skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is that, yeah. But that's a lot of screen real-estate for viewing the last-updated-at date for a project, and it's in a different color than other things on the page so it draws your eye. Probably intentionally for this reason.

Do you mostly value the commit's date, or any of the other information in that block? I've only ever cared about the date, personally.
> Do you have a cite for your claim ... Of course you don't...

Isn't it a little presumptuous to deride someone else for not providing cited sources when you haven't provided any yourself?
Sure, but it's not either/or. My last company was very profitable but is not going to IPO any time soon or get bought for a crazy valuation. However, I cashed out enough to fund my current company. I don't have millions in the bank, but I have enough to give me a 2 year runway and still live a comfortable lifestyle.

"Go for broke" companies usually end up just broke. But if you can build a profitable business that finances future endeavors. Last year I had an epiphany that I'll be working in small tech startups for the rest of my life, and that I will enjoy it very much so long as the bills are paid.

If I could repeat the last five years 4-5 more times I'll be very happy, even if not a jillionaire.
BitC Retrospective: The Issues with Type Classes
That youtube video is propaganda. Note how almost every single missile fired by f-22 hits, while enemy missiles lose their target constantly. It doesn't tell why U.S. missiles would be better. Also I find the explanation why f-22 would be better in dogfight to be very lacking. Vectored thrust is not going to cancel effects of high wing loading or slow rate of roll. Or it might but then it's something more harrier style.
How's code-quality measured?
Remember, the Easter Bunny died for your cssins!
Great thoughts, Jason. Your point about the change in valuations is more than an observations, though. Implicitly, it suggests that valuations are less a function of the companies themselves and more a consequence of exogenous macroeconomic and industry specific factors.

This is sort of a scary realization to me, because it means that "crushing it" isn't a strategy to preserving valuation. Perhaps the Dropboxes of the world will always be able to name their price, but for the rest of us valuations will come tumbling down if the outlook turns negative on the startup asset class or economic activity broadly.

Startups taking a more conservative approach to valuation and amount of capital to raise may be much better positioned to raise subsequent rounds of financing when the market, as all markets do, regresses to the mean.
One of the comments on the blog perfectly sums up what would have been my hypothesis, so I will simply repeat it here:

Part of the drop may be due to Groupon inducing
people to visit a business selling something
they otherwise wouldn't be interested in.
E.g., I might check out a Greek restaurant
even though I'm indifferent to Greek food because
of a good deal and curiosity. Given the same
experience as someone who likes the cuisine,
I might then give a lower rating.
- Anonymous

http://mybiasedcoin.blogspot.com/2012/03/groupon-effect-on-y...
Great job. Curious where are you getting your raw data from?
This applies to any case where you want a single process to use more than half the server's RAM.
Could be here:

http://developer.yahoo.com/fantasysports/
No. Just no.
Simpler is better, especially if there are no real drawbacks.

I think this remark about entry level developers is snobistic.

I have an open mind and I am always willing to learn. Yet you just dismiss my approach without providing solid argumentation. The only real argument against the minimalist approach is performance and I was well aware of this when I wrote the article.

And yes, prototypes are more difficult, not just for entry level developers, let's see why:

* you cannot use previous OOP experience (aka 'transfer')

* there are MANY ways to do OOP using prototypes (functions,direct prototyping,__proto__) vs ONE

* 'this' has different meanings depending on context -> requires you to process contextual information

* prototypes make existing objects unreliable -> requires prior knowledge about libraries and APIs (leaky abstraction)

* building an object with prototypes requires far more mental steps: you have to know about objects, functions but also about the prototype chain, the hidden prototype property (why?), the logic behind the new keyword etc. If prototypes had been implemented in a very consistent way (without the new-keyword and only using __proto__) I would have advocated prototypes instead of literals.

On top of this, many different 'sugar' solutions exist, most of them incompatible.

