skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cute story, but shitty management.

So you go to your boss with (a) unfinished work and (b) some accompanying data. He searches his manual database, looking for a match of your data, then "classifies" it as an excuse, not a reason. (After reading the entire post, I still don't know the difference.) He's so busy belittling you that he spends no time:

a. trying to understand your data
b. trying to separate causes and effects
c. getting down to the root cause
d. identifying systemic problems the enabled the cause
e. fixing the current problem
f. implementing systemic changes to prevent further instances

Here's my take:

My excuse is that the job will not get done.

The reason is that I got fired after shoving my boss's little book up his ass.
Show HN: Investy.com - Portfolio Analyzation Tool
Investy is a portfolio analyzation tool that allows individual or professional investors to breakdown a stock portfolio and see financial data across the aggregated investments. Investors can model hypothetical portfolios, leverage diversification and allocation data as well as compare their portfolio against professionals such as Warren Buffett and others.

http://www.investy.com
Seems to me the non-techie doesn't even know about the labs features.

Techies might use it though, if only to see how it works.
Gaming Code on Wrong Assumptions: A*/IDA* Algorithms are Exponential
I would love to see the actual implementation, otherwise you're asking people for feedback on sentence fragments and a sign-up page. How far along are you?
D3.js: Data-Driven Documents
It did nothing to advance the discussion in any meaningful way. If you don't like this article, don't read it. If you really think it's awful and doesn't belong on HN, then flag it.
Quick survey: if you could have the equivalent of this stack, with persistence, as a service, would that be interesting to you?

It would be RESTful relational database-as-a-service but where any individual item could show updates in real time. (E.g. real-time chat would just be a Javascript component.)
42M for the equivalent of a flash game? There's no bubble here, move along.
That's a great feature, Arvind. I'll keep MyLikes in mind.
That's a good way to put it for those who see startups (and perhaps business in general) as a lottery ticket. I have a very strong suspicion (though not substantiated by evidence at this point) that the chances of success (where success is defined in the typical startup way as "fuck-you-money") are much higher if one goes about deliberately and sustainably becoming a fantastic entrepreneur, rather than betting everything on a single startup.

The question is, really, what affects potential more? Over the top dedication, or marathon-like persistence?

I'm betting on the latter. If two equally bright and ambitious young kids come up and say "I want to succeed in the startup world", and one of them continues "I've building this one startup and throwing everything I've got in it, my entire existence rides on it", while the other one says "I'm planning to spend the next 20 years doing it and I'll probably start 20 businesses at least in that time, each one better than the previous", I'd bet on the latter.

I suspect the only person who has any solid evidence that could weigh this debate one way or another is pg, though.
Laptop: Win 7; Home: Win XP; Workstaion: Gentoo (Ubuntu/FreeBSD KVMs); Server: Gentoo
Safari And IE8 Got Hacked while Chrome Remained Safe in Pwn2Own
Founder here.

The pitch behind this is that the current landscape of investment tools isn’t fitting the bill for what I needed to effectively invest. Google/Yahoo Finance are great resources for seeing statistics of a single stock, but they weren’t really built to show aggregate data across an entire portfolio. The aim of this product is to give a point in time snapshot of a portfolio in order to bridge that gap.

This initial release is just a small subset of what is planned for the product. There’s a ton of exciting things planned for the next release, which will really catapult it forward in terms of usefulness.

Would love to get your feedback HN! Positive or negative, it will all be helpful!
Clickable:

http://www.investy.com
For future reference, don't plan your schedule by looking at the tasks you need to complete and thinking about how long each will take you. Plan your schedule by looking at how long similar projects have taken similar teams.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting
Where's the hoax?
I left those details out because I didn't think they would add to the story. The big company was KPN to which I sold my WiFi Hotspot operator in 2003. The manager who told me the story was Jan Kroon and it was about a manager he reported to. See, all that info doesn't make the story that more interesting really.
How-to: Site Speed Assessment and Web Performance Monitoring Tools
The system is being built with node.js, Amazon EC2 and S3, I've got accounts management in place, and file uploading and obviously chat. I'm still working on integrating everything. It is very early days indeed but if the overwhelming response here is negative then my views will be to just bin it and work on something better.
50-70mg and no coffee, taken only when needed seems optimal to me. 150mg in a day is definitely too much, unless you're trying to pull some ridiculous 60 hour marathon, which is inadvisable anyway.

Too-large doses leave you unable to concentrate on anything for longer than about 10 seconds.
The Billionaire Who Friended the Web
I think most people miss the point that the statistics provided by the Khan Academy is equally kick-ass as its videos. He mentions of a "teacher driven" design process.

