skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Smokers in the workplace Down with you all
I'm sorry smokers! I am tired of all the cigarette smokers in my office, these people easily get an extra hour of breaks, and for what, being addicted and not being able to focus on their jobs. A 10 minutes cigarette break is easily a waste of an hour.<p>1. The half an hour leading up to the break is lost productivity, nicfitting and clock watching.
2. The 10 minute break usually turns into half an hour by the time the entire smoking crew is out there, one cig turns into two
3. Then there's the time needed to get back into the task you were working on.<p>I don't smoke, and feel i should receive additional compensation for NOT being addicted to a substance the repeatedly takes me away from my duties.<p>Don't get me started on the cost implications for a group healthcare plan, I hate having to share the costs for these smokers health problems.<p>Hackers... Weigh in please, i can't be alone on this.
I doubt it. Based on the number of sessions at Google IO this year for GWT (many) and the number of sessions for Closure (one?), I would say they were outwardly pushing GWT much more than Closure.

I wish they would come out with more JavaScript tools. I have used GWT for a couple side projects, and while the tools and library are amazing, writing an app the "GWT Way" (using all the design patterns) is cumbersome and difficult, especially for a one-man-show.

Closure is better in this regard (mostly by virtue of being a JavaScript library instead of a Java library, IMO), but it's still overkill for quick side projects where something like underscore.js would suffice.

Why would they use Closure instead of GWT? Closure is just JavaScript. No waiting for the GWT team to build the features you need, no having to build those features yourself. And in my experience, when I need cutting edge with GWT, I end up writing a bunch of wrappers for JavaScript functions, which makes me wonder why I'm not writing everything in JavaScript. (Like I said, the GWT library is very compelling and when planning a large project, Java often feels more comfortable for some.)

So no, I doubt they are killing GWT, but it would sure be nice to see them develop some comparable JavaScript tooling (as one of their main points for choosing Java as the language of GWT is because of the quality of the existing Java tools).
Good for you. It's still not a big deal and you can't "outrage" that away.

It's not a small gain, for the record. And the only users you are inconveniencing are ones that are malfunctioning. If everything is working correctly and the AP hasn't been reset, this causes no inconvenience to anyone and results in a clear direct benefit for the user.

You figure a community of developers would possibly give a shit about what matters to the UX, I guess not. You do know that the "U" stands for user, right?
As a fellow Canadian dev, I'd urge you to assume the worst case scenario for litigation. Or at the very least, consult with a lawyer. Patents can be defended across borders. At the very least, your life can be turned into hell.
We have to pay for every single bit our customers transmit.

What about all the bits your customers receive? You sound like you're at least somewhat familiar with peering agreements, so I'd like to know how that part works. If your customers are mostly receiving instead of sending, wouldn't those bits be paid for by the ones sending the bits?

For that matter, why can I get 200GB/mo at 50mbit/s plus a server for $20 from a VPS provider, and $.15/GB beyond that ($.10 if purchased in advance in the case of Linode)? Why do consumer ISPs need to charge so much more?

Based on your arguments in this and other posts, they have caps because they have to pay for the outgoing bandwidth. Why not just charge $.15/GB over the cap? Last mile infrastructure doesn't account for the difference, since it has a mostly fixed cost of construction and operation. Interfering with other oversubscribed customers can't explain it either, since everyone gets a fair and equal share of the pipe when the pipe is overloaded.
The innovation policy problem is not just an innovation problem
Won those games against whom? Other copies of itself? The weakest built-in AI? The strongest built-in AI? A pseudo-random number generator?
This long post got comments from both Nivi and Naval (the founders of AngelList). Is there anyone here with a success story from AngelList that would like to comment on it?
There's a lot of cool science being done in Valley startups...you just have to dig a little deeper to get through all of the mobile-y social-y noise.
... and here it is:

"nginx does not suck at ssl"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2759596
This whole notion that unlimited internet for $60/month is some kind of "right" is just preposterous.

