skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Besides HN, What Sites/Blogs Do You Visit Daily?
I find that I pretty much limit myself to a few blogs and tech sites. Mostly I read Techmeme, HN, Reddit, and Tech Crunch, but I'm sure there's more interesting sites and blogs out there. Which ones do you visit on a daily basis?
+1. I once wrote an article on why the idea of luck pissed me off too. You succinctly described my own thoughts better than I did. Thanks for writing this.
We do mostly baseball and in our first year, we used a bunch of retrosheet data for historical data and we went with BIS for current season data. They're pretty laid back and their data was pretty detailed for us. Recently, we went with MLB.com's xml data over at http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/ where we had to do a bunch more calculations to get all the data we wanted, but it's free (for now).

We also looked at XML Team and I found their prices to be completely reasonable and they have a per document pricing structure which allows you to control your costs to a much greater extend.

We also spoke with Stats Inc and found them to be pretty unreasonable in terms of dealing with startups and for home projects.

Hit me up if you want any more data or if Benchcoach can help with the data on the baseball side. We're looking at expanding it to football and basketball this year so we've been speaking with XML team about that.
Verizon to start selling iPad Oct. 28
It goes straight to self-expression and provides a program that is customizable in a way as unlimited as language itself. A beginner can put in a string that no one else would ever say and then have the satisfaction of seeing a program that no one else could have written. It instantly illustrates how programming enables individuality, self-expression, and control.

Also, for environments where saving code in an editor doesn't instantly cause a change in behavior (compiled languages, web programming, working with a running Lisp image) it gives beginners an easy way to learn and troubleshoot the process of deploying their code.
I did that too, before mIRC supported multiple servers, I loved mIRC script, now, not so much
It's a lot more than 4 figures. Getting just the basic data will be in the 5s, and that's per season of 1 sport. Maybe I suck at research but after talking to the reps about pricing, 4 figures would be an absolute steal.
it'd be cheaper for Novartis to just have these guys killed. Maybe after a dozen or so patent trolls end up dead, they might go looking for a safer market.

Frankly I think patent law, should be like trademark law. You can patent anything, but you can't sue anyone who is not your direct competitor.

Also it couldn't hurt, to have a clause that in order to be granted the patent, that you'd need to show a fully functional prototype.
The problem your fixing is probably the most important part of the investor pitch.
I completely agree. Companies change over time. The startup you founded with one or two other people eventually becomes a business.

Now there are typically two ways of running a successful business: (1) culture; or (2) process.

If you build a business with a very specific culture that you will love to work within as the company grows then great. However building a business is much easier than establishing a culture you want that grows with the business.

Process is the alternative to culture as a route to long-term success and profitability. When you can't hire smart people that will maintain a company culture, you have to rely on process to scale. Even Warren Buffett once quipped, "I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."

Once you take you business down the path to process instead of culture, you are creating a monster that hopefully craps cash. Eventually that monster becomes so big and powerful that your position as a leader becomes a position as a process manager.

Leaders lead people. Managers manage processes.

Processes don't have room for vision. Leadership does.

Once you have processes, you start looking for an exit strategy.

Besides the issue of culture versus process, many entrepreneurs also enjoy the act of creation most. These entrepreneurs are like artists. Once they've created something, they desire to move on to the next piece once they are satisfied with their current piece. The different between the entrepreneur and the artist is that for the entrepreneur it may take months or years before they are satisfied with their current piece, whereas the artist may take days to weeks to months to finish a piece and move on to the next.

Plus, deciding to move on to the next piece doesn't mean that you cannot stay on as an advisor to those who will continue to work on your previous pieces.
Ask HN: Advice on job/salary/etc
Posting as anonymous to protect my identity if my office finds this.

Situation: Currently employed by very small Indiana based Advertising agency as front-end developer. I have around 2 years professional experience and another 8 years experience working as a freelancer/tech geek. 24 yrs old. In addition, I handle our IT, dabble is custom software development, backend work, and a few other areas. I make $30,000/annual with no benefits other than vacation + paid sick days.

I'm obviously severely underpaid, but I took the job when freelance work ran out and finding a job in my city was hard. I needed any money.

Last week I asked my company for a raise, showing them I make at least $15,000 less per year than I should be and that I needed benefits. They just offered me $6000/yr raise and $100/mo for health. HOWEVER, they are requiring me to sign a contract saying I will not leave in the next year or I'll be penalized (pretty much refunding the salary increase). This obviously sounds like bullshit to me.

When they first presented me with the idea I said sure, just thinking about getting extra money. Now I'm having serious doubts and they're pressuring me to sign the contract because they think I'm staying for a year. As much as I love the job and the people I work with, I don't think I can afford to stay at $36k. I know they can't afford much more.

