skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TweetBot's also been in development for a long, long time. They had to put it on hold the first time, when Twitter bought Tweetie and put it out for free.
I don't know about the GP's project, but I implemented my own for historious by using PayPal's recurring payments feature. I store the user's subscription expiration date in their profile, and when the PayPal rebilling notification comes, the date is just reset by X days, which is stored in the PayPal "extra data" field (signed, of course).

Doing the charges yourself is exactly the same, except you have a nightly cronjob to find the accounts that expire today and rebill them. I don't think there's enough material in this to warrant a post.
Beware the results of polls such as this. Any time change is introduced, we know that some people will naturally react negatively. When asked what they prefer, people will often give an explicit response even though their "espoused theory" may differ greatly from their "theory in use": http://www.lopn.net/TheoryofAction.html

Not to say these polls aren't valuable, just take them with the requisite serving of salt.

EDIT: In the interest of full disclosure, I strongly support the new "no display" points.
On the upside, I spend a lot less time looking at the HN comments. I used to scroll down, looking for insightful comments within otherwise low-ranked threads or in a sea of trite comments. Now, I can't distinguish them, so I don't even look past the top-ranked reply and the top comment or two.

Not having points displayed has probably given me ten minutes a day of my life back :-) Though I can't say that I prefer it that way.
Ideally, every function you write returns a meaningful value ... even if that function is used for nothing more than side effects, and that value is just "true", or "null".

To create a void function in CoffeeScript, just add a naked "return" as the final line.

sideEffecty = ->
do something
do somethingElse
return
This is amazingly similar to Test Driven Development. In the purest form of TDD, you don't write a single line of code until you have a failing test. The failing test is the unanswered question. Then, you write the code that "answers that question." This means that each step of the way, you are confirming that prior principles are correctly understood by the human and the computer before building on those prior principles.

As the Agile theory puts it, this approach "maximizes feedback".
MNPP is a desktop application for local execution, the closest thing to a production environment. MNPP is beginning and is on the way to make things easier for the developer.
Here are the stats for Stanford: http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads
So the software identifies the song being played, reports the song back to a master server to determine the rightful owner, then displays an advertisement from which the revenue is shared with the copyright owner?

Why would any pirate even consider using this player when everyone already has ad-free options available? Also, anyone who uses this player or plug-in is handing the record companies a list of their music files and how often they listen to them. Even worse, this is all done under the pretense that the end-user hasn't actually purchased the music files.

Either this is business plan is missing some important element, or I'm missing something.
Yahoo blocks Googlebot
Do it yourself. Write a personal email, tell them your story, and give them a serious (but below your max) offer. If you can find the name of the owner, do some research about him/her, and see if you can find some commonalities just to get a conversation going (like going to the same school, hobbies, interests, etc).

Then wait and see
well, the model works for others: millions (or hundreds of thousands) gladly pay a monthly fee of £40 on usenet + rapidshare accounts, and i'm pretty sure most of them renew month after month
tl;dr Facebook is a fad, people will soon move on to other fads.

Fair argument, sensationalist title.
FYI, yes there are.
The post in the IGDA blog:
http://igdaboard.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/important-advisory...
CosUmiX-2
Well, be sure to e.g. factor in the terrible age discrimination in the former field (I have no knowledge of Computational Math as a career). Conventional, salaried programming careers end around age 35-40 and get totally impossible at 50 unless you can go the consultant route, specialize in one of the fields that respects gray hairs (e.g. embedded to some extent) or walk on water.

I had a friend who did that, finishing at about age 40 (and looking it due to premature gray hair). She never found a job, which is a terrible shame since she has "the spark" for programming which is rare in men and very very rare in women (she's the 3rd I've ever met in my 50 years on this earth---and as someone who until a year ago could pass for a college student my personal anecdotal data on age discrimination is rather solid).

On the other hand, if you're going to go the YC sort of route to start your own company, weight the risks of course but go for it! You'll get a mental toolbox which will do you well when you need to tackle difficult problems, and in many ways this field is like von Clausewitz's description of war, "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult."

As Microsoft and its competitors' history shows consistently writing software that works is harder than most people think. pg commented in one of his essays that a whole lot of the dot.com bubble era's failures were technical---well, their business model also may have had no chance, but they never got to the point of trying that. Friendster lost to Facebook if for no other reason than that for too many years they didn't solve their capacity problems which made the site painful to use.
Hey thanks man, that's cleared things up for me!
Joel's article is pretty good as a starting point, but, I think there is a lot of variation on what the first set of employees get.

I've been a first 10 employee (As an infrastructure contributor, not core engineer) twice in companies that eventually were valued at greater than $1 Billion. The first time I received 0.03% Equity (Before Dilution) - the second time I received 0.1% Equity (Before lots of dilution).

