skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whenever I read one of these TC articles claiming that apparent conflicts of interest are laughable, I'm amazed, mainly because I accept the claim for a couple of paragraphs before I blink several times and wonder, what on earth am I thinking?! It seems passionate and outraged hyperbole can take my eyes off the rabbit temporarily.

You can't make conflicts of interest go away just by saying, "No, but he's a really honest guy." That's supposed to be a given. That's the entry fee to persuasive analysis and distinguished news reporting. You'd better be honest AND free from conflicts of interest. I don't think there's a world where people take dishonest reporters seriously, just so long as the agent has no conflicts of interest.

Beyond that, no matter how honest you think you are, you are subject to the same cognitive biases that all humans are. As a matter of fact, bias is the rule, not the exception. We've never seen, nor could we really comprehend what a person free from cognitive bias would look or act like. It's completely alien. That's why we have all these checks and balances when apprehending truth, because some of the smartest of us realize that truth is shrouded in a dense fog and all we have is a dim flashlight to make out shapes in the mist.

How powerful and non-volitional is bias? I read the Four Hour Body the other day, and there's an anecdote about how the CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin, did a weight loss experiment. He made no conscious changes to his diet or exercise routine or usual habits. He did, however, track his weight everyday in a spreadsheet and charted a line from his current weight to his ideal weight. On either side of the line he charted boundaries within which his weight should fall for each day over the period. After 6 months, he'd lost something like 28 pounds. Understand, he made no proactive effort to lose the weight:

“I actually made a conscious effort not to deviate from my diet or exercise routine during this experiment. That is, I continued to eat whatever I wanted and got absolutely no exercise. The goal was to see how just the situational awareness of where I was each day would affect my weight. I suspect it affected thousands of minute decisions that I made over the time period, even though I couldn’t tell you which.”

That's why you can't wave your hands over conflicts of interest.
(disclaimer: He works for Google)
I'd rather keep off dependencies to other languages. Recently there were issues when compiling with the ruby option -- iirc, it was required for Command-T or some other plugin. Some version of ruby was required which was not compatible with the latest stable version of vim. Something like that.
Also, won't this slow down startup ? (I know lua is fast). Also, lua is not even part of any default install, to my knowledge.
Pittsburg Real Estate For Sale
I love this collection of Python scripts to provide Git stats for my projects. Appropriately named http://gitstats.sourceforge.net/
I don't understand how this article was any better than, say, this Old Man Murray post, written over a decade ago:

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

What ended up happening was that adventure games stopped being commercially viable as an industry. And that's fine. So what?
Nokia spills beans about unannounced Symbian Belle phone
The amount of ignorance and misogyny in here is staggering. Have any of you ever actually talked to a woman? I'll boil down the argument into one that favors women:

Men are biologically programmed to be violent. We should find it as no surprise that the vast majority of violent criminals are men. After all, it's their biology. And thus all men should be regarded as likely violent in the right circumstances. Also we should not trust men to care for small children, because they have no idea what they are doing since they lack the biological drive for child-rearing.
It doesn't matter how much software exists or is in use. We are talking about portability here. For. Net it is is not an issue at all and for Win32 C/c++ only a recompile is necessary. Oracle DB exists for Windows IA64 and office does for Arm. Those are proofs that like any other sane platform portability is not a big issue for Windows.
Moves by HP, Google further marginalize the traditional PC
If you don't subscribe to the logic and end-user benefits of progressive enhancement, there are probably many things about HTML+CSS+JavaScript that you don't like.

However, what are the arguments for what you are asking for besides easier short-term development practices? And, as said above, there's nothing stopping you from building your webpages that way (especially a “widget” that is self-contained). It works that way as well. How does this make HTML+CSS+JavaScript broken? If anything it is very resilient to different coding practices.
dramatic, hyperbolic, AND pointless!

