skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that punctuation to indicate seriousness/sarcasm would never catch on because it would interfere with deniability, deliberate obscurity, signalling and (im)plausible deniability.

I wasn't really joking at all with my description. I mean there are almost certainly groups that fit that description perfectly among YC alumni.
Does the reverse (finding a business cofounder) also apply? What resources do you recommend a technical person gather (beyond things like Rework, which I grok, and Four Steps to the Epiphany, which I need to reread and try to grok)?
Founders new to coding write horrible code. And that is ok!

At the beginning the biggest risk is not writting terrible code you will regreat having written, let alone give maintance. The biggest risk is making something nobody wants.

From my experience, the biggest issue comes after you get enough traction/money/funding to hire a team. This is where things can get really bad, when the founder thinks he actually knows how to solve CS problems, and says things like: "This Machine Learning thing is not that hard: I wrote the landing page for the startup in 3 hours without any programming knowledge".

Hubris is one dangerous trait that will get anyone in trouble. Founders, due to their natural Reality Distortion Field[1], can be a victim of it[2].

Kent Beck, creator the agile methodology XP, discussed some of this in his The Flight of a Startup[3]

[1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/09/visionarys-lame...

[2] http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...

[3] http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=251
I haven't read it, and as you can see I have an axe to grind about him. If it's a collection of his RS articles, then I'd say not to bother. I'm a legal nerd, and I just find his coverage way too factually selective for my taste: I'd be afraid to quote him on any topic other than as a reflection of the fact that people are angry, because I worry that I would get called on for having the facts wrong. Every time I have ever dug into the facts behind a Matt Taibbi story I have felt shortchanged at best, lied to at worst. Your mileage may vary.

I do like Michael Lewis's writing - it's not perfect either, but he's good at presenting complex facts and tries to approach his material from a neutral standpoint. I have not yet read 'Reckless Endangerment' by Gretchen Morganstern and Joshua Rosner, but there seems to be an emerging concensus about it being the best serious book on the subject for a general audience.
I never see posts on HN from the perspective of "I'm a technical founder with an idea and a product, and I need a non-technical co-founder who can pitch, market and sell it".
The first couple YC batches were small enough that the money invested was probably a very small portion of what PG/Robert/Trevor earned from Viaweb.

For later batches, it had become evident that YC's model was promising, and YC also raised money from outside LP's.
Yes, you've got it. Local control.

Much better than lobbyist control.
What could be cooler for a few days work to be out in open beta? You get feedback from real users (not friends/well wishers) and if it works well or sucks, you at least get honest feedback.
Piracy bill could waylay FLOSS projects
With the last three projects I have started (none live, yet) the backend is nothing more than a REST API and the frontend a single HTML page with javascript, javascript, javascript.

This is what web applications are now and will be. The user experience can not be compared to the old style of application. If you are still building applications today that are GET, fetch, pause, render, etc. then you are years behind. It is awesome being able to click on a link to a 10-page forum thread or blog comment page and have it render in ~100ms.

I think all of the web server frameworks will have to adapt - from RoR to Django etc. since a lot of what they do is being moved to the client (and it becomes even cheaper to run large-scale web services because of this). There are also tons of gaps on the client side - from more capable and cachable templating engine through to a full-stack framework (something like RoR for Javascript but less confusing and hard to use than the current)

The server now is just db+REST, auth and pubsub - soon enough somebody will release a generic PaaS that does all this based on a schema. Almost no more, or very little, server-side code (unless you insist on supporting old HTML clients).
"Proof" as in mathematical proof. As in, it proves a particular mathematical model of the universe is consistent---but says nothing empirically about the actual universe. Am I missing something?
Agreed -- tangible honest feedback from real people is invaluable. Thanks for the feedback.
Touchscreens have no hand
I just added conditions & restarts today to Fancy (http://fancy-lang.org/). It's currently in a branch but it works =).
Thanks for the template Greg,

I've written the address a similar please. Good work!
When I read the title I was expecting an article on augmented reality
It really depends. Ideally, these guys you are asking for advice would either be potential customers or have some sort of interest in your application. Don't email the star street sports guys about a financial startup (unless it's a B2B product they may be interested in).

You'll want to cater specific feedback to each person you email Don't ask Alexis Ohanian technical questions - ask him about branding or design. Also - what do you honestly want feedback on? Don't think of this as a stepping stone towards VCs/Angels, you can get honest feedback about your application that may help you tremendously.

And don't forget to reciprocate. Introduce them to people you know that may be helpful in their business.

Email me if you have any follow up questions rcavezza[at]gmail [dot]com
All the notation is marginally useful when you're writing math on a chalkboard, but saving a few characters in source code isn't really worth it. I like languages that resist the urge to make use of those letters above the number keys.

