skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ben Huh does an AMA on Reddit and gets trashed in the comments
I think the biggest reason that draws people to the board is the anonymity of the response.
Optimizing your Startup Financing Strategy
The explosion of domain-specific languages that we've seen in the Ruby space in the last few years, from Capistrano for deployment to Sinatra for web apps, would seem to contradict your statement. A friendly language helps with and encourages friendly programming but does not guarantee it.

Rails itself contains several nice, simple APIs that hide extremely complex implementations. Simplicity is not the same thing to everyone.
lol minecraft and that, but a big part of the appeal of Thorium is that we have ridiculous amounts of it laying around already. It's a byproduct of other actinide mining, useless at present, and toxic enough that the safest thing to do is stockpile it.

Which the US has done, leaving us with enough to run reactors for decades / centuries at projected power loads.
> Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market.

So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left because he couldn't stand working there anymore.
Live From Facebook HQ: A New Approach To Data Centers
Yahoo Search BOSS V2 Launches
Used LKW9XAXL436R. Thanks Chad!
It would be slightly more usable if the hover area for the footnote was two to three times larger than the number.

I takes me a few tries to home in on the numbers; it's pretty, but frustrating.
I overlooked the "search" button at the bottom of the page for weeks until I actively went looking for it.
This company and service is absolutely amazing. Points for the amazing UI/UX
If your kids are in school and you work 10a-10p you will probably never see your kids.

I did the crazy startup schedule when my kids were that young too. I hope you're handling things with your partner better than I did. It sure seemed like things were going OK at the time! Heh.
Facebook performs 24 billion calculations a second at peak times
This isn't entirely correct. The basic idea that countries are only bound by treaties they agreed to (or laws that flow from those treaties, e.g. if they give the EU parliament legislative power in some areas) is right. However, some laws might be in breach of existing treaties (like the ECHR) that the countries previously signed. That might very well be the case i.c. If so, the (part of the) law that is in breach is void until the treaty is changed (which is unlikely in most cases).
Interview with a cracker
Some good quotes from the comments:

"I personally know two women got promoted to be managers, not because of their performance, but because they each is a higher manager's mistress. In short, Microsoft's is a fear-based culture. How could Microsoft not fall rapidly?"

"I'd attend a meeting where we needed 3 or 4 relevant people to discuss something but 30 or more would show up, to represent their group's interests, even if they had no real idea of what was going on. It was nearly impossible to reach any consensus, all decisions ultimately got made by whatever interested PM had the most clout - often not the PM with the most expertise or relevance"

" I recall the sole-sucking Business Process Reviews we'd go through. The culmination would be a Bill/Steve meeting. It was the 30 people developing 98 slide powerpoints with 2 point font (again, no exaggeration). It was game over for me once I sat through that."
The classic issue devoted to Unix (scroll down to the bottom): http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/bstj-vol57-iss...
Used YWWXYTRXNAA7, thanks!
Fixing the SSL cert nightmare
I am in the UK :)
I'm sure Microfot has many smart engineers that make a lot of cool stuff in their labs, but almost none of those are coming to market, so in the end all that research goes to waste, or perhaps to patents that they'll only use to sue others later.
I'm sure Microsoft has many smart engineers that make a lot of cool stuff in their labs, but almost none of those are coming to market, so in the end all that research goes to waste, or perhaps to patents that they'll only use to sue others later.
Not all Android devices allow side loading, to my knowledge. So it doesn't seem to be an inherent advantage of Android. After all, you CAN jail break your iPhone.
Whoa, so Google Chrome is now talking SPDY to www.google.com ? I had no idea.

Anyone know a good way of running a packet sniffer on OS X so I can see it in action?
SEEKING WORK (REMOTE PREFERABLE)

UNIX systems admin, python (mostly django), a bit of clojure and ruby.
xPhone would have been nice, reminding people that they also created something as cutting edge as XBox which gave Sony and Nintendo a serious run for their money.
I've worked in Japan with the stereotypical salaryman "work ethic". I completely agree that it's toxic and horrible. Truly horrible. (I eventually rebelled and started leaving at 6PM, choosing to suffer the shame.)

