skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found this set of tutorials to be a great resource for picking up many machine learning methods

http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/

Somewhat complementary is this set of implementations (in Python) of many common machine learning techniques

http://www-ist.massey.ac.nz/smarsland/MLbook.html
Read Steve McConnell's Code Complete. This book takes you from apprentice to journeyman.
The amount of entitlement some people feel from the authors of free software is quite surprising.

It's twice as bad when those people are pirates. Honestly, I don't have a big problem with people pirating our software, especially when they probably can't afford it (young teens etc.) but they certainly don't deserve to get our time and support for free as well.
Non-techie checking in.

As an outsider, this diminution of the non-techie into the "sales and marketing" box seems pervasive throughout the hacker network. And a bit dangerous. Is is not I, the non-techie, who is responsible for your sacred traction, which is required so that you may be crowned a success?

Perhaps I've other contributions, relevant to the actual product you want me to sell, that might be of value.
Read lots of books to understand how expert programmers think about problems. (SO and other sites don't qualify as this as they as they are focused on "How do I do X?" which is a completely different thing -- mostly trivia)

Pair program/code review to learn what you're doing wrong.

Teach it if you want to really know it. PG's idea of writing a book is great, but I've found the interactive nature of hands-on teaching really makes me grok something. Writing, for me, helps me organize my thoughts, but coding is something you never do "perfectly" -- the goal is to solve a problem for real people, not create the perfect mathematical construct -- so I'm much more interested in how different personality styles and moods approach problem-solving in a language more than I am the details of the language itself.

Each of these works at a different level: strategic, quality-control, and tactical. Depending on personality type, folks have a tendency to get hung up on one level or another -- as if learning all the syntax of a language or how to use the IDE is the same as mastery -- but for me I've found I need all of them in equal parts.
There's no sales pitch here.

> I was civil, and I was marking the post for what it was. I've gone out of my way to explain my opposition to this charlantry and instead you saw it as an opportunity to paint me as unhinged, rather than merely concerned about the community.

I actually think you're sincere. At first, I thought you were just trolling - y'know, when you insult me personally without addressing any of the points in the article, I think that's kind of uncool.

But you just replied with your reasoning - if you want better writing on business and entrepreneurship from me, maybe I can do that. I'd like to write better. But can you be more specific than desiring more "Substance"?

What does more substance look like? More stories/anecdotes? Statistics? Context? More tactical stuff, like which terms of a contract are important to negotiate over and which aren't?

If you'd like me to step my game up, hey, maybe I can. I believe you're sincere about wanting a better community here, more resources for people to break from the corporate world and do their own thing. Me too. So, I'll listen to your feedback. What's more substantial writing look like to you?
>I can't comment on the quality of the application, because for some reason that I can't understand it doesn't seem to be available for non-US iPad owners. Well, not in the UK at any rate.

It's coming to the UK "soon" according to @daily.

Content seems to be pretty heavily US-focused, and as it seems to be (at least in large part) a gossip rag, it was decided against shipping US gossip to rest-of-world customers.
Context is important here.

Bruno was saying that Google are the gatekeepers of V8 and that if they didn't plan to support server side use of V8 that it'd be hard to contribute to the official codebase. Jason said that not only did Joyent have many V8 committers but additionally they've worked with the Google guys to submit real contributions. This would mean that any contributions they make in the future are far more likely to be accepted due to both the quality of work and the previous credibility they built up with the Google V8 team.

Simply put you're a lot more likely to accept a large feature patch from someone you know and has contributed previously than from someone who doesn't contribute. He doesn't mean to say bug reports have no value if there's no patch.
But making money is one of the most fun and meaningful games out there. You can make many people happy with the money you have, you can make your life better, you can travel to new places.

If you win your fantasy football league a million times, nothing changes. If you win at the entrepreneurship game 20 times, your life becomes a whole lot better.
You're letting the lack of requirements blind you. Depending on who you are, there's 2 ways to fix it:

1) Write some requirements! Clarify in your mind where the project is heading both in the short-term and the long-term. Agile-style user stories is one way to do both of those.

2) Start with the basics. Get the Rails framework set up. Get the DB set up. Start writing the schema. Etc. Once you've got the basics of every app (mvc, authentication, ACL, etc) then move on to what makes your app unique. Start with things that will provide benefit for you or your customers.
Just out of curiosity, have you thought about going the academic route and publishing your research in a journal, or presenting it at a conference? You're likely to get more attribution for it that way, I would have thought.
where's the app that gets linkedin data and renders this?
Just because two things sound alike does not mean they have related origins. I am reminded of this incident: http://www.adversity.net/special/niggardly.htm

I am not saying you are wrong. I am only saying that I have no idea if the writers of the TV series had any knowledge of such myths and drew upon them -- even unintentionally -- or if someone sat down and played around with sounds until they found something "alien" sounding. I had never heard of what you are talking about until you brought it up and I am fairly well read and have had middle-eastern friends. If I had any awareness of such myths prior to making my earlier post, I am sure I would have made some effort to clearly indicate it was a sci-fi reference in order to avoid confusion. As far as I knew, there was only way to interpret the word "magog".

