skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Get all excited about developing for a great open source platform.

2) Find out that the API is so utterly backwards that getting even simple things to work will cause you hours of pain browsing stack overflow until in blind rage you just want to kill whoever 'designed' this steaming piece of shit.

3) Kill yourself.
The Best take on Berlusconi to date:
I'm tall and am/was arguably somewhat good looking. I don't get many, if any, advantages from this because I grew up as and am a pretty serious geek. Now that I'm older I have better social skills, but because of how I turned out I never got the benefits of this. Without the proper attitude even looks aren't helpful. It took me a long time to learn proper social skills and I feel ten years behind my peers. This is typical in technology. I wont even go into how tech is this ghetto that rich kids never bother with anyway, they are just on the fast track to management.

On the other hand money is concrete and real. If I had 5 million in the bank my attitude would be 100% different. I wouldn't be considered geeky, I'd be geek-chic and eccentric. I wouldn't have most of the anxities I have now because I know money can buy me almost everything I need.

Sorry, but large sums of money are nowhere comparable to less tangible gifts like height or looks. One buys me a home the other maybe gets me an occasional second glance.

I'll also toss in that thinking of yourself as a social peer with your bosses is a huge benefit. The book "Outliers" explores this. Well-off kids are raised to be assertive and have a sense of entitlement. They just do better in life. They can defend these attitudes by saying "I come from a well off family, just as wealthy as you. I went to the same school as you and your kids and my parents know the same people. I was taught to get my way and that my parents will protect me with their riches."

Lately, coincidentally, I have a lot in common with my current bosses. The social parts take care of themselves and its a huge benefit without me putting in a lot of effort. I don't feel the divide between them and me as much as at my previous jobs. I have a small amount of savings that can help me get by if I get fired or laid off. If this is how rich kids feel at age 23 when entering the workforce then they have a HUGE advantage.
The price might be high, but I figure this (consolidation of market participants) is normal in a market that is peaking or on the decline.
This indeed made a lot of noise, I still remember quite well the polemic at that time. It should be understood in the context of the "science war" (context which was sometimes missing during the polemic in France, since many French "intelligenstia" are rather ignorant of the American academia). Perhaps ironically, the whole affair has a fundamentally political aspect (one of Sokal's argument was to defend the left against what he feared would become anti-science ideology coming from the universities themselves).

The whole idea of publishing a paper without meaningful content may seem clever, but it really isn't: the same has been done in so called hard science. While amusing, I don't think it proves much. Dawkins forgets to precise that the paper in question was not reviewed and that the authors refused to make changes suggested by the journal which published the paper (not to defend the journal's attitude either).

As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other) blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from either.
The audience isn't the contributors; they're the audience. The speakers don't pay; if some homeless guy had the credibility and charisma to speak at TED, there'd be nothing stopping him.

Let's be very clear, here: TED does not exclude poor people, they exclude non-extraordinarily-rich people. If Bill Gates had released mosquitos all over a crowd of poor, or middle-class people, he'd have been an asshole. Because he did it over a crowd of the uber-rich, he was awesome and promoting awareness of important problems to people who can do something about them.

The fact that TED charges so much for a seat makes them elitist and generates buzz and social proof; the fact that they share the content for free makes them egalitarian. But they focus on getting the eyeballs that are equipped to actually do something about the cool new ideas presented there.
Since when can you not apply financial aid to summer classes? When I was in college (10 years ago), the rule was 2 semesters/year.

Summer usually wasn't viable because class selection is limited. For example, Quantum Mechanics 1 is fall semester, Quantum Mechanics 2 is spring semester, and you need both to graduate.
Allow me to rephrase then: to the extent that lack of comfort/possessions motivates people to strive for better, rich kids will experience less motivation from that source. Of course they can always find motivation from other sources. I suppose you could also argue that everyone is motivated to maintain their current standards of living, rather than (or more than) elevate to something higher. So rich kids will find it unacceptable to settle for a middling income.
Much of this essay is based on the idea of social capital,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

I've found a lot of people, especially in the upper- and upper-middle classes, often deny the importance of social capital, but I find it to be very important.

Someone from wealth can lose all of their money, and still have the social capital necessary the maintain their class status.
Fuck Yeah (noun)!
or you aren't doing anything.
Wow. This is pretty funny considering how old the news is that this article is about.
Well, things would get tricky, because even stuff like "foo.bar" gets turned into a dictionary lookup.

