skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Earbits guys do this for a video tour of their website. The first time you visit it there's a banner link to watch that video, but if you click it it says something along the lines of "thank you for your interests, we wanted to know if people actually want to see that video before hiring Spielberg to make it for real". This is brilliant and the fun part of the message even makes users happy with not seeing the video.
I stopped short of saying that in the article (I was trying to make the point that even if you're not working directly on the product, there are many things to do in a pre-launch startup), but you're absolutely right! I actually had a sentence that I cut out which said something along the lines of "By the way, if you're a 'business guy' on a startup but you're not at all involved in building the product, you're probably doing something wrong!" - however, I don't feel I'm in a position to make such a generic statement, especially in view of the counterexample of Seth Sternberg himself.

I do feel that the 'business guy' should be involved in the product development/leadership, though, as you feel.
Lots of unreported personal income as well.
I'm also happy and couldn't agree more, but I would make it more generic: Canvas/WebGL is the huge change. And I would add Local Storage as a distant third to WebSockets' strong second. The rest is fun but not game changing.
Airbnb is in a prime position to expand into the market of web-based PMS (I'm not kidding -- Property Management Systems) that are super expensive and still run on old MS-DOS machines in many hotels. Give hotels a web-based solution that interfaces with hotels.com and other sites (there's a rather involved protocol that you need to license, but the name escapes me) and you're in business.
Break away from usernames and passwords
17 days ago, if you're interested in previous discussion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2543977
Twitter launching photo service
Most investors want to play it safe. YC wants founders to succeed. Sure, there's money in it for them, but that's not why they're doing it.
groovy helps a bit with this when you use the jvm -- lots of their operators are null aware [1], ie

max([3, null, 4]) == 4

and they have a null-safe dereference operator [2], so returning null is actually reasonable as an error

def user = User.find( "admin" ) //this might be null if 'admin' does not exist
def streetName = user?.address?.street

Collapsable to:

def streetName = User.find("admin").?address.?street

It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than plain java. Compare to:

String street = null;
User user = User.find("admin");
if (user != null) {
Address addr = user.address;
if (addr != null)
street = addr.street;
}

// or even
String street = null;
if (User.find("admin") != null && User.find("admin").address != null)
street = User.find("admin").address;

I think one of my biggest complaints -- and the reason I think Gosling is a moron -- is how programmer unfriendly java is. Some syntactical sugar as above, so you don't have to nest null checks, goes a long way towards making languages more friendly to devs. Even simple things like in ruby being able to say

1_000_300_233 == 1000300233

makes it a lot nicer to read big numbers. Sigh. If Gosling actually wrote code instead of doing whatever he wastes his time doing, you'd think that's the sort of thing you could just add to the language.

[1] http://groovy.codehaus.org/Null+Object+Pattern

[2] http://groovy.codehaus.org/Operators#Operators-SafeNavigatio...
Maybe someone could explain the original security concern, and how masking is able to address that concern?
So I do agree that the tipping point will be when the danger is in our collective faces. I also agree there is a good chance it might be pretty bad indeed with as you say large numbers dying.

I don't believe that sustainable ways of life will prevail before any fall. Look at the fishing in the North sea - despite the stocks being pretty much destroyed the fishermen who have taken the fish continue to argue their case to take the very last few because they don't want to change their way of life. This is sadly all too common.

There are people who can see all this working on tech - I think the best bet (ie the one were more of us survive) is if there are some decent breakthroughs. Knowing what I do about projects in progress and the work being done I think there is a good chance this will work out. The reason is that this isn't just a stopping us dying scenario this is making lots of money for lots of people scenario.

If we have to sort ourselves out after a fall - well you may be right. But only for a while. It is almost certain that sooner or later some person or other will look at the next valley or over a sea and think: "hmm what would happen if I went over there. I guess I'll need X Y Z" where X Y Z is some bit of basic tech that doesn't exist yet. and the human race will be off again.

We're tenacious buggers us humans. I don't think it's time to give up and sit quietly by the fire just yet....

(oh and also the very diversity - look at what you are into and what say, I am into - an entrepreneur, a technologist and an optimist - and our different views. That very difference means that we have a "portfolio" strategy as a species. Our eggs are in millions of baskets. There may be a catastrophe and you with your abilities to cope on your own resources will just carry on trucking. Something else my happen and some other group may thrive. It will be a damn hard job killing the lot of us - even for something as resourceful as the human race itself)
Courteous.ly lets people know when it's best to send you mail
Anything that Comet or other long-polling techniques provide, really.