The fact that Haskell allows libraries to define their own operators is a crime against humanity that justifies the sort of criticism usually leveled at Lisp macros, which is that it's impossible to guess what they mean without looking them up.
that is because most tech people think they can do sales, marketing and ops while non-tech people know they can't code.
Regular expressions: greedy vs. lazy quantifier
I'm sorry, but ..what? While Masnick's critique may not be wholly comprehensive, and is most definitely emotional, I'd argue that in this case some emotion is appropriate.

This legislation is indefensible; even in a diluted form it will almost certainly have a disproportionately chilling effect on innovation in one of the most vibrant sectors of our economy.
Hi quadrix,
Do you have any more promo codes?
Those aren't the only choices.

We have representative republic, not a democracy.

I would prefer no coercion at all. Let people join a political entity if they wish and let them leave if they don't like how its going.

And these political entities can cooperate amongst themselves. Or not.

For example, the nations of Europe might choose to cooperate on border control. Some might share have a common currency. They don't have to be forced.

The merits of an initiative are enough to entice them to participate. And if a particular thing fails, they should be able to walk away from it.

Obviously, there's no guarantee government won't still screw up. But at least you're not trapped.
SMS URI on Android: it boggles the mind.
"I put a DRSSTC on top of a hat..."
Why is bamboo flooring better than hardwood?
Vaio X has a standard DC barrel pot, ive powered it on anything from junk-heap printer wall-warts to 20-cent car-adaptors to lab bench-supplies without hassles.

other things it has over the air are half the weight owing to carbon fiber vs aluminum and a smaller battery owing to an Atom CPU (a feature - can tell which code is slow), and a full array of hardware ports and slots, a matte-screen with almost 0 reflected light readable in direct sun, a fan that is off most of the time, and GPS/3G. gma500 is main problem, but Alan Cox's driver is getting OK enough to use
1. The browser plugin is just to launch the game, not render the pages.

2. The "massive JS framework" won't seem so massive once you browse a few pages – the payload savings will likely pay off pretty quickly. Notice that the AJAX data for the index page was 4KB, vs. 18KB for the fully rendered page.

3. Cross-language templating languages aren't so rare (Mustache being a very popular choice).

Consider this: once you want even just one tiny widget on the page to update via AJAX or push notifications, you've already got the code to support half of these features.
Why All Filmmakers Should Speak Out Against SOPA
Although I think there's room for discussion on the amounts, these seem like sensible counter-proposals that do a lot to overcome the objections of consumer advocates. I'd be OK with a law of this form and figure that one could build in support for intermediate levels of investor sophistication after a year or two. A $1000 cap is low enough to ensure nobody gets wiped out while still being viable for bootstrapping. Alternatively, I'd suggest $2500 - the same amount that individuals can donate to a political candidate.

The other requirements are sensible and might help budding entrepreneurs put pressure on their state legislatures to simplify, streamline, and reduce the cost of the incorporation process.
Nope, because I'm chicken. Also, I have crap bandwidth.
Jack Dorsey does 8 hours at Twitter, 8 hours at Square, 0 hours at life, daily.

Sorry to say, but considering the amount of work we do daily. Its difficult to separate work from life.

Work and life aren't two different things. Work is life, and life to a great extent is some kind of a work.

To make your life awesome, you have to do awesome work.
Guide To Rewarding Community Members
Congrats guys! That is awesome!
QuickTime MOV Files Converter - Multimedia software on iPOTT
A hacker is "[a] person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system" and this site is called "Hacker News".

And yes, we are going to help each other improve the security of our systems. If we don't, someone malicious will.
I think he means exactly what you just described. That if you're paid hourly you'll get overtime so don't complain lest you be fired. That simply deciding you don't want to work those hours regardless of the overtime pay is not on the table. That if you're a salaried employee and a white collar worker, somehow any and all abuse is justified in the name of making you really earn that 85K a year plus some options we're probably going to screw you out of anyway. That you can be fired for trying to organize. That you can be fired for being sick, subsequently lose access to health care, and die. That you get two, maybe three weeks vacation a year, if you're lucky. And we'll shit on you for taking it, btw.

I guess what he's getting at is that the US is a pretty terrible place to work and live, gilded though the cage may often be, and it is hard to disagree.
dang! no street view available
> Just consider the fact that Apple stuck with one standard connector -- however flawed -- for the iPod since day one

Nitpick: They did not. The original iPod only had a 6-pin FireWire connector for data and power; the dock connector was only added on the third-generation iPod, which was the first to use USB.
We are a startup called Glancee. We build a mobile app (iphone version + android version) that finds people in your area with friends or interests in common with you. The apps are native objective-c and java apps, and the backend is a mix of python, mondodb, and a bit of erlang.