In short, you could do it, but it would hardly qualify as readable in the general case. It is easier to do this to RPython since all the dynamic parts are gone (foo.bar just becomes a struct lookup).
Pretty good. I haven't read anything that deep in years. I do think though that a lot of management issues are simply avoided by having a good team. But given situation where that is not possible, this might work well.
The short version is that, if everything goes according to plan, they are Big Consultingware Project Management and I am Basecamp. (Or, to put it another way, I'm not competing with them, I'm competing with non-consumption of services.)
"write it into their contract that they agree not to work a second job on their day off."

In particular due to the exact language ('day off' vs. 'days off') -- If an employee's schedule is Mon-Thu, are they free to work the weekends at another job (but not the Friday), or is all moonlighting prohibited?

Are they free to work on their own projects on their off days?

If I'm showing bias, I apologize, but I'm a little bit offended that an employer would attempt exercise control over what their employees do in their off time. I'm not saying it isn't ever justified, but if the requirement is that they only work 4 days a week, then they're free to do what they will with the fifth, unless the assertion is that they're actually 'working' five days a week, and are just ordered to relax on the fifth day.
Advertising in Skype
Modern logistics developed mainly during the Second World War and post-war period, along with the computer revolution. My point is however that the last few decades have seen a refinement of more revolutionary changes in the first half of the twentieth century.

For example, from 1902 - 1960 we went from the Kitty Hawk to the jet passenger plane. From 1960 we went from the jet plane to .... ? We're still flying around in planes developed in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Sure, maybe they have better navigation systems, they might be safer and so on, but these are refinements rather than revolutionary changes.
Florida schools are getting 15 new homeless students per day
Type Technology Tree
Double curly braces makes me think mustache: http://mustache.github.com/
Slate article says from Financial Times, but doesn't provide a link. Thanks for the link to the other discussion.
Saw this on 60 Minutes last night - it's a "must watch".
>> I don't know if you've noticed but these two are having some very large impact in the world right now. Dictators of 30 and 40 years are being cast off.

Unfortunately, revolutions are nothing new. Bigger revolutions happened in the past quite impactfully without such technologies. These technologies perhaps add benefit in the arms race to better organize against government's controls for infrastructure, institutions, and society.

>> I think that's a pretty skewed view of history. Another way to see it might be that we used to mostly have largely anarchistic/socialist societies that were overrun by a few greedy people and we've spent the rest of our history taking back our freedoms from the elite few of our day.
Now you could say that even if we ever managed to get to a utopia state more greedy people will just show up but I would counter argue that e.g. Alexander the great wouldn't have gotten off the ground if people could have just sent a twitter to warn everyone else what he was up to.

The same technology that people use for freedom, powers that be can use for more nefarious purposes. Technology in of itself is amoral and neutral. It's rather about who uses it more effectively. Today, the general populace perhaps has an advantage in that they're maybe more savvy than governments. Not necessarily will be the case all the time though. And besides that, it depends on whether people would love what Alexander stood for and would actually prefer to follow him. Look at what happened in Germany. Nobody better cite Godwin's Law here. Mein Kampf is seriously a great example of how a single idea, communication, or piece of media can rally the people to a cause that people in hindsight realized was incorrect. Technology can likewise be played by both sides.
The OP is ignoring a total deal-killer for this type of model: Proprietary code needs to remain so. It's what brings value to a service like Twitter. It would be great for open-source apps, but that is a small slice of the web's pie. Does he really think that Twitter will distribute their server-side source to browsers to execute locally? Even if it were compiled, the risk is too great for a company who relies on its unique property being the only differentiator in the marketplace.
Wow did that last paragraph ruin the article.
For a detailed, pragmatic exegesis of this insight, see Your Money Or Your Life by Joe Dominguez.
Yeah, Mark Pilgrim should have used his considerable power to influence geopolitics; rather than highlighting some interesting element of design he could have helped end war or famine!

(Sorry for the snark, but these arguments (along with "Why aren't all scientists ending cancer?" annoy me a lot))
Schools Kill Creativity (TED 2006)
Sure, can you link me to an academic study that shows the average "rich kid" has a better attitude or work ethic than average kid in the middle class? Of course going to an elite university will show highly motivated students (of all classes). However, it doesn't show the rich kids who decided to do nothing with their lives because they've been pampered 24/7.
Microsoft Touch Mouse -- black arrives in May
Hey, had no idea my little app had made it onto here.

Its running on ASP.NET MVC3, using MarkdownSharp to render the content.

Would have put more info on the site if I'd known I was gonna get so much traffic today!

Dave
The Social Network made me like Sean Parker more. Sure, he was a bit of a douche (in the movie), but he was a douche who did something substantial and made something incredibly useful that probably wouldn't have made it so far otherwise. It kind of surprises me that people have responded to it so negatively.

I just wonder what he really is doing now. After creating 2 wildly successful startups, is he really taking it easy and being satisfied as a part-time angel? He seems too ambitious for that.
Well, for anyone still following, not quite sure what to think.

