skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
improved: more M-ness to balance the arrow-ness and make it more distinctive, and -- more importantly -- made bolder to work at small sizes:

https://plus.google.com/102359018718464872517/posts/LKJA5Uua...
This isn't the first time this has happened. Remember that little game "minecraft"? The game was effectively developed live while pre-orders were sold that allowed people to play the pre-release code. It raised more money than both of these games before it was released. Enough to create a game company with several employees working on other games as well.

The fact should be firmly established now: it is feasible to bootstrap the funding of games and even the creation of game companies.

Of course it's not going to be easy, and for some people it's going to be harder than for others. But it's always been that way. Making games has always been hard, it's a rather brutal industry that is not very rewarding for most of the people in it.
1080p video smackdown: iTunes vs. Blu-ray
Passphrases Not As Secure As You Think
Since there is no mention of Firefox 'Metro Style' for Windows 8, should one gather that it won't happen during 2012? I realize they just announced that they're starting it, but I assumed it would come sometime around the launch of Windows 8.
There's not only the carbon dioxyde that counts. If you have ever been around a paper/cardbox factory you know how much it stinks and how heavily they use chemicals.

I don't have time to read the study but you also have to go beyond first order effects. OK growing the trees might be a carbon sink, but what about the second and plus order: the effect on the soil, heavy use of human machinery, use of pesticide.

Just FYI the energy used by laser is extremely low except if you are talking about CO2 laser or something. I would be more concerned about the making of such a laser.
Unit testing is the salvation of anything but the most trivial of projects.

Sometimes, it can be frustrating to have to stop and write a unit test before send out something for further review, but computers are more reliable testers than humans are.

Learn, use, and love unit testing, or face the consequences.
The quote around designer bothered me too. Seriously biased me against his opinion since that was indication he doesn't care for any other opinions if doesn't agree with his.

For instance, as you point out, his complaints about visual design in reference to blind people makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Either he is really outdated in modern theories of web design/development or he's just being confrontational on purpose.
We saw a lot of this during Internet bubble v1.0

The issue is that a bunch of folks who will flip IPO shares need to quote a number-of-employees. The implication is that a high number of employees is an indicator of the viability of the company.
This happens repeatedly outside the startup world as well. The company I work for has relied on technology that Microsoft developed, supported, and subsequently walked away from. That is the nature of both business and technology.
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on Engineering your marketing outcomes
The problem with ending the "madness" is that you need to convince the web spammers that create these solely for increasing pagehits to stop doing so. That doesn't seem likely to be successful as long as it is still a workable strategy.
5 Keys for Work at Home Success
New indicator Keep-it tell you when the food is likely spoiled
Would you be able to share what type of software it is? I'm curious what takes that long to run
Want to Find Government Innovation? US Military is often leading the way.
I don't think being a paid service makes it more likely that it will be around forever, but it is a good input to use when weighing and comparing different services. I would probably place as much emphasis on data portability and content license terms.

This is, off course, assuming you are comparing products that are like-for-like in features and that the product is good. Paying for a crap product won't save it.
CITATION NEEDED.
I've lived in Silicon Valley and did not like it at all. The population density is really high, the rudeness coefficient is really high as well. Everyone I knew was on anti-depressants just because the environment was so tough.

Contrast that with berlin-- a much more healthy lifestyle can be had there, at a lot less cost (both financial and emotional).

The one thing silicon valley has going for it is sand hill road. But I think venture capital is a lot less important now than it used to be-- at least it should be.

Getting a bunch of people who want to create startups together in a geographic area will attract the money eventually.

What countries support this idea? (I'd live in Berlin right now if german immigration wasn't a bear.)
Most youngsters (20's and under) will read this as a random snide comment. Unfortunately it (still) is a key observation about how our knowledge update heuristics lag behind progress in tech.
He effectively blacklists himself from any future job in finance (and therefore ends his career) just because he doesn't like his bonus?

So no, it's not Occam's Razor: if he were merely unhappy with his bonus, he would call another i-bank and move on.

BTW, I notice you're always quick to defend the big money status quo around here (you were against net neutrality a while back, IIRC).

What's in it for you, as a mere SEO "consultant"?

Are you paid to post these talking points, or do you really believe what you say?
Ireland is very pro entrepreneurship.

It's easy to set up a new company, the overhead is minimal and there are lots of financial and other supports available from government agencies like Enterprise Ireland:

http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/en/

We have a very low corporate tax rate and the government recently introduced R&D tax credits to encourage innovation:

http://www.bdolimerick.ie/department.php?pg=/Research%20and%...

