skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article, thanks! As we're discussing landing page effectiveness and I've just put together our landing page, I would love some constructive feedback:

https://www.openrent.co.uk/home/index

We're a week or two from launching, hence the slightly masked url. But any feedback before we put it in front of customers would be greatly appreciated.

I hope this is an appropriate place to ask!
IBM Demos Uber Battery That ‘Breathes’ oxygens and recharges by expelling oxygen
Thumbs up for you personally and for innovation in the space.
They are at least mature products. I've worked on kernel code in Sun product, linux and Windows. And Windows was the only one done professionally, with mature complete APIs and some kind of design.

linux was the least mature. The kernel was a maze, there were 3 similar-but-fatally-different APIs for modules depending on where you graft them in (app, loadable driver, kernel driver), only 1 model of memory mapping was supported. And the code quality was very low. Nearly identical complete methods for trivial differences in argument (instead of calling common code). The same variable names used in different places for very, very different things (e.g. 'page' used for a page table entry, a page table pointer, a page directory pointer, a page directory, a page directory entry...) Spaghetti style code paths.

A large company like MS may have no coherent ethics or direction. But they have Lots of resources to actually, completely, exhaustively complete a code module with everything tested and in place.

So the products may not be great, or apply perfectly to solve your problem. Consider we're developers and our problems are pretty not much on MS's mind anyway. But they are responsibly coded and completed, which is a big thing.
I read this, thought "gee, this guy gets it", then clicked on your profile and saw "developer/designer hybrid unicorn".

From my experience, it's mainly such hybrids that have this perspective on designing for the web. It makes it hard to work with people who don't see it the same way - either designers like Dustin or developers who don't fully appreciate the value of design.
crashed ("oh snap") in maze just a few seconds in, chrome 18.0.1025.163, mac os x 10.7.3
I guess it's a difference in perspectives, because in your lists I definitely see things that help society:

- Government provides services. Around here, it's healthcare, schools, universities, infrastructure, defense, a justice system, social services, plain governing, etc.

- The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other things couldn't replace this -- I'm saying right now they provide this value)

- Paper/oil/meat/mining provides tangible goods that while depleting a finite resource pool still provides value today to scoitey.

- etc etc.
That seems a bit simplistic as a binary choice. I'll ultimately choose for myself what I think is ethical to do, but that doesn't mean I should ignore everything anyone has ever written. Reading intelligent things other people have written is a good way to improve my own thinking on a subject! In fact I'd say a pure "do whatever you want" approach is somewhat intellectually lazy, because it actively avoids engaging with and working through ideas that might be challenging to my own preconceptions.
Matt Aimonetti: Ruby in 2012
I honestly think if you managed to get Tony Hsieh to run paypal you'd have an excellent system. Paypal has the market penetration and its actually pretty easy to use, but they treat customers like shit and they're a financial institution and not a bank they aren't subject to the same laws as banks. So take Paypal and add some ethics and customer service and i think you're on to a winner.
Stanford Machine Learning course online
Previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3862269
I think what a lot of people who say that mean by it is that to be successful, your primary focus doesn't have to be about making money. For many successful, people becoming wealthy is a (usually intentional) side effect of building a good business.

Conversely, people who primarily focus on making as much money as possible are susceptible to making mistakes such as scrimping on necessary expenses, or sacrificing relationships with valuable business partners.
They're targetting slightly different points on the power/safety spectrum.

* Erlang: fault tolerance, distributed systems, absolute performance less important.
* Haskell: correctness important, multicore+shared memory performance a main focus, distributed systems less of a focus (cloud haskell)

I wouldn't write my webserver in Erlang, for example, but my distributed object store, that's another story.
I first got a ZX81 and learned to program on that. When I got the Spectrum I started writing assembler on it. The first few games were developed entirely on one Spectrum in my bedroom. In hindsight it probably was difficult, but at the time it was wonderfully exciting and that is the way it was.

I did use Hisoft tools at some point, can't remember from how early. I also wrote a few of my own.

When I later went in-house with a company they used TRS80s with a hardware link. The code was edited and assembled on the TRS80 then downloaded and executed on the Spectrum.

They were fantastic pioneering days to me. I owe a lot to Sir Clive.
I once read an article on "Ultimate Play The Game", masters of the Spectrum from Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and they did indeed cross compile their code from a mainframe I believe.
No, it's tribalism. Tribalism mixed with an expectation of authority.

Companies don't make decisions. People do. When someone speaks ill of a previous manager, the reason he is unlikely to get hired is that the person assessing him usually is a manager, and managers don't like people who have the gall to speak out about executive decisions, even when they're objectively bad ones.