For one of those companies, I know that some of the core engineers received 3-4x what I did, so - extracting to all of the six core engineers in Layer 1, Plus the Administrative crew - comes around 6 * .4% + 3 * .1% = about 2.7% for the first nine employees. We had our series A before anybody came on board, as an employee.

There is probably a different allocation method for teams comprised of "Serial Entrepreneurs" - Your risk in joining that team is much less, so your equity is typically much less. Also, the approach usually goes like the following:

Step 1: Two - Four Founders create a company. Roughly sharing the equity, though, if there is a "Named" founder that will Garner Press/Financing/Customers, they take a bigger chunk.

Step 2: Founders brainstorm for month or two, commit to working together for a minimum of four-five years, and then go pitch their preferred VCs. VCs give them a valuation of $5-$10mm (pre-money) and invest $1mm-$2mm.

Step 3: First 5-10 Employees are hired, with a stock pool of 3%-10% - Sr. Employees with a great track record who currently have great jobs at Google/Facebook/etc.. will require a larger equity share. Out of work contributors who have a solid, if not exceptional track record will receive significantly less. The team now has a clock ticking, and has to demonstrate some traction within six-nine months to get their next round before the money runs out.
I remember reading about it at the time. As I recall, some units had gotten in before the majority were seized. I have a CD32 ( complete with an SX-1 ) in my garage that likely was one of your display kiosks at one time.

I have never been quite as excited over a machine as when I got my Amiga 500. I had owned a Commodore Plus/4 and a 128 since middle school and high school, and bought the 500 to start college. It was quite an amazing little machine for it's day.

Then again, I haven't ever been 17 again either, so that might explain it.
Actually if you read http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01/20/proto-minecraft-a... apparently releasing code (unintentionally) is what destroyed Minecraft's inspiration Infiniminer.
C-x z is definitely useful, thanks!
unrelated: j/k for up and down?! I never thought I'd see vim shortcuts at boston.com of all places. J Random Hacker must be working there.
The privacy policy states

PearWords does not...
Place "cookies" (small text files) on your system for any reason.

I would beg to differ, it may be Google Analytics dropping the cookies on pearwords' behalf, but they're still there. (http://d.pr/D3oy)
For me, M-d, (which I remapped from C-d?) does not put the text into the ring.
Sorry, I was talking more about 3D games, in particular those that became popular around the time Doom came out (1993) which is the same year the CD32 was released.

The Amiga was great for 3D production graphics. Software such as Lightwave and Imagine 3D punched way above its weight (and cost) for a while.
Listing "customer personas" instead of features improved our CTR by 200%
Market Street Looks for Twitter Revival
I think HN would do well to look at how Slashdot scores its comments.

Especially, I think having a few pre-defined tags that people can give is very useful, and in many ways a lot more useful than votes. Votes, as many people have noted, are often off the cuff, and I'll give a +1 without too much thought. Calling someone insightful? A troll? I'm going to think about that a little harder.

So the big thing is increasing the average amount of time people spend before voting. Some AJAX trickery would be a little strong-armed. I think focusing on finding ways of filtering content that are more descriptive is a better direction to go. (Being more descriptive, I think, is the only way to force people to be more discerning.)

Though I don't mean to suggest precisely Slashdot's system. The tags should be carefully chosen. "factually incorrect" would be a nice one to have. (And is a little less insulting than "troll," making no assumptions about the intentions of the author.)
dan, because you are holding the CC information on your site and POST'ing it out to external services at authorize.net, did you have to do any work for the "PCI" compliant/privacy stuff I see?

I read a few posts on forums that if the customer financial data is ever on a page you wrote, you come under the realm of at least some PCI compliance because of a possible XSS attack getting that information out of your forms.

That made the hosted "checkout" pages seem a lot more attractive to me... curious how you handled this.
While I agree in principle, you're perhaps glossing over the wave of handset TiVoization that is being championed by Motorola and now is spreading to HTC and others under the whitewash of "protecting the end-users". This prevents anyone except the manufacturer from updating or modifying even the most significant copyleft portions of Android (the kernel). Availability of free software is useless in that case. This is one of the "exploitable" weaknesses of GPLv2 that TiVo has pioneered and why GPLv3 was created. So, while yes, the Linux kernel on Motorola's recent phones is GPL free software, it's a moot point because you can't use anything except Motorola's blessed bits.
Users having to go through all of the extra steps just to install and enable the Amazon app is enough reason for not publishing via Amazon's app store.

Also, users have to enable Amazon's 1-click mobile purchasing. A 2nd huge hurdle.
NewME Launches Accelerator for Minority-led Start-ups in Silicon Valley
Ask HN: Is this a bad time to be majoring in Computer Science
There have been a number of news articles which have stated that there has been a somewhat significant increase in the number of students who are majoring in CS. Therefore, is this a bad time for someone to be starting an undergraduate program in computer science?
> Hmm, I wonder about the accuracy of this

To be fair, the article does say:

>> But I didn't know this factoid.

