skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was enjoyable. It is going to take me a little time to get used to protocols and reify, but looks useful.
Which part of the API has ASCII as the default encoding? From the v0.2.0 docs it seems like Buffer objects default to utf8.
Agreed. You maybe work a bit more hours (but honestly, if you want to compete at a 9-5 you are really working more like 8-7pm anyways.), but the hours happen when and where you want them to happen, which can maximize time with loved ones.

Case in point, sometimes my girlfriend works at my office. How is that possible at a normal job? Or taking a week off just to go work at your parents cabin? That kind of out-of-office working is just not possible or a great idea in the normal work force.

One thing I will say: Doing a startup by yourself would be almost impossible with a serious relationship. You need at least one partner to watch your back when you can't be on duty (which happens twice as often in a serious relationship, I've found).
Fortunately, that defense was never required - 70 years to the day since the famous speech:

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_was_so_much_owed_by_so_ma...
What If?
You really have a lot to contribute to a start up. I believe that each person in a startup should bring skills to the table to help it grow. You being with a business background could help create marketing plans, and secure funding for the start up. There's sooo much you can do!

Hell, I would love to have you on my team =D
Storage is cheap.... Why remove intermediate files at all? If you don't want to permanently remove files, then why use rm? Just create a "del" command that moves deleted files to a trash folder. You can then make part of your backup routine be to empty the trash after performing the backup (since that file would now be available in the backups).
I disagree with your answers, but maybe in subtle ways.

1) The no keyboard thing was a deal breaker. But Apple did something no one had seen before. They introduced an exceptionally good onscreen keyboard. Miles ahead of the competition. They insight Apple had wasn't so much that we could just get rid of keyboards. It was that they could create a decent onscreen keyboard experience. To me, that is fundamentally different.

Replaceable battery? The only people who cared about that are pundits who have to nitpick about everything. How many people do you know that have a backup battery. I think I literally know nobody who does.

2) My point with #2 was that smartphones as devices were considered to be extremely flawed. Satisfaction with their smartphone was very low. This would make it easy for a better device to effectively change the whole landscape as no one really had a high satisfaction device.

3) OK, I probably just read netbook as laptop.

I do think you underestimate how big of a deal it is/was. Apple revolutionized the smartphone industry. My argument against the article is I think they did it via software, not by form factor.
I agree — we can't simulate something we don't understand, and it's nearly impossible to estimate how long it will take to understand anything. We don't even know what consciousness is, so how can we even begin to simulate it?
Incubator Panel at the Founder Conference (Video embedded in blog)
Absolutely. I'd love to see it all go. It's just unfair to call out one kind of zealotry while ignoring the others (some of which is worse IMO than the called-out one).
"Something amazing will happen and it will resemble the human brain".

I imagine this is ridiculous to anyone working in Machine Learning, Applied Statistics, AI or what it is called at the moment.

Point me to the algorithms that have the potential of resembling the human brain, and I will have a look. Talk a lot about "computers are becoming smarter" and namedrop some brain region names and a lot of technically minded people will zone out.
Interesting idea. One could do that in ~/dev and see all issues of all projects inside...
TechCrunch Disrupt. If you win, you pocket $50,000, but also a bunch of angels of VCs will court you to invest.

It's not that hard, just one chance in a thousand.
Here: "the brain prior to learning and adaptation". Unfortunately there's no such thing.
I don't think anyone is saying that. I think people are saying it's a better idea to invest in HTML5 today. And with that I would absolutely agree. Flash has jumped the shark.
>> Total keyboard control over window placement.

I recommend Divvy or SizeUp
Stolen from ditz:

- create a simple website form for bug reports, which emails to the project mailing list, where all discussion should happen anyways

- let a bot scan the mailing list for bug reports and commit them, wherever suited
Foursquare Sees Record Signups In Wake of Facebook Places
Why Don't Universities Teach Sales?
Facebook-like Communication vs. Email Communication with the customer
Finally, a VC with a Sense of Humor
favorite job posting ever...until I saw the drawing by dropbox this morning (http://www.dropbox.com/jobs)
Parallel programming in Haskell with explicit futures
>Yep. He even said that he'd gone back while the fire was still being fought to look.

Arsonists always do. That's why they take pictures of the crowds at fires. The person who started it is almost certainly there watching. In fact, it will probably be a man standing there with a bulge in his pants (seriously).
Ad hoc polymorphism ∈ OOP

Parametric polymorphism ∈ FP
There should be a bear holding the shark:
http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Bear_holding_a_Shark
I wonder if having a catastrophic start-up experience is practically a rite of passage for the serious entrepreneur.

