skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was going to write most in my original post, but I figured most reasonable humans know that climbing stairs does not mean climbing all stairs in the world ever.

It seems like it's been a while since you read the HN guidelines. It might be good to read them again.
It's a great thing he started this blog. I hope he posts regularly, I have always wanted to take a peek at how things work inside Valve.
Awesome read! Valve have really caught my attention ever since I learned that they had wheels on desks, allowing their employees to freely move about and join up with others as they move from project to project. I can definitely relate to that part – I love working closely with our Android and iOS developers, but our company has them in like separate pods so I have to keep getting up and walking over to them whenever we discuss our projects. Tried asking if it's cool for me to move next to the developer I work with till conclusion of project but I guess the management likes to keep the teams 'neat and tidy'.
Google’s Political Site ‘Take Action’ To Host First Hangout
Recapp Launches to Keep You Up to Date On Sports
Into the Mosh Pit: A Mobile Shell Replacement for SSH
Iceland forgives mortgage debt of its population
I later asked him directly, “…but do you love your job?” He paused, looked down to his drink, and replied, “I love my team, but I fing hate my job.”

There's one thing that I heard pg say one time that's always stuck with me: people make the difference. Good people can make a boring project fun. Bad people can make a fun project hell.

It sounds to me like the person quoted likes his team, but it doesn't sound like they're meeting this definition of "good".
Again ... this is more an indictment on the poor IO performance of Amazon EBS vs. MongoDB as a solution. MongoDB can scale both vertically and horizontally, but as with anything you scale on Amazon infrastructure, you are going to have to really think through strategies for dealing with the unpredictable performance of EBS. There are blog posts galore addressing this fact.

I often think MongoDB has suffered more as a young technology because of the proliferation of the AWS Cloud and the expectations of EBS performance.
heh, read all about this dude back when I read Masters of Doom.
Did the entry ranked 5 also have the 2 algorithms? Then the title makes sense. A contest is a good way to motivate the base, but it can also cause lots of effort that is unnecessary in the end.
Sabpab - new backdoor trojan hits Mac OS X users
Red Ryder / Red Ryder Host FTW - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Ryder_%28software%29
I told my 2nd year CS students to create a programming language
Good here
Financial regulation is certainly a complex problem, and there are many ways of solving the problem, and my ignorance of the subject is vast.

As to why it's "instantly and unfathomably bad" to get rid of regulation: It seems to me that regulation, most of the time (and for most financial "problems") has worked pretty well. Other countries haven't had any where near as much trouble with, for e.g., the recent housing crisis, because they have had better regulation in place. So, At least as far as I can tell, it looks like regulations work fairly well. It's certainly better than no regulation.

There are already huge amounts of regulations in all sorts of fields, such as education, medicine, pollution, the environment, politics, etc... So we know how to make regulations work. There are certainly problems with regulation but it seems better than any alternative I know of.

So, and this could just be ignorance (or a lack of imagination) but I don't think the problem is in the concept of regulation. I honestly can't think of a systemic fix that wouldn't make things worse.

As far as it goes, the US has far more of a problem when laws and regulations are gamed by insiders for their own benefit, at great expense to everyone else. Another way of framing it is basically the "1% vs. the 99%" debate that's been going for the last year or so. So maybe that points at a systemic fix -- open government, especially open regulation, so it's much harder to game the regulations.
Blow himself is the most pretentious jerkoff in the world. He makes good games though.

His game is about a stalker whether he wants it to be or not. Authorial intent is irrelevant.

edit: Also, I hate how this article is written. It's not journalism when you turn the subjects into characters in a short story.
Cool. I use Sparrow at home. If you are on Mac, give it a try. Nice clean interface.
SnapTerms: Terms Of Service As A Service
The Awful Cover Letter All of Wall Street Is Laughing About
Can you go more into the challenges you had? From the few minutes I spent on your site I didn't see too much of a difference from what I can obtain from Project Vote Smart. That said, I do like your interface more.

I volunteer at a local nonprofit occasionally (plug: fairness.org) and we have people spending a lot of time addressing postcards to state legislators going by the home addresses people list on the postcards they fill out at our events. Right now we mostly use Vote Smart or a state specific resource to find the person's representatives, but their address lookup can be pretty picky. This is unfortunate when a large portion of people who fill out postcards have horrible handwriting. A tool that can deal with misspelled street names and provide the information you and vote smart do would save us an incredible amount of time and frustration. I'll try your site out next time tackle the boxes of unsent cards.
A company is legally required to go public when it has more than 500 shareholders.

Google had significant cash reserves before going public and has never had a period where they spent enough cash to go below what they received from the IPO. Facebook is in a similar position of having tons of cash and nothing to do with it.

Not to mention, both companies delayed their IPO as long as legally possible, which strongly suggests that they wouldn't have filed if they could get away with it.

