skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(deleted and moved here because it messed up the post order)

Ooh, ooh, and one more thing...

12. Advance your skills at all times [...] It's hard to say what will be popular in the software industry in ten years, but I can guarantee it won't be esoteric Anime.

At the risk of sounding even more juvenile than in my previous rebuttals: fuck that. I know that "anime" here is just an example of any "time-waster" that "professionals" like to hate on, as if every second of every day has to be scheduled in advance and accounted for or else... or else... chaos!

How about we don't just develop as worker bees but instead as human fucking beings? Saying "don't watch anime" is barely different from saying "don't read books" - it's the quality of the content that matters. I've gotten more out of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann than The Bible because the protagonists in those stories remind me to keep pushing past my limits, whereas the other work of fiction would instead as us to give in and accept our lots in life.

Whether you're Randy Pausch or Bob McBurger-flipper, our lives are ending one second at a time. Let's use that time wisely, sure. But let's also enjoy ourselves. I prefer my anime, books, wine, women, ...life to be the most interesting the most often. Whether that means reading The Little Schemer to expand your mind or lying in a field eating mushrooms to expand your mind, it's not for me to judge. So don't be hasty to write off the computer nerds who like anime.

I'm not mad, just passionate ;)
Bbaker02
5 Tips for Scaling your Startup
I guess Twilio has UK numbers in beta right now. Maybe I could clone the site and throw it up on another Heroku instance and use one of those.
Looking over the list here, I'd call out a few specific things that are important to me:

* HStore, the key-value store column type
* PGXN, still new, but going to change the world
* Replication that Actually Works For Real No Kidding.
* Window functions, which are a total brainf*ck but once you internalize them, indispensible.
The process of explaining something is very valuable. As a science fiction writer, when I tell someone a summary of a story I wrote, I can read in their expression or verbal "uh huhs" what's drawing them in and what's distraction from the heart of the matter.

As a business owner, the same process applies. I describe to them what I'm doing, and I can see the evaluation process at work in their face as to whether they get the value I'm trying to create or not. (Or put another way, if the value I'm explaining is actually valuable or not.)

In both cases, I may do nothing and let it fall the way the cards may and then hear their feedback, OR I may make adjustments in real-time as I read the listeners body language and use that as cues to feedback into my value proposition (visit my biz, read my story).

Comedians are masters at finding the heart of a dialog and adjusting (like jazz musicians) what they say to maximize the effect.
Not at all sure if it was stupid of them to wait this long to let everybody in (you want socializing on your social network!) or brilliant because now they'll get a lot more press right when the buzz seemed to be dying down.

One also wonders how this route will affect their demographics long-term... it's got a bit of a "geeky" slant so far, which seems to be working for them, but might not be in their best interests against Facebook.

Edit: kadabra9 makes a good point in saying that Facebook can (and rapidly seems to be!) copying/nullifying any advantage that Google+ provided so perhaps they shot themselves in the foot by not growing as big and as fast as they could. Time will tell.
Microsoft milks Casio for using Linux
I actually set up another Google profile using an email account managed by Apps, and this works fine for me. But it's not the solution I want since you have to switch users whenever you want to use Plus.
Isn't that like half of Palm? This sucks. The Apothekerlypse continues.
Deploy 14 different applications to the cloud with a single command.
Most entrepreneurs have horrible sleep hygiene is why most of them can't sleep.

That doesn't mean you should shift over to waking up at 6am or anything, but it is something learnable, just like shaving or keeping a child clean.

Here is a link of getting your sleep hygiene under control I wrote a bit back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2453370
He wasnt making that point. He was making the point that rat farming was bad but software bug farming was good.
You can hide them without defriending them - they won't even know, if you're worried about hurting their feelings.

If you can't tell a friend, "Sorry, but what you repost is of no worth to me", how good of a friend are they?
Chances are that this pharmaceutic company's "embarrassingly parallel" workload could be ported to GPUs to run on anywhere from 1/10th to 1/100th the number of machines.

Porting the application to GPUs may offer a good ROI if the company intends to run this workload often enough.
Install OS X Lion from a bootable flash drive
Simple Shapes of Startups
Welcome to WebDepot
There is no reading automobile license plates from space (a common misleading claim about spy satellites since the 1960s) at that resolution, not to mention that the viewing angle is all wrong for that. Thanks for sharing the photo to add an example to this discussion.

