skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been at Mahalo for about 1 1/2 years now, and I can certainly appreciate what all of you are saying about how I'd have to be an idiot to work here. Luckily I had no idea who Jason was when I started, so I didn't know all of the lore surrounding his insanity. Most of it is exactly that. People get together and sensationalize his attitude and statements (he encourages this a bit with his public persona, I'll grant you that).

For the most part, working with him has been a pleasant experience. He can flip out from time to time, often there's a good reason, sometimes not. He's not much more crazy than any other boss I've ever had, and his contributions to Mahalo far outweigh any of this.

On the plus side, we get sweet perks, our internal culture is awesome (because we don't get slackers on the team), and we're doing some very cool stuff on the technical side of things. (Expect to see more of that in the future, and if you're ever in LA, stop by the ScaleLA or LA Django meetups we host.)

That said, I'm a little dismayed that hacker news spends so much time gossiping about Jason. Get over it guys. If you don't want to work for him, don't. If you do, send over a resume.
To vote all comments up:

$("#allchats a:nth-child(1)").click();

Down:

$("#allchats a:nth-child(2)").click();
I wonder what percentage of those actually have Baidu instead of Google Search though? And Android Market?

Does Google benefit much from a China full of Android users who don't use AM or Google Search?
Electronic Pick Pocketing
You know that scene in Independence Day when Jeff Goldbloom flies into the mothership and uploads a program to shut it down? That.

No, I don't mean an alien empire running on Mac OS 7.6.5, I mean extreme interoperability so software can rewrite itself to work on a different platform (self-porting, in other words).

Having said that, their firewalls were lacking!
Learn How To Never Pay a Cable Or Satellite Bill Again
Why is Thomas making so much noise on this thread?

(a) Because he is addicted to arguing about things on Hacker News.

(b) Because he takes pleasure in pointing out how ruthless the venture capital funded startup environment actually is.

(c) Because he believes that people who factor their blood, sweat, and tears into how they should be treated by investors have set themselves up for otherwise avoidable heartbreak.

(d) All of the above.
Problem With Email - Between Unread & Read
And here's a good place to do that: http://smartfootball.blogspot.com/2009/06/gus-malzahnauburn-...
Ask HN: 2011 Predictions
As we near the end of the year, one realises how busy 2010 has been. There is already a post to show off what has been done, but I am interested in what changes and trends you predict will happen in

-the general IT fields (mobile hardware, net neutrality and other broad topics)

-your domain specifically (ie, what disruption can we expect where?)

-your life (what are you working on?)
Gee, there's been a 90% decline in deaths by fire since we stopped using open flames for light and heat? That's astounding.
A gigabit ethernet switch port in even the most expensive scenario I can think of would be about $1000. In 1996 it was all FDDI and HSSI ports, which were an order of magnitude more expensive than GigE equipment is these days.

There is very much a precedent for the scenario you describe: Comcast has direct peering agreements with Google. While I can't presume to know if it's settlement-free, I'm almost certain it is. Google's business model, especially YouTube, depends on it.

Your conclusion is a little off kilter. Peering is cheap because they do these types of interconnects in these carrier hotels, and as we all know, running a Cat5 cable through a building is cheap. However, space in these carrier hotels is absurdly expensive because of the demand. This is fine if you just have a few racks of equipment and ship all the packets out over WAN links to your datacenters, which is pretty much the status quo. Not just any average joe is going to be able to setup shop in these places.

YC companies pay for bandwidth because it's cheaper to do that then it is to build out a network. It's the same reason they don't build datacenters, own office space, etc. Most don't even own or operate dedicated servers anymore. Peering works at certain levels of network scale, but below that, somewhat pointless from a business/financial perspective.

