skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know someone who is non-technical and does startup Internet businesses. His lack of knowledge concerning software development is a real problem, but he guts through it. The biggest problem is one of trust: if you are not yourself a developer you don't appreciate why on rare occasion it can take a while to track down a bug, and other normal software development scenarios. A friend of mine has a way of explaining this to non-techs: "You are going fishing. Tell me exactly when you will catch a fish." :-)
Free Trade is Free Trade. If you need NAFTA etc it's not free trade.
This makeahistory site is spam. All the articles are copied from other sites. This one was copied and pasted from:

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/hide-file-in-p...

The images are even hotlinked from the original.
I wish more ideas in the U.S. were censored. Like the idea that it is okay for bankers to make millions for creating zero value while putting people on the street. Or that it is okay for the government to invade a sovereign entity and take their oil. Or that it is okay to fly people to other countries on corporate jets so you can torture them.
My opinion on Scala is that while it's a much nicer language than Java, it's going to be quite difficult to pick up unless you have previous programming experience in at least one of Java or an ML-like language. If this can successfully teach kids Scala as a first language I'm very, very impressed.
"While it is fixed, there's no reason to switch from dollars to yuan, but as the yuan begins to climb fewer and fewer banks or even individuals will want to hold the dollar and our savings will dwindle due to the massive inflationary effects. "

Actually, this speaks to me personally. The yuan is not really fixed to the dollar permanently - it's been climbing gradually over the past several years. As an American in China, I have done just as you have said - I've gradually moved as much of my cash to RMB as possible and enjoyed each time the gov't raised my purchasing power back home. As I now operate a business here and am paid in RMB, I personally look forward to it happening again in the near future.

Also, I think, at least in the short term, you are right. Increasing the value of the yuan will noticeably damage the average Joe's quality of life back home. All those little 'made-in-China' things that you buy without even noticing will suddenly become more expensive. Which means you will get less of them. Which means you will have less of the stuff that you are accustomed to having.

In the long term, I think a floating Yuan is probably healthy for all parties involved - for the US, because some of the imported Chinese goods will be produced back on home soil and for the Chinese because it will foster more domestic, service-oriented consumption (i.e., a modern economy).
Hi Mark,

First of all, I must say, your website is very impressive. I would love to chat with you about AI at some point. You are correct about the non-techs understanding and empathizing with the developers. I am a non-technical founder myself, that's why I wrote the post. I try my best to understand the processes and problems that the tech team goes through. I try and learn as much as possible in order to not be in the dark.

I also like the fish analogy :D
> Indian English is generally as valid as American English,

I don't know about valid, but if the point is to communicate with Americans....
I find the authors argument weak. WSJ.com has advertisements behind its pay-wall in addition to the subscription rate it currently charges subscribers. Additionally, pretty much all online news sites collect demographics that feed the ads that are displayed for the user. Ads are not targeted for the general audience like that in the print format.

In the case of wsj it would seem they are offering more generalized content in order to reach a wider audience to compensate for a potential niche audience saturation.

I think paid is definitely the future for news sites. Ad revenue brings in no where near the amount of revenue a paid subscription can generate per user. The question remains is there a hybrid model that can do both in a similar way that the airlines have pricing tiers on their seats to fill the planes (not everyone will pay for a first class/business seat, but that class generates way more money than all of coach). WSJ is doing selective free content and has a free registration that allows you to see a surprising amount of content, but what you get is not predictable (meaning when/if/what subscriber content will eventually be visible to the free registrant).

I would like to see a mainstream newspaper test a strategy where if you want the current news you need to pay, but over time (as less paying subscribers are interested), it is released into the free space to monetize potential ad revenue.
This is just a cut and paste job from wikipedia. The whole site is spam/stolen content, as far as I can tell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_i...
I don't think anyone seriously argues that it's impossible to scale Ruby websites, and make them run quickly with caching and various optimizations.

Rather, the trouble with Ruby (and Rails) is that you end up having to implement these optimizations much faster than with a lighter-weight setup (like PHP on top of a vanilla database, with no ORM).

Hence all the discussion about your "stack", middleware, load-balancing, front-end servers, merbs, mongrels, passengers, and all the bewildering variety of gems required for the care and feeding of a production app. Rails developers write about armoring their app with all this extra stuff in a way reminiscent of MMORPG players equipping a character for battle.

It's a legitimate trade-off, and many people seem comfortable making it. But posts like this sidestep the issue. It's not that Ruby can't scale, is that Ruby makes you fuss over scaling right away.
Well, Java would still come out on top, in all likelihood. I don't think even the idiomatic solutions in Python/Ruby/etc. would be faster unless they have some really nice JIT compilers I'm not aware of, or they changed the algorithm. They'd sure as hell be a lot smaller, though.

