skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not going to address your specific questions (I lack the proper experience), but I'll question an assumption.

I once worked on a project where the main developer was fired after 3 _years_ of failing to get the product out the door. There was a lot of code, and it was colossally bad. Worse than anything I had ever seen on The Daily WTF. I and another developer that were put on this project to take it over begged and pleaded that it just had to be rewritten.

We were denied. They didn't know how bad it was, surely. We tried going over heards. We made presentations. We e-mailed around particularly egregious examples, but this was a codebase where the total awful was greater than the sum of the individual horrors, so to speak.

Anyway, over three years this guy, bad as he was, must have worked hard. There was lots of it and we were just expected to 'fix it' since it was 'almost done.' Nevermind that nothing worked. Slowly, steadily, whenever we'd go to fix a bug we would (in stealth) rewrite whatever section we were in. Eventually we started writing adapters to help the new cleaned up code communicate with the bad, bizarre, inconceivable horrors or API design that the old code had. Eventually, like replacing the handle of an axe on one occasion and the head on another, we had a whole new code base that we had come to be proud of.

The lesson I took away from this is it's sort of limitless what this kind of refactoring can accomplish, even if it's not the most enjoyable way to go about fixing a mess. With something like your situation, it's how I'd recommend going about fixing it, since these sorts of things are hard to understand in the aggregate anyway.

Most bugs in any piece of software are concentrated in relatively small proportions of the code. Start there and you might be able to launch with much of his code intact, with the most damaging removed or repaired, and fix the rest in transit.

Or not. You know your situation better than I possibly could, but it's something to think about.
"... if you go to an application's profile page, you can see a list of your friends who also have that app installed, essentially getting a unintentional peek at their browsing habits."

This creeps me out more than anything else Facebook has done yet.
I must admit that I was careless in my terminology. When I said salary, I should have said total compensation. That, of course, covers the money he's paid, but also benefits (healthcare, pension, etc.), stability, satisfaction from a stimulating job, respect, and if he's lucky, perhaps the feeling that Feynman describes when he'd discovered something new and was for a short time the only human who has ever held that piece of knowledge.

But you're being a little careless, too, when you throw around a word like "important". Can you be more specific?
Decision urged on .xxx porn web domain
I don't know if it is clearly positive for the system as a whole, because if telecoms can charge more, and generate more revenue from existing infrastructure, then they can get on to newer, fatter, and longer pipes.

Right now, they are basically stuck paying for all the copper they bought. They can't buy new fiber. They can't install new towers, etc...
Mobile Flash Player Internals at FITC Toronto 2010
How the Brain Benefits With Aging
That has more to do with the economics of running cable to the middle of nowhere than it does competition. (BT are not the only people who can build broadband infrastructure and the fact that no cable operator has bothered to run a line out there either should be a good indication that it's not viable.)

If you want easy access to the countryside and all of the nice things it offers then you can't be surprised to find out that there are some drawbacks to making that choice. It's unreasonable to expect people who live in high density environments to subsidize your Internet access.

But that has nothing to do with competition - once BT does enable the exchange all the competing broadband services will be available. You won't be at the mercy of them being able to charge any price they like just because they built the infrastructure, and in a remote location that's even more important than it is in London where building a second competing telecoms network might be profitable.
MS has made many missteps, but I think with the Express versions of their development tools they are attempting to (and seem to be doing pretty well at it) migrate through a disruption in their developer tools and mindshare. Only time will tell if they were too late with the free tools.
Downvote system HN
When you don't like a comment on HN you just don't change the points of the comment. When you really think a comment is out of place you downvote a comment.

This is a great system. It keeps HN clean from flamebates an other spam.

Today my comment was downvoted. That's ok. I won't complain about that. Only this time I was very curious about the reason.

I like to be curious because I like to learn. And one of the best way's to learn is by your mistakes.

So wouldn't it be great when a downvoter must apply a simple explanation?
Or could this lead to discussions about the explanation instead of the subject?

edit Changes 'posts' to 'comments'
If you want to stand a chance at '4' I'd suggest you take charge. Now.

Not next month, every day spent in the current setup is a day wasted in the longer term, you need to change direction towards some form of launch, even if it is with an incomplete but minimally viable product.

The 'one more feature' or 'one more milestone before launch' mentality is the most certain way to get killed. If you can't launch before you've completed those milestones and you have internal troubles your chanes of survival depend on the depth of your pockets, and the speed with which you can get the situation resolved.

Your company seems to have two founder problems, not just one, both a developer-founder and the CEO are not currently functioning as they should.

If you are the CEO call a meeting of your co-founders, outline your issues, put up a plan of action and ask for a vote of confidence, if you are not the CEO then try to get your CEO on board. If he won't acknowledge the gravity of the situation you have a real problem.

