skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In response to your edits I agree, it would be nice if we knew more. Our website performance chart is under-representing our site in my opinion and there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it.

I also think they are possibly counting Tweet button/g+1/Facebook frames in the time which is wrong in my opinion as these are such small fragments on a webpage yet are often responsible for a large percentage of the load time (for us it is up to 50%!)
Considering the Zune never had an app store or any official way to distribute Zune apps, I don't see it as a net loss. Microsoft even said that the only officially distributed Zune apps would be from Microsoft themselves.

You're talking about the Zune as though it were a single product, like the iPod Mini. It's not. Zune is a product line. Windows Phone is a continuation of the Zune product line.

By your reasoning, Apple must have killed the iPod line because the older iPods are not being made. You ignore that they're making new iPod (Zune) hardware. The only thing that has changed is Microsoft is not making Zune-branded hardware anymore, rather hardware that runs the Zune software.
Can I sign up as a beta tester somewhere?
By "rumor" he meant "I'm starting this rumor".
Hey! I know how to build out Gems no problem, there are a few things beyond that I could just use another set of hands with:

* Testing!
* Railties. If you include it as a Gem in Rails, it should add itself to Rack, etc.
* Gemspec, Rake tasks etc.

I've done all this before, but it would be more fun to build it out with somebody else. Down with it? matt.beale@madhatted.com
Clojure Implemented in Pure Python
It's a very good point. I plan to add automatic discovery where every speaker and listener maintains a current list of the communication topography.

I figure I'll use this space to explain "why" messenger.js even exists.

One reason I wrote messenger.js is because I find it easy to install, work with, and deploy over using RabbitMQ in node. Personally I was using zeromq with node-zeromq.

This means, I need to install zmq, install the node module for it, and anything else that it may need to work properly. In addition I have to do this on dev and production.

On top of that, I also have to write an abstraction over it similar to how the messenger.js listener works right now. To me, there seems to be too many moving parts to the puzzle just to get some simple communication going.

I fell in love with the DNode API at one point, but I have to start my servers first and clients second. It doesn't appear to be a way to capture error events and try to auto-reconnect. There is a ticket for it but it seems neglected. For me, I don't want to worry about that. I want that abstracted away. I also wanted it in TCP, not HTTP.

Of course, the benefit of RabbitMQ is in a separate language, someone probably already wrote the adapter for you to communicate with services of different languages.

I'm not trying to compete with RabbitMQ here though. Just trying to get node.js communication to work in a scalable fashion with a 1 line install that just works.
In California, that would be $50,000 in fines. It's $1000 per commercial email you send to someone with whom you have no prior relationship.

As it should be.
A very good counter argument.

Windows 7 is awesome, but it wasn't going anywhere NEW. And that's something consumers want. A constantly moving product. Constantly evolving. Not just build it once and sit on it for a decade. But something that has life.

"They are abandoning their core strengths while poorly trying to duplicate what led to Apple's recent success"

But so is Ubuntu. They're just starting to realize that there's a huge demographic out there that they can make money off of and are adjusting their assets to compete for it, I think. A lot of the doom and gloom "desktops are dying" are because of mobile but also because of the stagnation and lack of 'ease of use' of desktop operating systems. Mobile's great but lets not bullshit ourselves, you can only stare at that little screen for so long before you hop on your laptop and do everything you wanted to do 10 times faster.
Thanks for the reply. It just seems counter-intuitive that canvas area should matter so much when the drawing logic is essentially the same. We are creating the same number of objects, just on a larger canvas and with different (X,Y) coordinates. Thus, the creation speed of the canvas itself (in memory, before flipping) should be roughly equivalent, right? The slow-down is simply from having to re-render the larger canvas? I'll dig more, of course, but quick insight from those in the know around here is always appreciated.
sounds like a big IT company
Thanks! You are correct on the connections, interesting iPhone allows 4! I've updated the article and credited you for pointing it out
When I bought a Windows Phone, the salesman tried very hard to steer me away. I asked about the Samsung Focus, and he showed me the Samsung Galaxy S instead. In the end I had to just say "is there someone else I can talk to who won't let me walk out the door right now?"
Great idea.

