skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not the first amendment thing I posted it for - but for the part where he points out that... "THEY'RE JUST WORDS."

Yes, words have meaning, and that meaning can change the world, but if someone making dick jokes causes you to get hyper-uncomfortable, maybe you have some personal sensitivity issues to work through before you start worrying about the level of professionalism at a conference that you obviously don't want to be at.

In short: "Yes Virginia, the world has dick jokes in it."
If it's loyalty to a person, then asking them to stay (even if they aren't happy) for $50k is a weak form of loyalty.

For stock ownership in a startup it makes more sense as they have to stay PLUS contribute to the companies success.
Online scan hardware
online scan hardware
I didn't see anything about a signed contract. A bonus is simply an incentive until it is paid and that incentive can be taken away at any time. Of course, these generally low wage employees are free to try and retain lawyers to argue otherwise, but I expect the cost of that would quickly overwhelm the value of the bonus.
There really must be some sort of cultural difference here. If I heard that phrase in a presentation and the presenter wasn't displaying signs of agitation, it would never cross my mind that they might be frustrated. And if they were displaying signs of agitation, I would likely suspect them of being frustrated regardless of the words used.
I am happy that you added the ability to generate WordPress themes...

This is going to kick ass once it's polished.

--

Adding an example of the two different options on the pricing page (or somewhere) would help a bit. People would have a better idea of what your blogging platform has to offer.
Couldn't disagree more, and I would have thought HN would be one of the few places not to see that view. With startups the founders and early employees often (not always) see their company/product(s) very fondly, the natural response to having created something yourself if you care about it.

And it doesn't have to be a startup, it can be any job that you become attached to. I assume it's a mix of pride in what you have achieved and the parenting instinct.

Your suggestion is insulting to many, many people who really do care about what they are working on.
Well yes some banks can be hurt in the process that are not acctully bad but history shows that in most cases bank runs happen on banks that are really bad. If you are a conservative bank you will acctully get a lot of cash (this happend in switzerland) witch you can then lend at high rates to banks that need it (if there wouldn't be the fed pushing the intrest rate down). Witch banks acctully are in a bad place and witch are not will be the task of bankers and private investors. The banks that are acctully good will probebly get survive.
So yes there will be some collateral damage but that just cant be avoided in a cycle. It would be much better then the mess we are in know.

That all beeing said in a system where you have fractional reserve banking (witch is a bad idea anyway) there is a case (not one that I totally agree with) to be made that we need a "lender of last resort". But beeing a "lender of last resort" is quite diffrent then what the fed did. They literly flooded the hole bankingsystem with cash, knowbody knew what was going on, how will be saved who want, witch banks acctully are still liquid and witch will bust when the flow of cash stops. Why should banks lend to each other if the get free money. If I would get free money, I too would just sit around and wait until the worst is over. If every body does that we acctully have a bigger problem a long rescession instead of a short crash.
"I think an often overlooked idea is that spec work is similar to internship. For little to no pay, you gain experience and a portfolio piece. I definitely don’t see anyone calling that exploitation. Yet being an intern lasts much longer."

Is it actually a common thing for design internships to be unpaid or minimum wage? Programmer internships, following internships in engineering disciplines, are usually pretty well paid, so this idea is foreign to me.
Effective rhetoric takes into account its audience. Because of their positions and the gravity of their speeches, none of those leaders could really have hoped to cuss in them. But it wouldn't be surprising in the least if they did when discussing certain matters with others, for example (obviously it depends on the person).

Presenters who cuss and are actually good presenters have made a decision that their audience will deal with cussing, and therefore it is a stylistic flourish they can use. Now, they may be wrong—but a few blog posts don't prove that. People no longer being interested in their presentations prove that.
Good essay, thanks.

>They are useful graphs with deficiencies.

This describes all graphs representing real-world, as opposed to purely mathematical, objects and relationships.
Which is surprising considering how positive 10gen looks coming out of this thing. A clear sign of maturity on their part.
Apple and Google dominate Sony and Nintendo in Mobile Gaming
> instead of creating a framework that addresses real problems.

If you need to protect code that is currently client-side while retaining responsiveness, this will solve that problem.

In my opinion, the price for that is too high. You are significantly increasing the traffic between the server and the client. On top of that, you are forced to do all your work on the server, which to me feels like a step back to the way we used to do things a decade ago. Beefy servers handling a few clients, rather than light servers handling thousands of clients.
> ploddingly slow with clunky non-standard UIs—a degraded, lackluster experience

That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear.

Sure web mobile apps kind of suck right now, but theres hardely any frameworks, established processes or documentation on how to build them properly. It's still in alpha stages.

