skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
*fixed, thanks.

the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order.

when we started in June, we'd get like an order or two a day, and it wasn't too bad. the daily trip to the post office was almost a welcome break.

now, we get as many orders in a day as we used to get a month back then, and it's hard to scale. we've made a lot of the processes as efficient as possible, but the whole thing is still a pain in the ass.

Fulfillment as a service seems like it'd be a good business. No stressing about packaging, customer service etc etc
Generating Text with Recurrent Neural Networks
I guess I phrased that poorly. I mean that you should work on problems which are hard but possible, not that you should be dishonest.
He said he wouldn't sign the NDAA, then he did. The only thing worse would be a President who won't even say he won't sign bad laws.
Wow, the guy just repurposed Yegge's rant without adding anything of his own.
My theory is that increase in sales of camera effect applications is directly correlated with increased popularity of instagram.

Atleast in my household our iTunes bill has included much more camera apps after my wife signed up for instagram.

Any other takers for this theory?
Absolutely. In this case I think it is possible to argue (rather than it being cut and dried) about the legality in the UK - at least to a reasonable degree.

If the judge decides it is then, fine, that's what he rules :)

I agree; #3 is the most compelling. If anything it's the same reason the CPS declined a UK prosecution (because to do so would be disproportionate).
The Startup Dragon
Yes, schlep isn't used for tasks. It's used only for journeys. The connotation is that a particular trip is going to be long, painful, tedious, annoying, difficult, etc. It is not used for tasks that don't involve physically moving yourself or transporting something.
Yeah, that's a good point. I think you might have better luck viewing any heavily down-voted comments in popular threads.
The locking section could also be dealt with by using mkdir for locking. mkdir is atomic. (Note that mkdir -p is not.)
Perfect. Thanks very much.
The best (in terms of browser compatibility) cheap cert that Namecheap sell is the RapidSSL cert at http://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/geotrust-ssl-certi...
They're not selling either.

They are selling ease-of-use. Filesharing between multiple PC's you owned along with potentially PC's of colleagues was always difficult and cumbersome.

Dropbox pioneered an easy way to make file sharing among machines as simple as dragging files to a pre-defined location on your PC.

And even this concept wasn't entirely new, Microsoft's "Briefcase" in Windows95 was basically an early version of this.

Dropbox's success is all about the simple execution of a task that impacts millions of PC owners, and removing the difficulty of performing that task.

Will filesharing make Dropbox the next Apple or Google? Doubtful. BUT, there are still several pain-in-the-ass little nuances about the multi-device world. IMO, they might look next to the overall interaction and data management among a household of PC/Tablet/Laptop/Smartphone users.

One example: I have a set of contacts on my laptop. Call it "Everyone I know", My wife has a similar set of contacts on her PC. Some of these contacts are duplicates (family members), others are unique to each of us (personal friends or business associates). On each of our phones we have a subset of these contacts. I'm not a fan of having an over-filled phone contact list, I want to keep it to the most commonly-contacted people. My iPad has a completely separate contact list that is all disorganized.

I'd like an easy way to manage a contact pool among multiple users and devices much like Dropbox manages files. I'd like to be able to edit or update certain info in my company address book, and sync certain contacts to certain devices.

Dropbox has a huge opportunity just in making all sorts of information appear and share in just the locations we want it to be, among many other things.
Kolmogorov Complexity, Natural Language Programming and the Bash shell
UK – workpermit (kamranbkhr)
Workpermit.com guide to UK immigration, UK work permits, HSMP (Highly Skilled Migrant Programme) and UK work visa Services. http://www.workpermit.com
Stop the Presses: Essay Shows That Hard Work Can Be Unpleasant
"Don't break the chain". I've used Jerry Seinfeld's method to just get stuff done since I first read about it a few years ago. http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...
... and nice things like https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic for vim (or your editor of choice).
Oh come on, that specific part wasn't the point. Have you gone through the process of actually being accepted? I have and it takes more than just a quick 15 min meeting. It also takes quite a bit of saving, planning, sacrifice and bit of logistics to actually get your life in order to go through an incubator program. Been there, done that!

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. Quite the contrary. That's why I said it was a schlep. But some people's wives can only handle so much. :)
Yes, of course you do sometimes need these types of abstractions, but you seem to have missed my point: they are a factor of incidental complexity. To restate, they are not at all inherent to the problem you are trying to solve. They are inherent to the tools with which you are solving the problem.

For instance, if your problem is calculating the trajectory of a projectile, a solution certainly exists that does not involve anything at all like an ObjectFactoryFacadeCollection. However, certain solutions involving unnecessarily complex abstractions could conceivably require one. This is incidental complexity. On the other hand, all solutions will require some information about the projectile's velocity, gravity, and so forth. This is complexity that is inherent to the problem itself.
Answer to unrelated question: Losethos is a developer of a quite unique operating system, http://www.losethos.com/videos.html which he has been developing for the past 10 years.

