skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use CouchDB as its easier to track development, the Couchbase builds are more convenient if you dont have strict version requirements and dont build from source (they have geocouch included and nice packaging for osx).
I wasn't familiar with the Project prior to this, so will look into it some more. The analysis Jason puts forward here reminds me a lot about the business owners I meet in the real world - they want an answer to questions like "If I do X what will happen?" and "Should I do Y or Z?"

The good part about my approach to those clients (broadly, 'coaching' vs 'consulting' but that's way broad) is that I can answer a question with another question like "What are YOU trying to achieve?"

Startups that pivot several times get more funding. "Do you need to pivot? Do you want funding?"

Solo founders take longer to scale. "Do you know any potential good co-founders? Of the potential bad co-founders you know, which ones do you think will help you scale vs break your vision for the company?" etc etc

Oh, and yes, I'm that really annoying guy when you just want a damn answer. But life isn't that simple, and certainly isn't as universal as you or I would like.
Color had 5 photos posted at WWDC this morning
We were in line with thousands of active iPhone users this morning for WWDC and Color had 5 photos posted in the vicinity of the Moscone.

Is this what 41M in Series A is worth?

...pop.
Ohmigosh. Thanks for the link to the lamest edit wars. That was just a lot of fun. Who knew Caesar Salad could incite such controversy...
Simple Thrift in Clojure
Quoting from that page: "Don't get upset if your bold edits get deleted."

Which is my experience entirely. Sorry, but being bold is a great way to waste my time, not to actually get things fixed.
I edited the title; is that better?
The Reports of Groupon’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
I'm glad they were doing it for the lulz. Some day someone's going to be doing it, not for the lulz, and the price we'll have to pay for this kind of massive developer/it-sec incompetence will be extremely high. Hopefully this has served as a wake-up call to people who weren't already aware how low the fruit has been hanging.
How programmers went from being "computer girls" to "computer geeks"
I still remember the uproar when .NET was first announced, and how it was widely predicted it would utterly fail, and people who couldn't understand why anyone would use it.

IT evolves constantly, and you have to stay with it. Getting upset about it changing is pointless and being stuck on 1 technology will quickly see your business left behind.
"This" as the start of a reply is shorthand for "the comment I'm replying to makes a very good point that I agree with entirely" (and usually "and here's my take on what (s)he wrote"), rather than "what you are about to read is the answer you are looking for".
Class A misdemeanor and in most states it actually punishment wise an actual felony..
مسلسل ندى العمر الحلقة 45
I wonder how much of that loss is due to people adopting Mac vs PC?
Having tried and failed two social news sites, and seeing tons of people try social related startups via H&F, I think I have a little to add. I wrote my own niche social news sites (on Django), and they both failed to get initial audiences.

Cuuute.com was going to be a social news site for cute shit (cat, dog pictures, etc...). It failed because I created a text based social news site rather than a image based one, and because after working on it for 4 months, I couldn't look at a kitten picture without wanting to vomit.

Newsley.com was my second attempt. It started out as a social news site for financial news. I worked hard at getting an initial audience for about 6 months. Finance types generally didn't want to talk about financial news, they want the news that's important to them, and they want it now. So, I pivoted to turn Newsley into a financial news search engine. That was going really well. Traffic was (and still) doubles every 6 weeks even though it's crap, alpha and buggy as hell.

<aside>Hackers & Founders started exploding this winter, and we had to choose either Newsley or H&F. Having a chance to hack Silicon Valley is a bit too enticing to pass up, so we're focusing on H&F right now. You'll hear from us soon.</aside>

The large social news sites, Digg, Reddit, HN have all had large geek audiences at inception. Digg had Kevin Rose's following from TechTV. Reddit and HN got a _huge boost from the people that read pg's writing.

The only other social news site that I'm aware of that's gotten anything close to successful has been Tipd.com. That was started by Digg power user refugees, and focused on a highly monetizeable audience.