HN sent about 2000 uniques (between direct clicks and shares) with about 10000 page views on day 1. Then it died.... :)

I've reached out to a number of blogs to share the site and its initial success, reached out to folks on Twitter, etc., and -- for whatever reason -- it just ain't happening.

It's that whatever reason part that I'm interested in now -- I think there was ample opportunity built into the site for sharing, and a number of people actually did use these tools. I'm at a complete loss, then, as to where it went wrong.

Any thoughts on where I could have improved the social aspects? Or the site itself?

Guess we'll see. It could still "go," but I don't have a lot of time and resources at the moment to spend pushing it. It was fun to build and play with, anyway. :)

- John
While these are fun, if you want something more serious: http://placehold.it/
There are several reasons for CouchDB's use of a single, strictly append-only file, but the b-tree is not one of them.

In fact, it's one of CouchDB's most clever tricks to store a b-tree in an append-only fashion (it's far more common to update in place).

Two reasons CouchDB is strictly append only.

1) Safety: By never overwriting data, it avoids a whole class of data corruption issues that plague update-in-place schemes.

2) Performance: Writing at the end of the file allocates new blocks, leading to lower fragmentation and less seeking than an update-in-place scheme.

"durability" does not mean "the file is...never left in an odd state". The right word there is "consistent". CouchDB provides both (In fact it provides all four ACID properties, but the scope of a transaction is constrained to a single document update).

Finally, I should point out that using a single file, as opposed to a series of append-only files (like Berkeley JE, for example) is just a pragmatic choice. Nothing in principle would prevent a JE style approach, it's just a lot of (quite hard) work to do well.
CoffeeScript makes its way into hosted CMS
Ask HN: Looking for a marketing-focused co-founder
I'm the founder of this site: http://www.snapplans.com. (It is up for demo purposes but not finished). I'm looking for a marketing-driven co-founder. If this is something that might interest you please contact me (my name is Barry) at bglenn09@gmail.com.
As I've always said, coding is easy, analyzing is hard.
That's true enough, parent should have been more careful in word choice. But it doesn't change the fact that even the worst players get paid a significant amount of money and should be able to retire just fine, if they knew how to manage their money.
How does TurboTax come into play here? I don't see the analogy really.
> So yeah, you can try to spin it as 'Linux is just as bad as Microsoft', but if one takes 5 years and is a complete disaster, and the other one takes 2 years and has a few hiccups, I know which one I prefer.

The point being made is that the problems in both the previous and current systems were probably nothing to do with the underlying OS/platform, but because of some incompetency in the design or implementation of this specific project.
I agree, and if I worked there I would completely ignore that clause. I wouldn't even worry about lining through it before I signed on. If they want me to give up my ability to make more money with my time, they can bloody well pay me for it. It's unconscionable and I'd like to see them try to enforce that clause on an employee who decided to do additional work.
It is important to differentiate between

* Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again

* Detectable / Manageable failures: You fail, but this failure is not central to your existence, so you simply try again

While there are some cases where you have no option but to risk catastrophic failures, manageable failures are something people completely miss.

Fitness / Weight training has all sorts of examples of this, the goal is to identify the limits of your abilities and to push this limit, without risking permanent damage.

Consider this: Blogger (Pyra Collab tools), Flickr (GNE), Twitter (Odeo), Nokia Phones (losses for first 15 yrs), Google (initial focus was Enterprise Search until Adwords / Adsense acquisition) were all pushing the limits, and failing, but not so spectacularly that they didn't have resources left to pivot.

Identifying the difference, and the ability to contain possibly-catastrophic errors into manageable pieces is the true art of the startup.
Good point.

Prohibiting what I do on my day off sounds restrictive and unfair.

Being paid to relax actually sounds quite nice.

Not sure it needs to be in a contract though; surely you should be judged on your performance at work (whether it is 4 or 5 days) and not external factors.
But What If We're Building The Wrong Thing?
The Most Disarming Pitch
Distributing images from feeds
Is there startup focus on mobile health?
Basically, I'd like to focus on this area for the startup.
I'd like to know if there are some startups focusing on this and how do they do so far? What are the strong ones?
I notice that I am confused, and echo the "citation needed".
In my case it was an acquisition and roll up - they acquired my company and one of my competitors, combined the two together and brought in a seasoned executive w/ IPO experience to lead the NewCo. I was retained to be the CTO, though it's tremendously difficult to go from being the boss to having a boss and left a little over a year later.
Too bad. I really would like to see a Neuro-Linguistic Programming app.
They're making an otherwise complicated practice (like doing taxes), and simplifying it, (like TurboTax).
There's something about these large Japanese conglomerates that just don't seem to have any parallel in the US. GE might be the closest thing, but even though it's a larger company it doesn't seem to have the finger-in-every-pie feel that these Asian conglomerates do (e.g., Hyundai, Fuji, Mitsubishi, ...)
I agree. He kind of reminded me of the Gordon Gekko figure in the original Wall Street. You're not supposed to like him because he's this amoral ass, but you end up totally digging him and a little itty part of you wants to be just like him.
I was going to ask the same thing, and doesn't TurboTax/Quicken have a negative connotation of being horrible software?

