skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am using CloudApp (http://getcloudapp.com/) to upload screenshots I take. Quite the handy tool.
I have a feeling that they havent been tapping the call for weeks because if they had they'd probably be smart enough to shut up about it.
Oh sure, this isn't terrorism, and calling it that is just silly.

"Political violence against civilians" isn't quite right, because "civilians" can nevertheless wage war. What happens when two nations fight against each other with the full backing of their "civilian" populations, who actively provide all of the funding and materiel to fight the war? Is it off-limits to attack civilians? Should that sort of warfare be lumped in with terrorism?
A snippet:

“Top programmers are like a race car,” he said. “Once you get them you don’t want to lose them and you want to get as many as you can.”

It is a little off topic, but I think comments like this give me an idea of what it feels like to be objectified, like a woman might be in American media. I'm only now realizing that's why the "rock star" or "race car" label makes me feel so shitty. From Wikipedia:

"Some feminists and psychologists argue that such objectification can lead to negative psychological effects including depression and hopelessness, and can give women negative self-images because of the belief that their intelligence and competence are currently not being, or will never be, acknowledged by society."

Now, I know this is only my career and not my body, but in spite of myself I get intimidated by all these C-suites looking for such hyperbolically able and single-minded individuals I start worrying about if I can cut it. If I will be recognized for anything except my ability to program.

I'm not comparing this problem to objectification of women in scope, and I'm not saying this is all-consuming my life or anything. It is far from that, but something about the "race car" statement brought this into focus for me. I don't want to be collected like race cars or Pokemon by some dipshit.

This was not intended to troll, I just wanted to share my realisation about being compared to expensive/flashy stuff.
The fonts look bad in chrome/win7, at least on my setup: http://i.imgur.com/eCGEL.png
And the money they made from it probably didn't pay their unearthly Amazon bills.
It's pretty clear that Obama has tried to evade drug policy discussion, but I'm surprised that Google didn't just ask him the question and let him give his canned / broken record response.
Last year's ValioCon was great. My favorite talk was by Ethan Dunham (the fontsquirrel/fontspring guy) about font hinting and the current state of web fonts. (Did you know font hinting is like a programming language in and of itself?) I went in not expecting to get too much from the talks, but definitely walked away with a lot of valuable insight on a wide variety of topics. Definitely looking forward to the conf this year.
If you read further down the thread they say that that's already had the non-interlinked files split out. What they've got left isn't easily broken up.
Given that Facebook is compiled into a single 1 GB executable, a git repo with 1.3 M files doesn't really surprise me.
I know this is a super cliche piece of advice, but a bird in hand is better than two in the bush.

Seems to me you would be best off trying to negotiate as short of an exclusivity period as possible and then working with the small company to improve your product.
I don't want to imagine the actual kind of code that requires 1.3M files to run.
Wow, vrapper is what I've always wanted. Thanks for posting this. Its always amazing to me when some part of someones comment really changes my daily development. This is one of those times!
Tracking a football match with HTML5 and Javascript
Indeed, the presenters on DnB shows are usually really hard to understand. "Big ups to cheesy grifter in tha gleebow huppa dig walla shim bam to ya fo keepin it real ya". I have no idea what they are saying. Since it's supposedly English, my mind has to try and parse it. Very distracting.
Its possible that "good" cop doesn't seem to realize how much money is involved when the corporate plutocracy declares WAR ON [insert soundbyte that appeals to the teaparty mentality]. Drugs, like Terror are money machines and are not going away until the corporate influence goes away.
In some country you are given the nationality of your father, in germany it is the mother and in the US it is the country. My brother has three nationalities because of that. I have two but not the US nationality.

There are now also agreements between some european countries that you don't have to drop your previous nationality when you adopt a new nationality. So I should get three nationalities in a few months.
That will be their eventual downfall, unfortunately. Life is not a comic book; FBI and friends can withstand humiliation after humiliation, they'll still have their guns, dogs and PATRIOT acts to come after you.

