skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's surprisingly less of a problem than I naively thought it would be. I'm upfront with clients prior to, during, and after engagements, and I try to set expectations accurately. That said, for the overwhelming majority of my clients, if e.g. the entire budget for my wedding was spent on a project whose final conclusion was "Experimental results: we now know one more thing that didn't work" that would not be a catastrophic loss.

Businesses routinely spend $$$, $$$$$, and $$$$$$$$$ on things that don't end up working out the way they were planned. They're pretty much OK with that, since they run "portfolio strategies" in terms of directions. Nobody is betting the company on a two-week engagement with me, any more than they bet the company on any particular man-month of engineering time.

n.b. This is partially influenced by being picky about clients and working with people who are clueful and have budget. This is one reason why if a startup with $X0,000 in the bank comes to me and asks to roll the dice on an engagement I give them a link to my blog, some suggestions, and invite them to come back when we're a better positioned to help each other out.
+1 for CircuitLab.

if you define 'painful' to be 'under powered, needlessly complex, and over priced.' then yes.

Single biggest feature asked for an NEVER delivered, 'solid way to export a schematic to web-useful format' (PNG, GIF, JPG, or SVG).
Over-hyped? In my neck of the woods these approaches are treated with extreme skepticism for just the reasons you mention.

For instance: De novo protein folding is not a solved problem, so how can a simulation predict dynamics for a protein whose conformation isn't even known?

I'm sure in the year 2150 when my grandchildren go to the doctor to be scanned by the tricorder, the results will go to the full-cell (and full-body) simulator...but for now, I think bioinformatics is better served by sticking to higher levels of abstraction like transcript and protein counts (for disease modeling purposes).
In the US, if you know the law, there are penalties for a company disregarding consumer protection laws. I forget the name of the law, but I actually ended up filing a suit against Alltel before us Alltel customers were moved to AT&T following the buyout. Alltel settled as soon as my lawyer sent the papers. It's colloquially known as the "lemon law" (though that's a term generally reserved for used car sales). If they can't fix a defective, in-warranty product in a reasonable time, the contract you have with them is void and they have to refund the price.

In my case, Alltel kept sending me broken phones for my warranty claims, then the third time I sent the phone back they said the warranty was void because I had installed a registry browser on Windows Mobile (and that was apparently the cause of them sending me a phone that was missing a loudspeaker).

At any rate, I don't remember the name of the law or the exact words anymore, but look into it so you know what you can expect when this happens to you. The FTC doesn't take kindly to it, and in some cases will actually pay a lawyer to fight it for you.
Pictorious is a game where you and your friends participate in and create memes. We're combining the fun game mechanics of social games (Draw Something, Words with Friends) with the ubiquitous activity of photo-sharing. Would love to hear the HN community's feedback on our little project!
LESS compiler and playground online
That's right, keeping the following header

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="...">

pointing to a URL that already exists and works just fine doesn't cost anything. If the primary reason had been maintenance cost, they would have removed the feature itself.
Not sure where you're getting that number from but it is not accurate. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month Units on the graph are USD.
Whoaaaaa, this is some hot hot hot JS. Thanks for open-sourcing this. I do a similar thing with http://somaseek.com/ (same basic concept only it's only reading XML from SomaFM ), and reddit is also open-source with a live "reference" implementation :)

I hope Google picks something like this up (or hey, just /hires you/ if you're into that) and re-does Reader for 2012 :)
Some good UI elements here as well: http://menucool.com/

I like the slideshow: http://menucool.com/javascript-image-slider
As long as I spend my day productively and get stuff done, why does it really matter?

Because people with a life outside their official job start demanding things like shorter hours or overtime pay, and those cost money.
Luminescent 'LED-Type' Solar Panel Design Breaks Efficiency Record
One of the very real issues with WebSockets is that they don't work often over mobile networks, with invisible proxying, etc.

Unless you go with something like Socket.IO, WebSockets alone would never be a viable solution.
And that's just it: cable has already turned into a commoditized dumb pipe for a large segment of the population. Instead of recognizing this new reality and adjusting to it, the cable industry seems intent on sticking its collective head in the sand and pretending as if the world hasn't changed.
Thanks for reading-- we're actually currently partners w/ Everyday Health for advertising & have no plans to build out a major sales team in the near future. We're hoping to build a business that isn't driven by ad sales, but instead driven by guiding people to products, tools, and services that are as high-quality as our content & will help them achieve their goals.

In terms of engagement-- we have a lot on the way. Right now our focus has been purely to build the highest-quality brand equity and an audience. We've got a 26% return rate, so think we're doing something right so far-- though obviously there's a long way to go and a lot more to do.