The advantages of WebSockets include constantly changing specifications which are neither backwards- nor forwards-compatible, a lack of proxy traversal, an arbitrary and unreasonable limitation on binary data transfer, and lack of unified browser and server support.
The quantum computer is growing up
All visitors are equal, but some visitors are more equal than others
One thing that might help is to prioritize "end-to-end", happy-path work highest. Once you've got the bare-bones, end-to-end functionality working, go back and start filling things in.
Local Storage is limited to 5MB, which cripples the ability of indie game developers to effectively use WebGL as an alternative deployment platform.
> If the entire email fits in the subject, put it in the subject.

There is a special place in hell for the people that do this. I'll hope you get there as fast as possible.

Seriously, Just because you have preview windows set to display the subject as a paragraph, doesn't mean I've got the same set up on my blackberry. If you want me to answer, write the text of the email where it friggin belongs, not in the subject line.
I believe it's such a wonderful thing you're getting to share with your son. Especially your humble approach of it being a shared hobby.

I'm a developer/designer because of both my parents influence. My mother was always interested in building, drawing and making things. While my father good at pulling things apart and back together again.

I've never really been able to talk much to my father but that he steered well enough - my father was born in Vietnam and has good English but not enough to fully understand every concept.

Yet he has helped guide me build my own computer and others with him, basic concepts of DOS and some trial an error skills.

I've always believed programming opens up our brains to understanding the world from a different perspective and that I hope one day to have a child also that takes an interest in what we do as a job/for fun with coding.
Loren wants to work at Airbnb
Inspired and motivated by some fantastic advice from the HN community, I’ve decided to pursue a frontend engineering position at Airbnb. I’m an entrepreneur at heart, but I love what they’re doing and could see myself working as a part of the team. In fact, Airbnb is one of the only companies I’ve really felt the urge to work with.

In addition to submitting a resume and cover letter, I thought it would be fun to put together this little project. I’m not personally sending a link to Airbnb, so any chance they have at seeing this is entirely up to the community. I guess this is an experiment of sorts - we’ll see how it goes. Thanks HN!
First test errored: line 4: test: too many arguments

This was on OSX + bash... wondering if I need to update something to allow more args through?

#!/bin/sh
X=9
tput clear
while test $X -gt 0
do
tput cup 5 0
tput ed
banner " $X"
X='expr $X - 1'
sleep 1
done
Where does it say that exactly? It's a public repository and the author is explicitly linking to it while saying that he has no plans of enforcing any licence.
Good question.

Copyright is concerned with protecting original works, so it depends on what exactly you're referring to by "API". My interpretation is that the technical document describing an API is an original work and that the library implementing an API is an original work (provided they do not copy or modify existing works protected by copyright, then they are derivative works), but the idea the API conveys is not protected by copyright (this is what's known as the idea-expression divide[1]).

This is further complicated by the fact that we're discussing the law here so we can't assume anything to be logical or consistent. In the US, the DMCA have specific portions concerning the legality of reverse engineering for various purposes, which have implications for someone wishing to write an independent implementation of an API[2]. Maybe someone would argue that any implementation written according to the API specification is a derivative work?

I don't think there's a definitive answer to your question, since AFAIK this haven't been tested in court. In fact, in the ongoing patent/copyright dispute between Oracle and Google, Oracle claims Google violated Oracle's copyright by reproducing Java API's in Android[3].

(Disclaimer: IANAL, and I've probably misinterpreted something along the way)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea-expression_divide

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1094103/is-copying-an-api...

[3] http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/OraGoogle-36.pdf (p. 9)
Ask HN: Is SearchYC.com gone?
I've noticed it offline the past day or two, I used it pretty extensively to find old threads on here. Any alternatives if it's gone for good?
It has unlimited storage if you use Chrome's Webstore. I suppose it will just take a while before the other browsers can figure out how to implement it the right way for more than 5 MB of storage.
Also relevant is the follow-up paper published the following year, which extends Dunbar's argument:

Dunbar, R. I. M. 1993. Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16:681-735.

pdf: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~johnson/COGS184/3Dunbar93.pdf

That said, Dunbar's paper - and the entire concept of the "Dunbar number" - is the shoddiest piece of science I have ever seen. Dunbar arrives at the magical 150 by extrapolating from the neocortex ratio to mean group size correlation of nonhuman primates. However, the human neocortex ratio is 30% higher than that of any primate and the resulting "corresponding" mean group size of 147.8 is more than double the highest nonhuman mean group size of 65.5, which makes the validity of such a large extrapolation highly suspect. In an attempt to justify this, Dunbar gives a 95% confidence interval of 100.2 - 231.1 (quite a wide range), then sets out to find as many examples of real-world data as possible that fit in this predetermined interval. As is often the case when one knows exactly what to look for, it appears to be everywhere. My favorite moment is where he encounters Naroll (1956)'s observed maximum settlement size of 500 yet deems it "likely that the equivalent mean settlement size will not be too far from the value of 150 suggested by the above analyses" (Dunbar 1993 p687).

How are you supposed to go about falsifying an argument like that?

