skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that negative experiences are hard to find is probably a good sign.

I can't think of much negative that pg didn't cover in his reply, though I think the size of the batches has grown too large, and is a less effective process because of it. I was surprised to find at the last dinner I attended that there were still groups at the very end of the 3 month period that didn't know each other personally. That blew my mind, as I was on a first-name basis with everyone in our batch by the third or fourth dinner, and the interaction with the other founders was the most valuable part of the YC experience for me.
Peter Shor's Quantum Money: cryptographic protocol for money
Yeah but how did you log into Disqus using Facebook?

I guess the 2008 policy for 4th party widgets isn't in effect anymore?

That's fine, but also... how does DISQUS get around Safari's 3rd party cookie problem? I guess they don't...
That's still partially rubbish, because you don't build technology on top of a fax machine. Many of the technologies at the higher level are directly written in C, and its going to be a while before the C goes away.

I.e.: its like a world where all our cellphones/email still, under the covers, run over fax, and we still need a fax machine in every house to make this possible. =P

Without people to write the languages in C, and without people to hack on the kernel in C, there will be no more languages, and existing C based languages will get no more features.

The best you can do now is write one high-level language in another, and that tends to be reasonably slow.

Just because you don't understand something, or because you don't know anybody who does, that doesn't mean that technology is disappearing, it just means you're in a selective circle.
Many times when I hear the "programming is very easy" claim it comes from someone who is out of work: "Oh, he say programming hard? Not so! Programming very easy! I do this job for you cheap!"
Talk to an accountant. There is an R&D tax credit in the US which substantially every software business is eligible for. However, the amount of paperwork required to qualify for it and rigorously document how you arrived at the number you quote the IRS doesn't make sense until you're closer to a Fog Creek or 37Signals than to a sole proprietor.

A different option is to use the time you've spent on the project as part of the basis for the IP you're developing, and claim a non-zero basis when you sell, thus reducing the amount of capital gains taxes you have to pay versus having a cost basis of $0. Again, this gets heady quickly: talk to an accountant.

Personally, at my scales, I find it easier to bill clients $10 than to decrease my tax burden by $1.
Then start a new company.

Eight years without going anywhere worth speaking of is time to call it quits, if what you want is a startup. Don't let old mistakes hold you back. I shutdown a seven year old business after its most profitable year in existence in order to start Virtualmin, because I made a rational assessment of where things were going and could see very clearly that the previous business would never be the business I wanted it to be, and because it had such a long, slow-climb, history, raising money for it or bringing in new partners would have been a challenge that new startups don't face. Unproven is better than "proven to grow slowly" for investors and entrepreneurs.
Immigration to US | Immigrations in USA | USIS US Immigration Services
USIS (U.S. Immigration Services) is a joint U.S. Immigration, U.S. office, based in HCMC, resettlement specialist consultants, investment in the United States, support for green card, Visa (K-1, K -3, EB-5), the guarantee of their relatives...
It can be done but it is a little bit of pain. There is a need here for a cross platform keyboard lib for js.

Also Chromium goes full screen just fine. Don't actually see too big of an issue with either.
I recognize how important marketing is. What makes me curious, is why has accessibility done so much to help independent developers, but so little to help independent authors?
> anti-social retards

> I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms

That actually sounded pretty condescending to me.
Am glad HN allows re-posting. I'd have definitely missed this wonderful article. I've read so many articles on leadership and this is one and probably one of the few that I've found meaningful along with Ed Catmull's story at Pixar and Jack Welsh's autobiography.
While it's true that Tweets and facebook messages are distracting, it's also true that these are the sources of some of the best available information today. If we learn to tune ourselves not to be distracted,and rather focus on a couple of tweets or facebook messages that we want to or find interesting, that might probably be the best way to stay focused and imbibe all the other qualities that this article has put forth.
That's most likely an American bias. In Europe, it has been followed quite heavily, especially of course in France: Tunisia is very close to Europe, and there are strong ties between several European countries and Tunisia (political and economical).

It is also the only country from Northern Africa ("magrheb") which is secular, with all the ensuing geopolitical consequences w.r.t. terrorism of islamic ideology. That's one of the main reason why European union supported Ben Ali quite heavily (EU represented 2/3 of international trade for Tunisia).
The same thing as when people say that teaching is not demanding.
Shouldn't using something sensing the movement of a mouse cursor be enough as a captcha? If no mouse movement is detected, fall back to a text input captcha.
I apologize up front for my possible ignorance, but maybe you could use a service like Twilio so that people could text message you questions. Then have it notify you via the screen when a new question comes in, so that you can address it at your convenience? It would take some time to set up, but that would definitely impress me if I were an interviewer, knowing that you made your own question&answer system!
Deal of the Day: $129.99 Spy Gear Spy Video TRAKR Robot for $75.88 Shipped
They'll gain more users by reducing options which make things less confusing than they'll lose because they didn't give fine grain control.
Poll: working class or professional?
Perhaps (probably) it's my personal bias, but it seems to me one predictor of "success" is one's family background.