Our traffic is currently less than 6% driven by Google search-- but we're already ranking for some pretty awesome terms ahead of some classic incumbents. We believe we're writing among the highest-quality content in the space already (every fact cited by a PubMed study, every article approved by multiple experts) & that if we keep consistently doing that and people keep returning & noticing that we likely won't penalized by Google in the future. My take at least!
I've experimented with 12 vs. 15 before. Null result. I might try pushing it down to 8 sometime. But, realistically speaking, only if it strikes my fancy some morning.
> leave people good at the job doing the job and let people good at managing doing the managing.

In my experience of UK military/security service there is a boffins + officers divide attitude all the way up.

Above any level of required knowledge it moves into the Oxbridge/PPE/civil servant mindset - it shouldn't take too much imagination to realise that these people aren't necessarily hired for the brilliance in management.
I find it cute that Google used a screenshot of an early version of our Opera Mini browser rather than one of their own to illustrate Android-based web browsing in slide 29. :)
Functional programmers are smug jerks
Replied to above.
It strikes me that this developer chooses to write an abstraction on top of JS for solving his recurring problems, over simply using language features readily available.

Promises are as much a pattern or mechanic as callbacks, but the latter feels far more natural in JS. The `promised` decorator is interesting, but it has problems:

- The application I work on, and have in mind with this, would need just about every function decorated.

- It doesn't account for methods, unless you're default decorating the method, ie.: `Foo.prototype.myMethod = promised(function(/* ... /) { / ... */ });`

- Every decorated function takes a noticable performance hit, because things like `Function#apply` and concatenating `arguments` are relatively slow.

- It doesn't sit well with me that the example rewrites a method on a prototype declared elsewhere: `console.log = promised(console.log)`

Further, the article and library don't even scratch the surface of complicated async flows. Think async versions of common functional-style methods like `map`, `reduce`, etc.

For example, a basic scenario from our own build process is: Scan a directory for template files, read them, compile them, then concatenate the result and write it out.

We used to have a promise library to do all of this, from handling a build process to performing database queries. I discovered Async.js at some point and haven't look back since: https://github.com/caolan/async
did you see they mentioned sun and oracle had tried to build smartphone platform on Java and failed, this can backfire for argument sake as it kind of justifies google did a favor by making android a success.
Link to previous HN discussion from yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3857119
I'm confused. What's the difference, other than Amazon taking a 20% cut of my sale price, between this and the already existing paid AMIs? Yeah, there's a pretty website and all, but it doesn't seem like much value for 20%.
Please show me a death caused by a car and not by the driver.
This is probably what Craigslist figured out a long time ago.
Or, you know, this is a trend on how consumer markets have evolved/are evolving.
Short version: traffic way the heck up, probably through a combination of Google algorithm changes, just natural growth of the Internet among people who matter to my business, and organic growth.
"I deserve" may be infantile, but I don't believe "I can watch it right now, and it hurts nobody to do so, so I will" is infantile. It's just reasonable.
At least the installation script adds some aliases to .bashrc.

https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula...
While it does look nice and all, I still can't figure out what differentiates this from other similar offerings (I see the same problem with many new project management software).
Since always. Major releases just about always lead to an influx of users. This may be less true on Linux — I don't know — but it is generally true from everything I have ever seen.
The problem is, that's your mentality that is infantile.

You're going to tell us how we are infantile, how we feel entitled, how we are morally wrong in doing that we do.
By doing this you implicitly show yourself as being grown-up and morally superior. And how you can go without watching the tv series as it gets released.

And that's lame. That's unhumble. That screams "I want to tell the whole world how right I am". "My values - right. Your values - stupid" (c)
The importance of test broadband speed when choosing an ISP
I say this because if HBO decided to make the change, and enabled, say, a $10 online, streaming subscription, I think they'd make more money than they do now.

They don't think so. And they have the internal numbers to back up their decision. HBO is a very smart and well run company, and they make buckets and buckets of money from their deals with the cable companies.

You (and I) would love to be able to buy access to their content without paying Comcast (or DirecTV &c.) but the number of people holding that position is VASTLY OUTNUMBERED by the number of people willing and able to pay $40/mo or whatever on top of what is considered a utility service. That's not going to change fast, and there's no point for HBO to get those arrows in their back when Apple/Amazon/Netflix are charging ahead regardless.
Having done some work at cable companies ... both are dependent on each other. HBO has huge clout at the MSOs of the world, and they like it that way. At the same time, HBO makes MSOs lots of money because they can bundle it with kruft (e.g., Starz) and charge more than for either alone.
Wow. Congrats and thanks for sharing your story. You scored $42k, well above your $25k goal.