Not to mention a very strong academic community, plenty of funding available for academic collaboration and the presence of a huge number of prominent US tech companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, PayPal...

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/11/26/what-attracts-big-t...
While I love the story, I think the headline gives too much credit to Google Earth. He was able to find his home by joining a Facebook group and asking people. Yes, he used Google Earth to find the town; but he was able to find his way home only by emailing people.

Regardless, it's a great story. Whenever technology (be it Google Earth, or Facebook) makes such a positive impact on someone's life, I find it uplifting.
Programming, Rubik's Cubes, and Unconscious Incompetence
I really do hope that user's demand more reliability from their computers (and various computing devices). However I believe that since the birth of the PC we've been training user's to tolerate a much higher rate of failure and a massive backlash is unlikely.

People have varying tolerance levels depending on what they're using. We have an insanely low tolerance level for jet failure (the safety checks and expense that goes into airfare is extremely high) due to the public nature of the failures. We have higher tolerance level for car failures even though they claim the lives of far more people every year. We have an extremely high tolerance level for personal computer failure.

I'd like to be wrong. Contrary to your statement, I find myself, as a techy, to be far more critical of computer failure than the average user. I will discontinue use of poorly written software much quicker than my non-techy family or friends.
BootstrapWP
The article specifically says that phones should be unlocked. You wrote a nice little rant that everybody agrees with so you got a lot of upvotes, but completely orthogonal to the original article.
Okay, I wasn't aware of the Minix 3 redesign, so I stand corrected on that. Thanks for updating me!

But I'm fairly skeptical about how much use (if any) Minix is getting outside research and education. Aren't there already widely deployed HR/HA OSs that target the embedded market? What real advantages does Minix have over something like VxWorks?
It's probably well worth questioning the value of any of this crap above and beyond whatever immediate social value it gives. I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments--does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages?

It's probably worthwhile giving your users a chance to recover their content. It's probably not worthwhile to be a digital packrat.
Well with visual.ly's launch on HN - one of the worst launches I've ever seen by the way - I think it's almost over.
Though I'm not sure about the "lawless" part, I like that idea more.

I've always found the blueseed idea backwards. Come on, live on a boat just to be able to work in some country? I wouldn't do that unless I had no other choice. And it's horribly inefficient and expensive too. I surely hope that petty geography issues will become less important in the future, as international cooperation through the internet increases.
http://fakeapp.com
From my prospective if one likes the web2py libraries, one should use just web2py and not other frameworks. Some web2py users have also complained: what's the point? I think the point is that everybody could learn something from trying to use different tools. I have learned a lot about the other frameworks just trying to implement this. I think others could learn something too from just reading the example code.
From reading the other posts, I see that I misinterpreted the article.

Saving blogging and other self promotion information is important. I hosted my own blogging solution in the past, but now I compromise: use Blogger, map it to a subdomain on my main web site, and make sure I back up Blogger's data so I could re-host it with some effort. So, I trade off some control for making life easier.
Well, here's a user story:

You're Kanye West. Lots of other aspiring hip-hop artists want them to know about you because you're Kanye West. As a result, your regular inbox gets 250 emails a day from said hip-hop artists. So if you're Kanye West, you stop using email all together because you can't filter out the noise.

You go to this email service, though, and you get 5 emails a day, and they're from Jay-Z, Rihanna, Def Jam Records, Barbara Boxer, and an up-and-coming regional hip-hop artist who sold 12,000 records, has a growing following, and just barely met the standard to gain access to the service.

Those emails would be far more useful to Kanye, and he would check that inbox far more often because of it.
I should read Ballard's "High Rise" before boarding this ship. Or maybe Lord Of The Flies.

I can picture the marauding feral packs of founders roaming the halls of the ship, ducking for cover behind burning barricades fashioned from Aeron chairs, hurling broken macbooks at interlopers from unfriendly decks.

Murder will be done on this boat.
I'm male but both my cofounders are female. One of whom is not a US citizen and thus to be in "silicon valley" this "boat" would be the best option for us.

Here in Startup Chile, a lot of the companies are run by women or involve women-- I'd say the gender ratio (completely unscientific) is something like %60 men, not %90 men.
Where is the "we'd like to do more testing" without the negative excuse option? :)
Yes, that's what I'm doing, but I feel it's a drop in the bucket.
Send Pi-grams; each url is six digits of pi
And they wonder why no women are working there...
What is the visa situation like in Ireland? How about the personal tax burden and regulatory burden? (We spent 6 months in the UK and were just constantly hounded by random bodies that believed we owed them taxes, for instance a tax on televisions (we didn't have one.))
Each time there is an article about password security, I say the same thing ;-)

"soccer123" is a secure password.