Check out SoftLayer's peering page: http://www.softlayer.com/network/peering If peering was as expensive and as uncommon as Comcast claims, why would SoftLayer need a special page for it?
(a).
there's also no way that I can see that this can be fixed (in its current implementation)...

if you somehow had a history of highly voted comments, you would need all the other comments to get context, but then some of those comments might be already be downvoted to hell, etc...

also, by their nature, chatroom messages are short and often only address one part of a conversation. I don't see how there will be enough time for users to provide a meaningful upvote/downvote for anything not obviously inflammatory.
PC Satellite TV Titanium edition costs $99.95 and you get more than 4,000 Satellite TV channels (with adult content)
PC satellite TV Elite Edition costs only $49.95 and you get 3,000 Satellite TV channels (with no adult content)
Just curious, what is the vision for Imoveyou (i.e. where do you guys see the product x years from now) and what is the business model?
whoops. http://pastie.org/1347896
GOOGLE buys New York block for 1.8 Billion
I was refering to FFMPEG, not the various ruby packages he used. All he really did was wrap FFMPEG with a script that called it with predefined arguments and kick it off to S3. He could have seen the same dramatic improvement with a handful of lines of bash.

Probably worth noteing that he doesn't even seem to know how his own script works. He was puzzled that it was burning all of his CPUs without him having to make it do that, when that is exactly the behavior you would expect.
Don't hire from the bottom upwards
It depends on your goals and learning style. If you're just looking to be able to tinker a little bit with existing code, or learn best by doing, then jumping right in is probably the way to go. If you want a deeper understanding, and to avoid making as many beginner mistakes and poor decisions, books are a great way to pick up "best practices" without wasting time going through all of the worst practices first. But lots of people have found success with each approach so if one way fits your learning style better, by all means go with that one.

And really, the most effective route is to do both. Focusing too much on doing without the book knowledge results in creating terribly awkward solutions to problems that have been already been solved. On the other hand It's easy to follow along with a book and fool yourself into thinking that everything makes sense while lacking the experience needed to figure out how to put all the little pieces together to create something useful. As is usual in life, balance is key.
No, part of investing the way Graham invests is helped by caring about people's personal lives.

Don't forget, most VC funds make 1-4 investments per partner/year, invest huge sums of money, invest at a point where the business has a life beyond the founder, and require a home run return to move the dials.

Graham invests in many tens of companies per year. He invests a small amount of money. He invests at a point where there is nothing but the founder. And he's thrilled with Wufoo.

Should more firms invest the way YC does? Maybe, but remember that many YC companies depend, at the DNA level, on eventually getting an investment from a major VC.
Perhaps we disagree about the term "static compilation". SBCL and other lisp compilers read a source file and produce native code which is then executed. If certain dynamic features are not executed, then the compiler (also part of the runtime in much the same way as libc is part of a C executable) is not invoked at runtime. If dynamic features are needed, then the expression is eval'ed by compiling it to native code and executing it. This is lighter and more powerful (for language reasons) than spawning a process to invoke a C compiler that produces a shared library which is dlopen'd on the spot, but I claim it is a closer analogy to what is happening than a JIT.

In summary, I submit that (i) Python eval is no more dynamic than Lisp eval and (ii) it is acceptable to use the term "statically compiled" even if the standard library includes "compile".
Easiest example of this to grasp: Apple bluetooth keyboard, which rolls up in the back to provide elevation. That roll in the back also happens to be a battery compartment: aesthetic and functional. Minimalist. Not just how it looks, but also how it works.
Stay away from gpal/gunpal -- their motives were honorable, but their management wasn't.
surely that title does not make correct use of the comma(s)
Outcomes in the stock market and the startup world are at least somewhat correlated, which seems like a downside to being heavily invested in the stock market while committed to a startup.
New to programming, you should probably get a book, start reading it at the beginning, and do some of the exercises. As soon as you think you understand how to do something, try it on your website. Pretty soon, you'll find you know enough to learn by doing, reading tutorials, etc.