The title subtly implies TechCrunch may be over, but really it only says TechCrunch will change because of the "As We Know It" clause. You are losing a editor-in-chief, things will change, duh?
I blogged about a solution to this about 9 months ago: http://blog.theamazingrando.com/the-road-to-better-authoriza...

Same idea: A browser (or extension) that knows how to sign up, and log in. Sign up would fill in the form from my choice of profiles (personal, work, fake). Log in would automatically use the saved credentials, and allow me to switch accounts from within the browser. Sync it to the cloud, or let me export/import it to another browser or device.

Edit: HN discussion of that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128966
Very similar to Autonomy, mastery, and purpose.. from a TED talk. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
I agree. I think the logic is: "if we train them, they'll go find better paying jobs, and besides, as soon as this project is done, everyone will be laid off anyway." So everyone only wants to hire exact fit.
No I agree, I don't do it. I was just pointing out what I have put in other posts
The story with Barclays † is the kind of pernicious theft of IP that unfortunately small businesses always face when dealing with big businesses, and is what always makes me laugh when patents are suggested as a good way to encourage innovation. A patent is worthless if you can't sue, and a small company can't sue a big one.

Congratulations to the team for remaining philosophical though, and winning on quality and timing. They truly are real artists.

† They were negotiating to sponsor the app, the developers sent them a roadmap of their plans, all went quiet and then, a year later, Barclays released their own app.
There has historically been a certain “quality” of companies publicly listed. Two things to consider. The first way this matters is that the “brand” of an exchange is, to a certain extent, harmed by a company of extremely low quality being listed. So it’s just like a store selling a terrible product. Even if the fine print says “terrible product,” the store’s business suffers if it sells terrible products.

The second way this matters is that certain investment vehicles are tied to investing in companies listed on the public exchanges. These investment rules rely on the implied quality of IPOs. If you throw that out the window and say “caveat emptor,” then all of those investment vehicles need to be restructured, which is going to cause a lot of disruption.

Neither of these reasons might compel the SEC to refuse a listing to an issue that seems to be of low quality, however they do point to the self-interest of a large number of people in ensuring that IPOs at least appear to be reasonable businesses. If Groupon appears to be a terrible risk and its IPO turns into a financial disaster, a large number of people will be adversely affected even if they didn’t invest in it. To the extent that they have influence over the process, they will resist, or apply pressure to Groupon to do a better job of selling itself as the Next Big Thing.

Cynical summary: The industry depends on its issues having a strong appeal. Regardless of the transparency and fundamentals, it is bad for business to have an issue that is perceived to be low quality.
> I, also, if I'm really honest with myself, just want to build cool shit with my time.

And that is _EXACTLY_ what your manager should actually enable and encourage and support you to do and that's pretty much what good management training should come down to IMHO.
You'll soon be able to pick up your Amazon packages at 7-Eleven
I don't know, Steve, it looks like you're creating classes with long scary names just to "encapsulate" Ruby one-liners; your whole DictionaryPresenter class (for instance) boils down to:

Post.all.inject(Hash.new {|h, k| h[k] = []})
{|hash, post| hash[post.name[0]] = post; hash }

You might be right that the forest of classes you're creating will be useful in the long run. But this is exactly the slippery slope that the Gang of Four disciples fell down in Java.

I think using the phrase "Plain Old $X Object" might be a warning sign.

Any time you write a post talking about learning OO, and your example class hierarchy includes classes that do nothing but wrap things that are already idiomatic in the language, expect your friends and those who care to jump on you to find and squash the radioactive object bees that are trying to burrow their way into your spinal column.
The evolution of the web
Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Conferences More Social
Well, a SAN has other problems; the primary advantage of a dedicated over a VPS is I/O, and SANs, well, you know with software, you say "good, fast, cheap; pick two" - with a SAN, really, the hard part is software. In this case, "good" means "reliable" and you have to be really careful to get two; usually you only get one.

I have a lot of admiration for Amazon's engineering; but even they can't come up with a reliable, performant, and cost-effective SAN solution; and they are able to charge a lot more per gigabyte and per iop than I can.

