skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're pretty confident there's a big business in our space. chee.rs is focused on the positive experiences in our users lives, rather than rating every little thing. Users post what they love (it's freeform: it can be music, restaurants or just general concepts), and other users pile on with positive reenforcement. What we're seeing is that users get hooked on having a space dedicated to things that people like and spend hours at a time (literally - like spending 3+ hours on some nights) in the app just going through what other people like, and posting their own content from time-to-time.

We've had a few businesses approach us cold after being cheered, asking if they could offer some sort of coupon, or other offer to users who cheer on their business. That's something we haven't really figured out how to run with and/or monetize yet.

I can't really explain what gets these users hooked, but you can see the sort of engagement we're seeing here: http://chee.rs/1433322
Ah, I can see where you're coming from. I think the best approach would be to go with both and potentially have an awkward interface with PayPal. People may stop using your service because of the awkward UX, however some people won't start using your service as you don't have PayPal.

Another option would be to use something like SagePay - or similar - which supports regular cards as well as PayPal, so it all happens through the one checkout. Maybe that wouldn't be possible, I don't know, but might be worth looking into.
Oh no, let's not go this way again. It a conversation that has been had on-and-on, and it is always the same thing. To me this is a form of soap opera. We know that this is a guy who chews skin that he just peeled off of his feet in front of an audience. So, obviously this is somebody who has to be taken for what he is, discussing his pros and cons is a waste of time.
The average customer is MORE likely to act on warm-fuzzies. Human psychology dictates it and the marketplace demonstrates it. The stock market takes that behavior to the bank daily.

The purportedly high cost of OEM development would be mismanagement at best and is simply an informal fallacy at worst.

Your rebuttal supports my statements, as captured by this statement: "It's like the PC market of 10 years ago..." Pray tell, which players remain from that era and, of those, which are not on the brink of insolvency?
That is normal for all sorts of financial organizations, to not put the name on an office building. If they do, they get customers wandering into the lobby thinking it's a retail branch looking for services. Bigger problem for banks, but investment firms get that too. I once worked for Citibank in an owned but unlabeled building.

Basically it's the same reason that Wal-Mart doesn't put its name on a distribution warehouse facility. People would try to walk in thinking it's a store.
Visual Studio has some fairly decent tools ("Find all references", "Go to definition/declaration"), although they tend to fall over in macro-heavy C++.

A lot of my coworkers swear by Understand, but I haven't tried it myself.
I think the guns the parent poster is referring to was the widely publicised statement that they would "shoot in the head" their projects if they weren't working. So they are sticking to that particular gun, as it were
Show HN: Smarter Commuters Via Apps. Feedback appreciated!
Question: what is the font they used for the "OINK" logo? If anyone has an idea, I would love to know.

What the Font was unsuccessful in determining it.
Facebook says they have 845,000,000 "active" users. log10 of 845,000,000 is 8.9 or so, log10 of 200,000,000 is 8.3, leaving about 0.6, or most of an order of magnitude. And Facebook hasn't peaked yet.
People seem to forget he is an idealist. If he thinks free software is the most important social issue of our time, don't be surprised his other beliefs flow from it. I think his role as an uncompromising figure is important to maintain the shape of the overton window. I wouldn't want him to be anything else.

You don't have to agree with him (he is ridiculously idealistic), but his position provides us a lenses to analyze our own. To understand what we want software to be, our ability to affect that, the constraints practicality places on that, and how we reconcile the two.

There is always going to be a line where we say "fuck it, I need money", so poke around and discover yourself rather than taking the quick route and just writing off everything you're not already involved with as someone else's problem.

Hopefully, on the other end of that process, we have discovered enough about our stance on software that we're above a banal characterization of free software like: Good at making software that helps people and brings joy to others? Don’t do it.
And, to be fair, as soon as the py3k WSGI spec was agreed upon the Django core developers also started implementing and pushing this transition strategy. It was a big deal at DjangoCon '11.
Honestly I had no interest in anything associated with Kevin Rose thanks to Digg.
First line sheds a bit of light on their philosophy: "We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project..."

Sounds like they are trying for a shotgun approach (didn't the company behind Angry Birds do the same thing? I don't know the official business term for this methodology). Where they have an internal API/system to roll out an idea FAST, then see if it gains any traction within their internal goal (whatever short period of time they set for themselves), and if not, scrap it to move onto the next thing...?

I think that works great for little one-off games. But with websites where people are expecting it to be around for years? Will that burn users too often, too fast, and sully your reputation? I don't know. I'm curious.

(imo, I don't know if I'd have put those two sentences in the shut-down notice - sounds like they were just experimenting with the site to see if they could make a quick buck, weren't really serious about it unless the $ or pageviews started flowing, and the users were just the guinea pigs...but that's just me.)
I apologise if that is the view that was put across. It is not what I/we intended but just thought it was unique considering 90% of the co founder requests on here are for technical based people.

