skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The payroll companies that I have dealt with have always been efficient and competitive in their pricing and level of service. And this is a mature industry with competition and multiple providers. The amount of disruption possible is probably nominal.
Maybe it's just me, but using short lived topic/feature branches and squash merges seems much easier than remembering all of these steps to "fix up" all these things.

I think it becomes some what of a game to use all the more obscure corners of git when a good 20-30% of it goes a long way.

Using less commands is more.
PayPal’s fake Square
"Anonymous OS" Taken Offline Due to Security Concerns
American Airlines Doesn't Like Letting Your Traxo Account Access Your Data
It means you keep your original history around & build a new one which breaks the code changes into functional chunks.

Rewriting your existing history with git rebase -i is fine until it goes horribly wrong & you have to go groveling through the reflog to work out which commits you need to rescue in order to retrieve your lost work.
They have been doing that for some time now. Typing "firefox license", for example, gives you an answer right at the top.
That's probably good advice. A startup is a bit like gambling and recommending that a student finish their studies rather than bet it all at the casino is solid advice.

Zuckerberg made a rash decision and got lucky. there were many similar sites at the time and anyone claiming to know which, if any, would become the big social site isn't being very honset.
Style is substance, unless you think that things like user experience are meaningless buzzwords and the command line is the only proper way to interact with the internet.
I saw a "pay with paypal" button on the self checkout at CVS the other day. Has this been around for a while?
If you're going from Earth to Mars, you waste a lot of delta-V going to the Moon first.
I'm not being obtuse, I'm trying to drive home a point that seems to be impossible for those of us who live behind a computer to understand: that for many people, the computer is a tool, just like their TV, just like their microwave, just like their car, just like their wrench set.

They want to use the same tool for as long as they possibly can, to get the maximum value out of it. They do not understand why computers are the only tools which seem to need constant attention and maintenance, even more than cars.

And I don't really think they're wrong, either. If anything, I think that the mobile phone and tablet markets are proof that computers are becoming more like tools, not less. So why can't we -- the programmers and developers and designers and engineers behind these tools -- accept that?

We need to stop demanding that people treat computers completely differently from all of their other tools.
Well, that's a nice resource. IMHO, 70% of that list is "improved this and that", which is understandable; another 20% are actual reasons which would make me consider an upgrade, and the remaining 10% is just mumbo-jumbo ("print from any computer in the house" - I mean, was this point left in the feature list since Win98?). I agree that 64-bit support is practically nil for XP, and its security record is horrifying; this was much improved in later OSes. I guess it's a "something for everyone" kind of comparison :)
His sister figures prominently in the most popular Ruby guide!
If Earth were in a situation of having to segment populations to prevent the spread of disease, all it takes is one little mistake to wipe out an entire intermingling group of people. I'm not saying we wouldn't have the tech to prevent that from happening, but humans are fallible creatures. Is it worth risking the entirety of humanity when we could have a remote colony that would be very well protected from those types of events?
Rocks? No. Water ice. Solar powered electrolysis, and you get to use the hydrogen for fuel too.
ClojureCLR and ClojureScript are not Clojure dialects - they are Clojure implementations. I'm not sure what the creators of clojure-py intend and Joxa is not Clojure as far as I can tell.
15:50 for the cannon in action.
So you're saying Apple can order millions of retinas from Samsung, but Samsung cannot order millions from themselves? Like I said, if they're not willing to take the financial risk (as HP did with the TouchPad, for example) then they deserve what they get.
Coopr: A COmmon Optimization Python Repository
Since many indexes are weighted by price, I find myself wondering if index fund investing has an element of "buy high, sell low" to it.

Only if you buy shares of the fund when they are high, and sell when they are low.

An index fund that buys a set of stocks in proportion to market price at one point in time will automatically capture the relative gains and losses within that set.

If Apple's share price doubles, then the market value of its shares that the fund owns will also double, and it will occupy a relatively greater percentage of the fund's portfolio. Companies with a flat or declining share price will account for a relatively lesser percentage over time.

Some buying and selling needs to happen, to accommodate new investors and to handle turnover within the target index, but the point of passive index funds is that you don't need trades to capture market performance.
Keynote: Guido Van Rossum (PyCon 2012)
I think there are 2 issues here: digging deep to try to get a response from _why, and publishing his real name and employer.

The first is debatable; exactly how much effort should a journalist put in to getting the story, particularly in a case where the subject didn't do anything wrong? Reading about the effort expended in this piece made me a little uncomfortable, but I don't know for sure whether I'd say it crossed the line.

The second issue, outing his identity, is more clear cut. The guy didn't want his identity revealed, hadn't done anything wrong, and is arguably not at this time a public figure; why not respect his wishes?

Publishing his name struck me as a vindictive way of punishing him for not responding to the requests for a statement.