What I really don't understand is how you've managed to hold out this long without any source of income or funding, 2 years is a long long time.

I wish you much good luck and wisdom, you will need it by the looks of it.
Beyond Liberalization II: The Impending Doom of Common Carriage (1994)
It's due to zombie apocalypse. Duh.
FireFox + Xmarks. With FF you can add tags and things to various sites and save them in folders. With xmarks, you can sync the bookmarks to a server to your liking.

Additional Bonus points: I also have them linked to my mamps server at home so i can access them online (Password protected of course).

A new idea i need to try out is to store them into dropbox so i can access my links on my ipad and on my droid.
The free market has failed the Internet. For some things, like utilities, government regulation works best.

It needs both, honestly. Companies need freedom to innovate, and they also need rules to prevent them from screwing consumers and other businesses. I see neutrality as a means to ensure freedom for companies to innovate on an equal playing field.

Here's an over stretched metaphor:

It's as if UPS owned parts of the highway and only allowed delivery of certain items by certain companies.

FedEx would pay huge tithes to them just to compete. Eventually FedEx would need to buy it's own network of highways somewhere else to lock-in an area and compete.

This is an exaggeration, but I see this as analogous to media companies (like TimeWarner) buying up cable companies to become ISPs.

Metaphors end here, because I personally don't see driving on a highway as a Right, and internet communication is very similar to Speech, which is an American Right.
My concern is that all of their new products seem to be sealed boxes.

Yes, they still make Macs, and still sell MacOS, and MacOS is still fairly open. But it seems like the Mac is quickly becoming a legacy product, and Apple is no longer a computer company but instead a personal consumer-electronics company.

And this chart (http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-...) suggests that the Mac is no longer Apple's biggest product in terms of revenue. The locked-down iPhone is, with the iPod coming in for a close third. Add in the iPad and it's going to move even more in favor of their closed products.

I've always had a soft spot for Apple since they came out with OS X and cheated what most everyone assumed was corporate death, and I'm writing this on a MacBook right now. But I find their other products less than compelling, and since it seems that the direction they're going in is more towards sealed boxes and away from the open-system approach of the (post-2000) Mac, I'm not sure how much of their gear I'll be purchasing.

I do own an iPod just because I haven't found a player that's as good, in terms of being well-integrated with software, and the iPod at least doesn't restrict you to only loading music that you buy from iTunes. (I do wonder if, were Apple to bring out the iPod today, if that would be the case.) But I don't have an iPhone and I don't see myself purchasing an iPad. And their last few updates to OS X haven't felt like they're keeping up the pace of speed and feature improvements that they had been; it seems like it's the red-headed stepchild now.

There's a serious question in my mind as to whether the MacBook I'm typing this on will be the last one I ever use.

It's just disappointing because they brought out a lot of neat stuff.
"I don't like this contempt for customer."

The advertisers are the customer. You're the product.
You can save some money in the outer boroughs but the entire metro region is more expensive than _any_ other American metro region for most lifestyles; and much more expensive than _most_.
Wait. How was that a "scandal"?
It sounds like the leadership at your startup needs to make the hard decision to fire the co-founder outright or to reducing him to a very limited consulting role (no coding, just answering questions about his code).

I think that you would have a great story to tell to future interviewers if you can get the bad code under control and launch the product (even if the startup fails). I would have more confidence in someone who overcame adversity than someone who never faced any problems.

The "+2.5-3 sigma technical and +3-3.5 sigma big picture" stuff would be a big turn-off to me. There's a lot of really smart and talented people in this industry.
For the past thousand years, people have chosen to live in the city

Hmm HN didn't update the full sentence. It was supposed to be: For the past thousand years, people have chosen to live in the city because they needed to get a job.
There are privacy issues, certainly, but as with the recent Yale rejection of Google Apps, I'd suggest we're not getting the full picture in this article.

Keep in mind that, as with any IT department in a large organization, there are vested interests to protect and outsourcing infrastructure can often be seen as a threat.

Holding up privacy as the showstopper is bit of a straw man. I could easily list a bunch of reasons why keeping mail service local has major downsides and security concerns.

I'm not assuming that the IT dept in question had covert motives in this, just noting that we certainly aren't getting all the information in this situation.
> are you one of those people who say the customer comes first?

In this case, the customer is the advertiser, Facebook is the broker, and the users (and their data) are the product. With its recent action, Facebook is clearly saying "the customer comes first."

> Or one that says that people who visit free sites shouldn't complain?

Facebook may be free in the sense that I'm not giving them my credit card number and they are not charging me a monthly monetary fee, but the price of admission onto Facebook is your private information. Even if you don't enter anything in your profile, your friends will start to form the links (by searching for you and sending friend requests (even if you don't accept them) or tagging your face, etc.) that any marketing person pays big money for.