What should I do? Tell them I'm going to continue looking for a new job and risk getting fired or making the office atmosphere awkward and having my bosses harbor resentment against me? Just take the raise and sign and pay the penalty if I leave? Just quit altogether?

Help me out HN... What should I do?
Arch Linux, no desktop (just a bare window manager with xterms, emacs, and stuff), and I turned the screen brightness down to the lowest comfortable level.
Hypercard?
Even mobile without location-finding would be useful. I would prolly use this app when I'm in an unfamiliar place and most likely only have a smartphone on me.
You'll never get selected. In most any lawsuit, if you have a three figure IQ, then chances are that one lawyer or the other doesn't want you on the jury.
Same here, multiple sites. Using the same code base for dev/stage/production is a huge win.
Just to be clear: I'm not necessarily suggesting that full multivariate A/B testing is the best thing to shoot for, I realize very well that especially in site design, different splits cannot be composed together.

However, related to a discussion this past week where it became clear that periodically checking confidence intervals until they "hit" was a terrible way to test because of the high likelihood of picking the wrong result, I am suggesting that the two-armed bandit problem should be considered mandatory knowledge for anyone working on A/B testing frameworks. That problem is literally what A/B testing tries to solve (try to make choices between two options to maximize payoff when you don't know the payoffs of either choice beforehand, taking into account the fact that trials spent building up certainty by testing the payoffs are sometimes wasted on the least valuable option).

I'd have linked to the two-armed bandit problem if there was a page on that, but it just redirects...
> I'll argue that it is possible, just not necessarily preferable.

No, it's not possible. I do my best to minimize complexity but it's hard.

I don't have access to most of the systems I interface with. This is what I am talking about. The complexity is not just in legacy code but in interfaces I don't have control over. The project I mentioned was a complete rewrite and I'm able to modify most sections of it without tons of brain power. It's just the main report that's confusing as hell due to requirements.

When things external to code are complex you need brain power. You need to create abstractions and your abstractions end up being complex because you can't mask some of the requirements behind simpler code. There is also a problem of lacking tools. I have no ability to use a real debugger on any of the programs I work with. Only one application will run on my laptop, everything else is sitting in a carefully deployed minefield of interconnected dependencies on various linux servers.
you know... the more i think about it the more i think their price structure is wrong based on industry standards. Pay as you grow? Then why not just charge a flat fee per transaction. Make it affordable enough and you'll be solving a whole lot of problems here... Give customers transaction discounts based on minimum... Is not my biz tho but is just a thought.
Read the whole comment. It's easy to configure Apache or whatever HTTP server you're using to not serve anything in .svn directories. Duh.
Supercomputer sets protein-folding record
Yes and no actually. I don't hide my real name anywhere but I keep quite a bit of my info restricted to people on Facebook. Basically, I don't make a distinction between the two except that, outside of facebook and gmail contacts, all my interaction/social graph is of a mostly techie nature. My family doesn't use twitter and read HN. Conversely, the people who follow me on twitter don't care about my kid taking his first piss in the frog potty ;)
hi pg, I'm curious about applying for yc (in the summer), but we're not completely sure if our idea is the kind of thing yc is looking to fund. I know you don't advise startups, but would it be possible to get some quick feedback on our demo by e-mail?
Where are you getting your data from? I just searched for "food" in Vancouver and got one hit - a Burger King by the airport.
The reason they want to do it in East Texas is because the patent infringement federal court in east Texas is one of a few that handles patent infringement cases very quickly. Most federal courts that handle patent infringement are very backed up and getting a verdict on a case could take years. Obviously Webvention does not want to get caught up in an expensive and long court battle. They make their money from the $80K fees not the court battles.
Thanks for responding. I need a framework for UI, but MVC would be a bonus and is what I am used to through Obj-C. The app will be light enough to run client side so it could be JS with JQueryUI maybe. On the other hand GAE seems like it would make the administration end very easy but how good is Django for UI? The app will have several mini-apps that popup and will be essentially different instances of the same class so MVC would be nice but UI is the priority.
(Posting from a throwaway account) These asshats threatened to sue the company I work for. We ended up removing the "offending" technology from our site because we were not going to pay their ridiculous licensing fee and we could not afford fighting them in court. I spent three days removing code that made our site easier to use. It was depressing.
Marketing is hard as hell, especially so for developers.

As with many other articles like it, the advice given is too vague. We know that we need to market our product but how? Make a landing page, and get 600 subscribers out of the blue? Just blog it all up in the twittersphere and get 1000 likes, no problem?

Anyone who has tried that without a thorough understanding of marketing, and no real budget for it, will know it doesn't work like that.