Normals don't get social news. They don't get the concept of voting, checking back on a regular basis, and contributing to the conversation. If you're approaching a non-geek niche (like I did for both my social news sites), you're facing an uphill battle. That may change in a year or two as Reddit grows, but Reddit's a juggernaught right now, and it's done a great job of sub-reddit communities.

I firmly believe that starting (like I did) with a social news technology, is the wrong approach. I took a technology and tried to jump start a community around that technology. What I should have done is to create a community and then create technology to support and scale that community.

Adam Rifkin is doing that at 106miles.net for the 106 miles meetup. I'd put a lot of money on him succeeding. Adam has been building the 106 miles community for 6 years and recently opened it up to the public the last 18 months. His team only recently started writing code to support online conversations for that community. Their approach is to build online tools that help their physical community continue interacting.

Start with the community first, and build the technology to support it.
Fun... who wants to read some legacy PHP code?!
The trend towards permissive licensing
Windows 8's squares and panes (edit: "tiles") will be programmable using HTML & JS. I think it's very likely that MS will add proprietary extensions to that JS code that will only render correctly in IE 10. I don't really know if MS still has enough clout to parlay that artificial "advantage" into browser marketshare, but they might.
That clarifies things. The thread clarifies what I said: the documentation should have given shareholders the right to participate in otherwise dilutive equity sales, whether they're accredited or not.

Anticipation of this sort of thing is why good lawyers are worth the money. But they're expensive, perhaps prohibitively for the amounts we're talking about here. So unless the majority shareholders are responsible, what shouldn't happen, does.
Check out the bottom of the page; it says, "If you see a typo, a spelling mistake, an error, or any other issue, please tell me about it by opening a case in my issue tracker or by sending me an e-mail at LKM@lkmc.ch."

Maybe you should help him -- he is asking for that kind of feedback...
Additionally, there are so few jobs out there for people of that age, they may see entry level programming jobs as iffy propositions (when generally speaking, programming as an employment market feels a bit tight if anything)
I think this should be the main point. The sites you care about (email, facebook) should have a unique password. The sites that don't matter can have a login with your common password.

This is much more reasonable than asking everybody to remember 50 unique passwords.
>By the way, since when did people start using the down voting feature on HN for posts they didn't personally agree with?

I think it was more the implied laziness of thinking Wikipedia is a great resource but not being willing to fix it.

As for your issue, if you know something's wrong from your own research, have you published it? There's a secondary source right there.

Wikipedia, by necessity, aims to be verifiable, not true. People will argue till the cows come home about truth, and do so much less civilly than when arguing about verifiability. So yes, there are plenty of errors on Wikipedia that exist because the source is wrong. The only consistent way to deal with this is to leave it in until other secondary sources emerge that allow you to fix it.

Still, you can just run the math, as that isn't OR. If you'd prefer, you can tell me the page and the error and I'll take care of it. Being an established editor can be handy sometimes.
That's pretty cool. I'm guessing simpler, more static games and apps like e.g. sudoku, wordsearch, anagrams, infocom text adventures, text browsers, alternative ebook readers etc. would all work pretty well if Angry Birds is nearly-functional. Any videos demonstrating those kind of things? It seems like scrolling is the real killer.
You don't have to by any means, but it's often much cheaper and easier to learn how to do software on someone else's time.
This is NOT correct. It is highly dependent on the subject matter and what is filtered from Wikipedia before doing the comparison. Take a hard science and take everything that is written and Wikipedia is substantially worse.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/16/wikipedia_britannica...

Furthermore, take Wikipedia and compare it with authoritative books on the subject matter in the actual articles and you will find that Wikipedia contains many very serious errors.

http://www.economist.com/node/17902943?story_id=17902943&...

