skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Word. You're right. I was over-hypey :D
It doesn't totally pass the silhouette test. It could with a thin edge of negative space in between each color block, OR... if we allowed a grey "cheat" in our silhouette test.

These kinda shape logos aren't just awesome for print, but in tiny places like web footers, twitter avatars, etc.

And for anybody in the thread rackin' their brain trying to figure out what we're talking about. Picture the Nike swoosh, or the Apple-missing-a-bite apple. With no gradients, colors, or shadows, their shape alone is recognizable.

This doesn't mean their every use + instance is this plain, but their logos survive such a deconstruction. It REALLY comes in handy.
CHAPTER 5:  Representational State Transfer (REST)
Debian 6 Squeeze: Not Good
I don't know how I feel about it, but it is definitely war; one simple test: if Libya "enforced a no fly zone on the US," would we say, "Libya is enforcing a no fly zone on the US?"
Dabble DB shuts down on May 18, 2011
Wankel Rotary Engine! (at 1:07 of this clip)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTDUxaji6NI
Dear HBR:

If you're going to place a pop-over ad for the iPad HBR app, please make sure that said ad doesn't annoy the hell out of iPad users by taking too long to load and being impossible to load.
What would I be fuzz testing, my own code? I do that always.
Book is awesome. Not only does it tell you how different elements of design interact with each other, but what about it causes people to react the way they do
> He's got a good, non-emotional speaking voice

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by this?

What makes it good? What makes it non-emotional? What is an example of a bad voice? What is an example of an emotional voice?
> I think projects get off course... teams can develop a culture of 'having unit tests' instead of a culture of 'writing high quality software'. The way the TDD/XP camp talk about software bums me out. As if the test they decided (key word) to write set the software on some Manifest Destiny vector to perfection.

The tricky part is that anything can become a cargo cult rallying point. Mediocre programmers can drive anything into the ground. Even a seeming no-brainer like the Law of Demeter can be misapplied to create byzantine systems if someone knows how write code, but isn't very good at it. The situation is ten times worse with test code because it's meta—there's no objective measure of quality for test code. At least with application code it's obvious for any user whether it works or not, but with test code it's all about how much manual testing time was saved, or how much smoother refactorings went.

I've long been skeptical of the claim that TDD or whatever makes you write better code. The way I see it, TDD forces you to put in the time to learn how to write automated tests. Once you are good at it, tests help you move faster by covering regressions and documenting your intentions. In Ruby tests can give a nice sanity check that is built into strongly-typed compiled languages. I truly believe in TATFT, but at the end of the day tests are still meta, and you can't polish a turd.
In this case you could also just as well promote the existing message feature that's already a part of Github. Promote conversations instead of a one-way "rate this" system.
About the downvotes: "Congrats Josh" and "Woot go Josh!" don't add anything. If they were "Josh sucks!", they would be downvoted equally.
I think the "why I'm not worried about the nuclear situation in Japan" guy needs to write a new assessment.
In it's full robust form? Maybe (though I doubt it); however, as a proof of concept with every song in your personal collection? Much more reasonable.
I've about had it reading discussion after discussion on the topic of REST between people who haven't read the damned paper.

Here is my takeaway:

There isn't much to do with URLs in here. One URL, One resource (collection counts as a resource). Talk about URLs all you want, there can bee good resource identifiers and bad ones. But REST doesn't care as long as you don't break the golden rule.

REST is an RPC system. You call remote procedures, GET, PUT, DELETE etc. on remote resources. You are probably not smart enough to do better than what naturally emerged as HTTP. Behemoths and industries have tried. But HTTP won, and it will win again.
Small web businesses are only boring if they aren't challenging norms in what constitutes a small lifestyle web business. There is always room for innovation and ideas even if it's not the next Facebook. It's like you say: Someone has to try; We're all better off for it.

ETA: I tend to agree with you, just sayin'.
NASA Probe Enters Mercury Orbit
There are tons; you just rarely hear about them.
Depends on your definition of war. Logically, yes. Legally, no, not by US standards - it takes a large flock of congresscritters to do that. I'm mostly glad that the point was made that this wouldn't be an occupation.
True, but there is a difference between downvoting and not-upvoting. Leaving them alone at 1 point would have let them sink to the bottom just as well and not appeared to be mean-spirited.
When I read the original article, I took it as a joke playing on the snowclone of "X doesn't have a word for Y".
Critiques Welcomed
Hello! We released our site for public BETA ~ www.SpotBanks.com -- constructive critiques are welcomed. Many Thanks, Joshua Kalkbrenner
I think better it come from the schools than from the group, no? The schools are the ones feeling the pain you're trying to solve, and it's a targeted segment where you don't have to searching for a customer. Your customer's right there, so the knowledge is right there.

