skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, the charm of simplicity of JS starts fading away when you start moving away from DOM manipulation and start writing complex objects. Just last week I ran into the lexical scoping issue ( I was not aware of it before) that had me scratching my head for hours. Scoping in JS becomes less fun the deeper you start digging. I am glad that they are aware of it and are actively trying to address it.
Kickstarter is US only, isn't it?
There is no shortage of workers. This is a myth. Always has been.

In economics, supply = demand. There's never a surplus. there's never a shortage. If you want more engineers, raise wages. They will come. If you don't want to raise wages, then you really didn't want them. Saying there's an engineering shortage is like saying there's a hamburger shortage because I don't want to pay more than 25 cents for a hamburger. If I pay $5, I could get a nice hamburger .and ... ta da ... end of "the great hamburger shortage" in this case.

Silicon Valley has the wealthiest people in the world and is a very expensive place to live. Engineering careers are quite short and living in an efficiency and washed up at 38 is not as inviting as our "we need more workers" mantra repeaters would have us beleive.

If they raise wages, they'll get what they want. Another alternative of those giant visionary West Coast capventure brains is use the principle of "capital mobility": just move the capital to where the labor is cheap. Not very hard, folks.
Spy One B
This is really starting to show the potential of Kickstarter.

So many of the successful Kickstarter projects have been unknowns. Just really smart and driven people with a dream.

If established companies can bypass publishers and investors by promising to sell a product directly to the consumer then we have a whole new ballgame here.

Double Fine has successfully funded a game where the only promise is that they will release it. That's it. No percentage of revenue to the publisher. The publisher can't demand they add DRM, etc. Their only obligation is to do what they do best because they are only answering to someone who wants a great game, not a return on their investment.

This is big.
Nobody knows what the topology of the universe is, nor, contrary to this animation, does anyone have a reliable estimate for the size of the universe (as opposed to just the observable universe). It might be infinite, or it might be just slightly larger than the observable universe.

But yes, all current models of the universe are homogeneous; no point is more central than any other point. It doesn't have to be this way, but it's the simplest assumption.
Accepting PayPal in Flash - a blog post in the works
Hi guys,

I'm just preparing the demo code to go along with a new article which describes how you can accept PayPal payments within a Flash game.

Of course you will need a server with a database in order to actually achieve this, and the blog post will cover how you hook it all together.

But the possibility presents itself to actually turn this into a product for people who want to accept PayPal in Flash but don't have a server or any php/mysql skills.

The question then, is what price would people be willing to pay for this service?

I was only considering charging a fixed percentage for each transaction made, that way, if you game isn't making any money you pay nothing.

The competitors are Mochi coins and Player.io. Mochi charges 40% per transaction and Player.io charges $25 / month + $0.05 / transaction + $0.01 / 1000 transactions.

Obviously both of these companies have a massive feature set which far outstrips just accepting PayPal, so I would have to be competitive.

Thoughts? Anyone interested in this idea? :)

TL;DR If you didn't have a server and wanted to accept PayPal in Flash, what would you be willing to pay?
It qualifies you to have a worthy opinion about what works for you.

Are you sure that what works for you scales well? I don't remember much of day to day activities in elementary school. I did go to elementary school. But I don't think my opinions on elementary school teaching necessarily are accurate even when applied only to myself as a youngster.

One doesn't have to be a teacher to come to valid conclusions. I think though that most conclusions that don't include an acknowledgement of the importance of the teacher's personality coupled with students' personalities is most likely not valid.
What is Karma?
I will pay more for mail if it means not getting spam.
We do use the sandbox and production git branches for those environments. If you want to puppet sandbox, you start with a git checkout sandbox. If you try to puppet sandbox from the production or master branch, you get a big warning and a prompt asking if you are really sure.
Richard Branson's controversial words about Steve Jobs.Do you agree with it?
Getting distribution is hard because screens for english titles are more limited abroad. You need to prove out the title before foreign theaters will pick it up. Obviously this doesn't apply to blockbusters which now often have global release dates.
Heroku is an impressive example of founders not selling out their users. They had multiple suitors before Salesforce, and any one of those offers would have made them millionaires. They only said "yes", however, when Salesforce agreed to give them not just a mountain of cash but also to let them continue running Heroku as an independent entity.

