Free speech" might be a societal deal, but it's never meant what you are claiming it means. You are free to redefine it as you like, but it's never meant people are forced to publish your book or an employer can't fire you for being rude.
I agree. Also the reason for alphabetical ordering is typically adding in lines will not cause additional changes in git blame.
You are correct that it could come across as rude and I have no problems with you mentioning it.

But, in 1 year having a successful startup in the live entertainment as a new frontend dev doesn't sound realistic to me. I've never even met a founder that would call himself a frontend dev tbh.

And if people blame something on Covid, at least they should be able to tell us why it failed due to Covid. It's not unreasonable to ask for more info, if specifics of cause / consequences aren't clear.

PS. The original comment was also off-topic ( there's nothing business related in the article), which probably made me doubt it in the first place.
Infotainment isn't well isolated from the more important parts of the car which use the same bus.

For example I recall reading there was an example of a car which wouldn't trigger collision avoidance during a phone call because it was erroneously triggering the breaks to a very small degree and the logic was not to trigger the breaks when the user was already braking.

There is every reason to believe security is as mediocre on cars as elsewhere.
Even in the midwest, tech people earn a lot more in the US than in almost any European country. Sure, for the lower income levels it might be a different story, but I live in the HN bubble like everyone else here.
Yup! I think the biggest win for me is not having to worry about CSS class names. Some people hate the fact that the HTML is now less "clean" but I appreciate not having to context switch or deduce that a child a tag inside a a div.card has a specific styling.
I've always had a pipe dream of building a CI system on top of something like Airflow. A modern CD pipeline is just a long-running workflow, so it would be great to treat it just like any other data pipeline.
I think the author is assessing what the average bodybuilder (i.e. not a pro, someone interested in lifting weights to look good) thinks about rest times. And on this question, it seems like the average belief has caught up (or agrees with) what the most recent scientific studies are showing.
>back up every single configuration file.

This right here. I recently lost my home server of 10 years courtesy of the Texas power issues during the winter storm. I rebuilt and started with fresh Linux install. Having a recent backup of /etc made it so much easier than it could have been. I had more trouble with the network driver on the new mb then with all my services, customizations and data.
I don't think Perl will ever recover from the Perl 6 fiasco, and I'm worried for Python for the same reason.

PHP, on the other hand, handled the PHP 6 "failure" relatively gracefully. There was a bit of stagnation in the days of PHP 5.2 when the devs devoted too much energy to PHP 6 and not enough on improving the current version. But soon, PHP 6 was put on hold and some of its better parts began to be ported to PHP 5. Thanks to this decision, PHP has improved by leaps and bounds since 5.3. Also thanks to the lessons learned, nobody is particularly worried about any breaking changes in PHP for the foreseeable future. Everyone knows that any script that works in PHP 5.6 will probably work just fine in 7.0, so new projects continue to be written in PHP. This peace of mind is very important for languages that carry a lot of legacy baggage.

If there's anything for other languages to learn from PHP, it would be their graceful handling of PHP 6 -> 5.3~5.6. The syntax is still terrible, and the default behavior remains borderline insane, but PHP since 2009 has been an exemplar of how a widely used scripting language should handle new versions.
On this, I've had taxis sneak up in me (small streets) because they were hybrid and were driving slowly. I , for one, like that fake car noises are a thing. Maybe a new sound would be necessary though
Cool!

Shameless plug: If you're interested in the actual hashtag on Twitter, you could like to use of our free embeds:

http://hashtagify.me/explorer/embed_wizard?hashtags=startup&...

Also let me know if you'd like to get detailed analysis of the #startup hashtag, I'd gladly contribute it for free.
They have several of these landing pages, you can toggle between them by clicking the "I don't get it" button that floats in the bottom right or by clicking the logo.

https://fibery.io/
How would you know if they provide useful intel or prevent terror attacks?
I literally started typing a note to my team to check this out and say: We're going to be trying this out after the holiday, and then realized it was wasn't Window's ready. Super bummed.
To echo some of the other sibling comments about this lifestyle- if you're going to over-optimize nutrition like this, and under-prioritize taste, couldn't you just eat Soylent or Huel or another over-optimized food substitute?
It's a model of programming. Rather, it's a remarkably simple model of programming. Any language could be interpreted [0] into it and thus its behavior is important for the comprehension of what "programming" means.

But that's a bit weak. There are tons of models which achieve these properties. Turing Machines are popular. Why lambda calculus?

One answer is that LC is easily augmented with things like simple types or System F types or Dependent Types to introduce the entire space of nice type systems that people are beginning to really enjoy these days.

A better answer is that LC is essentially nothing more or less than a minimal description of what a "name" means. LC provides the simplest, best notion of variable yet imagined and its influence strikes every time you use one in any language (programmatic, logical, mathematical, human).