That call is not yours to make. It was Comcast's to make, before they advertised exactly that. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission frowns on false advertising.
This is also a problem for users, who sink time into supporting/using a service only to have it yanked out from underneath them.

Right now I'm averaging 5x daily deal emails per day. I can't stop subscribing fast enough.

The valley is very insular, and IMO it doesn't get out often enough. To make matters worse, any time I argue this with my friends in SF, they get very defensive. The valley is becoming the popular kid in school, for all of the wrong reasons.
Wow - that was fast. Kudos all around to these upstanding cybernauts!
Not quite ironic, but interesting: IIRC from Founders at Work, mobile payments was PayPal's first focus - it was only when that didn't really pan out that they said "hey, maybe web payments can be a thing too!" Fun to see it come around full circle...
Telling a Useful Model from a Useless One
I'm not an expert in this area so take this question as genuine and not an attempt at playing devil's advocate :-)

Couldn't a company take significant investment, remain private, and maintain its founders indefinitely? For example, the founders may not ever wish to leave but are OK to dilate the shares through investments. Investors can then make a return through either dividends over time or by selling their shares to other investors who place a higher value on the company. This assumes investors aren't just in it for a quick buck, of course, but are buying into what they think will be a profit making machine within a reasonable timescale.
http://www.isitchristmas.com/ predates that one by a year.
Interesting. I'm on their 50/20 (mbps down/up) plan and regularly go WAY over the 250GB 'limit' in San Francisco's Mission district and have had no repercussions for doing so. I wonder what the specific conditions are for when/where they choose to enforce this limit, or if it is entirely arbitrary. I've hit a TB down in a single month, and have never heard a word from Comcast about it.

Do they turn a blind eye because I'm on a more expensive plan, or is it because of lack of network congestion in the Mission, or maybe due to the availability of alternative internet service providers?
I use a similar directive in my apache2 configuration. Would I see an performance improvement in removing the DH option from the cipher suite? Or is this only directly related to ngix and how it implements its ssl protocol?

Secondly, by removing the DH method do I restrict any browsers from connecting my site? Ie, are their any browsers, or security settings on browsers that prevent the site from being trusted if DH isn't available?
I'm not personally amazingly sympathetic. He uses his service for business purposes at home (as a consultant) - as he is perfectly entitled to do so.

If he had paid for a business class account, he'd be fine. I pay Comcast right on $100 a month for 22/8mbps, with 5 static IPs, no throttling, and no caps - I work from home and according to my firewall had approximately 800GB of traffic last month (and that usage is not out of the ordinary).
Globe Tweeter
I also think that the criticism that startups are not "big-thinking" enough is more appearance-based. She may be more impressed if startup pitches read like research papers and less like, well, startups.

However, there are a number of problems with conflating research problems with startup opportunities, one of the first being that the startup field is now a lot smaller than it was.

She talks about Stanford and Harvard students as though they're the best of the best and while it's true that recent graduates may have great potential, what you really want for research-level efforts is domain experts. It usually takes years to become a domain export -- far longer than the typical beginning-phase startup.

There are also a number of major problems with funding straight research efforts just from an expected-value point of view. Even Google was mostly working with known quantities (i.e., the exploratory research had already been done) when it started. If the result of a year-long startup effort is "turns out this is impossible" that's pretty bad.

Basically, there's a sweet spot for startups in a fiscal and informational sense and I think it will always tend to sound a little less impressive given that context.
Getting kids to learn via videogames.
Not necessarily. There may just be a mismatch between the worth of the shares between different parties.