Now, it's a tradeoff, I mean, local hard drives will /massively/ increase the failure rates, and moderately increase the cost of the individual servers.

I've got someone close to me who is an ARM person who has done PCB layouts and has participated in making custom SBCs; according to this person, the nice, fast dual-core chips you see in cellphones that we'd like to use are often unavailable in quantities of around 1000, which is where I want to start out (even this, 1000 at a target cost of $100 each, is going to require investment. I can drop maybe 1/5th to 1/10th of that of my money, but there is zero chance of custom hardware at the volume I can pay for being economical. My understanding is that you start to see reasonable pricing at around 1000 units.)

Memory, yeah, will be a big cost. But it's also really, really important; Until you have enough ram, nothing else matters.
How would you actually go about giving them 5%? It seems very complicated. Presumably it's after Apple's cut. There are also expenses. Is it a handshake deal? Is there a legal document? Is it 5% for all time? What about tax considerations since the government may think you got 100%, instead of just 95%?
"[..] we were really feeling the pressure to start making money, particularly since all our friends had found jobs and were earning a good income. The social stigma surrounding being 'unemployed' really sucked [...]"

Their motivation to make money was social? Their friends had jobs so they felt inadequate?

I've never heard that one before.

I guess it's been a LONG time since I first forged out on my own, but every year I take on new risks and search for new opportunities, and never do I think, gosh, what will my friends think?

I'm not sure if this is somewhat off topic, or if I'm asking if this is a common way of thinking, but I'm a little shocked that one entrepreneur's drive to make money was only because their friends were earning good salaries.
The Post-it War
It appears that there is a free version of this article available here:
https://www.u-cursos.cl/ingenieria/2009/1/IN578/1/material_d...
Here's a free-access version of the story:

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/swiss_franc/SNB_toughen...
Is TechCrunch unraveling in public?
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love TDD
I was cringing until I got to the end to find that his advice was bang on.

The fable of the Lion and the Mouse is something I need to constantly remind myself (and others) of.
Video Bahrain Vs Indonesia 2-0
Video Bahrain Vs Indonesia 2-0 | Pra Piala Dunia. Malam ini pukul 19.00 WIB, pertandingan timnas Indonesia melawan Bahrain digelar di Gelora Bung Karno. Tampak masyarakat kita antusias menonton. Tak ketinggalan, presiden kita, bp. Sby beserta istri juga datang untuk mendukung timnas kita. Selain presiden, tampak juga ketua DPR dan beberapa menteri duduk di kursi VVIP.
You don't buy DNS service from Godaddy, you buy registration. The DNS service is a courtesy.

For all this article states here's much more likely what's happening:

1. People are using the "free DNS service" for high traffic sites rather than rolling their own or buying a paid DNS service. Then setting their TTLs to 1 hour to make changes easier.

2. Godaddy is paying real $$ to host DNS for all those domains and in some cases could be revenue negative on a domain because of it. Regardless of how cheap you think DNS hosting is, Godaddy makes $3-4/year or less on a domain registration.

3. Godaddy is responding by throttling sources of extreme (possibly automated) DNS query traffic.

The author is someone going to the cheapest registrar and complaining that the complimentary serivces have limits. Once those limits are found he is trying to paint a "cheap/greedy corporation" picture. If the author is looking to write about underinvestment in infrastructure, he should consider an autobiography.
Is it? there are no other factors?
Sprint sues to block AT&T/T-Mobile merger
I'll change my mind if the plaintiffs and the plaintiffs' lawyers donate the proceeds to charity.
I just had a look at the 'guts' of your project box, please make sure that you maintain minimal spacing between the high voltage and low voltage parts of your circuit.

As it is it looks like they are much too close to each other.