I'm sure there are many serious entrepreneurs out there who did not need to lose their spouses to see that they were working too much!
It's relevant because Europe is the standard example of "we need ipv6". Americans largely don't care. :)
Luxury ....
We used to have to get up 10mins before we went to sleep, toggle the OS into a turing machine with our teeth and pay SAP for doing it.....
Navel oranges are all clones of a mutant Siamese twin orange found 200 years ago
SizeUp, while not free is a pretty nice Window manager: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

Package management is indeed lacking considerably.

Highlight to copy can be enabled in terminal and there are Firefox plugins to do the same (I run Firefox fullscreen on one monitor and terminal fullscreen on the other, so it works for me. YMMV.)
It's funny how much we demonize prejudice (racism) while simultaneously relying on it for survival (don't stick your hand in the fire). Whoever designed this whole "evolution" nonsense clearly wasn't thinking about social communication at the outset... ;-)
I am not saying that inheritance is mandatory to OOP. I think "mandatory" is too strong of a word here. As I said, OOP means different things to different people and I am okay with that.

Speaking for myself, OOP is a way to orchestrate programming on a large scale. To grow software without growing the frequency, severity, and difficulty of bugs and without growing costs associated with new features is the desired result. Component-ized architecture takes great steps to achieve this result. For this reason, I view OOP as being some combination of: message passing, encapsulation, and polymorphism. I do not believe this is a complete view of OOP, nor that there is no viable alternative view of OOP.
Scott Adams: The "Less" Feature
Rolled in at 4pm - when he wanted.

The problem is when you start at 8am, work all day, waste time in meetings - then have to stay til 10pm every night to meet some deadline so that a sales guy gets a bonus.
Request, response and streams default to ASCII, e.g. response.write(chunk, encoding='ascii')
Ask HN: Do tech firms ever offer on the job training?
In most firms entry level employees don't bring much to the table except their ambition and raw ability. The actual skills they develop are usual acquired on the job and specific to that firm and/or industry. For example, if you were hired as a logistics trainee, most of the skills and protocols you use would be acquired at work and usually could not be developed beforehand.

However, in most technology firms relating to developer/engineering positions it is expected that the candidate would already have a firm grasp on the technology he would be using and the only on the job skill development that would occur would pertain to that specific firm's projects. For example, if a firm had a job opening for a Ruby on Rails programmer the candidate would be expected to already know quite a good deal about RoR and he would not expect the firm to give them basic training on RoR.
Where does that quote come from? Anyway, note the future tense! You then ask for the algorithms that perform those tasks. Well, I think the point is that none of this exists yet but in the future we have a good chance at building it.

I'm a technically minded person, and I definitely don't zone out when people are talking about the future. Sure, some kook might suggest we already have those algorithms and then I'd zone out. But that's not what's happening.
The Financial Industry is unfortunately plagued with such issues though. I had to survive with the exact thing until I requested Admin access and updated my boxes myself. Dropbox definitely has it right though with the whole dream machine idea. Kudos to them.
10.10.10.10.10…..
Talk about your hot air balloon project pleeeease!!! It will be way more interesting than more startup/business stuff, which too many people are talking about too much.
Sorry, but there are more poor people who are hardworking than there are rich.

It's Rand's argument that's flawed: When you start from nothing, you can't achieve greatness except by raw luck. This has been shown again and again in economics game theory experiments, and it proves out in observations of real people.

Is it not passion that inspires someone to work three jobs, just to barely support their family? To come to a country where you don't even speak the language and take jobs that pay less than the legal minimum wage, living packed in like sardines, again just so that you can send most of the money back to your family? You can find hundreds of thousands of hard working, passionate people who are living close to or under the poverty line. In Rand's version of reality, those people would all be rich, and only the lazy ones would be poor.

Sure you can point to a few people who've dragged themselves up from really crappy conditions to multi-millionaires. But they're the exception--and it's not because they were the most hardworking, but a combination of hard work and luck.
Bit of an oversight :) Has anyone done interesting stuff using scripts other than vimscript with recent versions? I played with the python interface when it was first supported many releases back and found it hacky and also slow.
"In Ruby you don't declare your types, so you cannot get ambiguous instance variables: if you have two instance variables with the same name in different modules, then they're the same instance variable."

That line also bugged me. I struggle to see how that's a good thing. That seems like you could have code breaking in seemingly unrelated code due to seemingly common naming issues. That can't be right, can it?
While the 'from hell' part was interesting, as someone who was (relatively) recently put in the world of CNC and rapid manufacturing by my startup... seeing that from someone's perspective was also interesting.