What you want to avoid, whether you choose method 1 or 2, is the idea that you can write your first lines of code as a useful part of a real project. To learn effectively, you have to be willing to implement some examples, experiment, and throw some code away.
Both? Many books have coding exercises in them and I find it very difficult personally to retain all the knowledge I’ve glanced over in a book and be able to apply that in execution without having done any coding in-between.
You are missing the most mysterious domainer of all time. Google "Yun Ye"
Does BankSimple have it embedded anywhere past the login?

Hint: you don't know.
When programmers can earn an accredited degree and must be granted a license before practicing, we will have earned the right to be called "engineer".

Until then, using the title "Software Engineer" is a bit like a man who plays Warcraft all day calling himself a "Raid Engineer".
What we are looking for here is something like an Instapaper for email. I often open an email - scan in and if I find something important I make this email "unread" again...
But the studies show that for the vast majority of people (that is, everyone except the extremely depressed) antidepressants perform no better than placebo. Doesn't that astonishing fact change things a little?

The only reason we believe otherwise is that for many years positive findings were cherry-picked for publication while negative ones were suppressed. It took a Freedom of Information Act request and years of litigation to get access to the full spectrum of studies, and when they were finally surveyed, the statistical impact was negligible. (Except, as mentioned, for the small portion of the patient base who meet the criteria for severe depression. I don't remember the number.)

Far be it from me to condemn anything that truly helps people, but there is a lot of spin on this topic. Profit motive plus cultural bias is a hell of a double whammy.
How about this:

(i) to compile python into an executable, you must include the entire compiler in the run-time
(ii) this is inappropriate for gcc
This is pretty much a perfect example of an idea so bad, even its creator should have realized it and dropped it before it got anywhere near the implementation stage.
We're talking about using this to get peak performance out of your people. You can take the "everyone should be hard as nails forever or they're not a real entrepreneur"-type of position, but I think this is naive.
Millions of people drive Italian cars every day. Fiat is taking over Chrysler. You'll see modern Italian cars in the US soon. They are not like in the 1970s.
I hope I don't lose my job. Maybe it's time to start saving so we can all ride it out and then save up during the next!
It doesn't matter whether the pressure is explicit or not. If there appears to be pressure, and the company appears to act in response, it sets a precedent and acts as social proof for future actions. It becomes easier for the next company to do what appears to be "expected of them" when the government has qualms about the business they're doing, not even if they expect reprisals, but simply because that's what others do.
Most of the ads I have seen are specifically appealing to Android.. I've been playing Angry Birds a bit and have already clicked a couple of app downloads that look interesting and one for a foldable bluetooth keyboard... I probably have clicked more ads from AdMob than any other ad platform I've seen as they are things I'm interested in.
Supercomputer Use at the BGI in China to Study the Genetic Neture of IQ
The web can be controlled. It's just much harder and expensive to do so.

But what China should be worrying about is whether it can keep controlling the people in general. As the government begins to meet basic human needs, the citizens will start to yearn for higher needs to be satisfied like freedom of information. The government cannot provide that and continue it's authoritarian regime.
It's a constant cycle of learning and applying. You can't retain the knowledge without actually doing the coding. I'd say, read enough to know the basics (maybe chapters 1-2?) and then jump into your IDE and code away, then when you hit the knowledge wall go back to the books and continue the cycle. I guess my main point is that 1 and 2 go hand-in-hand. hope this helps!
Most software developers aren't computer scientists for the same reason most accountants aren't mathematicians and most engineers aren't physicists.
Barnes & Noble releases SDK for the NOOKcolor
I would've linked to the original article, but it is behind a paid wall.
That would be interesting- but I think this is something that should be built into mail apps natively. The way people are using email has evolved past it's current functionality.
Check out this concept for a chatroom I cloned.
Oh please. Apparently our memories are very short. Foursquare raised $20 million with 27 employees? Big deal. Pets.com got $300 million. Webvan raised $1.2 _BILLION_ dollars. Remember when everyone was GOING PUBLIC without even making as much as a dime?

