skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi

I have 2 questions:

1) If you are being overwhelmed by the amount of books you are being suggested by mentors, entrepreneurs and others, how do you tackle this information overload so that you only read and implement the ones which would have the most impact in your life ?

2) What would you do if you had recent failure and now you don't have enough clarity about goals, life direction and the skills you wanna learn to succeed ? I'm 22/non-technical and got little bit of savings from sales commission I earned through online stuff after dropping out from my undergrad program. The money that I made from online sales was higher than the money I could had made from the job in next 10-12 yrs after getting my undergrad degree. So that sales thing is now busted and I was naive enough to believe that the sales gig would last long but it lasted only 1.5 yrs. I had no team at the time, didn't knew much about marketing, startups etc. It was just self employed thing. I'm living in asia. Although I could still start that sales thing again cuz now I know alot more, but it would be just like a commission you get. Should I work on some other idea/startup or get some skills before I do something. Right now I know little bit of sales/marketing. What do you suggest ?
Here in The Netherlands we're pretty Liberal ( or libertarian, if you will), but I guess it depends on what you're looking for. Political freedom? Nothern Europe is a safe bet, Sweden for instance. Financially shady stuff? Try Antigua. I guess it depends on what you mean by a hands off regulation.
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Boost Christmas conversions by 10.2% with a simple JavaScript (code included)
Ask HN: What's the best article against SOPA for posting on social media?
And then the government makes using all that fancy tech a criminal offense (if they could pass PATRIOT act and SOPA, why not), makes a few demonstrative cases, and suddenly no normal people want to be part of that, since for the most part, the internet is still working fairly okay for them.
There's no evidence why that would be sufficient proof. They may have different values than you and still consider things reasonable within their framework of values. Then you have to decide whether disagreeing with you on this particular value balance is enough to lose your vote in the context of their other values.
> I'd argue the opposite regarding tremendous efforts and motivation; dynamic languages were an after-thought for both the JVM and .NET, and on the JVM side you've only seen any attempts to improve performance recently, with invokedynamic for Java 7.

> The investments here occurred long after the VMs were developed.

That's a valid point. It is possible that some entirely new kind of VM could work, that was designed from the ground up for both static and dynamic languages. But I don't think we have any good idea of such a thing!

Until we do know how to do this, replacing the JS VMs in browsers would slow everything currently running. And adding another VM alongside it would decrease speed in other ways (see for example the papers that the Apple dev mentions in the WebKit discussion for why Apple opposes adding the Dart VM into WebKit).
This won't work, but we should do it anyway. Just because someone is going to do it, doesn't mean that someone should be me or any of the people I am responsible for hiring. Unethical is unethical. I won't be responsible for it and I don't want to work with any of the assholes that are.
> Because we all hate javascript.

Says who? I love JavaScript, as do a great many other developers. I look at CoffeeScript and all I can think is yuk.
It doesn't have to be any slower than highly optimized switch statements if you're willing to compile to JavaScript. All you need analysis / compilation support. I've been working on this for a while now for Clojure / ClojureScript.
The problem is that SOPA also introduces a whole bunch of HIGHY SCARY laws and procedures. Disney did not like that review of Cars that you wrote? Then can abuse SOPA to get you off the net, sue you, and kill your revenue streams.

DNS hacks are nice but don't solve the real underlying problems that will actually kill businesses and bankrupt people because of abuse of this law.
Made in Texas: Apple's A5 iPhone chip
relevant cartoon: http://www.flickr.com/photos/monkchips/4254681996/
Well at least he got the thing with the Superclasses right (the first part)
That's awesome, now we just need to figure out who the companies were. Thanks for that link.
sopahitlist.com is available. Perhaps it's too violent sounding, so better ideas are welcome.

It'd be a list of SOPA supporters in Congress, and encouragement for their constituents to call in and say something, and/or vote for the other guy at the next election.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their [the people's] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
To prevent it from passing, publicity and writing congressmen would seem to be the thing to do.

There's such a mountain of documentation supporting the fact that SOPA is a terrible idea, that it must be true that politicians simply don't care how bad it is. If so, then publicizing the facts will have little impact.