I wish all acquisitions looked more like the Heroku acquisition. I also wish I had a pony... :-)
Not if you are pricing your own labour at a lower cost than it's possible to outsource it. An episode of Big Bang Theory, where Penny makes penny blossoms, illustrates this pretty well: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1256028/
VEVO Powerstation at Sundance: An Explanation
CakesTV Episode 2
"action" or "doing", whatever one does, says, or thinks is a karma
What is your opinion on Foursquare, as a business? Do you think it's doomed to fail?
Our goal is to make applying changes to a server an intentional step. Instead of changes in production being pulled, we make it a push. With more complex changes it involves unbalancing a server, making the change, testing that everything is working correctly, then rebalancing it. While smaller changes, we simply apply them to the environment wholesale. This process gives us the flexibility to do both.
> 288 hours PER FRAME

So it took close to a year to render each second on-screen. I do not believe this.
Good Old Games had a booth with "booth grandmas" handing out cookies at PAX 2011. http://geekfeminism.org/2011/08/28/booth-grandmas-at-pax-pri... I'm OK with this :)
First thing I thought, "I wonder how I could port this to canvas"
aaawwwww mannn... :(
It doesn't though.
Because how are you ggoing to know that they operate that way? You will have to learn that somehow. And you couldve just as easily learned how var works instead.

What's worse.... now you still need to learn how var works anyway! It isn't gone. I see 0 reduction in confusion and +3 increase in cognitive load.
There actually a lot of CG used in movies which people don't notice. Generally, if they are actually trying to fool you it works surprisingly well. Consider, movies don't show vary realistic explosions not because we can't do it but because stylized balls of fire look more interesting than flashes that end in a single frame. It might be hard to do realistic humans but, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWE18YjLA8U it starts do really unnatural things and yet it does not scream CGI.
Tell HN: Google Webmaster Tools is designed to help Google, not you.
I love HN because it's a place where entrepreneurs help entrepreneurs. I hope this 'Tell HN' post is useful for those who have lost organic search rankings in Google's index. A couple of my sites have always ranked on page #1 for fairly competitive keywords. A couple of months ago I noticed that one of my sites was not achieving high rankings anymore and from what I could tell the site was not being formally penalized by Google. I've never participated in any black hat tactics so I was stumped as to why one of my sites that has always ranked well, lost ranking. Like most, my sites are registered w/ Google Webmaster Tools so I can track performance and issues. To figure out what was going on, I spent days inside Google Webmaster Tools and came up empty. Not sure what to do, I started to build a new site. Then it hit me, Google Webmaster Tools is not designed to help webmasters, it is designed to help Google. If you think about it, by using Google Webmaster Tools, webmasters are telling Google what their bot/algorithm can't figure out by itself. Google needs webmasters to provide site data to make their algorithm smarter. After realizing this, I removed the site from Google Webmaster Tools and soon after... boom! My site was back on page #1.
I wonder if something like http://www.cloudflare.com could help.
Even with optimistic estimates, it's going to be years, likely decades, before you can rely on these features being supported by the majorly of browsers. That's kind of sad but is the hard reality. I hope they come up with a good design.

I think they should be very conservative about what they propose. It should be a very obvious improvement to the language or have a lot of design time spent on it. If all major browser developers are not on board (Microsoft?) then the improvement is much less valuable.
[2010] Overhauling Factor's C library interface
Futures like in node-fibers? https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers I think it is the proper way to complement generators and give the alternative to wait for a function value.
Interesting. Having lived overseas, that explains why it would take ages for a film to arrive (sometimes 1 year). Many films would never arrive...
Some of those I didn't know aren't VC funded, so thanks for educating me. But I wouldn't put Zoho, Atlassian, Mailchimp in the same bucket as Google.
لعبة جاتا 
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"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

Apparently said by Lincoln, though I remembered the attribution going to Theodore Roosevelt.
I guess I didn't display my 37signals fanboy card prominently enough.
A company that I worked for, Pivia (HTTP acceleration software/appliance), was sold to Swan Labs that continued to service existing customers rather than to an alternative that would have paid more, but was more interested in IP and engineers.

To be clear, we are not talking about successful acquisitions that make the fund. There interests of shareholders and customers are likely to be aligned anyway.

I agree, but few things are true of VC funds as asset class as a whole. Top-tier funds behave differently than the rest.
I was going to say, myself: if they want more workers, they could try moving out of the San Francisco-Seattle bubble. Portland, Boston-Cambridge, Texas, Raleigh and New York all have good supplies of tech workers who would love to work on Silicon Valley-grade projects earning Silicon Valley-grade salaries but who won't abandon our entire lives to move to Silicon Valley.
DHH VC Bashing
Not intentionally - I just wanted to point that everything boils down to gambling your time.
“Update 2011-02-10 18:05 UTC: We are working on making our obfuscating proxy more stable and easier to deploy. If you can compile code, following these directions will help. We're also working on Amazon EC2 instances of obfsproxy for point and click deployment.”

“these directions” links to an email from Jacob Appelbaum:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-Februar...

“
[tor-talk] Help users in Iran reach the internet

Fri Feb 10 11:41:50 UTC 2012

Hi,

In the last 48 hours a major campaign of filtering has started in Iran -
it started slow and now appears to be that nearly all SSL/TLS traffic is
blocked on a few major Iranian ISPs. Details are rather rough but we're
working on some solutions - we've long had an ace up our sleeves for
this exact moment in the arms race but it's perhaps come while the User
Interface edges are a bit rough still.

