skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pivoting at the right times can lead to success. But I have seen plenty of people just pivot endlessly, because sometimes that's easier than doing all the drudgery work required to carry an idea out fully.

I know most of us have to "fail" many times before we succeed. But if our failures never lead to any real success, then we are doing something wrong.
Sorry, I saw the article on Techmeme and posted it here. I didn't think about posting the original blog post, but I realize that would have been better.

I know that submitting articles gets you more karma, but I didn't do this to get more karma. I don't really care about getting more karma as I'm mostly just a passive observer of HN and not really an active participant.

I read a discussion on here the other day about abolishing submission karma, and I agree with it. It doesn't make sense why someone should get more karma just for posting a link, or if they do, more karma should be given for comments than for submissions.
How to cope with the Gmail redesign
For practical reasons there needs to be someone to break ties in decisions. However, this is different to thinking that your are somehow better than others. In business you should check your ego at the door, especially if you are in a position where you need to be the tie breaker.

The idea of "everyone is equal" is to remind yourself to respect your coworkers, actually consider their inputs, and remember that you too can be just as wrong as you might think others are. The idea not "we are equal thus if we disagree then nothing happens."
And then your code is extremely fragile against changes and its performance is dramatically dependent on the compiler. I'd rather use the Common Lisp LOOP macro. (Or require that stream fusion be explicitly declared, in order for the compiler to use it.)
Certainly not the first time students have hacked the Green Building's lights (i.e. http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2011/flag_on_9_11/).
No, sorry it's been years and years since I had any disks. But there's any number of guides available for doing it "manually" as well. For example (PDF): http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/re/Tuning%20the%201541%20...

The software tools don't replace manual adjustments - all most of them do is to try to give you some indicator whether you're getting closer or not but you can achieve that simply by attempting to load files and look for / listen for signs the drive is attempting to re-read the same track more or less often as well. Read errors has a pretty characteristic sound on the 1541.
I wonder which 1 of the 5 mistakes PG is least likely to make.
haha, great response. This whole dialogue reminds me of a Louis CK line: "Everything is amazing, and no one is happy."
If there is no boss, everyone is your boss, or your client. Not a bad way to go about things. You end up overall working better with people around you.

Also, being evaluated by what you deliver and by your peers isn't too bad, considering the alternative is possibly a non technical boss that may never understand what you do.

I try to work with co-workers as if they were friendly clients. I think this leads to good product launches and results.
Show HN: Event Study Tool Using Social Media and Regressions
Failure is just free knowledge. Also, don't set limits. If you set goals at all besides 100% language awareness, you are only serving to fuck yourself over. Transcend yourself every second of everyday. Let every line outdo the last and shit like that.
Nice, it's much better looking than the one I posted.

I wonder if I should have posted a Google cache link instead of the original, to prevent exceeding their quota.
Maybe this tells us that the staff of a McDonald's restaurant could conceivably be replaced by software, whereas Valve will always require human beings to do its work?
That would be your own government.
1) I said: "I trust the open-source web devs will be on it and synthesize it faster than your typical enterprise guy will even be aware there is a need."

2) The article: "It says here you went to the University of Pennsylvania for undergrad. Were you an engineer there?”

We're not talking about quants here. If (quoting myself again): "the industry as a whole makes a tectonic shift toward algorithmically more difficult problems" we'll probably need to enlist the help of more than the top .1% of all software/cs folk.

If you are a quant, I humbly apologize for implying mere mortals could even begin to grasp the fundamentals of a concept as abstract as machine learning. Norvig/Thrun/Ng might have something to say about that though.
Also, let's add wi-fi hot-spots to all of them so that they'll create a giant mesh-network, providing cheap internet access for everyone. And ponies! Everyone gets ponies!
You're missing the fact that reclaiming memory under garbage collection does not have any side effects, while reclaiming file handles does. That's why GC is appropriate for memory but not for file handles.
U.S. Government monitors emails; violates the Constitution (starts at 13:00).
No, EBS and IPs are separate issues.

My point was that rackspace is easier to get going when all you want is "some servers" without building a lot of machinery upfront. They sell you a VPS, no more, no less, whereas EC2 exposes you to all sorts of magic that small deployments don't need.

I.e. automating EBS attachment (reliably) is non-trivial. That's a major hurdle on EC2 if you're not familiar with it because most EBS-backed instances are deliberately on small volumes, thus you usually have to deal with it from day 1.

Likewise the networking/NAT on EC2 is a royal pain in the ass for newbies and veterans alike. It's a poor design; public IPs could just as well be mapped directly, but as it stands anyone running on EC2 has to deal with that idiosyncrasy of the platform.