Of course, there's the caveat that the customer isn't always sure of what they really need. But in this case, I'm sure they could think of some good ideas. :)
I have a sneaking suspicion they are chasing after Angry Birds, or Zynga... once again very different to a solid $10k/month b2b webapp.
I agree with you hypothetically. But my question was about their real world issues.

They could, in theory, have ids for songs-in-playlists. But they don't in fact have them and their RPC api doesn't require them. That's what I'm interested in. Not how they could change their architecture to make REST work.
Smart Dust - Not the kind that gets in your eyes...
The #1 reason I have stopped actively coming to HN. Too many self-entitled opinionated "authors" telling people what they should or shouldn't be doing (especially when it's not even technically relevant).

Or should they be called "writers"?
Thanks for the suggestion, I changed the title
Did you try and package fallback versions of files into a native app and load them with a UIWebView unless there's an internet connection?

It's not perfect, but it could save your ass until they fix the bug. Afterwards, make sure you don't forget how much Apple cares about you if you're not in line with their objectives :-)
"You got it done, but they'll never work with you again." is only about a half-notch up from "You didn't get it done."

There will always be a next time, and people never go away.
Top 5 brands that rawked SXSWi
My company is tackling the tutoring component. We think with free content like the KhanAcademy, the only thing missing is personalized help when you get stuck. We're launching a summer program where K-12 students can work with tutors from Stanford via Skype. The tutor will be like a coach, though, most of the instruction will be from Khan Academy videos. What do you think? We're at IgnitionTutoring.com
I think this article is just an original argument for bootstrapping. I don't think this guy is saying: "don't reach for the stars" - at least that's not how I interpret it. He's saying: "set achievable goals, lean how to execute, then you might just build a big ship organically."
#dickbar, the API/client controversy, and shutting down DabbleDB. Not sure if I've seen one company burn through as much goodwill in one week as Twitter just did.
Indeed. Another method that I've had success with is framing feedback in questions.

Bad: This variable name goes against our naming conventions. Please change it.

Good: Why did you decide to go against our naming conventions here? Did they hamper readability?

Not only does it keep the other person from becoming defensive, you might actually discover that they have valuable insight.
How To Dress Like a Man
Not Even Kevin Rose Really Uses Digg Anymore
The agility of small companies makes it ridiculously easy to compete with large companies.

Large companies have huge amounts of unsatisfied customers that are easy to research, find and sell to- who are more then happy to pay for a direct line to the software maker.

Large companies don't even care if you do this, because unless you hit $100m revenue you're about as significant as a gnat on their butt.
Congratulations Josh. I remember the first time we met in person a year and a half ago. Now seeing you rock it on the big stage brings a tear of pride to my eye.
Maybe that is an opportunity in itself.
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Here's the distinction I use:

If I'm building a business (focusing on money, market, customers, etc.) I call it a startup. If I'm building a web app only (focusing on technology) I call it a side project.
What category, if any, exists between 'startup' and 'project'. We registered an entity, work full time (quit good paying gigs 8 months ago),and raised small seed but have not earned much in terms of revenue. Comments such as "how much money have you earned?", "...so you're not earning a salary?", "so you're not working" might make your 'startup' feel like a hobby. Fingers up! We love it! www.SpotBanks.com
- What makes you think there's any real censorship?

See the atheism debacle. They tweaked the "algorithm" until it stopped showing up in the top 10 (requirement for frontpage). Try submitting an anti-haskell article in proggit. It will never show up.

- Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod shadowbans you, post elsewhere.

Post elsewhere? The difference between the front page and a random unknown subreddit is 20k or 10 viewers. Articles can be "shadowbanned" because of their faulty anti-spam system. The main problem with shadowbanning is that people don't even know it is shadow banned until they start digging, so good stories get stuck in limbo.

- As far as downtime, they have three engineers. One programmer, and two sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion pageviews. Give them a break.

They had uptime problems far before 1.1 billion pageviews. Read the The Mythical Man-Month. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. 3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website. If it isn't, then they should've stopped adding features.
Generating unique Base 62 encoded strings
Ricky Gervais on Not Having a Real Job
How exactly is it disrespectful to other startups to call your side-project a startup? This is the key assumption involved in this article, and it is not actually addressed in the slightest.

I would argue it is far from disrespectful: the funded startups know who they are; likewise with the YC/incubator startups; likewise with the full-time startups.