Advantages of the minimalist approach:

* conforms to established industry and business standards in OOP

* requires less knowledge about language details, this leaves much more room to focus on application logic and design

* very transparent, no sugar code (beget) or libraries required

* neat code: methods are grouped together

* allows to implement well known design patterns easily

* protection against corruption of existing objects

* no this, that or self variables

And all you are saying is: it's too easy, it must be for entry level developers. I mean... what is this about? Are we trying to build great products or is this some kind of puzzle contest? If you like complexity so much I recommend to write your next project in malbolge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge).
We do that a bit as well.

Now that I think about it maybe they just need an "awesome bar" for github; put in a sha, branch name, issue, tag, pull request, etc and it can auto-complete and take you there.

Also the network view could be really useful for managing projects if it were much faster and slightly better...

In general I just think that there are way too many similarly sized/colored buttons spread all over the place, so I never know where to look for what I need, and I can't ever quite tell where I am without much work.

I think the mental model of how to view and navigate the repo/network is not transparent or consistent. If they could nail that it would really help a ton.
"This sets the tone for the whole book: let’s skip the reasons and just focus on the solutions and hard choices that need to be made."

vs.

"I won't be buying this book if the opening premise is that the US electric grid is in crisis. This Ars article surely didn't give any justification for that. Must be sensationalism for the purpose of selling books. I've been an engineer in the US electric business for 20 years. It's not in crisis."

Hmm, who to believe?
I am trying to figure out how to reach this customer segment. Do you have any suggestions?
I find it fascinating that white people are finally getting upset at racism directed towards them.
I thought it was up to each person to decide whether it would be a beautiful day or not, but maybe that's just me?

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder?
I would be curious if anyone here has any insight into this decision.

It was announced that: "Nokia Lumia 900 Will Be AT&T’s Biggest Launch Event to Date" (http://www.gottabemobile.com/2012/03/29/nokia-lumia-900-will...)

Is this irrelevant? Could ATT, MS or even Nokia have secret reason for such apparent sabotage of the release? Is this bureaucracy-as-usual or has the MS/Nokia alliance already dived seriously into the ditch?
Better filtering with jquery.data.filter
If stripes are for insects not biting, then how come some species have developed only partial stripes? Would not make sense to get all the flies to concentrate on your non striped body-parts... Against lions this makes perfect sense as having striped backside makes the overall shape harder to grasp.
I called this hacky, as it would only work for executables, if this was in a dll/dylib/so shared library, then it might even make the things worse, as now even more stricter contiguous space would be neeeded.

For example, if the language runtime was loaded as plugin or something. So one has to be aware that is not always the good solution for all purposes, hence hacky :)
You sound like you know how to do it and like you want to do it, so do it. Thee simple answer to your question is that nobody who wants it can do it, and nobody who can do it wants it, and apparently the ones who do want it and can do it only ask why no one else did it.
upvote for the smashthestack.org link. really interesting place.
Is Bob Ross a startup thought leader?
"Don't be afraid to scrape the paint off and do it again." - "Now, let's make a happy little cloud." - "They might look at you like you're a little weird, but tell them you're an artist, (Hacker), and they'll understand."
Ask HN: how did you find a quality freelance designer?
Hi HN, a couple of us have been working on a project, and we would like to find a freelance designer who could work on the UI/UX. I know this is a common request on HN, but hear me out.

I don't like the idea of something like 99 designs/crowdspring, because I don't want to have 98 more people spend time working on something that they are not going to be paid for. As much as I like the idea of having choices, this really is not something I would do myself if I were a decent designer...certainly won't
do it as a programmer.

Although money is tight, I am not looking to short-change designers either. I probably can afford to pay 2X or 3X of what projects cost on those sites, but that would be it for a while as a bootstrapped startup. And I am not looking for a 'unicorn' do-it-all either.

On the other hand, I have not met my 'go-to' designer in 3rd grade, and I don't have a network of designers to fall back on.