This was when the average web server was $25k and 1/25th as powerful as what we're buying for $4k now. This was back when you needed millions in Oracle licensing to run and scale an ecommerce business. Bandwidth costs were fifty times what they are now. This was when businesses spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lavish parties. Flooz spent $8 million (out of it's $35m) just on TV advertising. Pets.com spent $1.2 million on _ONE_ superbowl ad. Now that's the stuff!
wow my server is crap!!!!!! but yeah it's a Marvell SheevaPlug
This is not a happy situation for the intermediary service providers for a variety of reasons:

1. They are not in business to be martyrs for a cause or to take unnecessary risks unrelated to their core business goals.

2. This piece correctly points out that the media cannot be subjected to prior restraints in publishing protectable speech. However, the 1971 New York Times (Pentagon Papers) case left open the obvious possibility that they might be prosecuted criminally after-the-fact and the law is such today that the sort of activity engaged in by WikiLeaks may readily be punishable as a crime (the thorny issues associated with this are nicely discussed in this even-handed piece from Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2276592/).

3. The furor surrounding WikiLeaks does not begin and end with one senator. The Justice Department, the Pentagon, and the Obama administration generally have indicated that they desire to find a way to punish this conduct if possible and are actively investigating ways to do so. This is not to mention that the overwhelming majority of politicians of all stripes have condemned it. Now, whether they are right or wrong, protectors of the country or boneheads out to suppress civil liberties, this has the feel of a lynching about to happen. And even those who vigorously support WikiLeaks must concur that they are operating in and about the edges of the law. Yes, there may be no violation of the 1917 Espionage Act occurring because the motives of Mr. Assange do not meet the statutory test for a criminal act, and, yes, the Act may not technically apply to the activity here, and, yes, the Act may be unconstitutional if tested all the way up to the Supreme Court in this sort of case, . . . but why would you want your company to be part of the test case? (My guess is that many of the principals behind Amazon, PayPal, etc. actually find themselves in sympathy with the spirit of WikiLeaks but that they are not allowing any such sympathies to color their business decisions). I would sum this point up by saying that mainstream companies do not want to find themselves aligned with high-profile situations skirting the edge of the law. Call it "turning tail" but I don't know very many responsible executives who would decide the issue differently (strictly from a business point of view).

4. Regardless of business factors, it does look bad for these businesses to be caving to political pressure. They can technically justify their actions on grounds that the WikiLeaks activities may violate their terms of service (whether or not they are in fact criminal, if the highest criminal enforcement authorities in the nation are on a concerted campaign to determine that they are, the service provider is in no position to second guess this). In spite of this, the appearance is one of caving on a point where the provider could, if it elected, choose to stand its ground in favor of principle. Thus, whatever the reality, it certainly looks cowardly.

Ergo, a no-win situation for these service providers. I know many in the HN community are outraged over their actions but I think the case is more complex than typically assumed.
"Sorry, it's not despicable for investors to focus on their investment and not the personal problems of founders."

The question being begged is whether these two things are positively, negatively, or un-correlated. That has a whole lot to do with the logic of making the investment in the first place.

So, setting aside the "despicable" question, is it rational to invest in a startup where the founders have tons of credit card and student load debt, or planning a wedding they can't afford right now, without also putting some money into alleviating that pain? Do crushing financial burdens make founders "hungry," "panicked," or somewhere in between?