The real Python code I'd use to implement the defined algorithm would be a fifth of the size and running time (7 lines, sans whitespace, runs in 16.4 µs versus 92.7 µs under his timing scheme (it should really use min/timeit, not average/custom-timing-solution)).

import collections

def kill(size, nth):
chain = collections.deque(reversed(xrange(size)))
while len(chain) > 1:
chain.rotate(nth)
chain.popleft()

return chain.pop()
FWIW:

I have found that good quality sea salt is critical my personal health. (I have a genetic disorder and have used food as a primary means to get healthy.) My kids and I refer to table salt as "industrial salt". We buy it to scrub mold from the sink and similar household uses. We don't consider edible anymore. A good quality sea salt has a high percentage of other minerals, not just sodium chloride. I have found the presence of those other minerals changes the way my body relates to sodium chloride and has, over time, changed the way my body works, very much for the better.
Thanks,
for some reason it didn't occur to me that there could be books on that.

Honestly, I can't stand shopping for clothing, you can waste an entire day and not find anything that's "both very comfortable to wear and [...] also flattering" and making people take you seriously.
What are the startup or hacker implications?
you can never have free trade without a free flow of human beings. As long as we have passports and border guards, we will never have free trade.
Yes, sometimes it's also happens to me (the perfectionism thing), but now is more that I just can't start (sorry if may I dont clarify it on the post).

Thanks a lot Martin :)
If I was going to buy some air time via Google TV to promote my Chicago news aggregator, this is what I'd do.
Your anti-Google rage is absurd and also very visible in previous comments you've made in other threads.
I recall a few studies from colleage and an old friend is currently studying non-human vergence tracking sexual dimorphism. I'll take a look, but here's a quick Google search on the relevant terms:

http://tinyurl.com/yhbwjde

One of the interesting results is that women are better at short-range vergence skills (e.g. obscured fast facial recognition & foreground-background discrimination) while men are better overall and absolutely excel at long range pathing prediction.
The linked page is a much better resource for understanding the Incompleteness Theorem: http://www.miskatonic.org/godel.html
I agree Eric. Not covering gen-class? That is the way to go if you want to package up a library written in Clojure.
There are approved thoughts in the U.S. too. Larry Summers wasn't allowed to think it is possible that there may be some gender differences in intellectual leanings. You get stiffer punishments for "hate" crimes. Try posting into a chat forum somewhere that you want to do something that a political leader in the U.S. wouldn't want you to do to him or her and see what happens. The secret service will show up at your door -- it has happened, because "threatening the President is illegal."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/16/teen_myspace_protest...

It is humorous to me, that we are allowed to have guns in order that one day we can defend ourselves against tyranny, but merely talking about what may be necessary to do that is illegal.

The level of hypocrisy in the google vs. china debate is bewildering.
Streaming March Madness On The Web
It's hard to summarize. There is a lot of data and a lot of stuff to cover. I'll grab a couple of parts for you and I hope others can summarize others for you. :)

Why we need sleep:

Your brain needs sleep because your brain uses it to organized and optimized the experiences of the day. Without sleep your brain is unable to support new learning.
Woohoo, sing it, brother! :)
See, another fine example of my point. Thanks for that.
Recently I wrote a small Ioke tutorial in which a simple Rake clone is built. The tutorial assumes you've already read the Ioke guide, though: http://jdp.github.com/biild/
I don't think this was intended to be a mathematically precise statement of the theorem. Rather, it's a decent introduction to the general concept behind Goedel's incompleteness theorem.
I've been anti-google for years. I'm not shy about stating it. It's not absurd. It's actually quite well reasoned.
People do stupid stuff all the time and while I agree that putting people in prison for talking about stuff is harsh, china must keep much worse things from happening to protect the lives of over a billion people.

That depends on what your society values most of all. In China, "stability" is king, in the same way that the U.S. values "freedom" over everything else. This shapes what tradeoffs and sacrifices your society is generally ok with, and what course of action its government generally takes.

However, just because a country has chosen a particular value, it doesn't mean that that value is the objectively best for that country. It's impossible to have some sort of rational discussion of this, though. :)

So no, it is not true that China must censor political dissidents, and we don't know if not doing so would be catastrophic, it's just that the Chinese people prefer that their government does so.
Most of the time, I spend very little time shopping for clothes. I have been known to pull something off the rack and buy it without trying it on and have it work out fine. Get "Metamorphosis" and figure out what shapes, colors, etc. work for your coloring and body type. Expect to spend some time up front trying on a lot of clothes so you can develop a mental model. Afterwards, shopping will get easier. You will be able to look at a rack of clothes and say 'wrong color', 'wrong shape', 'no..no..no..yes, I will try this one thing on'. Most of the time, the first thing I try on is the best thing for me to buy because I can pick it out so well.