I 100% regret the title in hindsight with the point you made.
Just curious. Why are you ruining such a good domain by redirecting to www.chee.rs?
Role of free Hosting in Cyber Crime | The Hacker News (THN)
Dropbox - How do I get free space for using Camera Upload? -
I've read books on this subject, most notably, 'Free Prize Inside' by Seth Godin- a perfect sequel addressing 'the how', to the book about 'the why' to be remarkable: 'Purple
Cow'.

Whenever I read on the subject it gets me to thinking about how my particular company might go about implementing practices & policies which encourage such exceptional customer experiences.

What I've come up with so far, is to invest in developing services that could be sold as 'add-ons', but which exist only to be offered as bonuses to customers when the time is ripe to affect & influence their opinion of us & the value we offer.

Of course, I aim to hire employees who will seek opportunities to go the extra mile, as do those in this article, but I also aim to empower them to& create a company culture that encourages such actions, and thus can be constantly innovating on the subject of customer satisfaction. In fact, our values statement says 'Our clients must be enthusiastically satisfied all the time', and our culture will hopefully facilitate that.

Seth Godin's book 'Free Prize Inside' covers the topic of employee involvement in this regard quite well, and I encourage anyone who finds themself inspired by this HN post to buy, read & give that book to an employee.
but that's not the point of Milk... Milk was founded on the idea of pumping out lots of small things and seeing if any of them stuck.

If they kept Oink alive until it took off (if ever) they wouldn't be able to build the next thing.
Thanks, always wondered whether I was just useless or 'especially useless'. Remember that writing an article like this means explaining things that may not be as evident to the general public as they are to you. Thank you for reading though, I appreciate it.
Maybe, but it would have been funnier if they used monotone ;)
Starting with a cruise ship is a good idea because it can set sail to other countries if it needs to, like a pirate.
FBI, stumped by pimp's Android pattern lock, serves warrant on Google
We're still doing this for two reasons: it's easy and it works surprisingly well. More complicated solutions would be difficult to implement and would probably be less flexible. It's just difficult to be significantly more efficient than somebody really good with Emacs using mostly code agnostic tools, except in real edge-cases (finding the right variable named x our of hundreds of xs is going to be difficult, but if your code looks like that you have bigger problems).

Also, I really wish the myth that "point and click" is inevitably superior would go away. It may be easier to learn, but my experience is that with some practice keyboard-based programming tools are almost invariably faster.
YC seems (I obviously don't speak for them) to like companies like Smugmug and Instapaper --- see what Graham writes about Wufoo --- and over the long term, companies with established niches can obtain valuations that outstrip that niche. Black swans happen, and it's good to maximize your exposure to the good ones.

But fundamentally YC is about shooting companies out of a cannon. Charging users a fee puts user acquisition and retention at risk. For Instapaper and Pinboard that risk is well worth the reward. But most YC companies have acclimated themselves to the idea of working for a VC-funded board of directors; if you're going to take VC, the risk is very often not worth it in the first year or two of your company, because traction trumps revenue in most VC-funded companies.

The overwhelming majority of YC's returns come from exits from VC-funded companies.

So the interests of free users and YC don't really so much line up here.
Perhaps, but the lack of bytestrings seems to be what bites everyone. It's the only "deep" change and it affects anyone who wants to slice raw bytes (which includes most web frameworks).
I'm saying clients who would use the tool use IE8 and IE7. Basecamp is a project management, and collaboration tool - so unfortunately those clients have to be supported (unless you can fire the clients or upgrade them to a newer browser :)
As natural as it feels on everyday use, dropbox is really an amazing thing
Finally, Microsoft Embraces Social
Download the dropbox app on your smartphone; open it; it will ask you if you want to save "all your photos" on dropbox; say yes; take a pic. Get your extra free space.
I like Microsoft's OneNote for this because it removes the saving/naming from the workflow, and it has a decent search.
Very clever move to let his clients know they should keep tabs on him. It advertises his integrity and informs people he's leaving.
Yep, my fault. I'm crap at dates. I've updated the article.
I chose tests all functionality, but thats completely unrealistic. We TRY to test everything beyond just critical items, but we'll never get there.
International waters or not, who would be so stupid to pull such a stunt so close to US territory? Or, in fact, close to any nation with a sizable navy.

Also, we do not know which flag they will sail under, but it my bet is that they will adopt the US flag. My understanding is that such an act would be an act of piracy against the USA itself.

Furthermore, they wouldn't be THAT far from land. Even in the impossible event that they government turned a blind eye to the fate of the ship, they would not want some armed terrorist skimming their borders.