One of his last sane comments were when he asked startup advice here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1782800 and got zero responses.

Sometimes it passes my mind that maybe someone on HN should help him. It's quite obvious he has lost his mental health.
At the moment each OS vendor is pushing their own cloud solution (Azure, iCloud, Kindle Amazon cloud storage)

Dropbox could become the universal cloud storage, which can be accessed using identical APIs on every platform, thus becoming the single store for users working with multiple operating systems. Furthermore, application programmers will only have to target this one API.
She ;)

I think the whole thing is disgusting and wrong. And I think that she was railroaded off because of the views she expressed post-sentencing--they were trying to make an example of her and "send waves through this community"* and she was standing up and taking it while disagreeing instead of bending over and whimpering with remorse. It's cruel, disproportionate, unjust and, frankly, mentally ill. This is not what our justice system is for at all, either prosecuting her in the first place or silencing her by whisking her away prematurely.

*"One of the reasons we targeted Ninja Video was because it had such a strong social element," says Kevin Suh, senior vice president of Internet content protection at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). "We wanted to send waves through this community." http://prospect.org/article/ninja-our-sites
their support is excellent too, I've had Eddy Nigg (the founder) respond to emails within 10 minutes on several occasions.
pushing out your own hardware costs more than just building software for a widespread platform...

Another fine example: the Kno
> Over Thanksgiving, my mom was showing my aunt how to download movies from these sites.

I am Chinese, I play tons of pirated games, over thanksgiving, I bought my favorite ones on Steam at a discount price, even thought I have done playing it.

The funny thing is, to pay for those games, I have to fake my country code and get an American IP address using a VPN. Is it pirating if stuff are not even available on my local market?
Fun article to write. I crowdsourced all those images on Mechanical Turk in about an hour. Best $2 I ever spent! :)
It is quite difficult, as well as painstaking. I can't find the article where Drew Houston was mentioning this, but because the API method wasn't available, they had to use a hex editor and alter the memory location to get the functionality to appear in the finder. And they needed to do this for every version of OS X as the Finder memory address to inject the assembler/C code would be in different locations depending on the version. The process would be similar to writing a crack for software to find the algorithm for the serial key check.

Besides Dropbox being a great service, what got Steve Job's attention was the fact that the internal cloud team was impressed on how Dropbox managed to do this, since they themselves couldn't get the OS X team's cooperation for a similar feature.

Edit: found the article - http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/backdrop-dropbox/all/...
I'm having difficulty believing this article got to the front page legitimately.
I don't understand this either, it's a commodity and everyone is doing it now. They don't seem to have special patents. I use Ubuntu One for example (5GB free) and there will be Google Drive soon.

Even when you count out the cloud future, how can Dropbox stay competitive against Google's infrastructure? They have peering contracts and their own servers.
There is no logic to those comments. That's why their author is perma-dead.
This essay is very disingenuous. Businesses are hard work, Paul Graham wants to invest in the next Facebook, he needs younger founders who are ridiculously ambitious and won't take an early exit.

http://diegobasch.com/stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard...

Edit: pg, don't downvote me :)
Tablets: Bruised and confused at CES 2012
I'm not questioning why the account has been silenced, just why the comments are posted at all..
I've seen companies working in this area for years too (my first company actually WORKED with this - for palm devices :-)) - my question was just about that product in specific and it's tie in to a proprietary hardware piece.
Nice one. And that's awesome. Do you have the mturk job writeup? Curious to see how the description matches the actuals.
I've found that classes are best for me. A few years ago I started going to an aerobics class that emphasized strength. Then I did a boot camp. In 2010 I started doing Crossfit and hope to do it the rest of my life. They push me well out of my comfort zone, and the group aspect makes it both competitive and collegial.

Last year I decided two times a week was good enough for me and it's worked. I'm in fantastic shape.
By the way, I don't think you need a better signature capture. You need to GET RID OF SIGNATURES, like they do already in a lot of countries... :-)
I always assumed it was some spam bot that had been set up by a moron, could it really be the case that somebody is genuinely writing them out sincerely?
How many files will there be in the future? The perfect cloud doesn't know the concept of File, only URL's.
I didn't mean the CUSTOMER's tablet/phone, I meant buying tablets (or making the restaurant buy them) instead of manufacturing your own
Of course, once you do that, you realize there are too many variables to account for and that it is an intractable problem that needs to be approached differently.

I don't see our government - or any current government being able to do that.

It's like expecting Ford to suddenly decide they want to get into the software business, and stop making cars. It's just not going to happen: not in their DNA.

Take 'a' proposal that would have prevented 9/11: issue every passenger a pistol and frangible ammunition. [1] Can you imagine any government doing that? Trusting their citizens to be adults?