When I read these marketing articles, it feels like they are explaining how to model my abstraction layers, when I haven't even written Hello world yet.
I grew up with 'learn by Googling' as my most used educational tool. It would have been wonderful if it didn't take so much time to sift through the endless misinformation, but doing so really leads to a pretty deep coverage of a topic. "Learning by Google" also often meant "Learning by perldoc" by proxy, or "Learning by O'Reilly e-books", etc. The real difficulty comes to when a subject is obscured by prominent shitty resourcess (Google, please blacklist w3schools.com, and please make the ACTUAL SPECS always turn up as the first result).
So they're tacking on $130 to the price of the iPad to cover the device? I like my setup much better ...

I have the iPad WiFi coupled with Virgin's MiFi which is $150 + $40/mo for unlimited bandwidth (on Sprint's network). No worries about overages, works great everywhere I've been and you don't even pay for months you don't use it.

Most Best Buy stores have them.
http://www.virginmobileusa.com/mobile-broadband/mifi-2200.ht...
I had the opposite problem. Sorta felt sad about it. And realizing I felt sad about that made me even sadder ;p
I found it funny that the person who wrote this has for his company ToS with the following under pricing and plans:

"We reserve the right to modify, alter, create, or discontinue our plans collectively or individually."

http://zferral.com/terms-of-service

To be fair, he did say this in his blog post: "As a CEO, I want my current and future customers to know where I stand. I can guarantee, that any customer of zferral.com will always be grandfathered into the pricing scheme on the day they signed up — if we ever raise prices."

Edit: I'm not suggesting anything more by this. I just found it amusing. =)

Edit 2: Scary. http://blog.zferral.com/post/1313271164/when-freemium-isnt-f... In a funny way. =)
Sounds like you already know what to do. PS. A good boss would want to help you grow in your career.
Preventative maintenance implies that there could be a problem if you don't do 'x', I am talking about the 'ice cream glove' type of speculation.
Very interesting article.
I understand. You are gunning for either all or nothing... I just wanted to point out that perhaps u can strike an in between option.. which might benefit all at the end and make it a win-win given the circumstances.
Whenever a large company does something, people always over-estimate how many people from that company did it. The organization as a whole doesn't train it's eye on each little problem, saturating it with thousands of engineers. Instead, a handful of engineers decide they want to do something, do it, and then eventually move on to other things.

You may not be able to compete with Google's infrastructure, but you can certainly compete on focus.
You'll never get selected. If you don't even show up.(1)

(1) I've been on the juries of 2 civil suits and one criminal trial so far, and was the foreman once. Want sanity in the justice system? Bring it.
Applies to writing code, documentation, novels too. Create first, edit later.
I would ask to start working part-time and quit if they won't let you.
Most people on HN would never be allowed to sit in a jury -- they tend to filter the smart people out, as the lawyers can't really manipulate them (this isn't just kneejerk, try to show up for jury duty with a big book under your arm).
Yes - Every time I turn on Roaming Data with my iPhone in Vancouver, I do the mental calculation of "Is this thing that I'm about to do really worth $15/Megabyte". $900 would have been around 60 Megabytes of downloads.

Whenever I'm traveling in Canada for more than a couple days, I usually go pick up a local data plan and device.
I think each lawyer gets only a limited number of juror challenges. So a smartie might still get through.
Same here. My real name isn't that far off from my handle so I don't think it makes a big difference.
Most sites have a player ID. If you map the player ID the aliases won't matter. Just keep that name data on your end and it will be consistent.

Getting accurate real-time data is not a hard problem. The real problem is coming up with the money to do it the legal way.
".. MiFi 2200 is small enough to fit in a pocket and allows customers to create a personal Wi-Fi cloud capable of sharing the high-speed Internet .. "

Wait, what?
Does pulling information from facebook likes really lead to better search results? How is this measured objectively?
> And people who use ampersand pass-by-reference in C++ ( foo(int &i) ).

Why?
I've sat on a jury... should I be worried? :)
mtbr.com seems to link to roadbikereview.com. From a consumer's point of view, they are both effectively spam. It's organized terribly, there's no content (photos, specs or reviews) for most of what is listed. And it looks like crap. I guess they "exist" for some definition of exist. Is there actual content on these sites that I can't find?
It's a valid concern. A single 25 mins block might indeed be too short for a big task but in Pomodoro it's series of such blocks interspersed with 5 mins breaks.