If I bought a house with a friend 10 years ago for $100k, we did some work on it, and it's now worth $200k, my friend may no longer wish to live with me or may want to move on to a different area and sell his share for twice what he paid for it. You could be in a similar situation with a business, perhaps.
She seems pretty clear in her own mind to me. I'm not saying she's right, but it seems to me this is the essence of her argument:

"Groupon clone after Groupon clone, yawn… yet another social media dashboard, a cloud-based enterprise solution or, worse still, another photo sharing app; I’ve heard pitch after pitch of the same technology and keep wondering why all these highly intelligent, well educated youngsters, many of whom have been educated in the best universities in the world (Stanford, Yale and Harvard) are not putting their brains to good use by solving real-world problems. Instead they’re building technology to solve trivial issues – like apps that show where to spot your nearest tofu cupcake and share it with your friends.

I’ve come to the conclusion that entrepreneurship in the Valley has become productized, as organizations like Y Combinator attempt to marginalize, commoditize or manufacture a process that is inherently risky."
Actually you should expect to find them disproportionately often at YC, because our structure (investing a small amount in a lot of startups) makes it in our interest to take the biggest risks.
The Latest in HTML5
Here's an ex-Google engineer who thinks Google's software infrastructure is obsolete, compared to opensource offerings:
http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye
I don't smoke, and this is basically flamebait, but seriously, get over it. Or allow smokeless tobacco in the workplace.
There is a fairly deep difference between a software startup and a 'hardware' startup. The fundamental difference - IMO - is the 'get off the ground' capital.

Non-labor initial outlay for some hackers to build a software system is well under 100K.

To put together a chemistry lab takes well over 100K (or so I have been informed). Imagine having to spend 100K just to have a spot where people can work.

Those costs of course start to spiral heavily upwards as you get more and more high-tech in your hardware. Then, if you're setting up startups for the hardware world, what's the ExpectedValue of your ROI. Batting average ain't going to be great. So the incentives are skew compared to the software world.

That said, I'd love to be involved in the software side of nuclear energy. Among other things, you can't rely on your memory as a given, since it is more prone to corruption.
It's too bad they don't also give away the dead-tree version. Some things are nice to actually have on your shelf...
مشاهدة مباراة البرازيل والاكوادور بث مباشر
مدونة يلا جول الرياضية تقوم ببث واذاعة مباراة البرازيل والاكوادور بث مباشر فى مباراة الجولة الاخيرة من المجموعة الثالثة من بطولة كوبا امريكا الارجنتين 2011 اليوم الاربعاء 13/7/2011 ( الخميس 14/7/2011 ) وموعدها الساعة 02:45 بتوقيت القاهرة لو بدك او عايز تتفرج على الماتش ادخل و وشاهد المباراة على النت بدون تقطيع اون لاين
It usually takes years to become a domain expert

Very true. Suppose you know coding when you're 25. Then you have even more years to study a domain and be able to apply your computational skills to the cutting edge and have that deep domain knowledge to pull off an amazing solution.
Most wireless routers offer some version of this feature, its not too difficult to use.

Really? I've never seen one that has it, and I highly doubt the feature was introduced before these data caps became a problem. Even if most wireless routers have the feature, I doubt most people find it "not too difficult to use." My parents, for example, can't even be bothered to learn to use the scheduling feature of their own recently-purchased router (which does not have a traffic meter).
I think people have a distorted view of how important typical work was in previous generations.
I confess the exit-focus has always been disenchanting. I'm not a founder myself, but it always seemed to me a founder who starts a company with his eye on the door is a bit disingenuous compared to a founder who starts a company for... well, the company's own sake. Ref. Ford, Standard Oil, every hugely successful company from a handful of decades ago.
I'll let them know about that. Thanks for the feedback.
This is not true. While this may be true in the future, Apple is not currently involved in the legal defense of companies involved in the Lodsys lawsuits and there is no timetable for which they will enter such an involvement.
This is not true. While this may be true in the future, Apple is not currently involved in the legal defense of companies involved in the Lodsys lawsuits and there is no timetable for which they will enter into such an involvement.
What's ironic is that the very tools she's using to complain are a product of the Silicon Valley. The blog itself runs on WordPress and pushes all its posts on Twitter. If it wasn't for the Silicon Valley model we may not be hearing her.
Crime doesn't pay? It does if you're a phone crammer
I just happened to have been in my linode control panel a lot the past few days and noticed the new tab. I don't think I could have clicked the link any faster. I had to do a double take when I saw 19.95. I almost thought they meant per day.
Ugh, what a rancid, judgmental article. His arguments about changing the world are stale. The problems of a Silicon Valley person are quite different from the problems of someone in an emerging market, such as rent of like $3000/month, and so it makes no sense for someone in Silicon Valley to address an emerging market that has no chance of covering costs of living back home. The people in the emerging markets are quite capable of helping themselves, and don't need privileged, naive Americans to step in and show them how backwards they are (ironically, most other societies are more socially advanced, even if they are technologically backwards, and could teach the Americans how to actually achieve quality of life without technology). [And if you are going to step in, please read Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful", and pay attention to his arguments for intermediate technology (i.e., you don't dump differential equations on someone still learning algebra).]

