skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20% Time doesn't appear to be as fruitful as portrayed.
A Show
Will this mean that they'll finally get a real website? I'd love to be able to browse my friends' photos. It seemed to me that the complete lack of functionality on the single photo page (not even a link to your home page?!) seemed like a big middle finger to non-mobile users. Anytime I clicked through from facebook and twitter, the fact that I couldn't get anywhere from there was enough of a turn-off to make me avoid getting the iOS app.

Or maybe it'll be folded into the horrible UI mess that is FB and go away....
Nokia Lumia 900: A good phone at a great price that you probably shouldn't buy
> The odds of notch finding this standard favorable to my standards are about the same as him favoring my standards.

Huh? Notch doesn't have to give a shit about these standard. He's writing the emulator (and memory-mapped I/O); we still need conventions on top (calling external libraries; linking libraries and so on).

> the standards are going to be what the implementors find convenient.

Yes, of course. All I'm saying is that instead of each assembler/compiler/linker using its own "most convenient convention" we can at least try to unify them. And someone needs to write down drafts.
It's something everyone knows how to do from a technology standpoint, which is why so many services are trying to do it. But from a user experience standpoint I don't see anyone really nailing it. And I think for this you really want to nail it even for people who are not very good at all at using technology.
(Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer/author of Zepto.js)

FWIW, it took about 10 minutes to remove the semicolons from the codebase, with a simple grep: /;$/

For the few places where a ; is actually needed you can run a regexp based search as well, the rest is easily identified by unit tests.

We've also spend some 50+ hours on writing new code, tests, a new build and automated tests system, a completely new documentation site and answering countless issues on GitHub.
Interesting that everyone is focused on Instagram as a company and how they just got $1 billion.

I find it interesting that Mark and Facebook were able to buy a company for $1 billion. Its like the joke chris rock said about being wealthy.

"Shaq is rich, the white man that signs his check is wealthy"
I really wanted ActiveResource to work for me, but I had a few requirements that it couldn't meet, like camelCased attribute and resource names, HTTP caching, and the ability to change authentication at runtime without race conditions (since configuration is done at the class level in ARes).

I wrote a small gem called well_rested to replace ActiveResource in my project. It utilizes ActiveModel for validations and generally plays well with Rails. Maybe it will be useful to someone:

https://github.com/DeepWebTechnologies/well_rested
From a game design sense, there are actually pretty good reasons for making the architecture somewhat hairy. If it's an ideal candidate for C, writing a new backend for a popular compiler is a few weeks of work at most, and then much of the motivation for dealing with the gritty details of the ISA evaporates. As we've already seen, there will be C compilers available for the DCPU-16, but there are enough tough nuts to crack that programming in assembly (or Forth?) will provide a competitive advantage for some time to come.
For what it's worth, I'm a scientist and I agree with you wholeheartedly. Many of my colleagues do as well. (Full-disclosure: I'm still an 'undergrad', but most of my courses are independent research.)

I don't cut out fun entirely, but I do tend to overwork. I'll be dead soon and have no recollection of 'fun', so I tend to prioritize/maximize my traversal time spent doing academic 'activities' (which are rewarding in their own right).

I still require a basal level of fun to stay sane, though; it would be interesting to quantify it...
I have always used the debit card that comes with the business checking account. If nothing else, it's one less account to deal with.
By the way, CISPA is the next retarded idea to kill the internet... I guess it will never stop.

Unless Google is truly committed to some "open web" idea, in which case they would do better than collecting tweets by throwing their weight and money around to ensure an open Internet.
$33 per user could make sense if this was a defensive acquisition as other HNers have suggested.

If G+ bought Instagram and it made enough of a difference in G+ activity to make G+ competitive with Facebook, I could see how it could knock $1 billion or more off Facebook's IPO price.