YMMV, but I've found out that the 5 mins breaks do not destroy my "state", as long as I don't start anything that tends to suck in like playing games or browsing the Web. Fetching coffee, going to the toilet, etc. is OK :)

Anyway, the hardest thing is usually starting the first block.
In the i4i vs. Microsoft patent case, in that very district, the jury foreperson had 3 college degrees (one a graduate degree), a couple other jurors had math degrees, and one had a computer science degree. The judge had a bachelor's degree in mathematics, and worked as a computer programmer and systems analyst before entering law school.
Flash 10.1 Downloaded Over a Million Times
OO is a committee designed bloatware mammoth.

Office was created in low level coding, with the minimum possible dependencies (e.g excel reinvents the wheel so it does not include so many external libs). OO is a sluggish and high level clone with minimum attention for detail. Consumes too much memory and too much processor, like Netscape Navigator became, but hopefully(thanks to the license) it could be transformed into firefox.

It will be very expensive to replicate the hard work that went into Office, only starting from scratch you could do it like Koffice, abiword or gnumeric did.

You can't outperform Office in their strengths, but you can outperform it on things Microsoft is not an specialist, like multiplatform coding, cloud writing, and new interfaces(multitouch and voice).

I don't use windows, and honestly I don't care about Office any more. There are very good alternatives, but not OO.
Adobe tops 1 million Flash downloads on Android
I feel like downvoting it now. That kind of stuff just has no place in rational discourse.

If the poster wouldn't hesitate to say it in real life, that's because throwaway comments like that have no record and no real cost among your friends. A comment on HNN is there for a while, though, and visible to everyone. It's appropriate that it have a cost to say something really ... I want to say stupid. But inaccurate is maybe something better.

I went to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology back in medieval times when it was all-male. This attitude was pretty natural there at the time - we were an all-male top engineering college in the same town with ISU, a middling state university, and St. Mary-of-the-Woods, an all-female liberal arts college. Engineers tend to measure intelligence by skill with math and science, so naturally Rose's student body was, by our own measure, the smartest of the three.

One year, there was a talk by a Rose alum who had been Out There in the business world, giving advice to the not-yet-graduated. One thing he said stuck with me - he said that one of the hardest things facing Rose graduates was working with women. This is because they consistently underestimated them, and were then crushed, because women are not stupider than men. But there's nothing surer to provoke animosity in any coworker than underestimating them.
Do you want to live in the Bay Area/SF? If so email me - I might have some contacts for you if you are interested in working for a consulting firm.

36K is low and their terms are probably not legal in most states.
I don't know what the OP's beef is. There's nothing semantically wrong or confusing about this.

However, for simple types like int and float, there's no performance advantage to passing the value as a reference. It generally takes as long to construct the temporary reference as it does to copy the value.

For more complex types like structures or objects, then yeah, you're better off passing by reference.
I read that whole thing hoping I would get the promised explanation of Toby (from the previous entries) and he's still holding out. Bastard.

Anyone have any ideas? My guess is that he's some sort of Zen master who has transcended the need to play games, although I'm not sure where that fits on the hierarchy.
My sites are PHP so building is limited but some things do need to be built. However, my sites effectively build themselves without the need for another tool. On the first access of a resource, if the target doesn't exist it's built by the code automatically and stored in a cache. During development, the cache is disabled so you can edit and run without any intermediate build step. Things built this way include parts of the ORM and output templates.
I use one of my real identities on HN.

;)
Next Hacker News DC Meetup on Monday, Oct 18
LLVM is a far, far superior platform for hacking than GCC.

http://www.llvm.org

http://clang.llvm.org

also, subscribe to llvm and cfe-dev mailing lists.
I'm always amused how the people who are easiest to manipulate think they are hard to manipulate.
For software products, I would recommend using Screenflow for the Mac. It is by far the easiest and most powerful of the screencasting tools. It allows you to record the screen, record the audio, and then edit the results.

All of the videos on our site (http://wistia.com) are produced using only Screenflow.
If you're starting a business doing something you love so much that you'd be happy in it all your life... sure. Don't worry.

But it's rare that you'll have that kind of certainty. If you don't, it's best to have a plan to get out, so you can move on to your next fun. You can always change course and stay longer if you want.
How free is the OpenJDK?
It's off topic, but a common enough mistake.

I could ask the dame of you, though. Is not your comment little more than a (successful) call for downvotes?
Either get your head back in the game, or quit. You aren't doing your employer -any- favors by taking his money when your productivity has "dropped to almost nothing".
The (Crippled) Invisible Hand
"According to Law.com, Webvention acquired the property from the great patent gobbler itself, Intellectual Ventures."

Aha.
That's a very, very good point - focus is another aspect (as both you and moultano say) which is an advantage to startups and companies in general. If you have focus, community (support) and a great UI/UX - Google isn't as scary.
Don't be so sure that all of Linus' opinions are valid for all areas of programming, or even in all situations within the kernel.