With regards to comfort: For me, cotton, nylon, and silk are good materials. I am okay with rayon. I avoid polyester like the plague, which is hard because so many things are a cotton-polyester blend. I wear a lot of knits, something men generally can't get away with for a business look but something I find is wonderful in terms of comfort and a woman can it wear to work. I'm just careful to get the right weight of knit material that works for me/my look. That will differ from person to person.

I don't get your remark about making people take you seriously. Do you mean the sales people?
Less worrying about staying insured if you quit your job to found a company, which is a huge barrier for a lot of people (especially with dependents).

More wanking over "oh noes I might not invest in your startup now that my payday would be taxed slightly more", followed by handwringing about a perceived slide into socialism, but nearly no change in investment behavior. Maybe a few people cash out earlier than they would have to avoid the tax increase.
"Indian English is generally as valid as American English

Perhaps when I'm in India."

And who says HN isn't "in India"? A webapp doesn't really "exist" at a particular point in space. (sure teh server sits wherever but it could just as well bin Singapore vs Califronia). Just somethng to think about.

When someone from Japan (say) is posting here, why should he speak "American English"? I'd say just speak English the best way you know how and if someone insists on everyone speaking American English, he can go jump off the nearest cliff. If our hypothetical Japanese poster were to use a phrase which I didn't immediately understand, I would just ask him what me meant, not berate him for not speakng the exact flavor of English most familiar to me.

My 2 cents.
+ PoF is no longer adsense based, he is running his own advertising and selling premium accounts.

Actually I've recently read an article that basically questions PoFs claims. It was a few years old, from when he was still running adsense...but basically it raised one question..."if plenty of fish is as successful as the guy claims(still had that 10mm/yr number back then)...why isn't he an adsense premium publisher?"

Basically it implied that the only reason Plenty of Fish took off, was because the guy lied his ass off early on when he was making a few grand a month, saying that he was making millions, which got him a ton of coverage which in turn eventually got him more users, which in turn led to the $1mm/yr number.

And that even now the numbers he is putting out for consumption are nowhere close to reality, and is just a way for him to get more free marketing.
I nice example of doing sockets in Clojure but the list of sockets to check and agents blows memory if you test for a reasonable range of port numbers.
Powershell makes me think Bash.NET. Not sure how to take it.
If we treated programming like engineering we would finish one project every twenty years or so, and proceed to work on the next for the next twenty years.

There's simply no such counterpart in physical engineering to the iterative programming process. Engineers know how to build a bridge, that's why a particular design succeeds and is then followed by construction properly carried out. Programmers face unknown and unsolved problems all the time; in fact, a solved problem is not worth the programmer's time. A solved problem has already been implemented several times and can be reused, either literally or conceptually.

Engineers have been trying to solve the problem of a practical electric car with acceleration, velocity, range, and reload time comparable to petrol engines for decades. New things take time.

The reason we can write complex software in a few years instead of decades is that in software world, luckily, the cost of building, compiling, and trashing a prototype is negligible. Conversely, the complexity of projects has been upped a corresponding notch but only to the extent that we can still actually finish some projects.
We're just pinballing around looking for a silver bullet here. The reality is we save and invest too little and purchase too much from abroad.

Like fnid says, the way to address the problem is a function of changing American behavior and increasing the value of our exports while saving more. This requires us to put off consumption in this generation for the benefit of the next one--sadly, this is the last thing Americans are going to sign up to do, ergo the search for a magic quick fix.

The Chinese response to a "surcharge" seems pretty obvious. China does purchase a lot of US exports--they're financial products aka Treasuries. America needs China to keep buying this to keep its whole leveraged jenga-stack of an economy intact. Devaluing US debt would hurt China, but it would hurt the US a lot more.

Which Krugman is talking is usually an important distinction... brilliant economist Krugman or OpEd/best-selling author Krugman?
That's my point: moral relativism.

It's not our place to say how another country should be run by another people. It's arrogant and ignorant. Imagine Baidu censoring stuff in the U.S. We'd be just as angry as they are about google not censoring stuff.

I will also argue that freedom is not what is valued in the united states. Freedom for the ruling class is valued, but it's not valued for native americans. It's not valued for Palestinians. It's not valued for people who smoke dope.

The United States is not a "free" country. Its prisons are defined by wealth. Its freedoms are defined by political clout. Its laws are set by the rich, broken by the rich, and enforced on the lower class.

Freedom of speech in this country is defined by what is acceptable to those in power. If the speech promotes what those in power want, it is distributed. The media controls speech in this country -- not the people. It doesn't really matter anyway. How many people speak out about the war? It still started because the liars were louder.

