skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's in name?... and a tag line.
Hi,

I'm about to embark on a new startup (which is a pivoted idea from a previous startup) called Smug Owl and I want to get the messaging and tone right of the couple of lines of copy that we put on the 'register your interest' page. This copy intentionally doesn't go into too much detail but it should give people coming to the site enough of an idea to register their interest.

Rather than tell you what the startup is I thought I would put the 2 options I have come up with for the mentioned copy.

I would love it if you could help me out by telling me:
1. What do you think my startup is, based on this copy?
2. Would you sign up? (why or why not?)

Any thoughts welcome. You can be constructively cruel if you like. Thanks in advance :)

Option 1:
Smug Owl - Great, recommended audio for the urban commuter
[smuhg oul]

- noun
1 . Busy commuter who conveniently enjoys audio recommendations hand
picked by well informed guides.

Option 2:
Smug Owl - Great, recommended audio for the urban commuter
[smuhg oul]

- noun
1 . Busy commuter who conveniently enjoys periodical audio
recommendations selected by knowledgable curators.
1) Bigger than having a bunch of warehouses spread all over the world, fully staffed, with logistics and inventories to worry about? It seems unlikely this is smaller than the infrastructure for digital deliveries.

2) "free" in the same way your coffee might be "free" with the purchase of a bagel...

3) True, but let's taked away all the fixed costs (and presume the warehouses would have existed anyways, which may or may not be true). There are still plenty of variable costs - storage space costs money, handling costs labour, and shipping cannot be escaped (and is expensive!)...
Superb Video of SpaceShipTwo's First Feathered Flight
Preface: Something I've noticed about jerks/assholes: they're convinced that they're surrounded by jerks and/or assholes. Almost none of them are jerks for no reason. They're almost always jerks in response to some slight (either imagined, or blown way out of proportion). A good sign that you might be a jerk is that you see jerks all around you. Most people are basically all right. If you (1) run into conflicts with a lot of people, please consider the possibility that you are at least part of the cause.

Actual Point: The reason I am hesitant about following the advice of this article is that it encourages you to divide the world into jerks and nice people. It's very easy to be a jerk to a jerk. If you are a jerk to a jerk, suddenly everyone on the project has to deal with two jerks.

I do agree that there are behaviors that just shouldn't be accepted, and there are lots of examples of them online. But you (2) do need to be mindful of your response to those behaviors. Make sure your response isn't to engage in those behaviors yourself.

(1 & 2) and by you, I mostly mean me. I am totally writing to myself here.
Right, so, it's a game... Details?
I'd say a MacBook Air (portable) or iMac (desktop) absent any other information, but I'd also recommend checking out this article:

http://brooksreview.net/2011/05/macs-cars/

What is MFi?
New Google Analytics - Overview Reports Overview [Google official blog]
I've never used it, but I know Yelp has one (http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/neighborhood_ap...).
I think the best way to choose is narrowing it down to a few potential frameworks/stacks that you (and your team, if applicable) thinks would be the best fit for your project. I don't believe any of these frameworks are the one answer to all your problems.

At work we build an enterprise level government used application in CakePHP. It's done fairly well, but given the ability to migrate our platform I would jump at the chance.

We begun trying to practice TDD on the project and it's been nothing but a nightmare! Whether it's Simpletest or CakePHP's implementation of Simpletest we haven't figured out (or had the time to dive in and figure it out). We run into issue after issue. The littlest change to the way our app runs at the core seems to trigger a shit storm of little issues here and there. Granted, a lot of this has to do with the architecture that was put in place by the Sr. developer before I got here, but it's definitely becoming an issue...

Might also be worth noting that CakePHP is a (poor in my opinion) port of Rails to PHP.
"I bet DNB will be around in for another 50 years. Do you think LNKD will be?"

I'd like to go back a few years and ask the author whether Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns will be around in 50 years.
Probably 1 coder : 10 designers -- at the very least.

Off topic: Would be a great idea to have a "design school for hackers" with some assignments/critique!
and yet we still have VAT on eBooks in the UK (whereas we don't on print books) :(
I think you're confusing "asshole" with "socially awkward". The real assholes are the ones who smile and ooze kindness and would backstab you for 10 bucks.

Usually the "grumpy" people you're talking about are just grumpy, but good-hearted in the end.
Obscurity isn't useless in all situations, but in this case it's important to realize that changing the port number is really only effective in preventing scanning attacks.

For a targeted attacker, finding the new port is trivial. (There are only 65k of them...)

