skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have you ever Kickstarted a project? Tips, tricks, thoughts
Have you ever launched a project at Kickstarter? What are some tips, thoughts, tricks you can share with us? How did you share your Kickstarter? I'm having problems getting my Kickstarter exposed, so making a thread so hopefully others who've been in a similar situation before can help.

Kickstarter; http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/imjonathanlee/persona-your-autobiography-in-graphic-novel-style
A timely post. I am a paying customer of Yahoo (yeah, I know), and they are badly broken today. It looks like the folks who got laid off are razing the landscape behind them (or pissing on the fireworks, to use the OP's metaphor). I pity their plight, but their actions, if my guess is correct, sure have me fucked at the moment. I can't reach anybody at all.
Introducing DCell: actor-based distributed objects for Ruby
I think you could probably get your analytics account closed if you violate some of the ToS like reporting unique identifiers (IP address counts) for your users into your events.
Marked, A Simple Way To Share Markdown
10 Free Tools to Help You Organize the Internet
Have they done this experiment with any other configurations of carbon?
Crowd computing taps artificial intelligence
It's worth noting that dataset this comes from is actually pretty reasonable:

"The speech data used are a subset of the MULTEXT multilingual corpus (Campione &
Véronis 1998, Komatsu et al. 2004). This subset consists of K = 20 texts composed in
British English, freely translated into the following languages to convey a comparable
semantic content: French (FR), German (GE), Italian (IT), Japanese (JA), Mandarin
Chinese (MA), and Spanish (SP). Each text consists of five semantically connected sentences
that compose either a narration or a query (to order food by phone, for example)."

Which is to say that the study took a set data (constant information content), translated into various languages, and then analysed the information density based on how many syllabels where in it and how long it took to deliver the information (read) by various native speakers.

The result being, basically, languages tend toward a common rate of information through-put using a trade off between speed of delivery and data complexity (ie. fewer syllables to communicate an idea -> the language tends to be spoker more slowly).

This is pretty interesting stuff; love to see some larger follow up studies.

To be honest, I'm not surprised at all to hear japanese has a lower information density, especially in formal stuff; I bet that if you tracked segments in the languages that had _no information content_ you'd find japanese right up there.

That said, the blog post doesn't really do much for the article, and just ends up sounding unsubstanciated.
Tried to get in touch with some people on the site but it says "Join CollabFinder by creating your public profile" every time I try to "add to my profile"
I did the grind-train for several years, and in bursts it could be quite useful, but when at my last $FIRM it turned into a never-ending march towards and beyond burnt out, I started pondering options. I don't think I could do that kind of run ever again.
I'm not sure that it would be bad if the average size/age of businesses decreased. It seems to me that in larger businesses, while you do get advantages of scale, you also have problems related to size (bureaucracy, knowledge problems, etc.)
Show HN - Review19's Collaborative Decision Making (Very early preview)
Crisis Guide: Iran
Fair question. We had some reservations about using EC2 for the reasons you mention. But we wanted to avoid any perceptions that we'd somehow cooked the books, so decided to run the tests on "neutral" gear.

If you look at the report details, you'll see some of the lumpiness your question suggests, particularly related to the network. The Node instances were beginning to starve when database server CPU utilization was still pretty low.

We would certainly have gotten better numbers if we ran these benchmarks on bare metal or a closely-tended cloud infrastructure. But we're a pretty low-BS group, so we'll stand behind what EC2 gave us.
Hacker's Tiny Spy Computer Cracks Corporate Networks, Fits In An Altoid Tin
Doesn't it make more sense to make a firm argument for "why not liquidity"?

Who exactly is funding this expensive and stupid zero-sum game? Exactly what effect does this game have on your 401k? Isn't your 401k invested in index funds? Don't they trade infrequently and in huge, huge blocks? A no-load S&P 500 tracking fund is not HFT'ing the components of the S&P 500.
An app that actually focuses on you rather than friends.
Pebble smartwatch breaks record for Kickstarter funding
It's amazing how many contests/challenges exist in the tech community given how poorly spec work is looked upon by the design community.

I'm not as knowledgable about the design community as I am about the tech community, but it seems to me that the design community rallies against these types of challenges a lot more strongly than the tech community does.
You mean because they threw out people who heard of "Open Source Software."

Yeah, that kinda stinks, but there is a bit of logic in having jurors who don't have preconceived notions of what Open Source means (since there's a good chance they're not even accurate).
$100k per month running Drop-Ship product websites
thanks @rb2k_ !
Making Lean Startup Tactics Work for Games
It doesn't seem to take long for products-named-after-common-words to rank high on Google (though search in the Play store has always been horrible). Case in point: my Pushover app/service was released about a month ago and is on the first page of Google results for "pushover", despite there being a game and movie of the same name.
Look one comment up.
The reality for app developers is that supporting a third platform is really stretching it. Even in the PC vs. Mac desktop world, the Mac often gets forgotten. It only has 5-7% market share so it's not worth the effort for many developers. Linux? Not a chance. I'd pay for Photoshop on Linux, really! Anyway, Linux might take off as an appliance someday, but I'm digressing.

