skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Terrible headline. It took me about 30 seconds to boil it down to "Lessons ... Disrupt ... Launch". And it turns out that this is incorrect. It is really "Lessons From ... Launch", awkwardly noting that Badgeville won the Audience Choice award at TechCrunch Disrupt.
I use Fabric at work, with South for migrations.

One useful technique I've found is to have Fabric deploy to a "staging" install on the target server (we still use SVN). It runs unit tests in that install, and if the tests fail, it stops deployment. If they pass, fabric will then complete deployment to the production server (and run tests again for good measure).

Of course that depends on having good testing practices and coverage, but it helps reduce the number of stupid last-minute mistakes that creep into the repo. Fabric is also useful in numerous repetitive small tasks that you need to run without going through the rigamarole of SSH.

Generally though we avoid running South through Fabric - changes to data schema are run very carefully after backing up etc. South is great, but any migration tool should be used with due care.
For everywhere else the answer to all but the latter is no.

Why should there be a right to food. I understand if there were legal restrictions on all forms of hunting, fishing and home-farming, but there isn't.

I can build my own house. Most countries have provisions that allow you to do all your own electrical, plumbing and everything on your own property with only minimal restriction. However, there is no restriction on fulfilling the basic need of shelter. Here in Canada you can set up a shack anywhere in like 80% of the land so long as you move if loggers (or presumably miners, etc.) buy the land off the government.

I think most countries are a yes for healthcare mostly because they won't let you practice medicine without a license. However, no one can stop me doing my own stitches or providing my own first-aid, it's generally only second-aid (hospital care) that is restricted solely to trained staff.
"...businesses are about people, not about money"

Businesses are about people giving you their money.
Ultimately I think this is very unfortunate. I seem to remember reading that Crytek said that they were releasing Crysis 2 on consoles as well as on PC due to the high piracy the original Crysis had (the original being a PC exclusive, and piracy on consoles being much less than on PC).

Something like this could be the straw breaking the camel's back for Crytek releasing their next game on PC (and I don't blame them).
Thanks for this I look forward to the rest.
You read about these "20 deploys a day" type situations, and it sounds great, and I'm sure it makes VCs all warm and creamy inside. But they're talking about small changes, and not all deploys are small. You can't incrementally change a database engine, for example.

What I would be more impressed by is if they could run tests against a full load of real user input, and have useful/reliable metrics come out the other end. There's no reason for the deploy to fail if you have a real mechanism for testing the deploy. I've yet to hear of a shop of the size of an Etsy that does real production/load testing.
I love mine. I never carry it around, but I use it all the time. I guess I sometimes carry it from the nightstand to the sofa, or to the kitchen, or to my desk to sync. Those journeys are too brief for a pocket.
Kindles allow arbitrary files and have a Webkit browser. I don't see how Amazon is worse than Apple here. Frankly, it is annoying for people to act like Apple is somehow doing people favors by allowing people to use the web and put their own files on their own device.
This looks awfully like a 90% rip-off of Tibia.

Link: http://www.tibia.com/mmorpg/free-multiplayer-online-role-pla...
Cosma was one of my very favorite professors at CMU
What's wrong with Vivek's suggestion that we concentrate on fixing the USCIS, which (nominally but not effectively) already has statutory authority to allow startup entrepreneurs to immigrate here? Doesn't that get us out of the business of encoding in laws what a "startup" is?
Pardon my naivety, but what do you mean by "thatched airplanes"?
This article describes how a volatile variable can be useful when dealing with excess floating-point precision:

http://blog.jagpdf.org/2009/07/avoiding-excess-floating-poin...
Ask HN: Os x hosting
I'm building a service that runs on os x. I'm really enjoying heroku and amazon ec2 for other projects. Ideally, I'd spin up os x instances on their ec2, but they don't have os x as an option. And from what I can tell, VMWare is technically capable of running a virtualized os x, but have been prohibited from doing so by Apple, so I can't even start up a linux instance on ec2 and virtualize an os x server. So I'll need to look elsewhere.

