skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why not use your own software to create niche job boards? Not only will it generate revenue streams, but it will also help you better understand your customers and further improve your software.
You need platform-specific APIs to give you direct access to the relevant hardware, which you then need to be able to use efficiently.

I'd rather see applications just feed the bytestream to the OS to decode using the best means available, even if it means support for new codecs is a bit slow. (Although an OS-level codec plugin architecture like QuickTime Components can get you software decoding for new or obscure codecs.)

If my GPU has a high-quality, high-speed H.264 decoder, I shouldn't have to worry about which browsers will use it. They should all default to the OS-provided decoding and playback methods unless there are sound technical reasons not to. If I want to use a new codec that's not supported by the fixed-function decoder, I shouldn't have to worry about which web browsers have bothered to include the necessary OpenCL code to decode on my GPU. I should just be able to install one codec that hooks in to the OS's media framework, and all browsers should use that first.
Oddly, I've never heard anybody say they use the OO part of OCaml much. (I don't, either.)
I've still seen points displayed on some comments. Is this a temporary glitch or is there some reason they'll be displayed sometimes?
Did you donate enough for him to win?
If we assume that this would legitimately motivate a developer to change their behavior, it seems like it would just incentivize them to run tests less frequently.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372748 : 5 comments
Just because Haskell is purer that doesn't mean ML is pointless. Under the right circumstances even a functional program can benefit from mutable state. One example (perhaps the only real example; I don't know) can be found in the SML New Jersey implemetation of splay trees, which modifies the tree during certain operations.

Even without the purity question there are other things to consider. ML is evaluated strictly, for example. I don't know much Haskell but I don't believe it has any direct counterpart to ML's functors, either. There are probably many other differences. Haskell is definitely more popular and is still a niche language, so the reason you don't hear much about ML's benefits is probably just because it has so few users.
2 Foot UI for the 10 Foot Screen
CodeConf wrap up
"jerk" would be a descriptive term.
If you don't think a story will get 2-5 up votes, then you probably shouldn't submit it.

Unless a link is linkbait attention-whoring or breaking news, it's basically luck whether it gets that first upvote in its first few minutes to cause it to hit the front page. If you patrol "new" often, you'll see this constantly: tons of things in "new" are relevant articles, but still have no upvotes.

This problem only gets worse as HN grows in size.

Now, obviously, I have >4k karma and I shouldn't care at all about such a small karma cost. But the psychological effect exists regardless.
Hiw Ayn Rand ruined my childhood
looking at the code, they've optimized for speed. And they also said -

> We decided to optimize for speed rather than simplicity and even included special cases for short inputs.
There's really not much out there about startup sales, unfortunately. Besides the SalesTie blog, the best I've seen is Mark Suster's blog at http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ - He seems to blog about startup sales issues pretty often.
Acunu (http://acunu.com) are a UK startup and have an implementation of Cassandra, it supports versions presumably based on this.
That's correct, but it's one of our highest priority feature additions. We'll be adding them soon.
The attack of the design weenie
And one aspect that no one is touching on is unsecured wireless hotspots. What is the implications of this for Safeway, or any other company that runs a customer friendly wifi access network?

Say goodbye to those conviences as well. ISP's will need waivers for customers running unsecured networks, not to mention potential liability when your supplying wireless devices to your customers.

Like gun control the only people this will punish is law abiding citizens.
It almost seems like the the sony comments are filtered to only display pro sony comments. Its sad to see so many people cheer for sony.
That assumes he paid Sony something, which isn't necessarily true. Given the way things were going, I personally feel that the impetus to settle came from Sony's side, knowing they had a weak case.

It's too bad we don't know all the terms.
It gets higher and higher pitched as the video goes on, so may have to do with the unicode values. But too jumpy to just be that.
+1, please. I very nearly flagged some submissions; on a slower day, I wouldn't have even noticed.
Your Laptop is Not Private or Secure at US Customs
Connection timed out.

Alternate link: http://www.king5.com/news/School-bans-students-from-bringing...
I see this is a question of group culture. We learn by looking around and imitating. We all acknowledge this behavior when advising startups to ship products and learn on the way. This group is no different; the main difference is, that it grows too fast to learn from old members and reading a guideline can be compared to reading a book about startups versus doing it. Here are my suggestions I hope they will be helpful:

for all new users and all existing users with karma<100

* on create account page give link to Guidelines to read and before signing up give us a quiz with 20 questions to assess our understanding of the most important ones. This would also give us a clear message that attitude and quality is very important on HN.

for all users

* rename "comments" to "thoughts" and add "chat" link to convore/wompt for a relaxed discussion. From "chats" users can deduct quality material to "thougts" for history value.

for users with karma<100

* include explanations on down-votes so we can understand our mistakes an learn from them. Give us a chance to become better rather then killing us and wait for us to reappear as yet another troll.