Remember, it's 30 million of the more active social network users. These are the same type of core users that Facebook had back in its early days that helped attract the other 750 million users it has.
Well, let's not get excited here. I don't think anybody is saying that they think there's some capitalist in a top hat allocating funds, saying "We will put $4B into cancer research to keep the eggheads quiet, and $9B into football to distract and pacify the proles." At least, I hope nobody thinks that.

But the point is that when we, as a society, allocate resources this way, it is an indication of pathological economic behavior, and we need to find solutions for that.
I still haven't gotten a confirmation email (and I checked my spam folder). Is the site overloaded?
Think of Node-Five as a very small WebKit/Gecko engine for Node.js. It is written in JavaScript on top of Node-Qt, whereas Node-Qt itself is written in C++.

When I say "native apps" in this context I simply mean you don't need a traditional browser to run the apps, and the runtime interacts more closely with the OS (for example, Qt exposes native menu methods, native OpenGL, etc).
Naturally, the semicolons have always been stripped by the minifier. This makes the code no more 'minimalist.'
How America Spends Money: 100 Years in the Life of the Family Budget
If I were a facebook shareholder, I would be livid right now. This was definitely an inside deal/giveaway that resulted in facebook having to pay much more for the company than it would have.
How should we promote it?
Hey Guys,
Heres our startup - Mingle Trips - http://www.mingletrips.com . It is for single travelers to meet other travelers/locals while traveling.
All sorts of feedback is welcome. Especially, ideas on promoting it.
Thanks.
Manas
How an automatic Refrigerator works
IKVM.NET Enables Developers to Run Java on .NET
Jesus v. Santa was actually their demo and went viral before (or just as, at the latest) the series was premiering.
It's very useful.

Use it like you'd use a bare object in Javascript, as a freeform data container to hold whatever properties you need. A bit like a key-value NoSQL store, actually.
Another important point to consider is that Facebook has a pending IPO. It's very possible that they would have delayed or aborted the acquisition for some unknown reason related to the IPO. If that did happen, Instagram had the cash to keep running.
NodeUp's JSConf Recap (A Node.js Podcast)
A focus on the common properties of cancer would perhaps provide more hope. The most obvious is the need for angiogenesis: the formation of new blood vessels to irrigate deep layers of a tumor. There are drugs out there targeting angiogenesis. Another obvious property is cell proliferation, without which a cancer is not a cancer. Both of these are core functions of most of the human body, but there is such thing as therapeutic windows: a time interval with a dose just so to have a greater effect on tumors rather than on the rest of the body.
It's beginning to remind me of the late 90's where the only thing that mattered was number of "eyeballs" on your site, sound business plans/profits be damned.
Congrats to Instagram. I think the real value that's been overlooked for Instagram is the Instagram community. Instagram has a very strong community around the world (www.instagramers.com has more than 250 chapter groups) and that may be one of the factors Facebook was looking at.
Values, yes, but keys?
Rand sounds very lucky.
Your article begins by linking to anti-PHP articles that are 6-8 years old .. You might want to start by bringing your research up to date.
Most languages' canonical implementations are written in C, including Java, Python, and Ruby.
Well yes, a starting point - but not also the ending point at the same time.

And by memorable I meant based on bootstrap but with own "personality", not bootstrap's.
All this genetic diversity seems daunting at first but I think it is also indicative of something that gives me great hope.

Cancer isn't like a virus or pathogen that has evolved to avoid it our immune systems and treatments as it passes from individual. It is a degenerative state of the same system that produces healthy cells and fertile humans.

It is genetically very diverse. Part of this is because cancers cells often have mesed up chromosomal replication which produces more variability. Part of this may be because numerous genetic variations can have similar effects because they effect the same gene or network of genes.

As the author alludes to at the end of the paper, there are a number of things a tumor must do to be successful. These include avoiding the immune system, avoiding programed cell death, recruiting blood vessels/nutrients etc. There has been lots of really promising research in the last few years that looks at analyzing and targeting the pathways that control these things.