(Search for Ofqual in that article.) In particular, Wikipedia is about as accurate as general books and press articles. It is not an accurate source of academic information.
Armchair astronaut discovers 'space station' on Mars using Google Earth
Scratch that, apparently I've got an ATI Radeon Mobility in this thing. Regardless, still an excellent update.
This morning I was mulling over the notion "when the product is good enough, specs don't matter; if specs matter, the product isn't good enough."

Consider Apple's "retina display": users don't care what the resolution is, because it's beyond anything they can reasonably perceive. Ditto iOS device memory size, processor speed, etc.: nobody (on the whole) cares, because it's enough to do the job. While other tablets are touting their long list of specs & compatibilities, the iPad triumphs because it "just works". Likewise most audio products, good enough that few users notice. Likewise the reason DVDs still dominate the HDTV media market: upsampled to a decent display, they look fine. You get the idea, insert your analogy here.

This is relevant to the article insofar as a list of features amounts to a list of backhanded excuses for why the user should buy this product after all: it's not so good that it "just works" and 'nuff said, marketers have to dazzle the audience with nifty verbiage which amounts to "it's good enough despite the limitations". This entails the bait-and-switch / smoke-and-mirrors of distracting customers with either great-sounding stuff they won't actually use, or presenting the sad facts in a cheerful way (akin to pharmaceutical ads depicting happy people dancing thru fields while a pleasant voice notes "may cause kidney failure", which the audience registers as a good thing).

Convincing the audience "it's adequate" means it isn't. Make something which just works. Lists of features is pleading a case which shouldn't be necessary.
The fact that all shares in a startup are not equal is VC 101. VC doesn't get common shares. They get preferred shares. It's right there in the name.

Jacking non-employee holders of common stock in a private company is easily accomplished, through:

* Deal structure (non-employees don't participate in earnouts)

* Participating preferred liquidation preferences

* Antidilution

* Retention grants

Your stock purchase agreement is a document carefully crafted to denude you of troublesome rights that will compromise the best interests of the company. That's not conspiracy-theoretic; it's just good business.

The structure of any deal that brings liquidity to shares is a negotiation that occurs entirely between the board and the acquiring company. Any vote on the terms of that deal is a formality, since every VC-funded company of them --- every one of them --- is itself structured to ensure the board has control over the company.

There is no entity with less power and fewer rights in a startup than a former employee holding shares.
On the one hand I agree with the criticisms on survivorship bias and the risks of hypothesis testing. There's also presumably a selection bias. And while Ron Berman's post on methodology [1] talks about how the goals of this stage of the project were to formulate a model that could then be verified, the results are certainly being reported as conclusions.

On the other hand, despite its limitations, it's very interesting data. So the title seems very much an overstatement. "Blindly Believing in Startup Genome Project's Data Considered Harmful" would be a better description -- although far less effective link bait :-)

[1] http://www.systemmalfunction.com/2011/05/deciphering-genome-...
I'm struggling to understand what this means from the description, anyone mind decoding for me?
ED almost certainly refers to http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Get_On_IRC_Fgt (usually semi-NSFW)
Or if you are LAMP developer, skip the blog post and email johnny@cpap.com for an interview. :-)
Bringing Fun Into the Workplace, Part 2
Show HN: InstaWWDC - Instagram WWDC Tag Filter (2hour hack)
Why is buying a movie "rofl never" ? That still sounds pretty low on the friction scale. The playback hardware is thoroughly cheap and commoditized, and there's no DRM. If you just don't like the price for buying or don't want to store the media, you can resell it after watching.
The key wouldn't have to ever leave the dongle. The computer could send it a payload to sign, and the dongle sends back the signature.
& is physically more difficult to type than U because of the hand stretch from holding the shift key. Not everybody has the same size hands :). While typing letters is easy, special chars are more awkward just because of where they are on the keyboard.
Startups do not as a rule give their common shareholders the right to participate in future rounds.