How have you done it successfully? If you didn't have a designer co-founder, how did you find a quality freelance/contract designer?
You are why Hacker News is in decline and why anyone who is capable of argument-- such as myself-- is hesitant to post here

I'd hate to see what happens when you aren't being hesitant.
Getting 512MB of contiguous virtual address space does not require 512MB of contiguous free physical memory; contiguous virtual addresses can map to discontiguous physical memory.
Analytics has a UX problem
Would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Either here or on the blog. Much of my work now focuses around lowering the barrier to entry for analytics (particularly in traditionally more qualitative fields), hence the post.
HTML5 roundup: Mozilla demos standards-based video chat in Firefox
The code is run through JSLint. Not perfect, but it's a game :)
That's the main issue I see, lack of interest from everyone involved in blogging.
I wonder if the cost-benefit balances out on this one. Obviously it varies by retailer/restaurant.

I'm not just talking about the incremental sales<->lower ratings tradeoff, either. According to the paper's abstract, running a groupon ad earns you a significant amount of new reviews - new ratings which tend to be 10% lower on average. But is it more valuable to have a lot of "very good" reviews, or a small number of "excellent" reviews?
Wyndham, who owns the largest percentage of the hotels it manages, also owns (and operates) Hiltons, Marriotts, and Sheritons. Starwood owns hotels with franchised brands, as does Marriott. They (nearly) all do.

It's not a fuzzy designation, it's what happens when the backroom guys are literally playing Monopoly with real world objects.

I was with Wayport (now AT&T). Who are you with?
Ditto. First comment(s) downvoted here too... by karma bigwig. I call it karma bullying. No explanation, aside from bigwig contradictions + downvoting. No real discussion, no arc of learning, no social reality check. Just a lot of specious scientific gobbledygook... and the karma bully downvoting. Hideous and abusive... especially to a first-timer.

Also, YCHN has all sorts of (undocumented) nasty consequences for anyone unlucky enough to get bullied into negative territory, e.g.: throttling posts (so bullies automatically "win" discussion), effectively censoring victim, losing posts before posting, pretending posts show (but not showing them publically), losing posts even after "successful" posting, getting negative points from no discernible source, and ultimately... hellbanning (all new posts invisible) ≡ permanent (?) bully victim censorship regardless of content topic, quality, or timeliness. E.g., you can not read this post (if you can, please reply to it explaining where and how you read it). Then perhaps I'll know there's a recovery path from hellbanning. Otherwise, once a YCHN hellban karma bully victim, always a YCHN hellban karma bully victim.

Net effect (as I gather): you can never recover from a ruthless negative karma bullying. Meanwhile the bullies get more karma for bullying. What a load of bullocks!-)

One funny thing is that I didn't even know what was going on at the time. I was "learning the ropes." Unfortunately, I was too "slow" learning the ropes to know I was being ruthlessly bullied. I still do not know where all the -18 points come from. Even ignoring any positive points from a few posts before the hellbanning effect kicked in, I count only -14 points. I guess at YCHN, they're using new math or something.

Now (still ignoring any positive points), if I count each of my four posts with negative points as a negative point, each, then I get another -4 points for "the" total of -18 points. But that's really pushing to find those missing -4 points. YCHN should make its "modes" explicit: Here are all your negative points; here's why you got negative points; here's where you became hellbanned (and define the term; I'd never heard of it before I became karma bully victim); and here's how you become un-hellbanned.

Unfortunately, in a computer forest, noone can hear you scream. I.e., noone cares at YCHN --- YCHN hellbanning AI is smarter than humans, so humans do not need to care.

Welcome to the Matrix.