What do you plan to do with the additional windfall?
I am well aware of these approaches, having worked on some of them myself in prior work I've done. You always run into limitations of what was known about the biology and how various things interact. The network models will probably work some day, but my point above was that this will only happen after a lot of hard wet bench work happens. There's just too much we don't know right now to use these techniques to develop deep understanding. Sometimes, when we were lucky, they would support an existing hypothesis. But that was only for activity in a single cancer cell line in a specific experiment, not a whole organism which is what matters for a drug.
Wouldn't that be fraudulent? As in, you've got goods in hand, and just deprived the retailer of the price of the item (plus a little more)?
12 ways to spot a liar
Clickable: https://gingerhq.com
As I have come to reply on Flipboard more and more over the last 18+ months, my Google Reader / RSS usage has dropped quite a bit. Flipboard is a great Google Reader and general RSS client, but I find the Twitter streams to be much more valuable.

For example, I follow the BikeEXIF blog (http://www.bikeexif.com/) via his Twitter feed on Flipboard. This feed includes all of the blog posts, plus links to other 3rd party content, commentary, and so on. This is much more interesting than a pure RSS feed.

RSS may not be as useful to real humans, but I do think it's tremendously important and very much alive as a service to service standard. I wrote the RSS ingestion system for Flipboard. When reading the BikeEXIF blog on Fliboard via the @bikeEXIF Twitter stream, the content of each article is fetched from the blog's RSS feed.
> For most human traders

You're living in the past.

> The consolidation process delays the data by ~100 ms. This is still considered real-time by many people including professional traders.

A couple of months ago we achieved round-trip [cleared] trades between Tokyo and New York of under 50ms. That's your barrier to entry.

You're not in business if you're looking at an average of 100ms.
Fake Instagram Android App Infects System With Malware
Out of curiosity ... if you love implicit returns in principle, then why would you dislike them in this context?

I'll guess it's because speed is less of a concern when programming in Ruby.

if you don't want to return any value, then just "return".

Yes, but that leads to clutter and goes against one of the selling points of CoffeeScript.

Previous discussions on this:

http://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1401

http://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/899
Man I really wish I could find out more about what this service does without signing up.

Please add some sort of walkthrough to your website. This seems to have the features (Dropbox/Google Apps Integration) that I think Basecamp sorely misses. Even when I sign up I get stuck having to configure my site team etc. Once I do setup I'm not seeing anything that really distinguishes this app from anything else.

This may be the holy grail but I spent 5 minutes on this site and decided its not for me. Very underwhelming introduction.
Personally, I think the landing page should simply be this (minus the "Featured Bingo Activities" heading and half-horizonal line on the bottom): http://imgur.com/GyRu8

and then add the rest of the info that's currently below this part into an additional tab up top, perhaps called: "Info" (and it should be the first tab -- furthest to the left).
The Humble Botanicula Debut
Inside LinkedIn's Expanding Data Universe
How do you do the math when one of the unaccounted variables is the potential conversion rate of people who would pay for a HBO streaming service but won't pay for it if it's chained to a pay TV subscription, and so they pirate instead?

Piracy thwarts everything HBO has to track and measure ratings, so how could they possibly "do the math" and figure out the size, demographics, and potential conversion rate of this group?

I think it's more chaining HBO to a cable subscription is a known quantity, and venturing out into a pure streaming service is the great unknown.
What is difference between Siasto and Basecamp? Why would customer chose Siasto instead Basecamp? What is Siasto's advantage over Basecamp?
We don't really need anything new in this space, though.

We need a free/open Photoshop clone. We need a direct, one-to-one monkey copy of Adobe's product.

We don't need flights of fancy, we don't need to retrain existing users of image manipulation programs, we don't need to experiment. Adobe already has all the legwork done for us--the answer looks a hell of a lot like Photoshop and its interface.

There is zero--ZERO--reason to try to come up with a new interface when there is a perfectly good one in existence that just happens to be poorly distributed.

The place where GIMP has screwed up (and Blender and the like along with them) is in not parroting exactly the common tools in the ecosystem.

There are weird programs (Wings 3D, Paint.NET, etc.) that are able to significantly depart from conventions, mostly because they have very narrowly-defined functionality (something I don't believe anyone would ever accuse the GIMP of).

The GIMP developers should either focus on making a monkey copy (and ignoring everything else until feature/UX parity is achieved), or stop working on the project entirely so they can do something else for a while. Once the monkey copy is done, then innovate. Until then, stop wasting time with things nobody cares about.

I used the GIMP as my primary art asset creation tool for several years. It was miserable. The filters and procedural image generation stuff was awesome, but everything else was at best hard to use. Eventually I switched to Photoshop because it was a (comparatively) clean, tight tool with all the bullshit removed.
I hope Netflix's original content gets good/becomes a large enough library to threaten HBO. They would offer subscriptions over apps, set top boxes, and maybe even browsers shortly after.

