skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jesus, that's just what I need as a long-suffering Wordpress admin, bloody spam from bloody plugins.

The main trick for getting high ratings is to have a) a good plugin, which b) solves a common problem and c) has been around for a while.

Boo bloody hoo if all those niches are occupied. If you pester me for stars I will round up my thousands of readers and get them to downvote the daylights out of you.

I hate Wordpress enough already, why add to my misery?
You hit what I think is a critical point but with some anti-Microsoft bias.

My view is that Microsoft itself simplified the PC experience quite well for a set of users during the 80s and early 90s. With DOS and Windows 3.11.

During this time, a lot of people who were not "computer experts" at that time were able get things done with the computer. Even if it was "painful" to do something (all those commands in the command prompt), people would do it beacuse they will achieve some result.

Then the Monopoly became evident, and around the time of Windows 95 Microsoft realized they did not need to make things simple to users, but instead users had to learn how to use their tools. This is what you get right; Microsoft did not need to do anything between Windows 95 and Windows XP to get money. People needed to use Microsoft products because other people used them and if you dared to use Qpro, Apple products or anything else, then your workflow was not compatible with the general workflow of everybody else.

This is were Apple (I guess, Steve Jobs) got it right. They looked all the "paper cuts" [c.f. Canonical] that people thought were "normal" (remember the "normal" BSOD?) and focused on doing products where people did not have to go through all those issues. More importantly, they learnt how to do that. How to detect those "paper cuts" and how to fix them.

In the 20 years that Microsoft monopoly served them, they lost the ability to do that. They lost the ability to know how to make things easier for the users; I suppose all that got mixed within the convoluted bureaucracy within the company. You actually can see some of that in the way Bill's mail is treated: The concerned people do not "get it", what is wrong with Bill's scenario; they just open a "ticket" to fix the Media player problem... and surely a download of Media Player appeared on Microsoft's front webpage next Monday. But they did not attack the underlying problem.

I agree with you that with Windows 7 Microsoft is doing better. But as you, I also think that they still have not "got" the talent they lost a long time ago of being able to make things easier.

I always thought that it would have been better (from the point of view of technology progress) if Microsoft had split in the 3 sub-companies when they were sued back in the day. That might have helped to streamline the bureaucratic processes within the company.
I quite my job 1 1/2 years ago, I was tired of being a mindless drone. I was frustrated, angry and stressed with everyone.

After I left my job I took it easy for a while. A little to easy. I ran out of money almost 8 months later and I was at a point I was not able to pay my next rent. I had to borrow money from my girlfriend who had to leave the country 2 days later because her visa had run out. I was frustrated, angry and stressed with myself.

By chance, pure luck, I found a contract job working in a similar environment I had quite not so long before. I don't think I have ever been so grateful. The guys who hired me had no clue about my situation of course.

I've moved on since then and looking back now (after I've sort of financially recovered), quitting my job was the best thing I've ever done. Not only that. I also know I will never work for anyone else again ever again in my life (as an employee that is).

Disclaimer; Hey kids, I'm 38 years old. Don't quit your job just because some guy on Hackers News did and told you it was the best thing he ever did. If you're just starting out, keep your job, shut your mouth, try to learn as much as you can and be nice to everyone you work with.
My personal experience contradicts this - and as context to that statement I've raised about 10 rounds from EU, US and Asian investors.

Some of his points (e.g. about not being shopworn) have some validity, but that can be avoided/mitigated with the right positioning and the upsides outweigh it.

My advice would be:

* Make it really clear you're not raising money yet. Don't pitch, don't take any slides/laptop, just have coffee with them. Talk about your business in a straight-forward/relaxed manner. This often bypasses the VC's pitch-defences (they've had 10 businesses already that week talk about how spectacular they are, and how they are world-leaders in a billion dollar market).

* Position it that at some point in the future once you've hit your next milestones. Define those milestones as things you feel extremely confident (and not just as an optimistic entrepreneur) that you will hit.

* At the end of the meeting, if you think you like them, ask them - 'so would you be interested in hearing from us when we're ready with our round?' as a soft conditional-close. VC's never like to say no (they just show interest, then stall), so they'll give you a yes as it costs them little. Also be prepared to ask their advice and for intros and use the fact VC's talk to your advantage. Ask them if this deal is in their space, and if not, are there any VC's they'd recommend you spoke to. Second only to making money VC's like to look smart and networked. So if you're credible, they can often introduce you to other VCs, or even useful industry contacts.

