skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This post made me glad I'm living the life I'm living now. I'm 31 years old -- 32 in a month -- and while my daughter is at school, I spend the day programming, running errands, reading, chatting with RL friends via IRC, playing video games, browsing Reddit and HN. When she gets home, I make sure she does her homework, I make dinner, I sleep.

Every morning I get to wake up next to a beautiful, brilliant girl who's several years my junior but emotionally more mature than me. I have never felt better about another person in my life.

I have no bills, I maintain a modest lifestyle and am attending university for a degree in a subject matter that simultaneously I love and will make me some extra money down the road when I need it.

Every day, I set my own schedule, fitted around picking up & dropping off my daughter at school. Beyond the normal stresses of being a single parent, my life is astoundingly, remarkably, wonderfully, joyously stress-free. For the first time in my life.

Reading Derek's post has affirmed the decisions I've made to put me in this position. I regret nothing, and just about every day is awesome. If you've read this far, please don't take this as shameless bragging. It is a sincere expression of gratitude to Derek, and a grinning shout of relief at the sky that I have let so many unnecessary, trivial things fall away from my life over the past few years.
I'm so glad they mentioned Philz, some of the best coffee I can find in the bay area and filled with hackers.
Before you decide to copy these tactics, you might want to read up on the law regarding using the name or likeness of another without their permission (i.e., grabbing celebrity photos off the internet for your ad).

http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likenes...
Ask HN: Any developers want to help change education?
I have a pretty good idea on how to tie education and the possibilities of todays technology together to really help teachers and students in a way that could really make a big step for student/teacher interaction. The MVP would be fairly easy to achieve and it could be profitable as well eventually. If you're interested let me know, josh [at] joshmlewis.com.
Loved this episode.. Now this is what I picture when I think about a startup! Kinda makes me wanna move out west...
This is just a wiki article explaining it, the URL is irrelevant here. The actual website for the project is https://gnunet.org/
I went to a school that operates that way:

http://www.parker.org/
yeah the communal nap area and movie room don't look too attractive...
Actually, I think the "inspiring" (his words) Aston Kutcher poster makes it so the shot at hiring anyone with actual taste is out the window.
The Jazz Fan Who Invented A Machine To Make His Own Mashups
What happens when the cloud meets a bandwidth cap?
Ask HN: How do incubators set up their equity purchase?
I have seen two methods:

1) $20,000 for 5% equity straight up

or

2) $100 for 5% of equity, and $19,900 for stipend (or some other thing not related to the actual stock purchase)

Are there any tax implications either way? Obviously method 1 causes your valuation to increase substantially, but I do not know how that affects the company. I've seen both, so just looking for some info!

Thanks.

edit: got rid of variables and just threw random numbers in
It's building electronic components vertically instead of laid out flat (think of a book stood on an edge rather than laid down, kind of). That has two advantages - they take up less room and they don't leak so much electricity to the silicon that they're sitting on.
Bitcoin is firing me up.

A www.secondmarket.com for Bitcoin? Drop me a line.
Thanks to Tommy for a great and entertaining presentation.
This is why I'm moving to Silicon Valley. I want this.
I find these sensitivities quite amusing.

I use Java, PHP, Django, GAE, Zope and have done some Rails development too. I happen to prefer the Python-based stacks because they are very elegant and don't have the irregular syntax that bothers me on Ruby (and that Rails exploits).

And yes, from all these, PHP is the one technology that has the ugliest syntax and the most ill-conceived ideas I have ever seen this side of FORTRAN 77. Very competent people write very elegant PHP code, but a lot of people who should never been allowed to use a text editor also write a lot of PHP code that should have never seen the light of day.

Your criticism fits the clueless developer stereotype so well, in fact, that hadn't you written several posts in this line, I would have dismissed this one as a failed attempt at humor.

So, here is my advice: PHP is not the end-all web language. Nor is Ruby and Rails. Learn more stuff. Learn, not only Rails, but Ruby - and do so deeply. Learn Perl. Understand RDBMSs are not the only way to save data and why text files may be a better idea. Also, try to do the SICP path (there are very good video lectures free to download and the book is available in HTML, ePub and PDF formats). You'll emerge a better programmer.

See you on the other side.
Ask HN: Do you publicly announce your number of users?
For Housefed.com, there are 634 users. I'm a small site and all of my competitors know that so what's the big deal? Some people seem to think there is a competitive advantage to keeping that information private - but it just seems funny to me.
IANAL, but I've spent some time on these topics, and in the end the only thing that matters is the result of some court case. But non-authoritatively:

It seems to me that if you were willing to go to court and defend yourself, you'd have a very strong case that posting your review is covered under fair use. Of the four factors of fair use testing [1] (which is to say, I'm talking about real fair use and not the nebulous Internet "I can do whatever I want with whatever I want if I just say the magical words 'Fair Use'" version), the purpose of the use and nature of the work are probably solidly on your side, and there is definitely no damage to the market value of the work (bearing in mind that refers to the value of the review itself, not any effect it might have on the doctor's practice), to the extent that I can say "definitely" without a legal ruling. The problematic case is that you'd be posting the totality of the work in question but I suspect it would not be hard to find a judge that would still agree that your First Amendment rights overrule that concern, especially given that we're talking about a commercially effectively-worthless work and it's not very large.