But now I've found working for myself 12 hours per day 5 days per week completely sustainable, enjoyable, and productive.

I certainly never felt this way when working for other people though. I think what makes it work is:

1) No external pressure. I could work 5 hours if I wanted.

2) Comfortable as possible office. I truly can't think of anything to improve.

3) Being able to take a bike ride or walk whenever I want.

4) Probably most important: a deep drive to work on my project. I can't wait to get to work in the morning. This feeling only lasted short times when I worked for other people.
Exactly what I did, fifteen years later. I haven't programmed for anything but fun in ten years, but sometimes fun means C or dialects. It has a staying power in my mind that I attribute to the rigor both of the language and of K&R.

By contrast, I did Perl work for years, and went to script something in it recently. Quickly decided it would be easier to learn Python from scratch than to get my Perl chops back.
It depends on the VCs. So far only the top VCs have realized it's best to leave founders in control. Below the top 15 or so, their thinking is 5 years behind. Plus lower ranking VCs tend to be less scrupulous generally.
Use wkhtmltoimage to create images of book-quality syntax-highlighted source code:

http://superuser.com/questions/213217/convert-html-to-image

Use gvim to pick from 100 different ready-made colour schemes:

http://www.vi-improved.org/color_sampler_pack/

Shameless plug: I describe this technique in an appendix of my technical manual.

http://www.whitemagicsoftware.com/books/indispensable/

For example:

#!/bin/bash

echo Converting $1 to $1.html...

# Schemes: pyte
vim $1 -c "set nobackup" ${2:+"-c set number"} \
-c ":colorscheme tango-morning" \
-c ":TOhtml" \
-c "wq" -c ":q"

echo Converting $1.html to $1.png...

wkhtmltoimage --transparent --minimum-font-size 80 \
--format png --quality 100 --width 4000 \
$1.html $1.png

mv $1.png $1.orig.png

# For scripts that are under 80 characters, make the generated image always
# the same size (4000 pixels = width + (border x 2) = 3950 + 25 x 2).
LENGTH=$(awk 'BEGIN {x=0} {if( length($0)>x ) x=length()} END {print x;}' $1)

if [ $LENGTH -le 80 ]; then
EXTENT=true
fi

echo Trimming $1.png...
convert -format png $1.orig.png -background none -antialias -trim +repage \
-density 150x150 ${EXTENT:+-extent 3950x} \
-bordercolor none -border 25 \
$1.png

echo Removing temporary files...
rm -f $1.orig.png
rm -f $1.html
What if they are not liable to pay CO2 taxes?
This is true. However, the services that startups use to host their servers (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, etc.) could adopt these practices in new datacenters because the specs are open. This could lower costs for the startups that use these services, and be good for the environment.

Seems like everyone wins.
I found this one the other day: SICP in Clojure (https://github.com/deobald/sicp-clojure). It's sadly not done, but looks promising.
I love the inclusion of the two end nuts. How do you know if something is expensive and built well? It feels heavy/and or dense. You definitely get that feeling when you pick up something like an iPad or a good digital SLR.
At a cursory look, this reminds me of the hedge fund-of-funds (right before the big bust) that marketed itself as only investing in funds that were managed by women.
The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot.

As you said, everyone will end up here. There's virtually no way a rational company can avoid it. It's textbook Innovator's Dilemma. Eventually you're faced with a situation that there is a new product/service that is cannibalizing your product. You can hasten the cannibalization of your cash cow and maybe succeed in this new space (or maybe not), or you can milk you cash cow for all its worth. If you do the math its almost always better to NOT hasten your own demise for an uncertain future.

But even if you were to break them up, there's really no good way to break them up that really helps all that much. Windows and Office? Nothing else can really exist on its own. Now you have two big monsters that have the same problems, but spread out in two companies.