This isn't the only way to go (for instance, the SKI calculus is equally powerful as LC, but manages to avoid all naming) but it's a remarkably powerful one which has, if popularity is any metric, been completely dominant throughout the entire history of languages.

So, studying LC is a good way to learn about all that.

[0] Side effects would have to be modeled "in universe", but the principle stands.
Only one improvment for me: It should bounce at the top and bottom!
It looks to me like the process converged on Alex's narrative.
O_o

Blueprints do not compile down to c++, it’s a VM that runs in the engine.

The reason no one talks about compiling the engine is because most folk don’t do that. It’s like recompiling python.

Sure… if you really want to…
Well it turned out to be a personal and even sacred experience so I don’t discuss it with very many.
If you call working for uber "slavery", what do you call what african-americans were subjected to in southern US up to the 19th century? "super-slavery"?
I have no opinion on Richard Carriers's views. My comment was his opinion on Tim O'Neill's views since that was relevant.
> Easy to say that would never happen, but "private citizens operating unregulated hotels/taxis" seemed impossible/illegal just a decade ago...

I think a lot of it was making it "cool". These things definitely existed in the past and you could avail yourself of them if you knew where to look but these were seen as seedy and lesser than calling a real taxi/car service and staying in a "real hotel. Somehow making it an "app" from a "tech company" really changes customer perceptions.

> if essential services start getting "gigged out" in a similar manner, that would be problematic..

Just have Uber drivers carry a gun, handcuffs, a fire extinguisher and a first aid kit in the trunk. Now they can shift from taxi driver to cop to firefighter to paramedic at a moment's notice. Maybe an LED light bar/siren combo they can quickly attach to the roof of the car with magnets when they switch to emergency responder mode. It'll be a hell of a lot cheaper too, they won't have all those silly pensions and unions and stuff.
The author explained that it was a trick question -- the solution was to copy-paste code without trying to understand it.
Security is multifaceted.

Ideally, yes. But you still will be more secure than having multiple security holes.
Somewhat got confused by the question given part 1. I didnt think we were asked to modify the source but just write a middle layer. Considering you want to stay in sync with the main codebase for memcache with updates and what not, my (potentially incorrect) solution was somewhat hacky

1. Client saves value in local memory. Then issues a command to update the number to a string version of the number (maybe with a flag telling any client to parse it as integer for get). Assuming setting a value is “safe”, this would cause other concurrent clients to error if they are trying to incr (according to example from part 1)
2. Client that did this update now multiplies that local variable.
3. Client updates value to final answer.

If a failure/crash happened you could still sort of retrieve the original value since it is a string version of itself.

Anyway it is hacky and sort of messes up if someone attempts to get the variable while it is a string. So I probably would fail this question.
People on Hacker News love discussing how to secure their information, but it's not clear if they have anything worth stealing.
That's great. I was doing work, checked google reader ("just for a minute"), followed the YC link, and then resolved to buckle down and get some work done.

After I post here of course...
I'll re-phrase an earlier comment: JS is the x86 of the web, so why argue about which macro syntax is superior?
From what i get, is it more or less the same as http://page99test.com/ but with the whole texts?

Did the adwords campaing success?
Original post with discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870029
Effort ? Way more work than putting a black box in.
"How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?"

I wonder how many single founders make a terrible joke answer to that question and if some sort of filtering could be applied. Drew handled it well, I would have just put n/a
Wow, that's not a very scalable business. You need one physical DVD player for every concurrent customer, inventory of all of the DVDs sufficient to handle peak demand, and a small staff of bored employees keeping the right DVDs in the drives.

In other words, you still have all of the worst features of owning a DVD rental store.
It's more like learning how to take care of your car based on common habits of owners of well-maintained cars.

The guide doesn't even sort of mention how to think/create using Haskell. It also doesn't even sort of dive into real Haskell magic like how Hindley-Milner type systems work. It's tangential to both.
I like the point that "winning" requires abnormal behavior, but I don't like the phrasing as "winning". Winning implies a competition, when many worth-while things in life aren't a competition and often simply passing a personal bar will suffice.

It is a good point that doing extraordinary things requires extraordinary devotion, but the focus on overworking and beating an opposition bothers me.

I'd like to think that accomplishing extraordinary things requires an extraordinary goals and extraordinary passion. You need to have a goal to direct your energy towards, and you need the passion to pursue that goal even when it feels like it might be out of reach.

I think the real message of this article is just that accomplishing extraordinary things requires a lot of hard work, persistence, and patience. I think it misses the love and passion that is required to do that long-term.
You know what's full of explicit incest? Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor. It's also one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

But it looks like it's not available on Kindle either, now that I check :)

http://www.amazon.com/Ada-Ardor-Chronicle-Vladimir-Nabokov/d...
Today's grandmothers won't be around for long. The core generation that joined Facebook because it was cool will become boring old people themselves, and that's why Facebook won't survive.