If you Google define:factoid, you'll see the definitions are like "something resembling a fact; unverified (often invented) information that is given credibility because it appeared in print".

Looking at the suffix "-oid", it makes sense that the definition is akin to "similar to a fact."

However, I don't think that's what the author intended. "Factoid" has come to mean, "a little fact", it seems.
Bank email archives exposed via financial crash investigation
For anyone interested we used A/B tests, powered by the seven_minute_abs Rails plug-in, to measure the results.

I'd be interested to hear about other people's experiments both with A/B tests and customer segmentation.
I can believe that if Amazon were sticking to terms for its own market, but Amazon is attempting to prohibit anyone who sells through its market from simultaneously trying other pricing strategies in other channels. That seems more like a classic attempt at using market power in one channel to coerce behavior in other channels, rather than competing on the product's actual strength (unlike Google or even Apple).
It could be that people who are working during the day prefer HN with points so that they can skim (since they may not have enough time to read fully).
> Planar

Thanks.
neat, I'm not hungarian but I live in budapest :)
That's true but both approaches are not mutually exclusive.
I see Spotify more like a radio service, albeit one I do pay for. If the radio station shuts down I find another way of listening to music. I still buy some music in addition. I dont feel I own the music in Spotify so if it went away I havent lost it... I could never afford to own that much music.
Thanks! That's an interesting idea, I'll have play around with ThinkUp a little bit and figure out how they can be integrated together
From my understanding you can put that sort of thing in an operating agreement, and still have an even split. Please, someone with more knowledge on the subject confirm or correct this.
Show HN: Pacmaze V1 - a Pacman in WebGL - first game of the Pacmaze Experiment
Mark Zuckerberg: Brilliant. Deceptive. Interactive?
Agree. Startups are small companies. Firing someone on Day 364 to dodge equity vesting is going to be noticed: he'll send emails or place calls to former employees. Even if every other employee agrees that he needs to be fired, no one is going to have good thoughts about it if he's scumbagged.

The way you handle that, if it's day 330 or so, is to negotiate a fair severance and buy out the equity on a pro-rated basis. "I don't have to give you anything, but you've worked nine-tenths of the year and your equity stake would be worth about $50,000 at the current valuation. Here's $45,000 not to make waves."
I haven't heard any mention of this game being free or open source. The software it uses (Voxlap & GenLand) both have permissive non-commercial licenses w/ attribution but are not viral like the GPL.
How to hack your company's crappy CMS
This was an interesting article. In some ways, I think I learned more about Oracle than PostgreSQL, but it's all good. My perspective is developer, rather than DBA, so it was enlightening to delve into another's specialty.

I've occasionally used Postgres at home, including doing some work at home long ago for a (small batch oriented) project to be hosted on Oracle at work. Irony on that project: my crap hardware at home outperformed the server at work, due to neglect by the Oracle DBAs at work. The DBAs had to really be pushed to index several of the tables, as we had to convince them that we really did read some tables and columns many times, rather than generate "write once, read never" type data :-) In contrast, the default Postgres setup did well at this particular job running at home with my "2 cans on a string" setup: 200 MHz Athlon client & 166 Mhz P1 "server", joined by a 96 Kb serial PPP connection! (I forgot why I used 2 machines instead of 1, but computers were small back then -- my "Atom" laptop now has more computrons than those boxes)

I found that MySQL was not even close (at least 10 years ago) to emulating Oracle. At least Postgres was close enough to make the effort, and the poster's comparison, worthwhile.
I happily pay Spotify €10 a month for an all-I-can-eat buffet of DRM'ed downloads, covering much of all the released music of many of the major labels. I'm certain I'm not alone.

I don't care that I'm left with nothing when they fail or change their policy so it doesn't suit me and I decide to take my money elsewhere. They offer me a convenient service. I'm not even interested in buying CD's.
Are you in it for the money or because you love technology/programming?
Don't get me wrong, as I am not trying to start a political argument, but the graphs on the page show the top level spending; leaves out lower level stuff. Defense spending doesn't mean buying stealth bombers. It can also mean foreign aide, food for needy afgans, providing soldiers with better equipment, paying families who had loved ones killed- on both sides- and a myriad of other things.

The illustrations are pretty, but lack substance to form educated decisions; that goes for all categories. A break down of each section is what is needed. Can money in education be spent better? There is a lot more involved than just "cutting the defense budget".
I was thinking how painfully slow it was, until I remembered the adage: "make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast."