A month ago we decided to build a facebook app to reach users that don't have a smartphone. We chose not to change one bit of code in the backend, and we were able to build the web app in 3 weeks with backbone, jquery, and websocket-js.

You can try it here: http://apps.facebook.com/glancee

The app is just one 40-line html page, the rest is javascript (and templates embedded in js). You never refresh the page when clicking a link, which gives you the feeling of using something as fast and robust as gmail.

CSS files and JS files are compressed with requirejs before being deployed, so to load the page you need three requests (plus images). Right now our biggest bottleneck is the facebook api, which is tremendously slow.
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well.. just like any other law.

everyone is guilty all the time. or have you never ever checked an sms while in a red light?

"to my friends everything. to my enemies, the law!"
So therein lies the fatal shortcoming in the "real names" policy. Looking beyond privacy and anonymity issues (though those are important), the policy itself doesn't work simply because the concept of a canonical name for a person doesn't really exist.

In some cultures it's prevalent to go by your middle name. In some others preferred names are shortened from its legal form. Some people have multiple names, each one just as legal and valid as the other (I have both a legal English and Chinese name, for example).

Nothing that Facebook (or to be fair, G+) does accounts for any of this, and without a framework to manage a person's many names (not to mention identities), a "real name" policy is both shortsighted and unenforceable.

My original point stands - we've established and agree that asking Salman Rushdie to use Ahmed Rushdie is stupid and unacceptable. Rushdie got this decision reversed because he's famous and published. Anyone else would not be so lucky. So why does this policy continue to exist and get enforced?

[edit] And something else: my parents had the foresight to officialize my English name when we immigrated to North America. Many other Chinese I know have gone by English names for decades and yet never got it cemented legally. According to Google/Facebook these people have no claim over these names, despite the fact that all of their friends and family have known them by only that name for decades.

So I guess what these companies are trying to communicate is, if I pay the paltry fee to get my name legally changed to Superfly McAwesome tomorrow, that's a-ok by them. But an account belonging to Ho Li-Jen, who's gone by "Jean" all her life, who is known by her neighbors and friends by that name, needs to be found and made to fix their account.

Nice priorities.
Hm.. I tried doing this on windows but it turned out to be a lot of work to get it setup correctly. npm is hard to install on windows, and the jquery project depends on contextify, which has a binary. It does have a windows build though: https://github.com/Benvie/contextify
(1) Top Paw Rescue Inc.
Fast Runner - Military Robotic Biped
nice try. but to enforce that the prosecutor would have to call the guy "a complete moron"... i don't think the jury would take that very well.
404.

The date in the URL is wrong.

http://www.thecuriousentrepreneur.com/2011/11/14/what-losing...
Depends on your definition of ethics.
* Consequentialism ethics: make sure the benefits to users outweighs the harm to them (in your judgment)
* Deontological ethics: do the morally right thing (for some definition of morally right)
* Or pick some other ethical theory

Pragmatically, you want users and prospective users to feel that you are being ethical (assuming they know what your app is up to). Technical people often have a hard time putting themselves in the user's shoes (when users are non-technical). Just pitch your idea to some non-technical friends and ask them if your plan sounds "ethical."
Step by Step Guide on How to Write a Literature Review
Accurate terminology and proper structure is very essential to maintain the flow and readability. Only then you will be able to prove your credibility, and gain trust of the reader. It is very important that the reader gets clear idea of the topic that is being discussed.
Intel 4004, the first CPU, is 40 years old today
Without criticizing Pulse, why are you all so congratulatory of this move? What does Pulse do?
Just to note: This is a licensing change (I think). Because flex developers have had access to ALL the flex code for years now. (And all the embarrassing comments as well ;) )
FYI, Armin doesn't mention it in his article but the guys that built Battlelog, ESN, is releasing the web framework behind it: http://www.esn.me/product/planet/. They also have a great service, BeaconPush similar to Pusher, only better IMO. Both because it supports the notion of users and also it has both a Flash websocket and XHR long polling fallback where as Pusher only has Flash websocket fallback (believe me, this matters, I've tried both).
I've been reading comments on Hacker News since this happened, and I have to say, you people sure have a funny definition of "failure".

https://joindiaspora.com/tags/NewHere – New users every one or two minutes.

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commits/ – Multiple commits, sometimes dozens, every day, many from volunteers.

Would that I were fortunate enough to "fail" this well.

Attributing Ilya's suicide to "failure" is, to my eyes, condescending, and I wish you all would stop it.
Honestly, the odds are so skewed in your favor that the only thing you need to do (if you're happy being the tech guy) is meet quality business co-founders. Let it be known that you're available. Go to meet-ups like Hackers and Founders. Go to founder-dating events. Build a cool sample app and post on HN.