Edit: Better formatting.
We weren't. This is a good illustration of why you want to invest based on the founders rather than the idea. The founders we liked immediately.

Also, the idea was different initially. Initially they expected the host always to be there.
> Another question: is there built-in support, or an idiom or standard practice for unwinding multiple levels of stack? Is it possible to have handler code is not directly in the function that called, but somewhere lower on the call stack -- and have it reached automatically like an exception does?

Not that I know, but I am very much a haskell novice. You may want to ask for further information in /r/haskell, on reddit.
I'd like to know this as well (although $1 billion makes sense, they make a cut on every transaction, as opposed to Facebook which doesn't make a revenue on every customer)
There's not many original ideas around regarding this stuff, and even fewer plausible explanations, I'm afraid most people will usually sound like they're repeating other peoples' ideas.
I've held off on using WebSockets until binary frames are supported. I'm amazed they haven't been so far.
If you prefer a small-language, build-up-blocks version of Lisp, Scheme may be a better place to start than Common Lisp (clisp is a Common Lisp implementation). There are other pros/cons, but in general Scheme is the more minimalist branch of the Lisp family tree. Racket (http://racket-lang.org/), formerly "PLT Scheme", is one popular choice in the Scheme family. Clojure (http://clojure.org/) is another possibility, neither Scheme nor CL, that has recently been gaining popularity.
I've been waiting for some time to call out Airbnb, and I think this is the right time.

Firstly, the idea of short term residential rentals is not new. Long before Airbnb major cities, Paris, London, New York, and Toronto were dealing with the issues and the problems of short term / nightly residential rentals. In fact the latest condo boom in Toronto has been ascribed to international investors buying condos explicitly for this quasi-hotel rental market. Many cities have been passing local laws trying to prohibit this type of rental use for residences because they carry a whole host of problems. Some of those include -- emptying the downtown core of residences, artificially increasing housing costs for residents, removing the stability and security that comes from having permanent and community-invested residents, shorting cities on their hotel taxes, providing unlicensed locations for short term illicit activities, etc. So by increasing the market in these short term rentals, the communities will also feel the increase in the unfortunate side effects of these short term rental impacts. These are long term market problems that Airbnb will have to address.

Secondly, it's not a new idea because in the recent past, these rentals were managed by hotel brokers. So in that respect, Airbnb major idea is simply to replace the traditional broker that used to handle the short term rentals with a direct owner to renter model. Across the internet we see great success in online services removing brokerage inefficiencies to various markets, and for this they should be congratulated, but not overly so.

And finally, about their execution. Airbnb is not the market leader. In fact --http://www.vrbo.com/ is. This is what amazes me the most. Vrbo (I have no professional relationship or otherwise) regularly get better reviews in online discussion boards comparing the two services. Their price structure is much more competitive, their review structure is much more robust, in fact aside from Airbnb's more sophisticated visual design, Vrbo leads in many segment of this space.

So, to what do I think Airbnb's success comes from? I think it's Airbnb's marketing / hype / buzz that has been carefully choreographed to maximize their valuation. And to this, I congratulate Airbnb on their latest success, and to a dance well done.
Digital Contracts with DocuSign API and Mimeo Connect
At first I was a detractor but it seems Lee Smolin agrees with you. From "The Trouble with Physics" (free preview part):

The period of time I will address -- roughly since 1975 -- is the span of my own professional career as a theoretical physicist. It may also be the ... most frustrating period ... since Kepler and Galileo....

The story I will tell ... tragedy. To put it bluntly...we have failed. We inherited a science ... that had been progressing so fast for so long ... model for ... other kinds of science.... For more than two centuries, until the present period, our understanding of the laws of nature expanded rapidly. But today, despite our best efforts, what we know for certain about these laws is no more than what we knew back in the 1970s.

How unusual is it for three decades to pass without major progress in fundamental physics? Even if we look back more than two hundred years, to a time when science was the concern mostly of wealthy amateurs, it is unprecedented.
It's not that bad. Right now you basically have support for the -76 protocol in release channel Chrome and Firefox 4 or 5, it's nearly trivial to support all of those with a single server.

With Firefox 6.0, I had to spend some time to upgrade our little Python server, but now it happily serves both -76 and -07. It also looks like -07 is very close to being signed off on as the actual standard, so the compatibility problems are probably a thing of the past soon (-76 and -07 are actually completely trivial to discern from a server point of view).

I haven't tried with binary data, but it looks like it's explicitly supported with -07. Not sure about proxies, they aren't relevant to our work app.
You could hack up something very roughly like it with Kinect but it wouldn't work as well, it'd be a neat hack but not actually usable for anything serious.