And finally, price/performance really is better on the small rackspace instances versus the small amazon instances.

As a rule of thumb: When you can get away with instances smaller than the 16G-rackspace then use rackspace (beyond that their pricing is even more ridiculous than amazon's). When you need bigger (or expect to need bigger in the future) then use EC2.

And before you pick either make sure to remind yourself that the cloud (any platform) only makes sense for small or large deployments. If you're in the mid-range of 10-40 servers then renting dedicated servers will be drastically cheaper in almost all cases.
Do you know if that is still true with the new 64 bit m1.small instances?
SOPA is back
Well, the problem that I mentioned is that you no longer have the opportunity to actually set your goal to 100% language awareness if your startup had made it BIG. You don't have the time to do that when you're managing a startup like that. Also, it'll cost your team more time to debug and fix your problems than for the programming wizards on your team. Your comment, although appreciated, didn't really respond to the post.
Thank you, the email accounts were compromised and filters were set up to delete any incoming emails from registrars so I never saw any notices.

Thank you very much for this tip
I think part of it has to do with a tipping point: if you can hire up a good chunk of the key contributors and run with it, then it's easy to make a proprietary fork, and at the same time weaken the open source project. The GPL prevents this.

No, it doesn't. Those key contributors are still the copyright holders of the code they contributed, and they are free to redistribute those contributions under different terms. If they all work for one company, they can just license copies of their code to that new company under non-GPL terms. The GPL fork still exists, but now a new, closed-source version of the code can be made with all of that (now-)employee-written code. If there are enough of those components, that company can just rewrite the code contributed by others that were only licensed under GPL, and now they have a mostly duplicate version of the same program, able to be extended and resold without source code.

Digium does this for the Asterisk project. They have a GPL version that everyone is free to use, but nobody else is allowed to redistribute it without the source code. However, they make all contributors to the GPL project license their code to Digium so that Digium more-or-less owns the code, which Digium then turns around and sells under a closed-source license to companies that don't want to give their changes back to Asterisk.

https://www.asterisk.org/doxygen/trunk/Licensing.html

https://issues.asterisk.org/view_license_agreement.php
> The workload is simply unmanageable on your own.

Disagree. You have the power to choose what the workload is as a sole founder/bootstrap. You choose the feature set. You choose what's in the next iteration. You choose how fast or slow to go. You choose your cash burn, if any. You choose how many hours to put in. You choose.... I could go on but I think you see the pattern. Anyone telling you these choices don't exist has made an incorrect assumption somewhere.
USB Typewriter: A groundbreaking advancement in the field of obsolescence.
Perhaps you could disallow ssh login and only provide a web interface to users.
ob. disclaimer: I am not an attorney, this is not legal advice.

You can get sued for any reason, at any time, contract or not. Whether a plaintiff can win against you is secondary.

Talk to a lawyer. Tell her your situation and that you want to leave. Bring every slip of every communication you have had with anyone regarding your employment for review by the lawyer. Although you don't have a contract, that is not an automatic avoid-the-litigation-sewer card.

Ask what your options are.

Consider lining up your next gig before terminating the relationship. Don't negotiate anything except your departure date and terms, you're not holding out for more money, don't so don't open that door.

If the situation becomes hostile at all, down tools, walk away and tell them further communications will be via your lawyer (have his/her business card ready to hand over).

Your initial consult with a lawyer will cost money. Pay promptly. It will be far less than the soul suck of continuing or potential litigation if you don't consult.

Even then you still may get sued.
Reminds me very much of the job adverts I used to see asking for '5 years C#' when .Net was about 6 months out of Beta.

Either they only want people who worked for MS on the platform/language itself or the whole thing was copy/pasted by a recruiter.
If you really knew what you were talking about, you'd express more doubt about whether it's actually a good measure of how well you know any subject :)
> I'm surprised you haven't wrote anything about Ghost in the Shell

It's not because I haven't seen them - I've seen all the GitS, basically. (I'm also a Kanno fan, so I recognized your username instantly.)

It's more that I have nothing in particular to say about them. They're not very deep SF, nor is the feel of the future particularly unusual cyberpunk; they're just done really well. I've read discussions and interviews with Mamoru Oshii (and transcribed them) for my Evangelion research, and, well, he's the kind of pretentious loldeep guy I strive not to be.

> and Technology Singularity yet

Here again, I lack any particular angle or insight. I've written on closely related topics, though, see http://www.gwern.net/tags/transhumanism
‎"The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state—to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation—and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good."

Ayn Rand
back? it goes into vote in less than 72 hours.