Or at least, it ought to be, in most cases. The reason that 99% of the time it isn't is because bad security practices are implemented that don't lock users out temporarily after around 4 or 5 attempts, don't use captchas after the first 2 attempts, etc.

Nowadays it really ought to be impossible (unless you have access to the database, of course, in which case you have other problems) to brute force passwords. But then again, developers (including myself) are lazy :-)
I don't test as much as I probably should, because it seems cumbersome since I am mostly dealing with APIs like Facebook. For example, if a user revokes their Facebook OAuth app token they get an email notification about that from me, informing them that the app will no longer be able to function because of the expired token.

I am not automatically testing that, perhaps I am missing something, but automating the steps to log in to Facebook and revoke the token and then also making sure that SendGrid sent the email correctly just seem impractical.
I think your last paragraph aptly explains it all. A fish rots from the head down. If we take a broad and intangible concept like "culture" and reduce it to its mechanical workings, we see that it's usually the net result of everyone's incentives. If people at the top are setting perverse incentives, then their lieutenants will meet those incentives, and on down to their lieutenants, and so forth. Those at the bottom of the ladder will model the behaviors of those they're seeing get ahead. And one day, when they're moving up, they'll carry out the behaviors they've been conditioned to exhibit.

The other tricky thing about culture is that it's a lot like trust: very hard to earn, very easy to squander. Once lost, it's difficult -- sometimes impossible -- to recover.
frobozz nailed it, really. If something can't be done, it is the engineer's responsibility to make that known to his manager, who is responsible for communicating that to whoever is asking for the work.
A Simple Device Diagram for Responsive Design Planning
I assume that Reginald's complain was not about the data itself, but about the fact that he will now have to move his blog elsewhere - the drag of setting it up, and making sure that everyone can find it.
Even the people who are supposedly masters at this type of data presentation mess it up big time: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/11/how-to-fail-at-data-visualizatio...
Look into Jasmine BDD for js testing. We use it for all our js and it has greatly improved quality and reliability.
I disagree completely, and your comment makes me think you've never seriously used unit testing.

Writing tests makes you think about how pieces of your code interact with each other, dependencies etc.

As an example, if you're trying to test Function A and are finding you need tens of lines of setup code to be able to do so, then that would be a warning sign that you may want to think about refactoring out some of those dependencies
Object-oriented design patterns in the (Linux) kernel, part 1
Gracefully exiting from console programs in Ruby
100% branch and statement coverage doesn't begin to cover "all". Consider:

double sin(double x) { return x; }

Simply testing x = 0 gives you 100% branch and statement coverage, but I don't think you want to ship just yet =)
Smart move to leave Google b/c it was buying its way into social and then go to Microsoft who's trying to buy their way into relevance #fail
According to the roadmap[1], a proof of concept will be done in Q2, and an alpha and a beta sometime in the second half of the year.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap
Interesting idea. I do a similar thing with OneNote on long outgoing mails that I write that take a long time to compose.

However, how do you deal with threaded conversations and tracking the 1 liner replies to those mails? There are a large # of mails that I write that fall into this category.

Someone I know wrote his own email client that is essentially a long text buffer where email conversations are persisted to a single text file. He has commands that allow him to select portions of text from that file to compose in his replies. He's used that system since the 1980's and still has all of his email from back then logged into individual files.
They Write the Right Stuff: How The Shuttle Group Wrote Software
Agreed. Missing the option of "Most functionality", or "All functionality within reason". Without that option anything I select would be misleading.

I think it's safe to assume that anyone who selected "All functionality" actually means "Most functionality". Also I think we can assume that a good proportion of people who selected "A few critical" would belong in the "Most" bucket.
Interview with DuckDuckGo founder "Don’t Stop at One Startup"
I find gcc usually spends about 80% of the total compile time in optimization with -00 as a baseline (which despite being 'no optimization' actually does some optimizations). This is just C code.

Optimization takes a massive proportion of compile time these days. This is something the Google Go designers didn't understand because they had been programming for decades using a mostly unoptimizing compiler (for plan 9).
Why Windows 8 Server is a game-changer.
As a student I did an OS design module in 1987-88. The main set text was Tannenbaum's book Operating Systems Design and Implementation. I remember it had the full Minix source as an appendix, and I don't remember it being a particularly thick book.

Would I be right in assuming that Minix has put on a bit of weight since then?
Olark (YC S09) is hiring amazing customer advocates. Help make customers smile
(in reply to nirvana)

The Irish startup visa program has recently been amended to make it easier to qualify:

http://founderware.co/ireland/ireland-launches-startup-visa-...