Facebook is not free and the customer is definitely coming first.
You're begging the question of whether the FCC should or shouldn't have the same regulatory power over ISPs that it does over traditional common carriers.

You're also begging the question of whether treating ISPs as common carriers grants the FCC power to "regulate the internet".

Those are each highly debatable positions that you're assuming as truth.

I'm not going to question your motives, but suffice it to say your argument is hardly convincing for making these assumptions.
How to be remarkable #71: Think Up your last words
Unless I'm wrong, these are sites you have authorized via Facebook connect. They were always there. (Any site using facebook connect is an "app") And they always showed your friends who have also "connected" to that site.

(Edit: Seems to be confusion between "Recently Used" and "Authorized")
You're right -- I misunderstood your initial comment. I'm going to think about this some more. Really appreciate the feedback.
I'd say it's not a reminder for many; it's news. I've always been very careful with my info on Facebook, but I never considered how easily they could invade my privacy when I'm not even on their site.
Ask HN: What to do when a 800 pound gorilla enters your business?
Sorry, you are wrong. No authorization is required.
That made my head hurt. Somebody's doing a little bit of pretzel logic here.

Let's put this more simply, if that is even possible.

You visit a site. You do not pay anything, but you log on.

You put stuff on the site.

Regardless of the business model, do you have any sort of reasonable expectations?

That's Facebook. That's HN. That's LinkedIn. That's any site that the visitor does not pay for yet is able to store things on there. Simple question.
I was brought up in a family of avid hunters and fishermen (although I find fishing boring and prefer target shooting over hunting), and here are some things you might want to add:

Size.

Weight.

Distance for hunting.

More details on gear used.

The place where the game was caught in addition to the home town of the sportsman.

On question here is do you want to do this free form, with perhaps some suggestions to the user, and then have to police abuses (e.g. anything that passes a profanity filter) and have things look a bit irregular, or do you want to try to limit and regularize the inputs?

If the latter, type of lure or load would get onerous and would get really obnoxious for handmade flies, hand loads, etc.

And then there's people like my father who has about 2 12 gauge hand loads he uses for his Browning Auto-5s, for small (dove and quail) and medium (grouse and pheasant) upland birds. If he were the type to put up pictures like this, I'm sure he'd prefer being able to pick from those few options (no drop down lists though!) rather than entering the details each time (I'm sure he wouldn't bother to do the latter).

And, yeah, the profile slider is very nice.

Good luck!
You can't downvote posts on HN.

You can downvote comments though. You just have to learn to live with this.
What you missed yesterday: Schmoozing...
Why tech giants are putting the silicon back in Silicon Valley
I had asked this on Onstartup Answers today. I got a couple of strategic answers to this. Wanted something more tactical like, doing these couple of things in your situation can be useful? Or such a marketing approach might work?
What was the parsimonious design principle cited by Knuth
Don Knuth, in Volume 1 of the Art of Computer Programming, cited an engineering principle where in good design employs the same component in a variety of different contexts. His example was the Atlas Rocket which used a paper think fuel tank to provide both containment for the fuel and structure for the airframe. My copies of Knuth (I have three or four of various editions)are inaccessible. I'd like the name of the principle for a slide in a presentation I am putting together. Can someone assist?
Apple extends AT&T's iPhone contract until 2011 due to cheap iPad data plan
Well then somehow it skipped adding them to my profile. Any app that shows installed for me is one I authorized.
Most People Carry Neanderthal Genes
I heartily agree. The problem is the same which besets comparisons of weather and climate: short-term profits and/or share values are measurable, whereas longevity and stability are abstractions which can only be assessed retrospectively, and the relationship between the two is not always clear.

I'm not sure how tractable this problem is. If you'll forgive some hand-waving, it reminds me of the oligopoly problem turned inside out - rather than a few large companies in a market, you have a few powerful directors in a market where shareholder votes are exchanged for management services. Even if directors have independent ideas about the right policy for the corporation, as they should, the nature of the (internal) market itself may result in unanimity to the detriment of shareholders. Shareholder demand for value (qua consumer demand for management services) is rather inelastic, which limits the appetite for risky things like firing the entire board, and by proxy firing the management team - the more so when fund managers of institutional investors (administering important things like pensions) have a clear fiduciary and ethical duty to maximize returns to the fundholders.
The right tool for the right job.
Until now I've been mostly ignoring the uproar over Facebook privacy concerns - if I didn't want people knowing stuff about me, I just wouldn't put it online.

However, if Facebook wins this particular battle (and if I've understood the battle itself correctly), then I will leave. It would be evil for them to claim that my data is theirs, and that I can't authorize a third party to access it.
What's your favorite, latest Linux innovation?