While the boat wouldn't be far from the land, any potential attackers would be an ocean away. I assume the boat would be fairly safe. It is not like they'll be sailing next to Somalia.
I would move it to domainregister.it

Good, honest people. No idea if/how well they speak English, though.
point taken.
I thought you didn't mean it THAT way, however, writing something in a short space like a title can come across completely different than when you say something.

Good luck with your startup, I'm rooting for all entrepreneurs!
That is exactly what I was talking about.
So as a consumer, why would anyone ever even try Milk's products until they clearly become viable? You are being asked to give tons of your time and energy to build out their product (user generated content), recommend it to your friends, and do their word of mouth marketing, and in return the company has no loyalty to you unless its spectacularly successful.

And in contrast to the Milk model, you have sites like Delicious, Flickr, and even Digg itself which still operate even after the original founders have moved on.
That was my initial thought. Whose interest is it to run a negative PR campaign against Pinterest?
That bothers me too. One of the limitations of AppEngine, sadly:

http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/general.html#naked_domai...

We've been waiting for them to fix this for a while. I hope that it arrives around the same time as SSL support for custom domains.
That's precisely what makes the landlord metaphor so effective.
I know it shouldn't be a factor when it comes to judging his work, but there's something about his attitude that just rubs me the wrong way.
We know that this is a guy who ... <insert something that has absolutely nothing to do with software here>

Nice ad hominem there, pretty much right from the textbook. Really, how does that affect the status of his statements about software?
Introducing key/value data storage in Heroku Postgres
Curiosity: do engines in a big cruise liner ever stop?
CS229A is a course taken by people from different backgrounds not just CS. It basically deals with the practical aspects of machine learning, implementation issues etc. In addition to the lectures and the assignments, stanford students also had an additional course project.
Developing Game Audio with the Web Audio API
If only you were talking about methane then it would be the converse.
I can't reproduce it, and it's not the sort of bug HN's architecture would tend to produce. The most likely culprit may be excessively aggressive caching by someone between you and HN. I've heard reports of that.
I left that out as I needed to filter for files with two or more keywords occurring on possibly different lines. I don't know of an easy way to make M-x grep do that.
While an interesting perspective, the author's idea of what constitutes the "wrong problem" is strange. Making it easy for non-technical users to publish strikes me as precisely the right problem.
I agree. this poll forces me to choose between a test suite that tests "all functionality" and "a few critical things". I think a lot of people who value high levels of testing coverage still fall somewhat short of all functionality, but are way above "a few critical things".

I'm using rails these days, and I have 100% test coverage on models and controllers (though that really just means that all the model and controller code is executed when I run my tests, these tools can't really tell if you've tested the code intelligently, though I hope I have).

I don't have a full suite of integration tests that validate all of the view logic, though there are some checks. I also have integration tests that validate external dependencies (file storage, database connectivity, etc), though again, there may be some holes.

I picked "all", since that's closest to where I am. But my best choice would be "we maintain a high (95%+) level of testing coverage". I don't think I'm splitting hairs here, because there may be a practical tradeoff between high levels and complete levels of test coverage.

NOTE: "high" levels of testing can mean different things to different people... doesn't have to be 95%, which I would consider to be higher than absolutely necessary. It depends so much on what you're actually testing (anyone who has used a coverage tool knows you can often "trick" the tool into awarding the 100% bar without doing much other than just making sure the tests run the code... which is useful in its way but can let all kinds of errors slip through).
Going to typewrite letters responding to people's Twitter feeds.
Y Combinator’s new Gambit is the ultimate founder dating & recruiting manna
Won't somebody think of the children!

If you think something is unethical, as rms does with proprietary software, why would that change if it puts people out of work? He still thinks it's unethical.

He ties it up with a false dichotomy: either I develop proprietary software or my children starve. If children really did starve due to there being no proprietary software jobs, then the discussion is different, but it's not the case.

Surely there are job losses in the tobacco industry, but I don't think we should stop discouraging it as a society.

This is such an ignorant and lazy article, why has it got so many votes here? Sigh.
Interested, not excited. I want to see the "better idea".

I am suspecting this episode will offend people who are working real hard on what they think is are more important ideas and are struggling to get finding, only for Kevin to throw away millions for fun.
You should check out QuickCheck for catching edge cases you did not think of. The idea behind QuickCheck is simple--you specify invariants in your code (called "properties") and the framework tests them with random inputs.

This tool is very widely used in Haskell, but it's been ported to a whole bunch of other languages and could make your testing more thorough. In Haskell it's also easy to use and more fun than normal tests, but I don't know what it would be like in a different language.
In this scenario, there should be tests already present covering developer A's portion of the codebase, together with documentation on how to run them (though tests should be as self-explanatory as possible).

