skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am reminded of this footnote in Feynman's Lectures on Physics:

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
I agree about simplicity.

But you have a missunderstanding.
You do should not have a page about weight loss. It should be about fatloss.
% Fat is minimum.
1. Do something wildly impressive.

2. Generate a corpus of quality output that is public and can attract eyeballs.

3. Get someone to believe in you, and use that to launch yourself further.
I agree, and TBH - I like being able to scroll through hundreds of comments (at most) to skim what I am interested in. It's much more difficult to do that when comments are hidden.
Good call! I'm familiar with Demand, but didn't realize it extended past blog posts to copy/pasting google maps entries.

I agree with you on the organization partnership. It really surprised me when I saw it, and the content never actually gets surfaced to their homepage. I was googling for my business' name to see where we came up in search (note: the link I posted is not my business) and was surprised to see it surfaced on the second page of results.

Super shady, especially coming from Lance :\
I am surprised by the fact that arrington allowed an article that criticizes tehcrunch for being hype machine (which it is).

I doubt arrington views that as a bad thing.
What I'm tired about reading are these startups who actually have invented no technology whatsoever, being called innovative technology companies.

Qwiki didn't invent the Text-to-Speech system they're using. And they didn't create any of the content. They made a flash file that plays back audio and video -- a technology they also didn't invent. What is remarkable is that technology investors (even really rich ones like a Facebook co-founder) are investing money into things that aren't even technological innovations at all. It's like even they don't know the difference.
There's also a bug with the feature: it's easy to end up "orphaned" on a page of comments, with no way back to the article.

Just a few moments ago, I replied to a reply of a comment I had made earlier. I got to that comment via the 'threads' link in the top bar. After I submitted my reply, I was taken to what normally would be the main article comment page, but in this case was some kind of limbo page of comments, seemingly unattached to an article header.

It was basically a 'more comments' page, except without the means of getting to the prior page.

(Specifically, it was this page: http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=6St6XsAdgY - and I don't even know how durable that link will be, as it seems to identify a closure, I would guess.)
Prety cool, let me know the URL when you're done...
Ah, I agree with you on that.
I tend to think that this piece was posted so that TC could masterfully play both sides of the Quora debate, thus keeping it alive and us talking about both.
In the same vein: http://lesswrong.com/lw/oo/explaining_vs_explaining_away/
Getting screwed works both ways. I know I'd uncomfortable paying the final invoice before receiving the final source code deployed and working. What's stopping the developer from never quite getting around sort out the final deployment after I've handed over all my money. I know people who've experienced more or less just that.

Perhaps there is a market for some sort of third party source code escrow service, for software contractors.
QDB Latest (funny) bash quotes
Is Sunday and here you have some nice quotes about C++, ruby
and others can be found on the following url ->
http://bash.org/?latest

http://bash.org/?928788 :

#928788 +(364)- [X]

R4V: I really want to learn some C++

R4V: but the problem is

R4V: that there seems to be months of learning

R4V: before you can do ANYTHING usefull.

Shrum: it's kind of like a highschool girlfriend
Hmmm... problem with the two columns is my android phone, and my partner's iphone. We don't want to have to rejig things.

The check box is literally going to arrive in a few minutes... do tell us what you think?...
プレミアムパヒュームストーリア口コミ・評判・効果なび。
Actually my hiring policy was ridiculous.

Because I was "too busy to bother", I'd just ask my current employees if they had any friends that needed work.

Someone always did, so I'd say, "Tell them to start tomorrow morning. $10/hr. Show them what to do." And that was that.

To be fair, this was a mail-order CD store, so most of my employees were in the warehouse. But I even did this same approach when I needed a CTO. ("Anyone have a friend who's good with Linux? Yeah? Is he cool? OK - tell him to start tomorrow.")

But maybe that they were friends-of-friends helped with the trust part.
Apple's diabolical plan to drive traffic to iFixit
They also are asking to post for you:

iAssociate 2 may post status messages, notes, photos and videos to my Wall
I think he was talking about the rest of the OS.
Well, better to have a troubled start due to insufficient DNS testing than having hosting/DNS issues along the way. You probably should’ve just waited with getting the word out (>72 hours after the DNS change), but eagerness/enthusiasm is understandable—even if not necessarily desired at all times ;)

I'll be keeping an eye out on how it goes, and should we deem it reliable enough later on, we'll link to it from the Modernizr site. Feel free to let me know at some point in the future when you feel you've resolved all issues.
Is this anything other than a product launch announcement with a misleading title?
A Crazy Entrepreneur's Online Database of Every Single Object In the World
I think FF needs a way to benchmark extensions.