* make submit button on "thoughts" to countdown 10 seconds (with bail-out option) to give us time to rethink if the post is really useful
I think this would exacerbate the "comment quality" problem by encouraging people to make lots of sub-par comments so they can gain enough karma to submit their latest blog post.
How everyone hides the true knowledge. That's why people worship "the bingo guy" he's one of the few that disclose.
+1

What a great way of making yourself feel a bit more insignificant and smaller.
(Yes, to clarify, by "projecting external feelings", I didn't necessarily mean your feelings, but those of people you've met. Maybe I was unclear.)

I am what you might call an autodidact. When I observe an institution isn't sufficiently good, I pivot and fulfill my requirements elsewhere, for example by reading a book or meeting passionate people informally. I do not believe that this autodidacticism is great efficiency-wise, but often it's unfortunately better than alternatives.

When evaluating the earlier poster's anecdote of teaching 180 adults, of course it's very unlikely that she/he had the terrible luck to draw 180 (or even 100) genetic freaks who were born with terrible attitudes. (And even if she/he did, just wait a semester and problem solved!) Far more likely to me: at least one major institution failed them along the way. So it is clearly useful to identify which ones failed — especially if it's the one you're in, as that's the one you have most control over. (Teachers in particular have a position of power in the classroom.)

(The power of institutional analysis is you can completely replace the people in them, and they'll still function essentially the same.)

More important — if you realize that your approach is clearly unsuccessful, I think you need to stop, reevaluate and probably pivot. Be open to shattering your worldview. Rather than plod on stubbornly in a direction you know leads to abject failure, because most people around you are willing to fail miserably in the same way. (Or because "But it's not in my job description!") I do not intend to be such an extreme romanticist of failure. In fact, today I happened to institute post-mortems at work, to identify our little failures. Not to blame, but to improve.

It is important for teachers to have good attitudes, and it's disheartening to meet those ironically unwilling to learn. But I've met wonderful teachers.
That's exactly the right analysis.

More generally, there seems to be an entire class of apps out there that could be really useful, but which are really hard to monetize with subscriptions and/or ads revenue alone. Think about an advanced file converter, or maybe a one-off fax service. There are also the more traditional use cases, such as purchasing a single article from an online journal, or streaming a single movie online.

Minno provides an effective alternative to monetize these services, and it does so with much more ease than with traditional payment systems.
Or you could feel proud of yourself for speaking a language - a meme - that was sufficiently virulent to overtake most others.
SF to Paris in Two Minutes [video]
So Much Potential
Yeah, I know the guidelines, but pg himself said that using voting to express (dis)agreement was OK. I don't have a link to his comment, but it was mentioned in another thread few days ago. To me his position confirms that the voting function currently sits with one butt on two chairs, and this may be the root of the fanboy-style mass-upvoting problem with comments (that, again, was pointed out by pg not few days ago).
Grudges are what Ignore features are for. (And the opposite for Buddy systems.)

I recently wounded up criticizing a start-up pitch in a thread, and it turned out that the person I had the conversation with was one of the founders. At least the OP - and preferably the coworkers - should be highlighted. The latter could be achieved by letting the OP include user names, when s/he creates a thread.
This was a SolveMedia CAPTCHA? The ones I've seen that they having been promoting force you to watch 10-sec movie clips, among other things, and then enter the tagline of the film.
% profits on a pass-thru payment system are not the same thing as % profits on actually building something.

Could you explain this claim?
So that your browser vendor can force their philosophical decisions about file formats on their users. That's basically it.

Security is supposedly an issue, but "clicking on a video file in your browser to play it" is no easier than clicking "open file" in a download prompt -- if there's a vulnerability in your media player, attackers don't need <video> to get to it.
What I am looking forward to is submission downvoting. I hope it's one of the features that gets experimented.
snewman's comments have addressed most of this. (hey steve!) i'll just add that HRD has more predictable read and write latency, which most developers like a lot, but its writes are also slower on average, since they incur at least one Paxos round across datacenters.
Great explanation on how it works. I was wondering the other day whether there was a way to tell when a tab gets the focus to autoupdate content. Now I know I can use window.focus and window.blur.
Rules for a Creative Startup Culture
Hip str submit - Google Search
Bitbucket: Import SVN, Google Code, SourceForge and Hg repositories
Hmm, that looks like a different paper. Try this: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1103/1103.4282v2.pdf
You could even have everyone's HN be seeded by his own upvotes/downvotes. Everyone would then get their own HN with stuff they like on top and stuff they don't like on the bottom. A tagging system would also help a lot. People who are interested in politics get politics, people who are interested in science get science. I'm not sure if these are good ideas however, because you might get multiple ghettos (and it would be hard to implement).
The Developer Landgrab - Another Way to Look at Dev/Ops
$100 million is rather less than 1% of Zuckerberg's wealth. Little old ladies donate higher percentages than this.