Here's the deal - we need people to run Tor bridges but a special kind
of Tor bridge, one that does a kind of traffic camouflaging - we call it
an obfuscated bridge. It's not easy to set up just yet because we were
not ready to deploy this for everyone yet; it lacks a lot of analysis
and it might even only last for a few days at the rate the arms race is
progressing, if you could call it progress.

There are highly technical instructions here:
https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy-instructions.h...

Currently if you run such a bridge, you'll either need to manually tell
us (via email to tor-assistants at torproject.org ) about it or you'll need
to share these bridges with people you want to help directly. It's a
pain and we're working on it.

Here's a bug report where we're working around the clock to get stuff
going in a user friendly manner:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5009#comment...

This kind of help is not for the technically faint of heart but it's
absolutely needed for people in Iran, right now. It's likely that more
than ~50,000 - ~60,000 Tor users may drop offline.

Watch this graph for an idea of the censorship impact of directly
connecting Tor users:
https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=direct-users...

Here's the same graph but for Tor bridge users in Iran:
https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=bridge-users...

We're working on easy to use client software and if you're in Iran or
need one desperately, please email help at rt.torproject.org. We'll try to
get you a working obfsproxy bridge address and working client software.

All the best,
Jacob
”
Don't know why you're being down-voted, I've never heard the term either.
Is... is the author advocating that Germany buy Greece? Or simply that Germany help bail Greece out? Either way sounds a bit... unprecedented and unlikely.
There is a foreach that works: .forEach(). And when you're not just iterating over an array but transforming it, you have map(), reduce() and filter().
As if you need more votes for "twitter bootstrap", I'd say please use twitter bootstrap!
Vevo is not a label. It is a JV that includes YouTube among labels.
We won't have photorealistic game for a long time because how way our GPU and 3D graphics works. With a pipeline architecture, every single object inside a game is rendered individually. Things like shadows and reflections in games are all "gimmicks" or "Tricks" to make it seem like shadows and reflections. Until our computational power increase to a point where we can do massive ray tracing in real time, we won't have a truly photorealistic games.
Anonymous claims to have taken down cia.gov
> Indeed, why _would_ anyone want to DDoS github?

"Some people just want to watch the world burn."

Organized crime extorting sites with DDoSes is certainly not unheard of, either.
I love this article. I've seen this firsthand, having been the "fall guy" for an outage that nobody really understood. There were many causes for the outage, including poor software design, but the entirety of blame and punishment landed at the convenient "single place where a human touched something".
There was apparently a bug, and the latest version (which I tried two days ago) worked fine. I plugged in my iPhone and uploaded 2.2 GB of pictures, and then plugged in my 7D and earned the rest.
You guys might also like my new web app, Lean Domain Search (http://www.leandomainsearch.com), a fast new domain search tool that pairs your search term with 1,000+ other keywords and instantly shows you which of the generated domain names are available.
> If you're teaching the process, teach the process.

I do, thanks.

> Don't set up a project with a clear objective, force students to rigidly follow exactly the steps

I really do not understand what you're saying here. You want me to teach the process but then not evaluate whether students can do the process?

> you yourself took to get to that objective, and assume the process transfers to the students through osmosis.

With your "you yourself" comment you sound like you're objecting to the very idea of teaching process; and why are you assuming that I'm attempting some sort of osmotic transfer?
hrmmm... but not multiple causes that are actually fine on their own, or not in this particular order, or on that one day when that other (unknown) condition existed? I've been in many of tense meetings over those kind
Not a Sinatra app but you may want to have a look at this:

https://github.com/lottadot/lottadot-restkit-ios-rails3-1-ad...
Uptime is very valuable to github. For example, I can't easily deploy to my site when githubs down. I suspect many others have bought into its availability too.
Really?

You seriously think Dart is anywhere close to taking over Javascript?
But even if you use an arbitrary object....if it comes from a user supplied value you are going to have to validate it somehow.

It would be great if the post included good examples of how these things are going to produce better code. Maybe my imagination or experience is just insufficient to see the great win here.
I thought that botnet operators had methods of rapidly changing bots' IPs so as to defeat IP blocks.
"Yes and no". The universe is not homogeneous on a large scale, there are filaments of galaxies and everything but yes the idea of the center of the universe does not correspond to anything. The Big Bang from current models happened everywhere and the expansions comes from the fact that the very "fabric" of the universe expands.