So does it matter?
That's one-half of an FTE up-front and one FTE's salary reoccurring.

Only if your FTEs are very cheap. Most I know wouldn't get out of bed for less than $50k+.

But even if it was half a man-year upfront and one recurring - that's still a no-brainer (remember we're talking an entire rack here, which goes quite a way for most apps). If that rack enables your 5 programmers to work only 10% faster (completely theoretical ofcourse, but for the sake of the argument...) then it has already more than paid for itself.

Your argument is quite old nowadays (I remember the heated efficiency debates in the 90s) and has long been decided. Hardware is so cheap now that in most cases it really is demonstrably more cost effective to throw hardware at certain problems.
You never know, that is a distinct possibility. If the numbers are relatively correct, then it is a different way of doing business. If not, then it is another case of trying to get marketing any way he can.
I like these small devices, but as a practical setup, a good choice is just a very small Ubuntu laptop with a large external monitor for when you happen to be working at your desk. Inexpensive, not a lot of wires, and portable when you need it.
CrazyEgg To The Rescue Again
Well, "right away" is kind of misleading. If you're the average company making a Rails website, you'll get by with common-sense optimizations, database indexes and the like that you'd have to do in PHP anyways. I've worked on probably a dozen Rails apps and have only ever had to resort to horizontal scaling and memcached once.

I think the key is that developing the app and scaling the app can be separate tasks. If you do it right, for the lion's share of your app code is still focused on the app, and all the caching and whatnot is handled elsewhere. In PHP, if you had to use memcached it would be a massive change that would touch every corner of your codebase. In Rails, you'd use a plugin and maybe a few filters and you'd be good to go.
And yes, I go out to chill and take some inspiration, but when Im in the computer automatically I stuck again.

Weird but true: When sitting at my computer guarantees that I can't think clearly, it usually means my computer is making me ill. Try cleaning your computer and see if that does anything for your mental ability while at the computer.
Art + Engineering = Software
The usual incoherent/conspiratorial rant that you'd expect from a totalitarian state media. Google isn't trying to impose a political agenda, it's merely trying to provide access to the world's information, which may include things which the Chinese government prefers its population to remain ignorant about.
Ben Folds Chatroulette Piano Ode to Merton
If you're interested in more research on image steganography, Hany Farid and Jessica Fridrich are writing great papers about it.
Don't be fooled by the word iPod - this has nothing to do with that, and has only to do with someone wanting to justify overpaying for a toy.
Now we're not talking pennies anymore. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars.

Do the math. If 4 devs cost $1500 in a day then "tens of thousands of dollars" is not much in comparison. I think you, like many devs including myself, might be suffering from "big figure anxiety". A $50k investment for a rack looks mighty intimidating at first. But break it down in excel and in most cases you'll find it turns out way cheaper than the alternatives (e.g. hiring a few "C experts" or "spending a month on optimizations").
Writing better code: it’s imperative that you are declarative
Most C# developers are very familiar with writing imperative code (even though they may not know it by that name). In this article, I will introduce you to an alternative style of programming called declarative programming. Proper declarative code is easier to read, understand, and maintain.
But no options outside the US :(
Worlds oldest civilisation? The CCP is not another dynasty and is only 60 at best.

What the CCP has been doing is keeping itself in power and keeping the gravy-train rolling.

Life in the U.S is far better for most than in China.

And the last time the CCP tried to run the country up to 80Million died, now they let most things run themselves and just collect the protection money.

You sound like one of the 50cent gang, how much did the CCP pay you for this post, and do you get more for it being in English?
So use sinatra if you don't want the complexity of Rails. You seem to be conflating Ruby with Rails.
Do your designs have a purpose? If all you're doing is trying to make pretty stuff, that could be the problem. Instead of doing the pretteh, come up with problems you can solve via design.
Scala as a first programming language? Whoo. Scala is the richest language I've interacted with so far.

But then again you can't underestimate motivated kids with infinite free time. I certainly remember that my own abilities were vastly underestimated when I was a youngling.
A day-long argument between otherwise very intelligent Hacker News denizens on different sides of the political aisle, who would otherwise be arguing about 37signals vs. Mahalo or JSON vs. XML.
Why should you spent your life trying to get more money?
If this reflected what was actually out there, it'd just be, "Mafia Wars + X", where X is a random idea, like "School of Wizards" or "Military Combat" or "Small Pets."

(I've seen all of those.)
Of course a non-technical founder can run a startup. Just look at Richard Branson. Or some of the many startups in greentech, biotech or anything else not directly related to the internets.

However, I don't recall any startups without a founder that has some flair for sales and marketing succeed.
Us: request to regulate aipac as a foreign agent