Comparing service discovery with maintaining a fog of war isn't really an apt comparison.
We're in rural southern US. Not a lot of Macs on the local CL. Boss man is more comfortable with new, or at least factory refurb.
Who are the writers? I read a few summaries and they seemed pretty good.
Hacking the American Dream
The first other one that actually came to my mind was Microsoft. I can't count the number of zealots I encountered that bowed before Microsoft software überness, regardless of how far you stick their nose through glaring deficiencies, refusing to even begin to consider any alternative, whatever the context.

The study itself does not surprise me the least. It's no wonder we describe such close-minded people zealots and fanatics, both terms having a religious history.
Nice. I watch the RSS feed and rather like the full flow, but if I didn't, this would be a great substitute.

The only concern is the comments there... Doesn't that seem to take away from the comments here? It would be better if you could pull the number of comments here and link here.
> These people behave in a way that would not be tolerated in real life. I’ve worked with a few of these jerks in real life, and when they’ve been unable to restrain their behavior I’ve asked for them to be fired, and I’ve quit.

Just because you couldn't tolerate them doesn't mean they aren't tolerated. When you asked for them to be fired (instead of asking the manager to talk to them about their behavior), were they actually fired? That sort of thing depends on the amount of power you hold in an organization. I certainly couldn't just demand that one of my coworkers be fired and expect my boss to acquiesce.
I think this effect is exercerbated by the fact that it is difficult for users to discern tone in online modes of communication, unlike phone or face to face discussion (geeks in general have a hard time with either) I've been trying to ensure that I speak to people on the internets like I would if we were talking face to face.
I think it might be worthwhile to consider the influence that the egoistical and condescending example person might have on someone who is not a perfectly rational actor, and possibly easily cowed into giving up on a technical discussion or retreating from the project as a whole.

Sure, ideally all contributors to open-source projeccts are thick-skinned and confident enough that harsh condescendence will not affect them much, but in reality, they probably are not, and I would rather cater to them than to the "assholes" who might be scaring them away.
Definitely agree with you that abstraction matters. I use C as an example because it's the canonical way in which we as developers can reasonably converse about directly dealing with the machine. C is still important and will continue to be important because it's arguably the best abstraction we have to write code directly against the machine. GC and STM would be orthogonal to the purpose of C.

It's really sort of pointless to argue what's possible in environments lacking real, unsafe pointers, because the whole idea with mmap()'d I/O is that it lets apps access files as if they are a region of memory. Java wraps up the behavior in FileChannel, and most other platforms have a way to access mmap() in some fashion, albeit the practical use cases are vanishingly small. In C, it's done mostly for squeezing out bits of extra performance by shrinking memory requirements/allocation cost and avoiding copies. Much of the safety mechanisms used by VM environments invalidate or make unavailable the shortcuts that are used in tandem with mapped I/O to achieve higher performance.

In the end, it's all still triggering the virtual memory interrupt that will load the page from disk if it's not in RAM, and the kernel is still going to suspend the calling thread while it's happening. No way around that. Alleviating this through thread pools would just re-introduce the issues of inter-thread locking and context switch overhead, and present an additional bottleneck; in the end just piling on extra complexity. I don't see that as a net win at all.

While the post has some great information on mapped I/O, it seems as if the author is dogmatic about the use of mapped I/O and is trying to find a way to use this hammer in a situation where it might be inappropriate.

EDIT: To the author who replied: awesome, awesome. Ultimately this is great stuff to talk about and these types of posts are what HN should really be about, even though it's turned into startup TMZ.
There is a classical school of valuation that has difficulty dealing with Internet companies. Namely, a number of VCs, etc. have recognized that having a large number of passionate (or possibly addicted) users is the ticket to desirability and also valuation. It is better, in this sense, to have an indispensable product that is free or near free, than to have 5% of the population paying you $1K per year.

Does this make any sense? Well, given that the stock market largely runs on hype, it makes lots of sense if you are trying to make money (the stated aims of VCs). Large investment banks that underwrite IPOs know that money flows where there is hype and they stand to make a good deal more where there is hype. Not only that, hype is ultimately close to (although certainly not the same as) making a sale.

There is an additional wrinkle, social media, which no one knows what to do with, yet is so the subject of so much hype it is sure to attract lots of money. This system clearly is not broken when now big players like Facebook are able to attract money, expand, then once they've captured virtually the entire market and gotten them "addicted," they can capture advertising revenue and a percentage on Farmville-esque games. So social is weird, but the strange system in place, even if it doesn't make sense to the casual observer, seems to be working in some strange way. And it really is different. A good product can capture most of the viable US market in a year or two, which is virtually impossible in other arenas, but this is made possible by rapid growth, which is also made possible by the influx of capital.