I think you have to let nature take its course. Which probably means some breakout technology that lets them continue their cash cow while providing new scenarios. If Windows 8 can actually merge the desktop, tablet, and phone in a way never even envisioned, that would be a shot. But it's such a long shot I wouldn't hold out much hope.
Link to an article in James Hamilton's blog with actual pdfs of various designs:
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/04/07/OpenComputeProje...
27 Best Games Ever On Facebook
No, but Apple has Steve Jobs. Microsoft has Ballmer.

There is a difference. ;-)
How We Increased Conversions By 25% (Again) With Our Latest Redesign
These problems have nothing to do with software. Every major company that makes innovative products have had this issue for the last few hundred years.

That also means that ways to fix or prevent it have been researched extensibly. It's doable, just take a look at Drucker. Of course, it's also often not done.
chrome://net-internals/#spdy
Wireshark works just fine on OSX.

http://wireshark.org or brew install wireshark
Used WEPY4JLM4ETE, thanks!
Looks cool, I used NKE3E3L6637N
Glad to see phage therapy mentioned. It is time to begin investigating it again. While most of the world was focused on antibiotics, the Soviets were researching phage therapy. Much of that work fell with the Wall.
It depends on many factors. I was in a 6.8 earthquake in Seattle in 2001 that did some fairly significant damage to a few buildings in Pioneer Square, but otherwise was just a scare and an inconvenience. At the time I read that we got off "easy" because of the depth of the epicenter. An earthquake of similar magnitude had hit Turkey a few years before that and did a lot more damage.
Or: Tell me WHY to use the product. This is a much more common failing, IMO.
All programmers should know C.
This isn't a response to Greenpeace, this is a response to the real costs that it takes to run compute infrastructure at the scale of Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.

If a datacenter can run at 1.07 PUE (as Facebook's new datacenter does), then it directly translates to massive power cost savings. Environmental efficiency just comes along with it.
I think the paths are similar, but there is a key difference for me: YouTube's success didn't initially 100% rely on using other peoples copyrighted works without permission or compensation. No doubt music videos etc. helped immensely but funny cat videos and other amateur goofy content was a big part of its success. Whereas with Grooveshark, I am fairly confident that amateur authorized content doesn't factor into the equation.

That said, if the major music rights holders would just license to them from the start at affordable rates they wouldn't need to violate copyright so I suppose it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
That's a high bar to set.

Kind of like saying "don't design a laptop uglier than a Macbook." Sure, you can do it, but you may be optimizing the wrong thing (and/or at the wrong time).
I am based in Ireland. I pre-ordered my Wakemate ages ago and when they finally became available, I had mine shipped to my sister in the USA, who then forwarded it to me. It worked out quite well (despite an additional 2 weeks of my sister's procrastination!) and I'm very happy with it.
Same! Thanks for the nice comments :)
I appreciate that comment, but don't like how many up-votes it got. From my experience with Hacker News, the comments with the highest rankings are usually those that point out another post as stupid, instead of those that give valid information.
Enrique = he. And he is cool - he's the designer-in-residence at 500 Startups and a very chill guy to talk to.
To my knowledge that's still around. I've heard that the prominent reason some funds tout themselves as woman-led is because some studies showed that women tended to get consistent although smaller returns then men-led funds. Had to do with not taking big risks and making more calculated decisions. This is all anecdotal of course.
Get all the CAD files and other specifications here: http://opencompute.org
Colleges Spend Far Less on Educating Students Than They Claim, Report Says
But the name of the iPod originally came from a freelance marketing guy, not Jobs himself. After the success of the iPod, the iPhone name was pretty easy. With that said they could have called it the Apple Phone and probably not lost a sale.
So wait, if we somehow ran SPDY on our own servers, would Chrome auto-detect it, or is it hardwired to Google services?
> Is there any particular reason you use Alfred vs Spotlight?

Edit: I'm not the OP.