* When you are then ready to raise, you have a warm prospect you can call on, and you gain credibility by hitting the milestones you talked about. It should be easy to position the partner you first spoke to into an internal champion, by letting him position it as a company he'd been tracking for a while, and that they are one of the first people you'd pitched to as a result.
Showing jQuery Growl Notifications for New Web Visitors
Because you aren't asking the same person the same question over and over again, and in fact only have a single data point for each person, there is no way to "infer the result, the true signal": the "plausible deniability" this yields isn't just a psychological trick, but is actually mathematically sound; in the end you can determine things about the population as a whole, but you cannot determine who was forced to say "yes" and who volunteered a "yes".
In a lot of use cases for this I also need to be able to verify you did apply f too, which may be hard. There is clearly a huge lack of trust here. Thinking of financial service applications like trading.

I think the use case where I want to compute f(x) in an untrusted (eg cloud) environment is probably the real potential use case.

The (slightly odd) book Translucent Databases gives some more use cases, such as working with anonymised statistics.
I don't see how this will work in 3 years time. Cheap robots today (<100K) suck at manual dexterity tasks. It took quite a lot of work to get a PR2 to fold laundry (and some of the best robotics people in the world worked on this). The kinds of tasks I imagined Foxconn workers performed all require significant manual dexterity.

For an amazing use of robots in a factory environment, I would suggest a tour of BMW's Munich factory. They have a whole bunch of specialized robotic arms that do things like welding, lifting, painting, etc. Their factory still employs humans (albeit fewer humans). In BMW's case, their use of robotics makes sense. Foxconn, not so much.

Finally, there are some completely automated car factories. I thought Hyundai's US factory manufactured cars solely with robots. However, I believe they have a higher defect rate (partially due to this process).

Edit: Link to the PR2 laundry folding robot - http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/04/02/towels-uc-berkel...
This is brilliant and I could have used it many times!
How to survive Black Hat and Defcon without getting hacked -- maybe
If USA wants to become a strong "manufacturing" country again, it needs to become a leader in the robot workforce revolution, too.

You are more right than you know. This sentence is ten years or more out of date.

I don't blame you for writing this sentence, because journalism is nigh-100%-broken and absolutely nobody understands the following facts. But:

The USA is and has been a "strong manufacturing country". US industrial capacity has risen steadily since 1970. Until this last recession started, there was no year since 1970 where that capacity had gone down:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ipg1.gif

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/

(The Great Recession is, obviously, a problem, one large enough to show up on this chart. But it's a problem for China and other countries as well.)

The problem is that US manufacturing employment has crashed. Here's a chart showing a 30% drop in the last decade alone:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001?data_tool=XGtab...

Why is this happening? Increased productivity. Why has productivity soared in this way? "The robot workforce revolution".

And why do people persist in maintaining that US manufacturing is "not strong" in the face of very obvious evidence that it is strong? Because there is mass suffering due to mass unemployment, and it is easier to blame "robots" than to blame the humans that mismanage the economy and allow needless suffering to persist.
Blind Mathematicians
This is my current diagnosis, for those who might have been following my story from over a year ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1399450). I've been wanting to publish an update to this story on HN, but I'd been hoping for better news first.

My last doctor (a very good, well-known Rheumatologist in my area) spent a long time working with me. After months of trying everything he knew, he put it to me like this:

* You have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Name sucks, but that's what it's called right now.

* What you have is real, it's not "in your head".

* A typical outcome is that you will start to feel better when you turn 50 or 60. In other words, my best outcome is to hang on for another ten to twenty years and hope that I feel better then.

I've been dealing with this since college, but this is the year that I finally had to admit I was failing, and had to quit my job.
AFAIK HN is not the place for such links. I would understand a celebrity (which in this case is not much of a celeb anyway) would do something towards "enhancing" human existence, could make its way to HN.

But please stop posting your bollywood celebrity blog's link to get traffic.

I do not have permissions to downmod this otherwise I would.
Good advise though! I think if you're know your running in circles, it's time to think about a new job. Don't leave and do nothing. Search for a job you like, sign the papers and quit your old one.
And why do people persist in maintaining that US manufacturing is "not strong" in the face of very obvious evidence that it is strong?

Because a lot of today's stuff, e.g. iPhones, LCD monitors are made in China.
I would like to know this as well. Do you mean H1B visa?
This is the real challenge. In 1995-2002 the us lost something around 2 million jobs to Chinese manufacturing.'the chinese lost 15 million jobs to the robots.
A copy in RAM can last as long as the computer is turned on. What if that memory page is temporarily stored on disk? What if your computer hibernates?
I'd be willing, if you were well qualified.
My condemn, Why I Hate Google
It's not an "ask".

It's just info.

I didn't have any blogpost covering this story to link to.
This is meant to make the output of the Markdown > HTML conversion look good. Even though there are other CSS projects that try to make default browser stylesheets look nice (many of which have been featured on HN), I particularly like this one since there are certain Markdown elements that the aforementeioned projects might not tackle (for example, indented code, `inline code`, etc).
Group buy anyone?
Epic fails happen.