So, no: We're stuck with TSA and the government screwing the pooch by insisting they can control was can't be controlled.

[1] If you want, issue them only to people who can prove competence with firearms, or veterans. Instructional videos: "So you want to use your pistol!"
I didn't save them. They were something along the lines of:

"Draw a man in a cave being chased by a fire-breathing dragon. He is desperately trying to remove a bunch of stones that are blocking his path. A fairy and a forklift just appeared beside him."

I can only hope that I made the turkers laugh a little bit when they saw that. :)
Thanks for the response Larry. Since all I'm willing to spend is in the ballpark of the UDRP filing, my major take-away is is that coming to an agreement without the use of legal tactics is optimal for both parties.

I was surprised to hear you say I have no case though. I thought that owner of a domain needed to be able to show intent to make use of it. Otherwise, it could be argued that they are squatting the domain and holding it in bad faith. Is this not the case?
Which is strongly referenced in "Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie".

Which is to say: both the referenced article and Rippetoe's books are excellent references.
One good use for tablets-on-bar-tables I thought about, years ago, was the exact opposite: make people interact, sending messages between tables and the such. Then I've read an individual somewhere saying that "meeting people face to face is too creepy, that's why everyone prefers online dating".

Goes hand in hand with this comment. Scary faceless world..
Marketing Right vs. Left Brain Advertising
MacOS KenDensed: The iPad Rumor Frenzy & Creepy Steve Jobs Dolls
> "I'm a Windows guy anyway," Houston said with a smile.

Really? Drew runs Windows?
I'll just chime in saying that my experience was smooth like this. I'd use them in the future myself.
Good point on geeking out on strength training.

About 5 years ago I set a goal for myself of both understanding as much as I could about strength training, and accomplishing as much as I could. Rippetoe is indeed a true geek of iron. I've managed to hit a 500# deadlift and mid-300s for squat, trying to get both of them up above that, but it's tough to make progress now.

Another great resource for the squat fanatics is Boris "Squat Rx" Bachmann's "Squat Rx" YouTube series: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C03D688F10C4DE1F
I think you're mostly right, and your example (sales work with big companies) is well aligned with your theory, but there are plenty of schlepps that are not conceivably anyone's passion because they don't require any differentiated work. My personal favorite example is a service that will perform DMV operations on your behalf (where the primary work involved is standing in line). Whenever I need that service, I am ecstatic to pay the $50 or so that they demand rather than lose rand()*4 hours of my day.

Similarly, while someone somewhere is probably excited to work on Stripe's fraud and security problems, I suspect there's a ton of paperwork that must be filed and waited-upon in order to operate such a service legally. I know plenty of lawyers and none of them consider that sort of thing fulfilling work.
Have you considering putting a phamplet in each envelope that people can give to friends who can try it at half price for the first month or so? That way you could get access to new potential customers.

You could also make it more enticing for people to give the phamplet to someone by rewarding people who have friends sign up.
If it was a computer playing the exact same notes as MacDara Ó Raghallaigh but with simple sine waves, would it be boring then? The author notes in the first paragraph that if an instrument is producing overtones then it is being polytonal, and hence not necessarily boring.
It's still not a slippery slope. It's an analogy that illustrates what would be possible, de jure. Honestly, there's no slope involved at all.
Seems like an irrelevant comment. He's not doing anything publicly with the domain and never has.

And: If he were now to start doing something with the domain related to either tapping (as in on touch screens) or typing he could reasonably be said to be creating confusion for my customers. So what part of my comment seemed arrogant? Or do you just not like the cut of my jib?
By "better" I meant "works with a stylus". Most of Europe might be paying for meals with PIN-based debit, but a lot of Americans still pay with signature-based credit. The banks need the signature.
Sometimes the first lines make some sense. Sometimes he talks random things about his operating system. Then there's the God says part where he generates random blabber from Bible or something. I'm pretty sure this is caused by mental instability, not any kind of spamming/harassing purposes.
Cool. Yeah, my favorite part of turk is using it for more creative jobs like this, had to ask. You should make this a habit with your blog posts - I'd read every post, just to see how a turker interprets your startup experiences.
Homeless Long Island Teenager Is Intel Competition Semifinalist
Well, don't be too enthusiastic about this idea.. I've seen lots of sites try it and fail such as Measy, Gdgt, etc. The ones that succeed are the ones that thrive in the search engines. People use search engines to find what they want.. they don't go to a specific destination.
No more list spam!
Dropbox have one special ingredient - it actually works. Do you think Samsung or Acer are going to come up with something robust and resilient? Even if they did, do you think it would work on Mac or iOS or WP7? Do you think Microsoft's solution would work outside of Windows?

Heck even Ubuntu One (which only had to work on one operating system whose source they had) never worked reliably for me. (I ended up with machines in the admin centre multiple times, and about once a month one of my machines would silently decide to stop syncing files.)