Just having them electrically separated is not enough, you have to account for arcing in all kinds of conditions as well as temporary over voltage (spikes) on the current carrying wires.
I think that the hardest lesson to internalize over here is, "every no gets you closer to a yes". Most hackers thrive on finding, solving problems and getting the solution just right. Intractable problems are apparent at the surface and they can get shrugged upon, at least for a while. The trouble wit people is that it isn't obvious when they are intractable, so there isn't a way to know if it's your failure, or if it's a fact about the client. Sometimes the person just doesn't want/need your goods, and no amount of persuasion will budge their mind, but it isn't possible for the seller to know that, so it's easy to chalk it up as a failure.

I think that if one doesn't recognize this subtlety, it's easy to fall spiral into negativity and lose hope. Since we're social animals, this comes across to the customer and it further reduces the chances of closing a deal, thus creating a vicious cycle that's difficult to recover from.

So, if you're a startup founder, do yourself a favor. Get some chart paper and magic markers, and paste a giant sign saying "Fail. Learn. Iterate."

(BTW, to be clear the learn doesn't imply that it's your fault, it simply means extracting lessons from the experience)
I don't think this quite captures the situation. Companies aren't complaining about a lack of credentialed developers; they're complaining about a lack of competent developers.

In 2000 there were far more people graduating with computing degrees than in 1995; but the average quality was far far lower. The people who suddenly found that they couldn't get jobs when the dot-com bubble burst? Most of them didn't belong in the industry in the first place.
How does this have nothing (in italics) to do with the OP? If it's true, it's the whole story!

Ps I did not down vote.
Anything with delayed results will have cycles. You express cynicism, but there's no great evil behind it. Predicting the number and type of people that should study engineering today for work ten years from now is no easy task. It will always be a little bit wrong.

And at least you end up with educated people and the fruits of engineering work. The alternative is giving up: "I might as well not learn anything very useful, because there might be a period in the future where it's not so useful for a while."
Solyndra files for Bankruptcy
Seeing capitalism as amoral discounts the fact that capitalism a system used by humans. It's humans who are being amoral to attempt to enforce obviously bad patents. A rational and moral human shouldn't enforce (or consider there to be any value in) a patent that is obviously overly broad -- any more than a rational and moral human shouldn't attempt to steal someone's house because of an error made by the government in recording the deed.

I vehemently disagree that you can "blame" the patents. It's humans all the way down.

I agree with you on the STRATEGY -- the best way to fix the problems is to change the rules. But I will continue to call people amoral/unethical and lob lots of hate in their direction when their behavior justifies it, regardless of whether they are technically breaking the law. A parasite is a parasite.
Here is a great talk on that subject; well worth the 40 minutes if you are interested in this subject:

"F*ck you. Pay me.": http://vimeo.com/22053820
A somewhat amusing related anecdote here, is the way Arrington managed to get Leo Laporte to blow up on him a couple of years ago by prodding him about receiving a review unit and the implications that might have on bias:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsV-lgnAjps

I'd have to say that's a sight different from having a personal stake in companies you or your company are writing about.
I will join the book recommendations with THE book on pricing - The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-5th/dp/013610...

I'm reading it for a second time right now and it's stuffed with actionable information on pricing, value communication (aka marketing), price communication, purchase cycle, pricing over the product lifecycle and so on.
That reminds me of how people use to think that games were recession-proof before 2008 or so. Then the numbers came in. Quite a reality check when your sales drop by a third in a very short amount of time. All the big publishers took note.
Should Paul Graham give up his equity because of the illegal spam AirBnB initiated on Craigslist without his knowledge?
It's not about the attribute itself, but affirmation along that attribute.

It's the same conundrum facing parents of gifted kids, praising innate ability vs. hard work backfires in a spectacular way sooner or later and the child stops taking risks because they are afraid of being dumb.
How the Starz-Netflix Divorce Will Remake Video
Yeah, MG's comment itself was laughable. And that's not disrespecting TC or it's writers, it's just human. Whether or not undisclosed conflicts are a worse problem is orthogonal.
Exchanges for startups: no longer just pre-IPO, maybe ‘post IPO era’
From your own link:

Diana Adair, a spokeswoman for Google, said the company took the problem seriously and in addition to using Pharmacy Checker, had consulted with federal agencies on ways to stem the trade. Kelley Benender, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, said the company was “working to identify the illegal sites and will take appropriate action.”