I imagine quite a lot of Americans have no knowledge of these mythologies, which would be good reason to borrow from them as inspiration for sci-fi: It's adequately foreign and unknown that it is "alien" to the general public here and there is rich material to draw upon if you get stuck, material that is sufficiently unknown that most people won't realize you drew on anything and will think you are just really, really creative. I have heard that Japanese fiction often draws on Christian mythology in a similar manner, which makes for some misunderstanding if it later gets translated to English and marketed to the "western" world.
- Should it be out of service for a short time, it'd be disrupting my workflow.

- Should it be out of service for a long time, I'd have to move to a different server and risk losing contacts that only know me by my github name/URL.

- Most importantly: On my server I have repos that are more open that 'private' but less open than 'public'. E.g. I hand out invites to a repo to attendees of a meeting. Or I limit by location using geo-IP.
ooh, very cool. I like it!
Show HN: cofoja-like's contracts for Javascript - my weekend project.
I saw cofoja (http://code.google.com/p/cofoja/) yesterday, and realised it would be good to be able to code like that, but since I spend my days doing mostly Javascript I wouldn't get to use it. So I've basically just ported it across. It's just an afternoon's work so it's probably incredibly bug ridden - don't even consider thinking about using it for real production code!

There are some other libraries that do the same thing for Javascript, (http://www.cerny-online.com/cerny.js/ http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/weirdal/archives/016921.html and one also called jsContract (oops - - looks like I might have to change my name...) http://kinsey.no/projects/jsContract/)

The difference with these is they all expect you to call a special library within your functions. My library takes the cofoja approach, where you keep your function the same, but wrap it up with annotations that specify the contracts. You can even turn contracts off completely, by setting a variable.

It has some tests there, but they aren't in jsUnit - I'll do that tomorrow. My next step is to put contracts on each of its own functions, just to prove it works.
Mobclix was acquired by Velti last year for <50M. So Seedcamp has had an exit.
Not sure where his comment's gone, but wzdd correctly pointed out you can scroll this (and any other seemingly unscrollable area) using two fingers, as with a multitouch trackpad.

But I totally agree with you. Not only is it not possible to scroll without the two-fingers trick (which I didn't know about until now, despite being a pretty advanced/heavy iOS user), it also scrolls really jumpily.

But the hypocrisy shouldn't detract from the merit of the article: his points are well-made and correct.
Although the article suggests the methods are the problems and that they should change them (e.g. the removal of the carousel and introduction of greyscale thumbnails), but actually these aren't necessary: some iOS developers have taken it upon themselves to improve the daily, and have come up with the following: Loren Brichter (Tweetie/Twitter) optimised the carousel [1] and Jonah Grant optimised page turning [2].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C6s9BLyur4

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IHOCFb_hDE
And yet I've never seen a recruiter ask for anything but a Word document; this seems to be significantly because they then strip off your contact details and put their own header on it, mangling your carefully thought through presentation....

I do wonder what ueful place recruiters still have in the process; they often seem to be providing a service that amounts to little more than running an advert and forwarding emails so why are they so highly paid for a variant on secretarial work?
Mobclix (SC 2008) http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/30/mobclix-acquired-by-mobile-... (50M+)

And one small acquisition: Talasim http://www.thenational.ae/business/media/jeeran-acquires-tal... (1M)
I'm not sure LinkedIn has quite this much information, but after a short search -

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiekite
I'll read it later...
Alnayyir,

If other non start-up hackers don't like advice such as this (business advice, which seems to be what you're saying), perhaps the problem is with them and not Lionhearted? They should be able to understand that it is a valid viewpoint and a general truth that these things exist, are useful, and are neutral in nature, and it doesn't make sense to ignore it.
Ask HN: Examples of this marketing / sales pattern?
One piece of advice that pops up on HN and elsewhere is that it is easier to sell to companies than to consumers (or that it is easier to sell at a sustainable price, anyway).

Assuming that's the case, are there any examples of selling services intended for consumers to other companies who can then bundle it as part of their service to consumers (to make their own offering more attractive)?

My hunch is that this pattern must work in quite a few situations. You can't easily sell after-dinner mints to people leaving a restaurant, but you can sell them to the restaurant to give to people on the way out / with the bill.

It's similar to white-labelling, but that's not exactly what I mean, as there would be no reason for the company to pretend that they are the ones delivering the service. It would just be an added extra to help them make sales / make their customers happier, etc.