Strategically speaking, it would have been much better to just keep listening. Now involved parties will do their best to lock down, and it will be harder for Anons to eavesdrop... but hey, we got some LULz, right?
So, nobody used short, perfunctory sentences before Apple did.

Right.
hah! Yes!

Better to have read:

IPO TIME.

YOU JOB IS AT RISK.

WORK HARDER.
If you're just interested in the takeaway from this article, here it is: spaced repetition works. We've known that it works for a long time.

If you want to use this in your learning endeavors, I recommend checking out Anki, an open source flash card tool that uses spaced repetition.
Ask HN: How to value your company when departing as co-founder?
Hello,
for obvious reasons, i'm using an anonymous account to post this. but i've been a longtime member of HN so i was hoping you could assist me with this.

I was one of the 3 co-founders of a startup which has been running for 3 years. I'm the only technical co-founder and basically created the site and maintain the servers. The business has been profitable and we make around $100,000-$120,000 a year.

I've since started a side project for myself which i want to focus on and want to leave the current company. We all signed a contract to own 33% of it. Now if i want to leave, how much money should i ask for? should i sell my 33% for $100,000? is that too much?

what would you guys suggest?

thanks
Maybe, but that startup exists in the first place only because the big companies willed it. How did that startup come to be? It got some investment money. And why did anyone invest in it? It wasn't for the hopes of an IPO because the chances are too low. The only reason that startup came to be is because the investors liked the odds of that startup being acquired. Like I said, if tomorrow morning Google, Apple, IBM, Facebook etc. decide they're not buying startups anymore but employing all developers directly and doing their own risky development, the startup scene will vanish in an instant. So the author is right in that the startups exist to serve the big companies. The reason the big companies don't do that is that they know that true innovation flourishes under perceived freedom. So we all win, but big-tech still wins the most.
For me, in the browser, the edges just smooth out to a straight line, and seem blurry only because of the color scheme.
In the desktop version, however, I see this when zoomed in maximally: http://i.imgur.com/ryhai.png.
Some of my favourites:

Michael Brook - Err: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcyQISCPTTs
Michael Brook - Ultramarine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITFyP9b7ius
Michael Brook - Several Times II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK-oVQaTg_4
Cliff Martinez - Helicopter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogDj3uXLP7w
Hammock - Maybe they will sing for us tomorrow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6kKjyHrXMw
Dropbox gives beta testers an extra 5GB of storage space
I'm mainly a software engineer with little artistic talent, currently doing my first web design in Photoshop.

Is it possible to ask for feedback on image renders as opposed to production sites? I've been playing with this exact idea so your post couldn't arrive at a better moment.
Man. I've wanted to build something like this since I was at Yahoo. Glad to see someone's finally doing this.
Best argument I've ever seen for not wanting to work at Facebook... wow that's a lot intertwined spagetti code.

Our source repo at work (a C++ compiler with full commit history going back to the early 90s...) is smaller and more componentized!
Well, of course that at some specific scale, you're gonna start to have trouble with any DVCS maintaining a complete local copy of such a huge repository.

It's even worse that just disk space and performance issues.

I can totally imagine a huge, busy repository where by the time you've pulled and rebased/merged your stuff, the repo has already been committed to again, invalidating your fast-forward commit and forcing you to pull again and again before you have any chance of pushing back your changes.

This is an inherent problem with DVCS that just can't be solved (trivially) when working on huge repositories that span millions of files and involve thousands of developers.
A lot of big companies have repos 10 or 100 times that size. With tens of millions of files, sometimes up to 100 gigs or more of data under source control.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/18977...

They keep every project in a single repo, mystery solved.

Edit:

> We already have some of the easily separable projects in separate repositories, like HPHP.