----------

See how shareholders who saw that thought Google was taking care of the situation?
I have an idea for an ARPANET mailing list about cats! (1980)

I have an idea for a USENET newgroup about cats! (1985)

I have an idea for an IRC channel about cats! (1989)

I have an idea for an FTP site about cats pictures! (1990)

I have an idea for a Gopher site about cat pictures! (1992)

I have an idea for web page about cat pictures and stories! (1995)

I have an idea for Java applet about cat animations! (1995)

I have an idea for a Yahoo category about cat fans! (1996)

I have an idea for a blog designed especially for publishing personal opinions about cats! (1998)

I have an idea for an e-Commerce cat food distribution network! (1999)

I have an idea for a virtual online currency for cats! (2000)

I have an idea for a web scripting language for building feline sites! (2001)

I have an idea for a Flash game about cats! (2002)

I have an idea for a Content Management System for managing cats! (2002)

I have an idea for a Object Relational Manager for storing information about cats! (2003)

I have an idea for a social network for cats! (2004)

I have an idea about a movie sharing site for cat videos! (2005)

I have an idea for an iPhone app for taking pictures of cats! (2007)

I have an idea for a iPad app for cats to use! (2010)

...How far we've come in 30 years...
I also have that problem
time leon
lein 8.70s user 0.45s system 159% cpu 5.739 total

Saying "oh fix your whatever" is just passing the buck. This is a frequent enough problem to be a major issue. If there are more than a few of these issues people will simply move elsewhere. Rightfully so too.
With or without AT&T/T-Mobile merger, Sprint already lost
Damn, poor java people. 10 minutes just to build! I thought that more than 3 minutes to run the full test suite was so long it killed productivity.

No wonder java developers like 2 week or 1 month scrum cycles and infrequent releases. They work in slow motion.
How Much Does Christian Doctrine Have In Common With Open-Source Software?
Is this situation somehow related to 'improper' coverage of recent airbnb's issues at the time of its 1 billion valuation? ^_^
Doesn't mean the shareholders knew about every detail or management decisions inside Google. There's no denying the fact that Google handled this one poorly. Google broke the law and they knew it.

Justice Dept. says Larry Page knew about rogue drug ads

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190478740457653...
It's ok to move, many will pay for relocation!
Flaws in the AES Algorithm Used for Internet Banking Identified
Why don't any websites add the option of just emailing me a link to login anytime I want to use the site. Effectively this is what happens with "forgot password" features.
I don't see this app as a problem - it's obviously useful to people and no one is forced to install it if they don't want to. But:

> People value all sorts of ridiculous things like homeopathic "remedies", psychic readings, and bullshit seeds on Farmville, how are those any better than spamming or content farming? I'd argue that the first two, at least, are far worse.

Consent makes all the difference (cue BDSM jokes). You have to make a decision to play Farmville to be harmed by it; spam drains the money and time of everyone.
I definitely prefer to use the software that accepts efficient input and provides useful output for a particular given task. That's why in my mind the clearly superior interface is [RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB]. When you need to get something done quickly an efficiently, you can always count on [RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB] without fail. Take it from me, and I have lots of experience, [RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB] is the right tool for the job every time.
A minor tangent, but do db tables whose models use `include` instead of inheriting a base class count as POROs?
膜法世家
I created a fork of janus that removes NERDTree from the distribution just for using it with alloy's fork. Also some other nice textmate behavior like quote/brace completion is included. So to get started immediately you can use it too, it is on github: https://github.com/JFrolich/janus
Would you mind expanding on your last sentence. What was your personal experience? I'm guessing you have Rails/NoSQL experience while the jobs at your current market tend to be Java/Oracle type?
People tend to buy consoles when they are newer. This range of consoles have been out for quite a while.