skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not part of a minimum viable product. When you're trying to get something out the door, your downtime communication is not your top priority, so you can afford to improve it later.
Ahem!

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ironical

Words grow quicker than we can catalog them, and die preserved on paper.
Why It’s Foolish to Weaken the Dollar to Create Jobs
USA the country who invented Internet, and the one to lose it first.
How sad.
Here is the direct link for it.
goo.gl/aLzQ
Thanks for reposting this, but he claims it was $300K in legal fees, and an $850K settlement. Sounds like he got off light.
Microsoft is championing this FUD, but I think it's worth remembering that it didn't start with them. Apple and Oracle have set the "hidden cost of Android" conversation in motion with their lawsuits.

Redmond actually has some room to make this kind of case since some of these patents have already been licensed by HTC and (from what I read here) Google.

Go figure.
By experience, I'd say it was on their roadmap, there was even maybe a ticket about having a status.foursquare.com.

But you know there's tons of tickets, tons of priorities and finally shit happens and some tasks are placed on top of the pile and become priorities.
aka "cross that bridge when you come to it"
I have no idea what causes this particular problem, but Office is notorious for just writing in-memory data structures to disk and calling it a "file format", which would make 32-bit and 64-bit incompatible.
Is "people" now considered the short form for "people in the United States"?
Well, that's another example for the "dangers of making untested changes to your production environment" pile. Of course, people rarely feel the need to post when everything works out...

Sucks that such a popular service had such trouble. I look forward to reading any additional posts they write explaining in more detail exactly what happened.
It seems that the authors of the paper are implicitly suggesting that speed limit should be lowered across the board.

How about we use that time and money and use it towards better driver education. Something more than a 20 questions test and 10 minutes in the car with a tester would be a good start. Maybe some sort of forced driving school?

Then, when everyone's better educated, we can raise the speed limits to reasonable levels and still have less accidents.
I think that the maximal renewal time should be proportional to the expiration time.

If, for example, the original expiration time is 5 minute, during the first 5 minutes any new resubmission of the URL gets the same address, and the time is extended to 5 minutes. After these 5 minutes, the address is still available if it life was extended, but any new resubmission get another address.

In this way the shortcut is active between 5 and 10 minutes, and at any time there are at most two shortcuts for each original URL (for each expiration interval).
That is a fantastic signup form! I just signed-up myself, and I don't even know Ruby. But I've been having a huge itch to learn for a long time, and your newsletter may be just the trick to get me into it. Thanks much!
"Can you convince your best friend to work on your 4th idea, when the previous 3 failed?"

Any business/idea guy worth his/her salt will have more than one great idea. This is why I am learning how to code; so I don't have to go through all the trouble to get a technical cofounder every time I come up with an idea I really like. This way I can build a prototype and be a lot more credible when I approach people to work with me.
The difference is that testimony is revealing the contents of your brain ("I saw X, I did or did not do Y, I felt Z") and evidence is revealing the contents of your car trunk. Evidence does not have its own opinion of what did or did not happen, evidence does not decide what is or is not the truth. Evidence simply exists; it is for others (giving testimony) to give evidence context and relevance.
Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do):

http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Dangerous-Things-Should-Children...
The site just went down again, awkwardly enough, only moments after they published their post-mortem on yesterday's outage.

Clearly, as their blog post indicates, they were unable to trace the root problem.

To me, the worst feeling in the world as a developer is when there's a major bug in your production site, and you can't figure out exactly why it happened. Then even after you get the site working there's that pit in your stomach of "what if it strikes again?"
yea. I like that idea.

Thanks :)
Here you go:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/pagelinks.html#targe...
Where's All the Free Wi-Fi We Were Promised?
I believe there is a specific law in the UK that mandates key escrow -- the government must be able to decrypt anything.

This has been floated in the US before, but it has not gotten good PR. As it stands now, it is a Constitutional law issue -- does the fifth amendment mean that you can't be compelled to get up in the witness box and talk, or does it mean that you don't have to assist the prosecution in any way? Right now, the courts seem to be split 50/50, but I feel that practicality dictates that you don't have to give up your key. First they have to accuse you of a crime and bring it to trial, then you have to refuse to decrypt the key, then the first trial has to stop, then the government has to prove that you know the key, then you have to be convicted and sentenced, then you can go back to the original trial after analyzing all of the decrypted "evidence". If encryption becomes widespread, this just isn't practical. It's easy to prove that you sell drugs; someone goes up to you and buys them. It's not easy to prove that you didn't forget your encryption key, because we have no way to observe someone's mind. Laws that prohibit crimes that can't be proved tend not to do well.
I tend to use Yelp only in the capacity that I run into it in Google results.

I imagine quite a bit of their traffic does the same thing if the "1% contribute" axiom is true.