One thing makes me wonder. Who keeps all backups of such precious thing as bitcoin wallet of bitcoin exchange on virtual machine, the same virtual machine that is used for all operations?
Very basic example, but an awesome concept.

I keep meaning to get started with R. Can anyone point me towards a decent primer for a mathematically-literate-to-undergrad level audience? (Not that I did a Maths degree, y'see ... :-))
I don't think you understood that essay. That essay is about when things that are not stories make it into many news outlets - things such as suits. There is no story, people are not talking about them, so PR firms conjure up an angle and sell that angle to the media.

This is a story. People are talking about it.
i'm very interested in learning more about deployment, does anyone know where to look ?
say for a small webapp that has 1000 daily users
Given that you read an awful lot into what I just wrote I think my point still stands.

You have no way of knowing what is going on. Feel free to speculate just don't wrap it into a vail of certainty when it's clearly not.

She don't have to lie for your interpretation of the whole matter to be wrong.

If you have ever dealt with angry customers or mis treated customers you would know what I mean. Things a rarely as crystal clear as they seem.
How come there aren't any lottery start-ups?
They usually have to publish a payout rate, it is a common requirement for most forms of pure chance gambling. If people dont win you need some form of rollup. However if you keep it purely on the single big win it does not lead to schemes like this.
Apparently, this particular lottery was created to pay out a bigger percentage of revenue than other lotteries. That is not entirely a bad idea: if people are going to gamble, it's better that they don't lose too much money.

This particular scheme pays out most of the money to a select few, though, which defeats the point.
"Among 4,800 small and medium sized enterprises" that didn't go bankrupt!

There may be survivor bias (Is that what it's called?) involved in that figure. Not enough details in the report that I could see.

Impressive reference hunting though
never too much hassle if there is a mutual click
So, what can you do?
I totally get all these points; is there any literature I can point our devs towards to convince them (a) #2 + #3 don't leave any corner cases and (b) they really should take the time to do it (ultimately so I can put an automation solution around the the DB)?
I believe any object passed in Java can be modifed by the receiving method, right? So that is pass-by-reference. If we want to say we're really passing a reference by value, that begins to be silly - if the object passed can be modified, its a reference.
CAR SHIPPING COMPANIES
Also check out the author's blog, which has articles about the creation of this compiler and some of the challenges involved.

http://www.luminance.org/
Developers? >:-)
For "why not", I suppose it depends on whether the factory has any downsides. Traditionally they have some pros and some cons: they bring jobs and tax revenue and a thriving "stuff is happening" feeling to the local economy, but they can also bring things like odors, air and water pollution, noise, increased truck traffic, and possibly requirements for new infrastructure (e.g. wider roads). That's why new factories can run into opposition in a way that new Google offices don't.

I agree they bring some needs for service as well, but even that might be non-local. In the story I can't seem to find, that was (correctly or not) a complaint of the local government, that of the people the factory did employ, many weren't even locally based, but Parisians who worked remotely for a third-party servicing firm, and drove out to the factory only when needed.
I doubt that every single customer has to be on their own VM. It's more likely that many people share the same VM, and only larger customers need their own VM.

Let's run some numbers though, using your assumptions:

500 VMs @ $179 per customer (business class licence) means a little over $1,000,000. At that point, you'd be right---it wouldn't scale.

However, this is a business and not an HR exercise. So you could easily hire less people, and have less reliability. For a business like Shopify, I imagine their best customers are those who pay the $99 plan, accept a transaction cost, and other limitations. These customers can be piled onto the same VM together, and probably don't have such a huge throughput that a few minutes of downtime means money lost.
I'm sorry, I figured you could just link to Google translate, but apparently it doesn't accept https URLs. Sorry. (I'll delete this message soon, to clear up the comments page.)
Bistec is commonly used in Spain, too. And Bife is used in European Portuguese - not sure about Brazil.
Another example of Bitcoins being run by a bunch of amateur clowns. Drag this poor excuse for a financial instrument behind the shed and put it down already.
They do something else, as the said 90% of agricultural workers did during the industrial revolution, as did typesetters in the 80s, as did computers (the profession) when computers (the machines) took over.
So does the Linux client... Well memory more than cpu, uses more than my 8gb.
You have references but they don't back up that implication robots are being used in US factories.

There are a lot of things that have changed in US factories in the last 35 years but I don't think widespread use of robots is one of them. But I can't find references :-(
> This particular scheme pays out most of the money to a select few, though, which defeats the point.

Does it? To me the only point of a lottery is for the operator to make a predictable profit; that predictability is why governments like them so much.

Who wins the jackpot is pretty close to irrelevant.
Because it is a state-run monopoly in most jurisdictions, and in the remaining ones would likely require a legal staff substantially larger than the programming staff.
Is the published payout rate based on calculated odds or on the historical payouts made?
No, but most people used to work in farming. Then manufacturing became dominant. Today the service sector is dominating. It is 1.4% agriculture, 20.6% industry, and 78% services. (source: Wolfram Alpha).