Not that you were 'just starting' with hardware, but still.
You are a pretty smart guy.

It seems to me you would be happier with another job that allows you more "free time" to find something pursuable (some idea) that you can get passionate about.

You are working 11 hour days. I'm sure when you come home in the evening, you really don't want to teach yourself to write code before you pass out, all the while torturing your mind to find some passionate interest to pursue.

I recommend finding a job where you can have more free time, even with a paycut.

PS: Since you are making a decent bit of money, and can speak 4 languages, find a successfull website in one language/country, and you can create a similair site in the same/other country using the other language. You can hire contractors to build the necessary components, and should be able to do this without quitting your job. You manage the content in the language of your choice.

You also would have an edge in affiliate marketing for these other languages.

Can any other HN readers comment about their experiences with Google AdSense/Affiliate Marketing in other (non-US) countries/languages? or US non-english?
That is an _amazing_ "we're hiring" image! I didn't even need the rest of the page; why would I, with a graphic like that? Truly remarkable work, dropbox.
Rotating solar home generates 5x more power than it uses
Aren't those also just called "functions"? In this case one function per file?
"3G" is a crock. Here's why. (Also, it kicked my puppy.)
I'm married (9 years) and have 2 kids (throw in house mortgage as well.) I've been working on start ups for the last 3 years. I left a very good, high paying, stable job to work with startups. The first key thing is getting your wife on board. There is a lot more risk and stress with startups. Make sure both of you understand this issue. Money is already a big stress on marriages and you are about to make that situation worse in the short term. The other big issue (at least in the states) is health insurance. It costs a lot more that I would like.

The startup I work at is a great fit. We are boot strapped and profitable. We are not trying to be the next google/twitter/facebook, so slow growth fits our lifestyle fine. There have been lean times over the last year which adds financial stress, but I have fall back plan of getting a real job at any time which provides a nice safety net. It pays to have a good network to leverage when you need it. I work from home, so that allows me to work mostly normal hours and still get to see my wife and kids a lot. I carve out a few evenings to put in extra hours. I also carve out date nights with my wife.

So I don't see any issue with being a startup and being married. There is never the perfect time to start a startup. The best time is now.
I seem to remember visiting an ancient English church, and being told by our guide that the original architect had caused a stand of trees to be planted near the city, of the same wood as the roof timbers. Centuries later, some of the roof timbers needed to be replaced; thanks to the architect's foresight, the necessary trees were there.
Twitter + location = I can stalk U
I don't think Flash's problem is speed. It could be sped up by 10x and I don't think it would significantly matter to its market position or future prospects.
Hmm...

Nope, never had your problem. I find it quite illogical to be rude. I'm assertive but never find it needful to be rude.

I consider from my perspective if I would like anybody say or do what I did.

A simple rule for dealing with people.
(Some caveat exist but generally works)
And if one of the others reads this and changes course it was worth writing.
It's equally impossible for Apple to craft a consumer experience with as wide a reach as Adobe or Microsoft. Apple is not going to get more than 30% market share with their present strategy.

MS/Adobe are unlikely to fall below 60% (especially since this is not a zero-sum game.)
The amount of oil in the world is speculated on. The number of IPv4 addresses is numerically fixed and known.

As other commenters have noted, it's not that one day your computer will just inexplicably fail to pull an IP address. But they are suddenly going to be come a more precious (read:expensive) resource.
A couple hundred in a couple hundred places would not be such a bad outcome
Some lesser-known truths about programming
My strong suggestion: do the startup before getting married, but while you live with your potential future spouse under marriage-like conditions.

My personal experience: I had a live-in gf (and possible future spouse), and I spent about a year in startup crunch mode on an academic research project (which I hoped to leverage into a future startup). It put a major strain on our relationship - she worked outside the home, I worked primarily at home, and she didn't get the concept of "physically at home but working and unavailable." We are no longer together, in part because of this.

Your SO may be incompatible with your startup - it's far better to discover things like this before getting married. You may choose the SO over the startup, but you should be aware you are making that choice.

Worst case scenario: an ex-wife who acted as a burden throughout the startup process walks away with 50% of your successful company.

(Note: a prenup won't help much - courts are in the habit of nullifying them if the judge doesn't like them. Witness the whole Elon Musk fiasco.)
Missing a 'for' in the headline makes it pretty hard to read.

Or am I assuming the wrong meaning?
ECMAScript 5: Object.defineProperty ... but Strict
"this is the kernel of knowledge necessary (with sufficient simulation of the environment) to "grow" a brain."