In fairness, I recognize that this isn't always the case in the real world. Sometimes you really do need to just blindly attempt to fix something, and there's nothing to be done about it. But it should never become a regular occurrence, and you should never get comfortable doing it. First thing I would do is tell my manager exactly why I'm uncomfortable, and what a conservative assessment of the risk is. If we decide to go ahead with the change anyway, I would create two new entries in the bug tracking system, which should be developer A's top priorities as soon as she returns: thoroughly vet my changes, and DEVELOP A SET OF TESTS.
Well, nothing new. If it runs, it can be cracked. I say it as a reverser (legal) with more than 10 years of exp. So, instead of investing money/time into the protection mechanisms, it's better to use the resources to improve your software. Yet well-thought custom protection (i.e. not ASProtect, Armadillo, etc..) can be harder, but it's all the same crackable.
I think you get it; Social identity just isn't worth that much and I don't think it's a question of nobody knowing what to do with it. It's a bubble and now Google is on the bandwagon as well.
Ask HN: New role for a software developer
Hi,
I 'm a software developer with 6 years of work experience. After working for 6 years as a developer I want to try and do something else. What that might be is not clear to me. At this time I have only two ideas , working as a Pre-Sales engineer or MBA. I 'm still not sold on MBA even though i like the idea of doing so. I 'm not particularly convinced because I would be moving into an unknown territory. If I take the MBA route I would like to work with one of the top consulting firms. And that is what I aspire to do in long term also, work for a consulting firm.

Can someone please give me some insight both good/bad about pre-sales engineer & consulting profiles. Any other recommendations would also be great..
Thanks for reading
I wonder how Tumblr handles this. Pretty much every Tumblr blog I've stumbled on to contains full size copyrighted images re-hosted by Tumblr.
"It's better to burn out, than fade away"
Look at it this way: you must be testing code as you write it anyway. There's really no other sane way to do it. You make a change, you load the page and see that your change worked, or you call your new function from an interactive interpreter.

Smart automated testing just takes all that extra test work you're already doing and saves it as you go along.

No need to try to invent extra things to test. You just test what you would have tested anyway by hand.
Agreed. At certain scales, it no longer makes sense to give primary mover status to humans within institutions. It is important to realize that there are several mechanisms within institutions that alter the values they serve. It makes more sense to treat them as black boxes and reason about outcomes rather than intentions.
Very biased interviewer and horrible introduction to a an interview about a rather interesting topic. I also do not agree with Mr. Stallman about this specific point, but this is just bad journalism.
Make the source code available; the app and website!
Well, while you can in principle do something, an accelerator is a pretty blunt instrument. You're unlikely to have practical success putting Krypton, Barium and a few neutrons together into a Uranium nucleus even if it's theoretically possible. The phase space for the reaction is just not there. Chemistry has a lot more tricks for synthesizing molecules than just shooting them at each other.
Seeking Review/Feedback for my MVP - Thrill Engine
Hi everyone,

I am excited to share with you my venture - Thrill Engine.
It's a service for finding and booking Action sports travel destinations.

I started working on this out of few things:

Pure passion - been riding a snowboard for a while, recently got into kiteboarding and surfing is next on the radar (life is short, gotta live it up :))!;
After using similar services, while planning trips, seen areas of improvement;
Had a long time goal to start my own thing.

I'm a hustler, who decided to learn and do all the coding by myself ( after struggling to find CTO )
Needless to say that it took me a lot of time and pain to build my MVP :)

Please check it out and let me know your feedback -- http://www.thrillengine.com/
Thank you for your time. You are Awesome!

Emils
It looks like BackTrack, just without so many tools and with a theme that looks like it were made by a 12 year old.
I mean really.. that theme looks utterly unusable..
cool, have you had reasonable interactions with them? most importantly, are they prompt in replying? (that's the main problem with the current registrar the domain is with. I worry in dealing with them if I'm not dangling money in front of them)
Oink was free, so why not?
If that's the case, then Imgur/Reddit is like the new pirate bay. They've been rehosting images (often without attribution, although not maliciously -- someone usually provides it) for years.
Interesting... I think I'm with you on this one. There have been a few occasions where I got my test coverage through integration tests rather than unit or functional tests as well.

My real goal is to have tests that will sound the alarm if I've done something that breaks the application. I think this is similar to the "smoke test" you're talking about. Don't want to have to fire up the server and walk through all the use cases - it's very useful to have integration tests that will do this instead.
The ESC key in vi is idempotent. It's not doing it wrong to hit it thousands of times. It's doing it wrong to have to model the state of your editor in your head.

I have a similar habit of typing "git " in my terminal, and then getting distracted while I think through what I'm trying to do, and then just typing "git " again. Rather than punish myself, I just wrote a script called git-git. https://github.com/jes5199/git-git so I can type "git git git push" and it works.