But maybe I missed something. Is there a way to run os x on ec2?

Failing that, does anyone have a recommendation for an os x hosting service?
Steering locks only engage when the key is removed from the ignition, not when the engine is merely turned off.
Video: How to make work-life balance work by Nigel Marsh
I'm pretty much good at only one thing: not giving up. The rest just seems to work itself out.
General Motors: Chevrolet Beat, now available in LPG version
Ask HN: What Did You Learn At Your First Start-up?
Hey everyone, my name is Kevin McCarthy and I co-founded a Boston-based publication called BostInnovation (http://bostinnovation.com/).

I want to put a series together called "What I Learned at My First Start-Up". The premise is simple: have technically-minded folks talk about their first start-up, the technical challenges they faced, the success they had and the mistakes they learned from. I think there is a lot to learn from other's "war stories".

If anyone is interested, drop me an email at kevin at bostinnovation.
I think it's usually a combination of things. This question is like asking "Why do you eat?" ... because you're hungry? because you can? because food tastes good? because you get energy? ... all of the above, but sometimes one more than the other.
This is what Popego used to do: http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/09/popego-tailors-the-social-g...
Yep, after all the tests run. I'm sure you have good test coverage on your payment stuff, right?

Besides, you should have your calls to your payment processor both abstracted and logged, so switching processors shouldn't change the way your application files payments. And you can review the logs to make sure things are still working, too. Which you should do anyway, code changes or not.
Make the code change conditional and push it out off, cookie (or query string or URL) force some users into the new path...

If you don't already have an A/B or multi-variate framework in place, first push the no-effect change to the old code to understand that now it needs to be conditional on XX.

IMO, adding a new payment provider is a logical evolution. If your intent is to turn the old one off, I still believe it's worth the complexity to run them both until you're sure.
I don't see how to reconcile your dismissive comment with the fact this is clearly written in the context of the Linux kernel, where it is perfectly reasonable to talk about "the memory model", imposed by the kernel, not the language. Is there some way you mean to apply your comment to the article, or did you just assume it was a generalized comment about volatile?
Ask HN: Self-marketing?
How much time and effort do you spend on marketing yourself? (Mainly interested in devs)

Do you have a website? Run a blog?

How important is your online presence to building your reputation?
Where there's a will, there's billable hours.
There's no technical reason why that should be so. Google Chrome doesn't make you click a button to update it, or even tell you that it has updated. It just does it.
It's not clear what this means:
a) Amazon has to provide a way of purchasing content via the apple store (and presumably can do so at 30% markup). Meanwhile, books that you purchased to read on your computer, kindle, android phone, etc. is still available to you on your iDevice at no additional charge.
b) Amazon is not allowed to transfer content that the user has already purchased. Users have to repurchase all content through the apple store and the only advantage of the kindle app is if you like the reading experience and syncing with your existing devices.

If it's (a), then ok. I wouldn't purchase through them, but some people might do so for the convenience (instead of starting safari and purchasing it that way).
If it is (b), then as soon as there is a credible android tablet, then it's likely to be goodbye to the iPad for a number of book users. The advantage of Amazon is that while the content has DRMd for the end user, they can read it on a variety of devices. Also, the selection is excellent (not perfect, but for light reading, pretty good). I don't see Apple winning the content war on this one. I suppose Amazon could make a web-based kindle service (again, DRMd) that would could be logged in through one's amazon account and used through Safari. The experience wouldn't be as good, but it would still let people read content on an iDevice and screw Apple.
OS X hosting options are VERY scarce. Your best bet is going to be checking out http://www.macminicolo.net and seeing if they'll suffice for you.

You should carefully evaluate whether or not you truly need OS X Server for what you'd like to do and see if you can migrate your service to a more traditional hosted *nix solution.
Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets
I am curious as to why you need to deploy on OS X.

