skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand where you are coming from. I feel the same about some MVP posts on HN time to time.

But if you were to ask me, MVP literally is what it says, a minimum viable product. Just a product decent enough so that other people can use it or to check it out.

I know many companies that spends over a year getting ready for MVP, myself included, and it depends on the product. Some products take a long time to get the MVP out and it's just the nature of the business.

As for honeybadger, I put this tool up over two weekends. I use it for my purpose and it's still too early to tell what I can do with it. All I know right now is that, this tool comes in handy for me even at the current state, just pulling up crunchbase data site to site. But learning from today, I realize I am facing an issue in that obtaining the API to get the traffic stats isn't free (there's a daily quota limit) so there does need to be a way for me to offset this cost somehow when I upgrade to premium. I just hope it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Interesting piece, and for the most part, spot on. A few thoughts as I read this, though:

> I need to use other peoples work to make myself look cool through sharing them with my friends

To me, sharing other peoples work is a channel for opening up dialog with my peers and learning more about them, and sharing more about myself. While I see that "looking cool" may sometimes be a motive, I think many may share things to spawn discussion (i.e. HN).

> I need to hear what others think before I form an opinion (If you have ever read a review of a new gadget before it launches: think about how ridiculous this activity is)

This one really threw me. Sure, forming an opinion based on reading reviews before something launches is ridiculous, but if somebody has a gadget that is soon launching that you may be interested in, it is only part of curiosity embedded in human nature to read what their experiences of it.

And I definitely go by others' experiences (reviews -- "what they think") of a product before making a purchase. To me, this is just being responsible with my money, and time -- and I believe this has paid off for me, and will probably always do this. I know several that don't do this, and often end up regretting purchases they make.

Reading others experiences -- not just on products, but in general -- help us be more educated and can prevent us from making mistakes. The key is to be able to filter out objective experiences vs. subjective garbage.

> Get off the popular train - teach yourself not to judge based on anything other than your own view.

I find that most people I know either follow pop culture or avoid it -- rarely have I heard about someone that on one end of the spectrum and decides to move to the other end.

I believe the real moral of this piece would be: Be open and make a conscious effort to change your habits.

Most adults are stuck in habits that take years to form, and will likely not change over night, and it will require ongoing effort. They have to first make be willing to do this, and make the decision to do this.

> Cease input - turn your cellphone off, stop reading every stupid blog post about productivity, just stop.

Remember that in order for our creations to be beneficial to others (and often times, that is the purpose of our creations), others must consume our creations. So I think it's more of a matter of finding the balance between consumption and creation, vs. altogether ceasing consumption. (I don't think this point was intended literally, but this thought did cross my mind as I read that statement.)
Any of those groups can do exactly that and we can't stop it. We may as well use it to our advantage when ever possible.
Big fan of Dan, but he sure takes his time getting to what he uses. Fast forward about 6 minutes in for the goods.
There's quite a few independent cinemas in UK cities, all doing that sort of thing - many of them are non-profits as well. Fewer screens than multiplexes yet a more eclectic choice.
"1. Kids get bored quicker"

A great point, but I would venture to say it is not just kids.

People who are now in their 20s and 30s, with money to spend on movies, grew up in the "MTV generation"; accused of having no attention span as a result of the format used by MTV. I count myself as one of them. Thirty minutes into a movie and I am ready for it to be over.

I'm not sure the majority of the population want to completely fixate themselves on a screen for hours at a time anymore. At least at home you can stop or shift your focus as you see fit.
As a business if you have a popular iphone game that, would rather create a new game from the ground up or make the sequel of that game?
The Simplicity of Apple
Uh, none of that makes any sense.

You don't have to stop using MMX to use AVX, although you might benefit from using equivalent SSE2 instructions when available (might as well, who doesn't have an SSE2 processor now, you have to go pre-P4 for that), and that gets a tiny little mention near the end.
I'm in Toronto (Canada), it's pretty much the same thing in terms of "*plex" experience.

Some reality check, they maximized things for profit so much that:

1. Most Hollywood movies suck to a extraterrestrial degree.

2. The food sucks and its expensive.

3. Say whatever you want, 3D still sucks comparing to the default 2D experience.

4. Way too expensive for what the experience provides.

5. Niche theaters with quality stuff are always sold out.

6. 15 min of commercials.

7. Noisy teenagers.

8. Most of these movies are a 1 hour long product placement

Finally: if they decide to compete with the home, they loose, my TV is huge, my speaker set is awesome, my food is better, my sofa or bed are more comfortable.

They need to find other ways to convince me to move my ass, pay $$$, and be there.
I think you are on to something about the loss of focus. My kids seem to always need two screens going when they watch something at home. I'd fight it more, but I'm bad about it too.