TDD? ;)
In situations like that, the real reason is often deeper than the "excuse". I'm a big fan of "five why's' [1] for root cause analysis. I think finding the root cause is far more important than differentiating between reasons and excuses, or belittling people because you think their reasons aren't good enough.

Example: "Laptop ran out of battery" - is that really a bad excuse? What if there aren't enough charging points in the office, so not everyone can keep their laptops topped up all at the same time? Analysing the surface reason alone is not enough to know whether it has merit, there may be a valid root cause for what appears to be a poor excuse.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
Freakouts Should Not Go Viral
Outsider perspective here:

The thing is, Singapore has done very well out of MNCs and government-backed large enterprises. Its comparative advantage over the rest of the world is in efficient implementation rather than innovation, and it achieves the former through values that are not conducive to innovation (central-planning, regulation, conformity). And it's a model that works so well for Singaporeans there's perhaps very little incentive to deviate from it either for entrepreneurs or investors. The country collectively went from "rags to riches" within the memories of the parents that most twentysomething Singaporeans live with, without a single Gates or Jobs to point to inspire individualism. Singapore's rich list is dominated by people who earned their fortunes through banking or smart property investments, and their highly-skilled job market is dominated by the finance sector, which pays very nicely.

At worst that can breed a sense of entitlement where not only is failure (the expectated outcome for any budding entrepreneur) inconceivable, but steady career progression is believed to be guaranteed simply by having the requisite qualities and turning up. A friend who headed up recruitment for an MNC noted how brazen young Singaporeans (by contrast to both immigrants to Singapore or job applicants in the Western world) were about stating that a percentage increase in salary was their prime/only motivation for wanting the job. Compare that with your average startup story where people are enthusiastic about working longer hours for less money for the challenge and the freedom - are these people as easy to find in Singapore?

Of course, that creates plenty of opportunities for those that do want to break out from the norm - it's a climate which is business-friendly, you can speak both the world's most important business languages fluently, the basic costs of living are cheap compared with much of the developed world, and if you've got the cash there's no shortage of smart, well-educated people to hire at lower rates than San Francisco.
Too-large doses leave you unable to concentrate on anything for longer than about 10 seconds.

That's easily balanced out by chronic lack of sleep :-) Even with that dosage, I was still fairly sluggish.
Here is my quick 0.02:

You might want to re-think at least the home page colour scheme a bit, that green is not what I'd consider very suited to the target market. Make it a bit more businesslike, may be? But then, of course, it is just my opinion. :)
Comparing RoR and node.js seems truly odd. One provides an enormous framework for business logic and building sites, the other is a low level toolkit.
My 9 year old son, who is the main ipad user, watched the video of the smart cover and was like :-O then he said "we should get the brown one." to which I was like "we're buying an ipad2?" Anyway, brown looks amazing http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/03/ipadre... and I am trying to justify buying an ipad2 for "development" purposes. Got any app ideas?
This sort of story reminds me no idea has (or can) been executed perfectly, a year ago I would have said Flickr has photo sharing sewn up...
The comparison isn't really fair, since they sell the game and make money - a different model than flash games (advertising, free distribution).

The problem with launching these apps is the amount of noise you need to break through in the app store to differentiate a product. People will probably start following brands instead of titles when searching for new content. This is already the case with other platforms, such as Zynga (Facebook), and EA (desktop, consoles). In that sense, the brand could become entrenched and very valuable.

There is no brand leader in mobile applications, yet.
I've encountered something similar to your "invoices" situation many times. I'm actually blocked on something now, but I know my mind is hard at work to get things straight in some background process. Once my block is cleared, I know I'll just dive in and get things done in the same amount of time it would have originally taken, only with better results. I know that, because that's how it's worked for me so many times before. Every once in a while I forget what I was working on, but it's usually in favor of a better project or solution.

Fortunately, my blocks are usually short and resolved by letting my background processes chew on a problem during a night of sleep.

I think the real trick is to actually attack problems that cause me to block. If I stick with simple things I can process in real time, I'm not thinking hard enough.

Of course, this sort of discussion here wouldn't be complete without a reference to good and bad procrastination:
http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
Keeping everyone happy? I'm still looking for a way to properly handle Launchpad bug reports.
Well I'm curious as to how the idea came about. Way I see it I think you may have gotten the idea by looking at conversations that might tend to flow on a forum like warez bb. But actual downloading for most people would work like this. Person sees link. Waits for 30 seconds for it to be available and then sets it to download and continues with whatever they might be supposed to be doing.

