skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the 2nd Ruby conference there was a general discussion (with all 100 or so attendees :) ) about Ruby's future and where it might find its killer app.

I openly wondered if it would be Web development. Mind you, this was in 2002; while there were some good Ruby Web frameworks (I think Avi Bryant gave a talk on Seaside and using Ruby continuations in a Web framework) we had yet to see the likes of Nitro or Rails poke through to show how crazy easy Ruby could make it.

The general response was, No, PHP and Perl have a lock on that, Ruby will need to find some other niche.

Obviously PHP and Perl are still used for Web development, but you don't need to completely dominate an area to be effective. Just be good enough for enough people.

As tech changes what makes something a good fit now may not apply later. Size and speed are important, but as things get faster and more hardware more robust you no longer be quite as fast or quite as small. Just fast enough and small enough and good enough.
"Markets of Magical Thinking" by Esther Dyson | Project Syndicate
"The Startup of You"
"Running Lean"
"The Lean Startup"
"Venture Hacks"
"Venture Deals"
"Four Steps to the Epiphany"
"Business Model Generation"
Chelsea - Barcelona match breaks the sport Tweets Per Second record
Chrome and Safari do differ from each other. But "as they differ from gecko or presto based browsers"? No. Nearly all engine-related bug reports we get apply to all WebKit ports. Gecko and WebKit only rarely have bugs in common.
I agree with the sentiment, but in real life it doesn't work that way.

You get the pots from your parent's house because you don't have pots and you have 10k in the bank. Getting those pots extends your runway by 5%. I do agree with the idea that certain services should be bought, but if anyone really, really believed what they were doing was worth $1000 per hour the first thing they would do would be to hire a do-everything-secretary that would make coffee and lunches, would send emails and do laundry. But people don't do that, what people do is maximize the chance that they can take off.
Thanks, guess my tone was too sarcastic...
When to teach C++?
This is great. I had never thought of comparing the shift from arcade to console to the shift of console to mobile. There are really a lot in common.

Thanks a lot for sharing.
Flat Rs.400 discount on Domestic flight booking by Cleartrip
This was an extremely interesting article. I hope Google rectifies this type of behavior. This is actually pretty scary.
Surely a lot of this is more about cashflow vs opportunity cost rather than the "value" of your time.

I would imagine many small businesses fail because they are making the decisions that would make a lot of sense if their company was the big established company that they wanted it to be but not the tiny cash strapped thing it is.

Just about any successful small business founder (not necessarily tech founders) I have spoken to has told me stories of staying up entire nights stuffing envelopes, traveling all over the place to beg/borrow expensive equipment that they required but could not afford or trying to learn HTML themselves so that they could get a basic website up.

Of course for an established company it makes no sense for the CEO to do these things but at this point survival is priority #1.
I would prefer an experimental feature not be implemented until at least the syntax has been decided on. Prefixes were implemented so that browsers could have experimental features in place and look where we are now. Adding in a prefix, even a single one, doesn't change the fact that if present then people will use it. If the syntax changes during the -beta prefix phase then lots of stuff will be broken anyway. Can the browser companies at least get their crap together to decide on a basic syntax and then expand on it if needed? Lately they seem to be able to do that with some of the newer properties but we still have prefixes.
Not to be a smart ass, but what makes you think I haven't tried, and found that I lack a certain artistic eye for shapes, shadows, and colors that prevents me from even having the slightest chance at reproducing things from my imagination, or even physical source material, in any recognizable way?

Although I pretty much gave up on trying to improve years ago. I switched focus to creating things with code, and have been faaaar more successful. So your comment is fair, in that I certainly could put time in to learn to draw and animate well, but I have a lot of other focuses for my life right now that can't spare that kind of time.

But, it doesn't stop me from dreaming :)
Kaiser actually shut down their kidney transplant program in 2006 [1] after a number of problems came to light. The state regulator prepared a 50 page report on the matter [2]. Incidentally--and I have no personal experience with Kaiser or any other HMO and can't tell how close to reality this is--Kaiser (in California at least) does pretty well in government quality of care performance measurements and overall member ratings [3], and they are also Consumer Reports's top ranked California HMO.

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/13/...
[2] http://www.dmhc.ca.gov/library/reports/med_survey/surveys/05...
[3] http://www.opa.ca.gov/report_card/hmorating.aspx
Flip this video: make any youtube video into a lesson
How do people review their own code?
The ClojureScript Compilation Pipeline
LayerVault 2 Launches – Simple version control and file backup for designers
The 8-bit dithered look brings back some great video game memories of my childhood. I really enjoy this type of artwork...
Part of the problem is that we continue to give the keys to the shop to bureaucrats who have zero real-world, business or employed-by-a-non-government-business experience. You really can't expect much from anyone who has lived their entire life within the confines of an ecosystem where personal decisions carry almost no risk.