Business guys will seek you out (at least, they do for me) - assuming you can hack, you're that one guy in green.
I received the following response:

We, too, feel that civil liberties are crucial, and by spreading knowledge, the Wikimedia Foundation strives to liberate minds. However, we cannot get involved in matters that do not directly affect our ability to spread such
knowledge, as we need to keep an unbiased stance, both within our encyclopedias and in our interaction with society at large. Also, please be aware that Wikimedia is a global endeavour and the English version of Wikipedia is only one of many, and the United States is just of many countries where it is published. As a matter of fact, less than half of the contributions on Wikipedia originate in the US.
Are you good enough to work at Socialcam?
> an exterior Siri button and purple LED

That's really gross, and exactly the kind of design choice Apple never makes.
Enkoder: JS Email obfuscator
> With the last three projects I have started (none live, yet) the backend is nothing more than a REST API and the frontend a single HTML page with javascript, javascript, javascript.

You might be doing that already, but the article mentions (if I got that right) that if you GET an arbitrary URL, the server will still serve the whole rendered page - asynchronous loading only happen on any subsequent requests.

This way, you don't "break" URLs, pleasing search engine crawlers and allowing copy/paste of the links, and still delivering a great experience for the user.

I truly believe there is a big demand for a Node.js framework to facilitate this. There are already a few that allows this kind of architecture (to some degree), but none are quite "there" yet.
> each request is largely stateless

Negative. Siri remembers the context of your conversation.
Only Android's modifications to the Linux kernel and a few other tools are under GPL. Most stuff is Apache 2.0.
I will come out and admit that when I read "network of stripes" I was thinking "oh, a story about RAID".

This is interesting too, though. Most likely it is a military installation similar to what exists in the US.
That's because most distributed data stores are eventually consistent. This works fabulously in a world where data needs to exist in a handful of places (say, a user's email inbox, which should be replicated so it can be accessed quickly from different geographical areas and for the sake of disaster recovery) but need not necessarily all agree with each other at the same time (If I send you an email, it's OK if you don't get it for 5 or 10 minutes, in fact, it's generally expected).

The problem with social networking is that such silos don't exist anymore. You can't even group users into larger silos with their cliques, because most social circles are overlapping (for some reason people feel compelled to keep making friends throughout their lives). So instead of the trivial email case of caching, you're fighting this battle where you have to constantly trade off consistency (do we synchronously write to every cache in every cluster in every region?) with performance (obviously not, round trip time to sweden is like 200 ms).

And you're thinking "Well, a consistent user experience is the most important thing, so just block the user's notification until the data is available to them." Well how do you know the data is available to them? They might see the notification on their cell phone, which is routed to the east coast for DNS reasons, but the write hasn't made it over to the west coast for whatever reason yet, and they're accessing it on their PC. If you wait for it to appear everywhere, two users sitting beside each other in a dorm room think that Facebook sucks because one guy posted on the other's ten minutes ago and it's not there yet. This isn't a logical consequence to the end user of a backhoe cutting a fiber line somewhere in oregon.

To summarize, it's a super hard problem, which makes it incredibly interesting to work on :) https://www.facebook.com/careers
Netflix appears to be in the first category, as well. They would do well to clarify their position. The last thing they need is more bad press in the tech world.
Ha! Very true, I didn't even picture it and indeed I can't. I don't think they would actually put any Siri hardware features on a MacBook in the first place, so I went off the deep end there.
if tor users would stop running bittorrent through it, my two nodes would still be exits instead of relays. DMCA complaints can quickly take down an exit node in the US.
Just got the same response. Bummer :P
I'm talking about the Siri outages at peak times, which seem to have subsided for now but indicate that they weren't ready for even the demand they've had.
How Instagram’s Filters Came About
What Happened to Kinect?
the comparisons of flash and html5 are nonsensical.

flash can do all sorts of things. i can remember when it was mainly for animations. playing video is just one of the many things flash can do.

there _may_ have been a need for something to replace mime and plugins, and for whatever reason macromedia's shockwave flash (swf) emerged as an interim solution. but adobe just abused its position. they are not an honest company when it comes to web users. they cannot be trusted.

html5 solves the problem(?) that flash was being used for, namely, playing media files through the browser. but we will have open source and we don't have to deal with a shady company like adobe.

html5 is not a flash replacement. you don't "transition" from flash to html5. html5 just keeps adobe and their sneaky tactics away from web video. and that's good for web users.

still, the fact remains, plugins (open source code not part of mozilla or another other browser, e.g., vlc or ffmpeg) are better media players than browsers. so i'm left to wonder if all this was really necessary.

stream this, stream that, but youtube is still using progressive download. so go figure.

last i checked mime still works. yet it was pretty much abandoned by the browser teams.

i'll bet there is really no good reason either.

just as there was no good reason we should be letting adobe control web video. adios adobe.
The Business of The Future