Further as projects like the the Cancer Genome Atlas (which I work on as a Software Engineer) produce terabytes of data about cancer, we are able to apply modern data analysis to better understand the system, hopefully discovering what separates the biochemical state of an aggressive cancer from one the body handles without issue which will hopefully lead to some novel drug targets.
Ask HN: Are these photo sharing apps in the making of the next Facebook?
Fair enough, I'm not claiming that other, much more difficult work didn't go into the feature updates. What was the reasoning for switching to semicolon-less? Why wasn't that a concern when the project started? (Apologies if I missed it in the notes.) I have no problem with projects doing one or the other, the _switch_ just doesn't fit into my brain correctly. Perhaps your tastes just changed?
Tell HN: thanks
We will be launching soon and before we do, I just want to thank everyone here at HN. Thanks to PG for creating such a wonderful site, and thanks to everyone whose stories I've read and comments I've appreciated. My special thanks to everyone who keeps promoting execution as the top priority for a start-up. This is my first venture, and while its small, its just the right size for me. Its not going to change the world, but it does exist in real form, way much more than my other ideas ever did.
I also wanted to say thanks to the people behind our open source software. I know they don't get the shoutouts they deserve, but if it weren't for three guys half way around the world I have never met, our little magazine might never have gotten off the ground. If you're interested in magazine publishing on the iPad, please check them out at bakerframework.com
Keep up the awesome work HN.
- T
Why? Facebook knew about the series B that Instagram took. They could have pulled out at any point if the acquisition didn't make any sense.
I haven't programmed for the "CPU" but I'd wager that certain things are designed to be slightly difficult for the sake of game difficulty and the inherent fun of pulling off something non-trivial with it.
It's Time to Invest in Hamilton
26 major corporations paid no corporate income tax for the last 4 years
Ask HN: Why would instagram raise $50 million right before being acquired?
I don't get it.
This needs some more love. Consider the cycle of academic career:

-Grad school for 5-8 years, averaging around 7 for most molecular and cellular biologists. You make $23-28k a year depending on where you live. You steal whatever free food is lying around your department

-Post graduation, you obtain a Post-Doc position for ~2 years (if everything goes well). This pays ~40k/year, again varying depending on region.

-If you got lucky and had a successful Post-doc, skip to the next bullet. Otherwise, go back to the last bullet for another 2-8 years.

-Get a junior professor tenure-track position. Salary is much better, probably around 60-80k. You have five years to prove you are awesome. At five years, go to the next bullet

-Tenure review! How many awesome papers did you publish?

---Not enough? go try again at a different university...hopefully your family is willing to relocate or there is one nearby. If you fail tenure review twice, you get to be an adjunct professor (zero job security, crap salary) for the rest of your life.

---Well, you don't completely suck...so we are giving you another two years to prove tenure. Go back to the last bullet.

---Wow! You got tenure! Welcome to the elite minority that actually make tenure. You get a nice salary bump up to 100-150k, have total job security, do zero science anymore (glorified manager now) and are probably in your 40's. Feels good, huh?

And people wonder why things are slow in biology? If this was a sales funnel, you would notice hideous conversion rates between all the steps. People burn out because of intense competition for few spots, crappy salary and crappy hours.

If you work finance, you may work 90 hour weeks but at least you make lots of money. In biology...you work 70 hour weeks for food stamps and the hope of getting tenure when you are 40.
This definitely isn't the case on iOS. I use instagram all the time, but only for the filters. Pictures I take with it get put on dropbox.
"Like water, oil is able to absorb more heat — compared to the same volume of air — from the hardware before heating up itself"

Am I just being picky, or should I expect better phrased physics from a hardware blog?
Android: Faster emulator with better hardware support
I agree consistency is key, but it _was_ consistent before (in it's use of semicolons), and is still (in it's non-use of semicolons).
one, instagram has brilliant team which also include creative people and not only tech.
two, very high yet active user base.
three, which is purely on business value - the cumulative time spent in the mobile app of 30 million active instagram users, when you add up, will give more revenue in facebook ad in the following years. i would say, facebook played safe here in trying to regain the usage time.
Instagram: Promises Broken?
Good point - though they did eliminate the brand with Beluga, and they probably won't with Instagram. That could change though.