CISPA has been around for weeks, and it's really not that bad.
> I would be somewhat surprised if on net, over next decade personal benefit captured greater for effort put into Wikipedia and similar edits than equivalent effort put into personal site.

I can't actually parse this.
No.

If you use a GPL library all of your code has to be released under a GPL compatible licence. The Meteor framework counts as a library due to the way it interacts with your code.

You might be confusing it with the Lesser GPL which allows library code to be incorporated into propriety software (or websites in this case).

To understand the difference between the two you should read:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
3% and 97% are the only numbers I've ever seen written by Paul Graham himself. PG has also informed me that I'm wrong about the lack of reason for acceptance posts on HN. Apparently, such posts get deleted because of the large quantity of HN submissions that would result if YC allowed such posts.
Economics excels at finding Nash equilibria. Unfortunately, the current Nash equilibrium is the one I have outlined.
"load no images when JavaScript is disabled"

This solution works fine if JavaScript is disabled. It just loads the smallest image if "mobile" is in the user agent string and the largest image otherwise.

http://adaptive-images.com/details.htm
>But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default?

For me, this is what mindfulness is all about. A mindfulness practice gradually develops the ability to be in the present moment and be aware of the choices you are making.
Other than it being a bit too crowded, there's not much wrong with it. IMHO, many of the sites I see on here are over designed.
Some products offered under GPL license require you to publish your code if you use it as a library.(ExtJs was one example of this) So MIT license for Meteor will help wider adoption.
AudioGO use DMCA to demand takedown of a 404 link
In a Kafkaesque use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the UK audiobook company, AudioGO, demand the removal of a web site that links to ...nothing.
It really is an amazing testament to human ingenuity that something as mind-bogglingly complicated as the modern automobile could have ever become a consumer item. But their cost is profound (DanI-S sums it up here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872338). Surely, concern for people who "can't afford" expensive things would lead to adopting more public transportation, don't you think?
I used a sys76 pangolin for two years and loved it. The only complaint I ever had was the battery life.
I think "say what you think" is fundamentally different than "not suppressing your feelings." I think suppressing your feelings goes deeper, into the inner person and getting in touch with who you really are and why you feel what you feel. But saying what you think is a lot easier. It's what a lot of know-it-all people do. You just say what's on your mind but that doesn't mean you're really paying attention to what you're feeling.
I've been implementing an iPad code editor with GitHub support, http://worqshop.com/ It's quite basic but you can do cool things with GitHub web hooks, etc.
I don't think that's a specific problem with the colleges themselves.

It's just when you spend 3/4 years in that kind of bubble and you get getting good marks on all your assignments you are naturally going to think "I've mastered Java" based on evaluating the only evidence presented to you.

Of course there is a difference between knowledge and aptitude here.

Would a candidate who doesn't know what .hashCode() does but who after a 10 minute explanation says "yes, I understand now makes sense" be a bad hire?

I program a lot of Java but I am unfamiliar with huge amounts of both the language and standard API (especially the parts dealing with 'enterprise' stuff and concurrency). This is mainly because I explicitly design my Java apps around a shared nothing/POJO-JPA configuration and I don't use RMI , Reflection or JMS.

Does that mean I am a bad Java programmer?
Pretty much. Who says that they didn't work as a janitor?
AES is an energy company that was run on similar principles for a while.

My knowledge of it is purely based on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Joy-At-Work-Revolutionary-Approach/dp/... book</a>, which was written by a co-founder who was later deposed. (The book goes into that story but tldr is company prospers, economic crisis hits, company suffers along with all other energy companies, CEO is blamed, fired and replaced with more conventional executive.)

But to give you a sense of core techniques, IIRC pretty much all staff - incl power plant maintenance staff - had major expenditure authority but before they could make any major decision they had to consult with at least two other employees. As long as they could demonstrate that they had done that, it was assumed that they had made a reasonable decision.
Related: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/122249/building-an-a...
I haven't benchmarked them specifically but I don't think there's a difference in terms of I/O or CPU. At least I haven't noticed one (we've switched to a 64bit image a while back).