So my questions are: (i) is there a name for this approach; (ii) what are some good examples to study; and (iii) in what situations does this tend to work / not to work?
True, but that mainly helps when it's the body of code that provides the key value, like in a large engineering project of the Linux-kernel variety. If it's the idea and algorithms that are valuable, and the code is a fairly straightforward implementation, then someone can just reimplement it and there's no GPL violation (subject to some gray areas). The only thing that could really keep that from happening is: 1) keep your methods secret; or 2) some variety of software patent.
Ask HN: Any Product Designer In HN
I was wondering if there are some product engineers in HN?
TheKnot
I like ZeroMQ but this slideshare doesn't deliver any substance at all. For an overview, skip it and check out the white paper (if you can call it that) cowritten by the same guy (Pieter Hintjens) instead:

http://www.zeromq.org/whitepapers:multithreading-magic
Are you a charlatan, martyr, or hustler? A geometrical illustration
That's absolutely brilliant. Everyone should see this, it explains a tricky concept really fast. Just submitted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185510

(I think most martyr-types won't like it though...)
Also, for those who are working a day-job in addition to the stuff they're doing on the side, there's something freeing about being able to write OSS stuff outside of business constraints

That's a big part of my reason. If I'm already working a day job, there's something freeing about not having to worry about whether my side project makes any money or not. Just do what I think is a good idea, release it, done.

Actually I do that for writing also. I spend a bunch of time writing Wikipedia articles, writing answers on various question forums, posting on HN and Slashdot, etc., when in theory I could probably find some way to monetize my writing. But writing a Wikipedia article on something I find interesting is an enjoyable hobby, while figuring out how to start a website with similar content that I could monetize feels like it'd be more of a job.
Credit to "nedwin" for sharing this in the other thread -

> So true. I have this print framed above my desk at work:

> http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/

A really good quick way to grok a tricky concept.
Top copyright-law tips for online developers (PDF - see page 9)
Ask HN: What are my chances of getting accepted to YC?
I was just introduced to this wonderful site a couple weeks ago. I gotta say this is such an amazing resource and thanks to everyone for sharing their insights.

I'm a designer working in the entertainment industry, but I've always been an entrepreneur at heart since I was a kid. Like most entrepreneurs, I'm really good at what I do, but I've always felt confined working for someone else on someone else's projects.

A couple years ago. I stumbled across an idea that I just couldn't resist passing on. With very little knowledge in hacking, I knew I couldn't do it myself and had to hire some help. Long story short, I took a good 2 months studying the structure and the knowledge I need to communicate with hackers and designers. After that, I went on to an outsourcing site and hired a phenomenal team to build my product together. It was a great experience, learning all aspects of the trade from doing the actual design to managing a small team of developers remotely. After months of development, we're almost ready to push the product out to closed beta, and I'm very excited with the work that I've done so far.

So I guess my question is, does YC accept founders with no programming / business background? What if I have a working prototype and a good profit model to prove that I can put a project together from start to finish?

I know eventually I will have to find a technical co-founder or hire a local hacker but that's really out of the question until i can secure more funding.
This article is a significantly less bad than most, but still suffers from the ol' "depressed people should simply try to be happy, then the whole depression-thing isn't actually that bad" fallacy of mental illness.

If you're hard-wired to be impulsive and have a knack for viewing things in a negative light, it is in fact incredibly hard to get rid of such behavioral tendencies simply by "getting off your butt, man." Similarly, all these hints and tips implicitly require the very quality they try to instill. Works for mild cases, but has little bearing on genuine pathological procrastination. (See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_M%C3%BCnchhausen)
are you looking for designers or enginners? most product designers handle the visual styling and the functionality of the objects only.
I hadn't thought of it that way. Thanks for the clarification.
Maybe the thing we see here is not "contagion" but "critical-mass".
I can recommend watching Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man in which he ran 43 marathons in 51 days for the charity Sport Relief.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m3z1f
This is the order I learned web development - I think it should be broadly applicable:

1. Static website dev - modern HTML(5) & CSS http://www.http://htmldog.com/

2. Scripting HTML and CSS - Javascript (use standards based browsers only - avoid JQuery/libraries at first) http://javascript.crockford.com/

3. Intro Server side programming to template HTML pages - PHP (easy to grok for beginners - combine previous lessons with some simple dynamic data) http://php.net/manual/en/introduction.php

4. Intro to SQL - MySQL (give them the basic CRUD commands and show them how to hook those up with PHP) http://code.google.com/edu/tools101/mysql.html

5. Cross browser Javascript with the help of JS Libraries - JQuery http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials

6. Using XML/JSON Web Services - Last.FM API (its a simple REST interface - avoid OAuth complexity) http://www.last.fm/api

If you covered all that in a semester, you would have some semi-competent (there's always more to learn) web developers. Good luck!
You're right, it's a plan for an MVP, not the MVP itself.
I'm not sure how much he learned with a site with 30 users.
The full context from the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185100)

dmg8

> The problem with hiring a hustler with a "knack for getting money" is that

> you might be the one he ends up hustling.

hustlebear-judd

> The problem with the word hustle is that it has a few very different connotations.