When building mobile apps has matured and if they still have the performance and UI issues, then I might agree. But right now thats like saying a kid won't have a good job because of his grade 5 scores.
The author seems to be completely confusing what probabilistic and deterministic mean.

If the world is truly and unknowably probabilistic, there is no hidden information to be learned. Updating your plans as you go in response to new (random) information will provide little benefit.

In contrast, if it is deterministic, there is hidden information to be learned. Once you learn this information (which may occur as the progress moves along), your subjective probability distribution [1] describing the possible outcomes loses entropy and your estimates become more accurate.

[1] This represents your uncertainty about the situation, not anything fundamental.
Ah yes. Write once, mediocre everywhere. Let's strive for that!
No. The worst thing is it's going down: living costs are getting much higher because of inflation while wages are far from catching up, real estate is still in a bubble, and it feels like the gov is getting more and more corrupted, blocking ordinary people from having a decent/good life.
My impression is that people who use MongoDB for what it is good for tend to love it, mostly because it is "developer friendly." I use MongoDB a lot, and at least that is my take.

Soon after I saw the rant, I blogged about how I work around some MongoDB issues. Also, anyone who uses MongoDB without carefully reading the documentation (apparently like the ranter) is going to have problems.
Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds
That's awesome to watch. If you start with an outline of statements you want to make, you spend less time picking through little clauses around the things you want to say. You have half an outline there to start with: your list of things to tell startups. There are other things it's clear you want to say: the quote from Paul Buchheit, mentioning this came from a conversation with a reporter, etc.

If you nested the list of things as one bit of the outline and then had the key phrase items of the intro as another, just don't worry about adjectives or adverbs or punctuation or flow or anything for the first pass, you may find you get faster overall, especially for longer pieces.
This gave me a completely new look at pg. It really lets you get inside his head.

What I learned: pg is an extremely literal and logical person by nature but in hindsight will tone down his own literalism in favor of a simple, goal-directed, aesthetic.
#12 makes me sick, but is understandable I suppose. I feel like it implies anecdotal evidence > fact based evidence.
This is a disruptive pricing strategy.

If Fire/Nook do 80% of what the iPad does (and with 50% of the screen size) but cost half the price, it can disrupt iPad sales. Apple is wise to head this off.
"have someone take a second look at the applications Rtm gives Cs"

lol I am sure that can become quite a chore
Maybe we just don't want to deal with salespeople but instead judge the product on our own without being harassed.

It astonishes me that you're able to describe interactions with salespeople as being "harassed" yet can't understand how it could be construed as competitive.

(Not that the study you're dismissing has anything to do with salespeople... You'd be better off attacking the tenuous and speculative suggestion that author has made based on a reading that study rather than attempting to nuke the proverbial site from orbit with such a monumentally tired argument as "I don't believe it so it can't possibly be true".)
Edward Tufte on Princeton's Acceptance Letter
Hmmm, it's really too bad the US doesn't have enough sense to invite more of these people into our country.
Ask HN: Python vs. Ruby vs. PHP vs. ...?
What are some of the pros and cons? Why would you choose one over the other (especially for web-based startups)?
Javascript working on multiple platforms (browsers) isn't quite a new concept is it?

Sure IE6/7 had poor JS performance but IE7 is nearing death and performance of on mobile browsers is increasing rapidly (as well as CPU performance).
Awesome! I had a similar on building something like this. One thing is for certain, members of the community lean more towards a simplistic, minimal, and clean toolset. Express.js delivers, and this seems to as well.

I've dedicated myself completely to Node.js for the last month, and I'm sold!
This way of thinking doesn't make sense. No one is claiming that you're responsible as in you need to fix this. We're claiming that you're responsible in the sense that you're part of the cause (or, in the language of Nagarjuna the "dominant condition" -http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/307/nagarlec.htm) of the exploitation of people in third world countries. There are many other conditions besides you, of course.

The most important goal is to deeply realize your position and relation to other people - how you act after you realize this is up to you/your emotional makeup/your virtues/etc.

My claim is that because of the complicating factors (visibility and ineffectiveness) inherent in this situation you aren't able to fully understand this relationship.
Right, thanks for the analysis. I look forward to seeing the specs for this - I always forget to water and my tomatos are complaining.
But does it blend and can I wear it?
Derek@TrailsVentures.com

Working on Roomeo.com!
Not bad for 1996! I'm amazed that they put so much media online. You see stuff like this on DVD extras these days but I don't see that much "behind the scenes" type stuff on most websites for movies.
I hate Unity. I hate GNOME. I hate Windows 8.
Integrating Machine Learning in a Semantic Web Platform
Swearing isn't a strong tool for communication, and the TFA is not arguing in favour of that proposition. You're arguing against somewhat of a straw man there.