For this reason, automatic web services probably have a larger potential for destroying jobs than robots. Hopefully nextparadigms is right that more jobs is created than destroyed by this process (I have no idea). Previous shifts seems to have worked out alright.
I can FizzBuzz 6 languages in 3 minutes, it's nothing for an engineer to be proud of, I'm a designer. Advice about Haskell? Drop it for now, you need food on your table.
Second that. Not having to click-look-back-etc really does save a huge amount of time!

Although I have to say that I don't like the hover. I think it would be better if clicking enlarged the theme with the buy/demo/etc buttons on top.
There's lots of them. Most of them are ... not quite legal.
In IE8 the badge is a few pixels too wide and an horizontal scroll bar appears.
Boston Entrepreneurs talk about Angel List
Is it fair for a person who doesn't have legs to run against people with legs? No. Even if the legs are ever-improving and highly engineered? Of course not, they're not legs.
"Your Mother's Tongue: Book of European Invective" is an interesting book about the same subject.
Well just think, if your bank used the same security measures how would you feel about it?
The Apple Tree: 35 years of Apple Products
Would people be happy for banks to use the same security for your account? Because that's what people seem to be arguing when they say it's perfectly safe/secure. This is in regards to the obscure URL being the entry point to the account not to do with BC itself.
necessary comment about the lack of a mac client (which is kind of strange since there is an iOS one, and it seems quite a lot of code could be shared?)
One reason that assembly of products like phones requires human hands is simply because nobody has yet tweaked the designs and processes to make them friendly to robot assembly. There hasn't been a financial incentive to do so yet.
Actually, in European Spanish, "Ordenador" is way more common than "Computadora" (as an example, the former has 5 million results on Google for .es sites, while the latter has only just over 270k).
I wouldn't be too picky, as long as I had a piece of paper allowing me to stay and work in the country for a longer period of time.
How bloodstain pattern analysis works
Let’s stop using “'” when we mean “’” and we're trying to pose as designers.
Sorry, I was unclear. It was meant as a general question, if start-ups are willing to do so. I am staying put for at least 1 more year where I am right now.

But thanks for asking!
This is not a case of bitcoin being run by any one, this is an independent party running a service dealing with bitcoins, and their service failing. Your comment is like asking the dollar to be dragged behind the shed and put down because of Bernie Madoff engaging in fraud involving dollars.
ネット婚活口コミランキングで比較！！
The obtainable future
In a lot of cases the cost of acquiring customers is high in the beginning. Thats a business scaling issue that you solve when you determine that you have a real business.

The landing page trend is just for early adopters, I would venture a guess that it has little to no impact on the success of a startup.
In the bay area, given the current market, any reasonably funded startup would likely work with you, assuming you passed interviews, etc.

It may be somewhat easier at a company that's dealt with the process before, but most valley startups will have access to experienced immigration attorneys.
I agree that the removal syntax is unintuitive, but otherwise a truly brilliant idea!
Social graph and social links
Author doubts the veracity of the reporter. Not very ingenious. When a doctor named Silliman reported witnessing a meteorite fall, Thomas Jefferson said "I would more easily believe that (a) Yankee professor would lie than that stones would fall from heaven."
is there any good site that would explain when to use what technology - like

when you need many concurrent users then dont use ROR but use JVM or C++ or Scala instead,

if you need to build a fast prototype build on ROR or PHP etc.
"I still think it's a mental illness."

Why? What does "mental illness" mean to you? You go on to say it's a diagnosis of exclusion, and you don't know for sure what you had/have -- isn't that the point?

I guess we need to be careful with our definitions of "mental" in "mental illness". For example, major depression responds rapidly to ketamine (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9696-ketamine-relieves...), and other NMDA antagonists may prove clinically useful in treating that "mental" illness.

However, there's also the "maladaptive beliefs" side of "mental illness" which may be applicable to depression -- change how you think, change how you feel emotionally -- but their application to CFS as anything other than a mild management technique is absurd and has been proven time and again to be a dead end. Nevertheless, the implication from the psycho-social CFS school is that if you change how you think about your illness, you can think yourself out of your condition. That's absurd. They talk in terms of validation, needing respect, and saving face by coming up with symptoms; i.e. that you, the patient, are neurotic. It's pernicious nonsense.

The focus on viral aspects is far from a dead-end - see the work of Dr Martin Lerner and his use of valacyclovir and valgancyclovir, for example.

There was also research done in Australia that CFS may be a "hit and run" brain injury cause by a virus or viruses -- is a physically damaged brain a case of mental illness or just plain illness? Either way, it's not something that changing "maladaptive beliefs" will solve.