That's not to say that there are no benefits from becoming a public company. It makes life much better for the employees who received stock options (though it doesn't provide as much of a benefit to, e.g., Larry Page and Sergey Brin). But it's fair to say that neither Google nor Facebook were enthusiastic about going public.
Interesting. I've avoided video games for quite some time for the same reason Mr. Blow avoids watching sports. Perhaps I'll check out this new game of his when it is released.
Summary of PG's response:

- Founder is more important than the idea

- He likes people who have been friends for a while.

- people who worked together before, so they know each others working capacity

- don't like people who came together for the purpose of doing this startup (nothing else holding them together)

- almost every startup, at some point the startup is doomed and worthless

- friends will work on the startup even if it's worthless in order not to let each other down, will often result in over coming the rough days and succeed in the end.

- It's really bad if they can't figure which one of the founder is the leader is (needs to have a more "forceful" leader)

- "it's good if there one who pushes the other out a little bit, but not too much"
How about if they RAN a BBS.
Say 'hello' to CISPA, it will remind you of SOPA
Unlike NoScript users Ppople running IE6 can't right-click and disable it at will.
Do you have a lot of money? No? Then no-one does.
Just in case anyone sees this...

It's up again. Turns out it was an .htaccess I had mistakenly pulled out of the webroot a few days ago. The JS couldn't resolve any of its AJAX, and I didn't build it to fail the calls gracefully.
Unless it's built into the OS. For example, NFC communications could function just like a PayPass-type card. Unlock your phone, tap it to the reader, a confirmation pops up (optional), and you're off.

It's actually much easier than your CC, because you have to dig that out of your wallet, which you have to dig out of your jacket/purse, etc. Most people keep their phones handier than their wallets, and even if they don't they don't have to take anything out of it and juggle the components in both hands.
Silicon Valley's Secret, Vicious Lust for Hollywood Fame
There's a precedent with "Wyngz" (http://askfsis.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1450), which are chicken wing shaped but contain no actual wing. They just need a name catchier than "Pink Slime".
So I though video games werent generating money because of piracy and that even big titles had troubles.
They'd have lied to me?!
Kickstarter's Pebble Dream Team (funny)
Republic Wireless starts new beta waves next week
With games like Braid you can afford to do that because as cool as the game is, it's just a platformer.

Big production games don't have the same luxury as most reviews will focus on graphics/sound etc. If it runs like crap and looks average no one is going to accept that no matter how much fun it is.
sadfdsasfsfddfsadfs
Probably a lumberjack or parrot.
It looks like a custom one, but it reminds me of "impress.js"
Yes, the engineering costs are too hard to justify... now that DVDs by mail is no longer their primary focus. it's not clear to me that that would still be the case if Netflix business were still operating around 2007's constraints.
Alone on a mysterious island... So maybe less ground breaking and more a spiritual successor to Myst? I'm not saying don't do or play it, maybe just that it's not as uniquely original as the article author breathlessly makes it out to be.
Contacts are a horrendous ideas. In fact soldiers are specifically not to wear contacts into a combat zone because the heat of an IED explosion can fuse it to the cornea.
The English language really has a delightful amount of three-letter words. I don't know all of them, but guessing gives me a high chance it actually exists.

One issue: Sometimes I want to start with some letter, but the game only marks the second letter, rendering the selection incorrect. Might be due to my computer being busy with some simulations though.
Don't forget, they also need to hire hundreds if not thousands of people and enter a market that is notorious for fraud/abuse, with extremely low profit margins. Gee, I'm shocked they haven't done this already!
I tried clicking on top words or something in the leaderboard and it just went to a new game (Win/FF).
National Geographic, The Daily Show, and More [Ipad Apps Of The Week]
Heineken Needs Help Designing a Greener Six Pack
aah, back when I was a node on FidoNET.
Great site. Aside from the local tab positioning as has already been mentioned several times, my only nitpick is with the use of the "See More" button. Not sure why it's necessary -- it means I have to click several extra times to see the information I want, rather than just once or twice. You should try to reduce clicks, not add to them.
In fact, I tried on-instance storage too -- this didnt help substantially. The reality is that many (most?) stacks these days need to be able live happily on AWS...
I think a lot of the discussion about why CoffeeScript is or isn't better is really a proxy for the real issue which is, is it worth taking the time to learn it.

People generally are motivated by feelings and the rationalizations come after. For awhile I felt like I did not want to learn CoffeeScript and that it was silly and annoying that people wanted me to waste time learning it. Honestly what really started to change my mind was that I needed to alter PDFKit, and I had to learn a little bit of CoffeeScript in order to do that. I think that the need to learn it came first and then later the rationalizations for why it was a good choice came after.

Another real issue that is below the surface but not mentioned while people are discussing the actual pros and cons of CoffeeScript: is JavaScript a good language, or is it fundamentally flawed somehow?

