skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People who work hard to make a dent in the universe will anyway, and people who just mess around don't really get much done at work anyway, so why keep up the charade?

This is typical libertarian claptrap, from the Skilled White Male litany. The only thing of value appears to be making a dent with your special skills, and no consideration is given to the huge numbers of unskilled jobs required to keep 'the universe' running.

The point is that society supports far more shitty retail jobs than universe-denting programming jobs. Those shitty jobs need to be done, and it's hard to excel in them. What kind of dent can a convenience store clerk make? They're still necessary though - and for people in those jobs, work is not particularly fun.

In terms of your hand-wringing about full-time programming work, there are all sorts of ways you can work part-time in programming and part-time in something else. That you can't see this shows you haven't really thought about the problem seriously.

Hell, if you really are a 'denter' and have skills that are in demand, you have a good chance of simply going up to your boss and saying that you only want to work part-time now. Frequently they'll still want to keep you on for your dentable skills.
Teaser:

http://urchn.org/wp/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/me...

Looks great!
Nicely put. Results matter, not hours. Most people have still not grasped this. And coding late, or even into the next day is kinda like driving without sleep: dangerous, illegal (in many states), and likely to lead to the shittiest code one ever writes.
I have a bit of a problem accepting one of the arguments in this article (under the heading "Is There a Bubble?").

The author seems to be arguing that if you look at the actual and projected growth rate for both Instagram and OMGPOP (measured in number of account signups) as a percentage of the userbase of their suitors (i.e. Facebook and Zynga respectively), then the money paid for these companies represents "EXCELLENT" value.

To me that is an absolute fallacy. OMGPOP was going for 6 odd years and almost out of cash before they stumbled upon something that worked. Draw Something caught on like wildfire but the buzz will eventually die. What comes after it? i.e. how does past performance guarantee future performance (especially given the majority of past performance wasn't great)?

Similarly, Instagram has caught on like wildfire but even the CEO admitted that they have no way to monetize the user interest. So what we have is a freebie product that people love to use to send photos and an accompanying strap line of text. Yes it's cool but it isn't curing cancer and the users are using it as a fun throwaway service. They have no loyalty to Instagram and would drop it in a heartbeat if a charge was attached to using it.

So, where is the inherent "value" in all of these user accounts & signups? Having millions of user's doesn't automatically translate to a long term money printing machine like Apple or Google.

You can apply this argument to Zynga and Facebook themselves. Facebook has 800 million users but its total yearly revenue is half of Google's annual profits (according the wikipedia entries). Zynga IPO'd at $10 a share. Almost 6 months later and the share price hasn't moved. That doesn't look like explosive growth to me.

Given all of the above it really does feel like a bubble (at least to me). All the valuations seem to be based on a house of cards...

P.S. It's 1am where I am and I'm not an econ or finance guy so if my assumptions or arguments above are wrong , I'd love to have it explained to me rather than being flamed to death :)
FYI here's the new draft that tptacek mentioned:

http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/cispa-sponsors-narro...
You actually can do all of the things you want to do.

The only thing that is stopping you is the risk / uncertainty of changing your situation.

One thing I've come to believe is that there is never enough time for anything. And so you have to make time.

If you're serious about adjusting your life to fit more outdoor or social interactions, there are part-time jobs and activities that can fulfill that. And there are plenty of contract jobs to fill up 20hrs a week, probably even several part-time contracts.
I wish this were the top comment.

The idea of Google indexing my harddrive and using this data to better profile me has scary privacy implications. I will pay these services (gmail, etc.) I can opt out of Google viewing my data.
Having something like gem and maven is certainly nice, but I think my point stands. Compared to almost every other language, the .NET open source ecosystem just pales in comparison. It's definitely improved after the MS debacles in the past, but only time will tell whether it ever becomes a 1st class citizen in the .NET world.
I wonder if something like this could be organised through github and kickstarter as a sort of open source crowd funded festival for geeks.

Could even be completely ambitious and plan to have it internationalised from the start with video conferencing devices of various scales and other assorted comms stuff connecting different venues around the world, then it's a lot easier to raise money globally.
It's easy to paint in a dim light if you don't know the facts, in particular the big picture, including the competitive landscape.

The value of Instagram to Facebook in particular is different than the value to any other company. If Facebook is worth $100 billion and Instagram poses a 1.1% threat to the value of the company then it's worth it to pay $1 billion to take them out. In particular Instagram being bought by twitter probably poses much more risk to Facebook than $1 billion. Twitter wasn't in a position to buy them for $1 billion in stock so Twitter loses out. I have a feeling that even a year or two from now buying Instagram is going to look like a very smart play, in 10 years it might just look genius.

Remember that Yahoo had the opportunity to buy Google for $1 million and turned it down. Given that Instagram added 10 million users on the news of acquisition it seems fairly sane.

