skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the author doesn't want to put the appropriate processes in place to handle security problems, bug fixes, and the what, than this is of course his prerogative, but he should find it no surprise when he gets roasted on a spit by the user community that surrounds him.

People get angry when tools that they depend on don't work, regardless of whether or not they had to pay for those tools. A cavalier attitude towards the user-base will only incense them further, and while it may not matter to the tool-maker that people are going elsewhere, rather than use his free tools, the negative press can easily destroy a career or ten.

I'm not saying that this is right; merely that this is the way things are.
The screen deal actually moves up and down. Its set for more or less horizontal view. It looks a little strange because when I originally made it, it held 3 huge 21" CRT monitors.
A Fundraising Survival Guide
Most tech PR firms asked for (and got) warrants during the Bubble. I don't know if they still do.
#django, #mysql sometimes #slicehost on irc.freenode.net
How much of that is just due to attention? Not being an expert, my assumption would be that we're just seeing the effect of chess software getting boring (no more people to beat) and the supercomputer games folks moving on to greener pastures.
Agile Methodologies Turn Dev Team into a Cargo Cult
Regarding iPhone Application Pricing
Seedcamp video pitches - voting now open
CNBC just reported that 8 people bought this app...
That's just sad
And what is this to be expected, given a real hacker?

As less as possible at all, since the most important part is always deep down in your head (and subconscious, and never ever would be able to have some 'screen representation'...)

(Let's be sincere: all other super-cool stuff is only vanity...)
In certain aspects of life, intelligence can be a liability. Smart people can tend to focus on analyzing a problem and what can go wrong/what went wrong while less smart people have virtual blinders and just act rather than think about acting.
I think that there are problems on both sides of this.

On the Ruby side, it makes a lot of sense to have Rails be part of the testing process, simply because it is such a prominent Ruby application framework. This doesn't mean that the Ruby people need to fix Rails, just that they should be aware when a core update breaks it.

On the Rails side, a bit more understanding, and a willingness to jump in and help, would go a long way.
What actually happened to Monitor110? Its VCs killed it
You seem to be making an absolutist argument about freedom here, but that's missing the point.

In your example: the answer is that the 10pm rule is a good thing if it means people have a choice of whether to live with late-night noise or not, and a bad thing if it means that no one does (because all available apartments have the rule, or don't). The proper balance of "freedom" (understood in the colloquial sense of being able to do what you want most of the time) depends on the state of the market, and has absolutely nothing to do with an abstract idea of "Freedom" that must be maximized in all cases.

In the linked article, the court found that in practice (because essentially all employers use these non-compete clauses) collective freedom would be better served by eliminating them. It's the equivalent of all the landlords in a city enforcing a 10pm noise rule, and it sucks.
How to Present Like Steve Jobs
Maybe in the general case (i.e, most software development), but in the special case (i.e, high performance computing, which this falls under), more powerful hardware begets more powerful software.
Both are real series. Considering that the Dummies haven't published yet, the Idiots appear to be ahead:

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Idiots-Guide-String-Theory/dp...
Hahahha maybe.

But maybe it's a good thing we don't have to churn butter anymore, right? Improvements in technology mean that we don't have to deal with the low level stuff that's been done a million times before, allowing us to focus on high level stuff that nobody's done.
The book he mentions explains why Facebook and social networking sites work as well as they do. Have you ever wondered why Facebook never invites you to be friends with someone, its always "Your friend thinks you might know.." Just the tiny change from saying "You might know..." to "Your friend thinks you might know..." makes a huge difference. I encourage anyone to read the book, because it has huge implications for marketing and start-ups. It explains a lot of why things work the way they do, why people like Apple, why people are encouraged to buy, or discouraged. Its a dry read, but invaluable.

It will even tell you how to monetize Twitter... :)
Useful summary: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6vgrw/historyca...
I use git, so I'll explain a few things I like about it.

1. I can commit things locally before committing them to the main repository. This allows me to commit something in a manner that separates it from all future changes, but test it for a few more days in future development before I actually push it to the main repository.

2. I can correct past commits. This means I don't have to clutter up the history with "fix typo"; I can just amend the previous commit. Obviously this isn't useful for stuff far back, but if I commit something and 2 minutes later someone points out a typo, I can fix it. A messy history makes development and bugfinding harder; git helps avoid it.

3. Git diff is formatted a bit more nicely than svn diff, IMO.
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in terms of a video mashup I thought it was really well done, good to see them poking fun at twitter and hyper connectivity.
JavaScript - HTML Template Engine: Pure (client-side tempalating)
Pretty much everything is open to bargaining, it's just a matter of whether it's worth your time. If you don't bargain, you are automatically allowing the other person to steal your money. You bet I bargained when I bought my house, when I bought my car.