It's true, without SSD, FF3.X cold-start is not what it should be.
However, many users do face an interesting dilema. They complain about slow startup time, and at the same time, call themselfs power-users with 10+ extensions, which makes it hard to switch browsers.

The recent Skype-disaster highlighted the problem of missing extension-benchmarks for the public. I don't know how that could be done, but besides the 5-star ratings, there could be a mozilla-provided performance indicator.

FF4 does improve performance, but power-users will still use the same extensions.
I don't know much about Financial Engineering, but most business fields value experience the most, with degrees being a way to get your foot in the door. Startups are much more flexible, and probably provide a better opportunity for someone who's self taught. I don't think you're going to get very far in GE or McKinsey with a Do It Yourself MBA.

If you're trying to get in on the startup scene, launching a business of some sort, even if it fails, will give you experience that other people will probably find valuable. If you've already been through the process of incorporating a business, dealing with lawyers and accountants, handling marketing on a small budget, etc, I'd think you'd be in pretty competitive position.
I am also very excited to see a CDN for the smaller libraries.

The service seems to be hosted on Amazon which is great and gives me a vote of confidence in using the service. Also very cheap to pull off something like this and with community donations are very possible solution.

It's disappointing to see the propagation errors but I have personally worked with the Amazon back end and CNAME records and recall the same issues when I sent a site live. Hard to test how your site works around the globe especially when third party tools report that its working.
I wonder why hiring isn't done this way more often? Specifically the "friends-of-employees" approach.
He was referring to OSX's UI.
Dupe of:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512930

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594210

I don't mind being reminded to see if there's anything new, though.
There is some confusion there.

His $1 salary is exactly that. A token amount paid by Apple for his work. It cannot be $0, otherwise he wouldn't be considered an employee and wouldn't be entitled to bonuses, stock options, insurance, etc. The fact that he is taking a $1 and tying all of his income to options, bonuses, perks means that he firmly believes his impact to the company will be rewarded - and it has, rightfully so. By taking a $1 salary, you are saying to the shareholders (world) that you believe so firmly in the company, that, you'll earn your income the same way a shareholder would - through the growth in stock price, etc. He does have to pay taxes on personal use of the corporate jets, and other benefits. I can't really imagine his situation being so dire that any social security income he could get would have any material impact on his life. We also don't know what the nature of his contributions were years ago.

Paying too little and taking out too much profit is actually tied to a separate issue. If one runs an S-Corp and is in the typical feast and famine cycle, i.e lots of work, bill lots of money, work slows down, time for lots of sales because there is no work, here comes work again, then, the IRS could say that you took $x+y during the time when you were cash-flush, and $x when you were in your income slump, making $y a dividend and taxed as such. In many cases, dividend income is taxed at a higher rate than personal income until you hit a certain income (I believe $373k/year or so and in 2013, $171k or so). If you earn less than those amounts, dividends are taxed more heavily than normal income.

A C-corp is its own financial entity. It pays its own taxes, has a separate tax structure. If you wanted to pay yourself a $1 salary, you could. Then, any money you take out of the company could be taxed as a dividend, you would have to assume 100% control of your retirement, probably wouldn't be eligible for Medicare after you retire, but, there isn't anything illegal there.
Weird that this hasn't been submitted before. The process (and purpose):

You create

1. One or several team groups

2. One or several user groups

You can then proceed to push pre-release builds to TestFlight and have specific groups of users (press, volunteers, friends, iPod/iPhone 3G/3GS/4) try the build, before it's sent to the App Store. Sending a release to the App Store before testing it with a larger group of users can be pretty catastrophic.

As a bonus, you basically drag and drop your .ipa(?) file to the browser, and TestFlight does the rest. The users can then proceed to get the build through TestFlight's HTML5 app.

Before, as I understand, the alternative was to send your app files to people and have them import it in iTunes.
The site-wide quality of answers matters less for Quora to be useful to an individual when you're following people rather than topics. You see answers upvoted by people you follow or answered by people you follow.

Quora will continue to work for the same reasons that Twitter does...I get tweets from people I follow, millions of bieber fans don't affect my twitter homepage.
We're working on benchmarking extensions' effect on startup time:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=623950
The key benefit of hosting common scripts on a single CDN is that everyone who uses a script can point to the same URL, hence dramatically increasing the chance that a page visitor will already have the file in their browser cache and won't have to fetch it at all.