Zach's point is different. It's about making a connection, establishing commonality and empathy at a human level. Carefully chosen profanity can be a branding tool; it can establish commonality with a certain group of people, and depending on when it's used, empathy too. Just about all of us swear when we accidentally hurt ourselves, for example; if we were acting that out and didn't swear (no matter how mildly), we'd seem more fake somehow, like we were pretending to be invincible or something.

And Zach has his "brand", it comes fairly easily to him, more easily than other approaches. If it turns off people who don't have that in common, that's OK.

And that connection is what in turn makes richer communication possible than dry exposition.
That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear.

It's also like the arguments made against Java 10 years ago. :) I agree with you - it's not yet clear whether web technologies will significantly replace native for mobile or not. Even if they eventually end up doing so, that appears far enough out that I can't imagine making any decisions based on that right now.
i'd recommend opening an issue over here https://github.com/flatiron/plates/issues so that the authors can respond to you more efficiently
MongoDB Is a Tool, Not THE Tool
Tara Ploughman ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554889
> Because the light absorption level is so high, the super-black material will also keep temperatures down

Can someone with more physics knowledge explain how absorbing more energy will result in reduced temperatures. I would assume the opposite.
It's generated using Jekyll (the technology behind GitHub pages).

The source is available here: https://github.com/holman/holman.github.com
Flash was how it was, but it was quite one -- HTML has never managed to be consistent and predictable technology, and I doubt HTML5 could change anything...
I think the current popularity of web apps over desktop apps is driven by two different motivating factors: social and centralized storage.

The nature of the Web makes it well suited to building social apps on top of it. It would be hard to build social apps on an application layer that didn’t transcend physical platforms, because then there would be platform-induced delineations between the social groups that could congregate.

But the other motivating factor is that web apps by definition are a centralized container for the data you put into them. You use Freshbooks and you can access your invoices from anywhere. I think this will become far less important as cloud-storage-on-the-desktop services like iCloud mature and largely eliminate this advantage of web apps. Given this, don’t you think think we’ll actually start seeing a resurgence of non-social desktop apps that would previously have been built on the Web for centralized storage reasons?
That link is pure garbage. Its every bit as bad as homeopathy. [Edited to remove overstatement.]
Nope, a contract wouldn't help if he did an asset sale, gave himself a dividend, and then shut down shop.

They should get the funds placed in escrow.
Is Viaziz.com a scam?
My Princess
Most of what I've seen of this debate is people crying over the fact that Holman doesn't fit into their mold of what a talk at a conference should look like.
Hmm...

Upsides:

It's easier to integrate ads and other third-party content like Facebook like buttons/comments, Youtube videos, etc. Unless you want to destroy Flash's performance by using a wmode other than window, there is no way to mix flash and html/iframe content. I'm pretty sure most people's hatred of Flash comes from ads that are not only annoying and poorly coded, but embedded with opaque or transparent. Then they will melt your laptop, yes.

It's easier to hire for, HTML/CSS/JS are more common skills than AS, especially when you're not hiring to do 'push movieclip around' Flash, but working inside a huge Flex app with 90% custom in-house components. It's also easier to find people who might not have a lot of development experience but are good at pushing around html and css to finetune the interface to our designers' desires. Maybe that got easier in Flex in Flex 4 with the Spark components, but we weren't allowed to drop support for Flash 9 despite it being less than 1% of visitors, so we were still on Flex 3.

Downsides:

Performance. Holy crap performance. The flash site still ran well in ancient browsers like IE6 and IE7. The new site struggles in IE7 and we had to drop support for IE6 entirely (performance was not the only reason there but, you know). And on the subject of mobile, the flash site was sluggish but technically worked on my Nokia N800 tablet running Maemo. New site doesn't. We're working on making this better, of course, but the new site was written pretty quickly and accumulated a ton of technical debt, mostly in the form of poor performance tradeoffs.

Stability. Ditto what I just said about IE6 and IE7. And now throw Opera in there too. jQuery eases a lot of cross-browser pain, but not all of it. The edge cases in which Flash behaves differently on different platforms are just that, edge cases, and usually occur when you have to cross the boundary into JS. So now instead of basically one platform to test your code on you have...well all the major browsers * all the major OSs.

Maintainability. When your application is pushing the 100k LOC mark, strict typing is a godsend. So are real namespaces, and interfaces. It is very very easy to write stupid code in JS. You can write stupid code in any language, of course, but at least in Flash the compiler will yell at you if it's blatantly incorrect, and exceptions throw useful stack traces on all platforms. I don't know what it is about JS and swallowing errors, but sometimes it's a battle just to figure out where in the code you need to even start looking for the error. Or that an exception even occurred.