Instead, I'd say that the best strategy is to more directly threaten their livelihood: out them personally for being the idiots responsible. Don't publicize information about SOPA per se, but make sure that any Google searches for any of its supporters will show that this person is the one to blame.
DNS could be circumvented or supplanted. The real horror scenario is language mandating dropping addresses from routing tables making it into a treaty.
I fail to understand why taxpayers pay $174,000 as a salary to Congressmen given that 261 of them are millionares. Furthermore, I don't get why they're given a wage when dozens of them are being handed this salary or more on a single issue. McCain got paid almost 12 times as much on this bill as his wage.
Something like this was done in the Cory Doctorow book Little Brother. It's surprisingly relevant to the SOPA discussion.
> You are very confused. Asking google for a list of IPs does not provide you with their page rank. IPs are not domains, nor are they websites

No, you are again correct. But if I know the IP address and the domains associated with it's very easy to determine PR 2+ websites and also from there figure out which ones have multiple websites hosted on them.

Will you promise you're not trolling me?
How AOL Advertising Uses NoSQL to Make Millions of Smart Decisions Every Hour
The product is probably about 90 % done already, the last 10 % should take no more than two weeks

Spoken like a true non-technical cofounder :)

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the the pareto principle applies heavily to software development projects. It's quite likely that the "last 10%" will take much longer than you think.

That said, I've seen this happen quite often from inexperienced developers, and it sounds like you have one on your hands. It's easy for passion and ego to carry a project from a blank slate to a state of mostly-functioning. Hackers usually get a great rush from this stage of the project. It's their code, their architecture, their baby. Sure it's got some rough edges, but the important stuff is done. Their genius has been imbued into it, now comes the drudgery of polishing the edges - oh wait, this sucks. The process of turning something that works into something that's usable or salable is boring. What a letdown. They just solved this intractable problem in O(log n) time, and now you want them to make the interface's corners rounded or add some copy? Bah. They'd rather stare at the wall.

This is a total shot in the dark here, but I've seen it often enough that I'm fairly sure it's the mentality you're dealing with. And I can't say there's an easy solution. It's nearly impossible to motivate hackers who think creating software is all fun, all the time. You either chose a bad cofounder, or just a young one who needs some exposure to real software development projects. either way, I'd recommend a confrontation, followed up by hiring out if things don't change.
HN's own RyanResella won the $30k Apps for Communities Grand Prize
> webapps

Mostly interesting because of their content and what they do with it on the server.

> games

You've got to be kidding me. There is nothing technically interesting in any web game I've ever seen.

> social networking

Again, has nothing to do with interesting client-side technical challenges and everything to do with the content and community.

> You're talking language syntax.

Don't forget the semantics too.
Well, you can use graphite as a frontend to your RRD files if you like. I'm using it to view data gathered by collectd and am planning to throw some RRD files generated by jmxtrans at it soon.

If you were writing a tool that recorded time-series data, there's some explanation of why you might choose whisper over rrdtool at http://graphite.wikidot.com/whisper. I don't know of any other projects thats use whisper directly, though, and the creator of whisper is working on a replacement for it named ceres (http://graphite.wikidot.com/roadmap#toc0). The primary appeal is of the carbon daemon, which lets you send data to it over a super-simple protocol and takes care of persisting it for you.
I once thought as you do that this story or the hundreds of others like it were just exaggerations or failed comic sketch scripts. I once couldn't even comprehend where the humor came from in Dilbert.

Then I worked in government, health care, and big business as an employee and a contractor which allowed me to the great opportunity to meet these very people. This type of behavior is particularly common in companies that like to see managers move around so they can get experience in many parts of the business. In many companies it is actually regarded as a plus to supervise technical people without understanding anything about the technical process or some failed programmer becomes a manager.
> However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor protection is for? They can't just pull their domain if they are responding in a timely manner to reasonable DMCA takedown requests.

Or am I missing a point you're making? Entirely possible. It's 4:55. I'm burnt out.
I'd say the experience is quite easy, especially when using browserid.org/verify for verification.

My biggest criticism is the lack of a concretely defined spec for how the Verified Email Protocol works, if one wanted to implement it directly, rather than relying on browserid.org.

Based on the code in the repository, the protocol seems relatively straightforward. But, as it currently stands, it'd be difficult to implement it based on the paper spec alone.

Anyway, nice work on BrowserID. I'm excited to see where its headed.
wow, yahoo abandon it and it's still ahead of bing
The fact that they don't have legal info on their site doesn't mean they haven't lawyered up.
And no, a bad name won't kill your product. A bad product can kill a good name, though...

My advice: save yourself the headache, and come up with a new name. A lot of names don't make sense if you thnk about it. Facebook? My father thinks it's a photo booklet with headshots from your friends...
glad to see there's some appreciation for real physics and not just sensationalistic higgs + faster than speed of light stories
FYI:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/nehr6/as_requested...
In a perfect world, paying them salary would hopefully make them ignore individuals/companies offering them donations in exchange for favorable legislation because they already were making a good wage.