Besides messaging and photos, I'm thinking that few things are left as halo products around Facebook. There's no reason for a "games" app - to me, at least - but there might be logic in acquiring something like Turntable.fm for music.
How are you promoting it so far?
I used AR for a small project a year or so ago.

What are people's favourite alternatives?
Funding for Malaria: ~$1.5 billion[1]

Priorities.

[1]: http://www.rbm.who.int/gmap/1-4.html

edit: That's worldwide funding for Malaria. The US gives only a small fraction of that.
The anti innovators holding payments back
> 1st & Goal doesn't matter unless you actually score

Well put.
Future Versions of Firefox Could Feature Built-In Video Chat
I'm surprised by a lot of the response to this post for a couple of reasons.

First, and very simply, the existing Exec design is conspicuously weak and unprofessional. It looks copy+pasted from a million other sites, but without anyone with a good eye to look it over and pull the disparate copied elements together. For all the negative feedback, there should be more acknowledgment that Kyro's decision does a far better job aesthetically and in terms of polish than what exists now.

Second, when did marketing and design become conflated? Most of the criticism is about the approach the designer has taken to writing marketing copy and otherwise persuading people to sign up. Is that really the role of a designer? Maybe it is these days, but I think that means the role has now become a hybrid of two pretty unrelated disciplines.

A great designer takes a sense of experience and branding and translates it into abstraction: color, form, rhythm, etc. Kyro has done a good job of this. The design, text aside, reads as high-end, serious, appealing to professionals, and most importantly like a solid company that is trustworthy and can deliver on its promises.

A great copywriter or marketer is doing a totally different thing, trying to persuade people and get them to convert. From knowing some people who are pretty good at both things, I'm not convinced that these two roles should be turned into one. I think this is a vast improvement on design before I even analyze whether or not its a marketing copy improvement.
it's a build dependency not a runtime dependency
Both GIMP and Photoshop can read any binary file as a "raw" file format, where you can specify the bit-depth (e.g. greyscale, RGB, RGBA, etc) and column width.
How much of a site's personality would you consider is design, vs content and UX? I'm considering tweaking the over all colors and such for unscatter.com and chatfor.us (when I move chatfor.us to bootstrap) in order to differentiate them. I just haven't put a large focus on that, choosing to focus more on the functionality of the sites.

I guess my opinion is Bootstrap is a great way to have an acceptable looking front end while you focus on building out your minimum feature set.
Sure, why not. I mean, I can't offhand of a time that I've really used mixed keys, but I also can't come with any compelling reason why it's a bad idea. Ad-hoc data comes up all the time.
Facebook Acquires Instagram For $1 Billion In cash And Stock
It's very simple: Instagram had a responsibility to its employees to keep the lights on. Deals don't always go through. If FB would have walked away for any reason, they'd have to start up again on raising. It's also likely that TG was able to parlay the possible acquisition as a way to significantly drive up the price of the company. Brilliant, brilliant move if you ask me.
ActiveResource was very buggy and it's good they're getting rid of it because it doesn't seem like there was any effort for improving that wart. Django ROA, which is just a third-party app, is far more thorough and predictable.
I was once one of the people who was incorrectly told, and therefore believed simple tasks like IO in Haskell was hard.
Though it couldn't be further from the truth.

main = do handle <- openFile "filename.txt" ReadMode
contents <- hGetContents h
putStr contents

Now that simple bit opens a file, reads its entire contents, and prints it to stdout.

Look at something similar in Java:

FileReader file = new FileReader("filename.txt")
//Then I have to choose how to read the file in, how to
//buffer it, ect.
String contents = file.read(...)
//...
System.out.print(contents)

In my opinion the Haskell approach is much cleaner and closer to reading a file in Python or Ruby, and more intuitive then trying to figure it out in Java.
Yeah, the semicolons where just there because "that's how you write JavaScript, right?". After reading Mislav's article and of course working with him on Zepto I realized that actually, the semicolons don't do anything; and I like the code better without them. (I'm also doing a lot of Ruby and CoffeeScript, so I'm biased, I suppose.)