If showing someone how to best locate the nearest cupcake shop makes customers happy, then that is a virtuous reason for a startup to exist. It is silly and judgmental to say that people are wasting their talents because they focus on the materialistic first-world problems rather than desperate emerging-world problems. It is about making customers happy, employees (and founders) happy, and investors happy. The question should be: are the founders actually happy doing the work they have chosen? If not, then it is a mistake.

Perhaps what the author is really trying to say is that people are focused on getting rich quick off trivial business plans, which will be easily commodotized, or will have hardly any market, causing failure and loss of the investor's money. There is some merit to this sentiment given some of the examples he gave.
What I'd like to see is a collective legal fund to protect devs from patent trolls. Like insurance, everyone pays into the system and if you need representation, high quality lawyers would be there for you. That seems to me to be the best solution to this problem short of abolishing software patents altogether.
Avoiding and fighting ostensibly-offensive but rarely-enforced laws and policies is essential to preserving consumer freedoms and civil liberties. I, for one, do not want to live in a society with laws that can be applied to anyone but are rarely enforced (as is common now), as in such a society the law will be applied to whomever the enforcer doesn't like.
http://isthisyourpaperonsingleservingsites.com/ provides a surprising amount of information on these kinds of sites.

"One of the earliest examples was islostarepeat.com [created in 2006]. This site indicated whether the episode of Lost playing during the current week was a new broadcast."
Right - there's probably nothing to stop a 'tragedy of the commons' occurring, and money is fungible so they can just do something else with it when the cash cow dies.
Super dumb question coming up. What is this?:

<script type="text/html" id="subtitles-tmpl">
<%each sub in subtitles %>
<% if ( sub.text ) { %>
<li data-time="<%= sub.start_time %>">
<span class="time"><%= Math.floor(Math.round(sub.start_time) / 60) %>:<%= pad( Math.round(sub.start_time) % 60 ) %></span>

I haven't seen this type of script templating before? Is this just standard? Part of jQuery? Part of something else.
You have something to learn from your smoking co-workers. Taking breaks often will make you a happier person and give you time to think on the problems you are trying to solve and is time well spent.

I suggest a brisk walk around the block in stead of lighting up but to each their own. I sometimes go buy one of those overpriced coffees just to get the hell out of the office and give me time away from my computer to think a problem over.

related: http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586

PS. <p> does not work here. Use two carriage returns instead.
This surprises me. When I had Comcast Business Cable installed at my home, the telephone rep got the install address, paused a moment, asked, "Is that a residential house?". I said yes, and all was fine. No raised eyebrows from the installer either.

In fact, my boss/company owner, who lives outside Scottsdale, who can't get more than 144kbps IDSL got so sick of things that he ordered a first, then a second bonded T1 to his house, without any hiccups.
Eee
ttt
There are already applications which do this, or things like it. There's a social network based on Dropbox called Frenzy[1], which seems to do most of the things that your proposed DropChannels would do, and plenty of applications that automatically upload stuff into Dropbox, or use it to keep in sync across computers.