If that's the case, the "shouldn't change in case we break SEO" is probably spot on, even though rearranging CSS shouldn't break the Google blackbox, if it did it would be catastrophic.

Related - 1% contribute -
http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/charting...
Your sample of domains actually look like very good and memorable names. But I'm hesitant to sign up for your newsletter because I'm not currently in need of one, but even if I were, it would be for a specific idea I have in mind, and thus, I'd be looking for a related domain name. I'm not sure if there's anyone who needs a domain name to get inspired to build a website around it, but perhaps there are, though maybe this would be a good service for people that buy and sell domain names, but that just feels like a dirty field to be in.

But good luck with it! Maybe you'll make some discoveries in the near future and implement something to make this more useful for someone searching for a specific related name. There's quite a few out there, and they all help, but I could still see some room for a new form of domain discovery.
Your observation that not every job can have people passionate about it, is probably a symptom of something other than what you think.

1. It could be a symptom of the fact that it's really really difficult to imagine how people can be passionate about something you find mindnumbing. I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't understand how someone can be passionate about programming. It's obviously very boring.

2. There's a distinction between a 'job' and a 'career'. Jobs are more about menial tasks that can be done by anyone, not passion fodder. Careers are more about personal growth, fulfillment in life and doing something for motives other than purely financial - great passion fodder.
Oregon news team finds Geek Squad incompetent [2009]
Hehe I was working on a competitor as a sponsored bespoke developer. Unfortunately, the project sponsor insisted on a similarly cluttered design, and then an even more hotch potch of a feature set.

What would you want to do I guess is the answer? See special offers? See reviews? See what your mate's have reviewed?
That's why Gentoo's system is called Portage.
That Req Square shot near the bottom - they are standing next to the so-called "Kremlin Wall", which was the honorary burial place back in Soviet times. Slightly over 100 people are buried there, lots of politicians obviously, but also scientists, war heroes and, notably, cosmonauts - Gagarin, Komarov (killed in crash-landing in '67), Dobrovolski/Patcaev/Volkov (killed when the landing capsule vented air while still in space), and I think several more.

That's the reasons for the photo. Paying tributes to those died in space expeditions.
Another way of saying "more people buy smartphones on Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T put together than do people on AT&T by itself".
That's true, but it's not like learning to code a little makes all your business knowledge fall out of your head. And the point of learning to code isn't that you'll now be the CTO, it's because founding a successful tech company is hard, let alone founding one when you don't know the difference between Java and Javascript. You can still be the business guy, but now you understand at least a little of the core of your business. Not to mention that if you're just a business guy with an idea and no money, few good developers will be interested.
New Startup Jobs.com just launched
I like to live doing things that I thoroughly enjoy, and I find I don't do great work if I'm not working towards something that I am really passionate about, or something that I want to really crush!
How about funding a startup which would also act as a label? Long shot (you would need to sign big names) but the rewards would be huge.
You make an interesting implicit association between passion and satisfaction.

> The result is that we end up in a place that’s not fully satisfying.

For you, you've decided that you want to be passionate about your career, and that would satisfy you. Does that always have to be the case though? Maybe some people would be completely satisfied with their work if they work in a nice and comfortable place, with people they enjoy being with, and not too much stress. They have a pleasant day at work, then get to come home and do whatever they are really passionate about.

I know that here, in the entrepreneur crowd, that someone will suggest that those people need to "figure out how to monetize their passion." Yes, sometimes that's true. Sometimes, I think people just want to enjoy their hobby or whatever, not try to make money at it. If I love model plane building and flying, that doesn't mean I would love to open a hobby shop, or run model plane building classes or whatever.

I think there are a lot of cases where people can be satisfied in their work, in that it is both enjoyable and that it provides for their other passions. I think that's an ok state to reach too.
I found Ruby itself a lot easier to learn than Rails, actually. Try doing some plain ol' Ruby learning instead.

You know at least a little programming, so I'd recommend starting with Everyday Scripting With Ruby rather than with Learning Ruby.

I don't know much about the more recent editions of Agile Web Development With Rails, but I have a copy of the first edition. In it, Appendix A is Introduction to Ruby. That introduction is about useless to someone who doesn't know any programming, but provides an easy, quick familiarization with the basics of how Ruby (the language, as opposed to Rails the framework) works. If you have access to a copy of the book that has such an Introduction to Ruby appendix, combining that with Everyday Scripting With Ruby makes for a very effective start in the language for those who already dabble in programming.

I'd recommend starting out on a Unix-like platform, and using Ruby to automate small tasks as a way to get used to using the language. While you're at it, learn the OptParse core library, which is great for adding command line option handling to your utilities, as well as help output.