At this point, Microsoft is probably too late. It'll sell phones to people who just want phones, but I think it's too late for the whole ecosystem. Not to worry for fans, I doubt if they'll ever give up.
VoltDB Community Edition uses synchronous intra-cluster replication, as well as rolling on-disk snapshots for durability.

The Enterprise Edition adds a synchronous or asynchronous command log (a logical journal) as well as asynchronous multi-cluster replication.

The VoltDB blog has a series of posts covering command logging in detail:
http://voltdb.com/company/blog/intro-voltdb-command-logging
http://voltdb.com/company/blog/voltdb-command-logging-replay
http://voltdb.com/company/blog/voltdb-command-logging-option...

In short, VoltDB offers tunable durability from single-node purely in-memory, all the way up to synchronous disk storage on multiple local nodes and multiple asynchronous copies in another data center. All options are fully transactional. All options are extremely performant.

We've worked very hard to make durability and performance not mutually exclusive. We have internally achieved six-figure TPS numbers using synchronous writes (requires a disk controller with a BBU, or a decent SSD).
This is one of the big problems with the supplement industry. The moment one small scale, unreplicated study shows potential for a compound people jump all over it regardless of the fact that it hasn't been shown to be safe in humans and the actual experiment hasn't been replicated.
I also almost left without looking closely because of the disabled demo link.

I look forward to the demo, because from my subsequent cursory glance, this may be exactly what I need for a non-profit project I'm working on.
World War 3.0
That shit cray.
The strength of PhoneGap & Co is the ease of rapid prototype-production cycling and the flexibility in UI construction empowered by CSS3/HTML5. This guy clearly took it as "a way to avoid native framework".

Interesting how one can make the right choice without of knowing what he truly wants and/or the right tool for his intent.
Labor is the biggest cost on most productions. That is why you will hear about certain indie movies with $5k - $10k budgets that do well, and $10,000,000 movies with similar production quality. If you can get people to get excited about your movie project, or about gaining production experience, then they will often work for free or for spec. When that's the case, the biggest cost will probably be equipment.
Great concept that is probably long overdue.
Are you under the impression that you're assigning homework to students?

I'm asking for an explanation that goes beyond "they make money, and I don't understand how, they must be ripping people off!"

e.g. Alice wants to sell at $10.00. Bob wants to buy at $10.05. They could simply trade with each other, but if Eve gets her way, Eve will buy from Alice at $10.00, and then sell to Bob for $10.05, making $0.05 on each share that would otherwise have gone to Alice

What's missing from your explanation is time. If you actually wrote out a specific explanation involving limit orders (like I suggested), you would immediately have seen that.

If Alice wanted to sell at $10.00 and Bob wanted to buy at $10.05, they would have already traded. The millisecond Bob's order hit the market, he would have filled Alice's order (or she would have filled his, depending on which was bigger). Eve never had any ability to participate.

If Eve played any role, there was a time delay. At 12:20, Eve put an order BUY(price=$10.00, quantity=100, time=12:20) onto the market. Alice chose to sell to her at 12:30 because she wanted to trade immediately, with no risk of her order being unfilled. After buying her stocks, Eve turned around and placed a SELL(price=$10.05, quantity=100, time=12:30:01) order. At 12:40, Bob comes along and places an order BUY($10.05, quantity=100, time=12:40), which is filled by Eve's order.

If Alice wanted to hold out for $10.05 she could have. She chose not to, because she didn't want to run the risk of Bob never showing up. Eve didn't "scrape pennies" from Alice and Bob, Alice paid her $0.05 to take the risk of Bob never showing up.
looks very interesting. If I architect a tracking system again, I'd look at this setup.
Java and C swap places at the top of the TIOBE index
Infographic: Tax Burden on Top 1% vs. Middle & Low Income
> Youtube is stricter than TV on nudity (and laxer on violence).

In your country. sigh

Many, many developed nations allow swearing, violence and nudity on TV at all times of the day.
It may take you or me only 10 seconds to install python on Windows, but my students need my help for every step. Even if I tell them to get up and I do it myself, it's still 10s X N students to get everyone up to speed.

Compare that with zero seconds for Mac or Linux, both which come with python installed.
Thanks for trying out the site - can you be a bit more specific about what happens when you try to sign up? Did you get a facebook dialog popup? Would love to help you get it sorted out - just launched and we probably have a few bugs lurking that we're not aware of. Also, refreshing the page might do the trick...