Is this some sort of service which is tightly coupled to OS X-specific dependencies?
~78% of the talks were in english.
EC2 Micro Instance Fail
Haha, good one. Trust me, I'm a HUGE fan of businesses charging for stuff as I run two B2B apps myself.

Businesses are consisted of people, money doesn't really make the business go round, the people running it do. A business making just money is pretty "soulless." I understand that I might sound like a little weird when I say that, but when they only focus on making $$(which again, is good to a point) they really won't be remembered. A good product is one part of the pie, good support is another and money is the the the oven; That's the mantra I like to follow
Yes, this is true, if you want the President of the United States to advocate for a Total War in the legislature --- one, by the way, which he will lose --- solely for the sake of clearing the way for entertainment content startups.
Networking for dummies
more private more secure. vpn make the network will secure
Asia's New Arms Race
I strongly recommend having a chat widget on your site. At IndexTank we use Olark, and if someone mentions an issue with us on Twitter and we're around we encourage them to come chat with us live. People love the instant response and the quick iteration.
Chamber of Commerce's lobbyists solicited hackers to attack progressive groups
Very interesting article, but I don't think that would apply to the App Store. Selling more copies increases your rankings, which in turn helps you get more exposure and more sales. That's not applicable to the website which offers a service for a monthly fee.
You should use twitter however you please. Yes you can take someone's advice with a pinch of salt, though I do not want to be dictated by "social media" tips. Unless they are outright participating in spam, I think they should go on their own path and experience the success or failure of a certain update. Also since the format is a stream, you can just ignore and let it flow.
What about (not) Burnside's lemma:

If $G$ acts on a set $X$ and $|X^g|$ denotes the number of elements of $X$ fixed by $g$, then the number of orbits $|X/G|$ is given by

$|X/G| = \frac {1} {|G|} \sum_{g \in G} |X^g|.$

The proof is simple, yet you can count an amazing number of things with it.
We are now running Node.JS v0.4.0 - Cloudnode Blog
Continuous Delivery is a great book about how to build such deployment systems and infrastructure (I'm only about a third of the way through it):

http://continuousdelivery.com/2010/02/continuous-delivery/
Actually I learned this myself just this week. Don't fear the binaries in Erlang. You need to learn how they work, and in particular they can surprise you a bit if you don't turn fullsweep on by hanging around in the binary heap longer than you'd expect after all processes are done with it, but you are not doing the runtime any favors by using a lot of "strings" instead. (Fullsweep isn't the only answer either, it's just an easy thing to quickly say in an HN post.)

In Erlang, slices of binaries are by default references to the original, and if you want a true copy (within a single Erlang OS process, sending it across processes will make one automatically of course) you need to ask for it, with binary:copy, available only in relatively recent releases. In the context of where Erlang tends to run, I think this is the correct default behavior, but it does mean that you end up having to do at least a little smidge of memory-management-type thinking. Since your Erlang code is very likely to be something that takes a packet in, does "something", and sends it somewhere else without hanging on to it indefinitely, this can work well as long as you don't leak references.
"Send me an email and I'll check it out. First of all, NO; You should email them, apologize, perhaps offer a discount and send them roses;"

When xXVikingsRuleXx tweets about my product sucking wind, exactly who am I going to email?

I have no problem whatsoever with a company owner asking me in a Twitter reply to email him directly. In all cases that I can remember this happening to me, it has worked out great.
Amazon just closed an entire distribution center in Texas because Texas wanted to take 6.25% in tax. Apple wants 30%? I doubt this will go un-protested by Amazon.
HBGary is in the news again.
I agree that a quantitative background is useful. But you can do a lot without a strong background in computer architecture or operating systems.

That said, I agree that the lack of a CS background leads to holes that need to be filled in the long run. But that is something that can be addressed down the road. It is not a prerequisite.
You found the secret prize at the bottom of the box.
BitTorrent Partners With Khan Academy to Distribute Education
It's great to see the ideas like CI trickle into the that startup world at large, to the point where we have VC blogging about it.