I think those are more interesting questions.
and using wordpress with all those damn plugins isn't really helping either
It's true China cannot absolutely filter the web. However the majority of the people won't bother with VPN. China doesn't need to make dissident ideas absolutely contained to be effective. They just need to make it sufficiently hard for those ideas to spread.
I agree completely. :-)
10 seconds until first response, 23 seconds until completely rendered on mbit connection in NV.
To enable multiple voting:

votedIds={length: 0, push: function(){}};
That appears to be a VPS provider, not a VPN. And it costs more than 0.02$/hour on demand.
I worked for IBM years ago. I remember signing their IP contract on the day I started work, while my manager explained to me "it doesn't matter if you're vacationing on the moon -- if you invent something while there, it's ours".
Travian plx
I'm not really sure this is HTML5. Looking at the source code, you don't see many of the hallmarks of HTML5. There HTML tag itself is distinctly XHTML 1.0 Strict, and the lack of any true HTML5 tags (e.g. SECTION, NAV) imply to me a hybrid -- a platypus, if you will. They do, interestingly, use HTML5 data tags.
I'm not sure what you mean by "frontend" so I'll make a wild guess.

Start with some lightweight tutorials about creating web pages (static content):
http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

Creating dynamic content (programming) is a whole different issue ( http://norvig.com/21-days.html ).

Start with learning procedural programming:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/html/

And then experiment with a simple web framework:
http://webpy.org/tutorial3.en

The learn workflow shold be a combineation of:
read some -> do some -> try some -> read some more -> experiment some -> read some -> continue

This is just a startingpoint, there are many topics to web development, from javascript for interface interactivity to distributed systems, message queues, scaling ( I'll write this link again just for kiks http://norvig.com/21-days.html ) etc.,

The resources are for the Python language, personally I prefer Ruby, but the resources for "learn programming" are more evolved in Python as it has bean adopted as a teaching language by many schools/universities.

PS. Exercise oriented: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
Accidental upvote, no undo. PG probably thinks it's clever to try to force people to be more careful before voting. It's not.
"The whole investment is predicated on the idea that you're going to make their numbers."

Serious question: at that point what is the qualitative difference with being an employee with lots of stock options? Isn't the point of being an entrepreneur that you get to drive the bus?
Is it? Doesn't that mean that you can't do any other work for anyone (e.g. contracting, startups, side jobs) while you're working there? That seems wrong.
This concept irritates me. You basically can't create things on your own if you work for a company? I just completely disagree with these kind of no-compete things.

That said, I also think it's silly to sign a contract that states this as a condition of employment. I've walked away from a couple of consulting opportunities in the past because of contracts like this, but gotten a few others because I just politely asked if they would strike out that part of the contract.

I understand wanting to protect your own intellectual property, but I think it's sleazy to claim ownership of things people do on their own time. It's right up there with "no competing with us for 2 years after we fire you" clauses.
I wanted to agree with you, and I'm only on Facebook because of non-geek friends, but I survive with twitter, newsfox (Firefox plug-in), and tumblr -- sometimes sharing via dropbox. Buzz is, unfortunately, a vacuum. And Google Reader for some reason doesn't quite work for me over Newsfox.

I agree that Facebook is horrible, in many ways, and hasn't progressed much at all in any useful or meaningful way (for HN-type users), but Google, while having the tools, needs to apply them better to win over the market.

Hell, I'm desperate to lead my non-geek chums over Facebook's horizon, but Gooogle's apps aren't there yet. Heaven only knows why, though :-/
The only possible way I can see this redeaming itself, is if the author comes out and claims that it is a joke. Meant to be a parody of other karma systems.
looks cool to me.
This is funny - people are slowly forgetting that our computers are cabable of running software other than the browser.

Imagine a future where your typical homeuser buys her computer from a browser company. Instead of buying Macs or PC's, instead of IBM's or HP's, people go and buy a Firefox terminal, or an Opera terminal, or a Safari terminal.

Ofcourse, the computer could run any browser, but the browser is locked into it and starts automatically on start up. Kinda like how people are buying Vodafone cellphones these days. Vodaphone doesn't make the phone, Nokia or Samsung does, but Vodaphone has it's SIM-card locked into it. The phones could just as well be sold without a SIM-card so you could buy one yourself from any phone company, but it's just more handy and easy this way.