skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been working for two months on a system built by hackers. Lots of hackers. All with their own different ideas.

Guess what?

I'd choose Abstraction Overload over Death By A Thousand Hacks any day.

Actually this system shows signs of a different antipattern - the "Protoductiontype" - the prototype that some idiot throws into production too soo, which becomes so vital to the business that it's irreplaceable (and entropies real fast into an unfixable mess).
uStew.com -

403 Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

What gives?
Really? I'll elucidate. There hasn't been a national copper interconnect (POTS) for a long time now. You might, have copper to the house but after that it's fiber all the way down. AT&T and all the large carriers leverage this to carry your voice traffic as data and on top of that can carry 'internet data' and whatever else.

With AT&T goes the data, even if you haven't had a 'phone line' in a long time.
"Prototype as fast as possible" is itself a rigid programming philosophy.
Setting up a (free) vpn in no time
Ray Ozzie Gathering Ex-Microsoft Colleagues for New Start-Up, Cocomo
Hi there. My name is Doug, I work at ck12.

If you're interested in learning more, contributing, or giving feedback please email me at doug@ck12.org I'd love to hear from you (or anyone else). Thanks.
At the same time you just pointed to one of the flaws in your argument that EC2 is overpriced: You are comparing two services which are very different. It's even right there in the name: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 allows for elasticity and scalability and therefore is not very strong in the pet-project market. If you want to talk about a rip-off, compare it with Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine or some other services and identify in your post on which grounds you compare them. A dedicated server has very little in common with an EC2 instance.

I bet you could buy a laptop for less than 100 USD, install your LAMP server on it an connect it to any leased line to get superior performance to an EC2 instance. But you lose all the advantages EC2 was created to have.
That's not so different from the way I'm approaching the startup I'm working on. It did start as something that I just thought would be cool to work on, and everything is open-source, and I definitely figure that I win from doing the project no matter whether it becomes commercially successful or not.

That said, I feel like it is something that has a chance commercially, and we are actually employing the Customer Development / Lean Startup model to things. I don't necessarily see that as incompatible with "doing cool stuff." I'm just prioritizing the "cool stuff" a little, based on feedback from potential customers. That's a sacrifice that I, personally, can live with. YMMV. :-)
1. It should be open-source or

Flexbook is a project working on this, the few books I've looked at are cc-by-nc-sa. www.ck12.org/flexbook/
I have Comcast for an Internet connection, whereby basic cable comes along "for free" because of the way they price things.

Last winter, in a series of roughly three major steps, my Comcast bill went up 24%. I didn't change a thing, and I was already beyond the end of all "introductory offers" and the like.

Of course, my state regulators have done nothing about this, and I don't expect any intervention from the FCC, either.

24% bump, over the course of about 4 months.

They aren't just a monopoly/duopoloy/oligarchy in content. That's the problem.

P.S. Actually, in the transition to digital-only TV service, I've lost service/content. Two out off three PBS stations and a few cable channels that they used to throw into the basic mix (obviously removed as part of their pressure to get basic subscribers to upgrade). And of the signal that remains, despite being delivered in analogue format, it is horribly full of digital compression artifacts due to what much be severe constraint upstream combined with piss-poor conversion.

In my mind, in this Comcast has failed to live up to its commitment to the FCC to maintain unchanged existing analogue service until... 2013, I believe is the year they ended up at during negotiations. Of course, no other regulatory authority nor the FCC is doing a thing about this.
I think you're missing the fact that textbooks are written by people. They don't magically appear. Writing a good textbook requires the passion of a single expert author, who must dedicate years of his or her life to write it. There are very few shortcuts. And crowd-sourcing is definitely not one of them.

A more innovative approach, I think, would be for the government to buy out leading textbooks at a premium and after holding an auction to determine the fair price. This gives you the best of both worlds -- rewards for individuals' efforts but the ability to use the published material in an unrestricted way in the future. Plus you avoid the loss associated with monopoly rights granted via copyright and wasted duplicative textbook efforts.

This ideas has been proposed more broadly for patents by Prof. Michael Kremer of Harvard. Its logic is pretty compelling:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2000/0...
When you are browsing the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is important to look at the several metrics they measure for unemployment. BLS reports U-3 as "The Unemployment Rate", but many people feel that U-6 is a better measure of unemployment.
It's pretty safe to say that if the cost of the highest cable package is a non-issue to you, you're in the top 10% of earners in the country. Keep that in mind.
What VPN service do you use that gives you access to both US and UK endpoints?
I think the other huge benefit of college and something that is often not talked about is the social and networking aspect of being at a top-tier university.

The most meaningful things I got out of my 4 years as an undergrad and 2 as a grad student were meeting people that could truly help me in my career.