In part this is because they don't want to, but it's also because they probably can't. Companies can only offer and sell shares to reg-d accredited investors. The shares employees get are as compensation, which is explicitly exempted from SEC reporting regs.
Oddly enough, that's a point I didn't say much about. I've found that online communities like HN can be pretty good for getting interviews.

Especially the monthly "Who's hiring" posts.
When Angry Birds Attack: Android Edition
and from the results of the benchmarks listed, the best speed improvements aren't even on sandybridge (gen6).
I was on ED IRC #lulzsec when they accused me of being a spy for the military. I laughed.
Are they? Or is this just some random guy who wants to get other random guy(s) in deep trouble?

edit: Indeed, following the thread reveals http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2011/Jun/88 -> http://pastebin.com/mmvBT7n5 The root entry dated May 13.
You say you are glad they were doing it for fun and wait for someone to do it not for fun? How do you know it's not already been done? A true hacker wouldn't expose their actions and would continue with the exploit.

I think these kids have exposed the true lack of security around the world in general and it has raised some serious attention for other people to take a look at their own defence, which is good in some respects.

What they have also successfully done is lowered peoples trust in massive corporations which in turn is going to hurt the economy globally, which is not good in any respect.

I think they should have hacked it then made the companies aware, not the whole world. It's hard enough getting someone to trust and pay for services from a company when they think they are safe, they really won't when there is no trust there at all.
A Sophos survey found that 48% of users use "a few different passwords."

http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200911/3184/Interne...

I have interviewed a few people about their password strategies and quite a few seem to have a tiered password approach. But that is still an easy setup to exploit, as I explain here:

http://www.filterjoe.com/2010/05/14/the-usual-way-to-manage-...

Furthermore, I've noticed in my interviews that few people realize that the account they need to guard most is their e-mail account. They may have a 3 password strategy but, it goes something like:

worst password: forums, news sites, Sony, etc.
better password: email, social
best password: banks, brokerage, commerce

Once someone gets into your main email account, it's usually pretty easy to break into all the other accounts unless you have a unique password for every account.
LulzSec posts source code from Sony's Subversion repositories
Memphis St Jude Golf-Tim Tebow In Pro- Am - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
Wow, I would def not consider myself a security expert but I seriosly have higher standards than this when it comes to security. Most obvious fails on this dude: 1) Windows, 2) Gmail (if i would be a hacker i would not use this for obvious reasons), 3) specifying any personal credentials in my "hacker" acount, 4) same username (...i would not use same user-id). I mean, c'mon...I had higher expectations on this guys really (considering I'm not into those kind of networks - call be hacker noob). Let's hope the other guys was more paranoid than this.

Btw, what will be the jail-sentence in US for this you think? Let's hope he's a minor - looks like a teenager.
And if cow manure actually was the only suitable material for organic fertilizer, you might have a point. It's called COMPOST, and it can be made from almost any organic waste.
Describing Human Intelligence with Math
RubyGems, Open Source, and Community
Maybe this will help, too:

http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile/
I disagree entirely. Trying to make a cache anything other than a cache is a fatal error. The purpose of a cache is to return exactly what would have been returned if the cache wasn't there, only faster, and even minor deviations from that principle rapidly become problematic. The gulf between disposable data that can be optionally used for speeding things up, and canonical copies of data (even locally canonical ones) is not a difference that should be glossed over into one single subsystem, but a difference that should be highlighted and called out and generally fussed over.

For that matter, the W3C should stop calling this a "cache". The offline applications, as specified, are not functioning like cached values. They are functioning like installed applications. If you can't dispose of a "cache" without a thought beyond "Gosh, my app's performance is going to suffer until this cache is repopulated", you are asking for pain, or, alternately, you don't actually have a cache.

To the extent that you may be able to re-use HTTP mechanisms for detecting changes, that's great, but it should be done carefully and consciously to avoid dependencies between the cache and application storage.