A lot of the time the rules are not made by bureaucrats but by politicians in receipt of lobbying money and an industry-supplied amendment which the politicians has neither read nor understood; also, when private actors dislike bureaucratic decisions, they frequently sue the bureaucratic agency in question to prevent its implementation. Blaming the problem on timid bureaucrats without acknowledging these frequently encountered situations is a hollow argument.

FTA: As it turns out, Shaw’s retractable syringe hit just as these trends were converging. In fact, the year his product came onto the market, three of the nation’s largest GPOs merged to form a company called Premier, which managed buying for 1,700 hospitals, or about a third of all hospitals in the United States. Shortly thereafter, Premier signed a $1.8 billion, seven-and-a-half-year deal with Becton Dickinson. Under the agreement, member hospitals—among them Dallas-based Presbyterian, where Shaw would hit a brick wall—had to buy 90 percent of their syringes and blood collection tubes from the company. Over the next two years, BD landed similar deals with all but one major GPO. As a result, almost everywhere Shaw turned, he found hospital doors were closed to him.

Here, for example, no government bureaucrats were involved at all.
Most of these SSL misconfigurations has nothing to do with certificates.
Asset Pipeline for Dummies
Google's original vision for the 'Google Phone' uncovered in court
Biz guys can never configure analytics right. Now they can
> people using keyboards

Never thought about that before, though I do know that keyboards are filthy. Is there any evidence that the rate of infection increased since medical professionals began to use keyboards for data entry? But I guess that kind of data would be buried under a lot of other factors that emerged over the last 2-3 decades.

Also, how would you go about fixing that? Tablets might be easier to clean, but you're still touching a surface. Speech recognition would be cool, but then you're spraying microscopic drops of saliva all over the place. Is paper just as unsanitary, or does the fact that fewer people share the same sheet of paper somehow mitigate the risk?
I was watching this game and and I had a feed open on the side. It was a crazy game. :)
How is the government incentivized in any way to do that? Politicians in the US receive substantial campaign contributions from established military suppliers who would stand to lose a lot from said laws. I don't see any rallying cries from the public about the competitiveness of supply arrangements government entities currently have.
Learn how the Asset Pipeline works and why you should use it.
In the context of the guy's post the compliance rules he was complaining about are there to protect the company. Right or wrong, that is why they are there and he was specifically told this as he admits. Any other example is a completely different debate.
Awesome write-up! Thanks for sharing!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding

The objective "facts" provided by fMRI are meaningless on their own.
I think 'runway extension' is an interesting/better way of treating the early stages. Using fictitious 'hourly rates' to make decisions seems strange and ultimately counter-productive. Only if you've got a clear way of making money (and customers waiting) can I see it making sense.

In general, I'm sure there are plenty of successful people for whom this worked out but there are probably as many unsuccessful people (that we don't hear from) who ended up spending cash they didn't need to. Cashflow matters.
> Not to be a smart ass, but what makes you think I haven't tried, and found that I lack a certain artistic eye for shapes, shadows, and colors

Well, mostly the fact that most people lack "a certain artistic eye" until they develop it, including people who later become competent artists.

>So your comment is fair, in that I certainly could put time in to learn to draw and animate well, but I have a lot of other focuses for my life right now that can't spare that kind of time.

A valid choice. So when you said you'd "give anything" what you really meant was not that you would actually give anything, but rather that you just wish that you could draw well.
I would definitely recommend Rework, by 37 signals.
DNA sequencing as a service
Can you point me to a de-duping algorithm that works well for personal photos?
Can you say more about the choice of swarm algorithms instead of Paxos?
Yikes, this is painfully misguided.

The fact that on the 10% chance that a startup is successful the founder's time will need to ultimately have been worth $1000/hour in order to make the gamble worthwhile does not by any stretch of the imagination justify your making decisions as if your time was actually worth that much. Because nine out of ten times, your time is actually worth nothing. [Not to mention that the market doesn't care one bit what your time would need to have been worth to make the gamble worth it for you, nor the fact that increasing your burn rate actually decreases the chance that you'll succeed at all]

Your time is only worth whatever you can reasonably expect it to be worth, and that has to include the chance that it's worth $0. If you start only considering the upside, then you can start justifying all manner of stupid purchases: why walk when you can save six minutes ($100) per trip by keeping a limo service on-call? Why bother cooking for yourself when you can hire a private chef? Hell, why bother coding when you can "only" pay $500/hour and get a best-in-the-business programmer to do it for you? You're still "saving money".