While I was in college I met people that:

1. Helped me land multiple book deals with O'Reilly
2. Got me to conferences I would not usually have been able to go to.
3. Got me a great job doing design/development for the University.
4. Introduced me to the founders of Slashdot--one of whom sat on my thesis committee.
5. Allowed me to make connections with faculty and staff that have led to business contracts and even an adjunct faculty position at MSU.

I would be nowhere if it wasn't for my college degree--but you have to do more than go to class--that's the easy part. Network and meet people, there will never be higher concentration of fucking brilliant and well-connected individuals as there are a major universities.
When asked the stock question "What is your biggest weakness?" I have actually answered it with "Answering standard interview questions."

And I still got the job.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وبايرن ميونخ بث مباشر مباراة تاريخيه وديه 7/1/2012
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وبايرن ميونخ بث مباشر اليوم
ماتش الاهلي وبايرن ميونخ اليوم بدون تقطيع
الاهلي وبايرن منيونخ بث مباشر
مباراة الاهلي وبايرن ميونخ بث مباشر
الاهلي وبايرن ميونخ 2012 مباراة وديه
http://mobilatco.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4614
Interesting analogy.

But couldn't that be said of any profession? Everyone should learn to apply medical procedures or represent themselves in a court of law? Ya it would be awesome to have a nation full of great doctors. The problem is that each of these things is a specialization that takes thousands of hours of study and experience to do well.

Yes, the barrier of entry to programming is much lower, but that doesn't mean it doesn't require the same amount of time to be a good coder as it does to be good in other professions.
Travel Time Tube Map (Built with Processing)
I think the rhetoric around MVP all boils down to market maturity...

MVP: If you are in a brand new market with few competitors you should put out an MVP. You will likely beat your competitors to the punch on visibility and customers will be willing to pay because of the relatively few quality alternatives.

No-MVP: If you are in a mature market your MVP will get you nowhere because there will be many competitors already there who are already competing with very mature products. (Ex. how many people will buy your MVP car made out of a hunk of steel, wheels, and a mower engine... 0 people)

So why all this talk of MVP...

Because many of the tech and startup markets of the last 5-10 years are maturing.

If you are creating a Fart iPhone app - that thing better be polished and be the best damn fart app because that market has become mature (well i suppose the wrong word choice but you get my drift).

On the other hand, if you are creating an iPhone app that lets you control your microwave, an MVP version would most likely be beneficial because its unknown if there is even all that much of a market for that.
Here is Jeff Atwood's response to that post dated Feb 2008, which gives you some idea about the date of the DHH post:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/02/douchebaggery.html
The goal is to raise awareness. For example, every cable news program in America would cover it as one of the day's top stories. You can't buy that with money.
I see two problems with this:
(1) They are apparently not attempting to discipline the students who cheated.
(2) They are requiring those who did NOT cheat to re-take the test.

And the biggest problem (but which PERHAPS they are planning to address) is this:
(3) If 1/3 of the student body cheated, then the school system itself has a problem.
He's a music analyst, so he probably means streaming. I'm not sure if he means from Youtube et al. or from dedicated music-piracy websites. It does seem like streaming is easier and has less risk of legal repercussions than file sharing.
I found his moral section on security interesting:
"...The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution."

and

"I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts. There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house."

So while interested in trusted code and security, he was also interested in criminal penalties for unauthorized access to computer systems. Of course, it's an unstoppable force and the metaphor with the real world is tenuous --it's just an interesting take.
That's incredible. Congrats!! :)

Are we allowed to ask how/if they're making money?
Who provides the bandwidth and hardware for the cloud?

Hint: It's not twilio. It's companies like AT&T, Level 3, Amazon, MS, etc.
There's nothing more infuriating and insulting to me than being asked to write some lame string sorting function on a pad of paper during an interview. I've been burned more than once because of pop quizzes like these before... lots of missed opportunities because some HR person thinks that writing dinky code no one actually uses in a real project is more important than my portfolio of projects that I've designed, created, and maintained.
This seems like a contrived example. You don't usually want recursive code in your product.

A more useful example was when I asked my high school AP Computer Science class years ago to test if an array of integers contained a poker straight without using a parser, assuming ace=1, jack=11, queen=12, king=13. The key was to see if they knew how to think about algorithms. I wanted them to perform a sort and iterate across the array, but was interested in what they came up with. It tested a lot of important concepts in thinking about problems, which is more important to me than correct syntax on a whiteboard or implementing valid recursion on the fly.
Share The Joy Of Coaching
Know you can share your experiences to people easily way of Coachtube" Providing all your sports information tips and share your experiences in a face to face on videos.
"Are the traditional cable premium channels like HBO & Showtime even relevant anymore? I would hate to be them."