Thus with those figures in hand it's easy to paint a picture where the board acted with fiduciary duty in the interests of shareholders. Even on a balance of probabilities this would be a difficult case to prove in court.
New Nook has built in light and e-ink
Next time my boss razzes me for not writing documentation about something, I am going to point him to this article :)

Seriously though, the article does seem to belittle documentation. Documentation gives an API context, it is often invaluable. Even if you have the source with some comments, this often does not give a clear picture right away.
Stunning. A response sonnet to each of Shakespeare's.
another cool startup bites the dust, have fun at the day job.
Don't you also need to remove cookies and perhaps clear local data?
Beat me to it. It's a pretty good answer, though I don't know if that covers them technically. Probably it does.
Great source here.

I for one don't think the Instagram deal was that bad in terms of value. I mean didn't Facebook have something like 9million users when Yahoo bid $1billion for it? Imagine if Instagram had said no and history repeated....
I know Marc has said he recused himself (see above), but it's worth adding the following:

You might think a board needs to approve it, but offers are often allowed within certain parameters prior to closing a sale. Facebook might have a higher tolerance for what that limit is.

It's entirely possible the board had previously, unrelated to any specific transaction, passed a motion that allows management to offer any M&A transaction up to one billion dollars barring anything that comes up in diligence. This is not uncommon.

We know FB is oriented to streamline processes and this might be another case of that.

For instance, I know that the Salesforce acquisition of Heroku involved a price ceiling at which point the deal would require board approval, so the purchase price was kept (just) below that ceiling so that it could be expedited internally.
Or even more fitting to the location, "the bloody Games"
Does it matter?

The fact is during this bubble, or non bubble, all of society is now online and connected and using the internet to make purchases for goods and services.

It wasn't the case during the last boom. If someone could enlighten me a little on how an exploration of things like this help move a startup forward, when we know there's plenty of profitable bootstrapped and funded startups that have become businesses.
I have to assume all of the other comments in this thread are from small shops that have never supported a live product.

We run a multi-hundred person team here for a live, 24/7 product, and as many as half of our developers have been scheduled as "on-call programmers," which we call our Live team. Their sole responsibility is the live, deployed product and customer-impacting issues.

They do no bug fixes outside of that. They do no feature development outside of that. There is an entire other team dedicated to those things, and like 37s, that team gets rotated through.

We also have QA dedicated to the live product, Operations dedicated to the live product, etc., etc., all separate from new feature development, because an immediate, customer-facing issue requires different prioritization than feature development.
He is not misrepresenting facts. Pardon me, but RTFA.

They were wearing orange dresses to the game, as orange is the color of the Netherlands. They were not paid. Orange is a color dutch people wear when they want to be patriotic, and it goes as far back when William of Orange threw off the Spanish rule once upon a time, and there is even a county of Orange and I am not really that well versed on dutch history, except that I know they wear orange to football games.

They were accused of advertising for Bavaria Beer, who also happen to have an orange advertising scheme. Also, Bavaria had paid people to wear orange lederhosen (without branding, to get around advertising rules) to games before, which is why these girls got the treatment.
Make Your Own Hotspot - Testing Development Websites on Mobiles & Tablets
It's really hard to explain without just restating the same thing. From my soapbox, it appears as if fictional sex is more likely to be portrayed as representative.
If nobody jumps to this conclusion, who's going to investigate it?

I don't think "If you can't say something nice, don't say it at all" applies when money and legal issues are on the line.

Stick to the facts we know, but don't fill in the gaps with the "high road" being taken by those involved. The fact that there was a lot of room for abuse should be seriously looked at.
Hacker News now generates 10x the traffic of TechMeme
CDATA means XML, most likely. See http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_cdata.asp
That is a very good point :)
It's part of the pre-installed Dropbox application on newer HTC phones. Some people have copied it and used it on other phones to get the storage upgrade.
I'm a designer and if I were hiring these blog posts are the best portfolio I can think of. I'd like to see more commentary, but these are a great idea. someone needs to make this a "aaS" business to hire designers or he hired.
Most TV's can display a QR code (as long as it's not too detailed), but the main issue is the dwell time. I've yet to meet an app that can go from off-in-pocket to scanned QR code in less than 5 seconds. Add in user reaction time and decision time and you've pretty much wasted a 30 second infomercial spot. Might not be such a bad idea for 60+-second infomercials though, as long as they keep reminding the viewer that the code is coming up.
Leader Technologies has a pending appeal at the Federal Circuit. Good description of how their patent was thrown out: http://www.lotempiolaw.com/2011/12/articles/patents/facebook...

Conjecture: this is a poorly executed PR campaign by Leader Technologies to embarrass Facebook into settling during their quiet period.
Quantum Money from Hidden Subspaces
Obama's Buffett Rule on taxes for rich blocked in Senate
I'd be happy to whip up an iOS/Android app to stream the episodes.
This is ridiculous. I'm embarrassed Hacker News is sending her pageviews.

Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook. His board couldn't make him spend a billion dollars on an acquisition against his will. Instead of admitting this gaping hole in her reasoning, she turns it into another exciting speculation: that Matt Cohler must therefore be blackmailing him.
Microsoft revenues grew 15% over the past 4 years. Large company, yes, but hardly a quick moving power like a tsunami. Google grew 85% in the period. Stellar for a company of that size but tsunami? Depends who you ask. Apple grew 190%+ during that period. Tsunami? Hell yes

Uber, Airbnb, and other hot companies like Square, Dropbox, Box, and Fab are generating lots of revenue and (probably) all growing much, much faster than any of the companies listed above. Sure they have smaller bases and thus can grow at faster rates, but they are becoming quite big, quite quickly. Having that many companies growing so explosively doesn't happen so often. And that's not to mention the growth that Zynga and Facebook also are having. Kleiner Perkins said Zynga was their fastest growing company in history - and they backed Amazon and Google!

To be clear, I'm not talking about the bubble. Just pointing out that there are many companies in this current wave that have obscenely strong revenue growth (Instagram obviously not being one of them)
Sigh. This is a rather myopic view of documentation.

Of course the source code is the ultimate arbiter of truth. But having a few roadmaps to that source code is _incredibly_ valuable. And as long as the underlying code does "what it says on the box", there's no reason to read the code.

Reading your stack's source should be a last recourse, not the default mode of operation. (Yes, I do read source code of my stack. Plenty of it. Which is why I appreciate any occasion where I don't have to.)

And when I see his "brilliant HN post" mention that suggests that "sometimes, you recompile your compiler", I'd like to smack some sense into people. You really don't. I've been working on low-level software for a loooong time, and I find about one compiler bug a year. I even do have a bit of a background in compiler writing. And yet, the sane choice is to write a small repro case, file it with the maintainers, and write your code to work around that bug, at least in most cases.
Learn to code and BUILD SOMETHING [esp for non-tech folks]
> ...why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter...

Here's one reason: you'll accumulate experience at half the pace of those programming 40 hours a week, which means you'll probably lag behind others in terms of usefulness and salary.
China's censors tested by microbloggers who keep one step ahead of state media
Once you start thinking of your object model as data, you can do amazing things. Want to find all the types in your system that implement an interface and spin them up?

var rules =
AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies
.SelectMany(a => a.GetTypes())
.Where(t => typeof(ISecurityRule).IsAssignableFrom(t))
.Select(t => Activator.CreateInstance() as ISecurityRule)
.OrderBy(r => r.Priority);

You can then run a chain of responsibility by writing

var allowed = rules.First(r => r.Check(someObject) != null);
//Check returns null when a rule isn't relevant to the object being checked

it's pretty sweet for metaprogramming when you can run queries against your codebase
Apache with mod_mono.
So all Apple has to do is to bring the price point of the 3GS down to feature phone levels to take over the world?
I've supported (what I would expect to be) an equivalently large deployment. If you truly have half of a multi-hundred person development team scheduled simply to respond to emergency on-call events, you very, very likely have fundamental issues in your development standards and processes leading to those events.

That's simply a tremendous percentage of your staff dedicated to putting out fires.
More than whether or not they "should" or shouldn't need on-call programmers, I am curious what causes the majority of errors that are encountered. Is it mistakes the programmers have made? Unpredictable interactions that are caused by the complexity of the software? Unexpected user behavior or interactions with client software? Something else a novice like me can't anticipate?
Compile .NET in your browser using Compilify
Paul Buchheit (the creator of Gmail) is investor in Rapportive: http://angel.co/buchheit/activity/5dG6n
Quora question on Instagram - Facebook board conflicts of interest
Or less cynically they make funny knockoff movies that a lot of purple watch on purpose. The book thing is pure scam.
I've been waiting for a reasonably priced e-reader with a built in light ever since I first saw a kindle. I remember thinking "Do I really want to pay a few hundred dollars for a gadget to have to clip a crappy light on the thing." Sony had made an e-reader with a built in light but IIRC it was even more expensive than the original kindle.
Publishing with iBooks Author offered as free eBook
Yes, it's educational, but generally not entertaining or relaxing, as is implied by the scenario of settling down in a comfy chair, etc. If code is entertaining, it's probably not the kind of code to learn good habits from.
Why we led an investment in Path
This is interesting and I am looking forward to signing up! I am wondering if the Military affiliation of one of the founders will cause hesitation. I am a founder who has a military background, not nearly as long and impressive as CDR Hyder, however we currently do not have any public products in the security market. Does anyone think such an affiliation may cause issues with certain users?
Yeah, I do this frequently with the source code to Lua, which is an astonishing piece of software engineering that constantly inspires me. I can hardly think of another open source project that does so much with so little code.
But root-cause analysis of the issues that arise is still important, right? Tracing customer-impacting issues back to the decisions that might have caused them? Perhaps not even particular bugs or parts of the product, but architectural decisions as a whole? Or even organizational processes? You can throw money at live support until the end of time, but the only way to reduce that cost is by addressing problems at the source, be it code or process, or something else... (right?)
I think its because you've lost too much karma, and have been banned from submissions until your karma state is positive.
It sounds like they have a dedicated customer support team and the on-call programmers are the second-level support. Take a look at the examples DHH gives of the work on-call programmers do-