Doing 80% of a file solution that works some of the time in some of the places is easy. Doing the rest is something that only Dropbox has managed.

As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing, that we often want to share differing parts of it with different groups and that there keep being new kinds of data beyond just "binary files".

Put another way, ask any Dropbox user if there is more they wish it did. You'll get a long list back. Where there is demand, there is opportunity and growth. They have a list of over 6,500 different requests at their website:

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox

Admittedly around 6,000 things aren't that interesting:

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox#votebox:popular:600
Protesters Turn Bank of America ATMs Into “Truth Machines”
Protesters acting on behalf of the Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco affixed the removable decals seen in the pictures below to Bank of America ATM screens across the city a few nights ago.
I disagree, I see dropbox files as MY FILES. I don't like when they are obscured behind some application. I don't see those as MY FILES, I like to see my files in my folders and it's nice and I have a sense of ownership. Dropbox is just an extension of my own personal home filesystem. But it's EVERYWHERE. And that my friends, is what makes all the difference. Like Drew said, he wants a filesystem for the internet. I think this is lost on lots of "the cloud" proponents, who are focused just on applications.
I don't think it was an argument so much as a way of registering her frustration.

After all, while convicts may, in general, have their rights restricted, it's not clear what state interest is being advanced by hurrying someone off to prison for making jokes on their Facebook page.
Loving this! Just needs a Picplum Rage!
Be aware though that GeoTrust and Thawte certs don't work[1] on android devices. There are claims that it can be fixed by adding a cross-root cert[2] but for me that didn't work out.

More generally: If you need to support mobile devices then read your CA's compatibility list closely (if you can find it...) and test, test, test. You'd think this shouldn't be an issue anymore in 2012, but it sadly still is.

[1] http://www.zimbra.com/forums/administrators/44675-new-geotru...

[2] https://support.servertastic.com/entries/426677-rapidssl-and...
I actually am planning on doing that! I had an idea for one today that I'll probably post later next week.
Is there actually any of the services offering a client based encryption? So far I am using Dropbox only for exchanging pdfs and other non-personal stuff.
There's actually no exception, it just returns "undefined" and the if statement fails. That's why it's such a deadly bug -- no exception, and path dependent. Combine that with the async nature of JS and it's going to be a long night tracking that one down
Is the API available for all versions of OS X? If not, when the API first appear?
His argument is based around jurisdiction, which is one of the restrictions outlined.
Heh, I'm not driven just by my own enthusiasm - that doesn't pay the bills.
Technically, search is a feature too. Google seems to be doing alright. I think that was just Steve being steve, and saying whatever would scare the piss outta Dropbox to get them to sell. If it's such a bad Idea, why did jobs want to buy it?
Love this concept. Value props are so much clearer with rage. Startups fix problems that cause rage.
I found it out within 5 minutes after reading your post :)
Weird, it never did for me and still doesn't.
We're talking about the actual design of the site. I'm not one to get all wound up over definitions so please excuse if I use the wrong terminology here, I'll try to be as clear as possible.

A beautiful site can have an awful UI. The StartSSL site doesn't have that polished hipster-corporate look that we're so used to seeing these days. I think you might be talking about the experience. It's one thing to have a pain in the ass experience with forms or actions that require multiple page views/reloads to complete and quite another to have an ugly site in general. "Ugly" can be a very subjective thing though. StartSSL's site isn't exactly ugly but more dated looking. Speaking striclty from a design point of view, without being overly critical, the site is aligned nicely, has a nice grid, the typography isn't fancy but it's not so ugly that you'd complain about it on first glance, the colors are okay and don't hinder readability, there's enough white space, etc. Even so, when it comes to design there are always those intangible qualities that you can't quite describe or put into objective terms (which I'm sure is very frustrating for programmers as we're all about exact, measurable, science-y stuff).

So considering that the site isn't ugly from an objective standpoint, how could it still be ugly? To answer that you have to take into account experience. Web design, much like fashion, has fads and trends. Right now we're used to seeing what I like to call "hipster-corporate" design. This style is all about being casual while still looking corporate enough for people to take the comoany's site seriously. It's really tough to straddle the line between trying too hard to look hipster-corporate and looking dated and old fashioned. We've all seen the website for the local doctor's office that looks like it's trying too hard to be that big corporate style but failing miserably and looking like the crappy free Wordpress template that it is. Hipster-corporate is really interesting because there are a lot of variations and the amount of hipster style or corporate style that mixed in all depends on the company's personality and size. Too much or too little of one or the other totally breaks the feel.

So the point is, after all that, I think we're talking more about the "feeling" that the site gives you rather than the objective reality of things when we talk about the site looking pretty or ugly, good or bad, well designed or poorly designed.