Really a laugh riot when you think of the negative spiral effects of YCHN from what is supposed to be such a karmic hotspot of technology news and activity. I suspect the programmer/designers are very proud of themselves. Laugh riot about sums up my YCHN experience from first interaction, indefinitely, and, without any fix for the current karma beartrap, forever.
From 2,000 words per day to 10,000 with self-experimentation
O(n) algorithm to find longest palindromic substring w/o suffix trees
No, I mean wrong. The GM is responsible for a single property, and is the employee of the management group (or the owner).
auth system doesn't work.
This is throwing js errors in the console in Chrome. Can't save. Doesn't remember github auth. What the heck is the i/o button supposed to be? All it does it wipe out whatever I'm working on. Can't save with :w, probably related to the js errors.
"They are king makers of the industry and drop suppliers like a hat for any offences."

No they don't;

"The FLA investigation, released late last week, resulted in the questioning of 35,000 Foxconn workers across the Chengdu, Longhua and Guanlan factories and found average hours worked per week were 56, compared to the legal Chinese limit of 49 hours, which includes overtime."

http://www.crn.com.au/News/295713,apple-auditor-finds-foxcon...

[edit] I do think that Apple has taken a lead by the standards of the electronics industry, but the global standards of the commercial electronics industry are not high and Apple has been embarrassed into a lot of this.

If Apple dropped suppliers for any serious violations in the way that you claim, they would not have the giant pile of money they have today.
100% agree.

It took us 2.5 years to get to product market fit. We raised a seed round and kept burn incredibly low for a long time while we figured things out. There were a couple of product adjustments along to way based on customer demand.

It took us 2.5 years, to reach out first million of recurring sales. It'll take us less than 3 months now to double that. Patience certainly is a virtue.
Same here. I use Google Nav everywhere I go, even when I know how to get to the location. I even use it on the ride home from work every day because the exit closest to my apartment (Balboa/Garnet on the 5, for those in the San Diego area) has a tendency to clog up easily due to multiple red lights right off the exit.

Google Nav lets me know if I should get off there (most direct route) or take the 52 to Clairemont Dr and circle around (less direct, less likely to be traffic clogged), depending upon the real-time traffic data.
I'm only getting errors when trying this.

Error: Subroutine crash
was not defined (address 40)
It seems like the best-of-breed

But it still lacks basic features such as opening the story without visiting comments or a back button to return to previously viewed threads

E.g., I've lost this thread after opening other stories and only managed to find it again because I've saved previously
Hey Idan,

I think you have a great product (trust me, I don't say that often)! It sounds like your biggest problem is distribution/marketing – I'd never heard of Skills before your comment and I've been looking for recruiting software. Perhaps you could do some deal with a job board where companies can choose to have applicants apply through you. Also, it'd be nice if applicants could list their HN profile as well.

Good luck!
Were you using a browser which supports hardware accelerated animations? On my Macbook Pro (last gen), my CPU mostly stayed around 10-15% when viewing the site with Safari.
My CPU barely worked at all. (latest MB Pro).
Saved file, had to re-auth, file got reset
Getting a 404 in Github auth callback
Wow! This solves my major complaint about GitHub. I wish I'd known that two years ago.
No-one's suggesting cross-continent rail. The argument that US population densities are vastly below those in other countries is true on a country wide scale, but false when you look at the key population corridors.

San Francisco to San Diego is approximately 500 miles. 24 million people live in that corridor.[1]

Paris to Marseille is 481 miles. It takes about 3 hours and 16 minutes by train to make that journey. I'm not particularly adept at French, so finding corridor population details is difficult. However, judging by the population of the regions the train passes through [2], I'd estimate that (11.7, 1.6, 6.1 and 4.9) 24.3 million people live in that corridor. That's a really rather close number.

Lack of high speed rail in the US is probably due to the auto companies removing the public transport that provides a feeder into that kind of system. The large spread out cities are a symptom of a car culture, not the other way around.

[1]: http://www.slideshare.net/mmazner/ne-corridor-facts
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_list_of_French_regions
Again: you are preaching to the choir about checks not being secure; I personally refuse to use them for numerous reasons, this being one (others include the variable delay, the risk of losing the slip, and the increased paperwork due to having to file 1099-MISC).