> Those who go far have moved beyond street hustling.

nedwin

> So true. I have this print framed above my desk at work:

> http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/
It's free to apply, so you should. Just filling out the app will force you to think about some things you may not have already.

Get a technical co-founder lined up, this increases your odds of acceptance (and overall success) significantly.
It would be all if he was some random English BS major graduate from Idaho. The fact that he has a PhD from MIT in EECS changes the underlying message to a "I am confident/arrogant enough that I'll land a top job despite the goofy resume".
Read the top answers on that page and it's easy to distill down the underlying motivation behind a lot of developers:

Fear.

"All these angry customers will demand support", "Nobody will buy it", "It's not good enough to charge money for." It's all just fear of the unknown, and if they'd take the leap, they'd find that none of those things are true.

The 3rd answer comes closest to explaining why I put some of my stuff out there for free:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/3233/why-do-p...

A good web application with a base of happy people using it, that was clearly built by you and only you, goes a long way towards proving your value for people who might want to do business with you in the future.
Tmobile android phone features
tmobile android phone features
tmobile android phone the sophistication of the android phone motorola ( tmobile android phone feaures )
Yea, I think you're right there.

Although, perhaps we underestimate the scale they deal with. Plus, manually removing sites that are not clearly evil but on the border may become a PR nightmare.
Genius SQL injection?
AppVita - Collection of great webapps
From the UML standard:

The Unified Modeling Language is a visual language
for specifying, constructing, and documenting the
artifacts of systems. It is a general-purpose modeling
language that can be used with all major object and
component methods, and that can be applied to all
application domains (e.g., health, finance, telecom,
aerospace) and implementation platforms (e.g., J2EE, .NET).

object and component methods. The UML comes from modelling for object-oriented software.

Using UML with Functional Programming is like using a hammer to drive screws into walls.
"We’ll fork it. And fork it hard. Fork it like it’s never been forked before"
ZeroMQ is fantastic for low latency communication between processes, but probably not the best choice for building 'actor' based systems. The slides don't really provide much basis for the argument.

Erlang & Scala (for a more object-oriented feel) are both excellent for building actor based systems.
I cannot get through this and someone would like me to read it. Any hope of a summary/tl;dr?

(Or is it as crappy as I think it is?)
I love this comment. I really enjoy node.js but have never really paid attention to Joyent, until now. They have immense respect from me (not that it counts for much) for their candid response and their push for SSJS and node.js
When to Avoid Using A.T.M.’s
Being dismissed as a "toy" is probably the best thing that could happen to DDG right now, and for the foreseeable future. They're searching for an angle against Google, a way in. They may well find one (although it's a tough battle).
Did you consider the content of my post before posting that knee-jerk reaction? The first site is inflammatory, but for our purposes it is just hosting some graphs.

similar graphs, less inflammatory sites:

http://ocw.jhsph.edu/imageLibrary/index.cfm/go/il.imagesByTo...

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/281/1/61.full

http://phe.rockefeller.edu/death/

The CDC addresses the claim of historical decline here:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/6mishome.htm

with this graph:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/images/measles_incidence...

Well, sure, so the measles vaccine sealed the deal, yes. But then you look at the longer timeline, and the vaccination occurred on the tail end of a much longer decline.

Science-Based Medicine has a particularly indignant blog entry on the topic here:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4431

Note the same trimming of the timeline.

I suspect the truth here is that vaccines were indeed effective in the (near-) eradication of most infectious diseases, but these diseases were already in longterm historic decline due to other more instrumental factors, like increasing urbanization and improved sanitation.
Even if you don't apply, I encourage you to start filling out the application as a mental exercise. Starting to fill it out may also give you a better feel for whether or not you really want to apply.
The complaint wasn't that established users could do that, but that they were doing that -- getting in quickly with broad-stroke, nearly content-free answers for placement, then expanding later. It's a good game strategy, but it does put the longer, more detailed initial answers either far down the list (or, if there are enough people playing that game in a particular niche, preventing them altogether).

The main complaint, though, was with the inability to comment. Why add a separate answer when there's one there already that only needs a minor caveat or qualification? Not everybody who wants to contribute where they can is interested in collecting reputation points; comments require fifty rep and edits used to require 2K. Anonymous edits provides that sort of repless contribution opportunity (the rep points would go to the original contributor).

[edited for grammar, perhaps inadequately]