For that to work, you need to be used on a bunch of large sites and hence be serving a lot of traffic - which at CloudFront's rates will quickly become expensive.
This seems a better explanation of "process" than attempted here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131105
I read somewhere "If you are the candidate of work it is difficult to delegate".
My family is taking the brunt of the impact of my project. My 3 kids are a bit older, youngest is 8. My wife is doing virtually all the parenting and household management. My weekends and evenings are written off to coding, but the biggest sacrifice if from my wife and kids.

When you have a family don't underestimate the impact that running a startup has on them.

I only hope this turns out not to be a false economy.
Second that strategy, I've used it to good effect.

One but though, I also found one guy like that that wanted to bring his friends on board when there was a need for more people and they were simply not good enough and this led to him quitting as well.
This is why it’s always better to get some real world testing done, rather than third-party tools. Ask people of whom you know are in various locations around the world to see how fast things are (and if they’re not working at all, that’ll become evident right away). Get data from the grindstone through other people if you can’t get it on your own (e.g. if you’re a small team in only one location).

DNS is a fickle bitch, but it’s also one that is the easiest to take care of before launch: just wait. (though if after 3 days it’s still not working, you messed it up)
I've added the option to hide taken domains. Hope you like it, I went for a checkbox as it could be done more quickly than anything else I could think of but it works reasonably well.
i think thats exactly what it is ;) good game though :p
This is how youtube got most of their initial employees. Since all the core people were from PayPal, the first 100 or so people were pretty much all ex-PayPal. It worked out pretty well for them.
An electrical fire during a test flight in November forced an emergency landing and ground Dreamliner tests to a halt.
… resumed … after the company said it had updated the power systems software and conducted rigorous reviews to confirm flight readiness.

And this is why I'm happy not to be writing airplane code. If the article is correct, the plane's software can cause electrical fires.

"Halt and Catch Fire" rears its head again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of record label executives suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
I'd just like to add that largestmeat.com is also available:

http://nametoolkit.com/registrars?domain=largestmeat&tld...

Might have me that myself :)
Sigh. Tech startups aren't ever about the tech. That's not the point.

Qwiki isn't about panning around images and playing back TTS. I know that wasn't what the developer was thinking, but I find people making this mistake a lot. Thinking of Facebook as a basic CRUD app you could put together, etc.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define:technology

Technology - the practical application of science to commerce or industry

Looks to me like they have applied the knowledge of Text-to-Speech, audio/video playback, content curation, etc. to the practical problem of communicating information.

Innovation is not only doing something new but also using existing knowledge and tools to solve a problem differently.

I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.
The ‘Point’ is Beside the Point
cdnjs.com doesn't obey the Accept-Encoding header - it just serves everything gzipped. This is a limitation of CloudFront when backed by S3 - as of a few months ago it's possible to vary on the Accept-Encoding header through CloudFront but only if you run your own origin server rather than using S3.

The Google Ajax CDN varies on Accept-Encoding just fine.
It seems like the author built a good system for operations that required little of his time, so he could focus on innovation. It's interesting that in order to delegate operations, he had to build a system (or manual in this case) to train people and keep standards consistent.

Derek - I'm curious how you handled innovation. Was it by yourself? Or did you have a team for that?
Investing where others won't
GDP isn't the issue with Africa and the number of Western companies that want nothing to do with the continent.

The issue is the governments like Nigeria are completely incapable of regulating what goes on inside of its borders. In cases like Nigeria, where the "419" scam is actually an measurably significant industry within the country, the scammers are probably in cahoots with the authorities.

Why does e-commerce work in the US? As a guy sitting in New York, how can I comfortably sell goods via the internet to someone in Hawaii or New Mexico? Fundamentally, it's because the US is a nation governed by law, and efforts to defraud are not acceptable.
What did you do to keep the manual clear and organized enough to be useful? Many companies I've worked with have an internal wiki for information like this, but things seem to go south pretty quickly and it becomes hard to distinguish stale content from relevant content.
You can do whatever you want, sure. But don't pretend this kind of actions don't impact the rest of your colleagues.
Mac App Store encourages resumption of development
That's a limitation we have to live with for now, unfortunately. We are looking into rectifying this.
I can't say that this surprises me. Though I don't necessarily share what may be the dominant opinion regarding the guy's character, Lance probably has nothing to do with any of this.
Security is a major issue and it is a top priority for us.
Great point, and a lesson that has already been learned (in a positive way) by the insurance business in England.

Elephant & Castle was once an area in London where you couldn't get insurance easily, if at all.