"We spend time trying to figure out why emails weren’t delivered (often because they get caught in the client’s spam filter or their inbox is over capacity), or why an import of contacts from Excel is broken (because some formatting isn’t right), or any of the myriad of other issues that arises from having variable input and output from an application that’s been used by millions of people."
Depictions of sexuality are of special concern (though certainly not the only area of concern) because sexuality is a deep thing, which most of us will deal with a lot in our lives, and which is easy to screw up in subtle ways. The difference between a great sex life and a mediocre one is often just a subtle shift in one's attitude in any of a multitude of ways.

We form our expectations about sex partly from our own experiences and partly from exposure to others' real or fictional experiences. We may not even realize we've formed an expectation; we may simply think that we're responding in the "natural" way and our partner is responding in an "unnatural" way. Consider how you interpret your partner undressing before bed -- to what degree does that signal desire or readiness for sex? Is it an invitation to a particular level of foreplay? If there's a small disconnect in expectation between you and your partner, that can cascade into an attitude of "he always wants sex when I want to talk first" or "she's always leading me on and then turning me down".

Every couple is going to have issues, disagreements, and disconnects large and small, which they will have to work through over the course of their relationship. Parents have the ability to make this better or worse for their children depending on what content they expose them to, under what circumstances, and what context they provide.

(For the record, my parents started teaching me about sex at around age 3 and were fairly explicit as I got older. I plan to do the same with my son.)
Be sure to check out Andreessen's follow up comment to his own post, which goes into more detail about the Instagram-FB deal. For some reason, this comment is hidden when the comments are expanded.

Here is an excerpt from the part about instagram-fb deal:

"The second potential conflict was when Facebook approached Instagram for acquisition, since I am both a director of Facebook and a general partner at AH which owned a meaningful percentage of Instagram (from our original seed investment in Burbn). As described elsewhere on this page, that conflict was averted by (a) me not even knowing about the potential acquisition until the day it happened and (b) me being recused from all discussions and decisions on both sides (Facebook and Instagram). By being recused, the conflict was averted."
Archaeopteryx: Fussstart (Foot launch) (video)
Fair point, you are right. I think it would be picked up as incorrect by most English teachers in Britain, all the ones I had anyway, however it is correct, if a touch archaic.

But I was being an arse for picking at that in the first place anyway, I just thought that your views on avoiding swearing were a bit over the top and not entirely realistic.

Many professional environments cope fine with quite a blue tinge to their speech, possibly because having to watch your tongue all the time can be a negative in places that require rapid communication with the full range of emphasis.
For reference. Other open movies made by the Blender Foundation are Big Bucks Bunny:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE7VzlLtp-4

And Sintel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ
I've seen the same at Big Lots as "Shapiro".

They wear out in 2 or so days.
Yes, stick to the facts, this article is mostly conjecture.
Beyond Semicolons: high-level style in javascript
Here's her linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/donnaklinekirschler
Going the other way: In languages where if is an expression

if (a) { b; }

would return b if a was true and nothing otherwise. Which is a similar to a && b.
I don't think "candor" is the word you're looking for. Probably something more like "credibility."
Twitter buys Hotspots.io
I didn't get in. Congrats to those who got invites!
Well, that opens up the spot for a new startup.
FTFA: "You could argue that Moody's was one of the ratings agencies that consistently passed off sub-prime debt as investment grade material in the noughties and that it may well be wrong – indeed, Nokia's share price rose slightly on Monday. But more than a few analysts are now seriously concerned about Nokia's future, with the company losing both staff and customers, and in an alliance with Microsoft to push an unpopular mobile operating system."
Hntube
I like how quite a number of peoples answers to the on-call programmer blog was "you need better tests"

here's a what if scenario:-

- you have a third party service your systems rely on

- at 4am on Sunday morning said 3rd party service upgrades their system, introducing a breaking change, having never bothered to notify users

- you get a call as the on-call person saying "application X is not longer working, please resolve"

How do tests stop that scenario from happening? Tests don't magically help you invent features/work around introduced issues in 3rd party systems.

Those are typically the on-call issues we deal with (we're on a weekly rotation)
HNtube