Ironically, other examples like Lady Gaga are even more driven by the hype machine and can fade even more quite quickly, meaning that if you were investing in her you would be depending almost entirely on hype, while the hype for Linked-In is based on an indispensable product.
Your last line was very nicely put. Something a jerk generally wouldn't say. I find that when I give advice to people often times it's more of a reminder to myself.

I agree the world is not divided into jerks/nice people. There's a spectrum. Try to stay on the nice side. You can't always avoid jerks but one should not go out of their way to be around them.
Because maybe those many nice people couldn't program their way out of a wet paper sack.

If I'm looking for someone to go to a bar with, I'll pick the nice person. If I need someone to help me complete a project at work, I'll probably try to find someone who's good at what they do, regardless of whether they're an asshole or not.
Traditional search is failing, according to head of Bing search, Weitz
University of Warsaw lets students choose either Pascal or OCaml for introductory classes.
> "There is a lot less grip at the beginning of a race weekend"

It can also be the opposite during a race, as tyre residue accumulates on the track, lessening grip in the most critical areas, often requiring drivers to change their line.

(To be clear, my question was a rhetorical one. I began to write a paragraph about that, and then another one... and then work brought me back from procrastination, so I deleted the incomplete stuff)
"Copyright owners have said the legislation has a series of legal checks and balances built in and would be geared only toward pirate sites."

Any information on what these 'checks and balances' would be?
Great. It would be better if the summaries were even shorter though, and had more links.

For example:

"Developers using the Lean Software Development model compare the writing of software to a manufacturing process where project requirements are considered inventory. The focus should be on the code as it is the real inventory. Like all inventory there is a cost to carrying code. Competitive advantage can be achieved by strategically deleting code and focusing on profitable features."

has a lot of cruft and could be summarized like this:

"Lean software says code is inventory - and carrying inventory costs money."

That way you get the main idea and you can click for more.
A Tale of Two Economies
During the first 30 days after an IPO, the underwriters are not allowed to lend shares for short sale. Additionally, number of shares are limited. The entire float is not available on the first day of trading. So today, it is probably impossible to short. 30 days from now, it should be available to short.

http://cash.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/062905.asp
I came to say what @rbanffy said about the 360 being a terrible thing to introduce into a school environment, and to add that Apple's usual giveaway is an iPod, which in contrast actually could help in school.
I went the opposite route - started out with buying nothing (pirated my books) and as I started slamming my way through books, I started buying the titles because they were better formatted and I wanted to support my favourite authors.
I agree with your conclusion, and understand the reasoning behind the clause. I just don't understand how it makes good sense for them to force me into a situation where I must choose between having an app in an inappropriate marketplace garnering negative reviews or having no apps on said marketplace at all.
I can't comment directly on his blog. What kind of asshole doesn't let people comment on his blog? :3 (Sarcasm, by the way; I don't have comments on my blog either.)

More pragmatically, the tolerance of assholes is a requisite for using a computer, if you know anything about who maintains your operating system. Linux, glibc, binutils, gcc, X; these are the underpinnings of your system, and they are all maintained by assholes of one kind or another. How do you propose to fix this?
"commercial airliner dogfights.". Sounds like my kind of thing.
A most excellent book, indeed.
If one of my coworkers was being abusive to anyone I would absolutely expect my boss to fire them.

Edit: Or I would expect the boss to fire themselves for not being able to protect the team from the asshole.
MFi: http://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi/ Hardware for iPhone, iPod, iPad platforms.
On top of all of that, using mapped I/O effectively means embracing it directly. Adding an abstraction layer on-top that would allow a quick switch to stdio would negate the benefits. Sucks.
Sword Camp 2008: Zompocalypse, Day Five http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=323
Happy b-day Ed!

I couldn't buy your book, but now i can get it free. Thanks a lot :)
I refuse to tolerate grown men with flying pony backgrounds on their websites.
Thanks I will check those out.
Agreed. I'm quite hesitant to authorize access (even to my public details) without a bit more info.

Side note: Github's UI for authorizing access is very clear and concise. Way to go Github!
Since I'm not sure what edw519 would think of me sharing his work online, I did the less wrong thing. I'm pretty sure you've got mail.
I know this will probably sound heretical, but I think that there's no such thing as an "unfair advantage". If we really wanted to see technical innovation in F1, there would be virtually no restrictions on the cars - just some basic safety stuff for the drivers.
what are your criteria for identifying popular articles? also, is there any NLP involved in the summarization process, or is it all manual?
Please don't editorialize in your submission titles. A better title would have been "Mixergy Interview: Guest - Andrew Warner, Host - Jason Cohen"
I enjoyed SICP, but the class teaching it was miserable. I read it in my 3rd year of college and found the text excellent. The professors on the other hand acted like baboons.