FWIW, we run a mid-sized deployment on EC2 (~60 instances) and anything interactive has to go on at least m1.large and up (usually xlarge). We do use m1.small's for queue-workers and low priority batch jobs.
Undergrads do have serious information asymmetry problems. My best guess as to the reason is that they don't have a lot of interaction with a wide range of people in the working world. They don't really have any idea what it'll be like to be adults. Incidentally, I think this is a big part of the reason undergrads at good schools gravitate to such a small number of employers (investment banks, consulting firms, and famous programs like Teach for America). Kids simply don't know what's out there, and so they reach for known quantities. And one consequence of that ignorance is that they don't have a very clear idea of which skills are most marketable.
Personally I really like the new design, despite the fact I have actually implemented most of the things mentioned in the article. However, I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation, and this doesn't include any of the stuff from the labs feature set.
There should be something like this for every language. I've recreated this so many times in so many languages.
One of my observations about software and websites has two parts and is seemingly paradoxical: design matters; and design just does not fucking matter. For every one beautiful polished friendly UI you can cite that made it's owners wealthy I can also point you at another app/site which is ugly/painful and yet it also made it's owners wealthy. I love design, I do -- but fuck design. You're right and you're wrong about it. Make something people need, that does something that matters for them, and get them to pay for it, whatever it takes, and you're gold. Plus I increasingly suspect that "design" matters most precisely when what you're providing is ephemeral or not really needed. I don't know about you but I sleep better at night thinking I'm providing something people need or that materially improves their lives, and not just hawking a commodity pig with lipstick. There are hipsters but also housewives. There are artists but also managers. There are problem spaces with dozens of pre-existing software solutions which are all friendly, effective and pretty -- and you want to stand out from them, so that's hard. And then there are other problem spaces with no software solution, or no affordable one, or nothing that runs on the particular platform a certain segment of customers wants, etc. You're free to pick which of these opportunities to take a whack at addressing.

Design sometimes matters a lot; but often design just does not matter much.

Automate someone's pain away and get them to pay you for it. There are lots of opportunities out there with this quality. Don't worry too much about design.
I was a student at MIT in the early 90s and Tetris on the Green Building was considered the "holy grail of hacks" back then. Definitely a major accomplishment, particularly with color and also lots of props to Brown for getting there first!
Click tip: Submit this to hnsearch@thriftdb.com so that's it's added to the official list of cool apps. If they decline, just keep polishing it!
"...Josh Bloch (the Google employee who checked it into Android) wrote it in the first place and gave it to Sun."

What does that mean exactly--'gave it to Sun'? He was a Sun employee at the time. It's silly to say the Java code he wrote while working at Sun was given to Sun by him. Likewise, it's silly to say that then by extension when he went to work for Google he just took his code with him and gave it to Android.
I just call it "sqwel" or "squeel" that way nobody is happy.
The biggest thing is to remember that they can't read your mind, so speak up. There's a big difference between, "I'm working 80 hours a week so I can make lots of money" and "I'm working 80 hours a week so I can help with my sick relatives nursing home bill" or "I'm working 80 hours a week because I'm self concious about my teeth and want to get them fixed." - they can tolerate it more when they understand. If you don't give them enough detail, their imagination will fill in the blanks with things like "they don't care about me" and "they don't want to make time for me." that's when the relationship falls apart.
You can talk IMAP/POP and SMTP, and you get to control your own user interface, or you can talk HTTP, HTML, and JS and abdicate control to someone else. I fell into that trap myself. I was a heavy user of Gmail for about four years, and when they started changing things and told me "only 0.07% of users use that feature we just removed", it was too late.

This mayhem ruined "the cloud" for me ... and I used to help run parts of it. Blah.
Not that bad?

How is "monitoring email, filtering content, or even blocking access to sites" not bad?

CISPA would allow the government, companies and ISPs to have potential access to your private information, all in the name of "Cybersecurity". Please tell me how that isn't bad.
There is no expression of creativity and it is fairly mechanical.

I disagree. Designing a good API is one of the most difficult skills to acquire in all of software development. If creating a good API were "fairly mechanical" then the world wouldn't be full of crappy ones, and we'd all rejoice permanently in the comforting glow that comes from writing code against an API written by someone who gets it.

Despite this, I strongly believe that APIs should be excluded from copyright, for the same reason that I support the US exclusion of fonts. Some things are too important to general communication and creativity to allow any individual to have exclusive control over them, and they demonstrably can and will be created without needing that incentive to make them economically viable.
I am absolutely furious how my account was forced today to the new theme - it's hideous.

I've tried several stylish options to no avail, I miss the old dark layout with high contrast buttons.

Even the dark theme has a bright white message pane for no reason.

It also runs very sluggishly compared to the old UI, not sure why.

Well this should give me the kick in the pants to get off gmail anyway.
How exactly is this double speak? I am parsing this as saying that "nobody" is my boss (if I were at Valve), ESPECIALLY Gabe. If I am working on a team and there is a team lead and he asks me to do something I am most likely inclined to do it with little pushback/skepticism, what the handbook is saying that if Gabe tells me to do something I better damn well run it by 1 or more other people (the team I am on most likely) and discuss it before I even think of doing what he suggests.
Show HN: My Attempt at a Recipe Sharing Community