Please don't think like this. It's a recipe for failure.
Radiation does not work the way you think it does.

Just about everything is slightly radioactive so saying something is radioactive is next to meaningless, it's a question of scale with some things being 1,000,000,000 times as radioactive as other things even though they are both 'safe'. The surface of an asteroid is probably be slightly more radioactive than average but they are planing on minding 100-500meter wide objects the vast majority of which are shielded by the ice and rock above them.

PS: Technically even 'pure' vacuum is slightly radioactive.
Shouldn't this read "The Physics That Explains Why ...".
No,no. Read it again. The government setup the rules that enabled exactly that behavior.

If they (government) didn't try to play entrepreneur or investor we'd be far better off. There are cases where government involvement is warranted. I'm with Ron Paul on this one: Get them off our backs, we do and did just fine when they had less hooks into us. This is particularly true with the existence of the Internet. It's pretty hard for a large company to misbehave today and not pay a serious price for it. Laws are far less powerful in this regard.
When people complain about entrepreneurs building social networks instead of curing cancer, they need to understand that this is a big part of the reason. The internet attracts so much innovation in large part because it's very open to innovation. In more regulated/corrupt (the two are closely related) fields, such as health care, there are many barriers to competition that kill innovative new companies. Mobile was actually very similar to this in the pre-iPhone era (because you needed to make deals with carriers). This in turn leads to less investment, since it's kind of dumb to invest in a doomed company.

We're at a point in history where most of our problems are social/political. Our technology is good enough to make the world into a nice place for everyone, but we don't do it because our social "software" is broken. It's easy to make fun of Facebook or Reddit as being all about sharing cat picture, but the reality is that they also are changing the flow of information and influence to be much more peer-to-peer instead of top down (e.g. three television networks). Many will disagree, but I believe that in the long term society will evolve to match this more egalitarian structure. The most effective way to cure cancer may be to first cure the social disfunctions that lead to the types of situations described in this article.
Samsung Rumored To Produce Next Google Nexus Phone
Yes, a lot of people throughout the world are working on write once run everywhere and they're the Java, Go, Python, Ruby, Lua... language developers.

And I have to imagine that what you're proposing is Valve write some virtual Steam-Machine that they port to every major OS, then they write a compiler that outputs Steam-Machine byte code. And maybe that could work (though different graphics libraries seem like a very hard problem to overcome). And maybe it would work really well for smaller indie games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, etc.

But I don't think it will work for AAA, computation intensive games life LFD2 or Portal 2. I don't know much about game development but from what I've heard, if you're making a game with whoa-mygod graphics then you're doing some really close-to-the-metal programming trying to save every cycle you can. And all the effort (and results) are for naught if you're running your super optimized code on a virtual machine. Portability would be amazing, but are people willing to cooperate and say "I'll live with a game that looks last generation because so someone running a different OS than me can also enjoy it."

I don't think so.

Disclaimer: I'm not a game developer, I could be wrong about the technical challenges, and if so, please correct me.
For example, trying to solve this problem (CodeJam 2008 minimum scalar product):

You are given two vectors v1=(x1,x2,...,xn) and v2=(y1,y2,...,yn). The scalar product of these vectors is a single number, calculated as x1y1+x2y2+...+xnyn.

Haskell:

sum(zipWith (*) [1,2,3][3,2,1])

Python is not inherently functional, just supports a few convenience idioms. It has zip, but no zipWith. As a result you have to use list comprehension to perform the same:

sum([x*y for (x,y) in zip([1,2,3][3,2,1])])
yup a little sacrifice and scrappiness goes a long way vs. chaining yourself to a desk and coding 24/7. I did however like the underlying message of "quit effing around and get stuff done" - thats advice everyone can use.
Try http://cloudability.com to keep track of your cloud costs.
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A few hundred hours? More like just shy of ten thousand. Would take roughly five to ten years of solid application of several hours a day to approach that level. Never underestimate just how many hours of hard repetition and practice it takes to be a decent artist.
How to Protect Yourself from Yelp's Robot Protection
Ask HN: How to deal with lazy cofounder?
Hi everyone,

We're a small startup of two. Lately, I found my colleague is working less and less. The code he writes is mostly buggy and undocumented. Even the unit tests are not working; so when we run them, we thought something was wrong but then saw the problem was in the unit tests themselves.

I don't want to micromanage, I don't want to be a bitch, but I also do not want to be the only one working in the company, or to see collapse of our hard work.

Is there any way to deal with this, or is there anyone who've been in a similar position?
While true, a company cannot change the laws it operates under by itself and must take steps to protect its interests. In the US most of these laws are created to protect the consumer to the detriment of the company. It is what it is.
Value your time appropriately is good advice, but it does not exist in a vacuum-- the author is just working backwards here to post-justify his decision.