It works, and it is certainly elegant.
City chat - mobile web chat (HTML5) for Foursquare
Why Snooki might be “worth” more than a Nobel Prize-winner.
You never know who might be interested in your code and what someone else might do with it.
As part of my freelancing I consult for the big Wall St. Firms, pretty much all of them. When they have a deal and need technical insight they call me up. One thing you quickly realize is that while they are a lot of bright people on wall st. There are also a lot of dumb asses that think they are running a con and think nobody sees that they have the mentality of a street hood. I will say that almost all of the quants I have spoke with a very bright people. I think saying that Wall St. is sucking up all the brightest minds frames the intellectual capacity of Wall St. as being a little more luminary than reality. Pedigree will get you just as far as intelligence in the sector.
Thank you. That was amazing.
The fact that someone can patent a fundamental of set theory is wrong. And history will look back on it as witch burnings.
I don't see how the numbers could show that this scenario is fair.

- Developer sets a minimum list price of $0.99 (fair)

- Amazon has an 80% off sale (fair)

- Developer later has an 80% sale on Android Market (fair)

- Amazon can now sell the app for 96% off, because the sale on Android Market resets the minimum list price (unfair)

The developer is punished for having a sale on a competing market by now allowing Amazon to sell the app for $0.04, forever.
18 Million WordPress.com Blogs Compromised In Attack
Programming in Scala, First Edition
Sorry for the belated reply:

My first job was at Epic Games working with Unreal Engine 2 which had a codebase of well over a million lines of C++ and UnrealScript. So, I agree with you of the value of learning your way around sprawling legacy codebases. But the company was still small back then (I think I was the 25th employee and the 10th programmer) and you could jump in at the deep end and quickly start getting things done. I've since worked at a massive company. I learned a lot from that, but it would have been frustrating had I gone there in my early career. That's the distinction I was trying to draw.

Getting red-flagged if you have too short stints at jobs is definitely a risk with taking Jason's advice. When I'm hiring people in the game industry, the most important clue in that respect is whether they stayed long enough to ship the projects they started, within reasonable limits. That usually works out to a 2-3 year minimum. That criterion isn't just meant to weed out job hoppers. The final six months of shipping a game are just qualitatively different (often in unpleasant but educational ways) from the rest of the development cycle. If you fucked up your design in the earlier stages, that is when your chickens come home to roost.
Amazon is an impressive company...I sometimes forget that they also sell books!
For new music. Sure the recording industry will feel they are getting ripped off but as the comment above says, they are getting nothing currently.
The Montessori Mafia: A Follow Up Chat
Great post, glad you are coming back to NYC! Wanted to make a comment about your website. I think you overstate cost as a deciding factor for parents. Right now, visiting your website and searching for a tutor the cost and picture are the most highlighted factors about each tutor. From my experience tutoring for 5+ years, most people who seek a tutor for their kid (especially in test prep) care far more about the tutor's capabilities than price.

I've been meaning to write a blog post about this, but when I started my tutoring business I was very worried about what I charged. Nervously, I would bring it up at the beginning of early conversations with prospective parents. Later, I realized that parents really use those calls to establish competency. If they believe you are really competent they will pay double or triple the "average" price for your help. People consider tutoring, and especially test prep as investments, and like anyone else they care more about their ROI than their exact cost.

I think the focus for the search on Tutorspree should be on emphasizing competency. Especially for test prep. So, in the big box where price is now, it could show their applicable SAT/LSAT/GMAT score, and perhaps the number of students they have tutored before. Then it could have a one-liner like "Graduating cum laude with degrees in Mathematics and Economics" or whatever. This is addressing what the parents want (especially in ultra affluent and educationally attuned uptown Manhattan).

Even more importantly, it makes the tutors feel like they are competing on quality, not on price. This will encourage better tutors to come to your site. Top LSAT companies will pay a tutor $100+/hour and charge $250+/hour. In order for a great tutor to use your site they must feel like they have a chance to get paid at least equivalently. And, I think in the end the most likely way Tutorspree succeeds is by matching parents/students with incredible students.

</completely_unsolicited_advice>

Good luck again! I will be NYC based soon, and have worked as a tutor for many years. If you guys would like to bounce ideas off someone with that background, my email is in my profile.
I think the idea is to make it so you don't have a choice.
Yes. No. I'm alone.
Big deal with GNOME and Ubuntu for me is the six month release cycle. I know every half year I will get a new version with lots of fixes and improvements.

This kind of expectability lacks from almost all other desktop OSs
or... be an entrepreneur and take a chance...
This isn't true. Email disclaimers can't unilaterally create a contract between the sender and receiver. This doesn't mean they are legally worthless.

Two legally useful email disclaimers: "this is not legal advice" and "this is not an offer to buy or sell securities".

These are both legally binding, because they merely remove potential ambiguity from an email and explicitly state the absence of a contract. Without the disclaimer, the text of an email might otherwise be interpreted to mean that a contract was present.