If you want to migrate from there to simple Web coding, you do not necessarily have to jump straight into Rails or any other framework. You can do CGI programming in Ruby, or you can use eruby to do template-based development much like the basic means of using PHP on most Webhosts.

edit: Wow. Maybe I should write a book introducing people to Ruby.
look at Parasoft's unit testing capabilities - it's very interesting:

www.parasoft.com/unittesting
In about the timeframe at MS, I remember stumbling upon a couple of living, breathing, but rarely bathing, young developer/gamer stereotypes being shown around one of the buildings in the Office division by two young, well, they looked like strippers dressed to appear in a porno as two hot "professional" women who let loose at the office.

Perhaps you were recruited by a related program?
Apple was one of the first to sue Android, followed by Oracle, and now by Microsoft.
I've added some documentation. Far from complete, but it should shed some light on the situation for the curious.
They share USV as an investor. I'd be astonished if they didn't.
I think I conveyed my point pretty hopelessly. Don't get my wrong, I love the technical side, I think it's fascinating, I just wouldn't want that to be my full time job. I can read and understand code, I just can't write it. I love to learn bits here and there, especially front-end.

I appreciate your reply, and I agree with you.
I doubt they actually let them slide down that slide though :)
For a service that is trying to be 'mainstream' I think their blog post is horrible.

There is no way a 'regular user' is going to understand what a shard is, nor should they care. Ok, they explained sharding in laymans terms but then went on to talk about "reindexing the shard to improve memory fragmentation issues"... Woah, that means nothing to 95% of users.

If you experience down time and you want your users to be sympathetic then you got to explain whats going on in terms they will understand. Sure, include a technical explanation at the bottom for those inclined, but not as part of your main body.
The article never said labels were going to die. It just pointed out how they screwed their digital future.
No more of the upvotes were from newly created accounts than you'd expect for a story high on the front page. I think users are just suspicious of governments.
The historical question is very interesting, and I'm going to have to look into that more. But I suspect that artisans (a class that has changed a lot, if not died out completely) were very passionate about their work.

With the huge amount of hours that a knowledge worker spends at his day job, I personally feel that it's almost never worth it to have a job you don't enjoy. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do enough exciting things, once you subtract a healthy amount of sleep, maintenance tasks, and the day job. It certainly isn't worth it at the typically small compensation differences between jobs.
Nine Boxes (customer interviewing maps to agile stories)
I agree with you, personally.

But from what I have seen of my customers? they agree with the previous post.
Pure CSS3 Sliding Image Gallery
But you code because that's what you're good at, and that's what you enjoy. I do marketing/biz-dev for the same reason. Why don't you do marketing and biz-dev?

I do front-end development, and I can read backend code, I just can't write it!
His point was, what is so fundamentally different about the 64 bit Outlook APIs from the 32 bit ones that would fundamentally break syncing behavior with mobile phones?

And, "How was building in this kind of incompatibility a good thing, anyways?"

From what I've read of Microsoft culture, it was probably because the Outlook team wanted to sabotage the WinMo7 team for some inexplicable and kafkaesque scheme to make themselves look better. Then again, that's speculation.
Usually there'll be a reason for the police to kick your door down. I imagine that plus destroyed evidence would be enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt.
Sebastian Wernicke gave a TED talk on what makes the most popular TED talks. It turns out the most "favorited" talks on the TED website are the longest ones. So it's a valid point either way :-) http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/lies_damned_lies_and_stati...
Stupid Questions VCs Ask
A touchy legal problem with LinkedIn and restrictive employment covenants
Agreed. And they did use their Twitter accounts to communicate the problem/downtime (which even MVP's should have & use for status communications). You can be sure their status.foursquare.com blog won't have any more information than their Twitter accounts when they have unexpected downtime in the future.
Try googling for:

cache: url you want cached

(I only found this trick out a couple days ago)
Oh, I concur. I've known a few unsigned local acts that have been able to edge in as an opener at Irving Plaza. But it's a rare case indeed. (it doesn't help that they play a semi-in-the-hole genre, at least in the US. It's still quite big in some cold, northern european countries)
Nice to see some skydiving love on the old hacker news. That's my friend Kurt and he jumps in Northern California.
> You cannot use technology to bring a mind into agreement with your objectives.

so you just use it to blow the mind. Give it some more time for mind-bending technologies to get developed.
Energy levels follow square law and the human body has a rather low ceiling for the amount of energy it can absorb.

Where does that reasoning come from?

IIRC, only fully elastic collisions (no heat dissipation) preserve kinetic energy. Linear momentum is always preserved though. As the name implies, it's not quadratic.
Disclaimer: IANAL

If you're in the Unites States, the data is probably protected by HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act[1]. HIPAA includes a clause stating that the Attorney General or their designee may issue a subpoena compelling your SO to disclose that information, but only to someone investigating a Federal health care offense.