I think the story would have been just as strong if the author hadn't mentioned his name or the exact city he lived in or the name of his employer. However, it would make the author's job harder next time she tries to get an interview if she doesn't have that punishment to hang over the next subject's head.
Did Oink fail because of product, or market? If it's product, being technical will help, if it's market, being technical won't help. (edit: to add, the product worked - so it likely wasn't a problem with the product.)
This is awesome - except that the post deploy hook times out waiting for my app to load after being deployed.

Heroku takes over 30 seconds to get my app from 'deployed' to 'running', and it's not even a very large app yet.
Lynda.com
> There are no asteroids big enough to do that, that we haven't seen.

How exactly are you proving that negative?
Because you want people outside your rolodex too. :)
If you're still very bullish on AAPL, you could consider buying call options instead of stock. I didn't know about (non-startup) options until last year. They may be the highest-EV trade for a given belief about the stock's future, though the risk level is always higher. Even if you aren't interested in trading options, I found learning about how they work to be intellectually interesting.
What 'blitz'?

There was one bridge-burning editorial by an outgoing VP. Then you have Taibbi doing what he's done day-in, day-out for quite some time now. And after that is just the 24-hour news groups doing what they do, which is latching onto and flogging the stories of the day that are generating interest.

And when you mix Rage-At-Wall-Street with what amounts to a Gossip column, the reader response is pretty predictable.
You can hide the feeds with no unread items, under the view menu.
The Milk shareholders won the bidding war. The Milk employees probably had their share options converted to Google share options. Not necessarily a bad deal, but hardly the payday that the buyout makes for the shareholders.

(Some companies have their share options vest immediately on a buyout to protect people against these kind of shenanigans. Not that it helped with a previous employer of mine since they ran out of money & when a buyer came along they required all the employees to waive that clause in the contract if we wanted the buyout to happen at all. Beggars can't be choosers and all that...)
Being aware that people are curious about you is not the same thing as being given an opportunity to contribute and respond to an article in which you play a central role.

Annie was entirely right to seek his input, and did nothing untoward in trying to track him down. I suspect the indignation here is a result more of the mythology surrounding _why and his place in the community than any actions on Annie's part. Were it some random person, an author perhaps, with whom HNers felt no bond, we wouldn't be seeing this issue as the dominant response to the piece.
I'm impressed that he can get low false positives with such simple methods. That's great to know.

If he tried using line detection, vectorize it, then train the algorithm with the tagged shapes of squirrels. Would that be too slow to do in real time? Or could it work to reduce false positives?
Sites that use the konami code
Oh, look ... they received an investment from Google Ventures. What a coincidence.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/milk
Make sure to stack tuna cans, eggs, brown rice and nuts. If you buy in bulk (which I recommend for everything except the eggs in your case) you'll get away with great prices. Preparing it is easy as well (think 1 tuna can + some fresh salad + olive oil/balsamico => awesome meal) if the hacker dojo has a rice cooker you're golden, otherwise get one for 30 bucks and you'll have a healthy carb source all the time.

Kudos to doing that, very inspiring. I wish you all the best! :)
> In January, Newt Gingrich’s space ambitions were mocked by many experts as well as the public, particularly his vow that a moon colony would be established by the conclusion of his “second term.” Musk isn’t committing to a timeline nearly so ambitious; when pushed by Wright, he suggested that this could be a reality within the next 30 years.

Gingrich's moon base by 2020 is probably less ambitious than Musk's Martian colony by 2042. The moon is orders of magnitude closer, doesn't involve leaving Earth orbit, doesn't involve the radiation hazards, and we've actually been to the moon before. I don't want to get into a political argument, but going back to the moon and staying there is not an especially difficult or onerous goal for the next eight years.
This is very correct. We compile Clojure code to Python bytecode. Clojure functions become python functions, clojure deftypes are Python classes, Clojure namespaces are Python modules. And yes, it runs perfectly well on PyPy. Actually it sometimes runs a bit better. CPython segfaults with bad bytecode sequences (unbalanced stacks). PyPy actually throws an error so you can fix the code.
It's not sudden, people have been hating on GS for months now. Though you may be right about using them as a scapegoat.
Then they need to be moved to a different place, at least. Tell your CI server to use them, but more them out of the way for normal developers.
I think you hit on one of the fundamental failings of education in general, in that the only ones qualified to do it by necessity forget what it's like to be learning. The kind of hands-on testing you do is, I think, both commendable and necessary if we are to improve the way we teach and learn.
Joxa is not Clojure. From joxa.org:

> Joxa (pronounced 'jocksah') isn't Erlang, though its very compatible. Its not Clojure though there is plenty of shared syntax. It's not Common Lisp though that is the source of the macro system. While Joxa shares elements of many languages, it is its own specific language. of all these languages, and knowing these languages will help you get up to speed with Joxa, but it is its own unique language.
This is a hits driven business. How many people do you see with a string of successes and zero failures? Kevin has had a few ventures, with varying degree of "success", which is more than most people can say. Consider the statistically typical case: it's complete failure and lost of time, money, and sweat. If you even break even, you're already way above average. So having even just a series of small wins is a big deal (not saying that Kevin's "win" was small - I have no inside info)
To keep it more real: it should be Pleistocene Park
Buy low sell high and you'll end up buying low and selling lower.