I'm not sure fully owning the copyright is really enough to prevent people from posting a review. I also would imagine a strong case could be made for even going back behind the standard 4 fair use factors and returning to the reason they were created in the first place, which is that while the Constitution grants Congress the right to write laws about copyright, free speech is in the First Amendment and where there are conflicts, the amendment wins, at least in theory. The fair use tests are intended to harmonize the two. Use of copyright as a speech restraint is a fundamental perversion of the whole system, not just morally (which doesn't really matter to this analysis) but legally.

I speak solely on the matter of copyright assignment; if the contract contains other non-copyright restrictions on posting reviews I have no opinion at all, even if I could see them. I am also not addressing the possible ways in which this could be considered an invalid contract clause in general, such as [2].

[1]: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability
Damn Dude. You cost double what I do in the same city. I live in a nice-sized apt in Manhattan, eat well, and go out.

- Get a roommate and cut out nearly half the rent and half the utilities (two bedrooms aren't much more in a walk up).

- You're clearly eating almost all your meals out. You could probably cut this by 2/3 if you went to a Trader Joes and ate 3/4 of your meals at home or made lunch.

- Cut out the maid. Buy a nice vacuum and some cleaning supplies.

New Total: $1,950. Just saved you $19k next year.

Pro-tip: Take dates to Thai restaurants in Manhattan. Many have great ambience and you'll spend ~$30 with a drink each.

Super Pro-tip: The girls you want to date in the long run will be happy to pay their share. :-)
Buy a fucking vacuum.
I think he covered that in his(her) last paragraph where he intentionally left out the kinds of products and therefore the kinds of customers to chase.

I didn't read it as a selfish list of needs with no regard for the team or the customer. In fact, I thought it was refreshing. It seems like he has a good grasp on the kind of team he wants to be a part of and what he can contribute. I would be more inclined to hire someone like that for my team than someone who wasn't that self-aware.
My EE professor in Dynamic Fields, halfway through a 3 hour lab, announced to the class "Oh, by the way, anyone who gets a right answer gets an F for the lab." Groans from half the class. "The point of the lab is to show how danged difficult it is to get to the right answer".

I looked at my mess of data and chuckled.
Because what to do when the queue is full is absolutely application specific.

What happens if the message you can't add is a specific system message that allows the suspension of OTP processes for a code upgrade? Do you end up livelocked? How do you propagate back that you couldn't insert your element in the queue? Do you make message passing an operation that can fail? How would that work over the network when the message telling you something failed is lost over a netsplit? Is it a different kind of failure?

This has very deep design repercussions on the language. It's not impossible, but it wouldn't let Erlang be the same.
Build a prototype with a few features in both and see which feels natural to you. I like to bang out small, silly projects in PHP with CodeIgniter or FUEL because I can move fast with those. But I find Ruby and RoR more methodological and RoR will handle more intricate stuff for me that the PHP frameworks won’t and will use that combo for bigger apps.
Tell HN: You should watch "Inside Job" to understand the financial crisis better
I just got around to watching the documentary "Inside Job" and before this I had vague idea of what happened. If any of you have watched it, I'd love to know what your thoughts were on professors acting as consultants to financial institutions, and writing papers portraying these institutions in a good light without disclosing personal financial gains.
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/
The Gutenberg method linked to in that article is a fantastic read:
http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html
That's where solving real-world problems and building something I'm proud of come in -- without knowing what the startup's customer will be like, how could I possibly be more specific?
Is your claim that mortality is indistinguishable from immortality? Here is a simple counterexample:

An immortal can count (by ones, out loud) from 1 to a googol. A mortal cannot.
Fair enough: you'll have a pull request shortly. ;-)

Edit: Pull request created. https://github.com/jmathai/twitter-async/pull/108
Yeah, I saw this on the Canadian CBC National news last night. The company must obviously be in a PR push right now.

If a doctor ever asked me to sign something saying to keep my opinions to myself, I would simply not use that doctor. If they were good, they shouldn't worry about what people will say about them.
Open Letter to PayPal: Do the Right Thing
This to me is one more link in the chain of evidence that this is not just the 2000 bubble rehashed. Not just different people but different kinds of people are in charge this time, different methods are being employed. The focus is less on sheen and who has the biggest flagpole or best in house sushi chef and more on results and methods.