Fernandez: [...] The day I updated my laptop's kernel and discovered the wireless now worked out-of-the-box [...]

Ok. So why do you put something like that in an article meant to promote Linux?
I'm simply saying, somewhat slyly, if a modest person expresses indignation over, e.g., tales of shaving, but their modesty prevents their audience from understanding why this tale could be reasonably offensive (i.e., the difference between "I had to shave my body for my race" and "I had to shave my balls and everything. You know that bit right there? Yeah, I think blah blah blah"), their modesty is doing them a disservice in making them look even more like a fuddy-duddy.

More exaggeratedly, if a person's sense of modesty kept their ankles so well covered in warm weather to the point of heat stroke, their modesty has done them a disservice less modest people wouldn't need to deal with.
OK, done with another round of wading through Facebook's privacy settings, etc. and fixing what Facebook did. This is getting annoying.
You'll have to provide a reference, because this one disagrees, saying (on page 3):

Shipping rates vary by type of commodity
Each cargo owner pays a different rate

http://www.cunninghamreport.com/uploads/backup_docs/585-Port...

CSX has pricing rates by commodity http://www.csx.com/?fuseaction=customers.pricing_lists

It's obvious to anyone who has shipped almost anything that costs are different by size and weight and scale.
Roku's Netflix interface getting an update
I like this video

I do not think

It is a lame trick
An event that trigged it for me: visiting break.com (after previously logging into facebook) resulted in a Break application being added without consent.
Startup tips-12 post on pr, marketing & venture capital
I'm quite sure that's not true, since I never use facebook connect and a couple apps for websites I have recently visited showed up in there.
CSS3 Transition - a simple slider demo
You're saying the goal of patents is to force others to adapt outdated technologies? Funny, I always thought the purpose of patents was to promote progress of "science and the useful arts".
But then again, there's safety in numbers. There may be more hackers, but there's a significantly larger number of accounts.
First-sale copyright cases headed for appeal (can you resell software?)
I'm a developer for a SaaS app that does exactly what you're looking for. However, because of their business model, you must have a strong brand in place. I sent them a link to your post, so they will hopefully contact you soon.
If you add a setting every time someone throws a hissy fit, you're going to have a lot of settings.
Works in Safari.
Its because you're British.
Consistently Underperforming For Motivation
... and just for the record, as someone pointed out up top, either of your figures are still expensive relative to most metro areas.
Truly. I'm getting sick of this. In the past I've defended Facebook and been a fan of their developer tools and relations. About had enough at this point.
I think some people who do know are big games publishers. They have a large number of data points, they're the only ones with total daily retail and online sales figures and they also track downloads.

Where are the numbers? Well, why should they release them to someone who isn't part of their own company?
Which graphics card are you using with i5/i7 MBP
Einstein is traveling by train.

They train zips past a meadow and the person opposite, who has recognized Einstein says: "I'll bet you don't know how many sheep there were in that field".

Einstein replies: 1241.

The man, stunned: Wow, that's amazing, how did you count them so quickly? I know the answer is right because that field belongs to my uncle.

Einstein: Simple, I counted the legs, divided by 4.
Thank you for replying. I have to say your landing page and app look very nice indeed, but unfortunately i don't feel this app would have enough of the features that i am looking for just yet.

Maybe you could keep me updated on its progress?
Im @KhuramMalik on twitter
Vision Gets Better With The Right Mind-set
I can't imagine where you got that I was saying that. The goal of patents is to allow innovators to share their ideas, while still protecting their ability to profit from the idea.

The goal of patents is to reduce the risk of competitors taking profits for an idea without investing the R&D in the idea.
If you select "Authorized" from the application settings drop down you see these applications?

I have visited hundred of sites that use Facebook connect and not connected and none of them have ever shown up
It's certainly a cool way to do it, though I am more in scope of a startup rather than a presidential election.
clammer, would you mind emailing me sometime? I was just reading some of your other comments on HN, and I really enjoy hearing your thoughts. My email is jon at atlaswebdev dot com. Thanks!
I think that you would have a great story to tell to future interviewers if you can get the bad code under control and launch the product

Great point. Thanks.

The "+2.5-3 sigma technical and +3-3.5 sigma big picture" stuff would be a big turn-off to me. There's a lot of really smart and talented people in this industry.

Sorry, I guess that does sound arrogant. To be fair, there are a lot of +3, +4 sigma minds in technology. Most of the programmers I've worked with I would put in the "+3 sigma technical" category (because I've worked with some awesome people at great companies). My "sigma" estimates were relative to the white-collar world in general. My point is that I have more than enough to make a great VC, EIR, et al with sufficient mentoring, not that I'm any kind of stand-out (relative to the HN-sphere, I'm definitely not, as there are a lot of people smarter than I am here).