As for the CG, the best effects are always in moderation. The more you can leave to the imagination, the better. I honestly think a big part of it is budget, too: ie, no money for hand-crafted animations true to the character... let's motion capture this thing and be done with it in two days. In the old days, the question was whether you spent the time to make a fully articulated puppet or you just put a guy in a gorilla suit. Most CG these days is the later, done digitally.
And like the Alamo Drafthouse, the Parkway and the Cerrito Speakeasy in the East Bay were doing something similar...though they closed in the economic downturn.
> An ini setting seems like a terrible and incomplete fix to the problem.

Why? It solves the problem entirely.
And maybe that should be their business model. Focus 100% on product placements and impressions and release movies for near-free.
Other reasons... BBM, Facebook and Twitter.

When RIM had their outage a few months ago, everywhere (in real life) was packed. People actually left their lying down position and went outside, visited friends and the movies. It lasted for all of 3 days then things went back to 'normal'

PS: Nigeria is a VERY BlackBerry centric country.
False Alerts: Growing Evidence that Drug-Sniffing Reflect Police Bias
Stephan Hawking help request
Alternatives to SOPA supporting VISA?
While "Transfer your domain day" is in full swing, I've been thinking about what could be done to send a message to other SOPA supporting companies and I thought of VISA.

While I'm not naive enough to believe that we can change VISA's mind about their SOPA support, (Just too big IMHO) I do think that we as a community could continue to send a clear and consistent message to all SOPA supporting companies. There are little known alternatives to VISA. Dwolla comes to mind. Unfortunately I don't know anyone in my area that supports Dwolla yet, but I am planning to suggest to everyone I meet and transact business with to look into Dwolla as an alternative. (I do not have ANY affiliation with Dwolla other than thinking its a cool idea)

I also love the idea that VISA's decision to support SOPA now could create a competitive nightmare for them in the years to come.

Any other alternatives to VISA? I don't want this to seem like a promo for just one alternative.
This reference is golden:

"Post-traction companies can use the old numbers – you can’t. Your first two engineers? They’re just late founders. Treat them as such. Expect as much."

Another point he addresses that rings true to me: programmer's motivation. I've made the mistake of throwing money at people when all they wanted was some more leeway to hack.
I don't know if I would put too much trust in this list. From what I know about NYC salaries - 10 years freelancing at all kinds of companies, from startups to corporate behemoths - the numbers seem about $20k low, on average. PHP, Ruby and mobile devs that I know personally make $120+ (both freelancing and full time), more on Wall Street. Sales engineers make significantly more.
Yeah, it takes a while to get to the interesting stuff; he was also interacting with the chat room during the show. There's good information in the FAQ portion of the show as well, like his reasoning behind NOT doing double-ended recording (anymore).
Theaters which "do it right" (bright projection, good sound, more varied programming, anti-talking/texting policies) also tend to show fewer ads before a screening.

The problem across the board really seems to boil down to "megaplex chains are bad for movies." There are a lot of specific line items but they all end up sharing the common denominator of "this wasn't a problem until the rise of big box multiplex theaters."
99% of Project Plans Are Absolutely Worthless
Instead of jamming, couldn't they cover the theater with foil?
> Interactive beats mindless observation.

Sort of how the appearance of music and movies let to the inevitable demise of books?

I don't think your argument holds. I'm an avid gamer and I still enjoy good movies, TV shows and books. Interactive media are not suitable for all types of storytelling.
The education market provides 3 main things: actual teaching, a social network, and credentials/social proof. Its great to see the actual teaching being tackled, and it will be interesting to see if they find a way to let students shine on the credential side. They say they will offer a certificate, but this certificate being difficult to obtain and highly indicative to mastery will be what make this offering a true alternatives to expensive colleges. Right now the best credential that I can think of that is relatively inexpensive, not tied to schooling, and highly regarded is the CFA.
"1. Kids get bored quicker"
I think that's related to multitasking, it's kinda sad kids today can't even do one thing at a time. The hole attention span issue.
Windows and Mac OS both derived their GUI idea from Xerox lab. While it is true that Gates got a glimpse of it initially from working with Jobs, Windows is hardly "a crude and far less accessible copy of the Apple OS". This statement you made is the one that's sensationalist and fictional rewrite of history.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - Book Review
Sendgrid supports this and we have used it to allow our users to have our system send emails on their behalf. The caveats are: (1) your email will contain info in the header that indicates it's on behalf of, which probably affects deliverability somewhat (we got very good results nonetheless) and (2) to get good deliverability your account probably needs to be at least "silver" level service which gives you dedicated IP address and some associated whitelabeling DNS entries. In other words, the more trustwoorthy your mailer domain is, the better deliverability you will experience.
This is a great post and I agree with everything he's said.

However, I know plenty of folks that are doing all these things but are still struggling to hire for the following reasons:

1) Not enough experienced local talent to attempt recruiting.