Alfred has a few options like find and open which allow you to directly open files. It seems more minimalist than spotlight. You can customize it a little better IMHO (they have a full version that has more features). And finally, you can do google searches and a few other web-related queries directly from alfred. Overall I would highly recommend Alfred.
Why the Kindle won't be Free
Using Pandora on my Atrix keeps giving me LivingSocial ads from Seattle, but I haven't lived there in 2 years; I'm not sure how tightly integrated the GPS information is.
I'm about to get out of college, and at my new job I'm using mostly C. Well-written C is surprisingly fun to work with (although you could probably say that about anything).
Robot Replicants Gather With Their Originals In World’s Creepiest Reunion
[Facebook] Building Efficient Data Centers with the Open Compute Project
Live Chat about YC S2011 Applications with YC Founders in Convore (W2011)
I think this was probably a "normal" earthquake which Japan is built to withstand without many problems.
Yes Tux. When you were just a twinkle in Linus's eye who would have thought you would grow up to be a Pengzilla that would chew up millions of volunteer hours cloning an old OS when a new modern OS would have served the world better!
He's a friend of mine, and he was making things happen at fbFund and Venrock's incubator even before 500 Startups was a thing. I'm excited to see what kind of inaugural class he lines up.
Agreed. But I don't think the situation is as dire as the article paints it. Office is not going anywhere anytime soon. The rise of smartphones does not suddenly mean that there is any lesser demand for Office. The enterprise trusts Microsoft (with good reason IMHO) and if they stay on their game they can continue to dominate the market. Can you imagine trusting your billion dollar company to Google's half-assed support, or some upstart pitching support for OpenOffice (okay maybe eventually)?

Microsoft should spin off everything except Windows and Office. Let all those divisions and products sink or swim on their own merits. Ultimately they will get more value from the ability for some of those units to have a breakout success than the marginal benefit they get from twisting all products to serve the "Windows Everywhere" strategy. Not that "Windows Everywhere" is inherently a bad strategy, but if you have a CEO lacking vision, and a glut of middle management politics, it just makes sense to gut the inefficiencies and scar tissue in the middle of the organization and give the rank and file the opportunity to rise to their abilities.

This would also play to Ballmer's strength as a salesman. I get the feeling he looks at how Apple is thriving on a closed ecosystem ("OS X Everywhere") and wants to succeed in a similar way, but he is utterly incapable of it. If he were to focus on Windows / Office and say how can we sell more of this on its own merits I think he would be more successful.
GNOME 3 and the focus on usability
The problem is that you can't actually be secure. This applies in all real situations. You can, however, be secure enough (ie. you achieve your security goals), with some thought and planning. There is a difference though.

What is expected when you go through airport security is that you will be "secure", ie. absolutely secure. The problem is that this is impossible. There are a myriad of ways that a person can cause untold mayhem in what is arguably one of the safest modern forms of long distance travel. Due to this impossibility, you see the authorities forever imposing tighter and tighter safeguards without any real improvement to safety.

What is done, however, is "secure enough", ie. it achieves the required security objectives (chance of serious injury/death is negligible, chance of being able to hijack a plane is negligible, etc.).

This then leads to a problem when "secure enough" is not "completely secure" in a way that didn't lead to a failure in a security objective. Then you have political pressure to "tighten up security", with no actual need, thus you have what can only be termed "make work" programs that look reasonable but do basically nothing for security.
Chirply Raises $1.1 Million, Launches Redesign
Building Efficient Data Centers with the Open Compute Project
Managing Crowdsourced Human Computation
If the other sections are as good as this one promises to be, I'm sure you'll find a lot of willing readers. My email is in my profile if you want to send me something to proofread. Seems like a great project.
Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
If you want to live chat about applications and acceptances with prior YC founders and other applicants, you can do so in the Convore (a YC W2011 company)

https://convore.com/yc-s11-apps/
One of Microsoft's biggest problems that contributes to their insular view is that they are located in Redmond. They're insulated from the rest of the highly competitive technology field (except for Amazon). This works out great for them when it comes to retaining talent in Redmond as employees are usually not willing to uproot their lifestyle to head to 'greener pastures'.