I really don't see how it's disrespectful to them to call your weekend project a startup. Do you perhaps mean dilution of the term? I could perhaps come around to that, but that's a far cry from any notion of respect; in fact, I would argue that you are diluting the very idea of 'respect' by applying it to this scenario.

Et tu, bmull?
That's pretty sad. The worst part is they just mentioned that they sped up the homepage by 75%, which is really irrelevant for a site that isn't technically focused like Google. They're trying to appeal to the wrong crowd.
search - I have always used query strings, since it will return a subset of some resource.

deleting songs from a playlist - the way it is worded makes you think you should use DELETE but if I said, deleting words from a blog post you wouldn't think of using DELETE. Use PUT for this operation.

multidimensional stats queries - this one is hard if you don't create some umbrella resource that contains the possible resources that may be returned (and most likely I would just make it multiple calls instead of one)
Google Ventures Leads Financing of Biofuels Start-Up
Well, I disagree. But I totally see where you're coming from and respect your opinion. I find that by people continually to call projects startups, it's muddying the actual startup community and taking the standards of what people see as a startup down. But again, I'm hopeful that these projects become startups as the founders dedicate themselves to them.
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Post-Tsunami Japanese Reactor Problems
A Checklist For Content Work
Exactly. In fact, you NEED average people on your team to play the roles that the superstars are unwilling to play. Places like Facebook where the dirty and boring work is respected and rewarded (according to a Quora post by Yishan Wong) are rare. In a lot of places, the superstars do the superstar thing, and other people do the other stuff.

Good teams will always find a place for people. Ironically enough, this sometimes may even mean promoting someone with poor technical skills to management, among various other drastic measures. Their technical skills may suck, but their interpersonal skills and organizational skills may be off the charts, and they'll still have enough technical background to understand what the heck they're managing. That kind of thing.

When my friend first started at Google, he commented that there seemed to be a lot of underlying impatience and discontent because Google only hired superstars, and so many superstars had to stay on the bench. Not everyone can go do the glamorous job. Various anecdotal blog posts seem to have given us that even Google hasn't been able to 100% figure it out.
Yeah that's weird. I don't understand how that happened. If anyone happens to have IE2 around I'd love to be able to study this.
Yes, they may be better at running a business, but they'll be stuck in running a business.

Small businesses aren't easy to sell, there are tons of family-type small businesses (and I am not talking about corner shops) lacking anyone to take over.
I learned that lesson the hard way... Getting fired because your boss can't stand to hear "I told you so" another time is pretty humbling.
I give them credit for trying to reinvent themselves but it seems it was just too late. People use twitter to share links now.

Reddit has stayed relevant due to its focus on community.
If you're in love with your current business, why would you do that just to take a 1/100 shot at The Next Big Thing? You wouldn't. If you're in love with your current business, you stay. I don't know if most people who get to the "Threadless" level of success with their companies are in love with them, but I bet many of them are.
Yes, although the company was acquired less than a year ago -- http://blog.dabbledb.com/2010/06/140character-dabbling.html
> The last thing I could imagine the Free Software Foundation wanting is a demonstration that it is impossible to construct proprietary software that runs on Linux.

Not yet, maybe.

Since he started his movement, Richard Stallman made it absolutely clear that he considers proprietary software to be evil in a literal sense of the word. He repeatably said it "should not exists" [1].

Recall that when Richard Stallman introduced the GPL for GNU, there was no LGPL. It was introduced later. Here's the announcement from the GNU bulletin [2]:

"We should by now have finished a new alternative General Public License for certain GNU libraries. This license permits linking the libraries into proprietary executables under certain conditions. The new library license actually represents a strategic retreat. We would prefer to insist as much as possible that programs based on GNU software must themselves be free."

Note also that any GNU system (and therefore Linux) is based on the GCC, distributed under the GPL. It's not just a compiler but also provides a runtime library that most programs need to link to when compiled by GCC. To make this possible, it has a special exception to the GPL. However, since the copyright is completely owned by the FSF, the exception can be revoked, anytime -- making it impossible to compile proprietary software with GCC (unless a fork proves to be viable).

In other words, the FSF has the means and the motive to make proprietary software impossible to run under Linux. All they lack right now, is the political power -- that is, the opportunity to do so.

[1] http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/031411-richard-stallma...
[2] http://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull10.html#SEC6
U.N. Approves Airstrikes to Halt Attacks by Qaddafi Forces
It was both.

If you read the various news reports closely, you'll see one vector was the 0-day IE vulnerability, another was malicious payloads in PDFs.