I've searched through the rest of HIPAA for keywords such as "law enforcement", "criminal", and "disclosure", but I couldn't find anything about being compelled to disclose HIPAA-protected information to law enforcement in any other circumstance than investigation of a Federal health care offense. However, I did not thoroughly read HIPAA, and there might be something in another section of the US Code that's relevant.

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable about this can let me know if I've missed something.

[1]: http://www.legalarchiver.org/hipaa.htm
I've been trying to learn enough Objective-C and Cocoa to be able to communicate at some level with a future co-founder (or even a contractor if I can find one within my bootstrap budget). It's slow going, though, and a first-mover just launched—the hardest question now seems to be just how much of the territory I want to be familiar with before I take the next step.

But I think you have a good benchmark there: Do I know it well enough yet to have a good idea of when I'm being bullshitted?
Since you know PHP, why not spend some time using a PHP-type framework, say yii. Once you have the MVC framework thing down, Rails will make a lot more sense. Small steps.
I love this article. I don't think that the concept of starvation is introduced early enough for node.js developers.

Cooperative multitasking was around for some time but it was eventually abandoned - programmers seemingly don't want the responsibility of cooperating nicely with other tasks.

node.js nicely mitigates the cooperative problem by using events everywhere (allowing queued callbacks to be called). This doesn't mean the problem is non-existent - something more developers need to be aware of.
Use TrueCrypt to do whole disk encryption on your Windows XP hard drive. Then boot your computer with a Linux Live CD and dd the first 512 bytes to stdout. This is what you'll see in plain text ASCII:

"TrueCrypt Boot Loader"

No expert is needed to prove that you are using TrueCrypt whole disk encryption. It has a huge stamp right up front.
"Breaking AES" is not at all necessary. All it takes is one implementation hole, or some plaintext unknowingly cached by a program.

The NSA don't merely employ scores of cryptanalysts to sit around all day to try to break ciphers (though I expect they do this too). Exploiting mistakes is their bread and butter.
How many "regular users" do you really think would spend the time to read about why they were down? They just know it was down and wanted it back up ASAP. And how would you better explain it to a layman? The servers crashed. We worked on it. It took longer than we wanted. They're back up again and we're working to make sure it doesn't happen again. How do you go further than that without getting technical?
When I hear "creative cover letter" I think of something more than three to four paragraphs that cover an applicant's background, interests, and goals. It's an excellent cover letter, sure, but I fail to see much creativity with the form or structure. There's "only" the creativity that underlies all concise, punchy, effective writing.
So, right now, this article is the talk of the Yelp engineering team. The consensus is that we need people to work on exactly this sort of thing.

If you think you can improve the design of this page (or any of the others), we're looking for designers and PMs. Send me your resume. My login (at) yelp.com.
Thanks pal. The plan is to convert my www.jasonnation.com newsletter to the LAUNCH newsletter at some point (or fork it, have to discuss with my list members).

Basically, I'm trying to do long form, in-depth profiles of startup companies. Instead of begging TechCrunch to get a profile, only to be mocked in their edtiorial, we will actually get to the know the business model, founders and dig deep into their vision.

It won't be a fluff piece, but it won't be a snarky/venomous TechCrunch/Gawker article.

all the best, jason

(in London for the first Open Angel Forum here!!)
I wrote a blog post related to this yesterday. I agree with the author 100%. I can't remember how many times some business guy tried to pitch me on some stupid idea without an inkling of knowledge about programming or how the web works. The worst part is that they generally have no money either. If you have a good idea with some idea of how to implement it and a clear vision, you may be able to sell me. If you have a half-assed idea and are just trying to jump on the internet millions bandwagon because you think it doesn't involve real work, go to hell.
Hmm, it's odd, it sounds perfectly acceptable to me. I'd never have guessed it's not used, maybe because it's "ειρωνικός" in Greek, which would accept the -ical suffix (like "λογικός" - logical (and not "logic")).

TL;DR: English is a second language :P
FWIW Jason Fried, one of the original founders of 37signals, still doesn't know how to program (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2540-no-more-drive-by-teachin...) but that obviously hasn't prevented the company from being a success. But then 37signals started off as a web design firm, and he had the good fortune to hire DHH.
At 6:30pm EST, we determined the most effective course of action was to re-index the shard, which would address the memory fragmentation and usage issues.

Sounds similar to some of the problems we're facing with MongoDB too. Indexes fragment a lot, especially if you delete documents frequently. You have to reindex everything eventually.

MongoDB offers background indexing (except for _id fields!) but it's not really an option if you need the indexes at all times to keep executing queries. Also, you'll need to reindex _id eventually and there's currently no way to do that without blocking the server.