Aim for buy high and sell higher instead.
They tend to run offline campaigns at the same time: some time ago, at IE9 launch, there was a huge promotional campaign trying to credit HTML5 to MS - something like "We're changing the web. Forever." (Gee thanks, but doing that once with IE6 was quite enough) staring at you from every RL advertising space anywhere.
By nature a false positive interaction could be re-tested more easily than a false negative though, correct? Also, that fits in with medical "first, do no harm" framework more readily.
Well, maybe. There is a very clear admission that yes, IE5 did drive us crazy. At least, that's how I see it.
Ask HN: Do you still watch the news?
I was wondering today, how much longer are news shows going to last? I would assume that a lot of people especially in this generation would rather just Google something and read an article rather than watch the news.
How's the silent browser update from Microsoft coming? Australia and Brazil were lined up for January. Is it making a difference getting all XP users on IE8 and Vista and Win7 users on IE9, and hopefully IE10 later this year.
I'm on the purchasing side and I can say that I've been turned into a customer during a sales process. I've called just to check things out and ended up a very happy customer.

I think a lot of what people don't like about the "enterprise sales process" is actually just due to shitty salespeople--folks acting pushy, calling all the time, trying gimmicks, being stupid or uninformed, etc. In contrast, interacting with a good enterprise salesperson feels exactly like getting great customer service, only it begins before you've plunked down any money.

The key to managing the sales cycle is to learn how to figure out early that you've got a shitty salesperson and either get a new one (if you really want the product) or get rid of them and find another option. You have to be willing to be firm, and maybe even a bit of a jerk sometimes.
Of course, I'd forgotten about ClojureCLR and yes, Joxa is not Clojure, but it's close enough [1] that the point remains valid.

[1] From the website: "[Joxa's] not Clojure though there is plenty of shared syntax."
Congrats on getting your product out there!

>Surround yourself with smart people always.
I've been struggling with this one for a while. I've cut time drains and people that keep me down, how to go the next step?
Cyborg Snails May Invade Gardens, Battlefields
Hi Annie,

I think it's really neat that you're taking the time to respond to comments here. Thank you for that.

I avoided the word "harassment" because I don't really think that what you did was harassment. But, I don't think I can agree to describe it as straightforward reporting, either. Straightforward reporting would have been statements like, "but the person behind _why remains a mystery to many after his infosuicide, having chosen for unknown reasons to remain as anonymous as possible..."

It's true that his identity was known in some circles, but Slate isn't exclusive to those circles; regardless of how you or I want to describe it, in the end, you published the identity (and other personal information) of a person who wished to remain anonymous.

Sometimes that can make for great journalism, but in this case, I think your article would have been even better if you hadn't done that.

Thanks again for participating.
Usually: millions to the investors and founders for their stock. Employee stock will be worth little due to investor preferences. The acquirer will pay hundreds of thousands to retain a few "key employees", and tens of thousands to the ordinary developers (similar to what they'd get as a hiring bonus). This is why it doesn't make sense to be a startup employee.

Your question about why developers can't capture more of their value is a good one. Obviously acquirers would prefer not to pay $1M signing bonuses if they can avoid it, but they also seem to be happier about paying off VCs than engineers.
I've always thought of creating a dining room where one wall would be a projected screen that would give you the illusion that your dining in a different part of the world.

It would be actually be even cooler if you could get a live stream from restaurants for their "virtual table" dining guests
Well, then how come every other new browser runs on XP, with all the nifty new features like WebSockets, if it's impossible? Hint hint, nudge nudge.
At least it will be suited for the large audience.
By definition, if you cannot live sustainably, you cannot sustainably live. Though sustainability, more or less, is about sustaining current populations and quality of life; most failures of sustainability won't extinct the human race, they'll just kill a lot of people off and deprive us of the massive amounts of energy needed to maintain our present quality of life.
I must disagree - not with the analysis but with the concept "you should avoid working for crazy assholes who demand blood while paying you peanuts". Now, I'm not going to say that living this life will make you happy, but you shouldn't think of it as "being exploited" you should think of it as "getting some other guys to pay for your education".