My fiancée and I are in our late 20s. We were in college when Facebook came out and arrived at the party early. We built our social networks to share the fruits of our newfound "adult" freedoms- namely pictures of inappropriate Halloween costumes and drinking games.

Now, Facebook is different. My mom is on it. My mother-in-law-to-be is on it. But because my fiancée and I are on it, our children likely won't be. It won't be a fun place to share things you don't want mom to know. Mom will be checking in and leaving embarrassing messages on your wall. I think my kids will probably find somewhere else to hang out. It will probably have a name I can't seem to remember, and I will likely embarrass them in front of their friends by pronouncing it wrong or misunderstanding its key features.

Social networks are binding, but they're highly generational. Unless Facebook can figure out how to get my future kids to think its cool, it's toast in 20 years or less.

--Edited for grammar--
This is sickening. 20+ upvotes on posts applauding this guy for scamming someone?

She did agree to buy the tickets in as binding a situation that can arise in an online auction, but to scam her to get the money is wrong.

I'm not rich and $600 is a lot of money to me. But I would rather eat a loss of $600 than scam someone to gain that money because $600, $6000, or any other number, isn't worth it.
I tried switching vimperator for pentadactyl today and found some unpleasant buggy behaviour. Will try again when not so many tabs open and uninstalled it.

Turns out what I use most is 'd' to close tabs and 'u' to unclose them. Most of the rest of vimperator passes me by except when I fight the modal/passthrough/where the hell are my keypresses going moments.
Has anybody come up with a plausible motive to lie about this? Shouldn't there be an audit of the relevant source tree at the time rather than now?
I'm not sure why this was down-voted. You may disagree with Fox News, but you can't deny that it is the most popular network. People aren't watching it because they disagree with it.
Cobra - I've dabbled with it to see that it works nicely with my brain, but not enough to really know and grok all it has to offer.

The initial draw is that it is a python-like language for .Net (important since my day job is in .Net). And while I've dabbled with Boo and IronPython, Cobra seems to have removed most of the syntactic worts that I found w/ Python, as well as a few other features.

In particular, as someone who hasn't really done automated unit testing or contractual programming, I'm drawn to the fact that support for unit testing and contracts is built in. I like the python-like syntax as I find it easiest to learn new programming concepts in (which I can then generalize to my day-to-day work).
It's web focused?

In 2015, your new language needs to have some web stuff built into the standard library or at least some foundation libraries. I don't know that that makes it web focused though.

Seems like there is a huge cultural gap or something, Go was initially built by real-deal C guys. There is a ton of overlap with them and like the plan-9 and suckless fans. If you're not doing hard-realtime or poking registers, it very very much looks like a language designed to fix the problems C has. Just about any of the standard UNIX tools could fairly easily be built in Go and probably be cleaner, maybe more bug free. When the go compiler and run-times are optimized up and the performance is there, it seems like you'd really need a compelling argument to not write those kinds of tools in Go instead of C. If you really dive in to the plan-9 and suckless stuff, how many of those programs legitimately have more than a couple data-structures? They are small, they do one thing, they try to do it well. There are a lot of "missing" things that they aren't urgent the replace because of that, like dynamic linking...

What's really amazing is that it has been drawing the ruby, js and python guys in. And generics is a/"The Big" hangup? Why not just the fact that you actually have to compile it or that the compiled product has an OS and hardware requirement.
but we shouldn't go until it's as safe as commercial aviation

I would not put the goal that far away. There are people taking a ~5% (nowadays; this used to be much higher in the early years) fatality risk to climb Everest. I expect we would get plenty of capable volunteers for that risk on a Mars mission, and I also think we should pick the best and send them.
It's a modify-as-you-wish license. You're right I can't imagine that people buy a look-but-don't-touch license.
Why I don't like lists like this:

how we are losing our civil liberties

Can I ask if inserting (sneaking?) this not-trivial topic into the middle of the list along with "what makes Apple so cool", is maybe a bit, uh, underhanded? (Assuming we're in a democracy, it's supposedly up to us-citizens to care about civil liberties - so talking about this is important even if the sky is not fall). I notice there's not parenthesized easy answer either (is it "who cares" or "write your congressman"?).

Also, if you were following your own sage advice, what force brought you on this topic?
This looks so cool. When I click on one of the +50 buttons, does it expand the pins?
You can stockpile supplies before humans get there. It doesn't have to self-sustain for as long as the supplies last. You can also send machinery to extract materials from the environment.
He didn't touch on Joyent's 2+ day partial outage a couple months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2269329