Thanks.
According to this article [1], it is the customers deciding. Carrier rejection is just a reflection of customer rejection. It happens like this: customers buy windows phone, get disappointed because it's worse than the old nokia n9. Return it to store. Stores get scared of high number of returns, which are bad for their business. Stores avoid selling them in the first place.

[1] http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/03/brutal-...
> that’s beneficial to the scaling architectures of both Node.js

That's not very accurate (unless you run multiple Node.js processes). See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2387724/node-js-on-multi-...
Scala Operator Overload
Doesn't everytime you update anything with the cms require a write? (asking purely out of ignorance to learn not to be snarky)

Not to mention everytime a user of the site updates content
How over-reliance on social signals could ruin online recommendations
The "previous post" link mentions some of them http://ayende.com/blog/154401/ravendb-amp-freedb-an-optimiza...
From my limited experience all I've heard is the people who have them love them but the people who sell them push people to other platforms. I've always heard talk of kickbacks for selling one phone over another.

For the vast majority of people out there just about any of the decent smartphones will work for them, they just have to play with them to decided which one they like best. Arguments over things like "not enough apps" or "too much fragmentation" is most likely not an issue (knowingly or unknowingly) to most shoppers.

It seems logical to assume that the sales guy will push you towards the phone he needs to sell, whether due to kickbacks, quotas, or management pressure. This is done regardless of the wants and needs of the customer. Part of my reasoning behind this is just the general behavior of these companies towards their customers to begin with.
TITLE DISCLAIMER: 695k using 20 fairly large machines

I was, at first glance, pretty impressed with the 695k TPS title claim. Upon reading the article, it became apparent that this was based on running 8 8-core EC2 m2.4xlarge instances for node.js in addition to 12 8-core EC2 m2.4xlarge instances for VoltDB. In terms of server architecture, this is quite a large setup.

Just for an idea of how big of a machine we're talking for each of these instances:

High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance
68.4 GB of memory
26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m2.4xlarge
$1.800 an hour running Linux on demand
$864.00 a day baseline for 20 of these

This isn't meant to discredit the author or work, just to make sure it's apparent that this solution is for serious businesses only with deep pockets and boatloads of traffic. You'd be spending $26,784 for the servers alone over a 31 day period if using them on demand.

The results are definitely impressive for the right target audience.
I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more about the pragmatics and syntax of the Japanese language.

In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University + a few trips to Japan), at lot is indeed left unsaid. The more common case for this from my experience is the null-subject/topic [2] (i.e. "Iku yo." literally means "go", however, depending on the context the topic and/or subject gets assumed and can mean something simple like "Let's (or let us) go." or something slightly more complicated like, "Let's go and eat over there."

There is also multitude of verbose set phrases that occur in Japanese. Example: [V]-nakerebanaranai/-nakerebananarimasen, which roughly translates to "I must do [V]" where [V] is a verb. There are two instances of it because of the honorific/politeness deal with the language which makes sentence structures even more verbose. A quick comparison with the word "to eat" would yield: Tabenakerebanaranai/tabenakerebanarimasen with 9 and 10 syllables, respectively, compared to English's "I have to eat" which is less than half [4 syllables].

I can go on, but I doubt I'm qualified enough to give a small lesson on Japanese syntax. Hopefully, though, that sheds a little more light on this.

[1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese...
YouTube Strategy: Adding Jitter Isn't A Bug
Saying because you want to go public, your company is legit is a pretty weak argument to me.

There have been plenty of "shady" companies who've gone public. The one that comes to mind most recently is Weedmaps:

http://bit.ly/ILSmST
Uniiverse will be to offline sharing, what eBay is to buying and selling of products.
Another option would be to simplify the tax code to the point where normal humans could do their own taxes in a few minutes.
Syllables are about spoken language (speech). Kanji Hiragana and Katakana and Romaji are about writing.

I think it's more natural to measure the spoken expression rather than the written expression, specially for Japanese as all the major writing forms[1] were borrowings made to fit the spoken language.

[1] I guess that's pretty generic as all writing forms are made to fit. What I mean is that Kanji characters were fitted upon Japanese language --which had not written form. Basically, the way I understand it, they took a word like Mountain (Yama) and then would ask, how do you write mountain in Chinese（山）/shan/ and then would say (山) = /yama/. Now let's say there was another word that had the sound /yama/ but had nothing to do with mountain, they would still use (山) to write it. so rather than being an ideograph, they became phonographs.
Appropriations Committee ignores Congress's mandate to webcast hearings
Aha! I have been enlightened. Suddenly, the GPL seems much more reasonable than I previously thought.
Alice wants to sell at $10.00. Bob wants to buy at $10.05. They could simply trade with each other, but if Eve gets her way, Eve will buy from Alice at $10.00, and then sell to Bob for $10.05, making $0.05 on each share that would otherwise have gone to Alice.