So here come the questions
1) are you solving a problem? Or is this a novel idea you think might be cool? If it's the former then what is the problem? If it is the latter the next question will be even more relevant
2) typical file share downloads won't last more than 15 minutes. Minimum a minute. Average somewhere around 4 minutes. Why would people want to chat for that time?
3) given that people set stuff to download and move along you have to be adding value to what peoples time if you expect them to devote time to chatting instead. What's the value you add?

I will never shoot down an idea outright so go ahead and answer without worrying that I'll cream over you. But you do need to be able to answer those questions to anyone to say why your idea is actually something that would be worth using.

Cheers. More questions after your answers :)
I believe most of the time, for any given idea, you'll get a number of negative reactions very fast - especially if there is no actual demo to see yet. If we take your landing page as an elevator pitch, the feedback you get will mostly consist of obvious concerns, such as:

Won't that devolve into piratebay with a chatroom?
How will you pay for the huge bandwidth and storage required?
Will people want to chat ad-hoc with strangers while they're downloading?
Do people want others to know what they're downloading?
How can you make this legal AND interesting?

But those concerns are largely shots in the dark. We don't know what you got planned. So I guess the question is more: Do you believe in the idea? Do you believe you can make this work? If so, you shouldn't give the reins to naysayers, show what you can do; go ahead and try it out, by all means! But if the concerns above are similar to your own doubts, move away from the keyboard and develop another idea.
I have a little saying that "Senator Obama would be very disappointed with President Obama". For me it sums up these 4 years in a nutshell.
There was an article on HN a few days ago that explained how Angry Birds was in the iTunes store for several weeks and got no traction. It was only after Rovio partnered with a company with a good relationship with Apple and got the game featured on iTunes that it took off.
I had a slow job for a year, so I bought Essential Blender and went through it chapter by chapter when bored, I'm no expert but I can now model reasonably well - you can also read it free online here http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Books/Essential_Bl... - but yeah it's 2.49 focussed, and the new 2.5 is considerably better/different - here's something I modelled after a month or so http://www.blackspike.com/site/3d/technics-1210-3d
I don't get the threading criticism of Node, php and ruby are single threaded too (except for something like IronRuby which few people use).
Unlocking the money to succeed | The Post
125 years of Angry Birds is being played every day.
I think the main thing holding erlang back is its community culture, its source may have been open, but it was not an "open source" project until very recently, some might say it still isnt, the good news is that it is changing.

The OTP team moved erlang to github so people can see and contribute to its development.

The OTP team are moving erlangs infrastructure to open tools (the tests are switching to common test) which helps outside contribution a lot.

Community contributions are starting to pick up, http://erlagner.org/ is finally a package manager that has been picked up by the community, http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ is an awesome set of beginner tutorials, http://erldocs.com/ (mine) is an easy way to browse the documentation.

Node is a lot younger but is already more mature than erlang in all the areas above, erlang is playing catch up in these regards, but it has a much more solid base.
And more so because its much easier to write rouge apps or malware-apps for smartphones than to hack the dedicated card readers

When I hand over my card to a merchant in a store, how do I know what they are swiping it in is a dedicated and secure card reader? I don't.
Pushy - serverless RPC in Python and Java
A Memory of Webs Past
CVV is printed on the back of the card. Thus the point remains, once I hand over my card to someone, all of the information they need to use my card is printed right on the card.
>A few months before they started learning to talk, say, at about 13 months, they seemed to need more sleep, even though they weren't exercising any more.

13 months has to be within a month or so of the median age for starting to walk (in my country at least, I know some start much younger) but you say your kids didn't increase their exercise; presumably then they were already walking at that age?

We have 2 boys that have been treated almost identically, obviously there have been differences and only one of them is a first child. However they have so far had vastly different sleep patterns. The one who sleeps least appears to have developed fastest in linguistic terms. His brother, the slower, was certainly no slouch (and without wishing to boast) is pretty close to top of his class for reading despite being one of the youngest.

I meet quite a lot of different parents & babies/toddlers from different backgrounds and find there are a lot of variations in sleep pattern - I don't have anywhere near enough contact with them to establish correlations with development and sleep pattern though.

My kids could be outliers. I'm sure such studies must have been done?!

tl;dr anecdotes are anecdotal and my experience doesn't bear out your hypothesis
Hey Alex, the short answer is that I'm just building it to solve my own problem :)
The major difference in what we're saying is that you're defining success as a step function, I'm defining it as a continuum. If we're talking about a step function, sure, you're more likely to get over the threshold with calculated risks and diligence. But out at the end of the continuum, where the Bill Gates and Michael Jordans of the world live, in that league, I believe you need over the top dedication and marathon like persistence.
If I take a photo with my iPod, I know it's really low quality to start, so I don't take things I'm going to archive with it. Hopefully others do the same.