Software engineers have a similar tendency, except we don't take it as far. We avoid working at companies that have a reputation for not respecting engineering talent. The difference is that we don't protect the malevolent or incompetent among us. They do too much damage, and we're too rational. No engineer would protect the scumbag consultant who puts a time-bomb in software to hold the client hostage. Yet bad managers are just as destructive, while run-of-the-mill managers routinely defend the actions of the worst managers.
I thought landing pages were super easy, until I messed up. When I put up the initial landing page for my latest startup ( http://questcompanions.com/ -- finally launching next week!), the 'Enlist' button said 'Start' instead. Due to the non-traditional input box and the text on the button, people would just click 'Start'. Due to a lack of error handling in the frontend code, the empty email would go up to my server, go out to Mailchimp, and they'd hand back an error. All the user would see is "Invalid or duplicate email", then they'd move away.

When I integrated Mixpanel, I saw why immediately and was able to fix it, but by that point I'd already wasted an easy $10-20 on Facebook ad clicks leading to the page. Tiny sum of money, but those were good clicks. Implementing error handling, better button text, and slightly different text on the input box caused the conversion rate to go way up, and the rate of people clicking the button without filling in an email dropped to nearly zero.

Long story short, measure everything and be very, very smart about your messaging.
Parkinson's treated with Victorian era device
While I wouldn't disagree with your points, I think you've chosen a fairly narrow view of reasons people might want an alternative to erlang.

An obvious case you've omitted, is that people already have existing codebases written in other languages, and rewriting them all in erlang is not an option. Attaching an actor library to "X" language can give us many of the features offered by erlang with our existing codebase, and allow us to continue using our existing skills and paradigms.

Erlang does an excellent job at solving certain issues, but it's lacking in many other areas that "X" might do a better job of. If my project needs both the fault tolerance and concurrency of erlang, and feature "A" which language "X" is good at, but erlang not so good at, then choosing erlang all the time might not be the right solution.

I'm personally a fan of polyglot programming. We should pick the most suitable languages for each task, then we wouldn't need to keep re-inventing programming languages and libraries to emulate other languages. It's quite an idealistic view, but there's certainly ways we can improve the interoperability between languages, including erlang's - which is quite limited so far.

An example of such approach is the (now discontinued) Axum project from Microsoft Research. It offered many of the ideas of Erlang, but built onto the .NET framework and largely compatible with existing code. Axum could call, and could even contain almost any C# code inside it, although it was a restricted version of C# which had isolated states, and no static variables - something that high standard codebases omit anyway, regardless of the whether language allows it, because it's been known good practice for a long time that shared state causes problems.

The Actor Model existed long before Erlang, and will feature in many other languages other than it - whether or not they are successful is a different matter, but programming language designers would be wise to have a good knowledge of Erlang, and many other languages, so they're not re-inventing the wheel badly. Concurrency and fault tolerance should be considered from the start.

I personally think we can do better than Erlang - or at least offer the same without sacrificing every other paradigm to achieve the aims of erlang. (And Haskell will probably be the language to better it).
GET AWAY FRO0M THESE MACHINES JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE! I think technology has created this vacuum where everything around you no longer exists and you find yourself in a place of isolation. To all those like myself jumping from machines at home, to iphones on the train, to machines at work, to iphones on the way home, to machines while you eat dinner, to iphones as you lay in the bed, and finally you wake up and the first thing you do is reach for your iphone. Let's make a serious effort to spend more quality time away from the machines before it is too late!
no crash on safari, but SMTP error on email form.
In this case the experiment compared bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their native tongue with bilinguals who had the problem presented to them in their second language. It found that answers were dependant on the language they had been presented in - when the answers were in a foreign language there was less decision bias. It seems that being bilingual did not prevent people from having this bias in their native tongue.
In Silicon Valley with a tech background it's rarely a very stark choice, though. If you have good tech skills, a the default/fallback option is a pretty nice one, materially speaking: a low 6-figure programming job at a big company. There is very little chance of ending up unemployed-and-homeless, given how much companies are scrambling to hire technical people.

In that context, it makes more sense to me to encourage people to think about something other than money as their main/only goal. It is indeed something you can only afford to do if you're privileged enough to have the option, but being a tech person in Silicon Valley means there's a high probability that you do have the option, because if you "fail", you can always fail back to the 6-figure corporate job, which is a pretty soft landing. So given that you can live a materially comfortable life just taking the default route, what else do you want to do?
garymcm, I'm not sure about a mainframe for Ultimate - they were very clever guys though.

I know Imagine (spin off from BugByte) used Unix workstations for development. I can't remember what they were called but when they went bust I went to the auction and drooled over all their kit
> It always grates me when people with lot's of money tell people who don't have lot's of money, that it's not about the money.