Also, I don't see how this secondary proposal deals with the fact that an application install may involve installing files that the browser has not accessed yet, which seems a fatal error to me.
Netflix's limited selection is of course a function of the rights holders' limited conception of digital distribution. Netflix would stream every movie they could, I'm sure, but the copyright holder is not OK with that.
Also gray-to-black hat spam with links. Just like the content farms that plague Google's results, they'll push in any low-quality content in hopes of trolling some clicks to their ad- or malware-laden sites.
Class of 2011: New era of programmers: blog about .Net Development, SQL Server
How does the browser know the set of pages to be cached for a particular offline app, though? Do you have to provide a static sitemap at a known URL? But to support multiple apps deliverable from a single subdomain, you would need to specify the sitemap's URL in some webpage, perhaps as an attribute to some HTML element. So each sitemap would be a sort of Manifest which controls the Cache for an app.

By the way, the app's cache obviously ought to be isolated from other apps' caches, right? Especially if you let the user grant an enlarged cache as a per-app permission. And the user might want to clear the miscellany browser cache without clearing the app cache, so we had better give this Application Cache a distinct name.
Gary Bernhardt Interview - Teach Me To Code Podcast
Um, it's not a bug - how would you purposely execute a subquery against every row in a table?

It's doing exactly what you told it to do.

The bug is a human bug of not understanding what you are asking even though it seems logical.
It seems killing Volta brings back the electricity at Microsoft.
http://hotarucms.org
How did your start up survive during its infancy?
I am curious to know how typical founders survived while in the initial development period of their site/startup?

Currently, my partner and I are looking at developing our idea and we are still trying to determine how to dedicate the time needed to build a beta version while also trying to earn enough money to live. We would like to put forth full effort towards the idea right now, but in order to do that we will need to quit our jobs which poses a serious issue given we still have debt and other bills to pay.

How did you pay for your basic living (food, shelter, etc.) and startup expenses (server space, cell phone, internet, electricity, etc.)?

Did you work two/three jobs? Did you do freelandce work? Did you spend all of your life savings? Did you get funded before writing 1-line of code? Were you on the unemployment teet? Did you do a kickstarter?

I understand we need to bootstrap, but you still need money to live.
From my (little) experience and reading I've done so far, if I had to sum up what 'agile' is, I'd say: 'feedback'.

I'm not surprised that 'waterfall' methodologies fail - they seem to have little to no feedback built in. And for what I remember from Control Theory course, feedback is essential to control a system we don't have full knowledge about. I do believe that it's a more general principle than just about differential equations and integration.
Ask HN: How did you discover HN?
I think it would be interesting to see how HN users discovered HN.

I remember to this day performing a google search more than 2 years ago and one of the results was an article on HN.

The quality of the posts I found here just struck me so I sticked with HN every since.

How about you? How did you discovered it? What's your story?
Recommended by a friend
Result to a search engine query
My blog/website's content got on HN
It's effective, but less-so when the audience hasn't programmed anything Big before. If you've only done programming in school, and all of your C++ assignments take anywhere from 1 to 12 hours to complete, it's hard to see the dev time benefits.
I really feel the battle is being fought on the wrong field. While it's great and nice to have more release dates and new features as an assortment of letters and numbers that the majority of the population has never heard of, past the initial adoption, browsers are very much a marketing problem.

If you ask the average surfer how excited he/she is about WebM, WebRTC, WebGL, XAML, WPF, etc in a new browser you'll probably get blank stare, a dropped jaw, and at best, a response of "how fast is it?" Chrome has begun to set a precedence for being fast and uncluttered, which is why the majority of people have probably switched. I ran/run a fairly large project serving primarily the 17-22 demographic, and in the course of a year from January 2009 to 2010, Chrome useage on my forums had increased from just under 5% to a stunning 29%.

Realistically, the IE brand is already damaged. If MSFT really wants to compete with Firefox and Chrome, their best bet is to create another browser for the new-adopters market.