Statements such as "My father was an anesthesiologist"[0] put me off reading narratives of a person's success, because my family background is borderline working/welfare class so I feel pretty much doomed to mediocrity at best.

So, what's your background?

[0] http://www.jeanhsu.com/?p=132
Welfare
Making a superfluous statement is a red flag. In most cases I'd nod and move on.
Page opens, I press TAB to enter the form. Now I have to enter that stupid Captha again. And what about Tablet PC's? I'm not sure there is a lot of mouse movement there. But well maybe It could be enough for a lot of desktop users.
It doesn't necessarily mean that your job becomes marketing instead of art, but even just a bit of connecting with your fans can make a huge difference.

And this is more focused on creative fields, because they have been so widely 'disrupted' by technology. I can download a book from a torrent site, but I can't download a programmer's time at working on a problem (though I could of course download OSS code, but that's a whole other thing).

So books used to make a lot of money (for very few people), now they don't make as much money, but the positive thing is that more people can get in on the action, because the costs of distribution are so much lower. And in this author's case, she's basically ranting about how fans of her books aren't paying her, when she could spend that energy much more effectively by somehow connecting with and cultivating that fanbase. If they like her stuff, they'll probably pay her for something, if not a physical book.
Audi Car Servicing | Nationwide Audi Car Servicing | Audi Car Service
Try explaining being a DBA or a sysadmin - if we're doing our jobs right, no-one will even know we're there.
Why lie, just tell then what you want. If for example you're making 50k, and you want 70k ask for 80k. Usually they will tell you yes or no, negotiate, and tell you what they can afford.
All very nice but based on my 5 year of project management, I'm fairly confident to say that organizing work like this will only be successful with a lot of luck. Every project or every product that gets developed has a moment where "things go wrong"(tm) and having external constraints (like deadlines, backlogs, ...) reduces the risk of failure ... a lot. I'd only try the approach from the presentation if your team is made up out of very disciplined, skilled people with the full benefits and responsibilities of the outcome.
If you get full control of the code base from the ground up, you can often make life easier for yourself (it takes work and continual refactoring, though). What's difficult is when you have to work through other peoples' messes.
Samsung Connected TV Hits Two Million TV Applications Downloads
Effective action: Advice to entrepreneurs from Machiavelli
Exactly. And teams do better when there are different perspectives, different ways of thought. Women have a different set of life experiences, and if we're dissuaded from technology, then the rest of the technology world misses out of those different perspectives. There's nothing better or superior about them, they're just different.

It's not that women should be encouraged because we're women. It's that 1/2 the population often feels (at least to some extent) like outsiders to the field. If there are other groups that feel the same way, then that needs to be dealt with as well. It's just that lack of women tends to be noticeable - in 15 years of software development I've only had 3 other women developers on my team.
Which slide was THAT on?

I'm reacting to slides like: "individuals choose what they want to work on" which is all fine & well, except that sometimes, if we want to ship in time for Christmas, people might have to work on what they wouldn't naturally choose.
That's the theory (and I am a strong proponent of teaching Scheme or Haskell in introductory CS followed by C in a data structures class: Visual Blub#++2EE on Rails is something you can learn on your own when you need it for a specific task), but that's not how it is in practice.

My girlfriend took Berkeley's introductory CS class as an undergraduate. She did well in the class, got an A, but she was really put off by the attitude of many classmates who had prior programming experience and judged her for not having any. It doesn't have to be with programming languages: it can be with things like setting up your UNIX shell, using emacs, ssh etc... something that we take for granted but had to learn at one point or another.

While she didn't intend to Major in Computer Science in the first place, I can't help but think that the environment was almost deliberately designed to make sure that somebody who had great potential to be an excellent programmer couldn't accidentally realize it (much as Jean, the author of the article did). Women who are good at programming still end up deciding against it as a career; on the other hand, many men are horrible at programming, but persist at it.