Yeah, because it makes no sense, it's C++. They probably use for everything PHP i assume then. Is there no good build management tool for it?
Another nice thing about refcounting versus other garbage collection strategies is that it can have more deterministic memory access patterns-- including possibly preventing heap fragmentation.
But when you are shooting at werewolves, silver bullets are definitely the thing to use.

A while back, I had an application which needed to do some fairly complicated string manipulation, both on the client side and the server side, and by using Node, I was able to write and debug that code once. There are good use cases here.
ha, nice. I kinda liked my Congrats idea better http://twitpic.com/8ehuxs :-P
10 businesses that hit first page of Google with NLYZR
Hating on the Ladies: The Real Backlash Against Pinterest
Others have tried and keep throwing more and more smart people at the problem they just shouldn't have.

MSFT with Windows codebase that runs out of several labs. Crazy branching and merging infrastructure. They use source-depot, originally a clone of perforce.

Google with all their source code in one Perforce repo.

Facebook will be on perforce before we know it.

The solution is an internal Github, not one giant project.
Hah! I've been on a conference call while in a building under an airport's departure corridor. If you're trying to talk, it sounds kinda like this:

"So, about that system rrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH and you think so?" (excuse the bad jet noises)

That was a fun hour or so - especially since, even muting the mic when you're not talking, when planes are taking off every 60 seconds, you're bound to get some background noise...
Apple updates iBooks Author to clarify that you own created content
"Enter a-ha moment #1. As a poet, this explanation of systems design made perfect sense. A layer that rationalizes concrete details in an abstract way–that’s metaphor, my friend. Effective metaphors build a relationship between the abstract and the concrete (i.e. “love is an island”). Like equations, metaphors also capture patterns in our lives–they “abstract out” the concrete details.

In a delectable moment, I realized it was entirely possible for a poet to think this way–and that the connections between the different disciplines enriched them both. For me, a discovery process happened when I could relate the new concepts to my framework for the world. Bring on the code."

I had that revelation too years ago, when I realized that the process of abstraction in programming was the same or similar to that of abstract art. I had never appreciated abstract art, and had been studying up on it to better understand it, when I finally grokked (what was obvious in hindsight) that abstract art is an attempt to extract the abstract essence of something and re-represent it in a concrete medium. Very much an a-ha moment.

I can totally relate the author's experience here.
You should probably be running something like Ghostery as well.
New York Times: F.B.I. Admits Hacker Group's Eavesdropping
Je woning beschermen tegen de winter
I find learning something new doesn't require a lot of context switching, and while does not show immediate productivity, the long term gains to the organization are present and quite valuable. It beats just randomly surfing the internet anyway; bean counters may not agree.
For my service at eatdifferent.com, I've offered both Facebook signup and email-password signup since starting the site, and I put a bigger emphasis on Facebook on the signup screen. Even with that, about 25% of my users use Facebook, and the rest go for email/password. I also sometimes unite an FB and email account so they can use either.

I think there's a danger in giving users too many options, because it's easy for a user to forget which one they used, but there's also a danger in only offering a 3rd party sign-in, as some users just won't be up for it. For me, FB + email is the happy medium.

But yes, there's a lot of little things to implement when you have your own user auth system. I'm using Flask, a microframework that doesn't have a user system built in, so I've had to code basic things like reset-password and change-password from scratch. Worth it, though.
With single device - you're right... but this becomes really a problem when you expect your customers to use multiple devices: computers at home, at work, smartphone, iPad...

how would you suggest your customer which login to use the first time she tries to sign in on another device?
I am in the Netherlands. As it so happens, the pirate bay actually told me a few days ago to install Tor or a private VPN, because my ISP would supposedly block them soon.
I used to listen Aphex Twin's music, works great for me, but now I mostly listening to The Flashbulb's compositions, can listen it for a whole day. Arboreal and Kirlian Selections albums are pure piece of art.
Seized Sports Streaming Site Makes a Blazing Comeback
I may agree with the sentiment of a snarky post and upvote it and thereby damage the discourse by encouraging snark.