So yes, you could say my taste changed, but there's good a good reason behind it—the semicolons are optional, and Zepto is all about concise code.
The front page of HN is a brilliant example of why you should use the active voice when the passive is unnecessary. 403 points (active) vs. 150 points (passive).

Great A&B testing, guys.
add to that the content side, sony music, sony pictures. the music & movies are great but the vast majority dont pay for them.

sony has no leadership. leadership is not "break down the silos and lets all work together".. thats management.
Picking a few billion that sports makes rather than the lots more billion that tech makes feels a little like pandering to the crowd, though (we're geeks, stereotypically don't like sports and "jocks"). A more edgy question, given the audience, would be to ask why our priorities are such that we pump much more money into web startups than cancer research.
You have got to imagine that the founders [who had the largest stake] made out better with this investment. It's likely the case that a smaller slice of a bigger $ pie > larger slice of smaller $ pie

The engineers would be in the same boat as the founders.

The insider VCs likely served to make the engineers richer. Facebook is likely the one who got screwed into overpaying.
Ask HN: Is YC Demo Day getting too big?
With Demo Day at 60+ companies, I (an HNer and early adopter) am starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with the number of startups to look at all at one time. I used to be able to properly consider all the ones that I figured are worth knowing about, but not any longer.

AFAIK, pg has suggested to startups that are in the current batch that they shouldn't wait until demo day to launch, but most still do launch on demo day.

Either way, I was wondering if other HNers on here feel the same way about the number of YC startups being launched almost all at the same time, or if it is just me.
The internet is filled with bad advice walking around as anecdotal just so story's. If you are looking for more than entertainment, I suggest you avoid anything that shows up in 'story' format.
So...how does it work? The README file isn't terribly informative.
3 Beginner Digital Marketing Tips from ckilgs
Here's something interesting about a common chemical compound called Dichloroacetic acid (DCA). Big pharma is ignoring it since it can't be patented (because it's so common).

Cancer cells change the way they metabolize oxygen in a way that promotes their survival. In laboratory studies of isolated cancer cells grown in tissue culture, DCA restores the original metabolism, and promotes their self-destruction. This has led to the use of DCA for treating cancer, by individuals experimenting with it themselves, by doctors administering it to patients as a non-approved drug, by scientists testing it in cancer tissue cultures in cell culture and in mice, and in human Phase II studies. DCA has improved certain biochemical parameters, but it has not demonstrated improved survival.

Cancer cells generally express increased glycolysis, because they rely on anaerobic respiration that occurs in the cytosol (lactic acid fermentation) rather than oxidative phosphorylation in the mitochondria for energy (the Warburg effect), as a result of hypoxia that exists in tumors and malfunctioning mitochondria. [9] [10] Usually dangerously damaged cells kill themselves via apoptosis, a mechanism of self-destruction that involves mitochondria, but this mechanism fails in cancer cells.
A phase I study published in January 2007 by researchers at the University of Alberta, who had tested DCA on human[11] cancer cells grown in mice, found that DCA restored mitochondrial function, thus restoring apoptosis, allowing cancer cells to self-destruct and shrink the tumor.[12]
These results received extensive media attention, beginning with an article in New Scientist titled "Cheap, ‘safe’ drug kills most cancers".[11] Subsequently, the American Cancer Society and other medical organizations have received a large volume of public interest and questions regarding DCA.[13] Clinical trials in humans with cancer have not been conducted in the USA and are not yet final in Canada, emphasizing the need for caution in interpreting the preliminary results.[13][14]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid
Highly recommended reading on the subject : The Emperor of All Maladies : Kindle URL - http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-ebook/dp/B003UYUP...
Value of Business Co-Founders