As several comments above have pointed out, Google Maps misleads the public by referring to aerial photos taken from airplanes as a "satellite" view of the ground. Studying imagery of my own neighborhood on Google Maps makes clear that the images at close-in views must come from airplanes. The particular walking path I take from my house to the local public library is very clearly visible, but again there is no hope of reading automobile license plates from those photographs.
I thought Facebook's video chat was still only one-on-one, and frankly, multiplayer video chat was the only thing about Google+ that interests me.
What is the worst class/variable/function name you have ever encountered?
Benford's Law is pretty well-known in mathy circles.
I did learn something from this question. I wasn't previously familiar with "watchdogs":

void crawl_into_hole_and_die()
{
while(1); // let the watchdog get us.
}

In embedded devices, there are usually things called "Watchdogs". The Watchdog will reset the processor if it is not kicked within a certain amount of time. So in the main loop (usually) there are instructions to Kick the Watchdog. This usually writes a special value to the Watchdog register. This function has an infinite loop, so the watchdog will reset the processor. – Robert
It's the same: successfully giving them the goods and service they want (laughs, a cool website, a web API). Being able to identify what interests them during a conversation is a master skill.

Let me say it another way: if you have a great business idea, tell everyone you can find about it and learn from their reactions/questions what's working in your pitch and not working.
It's advantageous to have them on separate accounts in case you are arbitrarily banned from Google Plus. This way it has no chance of affecting your other services. It would devastate me if I lost my main email.
I'm almost willing to be that more people are using Bing, relative to Bing's main competition. G+ has to get the buzz back, or this risks becoming Wave, Part 2.

Edit: I deserve some flack for using the word "buzz", I know ;)
Although in this instance I agree, I think the bigger point is that you shouldn't call anything "arcane" on HN. Because it'll be well known to someone and that someone—who is probably someone who could contribute a lot to the HN discussion—will think poorly of you.
Knockout is also probably being included in ASP.NET MVC 4 - it's in the beta - which should help it gain traction especially amongst beleaguered Silverlight developers thanks to it's familiar MVVM / data binding structure.
Hackers break SSL encryption used by millions of sites
Cricut Expression Review - Is bigger better?
Thanks for clarification, you're right. I thought it was translated from qhasm to C.
I don't think that's the reason. 99.9% uptime is plenty. Uptime in SLA is defined as "Monthly Uptime Percentage", which is explained as follows (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html):

"Monthly Uptime Percentage" means total number of minutes in a calendar month minus the number of minutes of Downtime suffered in a calendar month, divided by the total number of minutes in a calendar month.

For average month of length 30.4 days (~43776 minutes in total) that means acceptable downtime of 437.something minutes or 7 hours of combined unavailability.

Minding all of that, there is also a term "Google Apps Covered Services", which is explained as:

"Google Apps Covered Services" means the Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Groups and Google Sites components of the Service. This does not include the Gmail Labs functionality, Google Apps - Postini Services, Gmail Voice or Video Chat components of the Service.

So, legally speaking, there is no uptime guarantee for Google+.
for any purpose, at any time, provided that following collection
of such location and speed information identifiable to your Vehicle

They store the data tied to your identity. A data breach (quite common these days...) would be a Big Deal. GPS tracks of everywhere you've gone in your car, ever? That's worth quite a bit of money in the right hands.

He gave no evidence that they were not anonymizing the data properly,
he just assumed they were not.

Zipcode, birthday, gender: identifies 87% of Americans[1]. Your (Home,Work) gps tuple? Unique[2][3]. His assumption is quite safe; every "anonymized" dataset that's been released into the public (that I know of) has been de-anonymized. Why would this one be special?

1) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/your-secrets...

2) http://crypto.stanford.edu/~pgolle/papers/commute.pdf

3) http://33bits.org/2009/05/13/your-morning-commute-is-unique-...

EDIT: In response to parent edit and below comments

I have no proof of these, but factoids I believe to be true (so feel free to base a research paper on them :D)

1) To identify commuters: (Highway-Entrance-Location, Average-Highway-Entrance-Time, Highway-Exit-Location, Average-Highway-Exit-Time) -> some derived values: approximate (home,work), average speed, average driving aggression

2) Really, now that I think about it, any dataset where multiple gps tracks (for a single person) are tied together is out. If you can get any single Average-Location-at-Specific-Time data point, (plus point #3 below) you've reduced the unique set to quite small. Then you just stand on that street corner at that time (or, for the police, use the red light cameras...) and you're done.

3) This is an OnStar dataset we're talking about, so you're looking for GMC-manufactured cars, made in the last ~10 years (or whenever onstar started going into cars). I'm willing to bet that just that data point is enough to reduce any other lukewarm/weak de-anonymization to a solid match.

4) Anyone who buys onstar as an option is quite concerned with their safety at all costs (... my bias, I guess, since I consider it a waste of time), so look for e.g. families with small kids or other dependents.