If anyone actually used this logic (note the expectation of 4-9 failures per success that brings about this time valuation), they would be broke very damn quickly. Good luck getting funded the next time after 4+ failures.
No, in 1986 the government removed rules (forbidding kickbacks) designed to prevent such behavior. In 1996 the government exempted medical supply companies from many antitrust regulations. The facts laid out in the article are diametrically opposed to the point your are trying to make.

It's pretty hard for a large company to misbehave today and not pay a serious price for it.

for example?
> You use your driving expertise to stay on the road and if you do not have the skill-set to do that, you shouldn't be driving.

Unfortunately, in most many places in North America you cannot function in society without a vehicle thus even if you know you shouldn't be drive the penalty is so great that almost all keep on driving. If there were reasonable alternatives like mass transportation then we could reasonably expect thus unqualified to use them, but in suburbia mass transit does not work.

To me this is as rediculous campaigns against drunk driving that don't push for local busses to operate until at least an hour after bars close.

tl;dr: one cannot reasonably expect people to behave responsibly without there being reasonable alternatives
Agreed , they seem to be considering the mean startup founder per-hour value (which may well be $1000 or whatever) rather than the modal per-hour value (which is probably shockingly close to $0)
Because having just one of everything is boring and eventually stagnates?
There's also New Relic's end user monitoring.

http://blog.newrelic.com/2011/05/17/how-rum-works/
I think you are making a big assumption with your number of "50%". It's true that there are two possible outcomes for either choice I could make. But what makes you say they are equally likely? To my mind, the estimating of that probability is actually the crux of the game.
How 'Do Not Track' Could Kill The Internet Startup Economy
100 years ago patients died because of doctor's neck ties. He would lean over one patient with the tie dragging on their wound, then go to the next patient transferring the infection

Of course we are far too advanced to do anything so stupid today.

Now we examine a patient, go to the computer at the nurses station and type up the results, then the nurse comes along and rubs their hand over the keyboard and mouse, then you go the next patient ....

You can get washable waterproof medical keyboards but they are expensive, and get broken and replaced with whatever IT have on the shelf. Funnily enough I have never seen a waterproof mouse.
It's not trying to be more hipster by printing descriptions, the pictures are described via Mechanical Turk (from humans), this is why it's interesting.
Linux Audio Conference 2012 proceedings and videos available
Ask HN: Why are our posts disappearing from the front page without explanation?
Whenever an Intercom blog post gets to the home page, it lasts about 20 minutes and is then bumped to page 3. I'd love to know why this is happening.

These aren't spam posts, they're meaningful content (they have been featured in HN Monthly, NY Times, Daringfireball, etc) An example from 1 hour ago is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889878 This was #2 on HN and dropped to #87 despite praise on Twitter/FB/and here.

I work really hard to create good content that people will enjoy, and I'm sure you've all read at least one of my posts (even previously on contrast.ie) so I'd love to know what's happening.

If I'm breaking rules, what are they? If there's a spam filter, why is it flagging them?

I'd love to know,

Des
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The question "why" does not necessarily point to a purpose, although we can not 'a apriori' exclude that possible purpose from being there.

You could see it as two folds answer: either the laws and this "nothing" simply exists, or something else created them.

There's really no need to keep asking "what, then, created the creator", for simply things are the way they are and not necessarily as in the explanation we find satisfactory. It could be that the Universe has no creator (I personally find it highly improbable), it could be that it has one creator, or N. I can't be absolutely certain and we can't really check. All we can do is have an opinion/belief about it.
I'm a Physicist, and it's not 'nothing'. :) Lawrence is engaged in a metaphysics program. He wants to show that atheism is intellectually justified as to the origin of the Universe, as they feel it is with the darwinian theory of origin of species.
Travelling Salesman, Thriller Set In a World Where P=NP
That such a simple thing on your part could result in such an extreme and expensive result implies something is wrong with the design of the system you're using.
I agree; I work for equity- not hourly rates. I work towards completing my projects because I believe them and WANT to work on them. Tasks such as talking to users & adding features is fun for me.

I was actually hoping this article would translate the amount of equity most startup founders receive into a per-hour rate. Now that would be an interesting read.
Heh you're describing the whole implementation except for that pesky but critical computer vision part.
I love this line:

You should only be working on two things. Talking to users. And making features.

:)
makes total sense. why work > 40 hrs per week if you're already making an annual salary of $30,491,613 (2011, Wikipedia)... $14,659 per hr assuming 52 weeks x 40 hrs/week.
If it makes you feel better "eternity outside of our universe" is an incoherent concept; as time without particles moving around makes no sense[1]

[1] http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2190