As for an alternative payment processing company that supports transferring money for free: if you use your PayPal balance to transfer money for a purpose that cannot be disputed (such as "I admit that I owe Bob money, and this is my payback"), they do the transfer for free.
Quite fun, but a task like md5 is an obvious "google, copy, paste". Even with normal editor and without any stability issues (I was asked to "auth" multiple times) it is a very complex algorithm.
One thing that aggravates me to no end is when I option click the github logo on the upper right hand corner to open an additional screen on a new tab, I get greeted with a modal window of 'Looking for the github logo'.
Kept having to auth, kind of sucks.
This is fantastic, thank you. Any chance of adding predictions based on past performance, etc?
Which is entirely irrelevant, given that this scales. Split your country into regions, and treat them separately. Oh wait, they're already split into states, countries, cities, and in many other ways.

It's a tedious argument that gets trotted out every time someone compares the US with another country in terms of public transport.

But every other country also has low density areas, which often have weaker public transport.

As it stands, the US has lots of low density areas, but also a large number of really high density areas. I don't think anyone would complain about lack of train coverage for your hopelessly low density areas.

What is a joke is that there are US cities with populations the size of small European countries that are still served by useless rails systems, and there such cities within what would be easy reach of each other with decent rails where it is pointless to try.

E.g. someone pointed out that Oslo to Bergen in Norway is still about 7 hours. But that is 7 hours between a city of 500.000 people, in a region with less than 1 million, an a city of about 120.000 people. Yet there is a viable train service covering the stretch. What's in between? Mostly a mountain range where practically nobody lives. It's a service that is mostly there to serve the endpoints.

Yes, a lot of the potential riders take a plane instead.

How many regions in the US do you have with 500k-1m people on one end of a what could be a 7 hour rail link with regular speed trains, with 120k-200k people on the other end, that are currently not served by rail at all?

Now add in the number of much larger cities.

That combined with the useless excuse for commuter rail outside of some very limited areas (mostly a handful of cities on the East coast) is what makes Europeans generally consider the state of rail in the US to be ridiculous.
I think they might. You might combine an activity with placing and removing physical things, then showing on paper how the symbols represent this, then having the child try some problems on their own. You could do all the written parts yourself, or you might use a text that had it done for you already. And then the student might practice in a workbook.

Wouldn't that make sense? I feel like bad textbooks have given the idea of text books a bad name. And I don't think this is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. It's more an issue of mostly horrible Scotsman written to align with ridiculous state standards.
If they had left out the part about growing a significant other the article would have worked a lot better.

April fools joke aside with the growth of human organs in the laboratory this has to be inevitable right?
This was very helpful - thanks for writing it up!
Pinterest is a compelling story. As mentioned in the article, the main source of their monotonic growth early on was that their users loved the product, and personally recommended it to their friends. Seeing a product grow all by itself with little other advertising or marketing is always a good sign.

I actually use Pinterest myself to keep track of cool gadgets, books, and since I am in academia, papers, research, algorithms and ideas.

I've though about Pinterest's success for a while, and I think its special sauce has to do with permanence, where as most other sites are currently focused around recency. Posting an item to Pinterest feels additive: I am collecting and curating good content, and the entirety of my work is displayed for all to see in very few clicks. On the other extreme is Twitter/Facebook/Google+, where I've even stopped posting good content unless it falls in specific time on a weekday, or I know that it will sink into oblivion, never to be seen again. The time of a post can easily be the difference between 0 and 50+ retweets. (I tested this.)

The other major aspect of its success, I believe, is that Pinterest is very visual. This simple truth is obvious, but rarely executed on: People love pictures, and they don't like reading too much.

So Pinterest is doing many small things right, but more importantly it's filling a gap in people's desire to express themselves. Luckily, the team realized this and stubbornly believed it.
Dear Prospective Customer: You’re not worth the ink printed on that coupon