I've thought of doing something similar for an HTML editor, because—like with Lisp—the nesting can become a nuisance.
FreeBSD has made a lot of progress with clang in the base system (which consists of both the kernel and standard userland); I run a clang-compiled FreeBSD on my laptop.

But that said, we have a lot more clang coverage through the work done by the ports team who have been running experimental builds with clang for more than a year. That work is documented here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/PortsAndClang
I was thinking wireless doorbell. I can hook up the GPIO pins for power and the doorbell signal and plug in a USB wifi stick. It can then buzz my phone (maybe via Jabber) to wake me up in the mornings when there's an early delivery.

Even though the RasPi is hugely overqualified, it looks like it will be easier and cheaper than using a Arduino with a wireless shield. I'm also tickled by the idea of using a such a powerful computer for such a trivial task :)
Sounds like you get an ego trip off your depression.

Some of the worlds greatest artists, inventors, etc did their best work because they confronted the darkness of the world, and the darkness of themselves. And because of their darkness they had a lot to work with.

But to say that only unhappy people see the world for what it is is highly facetious. No, in fact, it's more than that. It's evidence of a clear desire to interpret your own suffering in a way that demonstrates your superiority over others, and as ploy to discredit those who spread hope and positivity.

I think it's very sad if the lenses of your world are so narrow that you can only see the depressed as wise, and the positive as dreamers, and I pity you, but don't try and sell that perverted mindset on to the rest of us.

The fact is, people use Youtube, Farmville, etc as a form of escapism from the challenges of life, which do, as you said, include confronting reality and the many negatives of it. This is an incredibly difficult task, and it's understandable that so many of us shy from it, in small ways almost every day. But it isn't an impossible task, and there are many great (and happy) people who demonstrate this. Off the top of my head Gandhi, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama all embody this truth perfectly.

And as for creative people needing depression to fuel their creativity; go watch 'Bill Cunningham New York', and tell me that creative brilliance and happiness aren't compatible.
You're welcome! I don't know how useful it is in practice. I myself don't mind the parens as long as I can see them match.
How about curating a list of startup friendly houses on Airbnb. Could be a good marketing approach for the landlords to say "startups X, Y and Z started here". I'm sure they'd be popular outside of YC seasons too.
Your Average Facebook Post Only Reaches 16% Of Your Friends
I don't know if this is what they did, but many embed their video in a pop-behind when buying traffic (for far less then a penny per view), and as the video is played behind the site, they get a view.

It's a bit pointless though.
I think the concept of having other creatives nearby is an interesting one, but there are unique experiences that early startup founders face and having a peer group of others solving the same problems is more helpful, imho.
Ask HN:  Do you set aside time just for "thinking?"  
If so,

(1) how often and how much?

(2) how often and how much do you think would be optimum for you?

I used to be fairly disciplined about setting aside a half-hour to an hour several mornings a week. Often I would "think" about things that weren't directly related to my work but rather to my interests- perhaps work a math puzzle, or clarify my thoughts on some topical issue. But I have always fallen back into the mode of just getting on with my day (which involves a fair amount of thinking in its own right, to be sure).

How much do I think would be optimum? I'm not sure- I haven't really thought about it :-)

Note that I'm not talking about meditation, unless you have a "thinking" form of meditation (and not, say, following your breath).
I'd wager that this is pretty much just business mentality.

YC isn't a charity, after all, beyond the public forum for discussion they provide in HN--and even that is arguably a chance to promote their own startups and scout talent. :)
I would wager that Zune and WP7 struggle not due to consumers not liking it, but due to the people the consumers get their information from not liking the idea of it.