Contrast this to how Google handles compensation and employee retention. Granted, Google is a much smaller organization and can afford to be more nimble, but part of it has to do with with the fact that being in the valley means that its incredibly easy for talented, motivated engineers to move to the next hot startup once they're dissatisfied with their current job.

In Redmond, however, these options don't really exist and creates a culture of stagnation. People goto their jobs because they have and leave as soon as it is culturally acceptable.

I fear a lot of Microsoft's future as I just don't believe that they are able to recruit top young talent anymore. Not only is Microsoft not a "hip" place to work anymore, but their compensation is generally below market. Its pretty standard for funded startups to give more BASE salary than Microsoft. Google's base is roughly 50% more than what Microsoft pays. New hires at Google make more money than level 64 Microsoft engineers (5 levels from starting).

Microsoft will continue to execute and create good products, but until their internal culture drastically changes they will slowly slide into irrelevance.
Travis May discusses his journey and why he started with Rapleaf
Hackers steal Dell customer information
"The 10am-10pm work culture is a market inefficiency. It biases recruiting towards people in their twenties, leaving experienced and capable family people on the table."

Having a family is a choice. If a consequence of that choice is that you will have a harder time competing with those willing to work more hours, then that ought to be one of many considerations when making said choice.

Why is is that we find it ok to preferentially hire people who work longer/harder due to some personal choices( don't watch tv, don't play xbox all day, don't wake up hung over every morning ), but we draw this imaginary line for other life choices( don't have a family to spend time with )?

Why should an employer NOT find the best qualified people who ALSO work longer hours, simply because you chose a lifestyle they didn't?
Would be amazing to have a few sample patterns as a way to show how it works (what to paint). Would help newer designers figure out how to make good-looking patterns and provide a shortcut where others could just change the colors. It's often easier if you avoid beginning with a blank page.

Thanks for making it! I'm generating a pattern for my startup right now.
Pretty cool, believe it or not I did something very similar as a kid back in 1983 or so, to build sprite patterns on my TI99/4A.
This is interesting, and it makes sense to me that markets would work this way, but I am not sure I can think of any real examples. Something like Bar Associations comes close, but AFAIK they are legally mandated? Do you have any better recent or historical examples in mind?
It's no use pretending otherwise, "what's with all the parenthesis?" is still a major roadblock to acceptance.

Sigh. One might imagine a similar objection such as "what's with all the significant whitespace", but apparently that shocks people less than a few parentheses.

I wish more developers would see radically unfamiliar syntax as an opportunity to discover ideas they might be missing out on.
This. I actually wish the be_ facility worked for methods besides booleans. Like:

it do
frood.should be_hoopy_for(apples, oranges)
end

Which would say "#<Frood> should have been hoopy_for #<Apples>, #<Oranges>". There's real value in giving your test infrastructure more responsibility for actually piecing together the assertions. Not only does it give you better error messages, it lets you avoid having to write so many explanatory labels for all of your assertions.
I'm there intermittently answering questions.
IOS sample code begets workable Hacker News reader.
Orbotix Scores $5 Million
Except for the small detail that it isn't true. In change ringing, what you do is to cycle through some subset of the permutations of N bells. So you might begin 123456 123465 124365 and so on. The whole thing is made up of blocks of N bells in each of which each bell is rung once. Therefore, all bells have (on average) the same period: one ring, on average, out of every N.

The bells are hung in such a way that they naturally want to swing with equal periods, so you don't have to disturb one too much to make it ring one place earlier or later in the cycle. (A bell is never moved by more than two places.)

I don't see any reason why a peal of bells couldn't be set up to produce the effect jws described, but it wouldn't be at all the same thing as change ringing.
Anyone get invited to interview (or rejected) by YC Today?
The anticipation is making me less productive today...
Except, it's not "OSX Everywhere" - Apple doesn't have an OS integration in automobiles (Ford deal), refrigerators (http://www.zdnet.com/news/microsoft-plans-to-sit-inside-your...), and they're not trying to right now. That said, if they entered those markets, it'd probably be good. :)