I'm running out of steam for this single comment, but name is certainly not necessary for unique ID. Ongoing research is cracking this stuff wide open. When the netflix dataset came out, who would have thought that movie ratings could uniquely identify a person?
Hacker Emblem
I would do this too. Hell if companies are going to lay down and take it all while giving your company money..DO IT! If these companies were all that concerned some of them would fight the claims, it's not like they are small guys who can't afford lawyers. So until they step up; I say go Microsoft! Always good to explore all avenues for revenue, they clearly employ the right people.
> Otherwise, just about any job will offer health care.

Many do, but it's no longer the case that "just about any job" does. 59% of Americans have some sort of employer-based coverage, and that includes people who get it through their spouses or parents. Small businesses in particular are rapidly dropping coverage (according to this random article, only 1/3 of small businesses in Wisconsin offer any, down from 50% a decade ago: http://www.jsonline.com/business/124753109.html).
Ever Considered Entering Your Pet into Pet Modeling? :)
I don't know... I like the message, but a programming language seems to be the wrong medium to convey it.

I would at least have used a procedure call to represent input from people, instead of an unbound variable :P
Ask HN: Is "Ask HN" broken?
I thought item ranking was based on a combination of votes (both up & down) and time. A quick look at the "Ask HN" page shows that this can't be the case. I keep seeing posts from months ago show up. This doesn't appear to be happening on the main page. Does anyone know what is going on?
I thought about building a site like this 10 years ago when I was living in an apartment. While I think free-form Yelp-style comments are useful, in most cases, they are going to be rants. As the saying goes in marketing, when they love you, they'll tell 1 friend. When they hate you, they'll tell 10. My idea for a site involved a more structured review process, like a survey. How much was your rent, deposit, etc,? How fast were maintenance requests completed? What percent of your deposit was returned? Rate the cleanliness of the building, friendliness of management, etc. Was there plenty of parking available on the street? That sort of thing.
>"....how medicines are developed "

"Mainstream medicine has tended to dismiss or ignore the placebo effect. Drug companies try to minimize it when conducting clinical trials."
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0329/opinions-placebo-harv...

+

Biological, clinical, and ethical advances of placebo effects [ Lancet 2010; 375: 686–95 ] PDF :
http://www.bioethics.nih.gov/departmentpubs/Miller%202010%20...

"For many years, placebos have been deffined by their inert content and their use as controls in clinical trials and
treatments in clinical practice. Recent research shows that placebo effects are genuine psychobiological events
attributable to the overall therapeutic context, and that these effects can be robust in both laboratory and clinical
settings. There is also evidence that placebo effects can exist in clinical practice, even if no placebo is given.
Further promotion and integration of laboratory and clinical research will allow advances in the ethical use of
placebo mechanisms that are inherent in routine clinical care, and encourage the use of treatments that stimulate
placebo effects."
..
The time zone setting for the task is used to determine when Proby should be expecting a notification from that task. We're still thinking of the best way to display the times on the dashboard. Listing all of the tasks in the same time zone makes them easily sortable based on the last execution time (we could still support this sort order while displaying the tasks in their configured time zone...but it may be more confusing if each time was in a different time zone). We've also thought about listing all of the tasks in the user's time zone. Jury's still out on this.

Representing the cron schedule in some other format is also feedback we have received before. I just haven't found a way to cleanly and concisely display the schedule in a format other than the cron format.

Regarding the downtime...we don't manage that right now. We're running on a single VPS. The goal of the beta is to determine if there is enough interest (and potential financial support) to deploy Proby to a more robust and fault tolerant setup.

Thanks for the feedback!
I agree with the concept of moving towards a flatter and simpler tax structure. The problem with any new tax proposed as a replacement for another tax: far too often the new tax gets passed, and repealing the old tax conveniently gets forgotten. And when the issue comes up, suddenly a pile of programs people supposedly care about couldn't possibly survive without the new revenue.

Speaking as someone who has seen a pile of new taxes go by and old ones rarely leave. Here in Oregon, we finally enacted a pile of protections against the continuous ballot measures demanding new taxes, such as a cap on how much property taxes could go up per year (no more than inflation), as well as a requirement for a 50% turnout in an election to pass a tax (no more special-election surprise taxes). It also helps that Oregon requires a balanced budget, which means that when the economy goes down, the local governments have to (gasp) spend less (and plead for money, which they usually do) rather than spending more and later demanding money to pay debt.
That's probably true, and it's also not clear that patents are a net loss for large established companies. Sure they have to pay off or fight the trolls, but they can use questionable patents themselves to shut down competitors, as we're seeing now with Apple and Microsoft trying to kill Android. It's the same principle as Walmart supporting minimum wage increases or Mattel supporting more extensive product testing regulations.
I think this is some of the best advice on hiring for a startup I have seen in a while. I just don't think the typical "reverse all the words of a sentence in place" is as helpful. With stuff like StackOverflow, it seems much more valuable that someone can figure something out and "get shit done", especially in a startup where there is so much to do.