[1] http://frenzyapp.com/
2 days long youtube video
Kevin, be assured, it didn't come across like a blowhard windbag. Thanks again for the correction.
A lie by omission. They forgot to warn (following their warnings upside down):

1. Website can be malicious, too. Phishing, clickjacking, XSRFs, browser exploits - there's a lot of nonpleasant stuff on the web.

2. Websites can't manage memory and other resources at all. Sure, you, for example, can try to measure performance and disable UI effects, but that's another story.

3. In a same way, users must have enough of free space where browser's application cache is kept, too. Or you'll strain network re-downloading same data over and over again. This is especially annoying for roaming and other areas with high $/MiB cost or countryside with slow GPRS connectivity.

4. Website can fail, too. And if this is not some user-local network problems, this is more disasterous than a crash of a single copy of app on someone's device - your "webapp" works for noone at that time.

5. And, obviously, in a same way as removing the app, users could delete the bookmark for your service.
Definitely, especially ##c has some really helpful people.
Even Microsoft started small. What PG likes to say is: YC is looking for startups building the next BASIC interpreter for the Altair (which was almost as obscure then as it is now.) Something minimally useful in or adjacent to a market that's going to explode, and started by determined/smart founders.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934374
Has Windows 7 Already Outsold Vista?
For working with embedded devices, I find putty to be slightly more convenient than setterm+stty+cat /dev/ttyUSB0 or cu -l /dev/ttyACM0. Its significantly more convenient for the purpose than minicom.
What SV needs to do is help the GDP go boom so they can chip in enough tax money to cover NASA's expenses for their groundbreaking discoveries. +1 if you agree!
If you credit yourself with being able to identify "game changers" among early stage startups, then you're crediting yourself with more wisdom than the VC community. Even VCs acknowledge that they are wrong a large percentage of the time.
Making realistic shadow of a cardboard packaging box
Java? so uncool! I wonder why Google doesn't use one of those sexy functional languages. They could at least use Scala.
It's an openssl configuration option, so it does affect performance for Apache with mod_ssl. It's not specific to nginx.

If you do not allow DH ciphers, you'll probably just lose users who deliberately configure their software to use only strong ciphers.

What you can do is put DH ciphers at the end of the list. That way, weaker ciphers are preferred but you're still supporting strong ciphers.
Thanks.

Also: I take it that you have to be in the top 10 to get something? Or is it that the top 3 get something, and 10 others are randomly selected to win a book? The award system is not explained too clearly...
Roar Engine shows how to build a game in four minutes
Surprised this got no traction. It is one of the best "getting started" talks I've seen for a while. Real ideas based on real world experience from a company that is demonstrably successful at innovation. Seriously, well worth viewing.
Show HN: Forbash, Complain Connect Co-create
I suggest using Cygwin's xterm instead of cmd.exe for accessing Cygwin. You can modify the Cygwin startup script (or create another one) to start X and an xterm automatically. It scrolls a lot faster than cmd.exe and seems less Rube Goldbergian than using PuTTY to connect to localhost.
Stupid YC companies with all their stupid IPOs.

At a BBQ last week with a group of Y Combinator graduates, the conversation went predictably back and fourth, sounding something like this: What batch were you in? How many times did you pivot? How much did you raise? From who? How many users have you got now? What’s your growth rate? Who’s going to acquire you? It’s never about the technology or impact it’s having, it’s about the game of entrepreneurship; getting users, funding and exiting as quickly as you can.

Normal people call this "talking shop". Get a bunch of doctors together sometime and see if they're talking about changing the world.
Original source: http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/021711disruption
I couldn't agree more. People sometimes seem to clone stuff because they think they're 'sticking it to the man', when in fact they can only do this because they work for a corporation during the day. And the 'man' they are sticking it to is actually an indie dev trying to get out of wage slavery.

I think open source is clearly critical to the modern software ecology, but I wish people would think
carefully about why they are doing it in each case, rather than assuming their actions are automatically benign because of a sprinkling of 'open' dust.