Sure, no karma system can prevent people from deliberately rewarding bad behavior. But at least you won't be posting another redundant snarky post, which makes my point that using upvotes to agree helps the site.

[D]ownvotes don't rob the site of a person's reasoning

Sure they do. If I downvote a post I don't agree with instead of replying to it, no one else knows why I disagreed. I may have knowledge that would be of general interest to the community. Which makes my second point, that downvotes to disagree harm the site.

Using karma to promote quality posting and discourage negative behavior is symmetrical; using it to agree and disagree is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDA#History
Yeah, it's a dupe. Flag it and move on. BTW the "different site" is the author's.
Yep --

The discovery here is an endophytic (living in a plant) fungus that can grow anaerobically, using polyurethane as its sole carbon source.

The authors suggest fungi that digest polyurethane have been known for decades. ("""Enzymatic degradation of PUR has been demonstrated by both fungi (4, 5, 6, 19) and bacteria (14, 17, 23).""")

They cite one reference from 1968, which itself implies polyurethane-degrading fungi had been known long before then:

"Fungal susceptibility of polyurethanes."
Darby, R.T, and A.T. Kaplan. 1968. Appl. Microbiol. 16:900–905.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16349806
Ed really wasn't working but just reading HN. He is one of those guys who is always busy but doesnt do anything. The problem is Ed's boss thinks that he is actually good. The problem is not just with Ed though, his boss should have had Sue on call before get Ed on. Sue is lazy too. This is a company that is not getting anywhere. :)
NY AG sues major banks, says electronic title transfers violate property laws
In the time he spent reading HN, you could instead write an automated test hook to make sure this problem never happens ever again.

Ed is a bad employee not because he is wasting time, but because he is publicly cultivating a culture of blaming time sink on others.
I think this illustrates a fundamental problem with the people being hired to manage programmers. I worked for a boss like this at Amazon. His degree wasn't even in business, but in criminal justice-- he was trained to be a prison guard and acted like it. His boss was even worse- I swear she must have been an ex-DMV employee, all attitude, no knowledge. (I forget her area of study but it had nothing to do with management, business or computer science.)

A previous boss was-- and I am not kidding here at all-- a grade school teacher. He was in charge of the programmers. Knew nothing about programming but since the company was making educational software, obviously an gradeshool teacher should be running the department, right? The person running the art department was also a grade school teacher. They all had mastered that patronizing "settle down children" tone, and used it constantly. When we'd tell them that what they were asking wasn't practical or would take extra time, they'd be patronizing like we were trying to lie about having spilled milk. It is hilarious in retrospect.

Why does senior management at these companies think that programmers should be managed by people who know nothing about programming?
Concentrated Solar Startup Sets a New Efficiency Record
No, I do not agree.

1. In a browser, the link would lead to a confirmation page POSTed to the server

2. In an API, there's no real sense in doing that, but it'd probably be a DELETE on the subscription resource.
It's called tags. Imagine if any post on HN could be tagged by anyone. Then, you are free to only read HN/Europe (all posts tagged Europe). Or browse the regular home page.

It won't happen because HN has made a conscious choice of not going after all the "web 2.0" gimmicks, but sometimes you wish it wasn't completely the case.
Great project!

One bit of feedback: I wish clicking the bookmarklet would keep me on the page I'm bookmarking instead of taking me to bookmarkly.
Well done dudes
LMAO. You can add:
- Joe asks a question without naming someone - 10 sec. silence - then Judith says: "was the question for me?"
For quick & dirty scraping, you might want to look at Webrexp ( https://github.com/Twinside/Webrexp ), the Hackage version is a bit outdated though.
That C++ compiler is a single product (okay, you might have built a linker, and an assembler as well - say 3-5 products). In even medium enterprises (say, 500 employees, about 250 developers) you might have upwards of 35 different products, each of which with a 5-6 year active history.