Donations, particularly ones which smell an awful lot like quid pro quo, don't count for much in my book unless they truly hurt. When Zuckerberg donates all but $100 million, I'll believe he's doing something other than buying his way out of hell. And when he donates all but $5 million, ideally anonymously, then I'll be impressed.
As I can see, every user with a submission on /noobstories is green, so that's probably the threshold.

Edit: On further inspection, it appears I'm wrong, there are users there who are not green. The newest users I could find that are not green created their accounts 6 days ago. Users who created their accounts 4 days ago are green. I haven't had any luck in finding users who created their accounts exactly 5 days ago. So the threshold is either 5 or 6 days.
Your second link from Github is it. Thanks.
Shared repository between svn and git without git-svn
Interesting, thanks! But here is it's baked in (like appengine). Isn't the point of PAAS like these to let someone else worry about the sysadmining?
I strongly disagree. It's very useful to be able to qualify comments with what I know of that user, especially when I don't know much about the field being talked about.

I'm much more likely to take tptacek's advice on security more seriously than someone else's. Likewise with grellas's legal analysis, Patio11's small business/SEO advice, etc. That their names along might cause high karma for them isn't a bad thing. Quite the opposite, it causes their comments to be pushed to the top, which is almost always a good thing, as they're consistently the best comments in those threads.

It gives some measure of ability to gauge trustworthiness.
Downvoted comments' text is still in varying shades of gray though.
The challenges faced with on-disk data structures compared to in-memory ones are quite different in some respects, so not necessarily. (e.g. disk seek time isn't uniform, indirection hits you MUCH harder, sectors are much bigger than cache lines, robustness against sudden loss of power is important, etc.).

That said, I can't tell what they're suggesting from a cursory reading, I'll need to spend some time deciphering it. (this one seems to fall into one of those unparseable academic publications where the interesting bits are buried somewhere deep within the text)
I agree, without the ability to easily prioritize the features I will have to abandon github issues. It was also extremely lame to "upgrade" everyone to version 2 and lose all the data the users had put into their issues for the priority order.
Right, I understand that. I'm just surprised that they aren't showing off benchmarks or statistics to quantify the performance gains they're seeing.
That's the idea in theory. In practice, it's clear that upvotes/downvotes are often used to guide the discussion in the direction that the voter wants it to go, which is often towards his/her innate biases.
This one is endorsed by seomoz: http://www.marketmotive.com/
Poll on the title for an O'Reilly JavaScript book. 
I'm writing a book for O'Reilly on building JavaScript Web Applications.

To give some indication of the contents, the chapter titles are:

Introduction
1 - MVC & Classes
2 - Events & Observing
3 - Models & Data
4 - Controllers & State
5 - Views & Templating
6 - Dependency management
7 - Working with Files
8 - The Realtime Web
9 - Testing & Debugging
10 - Deploying
11 - Libraries - Spine
12 - Libraries - Backbone
13 - Libraries - JavascriptMVC
14 - Appendix - jQuery primer
15 - Appendix - CSS Extensions
16 - Appendix - CSS3 Reference

The question is... what should the title be? Vote for your favorite, or include alternative suggestions.
Stateful JavaScript Applications
Stateful JavaScript Apps
JavaScript Web Applications
JavaScript Apps
I'll be happy to pay the extra $25 for the regular version. The ad block included works just perfect ;-)
That is a related but different phenomenon. What you're looking for is called "self-serving bias." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Self-serving_... The dunning-kruger effect is much more subtle than that, take another look at the wiki article on it.

Also related, the actor-observer bias, which describes the opposite effect, and has had more research done on it. This is a common problem in psychology, humans are so full of contradiction.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Actor%E2%80%9...
Too bad I can't admit to feeling a bit of relief upon learning about the impostor syndrome, since doing so would certainly out me as the fraud I am.
Forget learning to code, it's probably a waste of time and you'll miss the boat. Your medical background is by far your strongest asset.

I suggest you find yourself a technical co-founder or someone that would be willing to work on a prototype with you. Even if you have the means and are willing to pony up some capital having someone technical that cares about the idea and end-product is pivotal to your success. Additional capital can speed up the process of course.