I guess I should make a blog post about the switch someday...
Oliver Reichenstein Interview 'Why Simplicity Creates Great User Experiences'
Wonder how long it would take an 8th grader in a beginning web design Middle School course to code this website...
Or an ORM.
The Space Jam theme song remains a popular target for remixing and mashups.
Imagine if you could see the process of someone writing a HN comment, or see stats such as how long they took to write it or how many edits they made. I made a simple little visualization a while back when I was interested in this: http://justindonato.com/static/demos/sprezzatura/

(If its not ok to post self links, let me know and I'll delete)
It's probably a good indicator that the team at YC is very good at picking people who know their market and target audience. For the project our team is working on now we know everything there is to know about the industry and we wake up every morning trying to learn more.

Sometimes preparedness is a side affect of knowledge, if you feel you have prepared for every possible question that could be asked, then be sure to think of 10 more questions too just in case. Confidence is a trait that almost never goes unnoticed and typically having confidence in yourself gives those around you confidence in your abilities
We all have brands; in public, we try to be consistent with an idea we have of ourselves. Only some of us use that word thusly, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

So I ask you: is your objection to the use of the word, or to the notion of a consistent self?

(Every act of communication is an attempt to manipulate: to teach, to convince, to humour, etc. Saying that is almost meaningless in this context, unless you have specific moral wrongs in mind.)
Cool, thanks a lot for the lengthy response! Will let you know how it goes.
And the texture problem is being worked on: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26506/
Goodbye, Kicksend: Your latest version steals my data without permission.
Or C#, thanks to the MONO guys...
Security Hardened VM's for EC2
Google Copies Facebook Badges and Icons Pixel for Pixel
Without going into too much detail about it your assumption is only partly true. It depends on how many API calls you make to jquery from the server, but also sending your realtime data in HTML actually doesnt suck (your server already renders html like this for http requests) and you also dont have to serve up any client-side assets -- the total number of KB transferred is likely to be less with nodequery even after x amount of time on the site because you keep everything but arbitrary strings of HTML on the server.

You could make a 10,000 loc app, and you wouldnt even have to serve up a line of it to run it (in realtime) with a browser.

EDIT: After looking through Flatiron/Plates, I'm really interested in seeing how I might be able to get them to work together.
YouTube hell gets even better if you signed up for Google Apps in a country where YouTube isn't officially "launched" (what does that even mean?), like Austria.

My google apps account currently has a YouTube account associated with it that causes an error message to replace the current page if I do anything on that site while logged in as that apps account. Like a video, get redirected to a white page saying something went wrong. My solution now is to only log into google apps via Fluid/Mailplane or anonymous Chrome windows.

Whoever engineered this mess should go take a swim in a volcano.
> It astonishes me that you're able to describe interactions with salespeople as being "harassed" yet can't understand how it could be construed as competitive.

You make it sound like I'm drooling into a cup. So the competitiveness hypothesis resonates with you personally? Don't just imply that I'm stupid, explain to me what the competition actually is, and why I am automatically triggered into participating just because I have a penis.

> You'd be better off attacking the tenuous and speculative suggestion that author has made based on a reading that study rather than attempting to nuke the proverbial site from orbit with such a monumentally tired argument as "I don't believe it so it can't possibly be true"

I'm straining to see how this rhetoric can come from someone who is - in their own words - "just here for the polite and friendly atmosphere". However, I think I am attacking a piece of tenuous and speculative suggestion the author has made. I get that you disagree, I just don't get your specific objection.
Ask HN: Before developing a new website/startup do you look at competitors?
Or do you first go full steam ahead, create a prototype of the idea and then look at other websites to see how they have solved that problem?

With some ideas I feel that if you start with looking at competing websites, you will get discouraged that someone has already solved that problem. Also, after looking at other website, the mind tries to confine its creativity to what it has already seen.

Please let me know what is your methodology in this regard.
You can choose what things you find offensive.

If you choose to be offended when someone uses profanity, that's your problem, not mine. It's not my responsibility to protect the world from potentially offensive things.
The guy talks about tired analogies, whilst making one that looks positively sleep deprived in his headline and conclusion!
It's off line
Finding the nearest with the ORM
Ask HN: Any Rails devs from Michigan?
I'm a 21 year old guy that loves to create things that other people use. I work primarily in Ruby, Rails, Javascript and Java. Also.. I live in West Michigan. I know the typical thing to do for guys like me is to make an exodus to SF or NYC and get a padded job. But I really like the area of West Michigan, and I'm wondering if there are any like minded people here who wouldn't mind collaborating and creating something great right here in Michigan? This is going out to anyone and anybody who thinks they could use an intelligent and skilled developer with a 'Get things done!' mindset on their team in Michigan.

My email is my username at gmail.

This is sort of an 'I'd like to connect with people' post. So even if you're not from Michigan, but would like to talk or ask questions, that would be awesome too.