Going forward, I will probably only hire someone after seeing them work on a small project, maybe even pairing with them in the process.
Netflix Stock Erases 12 Months Of Massive Growth, Crashes Through 52 Week Low
I find it very interesting that they aren't using Gmail or Google search to heavily push or advertise it.
Cool! ... I too sit in my home-office and often think about how much of my day was spent in worthless activity at the office. Sounds like you guys have a great company culture ... I had to quit that job to become enlightened.
> G+ has to get the buzz back

Not a great choice of words there!
44%? I've never met anyone who was considering a Win7 mobile phone. I've met many that were considering iPhone and Android, though.

I might have considered one, if I didn't remember WinCE.
I think the discussed implication (some barriers to physical limits are primarily mental) is accurate, and evidenced years ago by the experience of Roger Bannister [1]. The barrier stood for years, but after it was broken it was beaten often, and "is now the standard of all professional middle distance runners" [2].

My broader question, however, is while it's clear how to apply the findings in timed individual sports (running, cycling, swimming), how can this best be applied to team sports like soccer or football?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bannister
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile
> The k array represents knowledge or experience.

Perhaps you might wish to name your variables? The tattoo will be read more often than it is written.

Personally, I like to name anonymous functions (function foo () {}) so when a stack trace occurs, you know where. For example, if you get a second tattoo in future!
I think it's cool that you will be able to use the same language - CoffeeScript - and even the same objects on both client and server side.

But the server side stuff is optional. At the moment you can persist to HTML5 localStorage or REST.
That is some scary reading. I would love to find the canonical source of the study. So, breaking a pattern requires ignorance or innovation.
the patent system is actually becoming a net disincentive to innovation, especially software. We hope Congress and the Supreme Court are paying attention.

Don't blame the Supreme Court. They were paying attention 39 years ago with Gottschalk v. Benson.

http://supreme.justia.com/us/409/63/case.html

They reluctantly outlawed patents on software for general-purpose digital computers. I say reluctantly, because they really thought Congress should be addressing the question.

"The technological problems tendered in the many briefs before us [Footnote 7] indicate to us that considered action by the Congress is needed."

Confusingly, they were overruled by a lower court (Federal Circuit: In re. Alappat, State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group). More on this at http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2011-07-28

One interesting note in all this is that even in 1972 they knew that it was impossible to expect the patent office to rigorously review software patents. Gottschalk v. Benson quotes the President's Commission on the Patent System as follows:

"The Patent Office now cannot examine applications for programs because of a lack of a classification technique and the requisite search files. Even if these were available, reliable searches would not be feasible or economic because of the tremendous volume of prior art being generated. Without this search, the patenting of programs would be tantamount to mere registration, and the presumption of validity would be all but nonexistent."
"As part of our hiring process at Mixer Labs, we would often give people a half day coding exercise. "

I (and many people who I've hired) don't have time to waste on your startup. I can tell within two minutes if someone can code or not. I've never understood the need to have someone write code (and then nitpickingly critique the code because it doesn't look like my code) when I can just ask them and know if they are lying or not.

And I've hired a LOT of super fantastic programmers.
Open to all... Unless you're using Google Apps like I do ಠ_ಠ
When I was working a full-time job, I found I could be super productive between 7am and 9am before most other people got in, then I wouldn't really get a huge amount done beyond supervisory and mentoring type work until 8pm or so when I could restart working.

Currently, on my own stuff, I work about 11pm to 3 or 4am which has been super productive but somewhat tiring. The huge benefit is almost complete peace and quiet, which really helps me focus.
Great! It's just a shame that all of my friends have died of old age waiting for the invite period to finish.

Seriously, what was the reasoning for this? It's not like Google don't have the infrastructure/capability to scale quickly.
In Canada, healthcare is partially paid for by future taxes.
Raising the driving-age has also raised the fatal crash rate for 18-year olds
With City-Specific Regions, Earbits (YC W11) Launches Improved iPhone App
Well, I was thinking more about the contrast between the supposed permanence of tattoo and a programming language construct. Now that you have pointed it, however, it might give a certain feeling of "old school" ("self modifying code in COBOL!?") -- and I expect closures to be still "reverenced" in 2060.

And of course a Lisp tattoo would be better! ;)
Why js vs λ notation?
How To Become A Hacker: If you don't have functional English, learn it.
There is a theory that you only build weapons that you intend to use, otherwise its a waste of funds. It cost money to put the language into the agreement and someone argued that cost with an offseting revenue. That suggests to me at least that the information will be packaged up and sold.

Now how nefarious will that sale be? That is fairly subjective. But as others have pointed out, if you're carrying around a smart phone you may already be giving more information to folks than you care to. It reads like OnStar wants in on that gravy train.
Not sure why anyone should give a shit about 100+ features or even 1000+ new features on g+.