The headlines haven't helped.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9144844/Hackers_used_...

"Hackers exploited an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser to break into some of the firms targeted in a widespread attack that compromised Google's and Adobe's corporate networks"

"Google and Adobe, the only two companies to have stepped forward thus far to acknowledge the attacks, were hacked using malicious PDF files that exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe's popular Reader software"
Here's an example of decoding and searching a DAWG in real-time in javascript.

It encodes a dictionary of 106,495 words (an old Scrabble dictionary) into 427,982 base64 characters.

http://www.davidst.com/jsanagram/
Reminds me of a Stephen Covey quote that goes something like:

"In any situation you can either be right or you can be kind. It is better to be kind."
Those conditions don't apply because Google is accused of distributing a derived work. If Google is distributing a work derived from GPL'd code then they can only distribute that work under the terms of the GPL. There's a lot of debate over whether what Google's distributing can actually be considered a derived work, but that's a separate question entirely.
> I'm mostly glad that the point was made that this wouldn't be an occupation.

Not yet anyway. When news broke a few days ago that a NFZ was going to be implemented, John Bolton and other neoconservatives started floating idea of ground forces.

If you give a mouse a cookie...
Straw man.

We are discussing wholesale duplication.
I don't know that that point was made at all. In fact, the intentionally loose verbiage of "all necessary measures to protect civilians" would seem to open the door to an occupational force, particularly as it authorizes member states to do so - without any manner of oversight UN task force.

This is essentially carte blanche for a member state (though, realistically, only UNSC member states would have anywhere near the clout) to wander in and occupy Tripoli. That the Lebanese ambassador said otherwise is effectively meaningless in the face of the text of the resolution.

I sincerely do hope both you and Lebanon end up being right, and no occupation happens. I hope.
Approval of the airstrikes notwithstanding, it doesn't really mean much. They should have done this days ago if they intended to do anything at all; most likely this is a gesture lacking any real substance.

Of course, that could change at a moment's notice. We'll see.
As far as I can see, finding all false positives for a bloom filter is effectively impossible, since a false positive is simply a hash collision, effectively.
Fair point, and you're right, what I meant was that by referring to something that isn't a startup as a startup, I think it hurts the term startup. I know so many people who have risked a ton to run a startup, and I'm seeing frustration in the community when someone throws together something quickly, releases it, and says "Here's my new startup" without really dedicating themselves to it.
Bahrain Pulls a Qaddafi and USA caught between allies and values
Seriously — I'm insanely bored with the bajillion "CEO's" I meet per week.
CEO means "Chief Executive Officer" not rando dude with a pet project. It sounds self-involved, and doesn't impress anyone.
Congress asks to review DoD and NSA contracts with HBGary
Your comment seems to imply that they sped up the time it takes to load the homepage by 75%, which is not the case. That figure was a in reference to how frequently a new story hits the homepage.
The New York Times paywall isn't about the money
Note: This was an experiment to see if javascript could be fast enough to do this sort of thing. It was never finished. The count of anagrams should be updated and the crossword finder should be hooked up. Feel free to take it and hack on it if you like.
Things I Didn't Know About Google (also: the worst VC decision ever)
great recommendation! I have heard of it before but I got it today, flicking through it and it is excellent - every dev really should read this. thanks again.
The Pirahã story is very controversial.
I get the feeling that dabble DB never truly solved the "excel being used as database" problem and that is why they didn't last.

I still think spreadsheets work really well for storing data (if you don't have time/money to imnplement a RDMS), plus now with google docs and dropbox there are enough ways to sync the data with other users.
Gizmodo discovers magnets stick to metal things and calls it a story.
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Thanks for the recommendations everybody. I will probably end up buying each of these and going through them.

I have picked up a lot of design tips over the years but never spent time to really learn the fundamentals of what makes good design. It is a bit like non-graduate programmers who skip over compsci theory, for eg. I know how to do stuff in CSS, I know how to copy and paste templates from the web, but never understood why certain designs and UI's are good and others aren't

I will prob do a blog post on these books and tips etc. in a few months once I go through it all properly - thanks again.
Yeah, but at some point it may very well be that you're no longer in love with your current business. It's just become a job. At that point, you can sell it and cash out, or you can hire somebody to run it for you - either way, you move to whatever your Next Thing is.

I see myself doing this eventually.
"Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)", gimme a break

Too much corpspeak, not enough real information.
Sleep, biking, and lots of wine!
FastMac U-Socket review
Why reddit was down for 6 of the last 24 hours