skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for trolling, Ryan.

It's easy to think this is impressive, but the reader forgets about the number of years Ryan has worked on creating businesses. He has made awesome stuff, but all that time can't be ignored. The suggestion that others can easily do it too if only they were less "messed up/caught up in old manufacturing ways", is some smug shit.

These crazy hard-working Americans are trying to figure out their first startup, with very limited resources. It's a different game, and they are in a different place in the food chain.

I am sure if they too have sold multiple companies and worked in the industry for 10+ (?) years, they too would adopt all kinds of relaxed ways of working and running firms. I agree that if they still work long hours after that, it is misguided as you point out.

But lets not get carried away with how the 1% works. How many days a week did you work on your first company?
I too understand the motivation of the project yet.... IMO if you can't trust the person you are having a conversation with then don't have it.

Great job at building something people are using, although it's not something I'd use.
Wasteful organization.

The post:

http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/04/22/wasteful-computation.html

One up, 404:

http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/04/22/

One up, 404:

http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/04/

One up, 404:

http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/

One up, something:

http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/

Why do this? I understand the desire to organize, but why make bins with nothing in them? As it is, all he needs is /s/.

I would naturally expect .../2012/ to have either all the 2012 posts or all months that have posts, .../2012/04/ to have all of 2012's April posts or all days that have posts, etc. But not nothing.
Guys who can do the things mentioned above are definitely hirable in 80% of dev jobs. They know how to solve problems, they don't have to be original.
Who do asteroids belong to? Can they just claim them and sell the material they extract?

Don't get me wrong, I would love to have my own asteroid mining company. Just need a couple billion dollars first. But what happens once there are two or more competing corporations? Who has the power to say which part of space belongs to whom? Will there be space battles?
Never Eat Alone mashup
http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2012/04/never-eat-alone_24.html
We had a post the other day about how important a name is. Here is another example of the name not being important. I mean what has "team treehouse" got to do with learning or web development?

To the article I am glad to see them get funding. I use the service and think its great.

I think a 4 day work week can definitely work, especially with motivation and guarding against burn out. Main issue is that the rest of the world works 5 days a week which in many sectors can create problems.
That's interesting. I consider the street signs evil. Ignoring streets for which even the Israelis I know don't know how to pronounce the name (for example אבן גברויל which GMaps lists as Ibn Gabriol but ends up as something different, whenever you talk to anyone).

Road signs in general wildy vary. The name 'Weizmann' (as in [1]) is generally butchered in latin script. The best form I found so far was in Acre and spelled 'Wiseman'.

Often the signs just contain a transcript of the Hebrew word. I saw a couple of signs that spell out 'Nemal', which isn't particularly helpful unless you know that this is the Hebrew word for the port.

Bottom line: The road signs here confuse the hell out of me. I'm amazed that they helped you learn the alphabet somehow.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann
I think that this[1] email thread between Torvalds and various other kernel developers sums up the use of goto in C the best.

I find that those who think that any given programming concept is "inherently" bad to be dangerous, especially if they were just taught that way.

[1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131
Must be Google's fault. I thought they would be more careful with their mining operation.
$3MM with 34 mouths to feed and families to insure, an office to maintain, and infrastructure to build out doesn't exactly seem like a lot of money.
Our name is Treehouse but the owners of treehouse.com wanted £1m+. We decided teamtreehouse.com was close enough :) Our name is "Treehouse" though.
Yup, jumps are the best way to correctly unwrap things (e.g. if you acquired resources), and if you're using it when you need to you might as well use it everywhere so your codebase is consistent.

Although I believe your jumps are in the wrong place logically speaking: if do_something() errored out, logically speaking you should not have to undo_something because do_something cleaned up its crap. So the jumps should be after the cleanups (and you should never need to unprepare_stuff).