When someone I know goes to buy a piece of hardware, generally they'll ask me or someone else what they should get. It's up to me/other people to understand what they need before giving them advice. Telling them " don't buy a Windows Phone" without understanding them or clarifying why (and telling the truth) is just being an asshole. The question should be "if they use a PC, why should they get an iPhone (and vice versa)".
Yeah, that's probably good marketing for some houses.
> Calling the above “ugly” isn’t fair. It’s not ugly. It’s what happens when Ugly and Stupid get drunk and make a baby inside the Fukushima safety zone

It seems to me that the article is full of hate. The author really miss the Start Menu.
I will put them up. In theory it should be faster than something like DNode or anything that uses DNode (hook.io) because it doesn't have the TCP tear down from using HTTP to carry what is probably small payloads most of the time.

Right now it's as fast as Node.js will allow TCP to be, if that makes any sense.

Benchmarks will come as soon as I get some free time to sit down and do them all. I'll plan to compare with zmq+nodezmq, rabbitmq+nodeamqp, dnode, hook.io. Any others?
I've seen pictures of that building before, and I like it a lot.

I know you mean living space rather than office space. It just doesn't seem an urgent problem. I think we've succeeded in making happy hours non-lame this batch, now that Garry Tan has taken over as social director. It may be that is the best way to bring founders together outside YC.
So did I and I also thought they would be funded by Sequoia Capital, because a user sequoia posted this. Oh well, now that I think about it, it was kind of unlikely.
Really nice. I hope it will make clojure scripts faster to start than with the jvm and thus a real alternative as a scripting language.
Building something like this has been my dream for the last 6 years or so.

"Hacker Hostel" (That name is already taken, though).

The "I'm an accentric billionaire" fantasy of mine is basically to build this, except to run it as an invite-only non-profit.

Makes me happy to hear that I'm not alone in this thinking :) (Because it does sound a bit like I'm wanting to build a hippie commune when I describe this to people).

To expand on the fantasy a little bit:

"To apply to hacker hostel, send us a puzzle, that's your application. It doesn't matter if you've never touched a computer before, or if you just finished your PhD.

If you get accepted, you can come out and live here for 1 semester, during which time you're free to create whatever you want. We'll fund the supplies, we've got a workshop, just build, and share whatever knowledge you have with the other people that are here.

If, while you're here, you build the next big thing, and are suddenly swimming in cash, good for you! We don't own your IP, although if you would donate to our trust, we'd really appreciate it."

Personally, I see a problem with the current cycle of:

go to school -> go to college -> get a job -> CAT PICTURES/Financial Services/Advertising!

I hate that. If I have have the means, I plan on breaking it.

And stuff I'm doing now: I keep a server that doesn't get any of my personal projects on it. Any time one of my friends posts to facebook or tells me that they want to learn to program computers, or that they have an idea they want to do, I give them an account on the box, and offer to build it with them, or to teach them python [the language that I know].

(Now I'm ranting, it's the tea I had for lunch, I think).

It makes me really sad that I can sit here and look at this computer with an almost total understanding of what is happening with it, and how to make it do whatever I want, and that the majority of my friends can't.

We [programmers] are all supermen. I've noticed that in the last year, a lot of us are trying really hard to give that gift to everybody else (code academy, khan academy, etc.), and that really makes me happy :).
There are body scanners in Europe. I went through one at Schiphol on the way to Washington last week. And I didn't see any sign there to tell me that I could opt for a pat-down, whereas there are screens to tell you that in Washington on the way back.
It really bothers me that a number of commenters on a TC article are still misinformed as to what the term "hacker" actually means. Thank you, mainstream media, for all of your misinformation and FUD. Regardless, I will still go about my days explaining to people that I'm a hacker for a living, and that it isn't a bad thing. I'll keep explaining that the term was derived from MIT's model railroad club and if possible, refer them to http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html or tell them to google it; then maybe someday along with the help of awesome programs like CoderDojo, the general population will be a little less misinformed.
That's a little bit of a shame. I'm not close enough to make it to the meetup, but I and others would love some way to take part and chat with everyone.
Interesting. One reason I'm wary of picking stocks is that most of my expertise is in technology; if my field goes south, I don't want my investments tracking it. But you don't have that problem. I'm worried I would; my best picks have always ended up being tech companies.
Okay, sorry to re-reply but here are the two versions of the email I sent. Mind skimming them and tell me what I did horribly, horribly wrong? I'd honestly love your feedback. I think I would follow something shorter than this but the same in spirit for cold phone calls. So maybe you can save me some pain and anguish.