I've seen bargaining even in department stores, a woman haggling down the price of Coach bags in Macy's by offering to buy several at once. She got the discount.

Just like you, I don't like being sold to, but I have no problem bargaining for something that I seek out myself. In Thailand and India I bargained for clothes, for my backpack, for cab fare, for souvenirs. It was not adversarial at all, and often both me and the merchant was having fun, trying to read each other's minds, pushing and retreating, biding our time. In a way it's kind of like dating =)
Video execs: User-generated videos aren't drawing ad dollars
Not much. Go is a fundamentally harder game to play than Chess, by several orders of magnitude. Unlike chess, where the next move set is large but fairly constrained, every turn in go can let you move (nearly) anywhere that hasn't already been moved to.

What's more, go players frequently make moves that to the uninitiated seem like "running away", which is to say not playing near areas of contention. These are placed in moments of low vulnerability so that eventually the player can build towards them. Seldom do even experienced go players know every move that will lead up to connecting with these distant stones, but they know they lend strength to that area and thats a place where they see potential for future moves.

As such, traditional AI game techniques really haven't scaled well to Go. It's only recently that we've began to use huge sums of hardware just to make it play go at a level that most would consider to be an experienced amateur.

It seems like Go is a more recognition-based problem, so we'll have to see if Jeff Hawkin's work might show some progress there once they get their work off the ground.
Online Video Ads Face a Tough Road
Requires a Nature login.
Do Non-Competes Make States Non-Competitive?
The Gang of Four (proteins) at the Gateway of Life
Will you link your site?
From the "things you can't say" department: This is hardly surprising.
Feels like a bike shed to me. The other %99 of the world is still using cvs or subversion or something else, waiting to see what proves stable over a number of years. Companies are going to thrive or fail depending on the products they create, not the version control system they use.
Mitsubishi to Test i MiEV Electric Car in California
I agree that as a developer of an open source project, it helps your project to be ... helpful. But at some point, after it's clear that your project is essential, you can defer some of that work to the user community.

Want that feature? Send a patch (because, yeah, that's a good feature... but I don't need it and I don't feel like writing it.)
1/3 of local media revenue comes from car ads
As long as it can be disabled like the Reddit one I wouldn't object to it. I don't ever go to homepages anyway, I use RSS feeds
Rackspace goes public in first tech IPO in six months
There is a video here http://davidbyrne.com/art/art_projects/robot/index.php. looks a little rough, article said it is an early release, but from some angles you for a second think it is real.
They're not the same at all, paintings exist to look good. If they're indistinguishable then they should be worth the same to people, that's all that matters is what they look like, all they do is sit there and look good. Currency is a marker, the look itself is irrelevant, the only reason it has a distinct look is to prevent counterfeiting
Lord of the Memes
Big company hacker considers options
How we'll do compared to VC funds is a hard question to answer because of the huge variation in their performance. The median VC fund actually loses money. I hope we do better than that.

It's true that we're not doing YC mainly for money, though. But we're not doing it just for fun either. The main thing that drives us, I think, is that it seems an interesting hack.
In fact, its a great opportunity to try some new marketing material. What will you say?
For people in laptops not coding, the wasd (+qezc for diag) is better
As a fan and practitioner of bootstrapping I was interested in the part where pg says that the delay caused by bootstrapping can be fatal to many kinds of startups. Flipping that around, are there kinds of startups where the delay is not fatal?

Taking Basecamp as an example, it was released probably decades after the first project management software. Is bootstrapping best if you're going after a mature class of software?

I think that might be the case. When I'd started I was looking at a completely new class of software that didn't seem to have any entrants. Then Ning repositioned with heavy backing and there was no way I could see to compete. So we went into a vertical as a new approach to an existing and mature field. That's when all the bootstrapping pieces came into place. Six months of side jobs built a product that we could build services around which lead to twelve months of ramen-profitability. Now we're in post-ramen-profitability and growing. It's definitely slower and that's let competitors enter with similar approaches but none that could own an entire market the way Ning could.

On the flip side, if we were venture backed we still might not have been able to compete and this story might be about how we'd wasted several million dollars.
But isn't a large part of it the fact they are working to reproduce an encyclopedia? Shelf space, and to a lesser extent paper, are limited resources so encyclopedia must naturally draw a line somewhere.

Why on earth is Wikipedia sticking so closely to that model, when they are not limited by shelf space or paper, is anyone's guess.
Sorry, I can't turn the volume up at work or wear headphones. Is there a transcript?
Ya that wouldn't be bad. I'm a bigger fan of random news articles though. Have an area somewhere on the page where it puts up a random article from sometime in the last two months. This way you can be reminded of what was happening just a little while ago and lets articles that may have been passed over get a little bump.
Conversation threads would be a definite benefit in Twitter, although I can't see how they'd implement it now without everything going crazy.