Seeing as how their original content is widely torrented, yes.
To put that in perspective, Flickr is at 1.5B. LinkedIn, 2.7B.

Edit: I'd like to go on record with a bet that by the end of the year, reddit will get more traffic than LinkedIn (which currently has a market cap in excess of $6,000,000,000).

Anyone want to bet against me?

https://plus.google.com/u/1/109191382354704910211/posts/ZRiC...
Seems like Apple is planning to implement multi-user mode in iOS with face recognition based login ie a user just enter his PIN, however, the camera detects which account to load.
(IMHO, more secure than the current Android implementation)
Article talking about related patent:
http://www.cultofmac.com/137393/apple-patent-details-facial-...

I would imagine at that time, they might support Guest logins.

EDIT: the implementation detail of Face recognition talked above is my own take on how it should be done. Not suggested by the referenced article.
Oh, I didn't realise much of Riak was in C, and the website now mentions Erlang a whole lot less than I remember. Still, in the technology stack http://basho.com/technology/technology-stack/ Riak Core seems to be all Erlang. Bitcask is possibly C--is that what you're referring to?
It felt a bit unfair that someone who hasn't contributed to a project in more than a year, declared it obsolete and urged everyone to move on (even if they were the original founder).

Also the choice of Couchbase to use "Couch" in their product name while completely breaking API compatibility between Couchbase Server and Apache CouchDB is a sly move.

All that left a bad taste in mouth. Good to see someone from Cloudant responded.
>Interesting to note that computer/math degree holders don't fare far better than recent humanities and liberal arts graduates. Journalism majors perform even better.

...if you only look at the unemployment numbers. Scroll down and look at the earnings numbers and you will see a very different picture.

I would be very interested to see the standard deviations on these unemployment and earnings numbers. I'd be willing to bet that they are much larger for humanities/liberal arts/journalism majors than for the engineering/computer science/math majors.

A liberal arts degree is very much what you make of it: if you are smart, motivated, and disciplined, you can get an incredible education and emerge with a much sharper mind. On the other hand, if you are lazy, stupid, and/or unmotivated, you can carefully pick classes and profs that require minimal effort to get by, and graduate without developing yourself in any meaningful way. I went through college with both types of people. I knew one guy who chose English as his major because he thought it would be the easiest major. He was right, mostly because he made it true: every semester when it was time to sign up for classes in the next semester, he would build a matrix of all of the books on the reading lists of all of the available classes, and then figure out which combination of classes had the greatest amount of overlap. This saved him a lot of money on books, a lot of time on reading, and probably some effort on writing. At the end of four years he had a degree and a job, and that's all he really cared about. If he had put half as much effort into work as he put into avoiding work, he could have had himself a hell of an education.

A technical degree, on the other hand, doesn't allow for such a wide range of effort inputs: if you put in minimal effort you won't just waste your time, you will fail. I saw this happen as well. More commonly, I saw people realize, "Holy shit, this stuff is serious, I can't just cruise!" and switch majors to something where they could get away with minimal effort.

As Jtsummers pointed out, humanities/liberal arts majors seem to enter into a wider range of employment fields, including (as ghurlman pointed out) software. As yummyfajitas pointed out, ability bias accounts for a large portion of the college wage premium. However, over the last few decades the percent of people going to college has increased dramatically. Some of those new people most likely have suitable levels of ability to attend college, but a lot of them almost certainly do not. Those who do not either fail out or gravitate to programs that will allow them to graduate despite the fact that they are not getting a true college education, like the English major I mentioned above. I think that these people are pulling down the numbers for such majors. If you were somehow able to sort out the "serious" liberal arts graduates from the "slackers," I think that you would find that those individuals who put in the effort to truly benefit fromt their liberal arts educations have unemployment and earnings numbers at least comperable to people with technical degrees.
Seems majorly confusing, and will potentially divide the community. Couchbase vs CouchDB. Can anyone explain the difference?
If that were the right solution, why does iOS have homescreen icons at all?
Kindle Touch Gestures
Yes, how many of those eyeball visits produce revenue, and does the company have actual earnings (profits)?
Awesome. Great post & discussion. Thanks for sharing.
This seems like a failure on the part of the publishers to collect all the money they could. There are large fixed costs to produce the first textbook, but relatively low marginal costs to produce the next million. If the publishers had some sort of "budget-impacted schools" program, under which schools that would otherwise share textbooks among students could buy textbooks at a relatively small markup over marginal cost (as opposed to the full amortized total cost), then they'd still be making more, and the schools would get the benefit of the use of the textbooks.
Corrected Link: http://www.netcoalition.com/
One thing about that though, Flask seems to monitor file changes in its project tree and reload whenever any of the files have changed, and with my OCD symptom of saving after every few dosen keystrokes, the reload script keps crashing on syntax errors taking the rest of the server with it.
Actually, there is significant case law to support this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._O_Centro_Espirita_B...