Technical skills in particular are in very high demand right now, higher even than six months ago, and they were astronomically high then. But it takes years to develop those skills, and taking uncomfortable, difficult work and living through it without visiting the psych ward (yeah, that's the hard part) is a notch on your belt.

tl;dr Life is a learning process, you can even learn from loser projects.
If I had to give a single tip, it would be "don't do fixed price contracts".
For instance, a Google search can distinguish a search for “New York” as opposed to one for “New” and “York.”

OMG, what kind of sophisticated AI did they use to accomplish this? I'm thinking random forests mixed with neural networks and SVMs.
>"It's making fun of us geeks who hated older IE versions."

It's also making fun of people who are still ranting about browser wars in the post-LoLcat era, e.g. all those people who used IE to download other browsers.

At a deeper level it reminds me of the WP7 "Really?" campaign by the contrast it draws between obsessive behavior in regards to technology and life away from the screen. It even shares the motif of a woman in bed being ignored.
I'm having trouble understanding who is a defector, who is a cooperator, and who is the joker. The author has copious asides where he asserts "the financial industry; most of the people you work with, and probably you, too" are the defectors. However, I'm having trouble understanding the leap. Clearly he wants to relate this game to an insight about society at large as judged by all of his asides. So I'm trying to understand his position.

In our society most people must perform work to earn money, that money is taxed, to provide public services to all of us regardless of if we work or not. Therefore, the people paying taxes have a cost and get a benefit of the public services which fits his definition: "Cooperators generate a benefit, shared by all, but they pay a cost to do so." If someone pays taxes that must make them a cooperator. Of course we can have shades of cooperation based on how much is paid because no one give all of their money to the IRS. We do have the other extreme where no money is paid.

Now, there are people who pay less taxes or none at all as much or at all can enjoy those same services less cost or no cost all. That's his definition: "[Defectors] sit back and enjoy the group benefit without paying the costs."

In the sliding scale we are all both cooperators and defectors, but to what degree our role alters the equilibrium of the system (ie causing more cooperators or defectors).

That seems pretty straightforward, but he seems have flipped even the definitions: not just the joker/batman role.
Good advice? Unsure. Safe advice? Yes.

I keep hearing the "got lucky" argument when describing Facebook and Zuck. All it shows is ignorance. If you study Facebook, you can seriously find very explicit product and culture decisions at each stage of its growth. These have little to do with luck.

I'd argue Zuck experiences the same share of luck as an average person does. It's what he has made out of his luck.

For example, a big evidence cited with the "luck" argument is how Zuck just happens to run into Sean Parker who introduces him to Peter Thiel. But the role of "luck" is over-stated: there are hundreds of people who run into Sean Parker. A handful of them even get introduced to Peter Thiel. But getting introduced or funded by Sean Parker/Thiel is not a ticket to a billion dollar company. There is much more to it having little to do with luck.
Why Finish Books?
I better go start getting all of these polygon domain names... just in case visa/master starts their pentagon/hexagon/heptagon services too.
I find it hard to imagine that people would have been as stirred up if she had tracked him down and given him the opportunity to respond to or contribute to the article, and then written only that the person behind _why wished to remain anonymous.

I think the indignation here is that _why's real name and past and current places of employment have now been published on Slate.
Kate Upton Topless in Esquire Magazine
Sports Illustrated turned Kate Upton into an overnight sensation, but this new topless spread in the March 2012 Esquire magazine is certainly increasing her fame.
I've used Clojure on and off but never really learned enough Java to be comfortable with it. Clojure-py has been a lot more fun because I can use the Python libraries I'm already familiar with.
Diagrammer: Buy PowerPoint-Ready Diagrams for $0.99 a Piece
One of the coolest startup pages
I don't get it. A company need not come up with something new to enter a business. Its fair game for a company to copy another. Paypal is being honest about it as the only differentiator is the fraud management capabilities they have. Square has to build it up from the ground up in every country they enter. Paypal can launch this in all countries they have a presence today and one up Square. Its a good move from a business stand point. A no brainer really. Paypal's strength is not in the US but outside of it and they are making good use of it. If their customer service is really that bad and hated as most tech comments section make it to be, the dongle will not be adopted. But this itself is a good move on their part.
> Remember, buy low, sell high.

This is the funniest thing one can ever say about investing, lol!

I would reply: f*ck the stock market: just remember to pick the right lotto numbers!
The whole math the RIAA and MPAA are doing is pretty laughable, so I didn't find that part strange. They should be mocked for it, rather than being taken serious by politicians, as it happens right now. They should be laughed out of the building when presenting numbers like those for their "losses".
I actually LOLed and wondered if it's not an early April Fool's prank. Without going into everything that's wrong with this, let's just agree that the future of commerce for small business simply does not include PayPal at all.
He also wrote some of the code for the first iterations of Digg himself, so its not like he didn't do any coding originally. He just passed in on to more skilled people once the requirements were out of his league.