Wouldn't it be simpler to say "put 10^80 hydrogen atoms really close to each other and wait a few billion years". Simpler, and just as useless (insofar as it doesn't get anyone closer to simulating a brain in the next 10 years).
The uses you mention sound like something for which you'd use byte buffers, not strings.
Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse.

Except there was photoshop involved.

And a solitary 15" monitor.

And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp).

After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..
Most (if not all) of those large-touchscreen phones had Windows Mobile on it, which was absolutely dreadful. There was no flick-to-scroll. You had to use stylus to grab 3px-wide scrollbar.

I think the problem wasn't that manufacturers didn't take browsing seriously (Opera is keen to work closely with manufacturers), but that they didn't take touchscreens seriously.
Is it fair to compare your last job as a Japanese salaryman, in terms of number of hours worked, to the average programming job? Aren't the hours really long for Japanese salarymen?
An SSD + 4 cores made the difference for me to finally move my Linux "box" into a VM and not look back. But again, I'm also just doing terminals, vim, and Chrome.
Now that was funny. LOL
Presumably when we're talking about this task the first simulation would take place on a very large cluster, with a lot of human data as input.

Kurzweil is giving a lines-of-code metric, but lines-of-code is only one piece of the puzzle. Kurzweil is calling LOC analogous to DNA. Chemistry is analogous to the actual hardware (of which there will undoubtedly be a lot) and classical 'experience' is just that. I'm beginning to feel like the people who understand the biology are misunderstanding the computer science.
What are you getting out of your current behavior?

Is that behavior something you want to bring to the current context?

If not, stop. If you can't think of anything better, then just remain silent. (Silence is easier than trying to generate something you feel is "inauthentic".)

If the "smart ass" ;-) reaction is not producing a result you like, why would you continue to employ it?

As others have pointed out, there's always more to learn (speaking generally). You may not know what that is, at the outset of an encounter / getting to know someone, but by remaining inoffensive and observant, you have a better chance of finding out. For example, there are some people who can barely add three digit numbers, but who are brilliant -- somehow or other -- at that overused term "social networking". I guess this example is a bit stereo-typical; nonetheless, it exists. There are others.

Don't spend excessive time on those who really don't interest you. However, contrary perhaps to initial expectations, being overtly offensive is not necessarily conducive to this. You piss them off, and if this is e.g. at work, you have to spend more and more time dealing with the fallout. Other people you do need or even want to interact with become more reserved or distant or require smoothing over because your interactions put them on edge or on guard.

Maybe a martial arts metaphor. If you fight stupidity directly with your own energy, you get stuck and expend a lot in direct effort. If you turn a bit and let it slide on by, you are free to move on to better things, at the same time leaving the other party unaware of what has just happened.

Finally, make sure your own house is (really) in order. In general, the better one feels about oneself, the less inclination to be defensive ("fuck you" is a defensive statement). And a tip: Don't conflate having X with feeling good about oneself. It's more about doing than having.

(I'll add that people learn better by example than through words. Meaning that verbal responses aren't that useful in addressing problems -- say, ignorance -- anyway. Doing things the right way shows a better way to those capable of getting a clue. As for those who can't get it, make sure your business doesn't depend on them.

And when your business is suffering, keep in mind that others are applying the same to you. They may not be investing a lot of energy telling you what your problem is; they are busy moving on.)
Are you hiring or know someone who is?! I appreciate your attitude, but it seems startups give us more business-focused people the cold shoulder. Or maybe I haven't found the right one ;)
It's not a picture of an iPhone running the app, it's a screenshot of the website, which has a scrollable area embedded in a picture of an iPhone. Very confusing screenshot!
Leverage your current position to acquire new skills. Continue to acquire skills until you feel moderately useful, then repost this question and list the skills you have acquired, and the quality of advice will improve.
Okay, I understand how this is a problem with news. I really do.

But with soda? Isn't the total variety of offerings more important than than variety of companies?
Weather Sites Gird for Hurricane Season
Yes, everything is automatically copyrighted. But there is some sort of enforcement action that you can only take after you register, I'm not entirely certain which one (suing in general, going for statutory damages, ...).

So my understanding is that it goes like

1. create something, get automatic copyright
2. someone infringes, you send a nasty letter
3. go register with the government
4. sue the infringer to make them stop or buy a license (assuming they ignored the letter)

or

1. create something, get automatic copyright
2. go register with the government
3. someone infringes, you send a nasty letter
4. sue the infringer to make them stop (or buy a license) *and pay damages* (assuming they ignored the letter)

where without automatic copyright it would go like

1. create something, forget to file for copyright
2. someone uses your work, you send a nasty letter
3. that someone tells you to STFU
Peter Norvig giving advice at startup school [video]