The thing that's amazing to me is that anyone would choose to NOT work like this. If you are web-based startup and cannot do multiple deployments a day, or you don't empower ever last person on your technical team to do a production deploy, you are at a serious competitive dis-advantage.
Show HN: Latrunculi, a classic Roman board game for android phones.
The game 'Latrunculi' is an ancient Roman board game. It offers strategically deep positions and has a higher branching factor than chess.

I implemented an app playing Latrunculi(for free with ads). The engine uses a negascout algorithm. Its searches are only shallow cause of the high branching factor but they are enhanced with a quiescence search, which works kinda nice.

Since this is my first app i appreciate any comments on how to improve it.

You can find my app here (market-link): http://bit.ly/hqbWZP
What it sounds like you want to do is be one step up from the "community manager" job.

It's definitely possible to self-create your own role here - I would imagine there are probably 50 people on this board who would pay you to do exactly that job on a limited basis. You just need to be out in front of them with exactly what you can do.

That takes a little self-marketing - what if you worked with the original poster here to turn around several of his largest customers?
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

"Thatched airplanes" being an imitation of the real thing.
"Let's say you're some entrepreneur, sure you made 200k this year and have 3000 followers on twitter."

I'm not sure that the author has any room to criticize how this entrepreneur tweets if they have 3,000 followers compared to the author's 65. And how is making $200k/year "doing it wrong"?
http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

"Last modified 1996-04-10 or earlier"
Why not use HN src ?

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc
Businesses have just twigged that there is greater and more sustainable profit in user experence. It is a product of modern times and social media for a business to act outwards and embrace staff and customer. But ultimetly they want your money or it's pointless.
Even if we can't measure it, what makes it so hard to believe that intelligence is inheritable? Is height inheritable? Yes. Is eye color inheritable? Yes. Is skin color inheritable? Yes. Is physical strength....? Yes. Why wouldn't a human characteristic that has provided one of the biggest advantages through evolution not be inheritable too?
"At Etsy, they push out code about 25 times per day. It has worked out very well for Etsy and has led to [...] improved morale."

I am in the opposite situation at work. My company has scheduled, monolithic, all hands on deck releases once a month. It's an insane legacy policy from a time before our dev team had scripted releases and automated tests running against every commit in development. We've solved the technical issues of continuous deployment, but socially, we're stuck in the dark ages. It's a huge morale killer. We've had several great developers rally to change this policy and were stonewalled, and eventually left.
Replace the in-app purchasing functionality with a link to Amazon's site that does functionally the same thing with one extra step.
That looks an awful lot like Tibia.
Awk is one of those tools I didn't know about until 6 months ago, and now I have no idea how I lived without it for so long. If you're manipulating text files, it's just so effortless.
Universal hashing will prevent collision problems.
Nothing wrong with the idea per se. But, as usual, no explanation for how the incentives and cultural changes needed to induce people would be implemented. Sorry, but no one is going to reward a grad student, career-wise, for rewriting other scientist's papers and catching bugs. Heck, the only reason scientists proofread their stuff at all is to avoid embarrassment. If there were an army of students eager to fix your mistakes, scientists would be even less careful.
Great pictures. But without keyboard shortcuts to jump directly between pictures, one is constantly micro-managing the window scrolling to fit each pic inside the browser window.
Asymptotic bounds can be given in the worst case, the best case, the average case ("in expectation"), or with high probability. All have rigorous definitions and you should go learn about them. There is nothing bastardized about this notation.
Ask HN: Which city in Canada is the best for Internet startups?
Which city in Canada is the best for internet startups, considering abundance of talent, a startup culture...?

Edit: Thanks to all those who gave in input.
This is not an amortized analysis, it is a probabilistic analysis.
I love how beautiful that median algorithm is. :-D
Toronto is the best city in Canada for business, unless you are in mining or primarily targeting French canadians. There are incentives to locate manufacturing plants in more rural areas, and the cost of labour is cheaper elsewhere, but no other Canadian city compares when it comes to access to customers / size of labour pool.