Kinect's image capture is very low resolution (even by today's cellphone camera standards), it doesn't give you depth information at a per-pixel resolution and even ignoring those issues in addition to depth information you also need a source image which has critically sharp focus across the entire viewing range (you can't selectively focus in software that which was captured out of focus with a standard digital sensor), which means using a very small aperture (large F-stop value). So it'll be very difficult to capture anything but still-life images because the small aperture means a long exposure time, and thus motion blur if anything moves. Granted this is already less of an issue with Kinect because the sensor in it is so tiny that getting out-of-focus areas is not that much of a concern, but the cost of that is that the image resolution is also atrocious.

Once you get up to usable sensor resolutions, if you're already limited to taking long exposures of still-life images on a tripod, you might as well skip the IR depth perception and just take a series of wider aperture pictures at different focus plane levels, focus stack the results and preprocess the image series for blur levels to work out the relative depths of the in-focus bits of each source image. At least doing it that way you can use a DSLR to get quality photos.

Neither of these is a true replacement for what they are doing here, though.
Thanks ... It seems a good way for now. Maybe I become more familiar with the back-end by this approach ..
"Sleeping" laptops get stolen too; this might slightly help. That said, this is a cool hack, not the greatest protection ever.

Full-disk encryption (on a machine turned off at the time) is, I believe, typically considered sufficient protection. Consult a lawyer in your local jurisdiction, though.
I have so much more data. I've been watching their trajectory for 4 months, while other investors (especially those that chose not to invest) may only have seen them for a few minutes at Demo Day.
How Jessica Livingston created a programmer
Hire this man.
It wasn't an Apollo/Domain machine was it?
Qualcomm roadmap detailed: Quad Core CPU and GPU chipsets coming later this year
Indeed, from the guidelines:

If you submit a link to a video or pdf,
please warn us by appending [video] or
[pdf] to the title.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Look at Node.js, where exceptions don't necessarily travel up written code, begetting the convention of passing an error object, similar to what the OP proposes.

I don't like it, I don't think anyone particularly likes it. It makes you miss exceptions.
I wonder if he's had an opportunity to invest since then?
Absolutely. Then again, assuming that you can't get from root to kernel on a Linux box seems somewhat optimistic. Still a cool hack, though.
Many investors view a company based on how much of a multiplier it can offer them on their investment. Is this a 2x money maker for me or a 10x? If I'm only interested in the 10x home runs then a 2x company may look like a bad idea to me.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes we're just not sure. We try to distinguish in the email we send after the interview.
Ask HN: Any suggestions for visual resume site?
Landing page: http://cvisual.me/

Hi HN,

I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on my online visual resume project. I'm being brief here in order to see how well my current landing page communicates the ideas that I want to convey :)

I'm most interested in three areas:

1. What do you think about the concept of a online visual resume?

2. How well does the current landing page communicate the idea to you?

3. What's one thing you would do to improve the current resume mockup?

Nowadays I'm endlessly hacking away at the backend but I decided it would be best to see how the idea holds up to scrutiny before I get ahead of myself.

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. I really appreciate your help!
I tried it a few times but got better results using Google with site:news.ycombinator.com so I haven't kept up with what's been happening with SearchYC.
Ask HN: Programming Blogs
Could anyone suggest some good programmer blogs? I just started as a Software Engineer and looking for some good resources. Thanks in advance.
The fact that we now have actual pirates in the news from month to month alongside copyright infringers does raise the stakes for those who want to stop calling infringement "piracy".

I think the far worse Orwellization is using "theft" for copyright infringement.
'only'?

6 reactors were affected. Four of them are wrecked. There are full pools of spent and active fuel exposed to sunshine.

Tepco had twenty years to build higher walls against a Tsunami. There were already enough complaints about the weak security before it got hit.

That there are earth quake in the sea causing Tsunamis is nothing new for Japan.

They failed.

You might be surprised to hear that there are also Tsunamis in North Europe.
Couldn't agree more. Let's look at the majority of email someone gets paired with the average workflow of actually reading email. 1. mail comes in, 2. glance at subject. {insert personal workflow.. pause, sort, filter, instant reply, et c.} 3. open email. now, what takes longer, the expectation of seeing real content and processing it or the shock that someone just put the entire email in the subject line and figuring out what to do next with it.

special place in hell +1.
SearchYC used to take points into account, which is at least one advantage over Google. I don't think it had any special access in the current case, though.
On beating roulette: part 2
Wow, congratulations.
You could just tl;dr the article as "Use transactions". Transactions don't have to be tied to a database, and anyone with a CS background should know what they are.
Don't ignore the opportunity cost of that approach. Every hour you spend on those eight things is an hour you could have spent developing the product.
Wait, you buy a smartphone plus almost-a-tablet, which has 70% of what other tablets have, costs probably 70% of the price of an ordinary tablet to manufacture, but doesn't work at all by itself. Doesn't seem like a rational thing to spend money on.