I stopped using Twitter because the signal-to-noise ratio became too much for me to handle. At one point, I disabled Growl (a system-wide notifier for OS X) for Twitterific but it was still getting on my nerves.

I don't know about a temp-IM feature--it's not what Twitter is about, and it's quite a tough crowd to deal with given the ubiquity of the more standard instant messaging protocols and online tools like chatterous, meebo or mibbit (assuming I spelt all those right).

What I'd like to see is Twitter for groups: I have 2 twitter followers who are working with me on something. Let me make a private group and Twitter away.
"It will stop the low budget projects and answer a lot of questions upfront." Ding, ding.

And at higher rates, you immediately classify yourself as an expert. The human brain automatically connects higher prices to higher value.

(Even if it may not be true over the long-term, we are conditioned to understand that if we pay $50 for a burger, there is something special about it.)
Video: Funny

Techcrunch constantly whining about Twitter being down: Lame
I assume "having an article" and the notability requirements are to keep the site from being overrun by fanboys.
I'm disappointed that they don't have a try-then-buy option. There are plenty of sub $10 apps that I would love to try out and wouldn't mind paying for if they are good. But I don't like payng the money first and then learning that I don't like something about how they work. The "lite" version works, okay, but I'd rather just one version that I could try for free for a week to see if it sticks with me.
Absolutely. Some have even asked me for help.

The difference is in how they ask for help. Folks that are usually thought of as stupid either get flustered and say "I can't do this", or they don't ask for help at all and hope nobody will notice. While the ones we think of as "truly smart" have confidence that they'll get it eventually, they're just missing some crucial piece of information.

I suspect this holds true of original research as well, but this is usually done in private, and so nobody sees the smart people struggle.
You're invoking Game Theory, by which I gather that your objection is more theoretical that practical.

I can't think of a single real-world situation that would be improved by having noncompetes enforced. Can you?

Maybe they are a lot like software patents. There are a very few cases where someone has created software that is a genuine advance, requiring rare skill and talent and time investment -- but the overwhelming majority of patent claims are totally invalid, hence they are a bad idea.

Maybe there's some imaginary noncompete agreement that would benefit the parties to a contract or the general public, but in practice they are just going to be used by institutions with greater legal resources to provide leverage on with fewer such resources.
A123 worth $950 million?
Does that seem high?
(well if they are struggling wouldn't you not consider them smart)
git is pretty good at dealing with lots of local branches. it has git-stash which supports that even further (stash it now, come back to it later). it has a staging area which allows you to slice and dice your commits. it seems to be better and allowing you to rewrite the commit history.

i don't like git-repack, git-gc. i prefer the hg revlog approach.

hg can package all of its state from a given commit into what they call bundles. git only has git-format. can git-format be as self-describing as a bundle?

you can't delete named branches from mercurial. i say, so what. we have an inactive branch. we merge uninteresting branches into there. hg branches -a then shows you the unmerged (active) branches.

they're both good. it mostly depends on the way you and your team work.
>What problem does Twitter solve that IRC has?

Ego.
Hamster: Time Tracking for GNOME
So—if an entity displays the correct facial expressions, sounds and gestures, who’s to say it’s not “experiencing” the emotions?

It is not experiencing emotions because it is a robot.

Sometimes very profound thoughts, are not very profound at all. When we see a rotting carcass we don't experience hunger, but a hyena would. It's just programming.

So the only way a robot would feel something is if it is programmed to "feel something".
Man usually has a tendency to overestimate technological advance in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. I think tha speculation about what will happen in a million is, at best, an interesting intellectual exercise.
Ah, OK. So, a "solution" is made up of many projects, which is made up of many files? It sounds very enterprise-y. I'll promise to stay out its way, as long as it stays out of mine.

And I guess I can get by without knowledge of what a Team Foundation Server is or does.
Oh my god it is so incredibly offensive.

How can it be the land of freedom if something like this would have been ok?
It is f*g absurd.

I'd rather die standing than live on my knees and I will fight this anti-freedom bullshit til I die.
5. They will lose customer because of this.
#launchapd #launchpad-meeting #ubuntu-meeting #ubuntu-quality #webpy
This actually makes an interesting psychological experiment. I know German, and I found I could not focus on the subtitles unless I turned the sound down, which took away some of the emotional impact. But it made me laugh anyway.
Homepage for the program: http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo.htm
Bijan's right. The enforceability of noncompetes probably does harm Massachusetts. It's not the main reason Boston lags Silicon Valley, but it doesn't help.
Many sites do not have API and hence the need to screenscrape. It is probably against their interests to have an API, being the type of organisation that wants to control the type of interaction others (especially customers) have with it rather than encourage more (even if it will benefit them in the long term).