That may be true, but it is equally grating (if not moreso) when people with lots of money tell people who don't have lots of money that it _is_ about the money....
Yes. That way the person who would use the domain more efficiently is more likely to get it. Remember that domains are not people, they're property, and it's okay to hold your own property hostage.
I would highly people learning to look at: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

Erlang really is the simplest of any serious language I know, after a little of erlang you will be pining for it when debugging some accidental misuse of globals in javascript.

Saying that no other environments will be able to provide the same isolation and elegant message passing is wrong, erlangs vm is good but it is not magical, but for now it does it best.
Kol Düğmesi
This article is from 2008...?
PayPal does have micro payment accounts. The micro account fee is 5% + $0.05 instead of 2.9% + $0.30.

http://www.paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayme...
CSS triangle with shadow
Defensible Space and the Tragedy of the Commons on the Internet
Alege un set de anvelope auto potrivit masinii tale
I too recall the power sockets wearing out - something that still afflicts many gadgets these days.

The microdrive connectors were also a little flaky at times.

I had a rubber keyboard lose some if the print on it so you couldn't read all the functions but it would still work. I'm sure I've still got a spare one somewhere, new and unused.
And I forgot to add, there's no way you can protect against other side-channel attacks like timing attacks. JS as it is today makes it impossible.
> 99% market penetration[0] is not losing.

Let's talk about trends: what is the outlook for web browsing on smartphones and tablets? How big part of these support Flash? What part of those supporting flash actually have it enabled?

IE had 98% marketshare once too…
I just had a moment of clarity.

Bill gates had vision to make millions of jobs.

What if Microsoft was efficient?

Relative to the amount of money it could make, it would only take a relatively small team of developers and R&D teams (in a perfect world). How many teams of managers etc does it really take? Think of the amount of money that would make. Think of the money businesses would save not having IT support teams etc.

But the fact is, Microsoft aren't the bad guys.

These guys employee countless numbers of people.
Around the world, Think of all the products that every business needs that Microsoft ressellers profit out of.
How many IT support staff are fed by microsofts hand.

Personally i think Microsoft are doing a good job of sharing the wealth.
Ben Horowitz is countering accusations that Kevin pivoted into photo sharing based on Dalton's work. He's saying that Kevin saw that Burbn's photo sharing was its most popular feature and so naturally (organically) Kevin pivoted in that direction.
If it's only about making money, you've failed, big time.

If it's never about making money, you've also failed, just as badly.

It is shameful that smart, competent, brilliant people let themselves be fooled into thinking that money is bad. If you're smart, competent and hard-working, in the world we live in, you can be well off and deserve to be. Being broke is not a badge of honour. Making money is not a badge of shame - nor is it an incidental event that just happens while you weren't looking.

What you're implying (though you're not saying it directly, so I could be misunderstanding you) with both of your stories is the exact opposite of what I believe. In the first story, you're putting up a straw man of the money-obsessed fool and warding people off the pursuit of money with that. In the second, you're implying that making money is incidental to other pursuits.

The reality, which I'm advocating for, is that money is a useful tool that is worth pursuing - not with soul-destroying obsession, sure, but with some portion of your mind. It makes your life better, extends the reach of what you can do for others, enables you to leverage your intelligence to achieve more in life, etc. And since most of the ways of making money that people on this site would consider are honest and value-creating, if you do something clever and make money from it, it's well earned, well deserved.

The answer to the second point is, as I've repeated many times, that making money will not happen incidentally while you're looking somewhere else, or at least not in 99.9% of cases. If you like those odds, buy a lottery ticket. I can assure you that your mentor and his business associates spent a lot of time sweating the details of how their business model would make lots of money, before it did. That was no accident, and it was not solely the result of customer focus. It was the result of customer focus and commercial acumen. Both are essential.
INFOGRAPHIC: What Does It Cost to Get a New Client?
Mutation Testing
One testing strategy that I rarely see among TDD advocates is known as mutation testing. The goal of this strategy is to modify the source code of your application in a way that should cause your tests to fail. If the tests continue to pass, you have a problem with your test suite.
It's the opposite. Honorable people (like Stark) tend to assume their enemies are like them. Big mistake. They assume that, when confronted with proof of their own dishonesty, they'll shrink away quietly. Oh no. It's the opposite. Dishonest people have no sense of shame. They don't care that they're dishonest, but they'll do anything to prevent other people from knowing it.

If you want to rise in the typical corporate world, you really can't afford to make enemies at all, which means that you often have to turn a blind eye to unethical behavior if you want to succeed. In typical companies, 70 to 80 percent of upper management is scumbags. Even in good ones, there are usually at least a few. You can't beat all of them, and chances are that you can't even beat one of them.