Why you shouldn't learn to code? The medical field is one that a hacker alone can't crack. Sure we can figure out what a user is looking for when we're designing a flight search interface - but if the end customer is a physician, being an actual physician is a huge advantage, both in designing the product and in speaking the same language as the customers (assuming they are also physicians).
dissenting opinion: It's easy to teach an interesting course when you get to handpick all of the material. 251 is called "Great Theoretical ideas of Computer Science" because it covers many of them. Alternatively, it's hard to come in and blow your students away with matrix algebra day after day.

His other popular class is called "Science of the Web," which is similarly open-ended.

He's undoubtedly a great teacher, but the other professors are also very competent; albeit in less sexy topics.
My point was that, as innocuous as it may seem, a message of support can make a few of the people in distress feel better. Maybe they've been materially taken care of, but there's still something amiss. That's where I believe emotion counts. If you can also donate something, well, even better.

And there is no dichotomy, I think. I'm glad we can both help and feel good about it.
> The salon scheduling example is particularly naïve, because scheduling software would not add much value to either salon owners or customers.

Interestingly, someone told me recently that his sister, who runs a salon, spends a ridiculous amount of money on precisely this: scheduling software! He's a hacker and couldn't quite work out why she would pay $thousands (sic) for some crappy semi-customised calendar when Google Calendar works just fine: in the end it came down to, "because all the other beauty salons use this software".

Not that I'm recommending this particular niche, mind you...
I think it totally depends on what you do there. I'd probably hire someone who has the full gamut of dev, sysadmin and customer interaction experience from a startup. Less so if they couldn't effectively describe how they'd helped get the business running.

> working at a startup might not have the same cache ...

By the way, I think you mean 'cachet': http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cachet
Foundry Group’s AdTech Investing: Adhesive
One risk behind hiding comment scores is that people will lose a cue for when they accidentally downvote.
Adding to your comment, it could also encourage group-think: "I'll only submit what I know others find cool." Note: I'm saying this as someone who submits stuff I think is very cool but doesn't get voted up very often.
Sure, you can see it if you look for it, but the only purpose of this landing page is to collect emails and twitter followers, and it could do that much better if it had a big visible email input field right below the main paragraphs.
SEC is considering easing limitations on the sale of stock by private companies
Would it really help with spam though? The rewards for a spammer to make it to the first, second, or even third page are probably worth the risk of negative karma.

As for duplicate articles, I'm not even really sure what the problem is. Is it duplicate articles (same url, slightly different) that clog up the system? Or is it the same subject being covered from many different sources? There have also been a few times within the last month where two stories about the same topic will be right next to each other on the front page--amazon/apple/other big industry announcements like to do this.
Amazon.com to Sell Kindle Digital Reader With Ads for $114
Ask HN: Which Currency to charge in?
First a bit of background:
I'm a Canadian, living, operating, and incorporated in Canada who will be charging $X/month for my service. Monthly expenses such as hosting are all US based and charged in $USD.

When it comes to charging should I tow the GAP and charge in $USD or go for $CAD? Only advantage to me in charging in $CAD is that I avoid currency fluctuations on the revenue stream as opposed to charging in $USD and converting to $CAD. For those who do not realize it, the $CAD is around $1.04USD right now whereas it has been as low as $0.65USD in the past decade. So as you can see, from a cash-flow management perspective, a bad exchange rate could be quite damaging to the business (OTOH a great exchange rate could be a boon).

To other Canadian operations: What do you do to manage the currency fluctuations?
It's an excellent way to mine the mid-point of the long tail. Clearly YC has limited resources and part of the requirement to be YC is to know that everyone they accept must be able to get the level of support they offer for new ventures.

The resource limitations guarantee that there will be people rejected which are otherwise solid ideas. So finding a way to get those people resources is a good thing for everyone.

I don't think it necessarily has to be a 'competition' but it could also give YC the ability to know what if they had chosen 'project Q' vs rejecting it, giving them a way to perhaps tune their own process a bit.

It's also true that there is an uncomfortable amount of randomness to startup success, founder chemistry, market windows, world events, consumer whim, all contribute an uncomfortably large factor to the success outcome. In some sense knowing the timing can be as important as executing well.
Winklevosses To Challenge Today’s Facebook Ruling
I'll echo "refusing to quit" being a key driver of success. I also won't claim to know all the tricks, but it seems like pg's standing assertion that founders' determination is the highest correlating factor to success is true, at least in my experience.
I don't watch TV. But I do see plenty of ads for CUNY (public, non-profit) and other non-profits on the subway. Ramapo college and Montclair State both advertise on the radio in NJ. Devry might be big enough to have commercials, but that doesn't make them the only game in town for worthless degrees.
You might find things have changed at a lot of big companies since you last looked. Many of my friends who are parents get a lot of flexibility with their jobs due to the workplace diversity programmes that urge managers to cater for people in different situations.
Amazon offers $25 off ad-supported Kindle