In the real world, it's just a $261,000 bonus.
In his defense, it was Sheila Jackson-Lee. Go watch any video of the woman, ever.
The next step is will be... robbers are allowed to break into anyone's house and take their money - well as long as the robbers "think" the people are terrorists/counterfeiters/bad-people... (and as long as the robbers are ... cops).

Uh, that was the previous step: https://www.google.com/search?q=asset+forfeiture
Tor? Why not I2P?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P
http://www.i2p2.de
> IMO Google chose to design Dart with curly braces.

I don't think minification was a concern. Familiarity was: the world's most popular languages are curly-based so adopting that makes the language easier to learn for millions of coders.
Eternal life holds no interest for me. Imagine living a million years, seeing and thinking all there is to see and think, then living a billion years after that. Then you realize that you're precisely 0% of the way to the finish line. Long after the heat death of the universe, a consciousness with nothing to cogitate.

No thanks.
احداث مصادمات مجلس الوزراء بالفيديو
I have emailed, wrote a letter and called my congressman. I also made sure to let them know that I will be a first time voter in the upcoming election.

I am not sure what else I can do. I definitely do not want to see SOPA / PIPA or anything of the like to pass.
Also, a link to Ryan's Github account: https://github.com/ryanatwork
From that same site [1], you can see a collection of checklists [1], one of which is the actual checklist that Pronovost created at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

[1] http://www.projectcheck.org/checklists.html
I really hope that the internet anthropologists of the future will someday read this thread and have a hearty laugh on our behalf in the knowledge that all our worries were for nothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Bus_Boycott

(agreed that it is very rare they work though)
Inlining integers in pointers by shifting up and adding 1 is a quite common trick though and I have seen it in more programming language implementations than MRI

This trick was already used in Smalltalk-80, btw. A more recent variant of this is NaN tagging, made popular by LuaJIT.
Also a UW student. This is hearsay, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's totally something I can believe.

One of the reasons why so many RIM jobs aren't as 'exciting' as Microsoft or Google jobs is because in the last last generation of RIM products, they actually had coops do a lot of work that got released into production, and then started playing hell after they left for the term. RIM apparently got burned pretty bad with that, so now attempts to limit how much coop work actually goes into production.

This was from gossiping with a RIM employee who I played Ultimate Frisbee with.
Using your data to visualize what your friends like
Keeping Grandma's photos fresh
Have you seen all the ICE FBI domain seizures over the last year? That part is already done and has been running along taking hundreds of domains in its first year of operations
>"If we make it to Friday morning without a test..." and this argument is simply FALSE. It's about something not possible. It is like saying "If 1 = 2..."

Well, yes it is like saying "if 1=2, then 2=4", but that doesn't mean that this line of thinking is an invalid one. It simply means that by showing the result to be wrong, the test at the start is also wrong. The statement isn't attempting to prove that 2=4 by assuming that 1=2. It's saying that we can show that 1 quite clearly doesn't equal 2 because the logic consequence of that would be wrong.

In the same way "If we were able to make it to Friday without a test, then we'll know that the surprise test is Friday" isn't an invalid line of thinking. It's simply showing that it can't be possible for the surprise test to be on Friday.
Exactly. The truth is, no-one points a gun at your head and promotes you. The only people who become managers want to be managers, or they'd turn it down, or quit and go find another tech job.
Did they reintroduce it? I saw it shot down around 5PMish EST, and rightly so, I suppose, if you believe in SOPA.
1) This is very common problem, everybody has problem of information overload. Its not possible to read all the book, read all the blog post etc you get the idea. We are always worried by not reading a particular book, we are missing on something important. Our mind try to deceive us whenever we are doing something that we are losing on something else, it will try to bump some idea so that you get off the work, its afraid that he might lose the control on you.

Solution: The main point here is taking back the control, when you are doing something and your mind tells that you are missing, or I have this another great idea. Ask him objectively what is the great idea or what I am missing, if he can answer your question, write it down in your notebook and politely say to him that I know you are trying to help me, I have duly noted down your suggestion / idea will work on it once I am done with the current stuff I am doing.

About books , blog , videos etc, I know I can find the something useful if I go find the dustbin again. The idea here is pick some gem, pick your books / blogs very acutely. Now trust that the book you are reading is sufficient and good and if you need to know anything other than this one, you will bumped by difficultly when you will be needed to know. I think the whole problem arise when we try to use books as Textbooks not as helpbooks, when we try to find the exact method in books not direction where to go from current situation.
The Manhattan Project was so named because of Columbia's involvement. Yet somehow NYC never landed the geek culture, almost as if it is squeezed out by squishier disciplines.