A professional JavaScript programmer's identity will often be tied in to some degree with his general JavaScript associations (the same way someone who races Formula 1 cars would identify with that type of car and might be offended if someone started attacking the body shape of those cars), and so to make a significant investment in learning CoffeeScript implies fundamental issues with JavaScript and may therefore be an attack on that person's identity. Obviously this wouldn't be a conscious thought process but the subconscious associations are often there.

Whatever is making people choose to learn CoffeeScript or not to learn it, its not really a rational process usually. Its more like a religious battle.

I think that the amount of time you have invested in JavaScript, how well you really know it, to what degree you have come to terms with/got over those pain points that CoffeeScript helps with, how much you identify with JavaScript versus other technologies, whether you actually have a specific need to learn CoffeeScript (i.e. for altering a library or reading a coworker's code), all of those things are going to add up subconsciously in a sort of vector for or against CoffeeScript that is pretty much an emotion which will motivate different rationalizations about specifics.

So in cases where that subconscious equation just isn't adding up in CoffeeScript's favor people will find all sorts of (often tangential) arguments against it. One thing that probably can help if you are trying to push CoffeeScript is to repeatedly mention certain small improvements such as using -> instead of writing function() or the class and extends syntax. That would mean that they would have to learn those things just in the process of the discussion. (Of course, they may want to stab you if you mention those things too many times though.)
if i had known that there were programming languages like python or ruby in 2005 i'd learn one of them instead of php.

haskell is another giant but i suggest going with either python or ruby. your taste will decide it.
Try Safari or Opera
What's to stop Facebook from going after this exact same space? Frankly, I'd be surprised if they weren't already working on something to this effect. Via Facebook Connect, they've already got the back-end infrastructure "trojaned" into a large percentage (maybe even a majority?) of all iOS apps, web apps, sites, and so forth. Feels like they could carve out a more defensible and expansive position in web and mobile payments than Apple could.

[To be fair, they don't currently have all the stored credit card info that Apple does. So that's a big hurdle to starting up.]
Could you please clarify on that issue? So it ignores the first letter and just skips to the second one? Thanks for playing the game!
That's still a migration, its just incremental.
I'm sorry. My comment was supposed to be funny, but it was just rude. Thanks for calling me on that. <:\

All kinds of software can be shitty or non-shitty. I appreciate the call-to-action to developers stuck in the "trenches" of corporate software development. The "C++ coding mines", as one co-worker put it. I just feel the world is inundated with advertising and I hope inspired hackers have the opportunity to solve problems that help people more than businesses.

As FAKEGRIMLOCK says: "FIND CONTENT USERS WANT TO PAY FOR. ADS JUST WAY TO GO BANKRUPT SLOWER."

https://twitter.com/#!/FAKEGRIMLOCK/status/18952272845223117...
Honestly, who decides what characters should be included?
Avg Joe: "Wow! They bought an iphone app for a BILLION DOLLARS? Must be an AMAZING app"

<rushes to apple store>
Microsoft wants your feedback for Windows 8 in new Windows Feedback program
I just finished a contract at a company of very smart engineers who decided to use Coffeescript way before I got there.

The guys that I was working with were way more brilliant than I am. Guys that have machine learning books on their desks for lunchtime and are doing some amazing work that is going to benefit hundreds of millions of people around the world.

To reference this quote from the article: "Any respectable CoffeeScript engineer should have a strong knowledge of JavaScript".

That, frankly, is not true.

One of the reasons I was brought on was to work on some javascript-heavy stuff. I was a newbie to coffeescript beforehand, so to hit deadlines wrote everything in vanilla js to save time and get work done. The guys on the team are very smart, but not really on top of the javascript game. So in this case, coffeescript was definitely being used because it was easier for them as traditional programmers.

Earlier this week, I spent a couple days and finally went through and ported everything over to CS.

In my experience of having manually written a complicated client-side app in js, then manually ported it to coffeescript, I really just don't like CS.

I'm used to Python. Indentation there is natural. Its idiomatic to what Python is. But its not in javascript. Granted, indentation should always be used in js for readability, but brackets really are needed to denote code blocks.

Another complaint I have against CS is that it tries to do so much stuff "as if by magic" that I was never 100% what my code was going to output. I just find:

abc (arg,arg2) ->

to be really fucking confusing. Not to mention adding in the fat arrow, or 'do' if you need to wrap something in a closure.

I'm probably old school, but when I write code I need to know explicitly what it will do. I know what 'this' will refer to based on how I write. Same for closures.

Lots of times, my original code was just as concise as the coffeescript version, and a hell of a lot more concise than what CS rendered out.