You now only need to invest €70k ($91k USD) to be granted residency. This is down from the old requirement of €300k.

Taxes here are quite reasonable. Corporations are charged 3.1x less tax here:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/us_companies_pay_the_...

On average, UK taxes are generally higher:

http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Ireland/United-Kingdom/T...

And it compares favorably with the US as well:

http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Ireland/United-States/Ta...
> The logic here is that if you are reminded of things your brain can think you remember them. This doesn't just mean that someone can say "when you were 2 x happened" and you suddenly think "I remember x!", it means that, if for example you heard the story when you were 5, a decade later that story might now feel like a memory of the incident itself.

I don't intend to make this a political discussion, but something similar appears to have happened to Mitt Romney recently:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/mitt-romney-remembe... (warning, autoplay video)

While this was, of course, widely interpreted as Mitt making up a story to play to the crowd, it seems a much more charitable interpretation is that he heard about the Golden Jubilee so often as a child that he internalized the memory.
The UK has a "common carrier" statute (there termed "mere conduit", which, more poetic, innit?) which the defendant lost claim to by (a) exercising control over who could post what videos to his site and (b) idiotically posting copy on his website about how people were "saving money" by watching movies through his site instead of at the theater.

That is a major point of contention.

The prosecution argued the "mere conduit" exemption does not apply because O'Dwyer "was intimately involved in deciding who was allowed to post links on the TVShack websites, which links would be posted [...]" but it is not immediately clear that by doing so he forfeited the exemption.

The applicability of the exemption hinges on the interpretation of "transmission", for example. In a case such as this, who initiates the transmission of copyright infringing material? Is it the cyberlocker service that hosts the copyrighted files? Is it the link aggregator site like TVShack that links to the cyberlocker service? Is it the search engine that links to TVShack that links to the cyberlocker service? You see where I'm going here.

Nor is it immediately clear that by selecting who could post links on the site, O'Dwyer forfeited the exemption. The regulation states a service provider is exempt if (amongst other requirements) it "did not select or modify the information contained in the transmission"

Does selecting posters of links to transmissions constitute selecting information contained in the transmission?
I went through an experience where 2 years ago I thought "I hate unit testing, don't know how to do it and don't see the value". 2 years later I think "I enjoy unit testing, know how to do it well, and see the value in unit testing _most_ of the time".

I believe this transformation is entirely to do with the fact that I paired with a brilliant developer every day for 6 months who really helped to answer all my questions and show me how to test a variety of different things. I truly believe that unit testing (and testing in general) is a hard thing to grasp without being able to learn from someone over a long(ish) period of time.

I realized that I hated testing because I didn't know how to do it and wasn't good at it. I also didn't understand what the essence of a unit-test was; my tests would often cross multiple integration boundaries (ie: hit the db and the server) and were really more like bloated integration tests. Once I had sorted that out and was able to see a variety of techniques for testing specific scenarios I realized that I actually enjoyed testing and the satisfaction of knowing my code was covered against defects started to be a big motivator.

To answer your specific question about JavaScript testing, I've been using JasmineBDD[1] for the last 2 years and have found it a joy to use. It really makes testing things easy and has tools that allow you to isolate your tests down to the individual units.

[1] http://pivotal.github.com/jasmine/
Zed, you realize that I asked because I wanted to change my IIH right?
Yeah, except he didn't say compensation was flat. He said wages were flat. The fact that we have a higher percentage of our compensation tied up in the skyrocketing cost of health care only underscores his point.
I agree. The third-from-last paragraph starts with " But surely there must be some way to guard against defoundering, we imagined. " ... One would imagine that if this article had addressed the subject, this question would have been answered by then.
maqr, I actually googled "Th3 Pir4t3 B4Y" and got to "The Pirate Bay" website. Thanks, brother! Just learnt about this site! boy I was soo naive buying all those CDs and DVDs and BluRays!! I say: no more!
I don't really know what he's thinking. But it is interesting that he was fine with the culture during most of his career, then not-fine with the culture after he found out how much money he'd be making in the future. There are many boutique banks whose management shares his sentiments, in the sense that they believe big banks are too self-serving and too indifferent to their clients. Some of those banks do very well, and it wouldn't be terrible for their PR to hire him.

Do you know anyone who pays people for saying stuff like this on random message boards? I tend to say this kind of thing because I think it's true, and because I'm unimpressed with the quality of opposing arguments and would like someone to refute me. But if I can get paid while I'm at it, that's even better! I don't think the economics really work out, though.
New nikes will be able to show athletic preformance live