Good call Stanford.
Another alternative is to consider a service that handles storage/visualization/alerting/etc for your time-series data.
I work for a startup that does exactly that and there are other options in this space as well. Would love any feedback you guys might have: https://metrics.librato.com
Does this mean they're going to push out an update to remove it from existing phones or that only new ones won't have it?
Like what? In some of the countries I mentioned they already have replacements. You think google is big in china? Try Baidu. Somehow the Chinese economy has managed to struggle on :P

And Iran? Syria?

There are already lots of countries out there with tougher laws that have also gotten rid of this companies influences and are able to carry on. And some of them also have successful tech industries despite it.

We need a better solution then revolt of the entitled well off white nerds.

How about instead we pour all our money into counter lobby or governmental reform groups, like what Larwence Lessig is up to these days. That may be the only way to change things.

This idea of a protest is at least a decade too late.
Your Nexus S Could Taste Ice Cream Sandwich As Early As Today
> You have to remember that HTML is predated by
> SGML, and that HTML and its precursors were
> designed for the purpose of providing document markup.

I remember. I also remember there have been people arguing all along (back into the mid-90s, at least) that this document-centric approach has been totally unsuitable for a broader platform.

And yet, it's been more successful at delivering applications to the widest possible audience than any other platform. Why is that?

Enumerate all the features of the web you can think of that have enabled it to explode and thrive compared to networked applications and the popular VMs of the last 20 years. Then explain why you're certain that having a VM instead of a browser act wouldn't erode those advantages.

(This is the most important part of my comment. Feel free to ignore the rest.)

> HTML has fallen over in this context;
> the DOM is ill-suited towards standard
> re-usable UI widget programming,

I don't think the evidence is on the side of your claims. Given the sheer number of web pages and apps out there vs the number of desktop apps, the widgets built in to HTML are more widely used and re-used than most desktop API widgets, and the sheer proliferation of derived DOM-composite UI elements out there (particularly contrasted to the desktop) belies any claim of unsuitability for use: DOM elements are creatively styled and glommed together with a regularity that dwarfs anything from the desktop world.

That's use and suitability. Re-use? There are also several well-known and a lot more lesser known libraries that do indeed provide widgets at higher level of abstraction. JavaScript provides ample facilities for abstracting the DOM manipulation behind object and method calls. Whether or not it's used is another question, but any developer that can't learn to do that job in JavaScript either can't do it because they're unwilling to learn how to wield JavaScript, or because they'd be unable to do it with any language and API.

> JS is frustrating for building large applications

How so? There are plenty of developers out there who've found that if you embrace the features the language and most runtimes offer, it isn't any more difficult to build large systems with it than any other language. Though despite that, the language seems poised to embrace some of the features from others if for no other reason than to make developers who already know another language more comfortable.

> Moreover, Adobe Flash was not standardized

Standardized enough that the runtime was successfully targeted by a number of non-Adobe products.

> the documentation was sprawling and complex, and the bytecode format and libraries available changed significantly through the lifetime of the product.

And of course, our shiny new standard VM will avoid all these problems over its lifetime. ;)

> the performance profile is tremendously bad on mobile devices

It's actually better than I'd expect in a lot of cases, but it's true that it's not good enough for a lot of kinds of apps. But the language is not what's causing the problem, so adding other languages won't fix it, and might introduce other problems.
Federal Reserve Printed $29 Trillion to Aid the Banks
> Because we all hate javascript.

You only hate JavaScript when you're starting out. When you get to know the language and how to use it properly, you begin to appreciate it in a very unique way. Until you understand what prototypical programming truly is, you don't understand JavaScript.
For second problem, I would advice you, encourage you to go finish the undergrad if possible. If its not possible, don't worry its not the end of the world.

When I don't know what are my goals and dreams, I help others to accomplish there dreams and goals, that's really a great starting point. Go help some startup use your skills to further their goals and nourish your skills.
Space exploration not thrilling anymore
16 Free Courses from Stanford University
Ok, so the part where I said "If they could cash out right now, I bet they would" was apparently more true than I thought.

Apparently the CEO Mark Pincus sold some of his stock at $14/share in March and made $100m from it. Why in the world would a CEO sell stock of his own company before its IPO? Maybe because he needed the money, maybe he wanted to diversify. It seems a little odd to me that he would do that though.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/for-zynga-ceo--cash-came-early...
Not just if you vote in their districts!

For many people, congressional elections are decided before the race even starts. The best way to make your voice heard if you're in this position is to donate to closely contested campaigns in other districts.

As someone who votes in Texas, I'm intimately familiar with the "my vote simply does not matter" situation. Instead, I (literally) vote with my wallet.