Interestingly enough, in Russia/former USSR the male:female ratio is in Computing is slightly better (more females) than other technical fields. I am not sure whether that's still the case (I left former USSR in 1996). My mother is a software engineer (she introduced me to Scheme and OCaml, back when you weren't considered a real programmer if you worked in anything other than C++). She had many female colleagues when she worked in a Computer Science research lab (back in the days of [Soviet clones of-] PDP-11s, VAXen and IBM 370s, ATT UNIX, etc... when programming was much more incidentally complex than it is now).
wolly mammoth steak, i can already smell you... yummm...
didn't give a damn one way or the other what their daughters did doesn't mention the word career. I do not know whether that is what was intended, but I interpreted it as "parents not giving a damn about whether their daughters have a career".
The OTOH Firmware (Arduino & Firmata)
Watch the Watson Computer Kick Jeopardy’s Ass
How about, "Knuth submits!"
Man tunnels into GameStop, steals games
But that is a ridiculous thing to say. Should people be banned from programming until college so everyone can be "equal"? It's like whining that you can't compete with an athlete who has been training since they were a kid.
I'm fairly certain their team (or any team like this) has little or no need for a project manager so I doubt they would need to worry about whether or not you would try it.

I realize this comes across a bit snarky but I honestly couldn't think of a better way to say this. I often find people in project management who have little or no trust in the people who actually do the work and that seems to guide their decisions about how the team should be 'managed' or how the work should be planned.

I also find that while deadlines and backlogs seem like something intuitive, in the end the belief that they really have a tangible effect on outcomes seems to be largely anecdotal. Sure it's often a necessary requirement to work with many organizations, but I rarely see any of those organizations actually backing up their process with measurable results.
How do i make an awesome PPT presentation without effort?
It is agreed that making an awesome PPT presentation is difficult unless you are a PPT expert. As PPT is quite popular to present your contents to your audience, how to make an awesome PPT presentation effortlessly becomes a problem to many people. Here i want to tell you how do i make one easily. The recipe is to convert from PDF to PPT.
Wouldn't that basically be a Kindle?
You don't have to work at Google to ask me a question. Just mail me (ian@hixie.ch), I'm quite happy to help people out. Just make sure you read the relevant spec first, since that's where I'll be pointing you (whether you work at Google or not) if it contains the answer to your question.

edit: Or as someone else pointed out, ask on IRC. The #whatwg channel on Freenode is where I mainly hang out.
This wouldn't catch browser based automation, using selenium for instance.
Before I got my first computer I read in some book about the first ever chess program that was written to be executed by a room full of people. Hey I thought, no money, but I do have paper, pencils and time. So one sheet became my 'variables', the other my program and I would run my BASIC programs without so much as a keyboard to touch.

That's not the fastest way to run your programs but things like 'guess a number' are definitely doable.

Shortly after that I got a Saturday job at a local radio shack which gave me access to the real thing.

So it's not necessary to have access to computer hardware at all to learn about programming, even though it certainly helps.
Why does this side load assets from twitter for every page scroll I do?
These are the kids the girls overlooked in school for the jocks... No wonder they're inexperienced.
How to convert Sony MTS/M2TS on Mac?
Step by step description of how to convert Sony MTS/M2TS videos on Mac(including Snow Leopard) with iFunia AVCHD Converter for Mac.
30 Music APIs
24/7 robots are fine, but helicopters are _loud_, particularly those with the lifting power to do construction work. We're currently seeing small proof-of-concept machines lifting small, light parts, but the machines needed to lift useful construction parts will need to be many times larger and heavier, and if they're going to run for any serious amount of time (as would be needed to be useful) then they either need very much bigger batteries or large fuel tanks, which again means extra weight which means more power, more noise and more energy to lift the extra weight of the energy. It's not impossible but it's a vicious, not virtuous, circle.

I relatively regularly have the local police helicopter overhead and it's definitely loud enough to keep people awake, sometimes to wake you up in the first place. A whole fleet of these withing 1/4 mile of you will be loud, noticeably louder than a usual construction crew, and I'm still concerned about the neighbours complaining about the risk of this fleet of robot helicopters crashing into each other or dropping parts. Really, I think this is a very cool tech but a mad application of it that I really can't ever see working.
I don't see another obvious advantage of Redis over Tokyo Cabinet other than the nicer complex data structure support. I use Redis for several projects and for me it serves well. Particularly, I know the limit of Redis and can predict how much memory it will eventually eat up with respect to the growth of site. Besides, Redis has a small code base that I can tinker around (It is c!) which would be nearly impossible for me to tinker around MySQL with confidence. Tokyo Cabinet has a nice code base too, and I liked it a lot but the limitation is: Tokyo Cabinet provides either a simple key-value db (b-tree/hashtable) or a full flee of table-like db. The former one is too simple to actual usage and the latter one is too complex (from my point of view, it is just SQL without parser, I even programmed a SQL parser on top of its table db). For my usage, a document-based db (MongoDB) or Redis which has sorted set/set data structure is enough and since MongoDB is complex in terms of code base too, Redis becomes my first choice.

Although Redis is critiqued for its VM implementation, I found that it is good enough for my specific usage: I have around 2 million or so keys and the workset is about 25k keys average.