Content providers need to be smacked around by someone like Netflix in a big way.
I own a subscription-based online business, and I've done many A/B tests of new designs, and my conclusions is pretty similar to yours.

Namely, it's always way more work than you expect, especially when you have legacy customers with prior expectations.

And results hardly ever budge.

My hypothesis is A/B testing can move the needle for light engagement, like "try a free trial". But pulling out a credit card requires a lot of motivation, and the 0.1% of your visitors that have this motivation are relatively unaffected by your design.
Notice how they conveniently left out Classpath and Harmony from their slides? They both violate #2 and Sun didn't care to sue them.
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The philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy
Hey Rubyistas Please take our Ruby Gem for a testdrive,feedback wanted:)
But then yummyfajitas' comparison doesn't apply after all. When transferring money, the recipient has to wait a day until he can order the next transfer. This is not the case with trading, so this whole "three days" claim seems spurious to me.
It's always social media vs RSS. I mainly see this storyline pushed by tech blogs. They use social media, all their tech blog peers use social media, they see that most of their users use social media. Tech bloggers then start to feel that no one must use RSS anymore since everyone is on Twitter or Facebook, when in reality it is just their circle that has abandoned RSS. Unfortunately, since most people form their opinions of technology from the people who have been loud enough to form a reading audience, more people also start to believe that RSS is being phased out.

The only "war" against RSS is in the mind of tech bloggers.
I switched over to NewsBlur from Google Reader in December (after there was a post about it on HN) and haven't looked back. I even emailed the creator once with an issue I was having and received a prompt and helpful response. Try that with Google Reader!
I quit using CS for essentially this reason. Implicit returns are a nice idea, but they are just implemented a bit too inconsistently. Additionally, it changes the language from being "it's just JavaScript" to sugared JS with different behaviour.

I listed some of the pitfalls with implicit returns at the following CS issue:
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/899#issuec...
Promises are likely to be baked into JavaScript at some point in the future[1], so I would recommend becoming familiar with them now. Even if you don't use the pattern personally you will likely run into libraries that do use it once it is part of the spec.

I don't too much like the promise pattern this article gives, Q is the definitive implementation: http://documentup.com/kriskowal/q/

[1]http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:concurrency
Thanks-- and glad you found it valuable!

Our growth has been nearly entirely social, with the 60% driven by sites like Pinterest, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, & Twitter. The rest mostly comes from our syndication partnerships. Outside of some free trials from Google Adwords, we've never paid for any visitors... and we've never been covered by any major outlet either. We've grown 35% on average each of the last 5 months & it's all organic.
Come now. If you are going to randomly put down people, at least point out why you think so.
Stripe is a dream come true for developers. I use Spreedly (backed by Paypal) on Appointment Reminder to do subscription management, and am very happy with it, too. I hear you can use them together now, which sounds like the PB&J of money if you ask me.

P.S. I also don't hate me love Paypal, too.
I bought a season 1 of The Walking Dead on iTunes, and found it suboptimal. It kept automatically trying to download the normal version, HD version, and each "behind the scenes" episode for each episode. All I want is the HD version! This was annoying enough to me to go back to just pirating episodes for season 2. If this experience has changed I might reconsider.
Thanks Fey-- means a lot.
Talk by Ben Chestnut founder MailChimp.com
Using Google Docs and Dropbox seamlessly for document management seems to be one feature that differentiate them with other competitors... for now.

Not sure how many people do care of that but if somehow a few people do have that issue, then Siasto may find a niche there.
Show HN: My Meteor App - Danceynous: Synchronized Youtube Dance Party
There are few products which do different kinds of Basecamp/Dropbox/Google Docs integration.
One of them is cloudHQ - we sync all Dropbox and Google Docs files with Basecamp: bi-directional and continuously.
The chargeback resolution policies are set by Visa and MasterCard, not by the bank. They do not have the option of forcing a chargeback where the store you shopped at did no wrong. Some bank manager could decide to give you their money in the form of a statement credit, I suppose...

Either way, switching banks regularly in order to steal electronics from stores doesn't sound like very ethical advice.
I think the concept of a 'shit job' basically is embedded in our human culture.

No, no, and no. It is embedded in recent cultures of vast inequality, slaves fed on dreams of glory. Egalitarian cultures don't have very much concept of "shit jobs", not the way we do.
The Pirate Bay Launches Contest To Support Indie Musicians
This exists. Petridish.org lets people help fund projects that wouldn't otherwise get off the ground, Kickstarter style