But there are some awesome implications of an infinite universe, take a look here if you are interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Level_I:_Beyond_our_...
SpareRoom(raza58)
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Ask HN: try out my startup - Learned By Me - $12 Private Chinese Lessons
At Learned By Me, we have begun beta testing our service, which connects high quality teachers from around the world with students looking for private customized instruction at a very reasonable price. We have started by offering private online Mandarin Chinese lessons from professional native speaking teachers to English speaking students. Each lesson lasts 45 minute and costs $12 and all levels of students are welcome.

It would be great to get some interested people from the HN community to try out the product and give us feedback about the experience.

To sign up for our beta: go to www.learnedbyme.com

To fill out the request form for a Chinese lesson: go to http://bit.ly/yQTjkh

If you have questions or want to email feedback directly: info at learnedbyme.com

Thanks very much!
If it is a smart DDoS the requests won't look any different than typical users visiting your site.
This is one of the better examples of "literate" programming I have seen. I do have a couple of criticisms though.

The first criticism is perhaps more of literate programming, the concept, than this example. I personally find it difficult to read when each line of code is disjointed by comments. I guess I prefer the chunk size to be larger; a coarser granularity.

Some of these comments really seem unnecessary. for example:

# Export `Cell`
_.defaults exports, {Cell}

I think that is obvious enough that the code is "exporting" 'Cell'. I couldn't tell you why though.

My second criticism is that it seems comments are all too often of the "what" variety. Simply translating the code to english. That's not really very helpful. Once someone has some grasp of the programming language being used, the "what" is right there in the programming language. No need to restate it in another language.

What is helpful is the "why" of a chunk of code. I can read plain as day what it is doing. But why is the code doing that? Why was it written? Why is it necessary to do this particular thing? To me, at least, that seems much more helpful.

I feel my commenting has gotten much better since I started paying attention to when I was writing a "what" comment, caught myself, and wrote a "why" comment instead.
Ask HN: Highest paying software companies in Bay Area?
Google, Facebook, Salesforce, etc. Who pays the most?
what are you using to display code on your blog, it's really nice!
But a blogger (the given example) produces content. A blogging platform is core to their business, but it isn't what brings value. In Google's case, the search engine is what brings value.

Don't let yourself get caught up in NIH syndrome.
Random thoughts but:

- Github are obviously very successful and may have money
- their clients are reacting quickly on twitter so attackers might think they have an edge in terms of pressuring
It's happening already -- Papademos was Germany's choice for interim prime minister. This was in return for the last round of bailouts.
Not a crime, not even something I'd suggest students get punished for - but definitely something that should be actively discouraged.

Yeah, you can make notes yourself and memorise them, and even that will probably teach you more than getting notes from someone else and memorising those. But it doesn't change the fact that it would be better if exams could only be passed by learning and understanding the subject material, not by memorising facts.
Responding to your last sentence, there was a comment on the blog post that they are being vague to not give anything away to the attackers. If they start describing the attack (even how they perceive it) and/or mitigation steps, they are giving targeting data to the people doing the attack.
Just starting to read but my understanding is that CocoaPods relies on MacRuby, not your XCode project.
At the risk of getting off in the weeds, I'd rather re-frame the problem here as to wether unary negation makes sense as an operation, at all!

In my ideal world, -EXPR would be a parse error, and it would only be valid to write -LITERAL * expr. (-1 * a.) So, you could have -4^2 is 16 because the - would not associate to the nearest constant, but rather be part of the 4-value.

The reason for this is that -a^2 is super confusing, and I believe it should be treated as invalid. I do not think that promoting the order of precedence of unary - is the best solution because it leads to the common confusion of thinking "well, a is already negative, so there is nothing to do". if instead this was explicitly -1 * a ^ 2, then you can always "plug and chug" with simpler rules.

Essentially, the confusion is because unary negation is the only operation that is confuse-able with the value definition.

Final qualm against unary negation: what does --4 evaluate to in ruby? 3? No. 4.

If I had my way, then --4 would clearly be invalid because the inner -4 could not receive the unary negation.

In more programming stuff, I think that mixed-type operations should be illegal (no implicit casts!) adding an int64 to an int32 and storing the result in an int32 should be a compiler error!
Isn't high risk by definition what a VC investment is? I'm asking, not stating because maybe my assumption is wrong. I thought VC's look for the high returns which come along with high risk (vs. banks looking to make low risk loans).
(Hacker School cofounder here)

I agree wages should increase. There are some signs that's happening already, and I hope it continues.

To be honest, we're much more excited about the education side of things, but the press seems to focus largely on the recruiting and hiring angle. For us, our current referral setup is a fortuitous model that lets us continue experimenting and growing the school, but it's a means to an end and not the end itself.
Anecdotally, this is also a problem that a lot of medium-sized Etsy sellers run into. When their sales scale up, they realize they need to either scale up their operations from something that is more than just one person at a kitchen table making crafts, or they need to spend dozens of hours a week just cranking out their craft projects.
Why You Should Never Use Google Wallet