Polite Version:
Dear %fill:FirstName%,

First off, sorry for this out of the blue email. I found your name %fill:FoundYourNameSource%, and was hoping you might be able to help me.

My name is Ian Fitzpatrick, I'm the founder of a small software company in Saint Paul. I'm investigating ideas for my next software product, and I'm interested in creating an application that serves your industry.

I see that you're a %fill:JobRole% at %fill:CompanyName%. Are there any parts of your job that you feel are a hassle, repetitive, or error-prone -- where if you had the right software at work, your life might be a little easier? That's the kind of thing I'm super interested in hearing about.

If you have just 20 minutes available any time this week, I'd love the meet and pick your brain. I'm honestly just trying to learn, and hopefully create a product that makes your life a little easier.

Impolite Version:

Hi %fill:FirstName%,

I’m a software developer investigating some projects ideas in the %fill:IndustryName%. I’d like to understand the problems and successes you've had at %fill:CompanyName% a bit better. I’m not trying to sell you anything, I would just like to hear your thoughts on a few things related to the industry.

Do you have 20 minutes available to meet at some point in the next week? I'd like to conduct an informal interview with you.
Back before I knew of YC, I schemed on the idea of having a startup frat. Where pledges bust ass to build products, apps, etc. The profits are shared with those that built them, but also heavily reinvested back into the frat... But then I never went back to college. :)
Thanks, I'll watch the talk with I get a spare moment.

Regarding the existing opportunities, It's interesting imagining a situation where opportunities did not exist, seemingly the market would either become completely random, and driven by luck, or remarkably stable. Most interestingly it crazy to imagine a market that has been optimized to complete stability. I wonder if that's the natural progression of things.
"We started making too many calls to S3, and almost took down one of their data centers. They throttled us and it took us a while to figure out what was going on; for a while our numbers cratered as users could not connect. We had to move completely off of Amazon and host everything ourselves."

Isn't this the exact scenario that people use the "cloud" for? Scaling up massively and quickly?
I'm curious, the US Interstate Highway numbers appear to be missing. Is this a design decision, or a yet-to-add feature?
I have written some amount of Lisp - at this point in the 5-10KLoC range, and I don't think this tool is a great editor.

However, it's one of the more useful code/program visualizations I've come across.
How a $350K/year income is "not enough"?
Yes, but they've only recently bothered or got the gumption to enforce it.
Musicians, sculptors, writers, philosophers, economists, architects, and dancers have nothing special to contribute to companies like Parse, Heroku, or Dropbox to name a few.

What is a dancer going to tell me about running my startup? The whole point of startups moving to SF is so that they can be around other startups.
How Carrots Became The New Junk Food
Why zooming on mobile is broken (and how to fix it)
Simple (and fast) jQuery object cache.
> have you ever seen one?
>
> Seems to me that the TSA has changed their backscatter
> approach since then. Instead of showing the full images
> to security personnel it will do some computational
> analysis of the images and then represent any anomalies
> on a simple drawing of a human. The people going through
> the machine will see the same images the TSA will.