I like that a little, even on the chance that it does fail again at least this time it will be on our terms.
> "If anyone in India and China needed this, they would have written it by now. "

This is a puzzling concept. If there's a need for a product, it would've already been created? By that definition, we should just shut down HN, since there is no more need for startups! Why waste our time here when every piece of software with significant demand has already been written by somebody else?

Goofing around aside, there is a lot of Ameri-centricity in both iOS and Android. For one thing, I cannot believe Apple is shipping the iPhone in Japan without a QR code reader.

The whole "translate it and ship it" attitude to globalizing products is a poor one, and explains why some scrappy locals can often take on big, cash-flush corporations.
Just rotate them. Mix it up. The body is well evolved to handle inconsistent nutrient inputs.
XYDO Feels Like It's Taking The Pageviews Out of Publishers' Mouths
Thanks for having me. Lots of fun.
When did I say "everyone is like this"?

My point was merely that co-founders with very different lifestyles may not be terribly compatible, and that age is not a good predictor of that.
Well Intel was hoping to hit 10Ghz with the Pentium 4 & we know how that worked out. Perhaps they'll hit 10nm in 2015, but a "small delay" in new process technology usually seems to be "12+ months".
wrong headline:

Free E-Book: "Principles of Digital Image Synthesis”
It's pretty clearly a joke...
Thanks, kerryfalk, you got my point exactly. :)
The process causes the gate to be exposed to a larger surface area of the source, thus allowing it to have greater control. How? by going 3D. Why? Think of it as a heatsink. If your heatsink was just a flat surface, it would suck. But because it has fins (or pins, or whatever 3d shapes that come out of it), it has greater exposure to ambient air.
I love LAL team. I was one of the active admins at my school. I flew to Cali for a week and Evan let me stay at their place for a week.

These guys sleep like for 3 or 4 hours and code for the rest of the time. Amazing company :)
No idea what i'm looking at but it definitely looks cool.
> Buy a fucking vacuum.

http://i.imgur.com/CuFuD.png
Hilarious! First time I've seen this and I laughed so hard I had tears running down my face. I think it was figure 1 "check this shit out" that made me really lose it. Got some odd looks on the train.
The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise
EA acquires Aussie app developer start-up Firemint
Since you asked...

I don't see the point. You seem to be aiming to be a drop-box competitor, and hosting the files yourself. You don't have a GUI and barely have an alpha for the CLI.

There are other projects that already do uploads to certain file hosting websites (like http://code.google.com/p/plowshare/ for instance) and those are totally free. (Well, at least that one. I haven't ever wanted it, so I had to search.)

Your website doesn't actually -show- anything and your signup has to be the worst I've ever seen. (Send me an email? Really? With the alternative being to give you an email address and then sit on our thumbs and hope.)
The problem is not confusion about them, or inability to figure them out, per se. Dealing with syntactic awkwardness and features full of tricky corner cases takes mental effort even if you can understand them perfectly. Coffeescript let you (to a greater extend than JavaScript) write and read just the code you mean, without having to think explicitly about these questions every time. You still have to understand JavaScript in a fairly deep way to build solid CoffeeScript programs.
Nice summary; I like the format as well. However, the title of the cheat sheet is misleading since (a) many of the algorithms listed can be used for non-linear classification and (b) some of them can be considered supervised learning, such as naive Bayes and perceptron since they're trained with sample inputs and expected outputs (supervisory signals).

Otherwise, this is awesome. Hopefully you will add to it, and make it available in web form.
Agreed. I hardly think that people who haven't used languages like Ruby or Coffeescript (with implicitly returning the last expression) ever forget return statements in a way where everything would be okay if they just added a "return" keyword. When I use Ruby and Coffeescript, I consciously have to think "no, I _shouldn't_ write return this time"; I find it hard to believe that, without using a language like this, anyone would just write an expression and expect it to be returned. I could see an argument that if you're returning the application of a function, but it has always seemed extremely natural to me that I think about what I'm returning when I write a function; I actually always have a little bit of trouble adjusting to writing Ruby-style return-less code.
I think this just means that software and software development is cheaper this time around. Back in the day, your CRUD app needed a proprietary compiler using proprietary libraries running on a proprietary operating system talking to a proprietary database. This cost mucho money, and was super buggy. So you needed a lot of smart programmers and a lot of time to get anything that worked.

These days, you just use Ruby or Perl or something and its 100x faster to develop and probably runs faster than 1999 C++ on a mainframe did. So there goes your main cost. (Netscape is a good example from that era. Not that great a piece of software -- it ran super slow and needed a lot of people to write it.)