So everyone has their opinions, likes and dislikes. For me, I'm gonna stick with native javascript for the time being.
"For a start, I dont think we should be second guessing their design"

Really? I guess you are right that this conversation is over. I'm sorry, but Lifehacker is not the end-all-be-all design mecca of the 21st century, quite the contrary, in fact. I only picked on the Javascript issue -- there are plenty more issues to discuss if you want to discuss design.

It's not about 2% of the population who don't use Javascript. It's about the fact that they're doing something fundamentally wrong if they require Javascript for displaying a simple web page with some content.
'Tetris'-Loving iPad Owners Just Got EA'd Hard
Just like all the iOS whiners that threatened to bail when the app hit Android. :)
Nobody has a comment about this?
A Russian City Always on the Watch Against Being Sucked Into the Earth
传奇3私服
I think you may have taken this too far. Graphics and sound can contribute to or detract from fun, but in the end it is fun that keeps people buying a game. A game that looks great, but plays poorly will not survive, but a game that plays fantastically might be around for years later.

I played Planescape Torment many years after it was released because I kept hearing about it. Comparing it to graphics in other games that I played at the time the graphics were poor. But it had a tremendous story and was a lot of fun, so I played it through and still recommend it to others even though it is now even more dated.
Fascinating...so wrapping an Ajax call inside a window.setInterval automatically switches it to "Comet"?
Many of the smaller ISPs (of which there are now not many) and some of the larger ISPs have peering agreements (with PIPE networks) which mean that this traffic is effectively "free". It used to be quite the selling point, but appears to be no longer be the case (possibly because it's a bit iffy as to what is and isn't free).
!!!!!!!+?
Saying "No" has big gains.
> I'll admit I'm a non-believer, but every time I see "Schemaless" in MongoDB, I think "oh, so you're implementing schema in your application?"

I saw what may have well been 'schemaless' in an RBDMS recently, and the application code for it was far from pretty. I couldn't migrate at all; the results were far too inconsistent to pull it off reliably (you know something is wrong when boolean values are replaced with 'Y' and 'N', which of course both evaluate to 'true').

That being said, I tried to implement something else with Node.js and MongoDB, and I found it quite manageable. As long as the application implements a schema well, you should still be able to infer it when looking at the database direct.

To that extent, I'd take that over using an RBDMS as a key/value store for serialised data, because that's typically useless without the application that parses it.
Instarchive – export and download your Instagram profile
I like your app. I have sent an email to your address (I hope it is the right one, please put in your profile) with some ideas that I will never have time to chase myself, in your space. I agree with the others that I am more confused about who represents me locally, rather than federally.
There is an easier way to fix it: Incentivize safety. Get rid of the TSA all-together, and charge the departing airport for the damages caused by any attempted or successful attack. The airport will have to balance the risk of an attack leaving from their location with the risk of losing all their money from people not flying. It's the same calculation they use (more or less) when they buy their insurance, so it should be a no-brainer.

On top of that, actually punish people for willful violations of basic constitutional rights to keep whoever the airports hire from getting too big for their breeches (unlike the TSA...), and the problem -- if it actually exist -- should resolve itself.
This is why so many schemes that promise "single sign on" fail. People have lots of identities (and complexes!).

OpenID and the like all try to link them all together. For me it just doesn't sit right: especially online. The whole point being I can have multiple personas.

No one is really anonymous anymore. It is getting much harder to preserve but I think sites that allow you to have personas will flourish in the future.
Texas colo that's legit...sure.
love it, seriously i love it.
Paul Graham On Founder Power, The Rise Of NY
I agree with OA spirit. But under "More than sugar" he only mentions surgary things like conciseness, readability, and saving time.

Also the title is total bull dooty, instead of saying what the title implies; "CS, it's for some, not for others. Shut up already." Or better yet not posting this crappy blog in first place. OA retreads the same horse beatings everyone else has ad nauseum.
If you're typing and hit the enter key it should start fresh so the first letter will be accepted.

I think what's happening is you're typing in a few letters of one word, then moving on to the next word with a new letter that's not adjacent to the previous ones. Typing a letter that's not adjacent causes the word to fail, and that letter won't be part of the next word. So if we had a 3x3 board

A B C
D E F
G H I

And I typed ABC GHI, it would only count HI since G was part of the failing word ABCG.

This is how it's supposed to work, but it can get a little trippy some times. If what I explained is not what's happening, and it's just not picking up the first letter in a normal case, let me know!
Ask HN: What makes a founder? 
The topic of solo-founder vs. co-founder keeps coming up (I'm a solo-founder) and I'm wondering what makes a person a 'co-founder' vs. a 'key hire'. What are the traits, actions, etc. that would separate one from the other? I would expect any key-hire to take ownership and responsibility for their job and be committed (with equity of course), so ignoring compensation differences, what makes a founder?
New games start 10 seconds after the leaderboard first shows and we pretty much have to hide the leaderboard right then and there. Since it's all real-time against the world, every game runs at the same time, so there's no real choosing when to start a new one.