The problem with OP's letter to the upper management is that he thinks they actually give a rat's ass about "the company", rather than their own careers. He actually believes that company-man drivel and that these people care enough about the firm to stand up for a "rebel" who is good for it. Not so. They won't.

One explanation of large-company idiocy is corporate consistency. People would rather be consistently wrong than admit past error and be inconsistent. It's the same with companies. The companies has already made the decision (right or wrong) that the manager outranks the employee. Asking a higher-up to do something about a shitty manager is asking him to override the corporate consistency, which people seldom do-- especially the sorts of people (ethically flexible, lacking creativity, politically minded) who get into upper management in the first place.
http://welkerswikinomics.com/blog/2012/04/20/golden-balls-ga...
There is very little chance of ending up unemployed-and-homeless, given how much companies are scrambling to hire technical people.

For now. See how it goes in 20 years.
Luxury shopping online: The trend of buying niche products online 
Online shopping has been on the rise and it has seen a whole new level of acceptance from the consumers over the past 4-5 years.
At least they're listening to their customers... Love the SAAS model.
Ned Starks blunder was also on TV last year. Unless there's a fantastic unguessable twist.
"The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other things couldn't replace this -- I'm saying right now they provide this value)"

Actually this is another example of a rich person talking about how it's not about the money. You think weapons are intrinsically unethical, go and talk to the hundreds of millions of unarmed "ethnically cleansed" peoples in the 20th century.

Are they dangerous? Sure, no question. Ethically negative? A lot tougher call. All of those beloved government institutions are fundamentally built on there being a strong government, and when it is all boiled down, that fundamentally depends on having a government that can defend you against foreign incursion. If that is easy to forget, it is only because you are abundantly supplied with defense.
Been using this for a while! Thanks! I love the labels with icons.
I think one of your problems is going to be peak usage times where a lot of people are traveling to or from work in the morning or afternoon. What would be interesting is to conduct a study. Get a bunch of volunteers in different cities to log their departure location and time as well as their destination. Then run then simulation to see how many shuttles it would require and how full each would be.
Giflib: everything old is new again
Open source vertical tab bar for iOS
this is absolutely true. having become fluent in french as a second language, i find that i seem to make decisions much more rapidly and with less consternation than in English. when i first noticed this, like the authors of the paper, i concluded that it did have a fair amount to do with being emotionally distanced from what i was saying, so awesome to see it formalized!
F#, MSTest, and FsUnit 1.1.0.0
I'll take tmux and vim over ssh please.
Your assuming everyone is equally good at building cat picture start-ups and doing Cancer research which I don't think is particularly accurate. Also, I suspect Cancer is over funded and we would be much better off diverting 1/10th of that talent and resources to building cheap self driving cars.
Valve's Handbook for New Employees
I think what a lot of people who say that mean by it is that to be successful, your primary focus doesn't have to be about making money.

I agree - if all you care about is money, you won't become successful. You'll probably become rich, though.

For many successful, people becoming wealthy is a (usually intentional) side effect of building a good business.

But a good business is one that makes money (apart from the instagrams and other lottery tickets of this world). So focusing on making money is necessary to them too. If you do a great job for your customers but you don't charge them, and so you run out of money and go bankrupt - well, you haven't built a great business at all.

Conversely, people who primarily focus on making as much money as possible are susceptible to making mistakes such as scrimping on necessary expenses, or sacrificing relationships with valuable business partners.

I think you're confusing short-sighted focus with "focus". Warren Buffet has primarily focused on making as much money as possible (his chosen career is literally to make money from investment) and he's not skimped on relationships or other necessities. On the contrary, I think if you're smart and you're focused on making money in both the short and long term, you probably will make money.

On the other hand, if you assume it will happen some day later, you probably won't make money.
The problem with lthread is that it does not really provide blocking calls inside coroutines (you simply cannot do this with current OSes like Linux or Windows). Just take a look at the docs:

If you need to execute an expensive computation or make a blocking call inside an lthread, you can surround the block of code with lthread_compute_begin() and lthread_compute_end(), which moves the lthread into an lthread_compute_scheduler that runs in its own pthread to avoid blocking other lthreads. lthread_compute_schedulers are created when needed and they die after 60 seconds of inactivity. lthread_compute_begin() tries to pick an already created and free lthread_compute_scheduler before it creates a new one.

It just does the blocking call on its own pthread. That simply does not scale the way Erlang does.

One day there is hopefully an OS where each file, socket, device, etc. is an actor with a message queue. Then you can really be concurrent :-). Even Erlang can then be more concurrent...