Also, good startups are pretty easy to do with just one person. So when you only have one or two people, you don't need flashy offices or sushi chefs... you just rent a nice apartment and order out. Expensive, but much cheaper than what people did in 1999.
Not what I said at all. I am honestly intrigued, but not because I care about Ruby.
> The tone of this article bothers me.

I stopped at being presented with a dictionary definition for the word parable, down to the syllable guide thingie.

Come on, now. Respect your audience's intelligence a little bit.
congrats guys. i was really upset when techcrunch took you off their website.
i have facebook disconnect, so now i dont go to techcrunch that often because i cant see comments without incognito mode.
Why was this downvoted? (note: I'm not potatolicious)
It also can't solve the "`function () { return … }` is syntactically very heavy" problem.
My favorite bit:

Evan: This is one of our recruiting strategies. We literally go to recruiting events...and we just tell them, "Hey, I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can beat my co-founder, Prasanna here, in a coding challenge."

Jason: Do you usually win?

Prasanna: Ah, I mean, if we lose...

Jason: Then you're going to hire the guy...

Prasanna: Yea.
I'm going to be blunt here. This isn't targeted at you specifically but I've seen a few posts about the comment scores being removed.

Are you addicted? If some tiny number on a website causes you to feel nervous or makes you feel like something has been taken away from your life, what does that tell you about your life? Worry about things you have control over and don't spend your life energy on things that you don't have control over and don't really matter. This comment score is both. You don't have control over it and it doesn't really matter one bit.

There I've said it. Downvote me if you want but it's just an insignificant number!

"There are some things in life that can be counted which don't count; there are some things which count that can't be counted."
- Albert Einstein
I don't think the point is "you won't need to learn how these work!"; rather, it's "you don't need to worry about using the normal convoluted ways of dealing with these". It's never claimed that => implies (ha, logic humor) that you don't need to know how this works, just that => helps you deal with a common annoyance found with using this.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Says Bin Laden Died in 2001
"Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations, Nixon, Ford and Carter, while also working under Reagan and Bush senior, and still works as a consultant for the Department of Defense. A former US Navy Captain, Pieczenik achieved two prestigious Harry C. Solomon Awards at the Harvard Medical School as he simultaneously completed a PhD at MIT."
There's nothing start-up specific about that list and getting hired and starting a company are two different things.
Photography Everywhere - The Instagram Phenomenon
A Piece of Cakefile: Simplifying Large CoffeeScript Project Builds With Cake
I got the impression this thread was about being an entrepreneur, not an employee.
10 Favorite Examples from My Book
AppleCrate II parallel computer made from Apple IIe motherboards
is it just me or does it remind you of the house from the Facebook movie?
There are two ways you can go:

1. Don't worry about design and think about every project you do as a prototype. If you get it off the ground are think your project has potential then bring in some design talent and do the project for real.

2. Before you roll up your sleeves and start to write code try to first spec the project with the help of a designer who understands usability. Even if these are sketches on a napkin you'll do better work.

Also there is a difference between art direction and usability -- if you just want to improve the look and feel you can bring in a designer after you're done.
Not because of the comment in the video, but because I can't imagine that that startup culture and living/working space would be appealing to any female engineer.
Turn around, it's ahead of you.
Your points are good, and perhaps I didn't make some things clear in my post.

> You seem to be aiming to be a drop-box competitor,

Nah, that's a different utility, I use dropbox myself and this tool solves problems for me that dropbox doesn't. I probably need to clarify this.

> You don't have a GUI and barely have an alpha for the CLI

I don't have a GUI (yet), true, but the CLI interface works, and is being used, and it's a first-class way of accessing the service.

It's true, there are other file-sending services out there, and you can access them using plowshare, but I will be running a quality service that believes a CLI interface it important enough that it will be provided by default, not through a third-party tool.

> Your website doesn't actually -show- anything

I should have probably posted this as "Tell HN" I guess, my mistake.

> your signup has to be the worst I've ever seen.

I'd love to hear some more constructive criticism of this. It seems that a mailing list is the standard way of letting people know when things are ready, but I'm open to suggestions.
Don't all those points fit into the story in that blog entry? No one is saying that Microsoft needed voice data. From e40's comment: "I think the point of the article is that they don't need to mine utterences with Bing 411, and that they merely did the service to compete with Google, without knowing why Google made the service in the first place." Isn't the speculation about Microsoft's reaction the heart of the issue? If Microsoft did buy Tellme's service so that they could compete with Google's that would explain how Microsoft wasn't playing the same game Google was.
Edit: I do agree that the blog post is all speculation. I'm just saying that I don't think those points prove that it is wrong.
As a 35 yo:

I used to be able to walk/catch bus/ride lots of places. Now I have a kid it's no longer possible, and things like school drop-offs double my commuting distance.