It took the founder of a business incubator there to call a few friends in the insurance business with the same argument: "how will you ever take advantage of this market if you don't start somewhere? I will do whatever it takes on my premises for you to be comfortable giving me insurance. After you're comfortable with doing business with me, you'll have first-mover advantage in the area." It worked.

Of course, insurance is a slightly more competitive business than online payments.

And I see Oo's point in the addendum too. Running a business is time-consuming. Saying you've identified a market gap so you should start ANOTHER business is patronising and ridiculous. And whether or not there is more fraud from any specific country doesn't excuse the laziness of a policy that unfairly prejudices and overburdens honest businesspeople from that country.
I love the Quake console reference :D
I'm guessing it's because, in sivers' case, he didn't really need extremely skilled labour? Or maybe people just try to overoptimise when "good enough" will do very well.
Most of us draw the line around 5.8.6 or so, given that all major distributions include a Perl at least that new. In fact most of them are at 5.10+ now, with a few notable exceptions.
Modern Mafiosi How does the Mob make a living these days?
Possibly building a java/flash app that will automate the torrent process for music torrents; Getting it is down to grooveshark/pandora level of just "type in artist/song name"?

I'm not an expert in flash and not sure if a flash app would allow a remote connection to a server other than the one where the flash app is hosted. I think some XML file is required on the other server that flash will look for to see if theres a wildcard to allow any domain to connect... I saw an exploit once for twitter or facebook that used this. I am quite positive this could be done with java though.

Basically a torrent client in java/flash that downloads mp3's only. Because mp3 files are fairly small the downloaders not becoming seeders shouldn't be much of a problem (so long as desktop torrent clients grow as the music site grows, which I think it will).

EDIT: I think this is a fairly good and obvious tactic to create the next big thing. Basically take a desktop app and find a way to put it on a website. Eliminating the need to download an app (torrent client in this case) can dramatically increase popularity.
Everywhere I've worked, the first step to hiring a new developer is to ask all the good developers if they have any friends that are also good and interested in work.
Ask PG/HN: "Hacker News" Gold?
HN is the most useful social news site I've encountered. I'm sure I don't feel alone in this. Unfortunately, its resource constraints are becoming an issue, causing changes that aren't necessarily best for the community (e.g. the "more" link).

HN is useful enough that I would readily be willing to pay for my use of it to help offset those resource constraints. I would even be willing to pick up arc and do some "directed" coding to assist (directed because I don't know where the bottle necks are).

So, how can the HN community help: A We Pay account to allow for increased hardware? A re-implementation in Erlang? ;) Anything else?
I'm guessing there is all sorts of online commerce you don't engage in due to the risk of scams. Is that also unjust, due to the fact that your attempts to avoid a scam might deprive some legitimate people of your business?
Exactly. It's not the how it's done... it's the problem being solved and how elegantly the problem is being solved.
The innovation was really just me.

It was usually just looking at places where our operations were very un-optimized or ineffective, and figuring out a way to do it better.

That better way usually meant me programming some new aspect to the site, or our in-house intranet systems that ran everything. But sometimes it led to a whole new public-facing feature.

Examples:

http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/02/14/3035318.html

http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/12/31/3116514.html

http://cdbaby.org/stories/06/07/31/4461455.html
Companies don't have a moral responsibility to do anything, but they have fiduciary ones to their shareholders. If a significant amount of harm was being generated from Nigeria, it's easy to understand why the country is cut off.
Actually, the new people learning it would clean it up.

If they found anything hard to understand, we'd apologize and ask them to make it easier to understand for the next person.

Since they had just felt the pain of it being unclear, they were in the best position to fix it.
I have no idea. But if I'm Paypal, I do what's in my best interest, and that doesn't include helping out the people of Nigeria. That's up to the Nigerians.
friends of employees have been my best hires. My very best employee was a friend of an employee who was looking for work. he ended up being better than the people I had known and worked with in the past.

Random chance, maybe? but I think it works better than people think. I think employees put more thought in to it than we give them credit for when they are asked for recommendations. Don't we all know that one person who is really good but unemployed because s/he isn't very confident?
More like the scene at the end of 'Return' where all the artists are dancing around a funeral pyre with the RIAA board on top
You can fix it by running an nginx somewhere that serves the files, then setting your CloudFront distribution to point to that.

... of course, then you'll need to make sure the nginx server is properly redundant.
We just got a bang operator on duckduckgo for our new domain name generator. Awesome.
Here's a blog that I ran into a while back. Lately the updates have been few and far in between. But it's still an interesting read.
http://raising-a-psychopath.blogspot.com/