Note: I've used turbotax.com and it's always worked well, so maybe that's a positive connection.
When I used to interview a lot of college kids, I found that I could guess accurately within a few minutes of conversation which had lived in a dorm/frat house/whatever and which had lived at home while going to college. The differences in social skills and worldliness/perspective were immense. Was this due to the effects of being surrounded by a bunch of relatively ambitious young people or was it due to the socio-economic selection bias inherent in the decision to live at home while attending school? Although I have read nothing to back up this claim, I presume that there is a positive correlation between high family income and the decision to go "away" for college. Living with one's parents implies going to a local college/university vs. the one which is a tight fit with one's goals. Also, it seems that those kids who live at home socialize with their local friends who, more often than not by virtue of still living in the town where they grew up, are less ambitious and worldly. Causation is hard to tease out, but correlation is definitely present, at least based on my sampling from doing college interviewing in the Cleveland area (another cause of selection bias, of course).
> (and each key has, on the order of, 20 bits of overhead, IIRC)

20 bits? Really? Less than an integer? Or did you mean bytes? (Not nitpicking here, I'm just curious)
Look in phpthumb.config.php for $PHPTHUMB_CONFIG['nohotlink_enabled'] and make sure its set to true.

If you need to enable it for some domains you can do that too:
http://phpthumb.sourceforge.net/demo/docs/phpthumb.faq.txt

Edit: you should turn off debug too:
http://placesheen.com/phpthumb/phpthumb.php?src=xxx.jpg&...
I agree, it sounds like they are just trying to be quotable.
The Joy of The Joy of Clojure Closure
The analogy here is that TurboTax takes a complicated thing (the 1040) and makes it into a very simple, intuitive process (basically, a managed clickflow that takes you from start to finish). The analogy is also in the market itself: most people don't need an accountant or fancy accounting software, TurboTax does what they need it to do.

Well, nowadays, marketing is almost as central a function as accounting to many small business. There's no 'TurboTax' out there to help get them online. The marketing space is still full of confusing and clunky tools that the average person can't really use. AdGrok hopes to remedy that by creating a similar tool.
There's typically a lot that's required in growing and scaling a web business. Often its a bit more than just learning to program and building your site. Technical co founders are generally hard to find, because the good ones get taken quickly. Additionally many technical co-founders don't see the idea in the same way you do. I'd recommend doing all you can to first validate your idea before attempting to find that technical cofounder or learning to program yourself. Your #2, seems like a great starting point. From there I'd focus on both #1 and #4, #1 more to build out your concept and prove it than to fully build the product. While it might seem like extra work, it's worth it to work through issues and will make finding a technical cofounder easier.

As for actually finding a technical cofounder, go to various events. Since you're in the bay area there's no shortage of them from Hackers and Founders meetups, to Lean Coffee. There's usually several per week so get out there early and start connecting with developers that may be able to help you down the line.

As for Techcrunch, like many others have mentioned here hold off. You won't get 10 chances to be on the front page unless your foursquare or twitter, even more so you want to be able to truly capitalize if you do receive that marketing.
> The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed.

If wikipedia is to be believed the journal switched to a peer review based process due to the Sokal affair.

> He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal,

Clearly it's a crappy journal, but unfortunately it's associated with some big names like Duke [1] and Columbia [2].

> I do not find this incident particularly disturbing, and I don't think it says much about the humanities.

Maybe not Sokal's article, but certainly their books says a lot about the humanities. As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out many of these big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Text

[2] http://www.socialtextjournal.org/about/index.php#contact
Ampersand to the designers is what sort() is to programmers :)
TV's Next Wave: Tuning In to You
No, TurboTax has the reputation of being awesomeness. They have extremely high retention and a very high viral-spread rate because the software works so well to take taxes and make them simple.
Actually he failed, we could say that he crashed the plane into the Hudson River. It's a matter of measure. If he ever do it again, he might do even better ;).

I think that we improve continuously from failure into something that looks more and more like success. Success is very relative to what you are able to accomplish at a time. If failing teach you something, might be it's a success ?
1) Learn from the examples.

2) Launch an app in a week or two.

3) Profit.

To each their own I guess.