Perhaps you don't travel often, but I have not been to an airport in the past 1½ years which didn't have either backscatter or millimeter wave scanners used as primary screening methods for the majority of passengers - PHX, SEA, FLW, MKE, AUS, MCI, SFO - those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Also, the generic image is only used with the millimeter wave scanners (the clear phone booth looking scanners). The back scatter machines still produce a grayscale nude image.

Every plane is already equipped with hundreds of pounds of explosives. You wouldn't get anywhere without them. The statistical probability of that or any other explosive causing you harm - even in the event that harm is intended - approaches zero. It is far more likely you'll be the victim of assault, auto accident, or of unknown causes than have any harm come to you on or by an airplane and this has always been the case. Statistically, there is absolutely no personal or public safety issue with eliminating intrusive, unconstitutional searches in order to board planes.
.co.us is Colorado. .com.us?
Personally, I have a scraper service, web app server cluster, stream server cluster, mobile service, and a data access layer in my setup.

They all communicate with each other, but in very different ways.

The scraper for example uses fire and forget to send something to the data access layer.

The web app cluster needs to use the request reply model with the data access layer.

The data access layer needs to send pub / sub messages to the stream clusters holding live connections.

I also have a mobile service which does a combination of pub / sub (notify stream servers), req / rep (data access), and fire / forget (analytics).

I needed one library with a 1 line install that handled all of these cases, with the simplest API I could come up with.
Hmm. Plan might be a stronger word than where I'm at with this :)

It's a 3-5yr vision.
A Photoshop engineer vs the exploitation of kids
It proves that technology doesn't solve these problems. Diligent employees who do their jobs solve these problems.

My buddy was told that there was a faint line on the xray machine and they wanted to check it out. He didn't even know he had those scissors.
The reference to my time spent with D1/D2 was to make the point that I like Diablo. I've put about 2 hours with the D3 beta and had to force myself to finish it.
Tips for Organizing Your Desk and Desktop for Better Efficiency
It's not even a true beta. It's like a demo. That lasts 30 minutes. So short…so sad…

Diablo 3 needs to be released like yesterday!
"We have identified the root cause of this incident. It has been traced back to a cert issue triggered on 2/29/2012 GMT," the software giant said.

So here is a quiz for you, does you software know that this is a leap year? I'll speculate that someone's software didn't recognize it as such. Personally I'm always on the lookout for this sort of 'weird' thing because in the world of testing the edge cases are often poorly tested.
It's interesting to think of you running a business school, pg.

It just hit me: he has been running a business school; or rather, an entrepreneurship school, for the last x years.
The API for auto-discovery will simply be the same API but pass in namespaces instead of ports / addresses.
Actually Starcraft 2 failed in its target group: South Korea, the original is still king in The Land of The Morning Calm. Blizzard screwed themselves over with the requirement of being online to play.
The big successes do make more money, but if you knew us you'd know that's not our top priority. The reason we want to fund the most successful founders is that they're the most fun to work with. It's exhausting trying to pep up founders who aren't really cut out for startups, whereas talking to the best founders is net energizing.
Oh and if you look closely, you'll see I completely stole my copy from you. Doh.
Well, this is not quite the same, but you can get indent-level highlighting in vim via these sorts of plugins:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3361

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1800

Some screenshots:

http://nathanaelkane.imgur.com/indent_guides

http://viming.blogspot.com/2007/02/indent-level-highlighting...

Of course, you can also get rainbow parenthesis in vim via:

:let g:lisp_rainbow = 1

There should also be some way to get background highlights based on sexpr's instead of just indent level, but I haven't personally seen it.

Edit: actually, come to think of it, I seem to recall hearing that the slimv[1] plugin can do this. But I haven't really played with it myself.

[1] - http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531
You just know someone's going to get .torrent, and then all hell will break loose...
Mobile Second Cup - the top MWC apps + devs have access to iOS photo data
Well, you do realize it is a hippie commune, just for people interested in building companies and cool technology. I mean, SF gave us hippies, and then it gave us silicon valley. Next step would be to have a silicon valley commune.