A christian/amazonian group fought the government to import and consume a schedule 1 narcotic in their ceremonies. If sharing information is central to kopism's practices then it seems it would be discriminatory to prevent them from doing so.
I started my blog partly to get things off my chest, partly to gain eyeballs - call me crazy, but having eyeballs that listen to your messages feels great.

Which is why "maintaining a blog" is not necessarily distinct from "hacking together your own blog" (which is not something I'm doing btw, as I'm using already available tools). The reasons for that have to do with methods of gaining conversions.

Conversions are hard to gain. Good content is kind, however many people that write good content then wonder why they don't get conversions. And sometimes it doesn't have anything to do with your content, but with the actual presentation. Marketing people have a word for it: "merchandising".

And if the blog is important to you, then it makes sense to approach it just like you would approach application development. You start with something simple, then gradually add to it. You also respond to user feedback. You make sure your design is bearable to read (I've skipped on many blogs with awful designs, which is why tools like Readability are a gift to our world). You also may be interested in doing A/B testing. And so on.

Doing this on e.g. Wordpress is doable as it has a great community and lots of plugins. But messing around with plugins, fixing dependencies and vulnerabilities, getting rid of crap you don't need, optimizing the user experience, finding a theme that doesn't make your eyes bleed and so on ... also takes lots and lots of time. There's no silver bullet.

I also like Tumblr, but it is unsuitable for the purposes of my blog. Tumblr is designed for writing opinions longer than tweats or for posting pictures. It isn't designed for long tutorials that also have code in them.

With my Jekyll blog I could even write a plugin / or some kind of script that runs/tests the posted code for me. And do so automatically on submit. And having your content in GitHub - is so freaking awesome. If you don't see it, just wait until somebody sends you a pull request for a fix in your article.
There is absolutely nothing stopping most people from just breaking a window and climbing into their neighbor's houses. But people don't generally do that, because there's a social stigma against it. There's no security around men's and women's bathrooms to make sure only the "right" people go in, but people know they shouldn't do that. There's no physical barrier on (most) roads to prevent a driver from going on the other side of the road, or ignoring lights, but drivers take courses that explain how to drive properly. That's the kind of cultural gap he's talking about. Stealing is easy, but we teach kids from an early age to respect each other's property. We could easily instill the same respect for digital territory, but culture hasn't caught up yet. I think it will soon though.
Ask HN: two questions about seed loans
We're currently looking to take a seed loan in the amount of 10-15k, probably from someone we know, to bring us through the next 6 months of alpha development.

First question: For this kind of (high-risk, IT start-up) loan, what's a reasonable interest rate? Any considerations on how this is typically set up? What should we take into account in negotiating it?

Second question: How much of a financial cushion would you recommend taking? My most optimistic financial projections say that we will probably make it with 8k, but of course we want at least a little safety net for unanticipated expenses and delays. What kind of range do you typically see for start-ups' in terms of safety capital?
Is Best Buy Really Finished?
HBO and Showtime are my favorite channels; too bad I can't get them because I don't want cable.
YmMot,

I see where you're coming from. I think the issue is that 99% (100%?) of all HNers would likely be great hires for most companies, so they see these questions as trivial, dumb, and not representative. Just the fact that someone thinks about these types of questions and reads programming blogs probably puts them ahead of most of the programming population.

The problem is that many of us have really never seen the mythical horrible programmer. The person that really can't even start a solution to FizzBuzz. The one that leaves the interviewer wondering how the person got jobs at other companies. I have seen and interviewed them before and it's frightening and uncomfortable for everyone involved. I've had candidates break down crying when I asked them to write a simple sql select statement on the board because their resume said expert in sql. For many, it's hard to fathom these people are out there, but they do exist.
I really don't know what s right way to interview, but I do know that you are actually hiring a team not set of individuals. You need to have balanced team (means to be smarter than you on each of the important fronts) to deliver a successful product.

So I guess it might be ok to hire somebody based on brainteaser if you need a sharp, quick thinking person which will be a great asset during brainstorming sessions. I don't know.
How Facebook built its Timeline feature
I'm guessing they are making money (ads & reddit gold) since they have been able to make a few hires recently.

Unfortunately the overall quality of content on reddit has really gone downhill. Even after unsubscribing to the subreddits that were the worst offenders, it's really hard to find interesting stuff with meaningful discussions. These days I'm almost embarrassed to tell people I use reddit.