But I also take pictures with the camera app first, save them to the camera roll and then pull them into Instagram/picplz if I want to share them. That way, I've got to versions if I want to get all retro with what I'm sharing. Or I can just share the picture as-is.
An unwillingness to accept and identify the causes of problems instead of dismissing all causes as facades for laziness indicates poor project management ability. A good project manager works with the team to identify why goals weren't met and to include these new risks in future estimates. If he spent half as much time identifying and mitigating risks as writing up his book of excuses he might not have had so many people giving them to him.
Top 20 FIX Protocol Interview Questions
Javascript on the server existed in 1996. Do you remember Netscape "Livewire"?

The big difference is node is event-based...
Exactly. At first, I listened to Veriphone's complaints with an open mind, because credit card fraud is pretty serious.

But then I started thinking, "That's it? A magstripe reader! You can get those anywhere and it will do the exact same thing. Unencrypted."

We had to pick one up for a customer so the can use magstripe time cards. To test it out, we plugged it into a computer, opened Notepad and started scanning anything with a magstripe.
During their dominant periods, dev tools on Solaris and OS9 cost money.
Listen to the Man Who Invented 'Control-Alt-Delete' Explain Its Origin
The difference is PHP is thread (or, rather, process) per connection. Node is one process handing multiple connections.
One of the fundamental points of the OP was that "The real use of being there in person as a teacher is for interacting with the students."

While I understand your concern in general, it seems unfounded in this case.
My 0.02:
Screenshots, Screenshots, Screenshots :)
A more accurate title today would be, "How I lost my faith in Common Lisp".
For me it's about simplicity. RoR has become a beast almost of asp.net/IIS proportions. I'd rather not deal with the hassle of getting everything set up. That's why I'm in love with Sinatra, Node, and golang.
Show HN: HTML5 Bookmarklet - destroys a website and lets race across it
Would love to get the communities feedback on my most recent project
Wait. Isn't the data on the magnetic strip unencrypted anyway? Sure, your little card reader could encrypt the data, then send little ones and zeros through the headphone jack to be decrypted by your proprietary software, but the original data still isn't encrypted. It's just sitting there on the card in all of it's unencrypted glory. This is essentially security through obfuscation.
I followed Dharmeshs' blog from one of the earliest posts.

It seemed from that outside that he learnt about entrepreneurship at college, and then simply went about the business of putting that into practice.

Theory grounded in the type of common sense espoused on this site.

Congrats to him & Brian for making such a huge success of it. Has been very interesting to follow.
In my humble opinion, this looks like a step backwards. Their current logo looks much slicker and more professionally-designed than the speculated new logo.
Reminds me of MIT Media Labs's new logo.
Out of curiosity, do you work in this industry? What is your proposed marketing plan?
I can't wait for the subtitles to be uploaded, so that I can share with my friends who can't be bothered to watch something which is not in their language.
The most valuable part of Paypal is the systems and strategies they've invented for risk mitigation and fraud prevention.

Before they developed those systems, online payment aggregators were a nonviable business.

Many people in the late 90's and early 00's felt that it was a failed experiment and that the risks were just too high. This after a long list of failed startups and failed infinitives at existing banks.

Yes, it can seem very obtuse. But they are in a risky business. Without their anti-abuse measures (which every other merchant aggregator has cloned to some extent), this niche would not exist. You would have to get your own merchant account if you wanted to sell online.
Ask HN - What's the best language for AST manipulation?
I'm starting a new project at work that will require a good bit of run-time code generation. I like the AST module in Python, but I'd like to think I have an open mind.

I also already know about, and sometimes use, Java Emitter Templates, but that doesn't feel like a run-time solution.

Maybe I'm subconsciously looking for something with the flavor of Go, Lua, Erlang, Ruby, etc. etc. -- you know, trendy ;)

This is a 18+ month long project, so learning a new language is completely reasonable (I picked up Python under similar circumstances).

It is OK if Lisp is the answer... how is arc coming along anyway?
Yeah, back when the original Mac dev kit was released you had to join the developer program for $1500/year. What you got was decent hardware discounts (for hardware that was much high priced than it is today), several loose leaf binders of documentation, and a big stack of floppies. IIRC, the original Mac compilers were designed to run on a Lisa (so toss another $10K in the pot).

As time went on, things got better. Codewarrior by Think appeared, documentation was distributed on CDROM, and the annual dev program dropped to $400.

The $99/yr, or the $4.99, is a pittance. Seriously.
Is stylish available for Chrome?

Because then you could do it cross-browser with Firefox.

In fact it looks like some folk have been busy:

http://userstyles.org/styles/browse/all/http:%2F%2Fnews.ycom...