If this is what HFTs were doing, it would be understandable why they were so upsetting. But of course, HFTs can't do this, because Alice and Bob's trade is executed instantaneously in the match engine.
VC Signaling Coming Home To Roost
Contactually Rocked My Inbox
Is the rate at which tax codes are becoming more complex exceeding Moore's law?
Any body likes? Eagerly waiting feedback from elite HN hackers.. :-)

Newbie entrepreneur, please be gentle.. haha
Yeah, since it isn't very reliant on word order for denoting function of words in a sentence and instead using markers, practically anything unnecessary can be omitted.
I did send you an email last night to booking@... hope you got it!
My father did mainframe dev contract work for the IRS and once told me it's a miracle you even get your tax returns every year. :) There's quite a mess behind the scenes due to a number of failed new projects at the cost of taxpayer money.

I wish we could automate all of this but taxes themselves are also still a sort of art with all the exceptions. Technically there are rules about when you qualify for things but from my experience accounting firms operate more like law firms in that they help you figure out how to meet the bare minimum to legally qualify for various returns.
You are right in general, but the study in question actually claims 99.9% significance, not 95%. That's pretty strong.
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Where did you get this idea? Programming languages infer almost nothing from context. Moreover, when they do that's often seen as bad because it usually creates ambiguous semantic or syntactic constructs. Good programming languages are often based off of a formal language[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language
Every single time I visited on a github repo of a Clojure based project, almost all of them are structured nicely (src and test) and have unit-tests.

This alone makes me think that Clojure developers are just regular people who care of the maintainability aspect of their code (and quite possibly the readability). Not just a "hacker" that writes code and jump into the next shiny stuff.

As a non-participating viewer from afar, Clojure community seems to have less hipster, less emotional, less roller-coaster, but more mature feeling when it comes to software development.

It also helps that they have a unified build+dependency tools, not a bunch of "upcoming great projects that will solve your build+dependency problem for the umpteenth time".
A message to application programmers
> I was surprised to find that the process of building gcc-4.7 from sources on Ubuntu is so complicated, after all, this is a Linux system …

It didn't look all that complicated to me. It seems like it is just the standard steps for installing gcc? Or am I missing something?
These days racks are so standardized it would be difficult, but it would be cool if they made more of a nod to their past designs.
How Tupac, dead since 1996, played live at this years Coachella festival
What I don't understand about HFT is why its efficiency does not seem to be limited by transaction fees. I've tried a bit in the past to play with some algorithms that buy and sell (on paper) and it seems like the faster you go, the more you need the market to move in order to scrape a few pennies of profit, because the movement has to be sufficient to cover the spread, the transaction fees, _and_ provide some profit. Of course with a simple example like "buy at $20, sell at $20.10", it seems simple enough to extract some profit, but in fact it would need to be enough profit that it covers the transaction fees, which seem to be a kind "friction" that limits the smallest change in price that is useful. From what I can tell this kind of movement just doesn't generally occur in the sub-millisecond time frame, so how does it work? Or is it just that they are trading so much $$ in one shot that a very tiny change in price covers the transaction fee without issue? (Meaning they are taking very large risks..)
I started a business, with three cofounders, right out of college. The year was 1980, and we had all just graduated from MIT. Here are some things I wish we had known:

() A market is defined by people's understanding of the function of a product.

() Most markets are winner-take-all. Sometimes two or three products can coexist in the same space for some reason, but usually not.

() So to be successful, you should seek to define a market niche you can own. You get to pick what that is, but of course you don't know until you try whether it's large enough to sustain your business.

() Also, you will need to communicate the definition of your niche to the market. This may be easy or hard. If you're in a crowded space, for example, or if (as happened to us) the space started out fairly open but then better-funded competitors showed up, you may need to redefine your niche as a specific smaller part of what is hopefully now a larger market. This is called "product differentiation".

() The better you understand the needs of your target market, the better you will be able to understand the potential functions for which your product can be used. This will help you in both choosing a niche and in communicating your definition of that niche to the market.

I could go on, but I think that's a decent summary of the basics. Of course, there's a lot more to marketing if you really get into it (chasm phenomena etc.), but I think if we had just understood that much, we might have been a lot more successful.
The problem with doing that from the government perspective is that it takes away a lot of its power to shape behavior.
My First Wordpress Plugin: MyTweetLinks
Twitter: Only PART of an Effective Marketing Toolkit (infographic)
Smartdrugs in silicon valley: lessons from sports
I'm not sure what the comparison between UK (where I am) and US taxes is, but I found the process here very easy. I load up an online form, I fill in the data and click submit, they tell me how much I owe and I pay. Very easy, the hardest part is saying goodbye to all that money.
Thanks for the feedback :). I'm terrible when it comes to design, and I totally agree that there's an opportunity to go somewhere with the BreakStreak concept -- back to the drawing board :). For now, though, I'm pleased with the experiment!