It also has the largest Internet + startup community.
I check it passively throughout the day, from the web (no reader or system of any sort). It's a bit of a time vampire, but I have a lot of free time — probably one of the lucky few here who do.
Fundraising with a PPT, in Italy
There's nothing preventing Apple from signing up to be a Kindle developer and using the KDK to develop an iBooks app for the Kindle.

http://kdk.amazon.com/

I'd like you to point out any evidence that Amazon has excluded or rejected Apple's application, because I've never heard anything of the sort.
Agreed... I wish more sites would do the gmail style j/k moving between anything.
I wouldn't code if I don't like programming. I wouldn't market my product if I don't like to make money.
Ask HN: What's Google's motivation behind releasing Android?
What's the motivation for Google to release Android freely? I don't think they're doing it for fun, because even if it's an open source project, it is developed behind closed doors till it's ready (unlike Firefox, Linux etc). Is it the same strategy that MS used to kill off Netscape by releasing IE freely?
I'm running a startup from Edmonton, having just moved there from Calgary to be with my co-founder. I haven't been in the city long enough to say how it compares, but my gut is that it'll be a good location for our particular business.
"Making math fun" is fine, but most teachers interpret it as "mixing fun stuff into math, which is inherently painful and boring," because they're focused on the kids who aren't doing well. To them, making math fun is the same idea as bringing a clown into the pediatric burn ward: "Let's make this suck a little less." That attitude rubs off on the kids.

What those teachers don't get is that math is most fun when you are using solid, polished skills to explore an area where you're still learning. The teachers are stuck in the standard educational mindset, which is that getting enough practice at anything to develop polished skills is "rote" and horrible. Plus it slows down their curriculum. So they move on and just do some review now and then, and the mediocre students end up with no solid skills they can rely on. All their skills are a little iffy, so they can't do anything with confidence, and everything is stressful.
The shortcut we took to build Yipit in three days
Oscar = Open Source Car
It isn't a Field of Dreams, you're right. You also have to market, advertise and sell, sell, sell.
Hey Diego. You know what's funny, I use IndexTank for PilarHQ.com(it's an app which really depends on search).

I can't tell you how much you having Olark on IndexTank has helped me implement IndexTank. I've had a few issues, and have spoken to two of your developers through Olark. Seriously, you have me on as a loyal customer tweeting(http://twitter.com/itsemil/status/34410618584825857) about how badass IndexTank is.
I've also seen many devs look at a broken release and instantly realize their mistake. A forgotten production config, a hard coded variable, or an empty cache. If code is in fact reviewed before going to production, the risk is significantly lower.
That's actually a reasonable question. What's a lot more likely:

"Here are fifteen for loop headers. For each one, write how many times the loop body will execute."
Elop has given a credible reply to this argument: Android would put them on the fastest track imaginable to commoditization. Nokia's support and supply-chain would have taken Android from the marketshare leader to the undisputed ruler of the smartphone market. In this kind of atmosphere, it could be safely surmised that no manufacturer would have any leverage with Google and there would be very little opportunity for interesting differentiation.
Over the years (decades now?) I have looked into hosting on Mac OS. The times that I have actually done so have allows been done in-house at clients site as part of an intranet.

I can tell you that your options are pretty few. http://www.macminicolo.net/ has been around for a while, but they specialize in the hosting of Mini's.

Another option is http://www.forest.net/ who has been around since nearly the dawn of the Internet, and who have always had Mac Servers as a specialty. Originally, they had a large number "Classic" Mac servers prior to OS X.

As I understand it, Apple allows VMWare to run OS X virtualized under Mac OS X server, but no other configurations. So your could talk to forest.net about running a dedicated Mac Pro tower running Mac OS X server and VMWare.

(Of course, you could try this on a Mini too, but I don't think a Mini will go far running multiple virtualized servers in production)