Yes, Redis is not a universal solution to everything, and I am a little worried about its current proposal of disk-based system (to me, Tokyo Cabinet's disk op implementation is more mature and antirez should do more analysis on the comparison to Tokyo Cabinet and Berkeley DB since these two are only known k-v based disk DBs that tested in battle field).
That sounds to me like google has a problem, not the googlers.
If it's in JavaScript it's trivial for me to hack on the client side, and if you insist on mouse movements I can just send along a prerecorded array of mouse moves before my request. Maybe even tweak a few every time, so you don't catch on right away. It's more trouble than it's worth.
Nam sai lam nen tranh trong linh vuc kinh doanh
Mỗi ngày lại có thêm nhiều người muốn thành lập công ty cho riêng mình bởi họ muốn trở thành ông chủ và nắm quyền kiểm soát mọi hoạt động trong công ty. Nhưng công việc kinh doanh này không phải lúc nào cũng là một sự lựa chọn đúng đắn.
+1 for "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman". Read it cover to cover in one sitting!

In addition to being one of the greatest minds of his generation, Feynman also had a rich life outside of science.

Reading his stories was as close as I'll come to having him share anecdotes as a guest on my "fantasy dinner party" list.
Modernize Your Kitchen with New Kitchen Appliances
Infibeam provides a convenient means of shopping for homemakers and also for those who are on the look out for resourceful gifts like cookware, dinnerware, nonstickware, tea set, utensils, containers and other kitchen accessories at lowest price with free shipping in India.
One big issue that nobody is talking about here: There is a huge increase in networks using cheap labor to solve CAPTCHAs. A service like decaptcher.com can have humans solve CAPTCHAs at the rate of $2/1000.

At that kind of price, all of the effort you go to to prevent automated signups is useless -- it's just being outsourced to humans, where these counter-measures are ineffective.
> edit: Now that I think about it, my habit of asking "stupid" questions (not only about technology) and the fact that I don't really care what people think of me when I do so have stood me in good stead especially with advancing age.

The only stupid questions are the ones you never asked.

The one thing that would help with this is if people realized that compared to others we're all stupid in one field or another, and probably in plenty of them. So there should be no stigma on asking stupid questions or any questions at all, in fact, most stupid questions when looked at in some detail turn out to be not that stupid at all.

The most frustrating part of asking 'stupid' questions is if the person that you're asking them off tells you to go away because it is a stupid question or because 'you wouldn't understand', typically if someone has a superior attitude towards a subject but refuses to answer stupid questions it turns out in the long run they didn't know quite as much about it as they suggested in the first place.
> As I grow as a developer, I realize that hey, I am really good at what I do and I've gotten to where I am because of that.

3 years out of school and already a big ego :)
Those did indeed exist. My first computer actually only had 16kb of RAM, which was "plenty" given the typical simplicity of applications back then.
Groupon CEO Apologizes For Poorly Executed Offer In Japan
bruben25's posts are remarkable in how they string together phrases that seem coherent in isolation, but when taken together are long, rambly, and impossible to follow. Skimming them, I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about half the time.
This evokes another business idea: airanything.com -- airbnb for everything else.
And later still:

https://github.com/sam-mccall/node-ship

(supports a few more things than just method chaining)
A genuine minecraft fan.
Yes, I did see the same videos. And I still think no wind is a useful simplifying assumption for them, particularly on power grounds.

A constant wind I agree looks like it would be within their capabilities, though their route planning software would need to take account of it and approach the target from upwind by default - not impossible but another thing to account for.

The real issue for me is gusting. They are definitely small and light enough that power-to-weight issues, particularly when carrying a load with a higher surface area to the wind than the craft itself, means that it will get knocked off course by gusts. That obviously needs allowing for when navigating to and from the construction site, but particularly when dropping off a load - if the release comes at the same point as the gust, the part simply won't end up where they wanted.

Do I think all of these problems are unsolvable? No, but it makes a useful simplifying assumption for their version 1 that they don't have to deal with any of them because they're flying indoors.
Real sandbox for  your desktop
Ask HN: Who would you invite to your "fantasy dinner party" and why?
In the spirit of getting to know a bit more about fellow HN-ers and their tastes, I would like to pose the classic question:

Who would you invite to your "fantasy dinner party" and why?

Rules:
1. 5 guests only (excluding you as host)
2. guests can be living or dead
3. famous, infamous and/or "recognisable" guests are preferred (NOTE: It's YOUR fantasy so lesser known guests are accepted, but please provide a short background/description to help readers)

Can't wait to hear your suggestions :)
And if a few of them tried Scheme, then teach Prolog. Nobody knows that ;-)