2) Not willing to train the available talent on their stack.

3) Not willing to hire remote developers to solve problems 1 and 2.
ROFL — "Oink for Books" — guess you could rate the individual sentences in the books, instant hit!
And of course their monopoly power didn't have anything to do with it.
I am involved in the agricultural community, and this sort of crowdsourced assertion has been bouncing around in the internet echo chamber for years. It started with Percy Schmeiser:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

You can read that yourself and draw your own conclusions (hint: you can't seed upwards of 90% of your field by driving past it with a truck). This has since then snowballed into the story of Monsanto employing a vast legal team to oppress the poor 'simple farmers'. This is patronizing - farmers (outside of communities that explicitly shun technology) are generally a very well-informed and technologically adept crowd, well used to hacking together electronics packages to make their lives easier (a cool example http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1254445743). The whole motherhood and apple pie callback to the days of yore definitely doesn't hurt the message though, so it stays around.

Anyway, take a look at the material on both sides of this topic.
If the candidate has enough free time try to do a trial project. There are also more procedural things that can be useful like code tests (although they need to be done in a respectful way and they are more about getting to know how each side thinks than actually testing whether the candidate knows how to program (hopefully you know that by this stage)).

I have come to the point where I respectfully decline to take tests and will generally end the interview at that point, because it tells me that the interviewer and the company has no way of knowing what constitutes a good developer. Figuring out if a developers is good is actually pretty simple, have them show you something they built and then ask them to show you the routine they are most proud of, this way you can start an organic conversation about something they know, testing only devolves into trick questions, unrealistic pressure, and testing candidates for what you think they should know, as such I start looking for the exit as soon as I see them. Not to be a jerk but, it tells me that either the company does not know how to spot talent or that they think they are elite, which tells me they will have a scalability problem in recruiting should they take off.
> Plenty of people enjoy hunting. Does that make them bad people worthy of contempt?

If they kill animals for fun, yes.

He paid $70,000 to shoot the elephant. He's sick.
Maybe I didn't find the best conversions, but the only ones I found with decent image quality were the MPEG1's from archive.org . Note also that in VLC I found I had to force-set the proper aspect ratio when viewing them.
Considering how Google has handled "customer support" in other areas of their business, the "override" option sounds like a cop-out.

What Youtube/Google should have done is require an arbitration system funded by "rights-holder", backed by monetary damages if they abused the system. Instead, we seem to have a system with no downside-risk for the media companies of over-reaching.
Hadoop versioning has always been a little confusing to me:

* 0.23.0: 11 November, 2011

* 0.22.0: 10 December, 2011

Now we have 1.0, but it's based on 0.20, not any of the more recent releases?

The 1.0 release notes are pretty useless--it's just a list of issues. Is there a summary anywhere?
How do we know your comment isn't product placement? :-)
Yes, ASP.NET MVC is very practical.

It's not completely main stream in the .NET community right now, and you will find that a lot of enterprises are still on Web Forms. None of that matters in the slightest though.

You do not want to work anywhere that isn't looking to make a move to MVC, or that is under the impression that knowing MVC you can't figure Web Forms out on the job.

I just left one employer (50,000 + employees) doing MVC (along with Web Forms, RoR, iPhone and other stuff), to move to another much smaller (but better paying) employer doing MVC. I live in flyover country (Knoxville TN) and am getting close to west coast rates doing MVC.
The problem is that this advice completely ignores the motivation for experimenting: optimal decision making.

If you run a test that ends inconclusively should you really just throw up your hands? And if you run a test that's quickly conclusive, should you really avoid all the profit that could be gained from immediately exploiting this knowledge?
The parallel thing I see happing is the strengthening of subcultures. Although the internet is bringing the world closer together, it also seems to be allowing like minded people to build lasting subcultures. Reddit has several of these. This is a pattern I have seen a lot. These subcultures might have sprung up before but after the initial enthusiasm dies out, the subculture moves on. Now, it seems that these subcultures persist and keep growing, building group identity, language, and camaraderie. The Ron Paul supporters have stuck around for years because of this and now they have the growing organization to push through to the mainstream, but it is the lingering subculture behind it , this strong foundation, that is allowing them to push through the normal barriers that would have prevented this in the past.
Due process? You mean like paying 50 millions to the congress to get a law to pass? Yeah, we can see how good this is.

Law? You mean like the 1st amendment of the US constitution? Yeah, we can see how easy new laws can override the previous laws.

Actually, the law has a funny way of working. It seems it works for you when you're rich and against you when you're not a millionaire.

Keep talking about the law & due process.

I choose to tell everyone I possibly can about these companies and not use their services & not buy their products.
What is the opposite of 'parse'?
Never been but sounds awesome.