The professor taught the course almost as a magician demonstrating a a magic trick and expecting the audience to recognize how it was done. We all knew it was magic, but few of us saw how it was done. Yet, the professor could do little but grin at how remarkable a trick it was. I think if SICP were taught as if everyone in the class didn't know anything about programming, it'd go better. But it seems like professors focus too much on how awesome it is and less on teaching.

Also, each semester my advisor always asks me about how I liked scheme when he sees that I got an A in the course, almost like it's some special club to be in.

For people that don't catch on to SICP quickly, it's a very hostile learning environment to be in.
I like how you're thinking but in this case Lean software generally considers features inventory. The author of the source article is suggesting it should be inventory instead. The transition is needed from the general perception to what is being proposed.
Youth Is The Power Of Tomorrow: Exit Interview.
Vested interests at work. They have an economy of scale in the political realm. More often than not, laws are drafted by the lobbyists themselves.
http://motivationaltubing.com/ are the folks that actually designed and built the Maverick.
Masterobjects sues Microsoft (after Amazon & Google) over Instant Search Patent
You can do that but these people that act like jerks or asshole really do alienate and demotivate others, so while you might be able to handle them if you have a group of people an asshole can really destroy productivity.
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.

Another point, which the author could have also argued, is that assholes push or scare others out of open-source communities. Much of the time, the people scared away are not profilic contributors, however many of them had the potential to become so if they were nurtured. I certainly wasn't the best coder when I started contributing to Drupal (and I'm still not), but I managed to do a lot of good for it both in code and evangelizing for it. Had it not been for the leaders in the community who were super-nice (e.g., Neil Drumm and Angie Byron), then I would have let the jerks keep me from using and contributing back to something I loved. However, I noticed that as I became a better and more knowledgeable contributor, it was easier for me to fall into the behavior of sounding like a jerk myself. We (or at least I) have to constantly check ourselves to ensure we are doing good for the community and sticking true to our nice roots.
If people want something that won't discolor the plastic or leave residue, use the sticky portion of a yellow sticky note to cover the camera. I've been using the same piece of little sticky for 2 years or so.

On Macs it has the added bonus of still letting you see when the camera light comes on.
If you're looking for a scandal, how about the apparent gross underpricing of the stock by linkedin's investment bank? Isn't the reason companies hire these "experts" is that they have a good idea what price people will pay for your stock? Missing by over 50% is pretty bad.

EDIT: On the flip side, you can't blame the banks if the institutional investors are simply overpaying.
Bram Cohen's Practical Cryptography
Those can be found in the banks and bank accounts of each potential infringer, presumably.
NYT: New Grads
raised to value civility above diversity of experience and raw merit?

You're forgetting all of the brilliant people who, for reasons of their own, prefer not to work alongside these assholes. That is diversity your organizations have historically missed out on.
Many people who are perceived as "acerbic" are simply direct and don't engage in the poo-pooing that characterizes many human social interactions. To get rid of them is to revert to a less intelligent form of life.
Mike Belshe adds CurveCP to Chromium's proto sandbox
|It takes a big infrastructure to manage an eBook store.
It also takes as big infrastructure to manage selling physical books. and the size of a book(900kb) is pretty close to the size of it's amazon product page.

|Amazon already has built up warehousing/delivery infrastructure and must maintain it
Amazon's retail business shows nice year-on-year growth, and probably can eat the extra capacity left by the book business.
I am still undecided. I think they should make 'the zone' shorter so that it isn't as easy - but that is all up to working it out for each track.
Now you have. :)
I always enjoy listening and reading stuff from Jason. He always provides value in what he does. Not to mention he is a pretty cool guy.
Persistent object storage in Python
Types of Web Hosting | Information
Web hosting is a service that allows people and companies to create theri own website that can be accessable via WWW (World Wide Web). This service is used to make your website visible around the globe.
Evelyn Waugh's words capture this rather well and applies to a much wider field: 'Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice - all the odious qualities - which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, and renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in so doing he enriches the world more than the generous and the good. That is the paradox of artistic achievement.'
Should Steve Jobs be fired?
Just be glad you don't work on high-frequency trading systems if "tenths of a second" seems like a frustratingly small gain. Our office erupts into cheers when we shave a microsecond or even 500 nanoseconds off our loop times. :)
I went back into history, to find my blog post about how to tweet from Python (http://corbinsimpson.com/entry/the-bird-is-the-word) and confirmed that Twitter started rolling out OAuth in July 2010. That means that they have given xAuth apps the better part of a year to transition, when the original plan was to give them only a month or so.

My sympathy is limited towards Twitter app developers -- you were warned a while ago, you've had plenty of time to figure out the new system, and it's really not that painful.