Also, if they did, it would reduce much of the value of the price comparison sites by reducing the barrier to entry (allowing more competitor services to the market) and hence they may not want it either (rarely see a comparison site in any sector ask for APIs).

Electronic harvesting is against the rules of many big sites out there (sadly), so is it wrong comparison sites do not abide the terms and conditions of others to fix something that is broken and add value to people?

If they paid these sites a fee to compensate, would that be good or bad? (as basically it boils down to money, and one party not happy another makes money "off its back", so to speak)
In footnote [2]: No VC will admit they're influenced buzz. Some genuinely aren't. But there are few who can say they're not influenced by confidence.

I think this wants s/influenced buzz/influenced by buzz/.
Nice machine learning paper on the program: (PDF) http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/3...
I for one welcome our new humorless hackerlords.

Sure, it's humorous, but unsophisticated and shows little effort. I didn't downmod you, by the way, but I didn't find it funny.
I for one don't welcome them. I thought the comment was reasonably amusing -- a Slashdot-esque quip here and there surely does no real harm -- but even if it were deemed unfunny, is -17 really appropriate? Would not a 0 suffice?
I'd say they're both ready, and I've used them both for over a year now with no problems.

My guess is Hg, as it's simpler. 90% of my SVN work is done with update, checkout, and commit. Really, why so many more commands for essentially the same work cycle?

I prefer hg for just this reason. But unfortunately, it looks like git is going to win. Why? http://github.com. Fortunately, they're both pretty good, and so living with git isn't the end of the world.
This is fairly entertaining, and I predict it will get a lot of votes because of who it attacks, but I don't think it's actually correct. I haven't noticed any change in the rate at which posers mention Derrida.
This needs an actual fix. I've often thought it should be acceptable to fork articles. Thus, there's the official "Battle of the Bulge" or "History of the Atari 2600" link (or whatever), and then there are 0..n others written by different historians or amateurs who have a divergent, possibly incorrect or extreme view.
AOL Officially Worthless?
This proves at least one of two things: that computers can be more intelligent than people or that one doesn't need to be intelligent to play Go.
4 most likely. Their CEO was on TV not long ago saying that if people's luggage got trashed it was their own fault for not buying more expensive luggage... Presumably the people with the expensive luggage are flying BA.

If you need to get from A to B for no money and you know what to expect, Ryanair's not a bad way to do it, but it's never going to be a pleasant experience.
Agreed. I prefer hg overall, but I know it's more due to style than a clear technical advantage one way or the other.

Is it possible to set branches -a to be the default in your hgrc, by the way? (I was going to check on that this weekend.)
Uh, #emacs, #tech.coop, #gsoc, #gnome-hackers, #conkeror.
Interesting... I don't spend any time in IRC Channels. I find them distracting. But it's cool that some people have gotten a job or two out of a Channel.
on an average how long do YC companies take to raise the next round (could be series A, or another larger angel round) of funding after the YC funding?
Submit or vote on questions for PG for the Cambridge/Boston Startup Meetup on Monday
We hope to capture the answers and post them here, but we're still working out the details.

The invitation:
http://anyvite.com/events/home/tmokjxuwai/cambridgeboston-st...
That is a very timely thread :)
I left a message in there, maybe will create a full-blown thread later on as well.
If investors always need a little more information and none of them understand the product, then doesn't it make sens to have funds?

Funds where investors would pool their money and where very smart people with very deep knowledge about he market make the investment decisions. Isn't that what VC funds are?

So if VC funds are supposed to be led by people who know what to invest in, but it seems none actually do, not even Y combinator, then isn't there something else that pg did not mention?

Could it be that simple, pure, dumb luck plays such a large role in each and every startup that educated guessing what to invest in is impossible?

And doesn't that mean that the most rational investment strategy is the one of the index fund? Invest in everything, most will fail, a few will succeed.

So does that make all investors just market inefficiencies?
You're right. I have to rush off to the day job right now, but this evening will test my creative writing stamina.

I hope it will stop hurting eventually. I wish I could code my way out of this duty. :)
Money quote: Startups live or die on morale.
Having multiple editors tends to bury any 1 editor's signal. The eventual style can be very easy to read once you learn to extract information from it efficiently.
Why do designers fail to adopt Perl?
You are probably in the lucky minority.
Google Search Appliance: 10 million documents in a single box
That's a great point. I think perhaps this is exemplary of the notion that they are still confined to their previous paradigm of "encyclopedia" instead of infinite knowledge base.

A good solution to this would be to introduce levels of specificity to Wikipedia such that what we currently have is the first level, and then the second level would be catered towards individuals who have more than a lay perspective, and then the next successive level would be for experts and so forth.

Perhaps this would require different levels of editorship as well, but it is definitely an approach that might give a better organization to Wikipedia that is not flat as is exemplified by traditional encyclopedias.