Enterprise source control can be ugly - particularly if you have non-text resources (Art, Firmware Binaries, tools) that need to be checked in and version managed as well.

With all that said - I don't really understand why all the code is in a single repository. Surely a company of Facebook's size would experience some fairly great benefits from compartmentalization and published service interfaces. I guess I agree with the parent - sounds like a lot of intertwined spaghetti code. :-)
Anonymous leaks Marine Corps massacre case details
What visa type do you need, exactly, to legally participate in Y Combinator?
> If that is true, why do so many guides stress URI design?

Because these guides are written for people who don't understand what they're talking about?

> Would anybody balk if all my REST API's URIs where obscure hashes?

> Is this no worse or better?

In terms of "RESTfulness" there is no difference whatsoever.

In terms of clarity, readability and debuggability, the former is better.
E-discovery for DevOps
Sorry to say this, but I think that the 'just ten minutes' task is a symptom of a much deeper corporate problem.

For example, consider the boss in this story. Why does he/she think a task like this will only take 10 minutes? Is he a developer? Does he keep track of what is going on in other departments? Does he understand how a (seemingly simple) bug like this fits in the context of the whole project?

Or, here's another question. Why is a developer sitting on that particular conference call? Doesn't the company have a QA department, or an internal support department that documents the issue and provides steps to replicate?

Forgive me if I come across as being somewhat dismissive, but when I hear stories like this, I see signs of a very sick company that needs life support.
Online stocks trading can be done by anyone and everyone
What do Facebook and the National Institutes of Health have in common? I'm pretty sure this will end with Facebook building their own versioning system from scratch and give it some kitchsy name like "Retro".
During our first Livemeetings, I would draw pictures all over the slides. Little did I know, what I saw drawing was visible to everybody! Luckily, no one knew who was creating the drawings. Good times.
How to create a kickass online marketing strategy
Apple Kicks Chart Topping Fakes Out Of App Store
This has a lot to do with the claim that some programmers are 10x more productive than other programmers.

If this happens to you more than once a month, you're not in the 10x club. If you want to be in the 10x club you need to avoid this at all cost. Otherwise you're just another muggle chafing at the bit.
Oh, I meant they are similar in terms of limited natural resources and they both have to rely on intellectual capital on their citizens and exports for growth.

Korea is mostly homogeneous society and not very open to immigrants, and thus their growth is limited. So is Japan, and their growth also hit the wall as well.

I also agree on money. So true.
The Investment Compliance Directions For 2011
Baseball MVP Josh Hamilton Relapse Reaction | Word News24
We must do different kinds of sites, because I found that the defaults were too low - I had constant trouble with them till I increased them by like 1000 over what they were before.
What are you using to generate the screenshots? I see a link to http://screenshots.bookmarkly.com/ in the code?

Edit - just seen this:

> The screenshot generating server is currently a separate repository that I have not yet released.

Any plans to do this? Been looking for a decent screenshot solution for a while now...
That's a totally reasonable consideration but the revenue model of the host platform isn't always the best indicator of its success or longevity.

LiveJournal & Six Apart have longstanding revenue models but aren't hosting users like the President of the United States or large corporate media entities.
Doing (starting and finishing) six discreet tasks in an hour is not too difficult. Obviously those tasks are not very taxing.

What is hard if you have one four hour task, and one task that requires your attention every fifteenth minute. It completely ruins the four hour task.
Having Andromeda Strain flashbacks.
This chart disagrees: http://www.centurycouncil.org/sites/default/files/images/AID...
In fact, the article does mention concurrency in there. I must have read over that thinking right away that they meant UTC/ Time Zone issues again. d'oh!
They bleeped out names of alleged Anonymous members. Sort of protecting their own. Did they also bleep out FBI agents' names?
Found the audio recording on youtube if anyone's interested http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryq1v-cLHrk