McMenamins in Oregon does similar things:

- Couches in some theaters

- Order food and beer from their restaurant

- special events (like Monday night football)
They're both broken. HTH.
Some Visualizations to Grasp the Scale of the Universe
If the NASA employees want to work on this project, then NASA should be selling their experience to the private firms who want to develop this for cheaper.
That said, there's only a certain amount of time each person can spend on escapism. If gaming is occupying more of that space it is intrinsically encroaching on other forms of entertainment. Ebert is notorious for writing off the gaming industry, so I'm not surprised it wasn't mentioned in this article.
The CG in the Planet of the Apes movie was really well done though.
It sounds like, with the no-length-field part, they're saying a protocol should define all metadata and data formats? I get this from the packet portion; if skipping over the data part of a packet is bad, but churning through it to get to the close-delimiter is good, then you must be validating the data somehow.

Well sure, validate your data. But why is that part of the packet protocol? I would think it should only verify that the data is properly escaped (if it is indeed escaped - with a length field it doesn't need to be). Shouldn't the contents be validated by what's using it, and not the TCP/IP packet specification?

Adding a length field certainly doesn't make the protocol Turing-complete, a pushdown state machine should handle it just fine - push the length onto the stack, and iterate and decrement until it's exhausted. That even keeps it context-free (if the protocol is regular, and you just added a length field), which they claim is a safe zone.

--

They also claim that escaping is a flawed art, citing SQL injection. Is it? It seems trivial to do a trivial escape that's not flawed (not claiming CSV here, just double-quotes or something), and such an escaping act must be performed if you read open and close delimiters... unless your protocol is also specifying and validating the contents it's transferring, down to the very last bit, and it doesn't allow those delimiters in the data.

Doesn't this mean they've just claimed that arbitrary data transport protocols are all inherently flawed? And that any nested specs (ASCII in a TCP/IP packet, for instance) are inherently flawed, but single-depth ones (which could very well specify ASCII as the only data format for TCP/IP packets) aren't?

--

All in all an interesting talk, and the core message is a good one - simple, non-Turing-complete protocols are best, and perhaps should be the only protocols, because they can be validated. But I don't think I buy some of the reasoning, though I'd love to be convinced otherwise if it is indeed valid.
Thanks. This explains it perfectly to me.
The Cineplex VIP theatres I've seen are very, very, small, show what looks like a weird digital transfer rather than the original print, and have poor seating arrangement which combined with the small screen makes only the middle two seats in each row any good.

And I paid extra for this?
This is all anecdotal evidence of course, but last night I went to see Hugo at a new megaplex that just opened by my house. Not only was the movie incredibly heartwarming and reminded me of why I love the movies, the experience was great.

There were no commercials or PSAs, and only 4 trailers before the feature started. A nice woman politely told us to turn off our cell phones, as opposed to an annoying loud surround sound gimmick. The tickets were only $11 for a 3D film. Parking was free. And the film was absolutely perfect.

There was a time that the movie experience was bad. Theaters built during that time are still bad. But the new ones are fantastic.
Open-Source Scala app APRSdroid making money, 2 years review
You conveniently missed the sentence right after your quote "Sure, it had a huge impact on the smartphone market..."
Yes, those numbers seem low to me, especially for NYC.
And given that Android is copying the iPhone experience, much of Android's impact is attributable to Apple.

If you don't think Android is copying, take a look at pre-iPhone Android prototypes.
It's the wrong question, trying to fit an appropriate interaction from the WIMP as an inappropriate interaction to WWCH (Whatever We Call Handheld).

The problem is you're looking at your finger like a mouse cursor, and a mouse cursor is always touching the screen, if you will.

The equivalent result could be had easily, with no change or advance in hardware, by introducing a trace mode (choose a better marketing term). Tap a pattern, and a cursor appears on the screen. Now when you drag your finger on the screen the cursor moves around. Other tap patterns can adjust the granularity of cursor movement. If the cursor lingers over an area that has some interaction associated with it, it can now also have a hover effect.
> has special exemptions written into SOPA for themselves
Source? I've been seeing that posted a lot today but haven't heard anything about that.
So what you're saying is they came around and said:

Oh, sorry, but we infected your field.

And by the way you're not allowed to use your own seeds (the ones produced by his field) anymore because we infected them.
People keep fixating on the fact that Android is not Free Software. It doesn't matter.

Android is giving us the option to use an open source OS on arbitrary commoditized hardware without paying any license fees or asking anyone for permission. The Android OS can and has been ported to all manner of devices without any first-party support.

When the only other comparably advanced mobile OS is totally proprietary AND only available on proprietary hardware made by the OS manufacturer, the existence of Android is a massive leap forward for openness and choice.

iOS is great, I love it. But it will be forever locked to Apple's hardware, and you will only ever have access to that technology in the forms that make good business sense for Apple. That is not true of Android.