Just as the opening of a file is not in a protected scope (if opening the file fails, you don't close it)
> Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME

Is it actively paging to disk at times when there is plenty of free RAM? A common complaint on Linux is "I've closed a lot of stuff but it is still using swap" because even if the pages are read back into RAM when next used they are kept in the swap area in case they need to go out again (that way they don't need to be written unless changed, saving some I/O).

Under Linux you can see how much is found in both RAM and on disk with the "SwapCached" entry in /proc/meminfo - it won't stop counting those pages as present in the swap areas until either it runs out of never used swap space so needs to overwrite then to page out other pages or the page is changes in memory (at which point the copy on disk is stale so can not be reused without being updated anyway).

> and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open.

Have you monitored system activity at such times to see where the delay is? While it could be due to unnecessary disk I/O it could also be elsewhere such as delayed DNS lookups if anything in your profile scripts does such a thing and there is an issue with your connectivity or DNS configuration.

(I'm not an OS X user and never have been so sorry if these thoughts are irrelevant - but I'm guessing memory management in OS X is similar enough for knowledge of how Linux plays the game not to be completely useless)
GET BOLD AND ELEGANCE EARRING ONLINE
If you need to accessorize yourself, earrings are the best option for the light and elegance accessory. There are different types of earrings which will help you to enhance your overall appearance.
Apple: why doesn't it employ more US workers?
It's definitely harder to work 4-days a week (from a management perspective). More planning and intensity, but I think a lot of businesses could do this if they really wanted to.
For me, Discovery is not a reliable source for science news. Way too much... sensationalist, to say the least.
Template management for Hogan.js
€1,400 b-strapped prod that’s disrupting the market, 250 customers before launch
Jumping backwards is fine, too. It's okay to ignore Dijkstra when he is wrong.
This has been done a dozen times before.

I worked at Authentica around 1999-2000. They got it working decently enough and were later bought by EMC. http://www.emc.com/domains/authentica/index.htm

The problem is that the data can be grabbed by image tools, etc., so you end up getting in a race to hack all sorts of libraries that can grab the screen, save text, etc.
The companies which ask you for 'your github profile', really want to see your code. When, people are passionate, they do things outside work. This article on Feynman is relevant: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html?r...

If you are passionate about football, do you play football? or atleast watch others play football? That's definitely not your work. Why do you do it then?
> I was tired of seeing my friends violate the confidentiality of our private conversations, by constantly forwarding our emails to third parties.

You're trying to solve a SOCIAL problem with TECHNOLOGY.

Better solution: get ACTUAL friends who won't stab you in the back given the chance.
Ruby Pair
First off, this is great. I applaud the fact that you can be profitable working fewer hours, and hopefully paying more than competitive salaries with good benefits.

But, that said, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned here that M-Th, 9-6 isn't a 4-day week, unless you include a required lunch hour, which most don't. So, since you didn't mention that, and I'm fairly sure that you work through lunch as many do including myself, then 9-6 M-Th is 36 hours, which is 4.5 "normal" 8-hour workdays.

I challenge you to be profitable working 32 hours a week (the equivalent of 4 8-hour workdays), preferably using flex time (so people can work those hours whenever they wish) and allowing telecommuting whenever the employee desires, and still be profitable.
Parse isn't a high level abstraction, they just like to make certain things more convenient, if you want you can just use them as a database with a rest api over it.

In terms of value ... I'm really not sure how you lose - if your app is a flop you're going to coast along on the free plan, if it's a success you can focus on your app rather than your stack, and you can migrate away from them when you feel like it.
5 Concerns That Keep Users From Signing Up
You're using a CNAME at the root of your domain for your DNS. This is invalid. Anybody who is using the Unbound DNS server and also has DNSSEC verification enabled, will not be able to access your site. All lookups will lead to a SERVFAIL.
Why not hire a support person for Thursday -> Sunday? I know it's not an ideal schedule for someone, but think of the entire restaurant business...
Perhaps you took it wrong, or perhaps I said it wrong.

Better stated: "Maybe there aren't enough women in tech, but they are out there, and they're awesome."

I didn't mean to bely the refute the numbers, but to posit that in spite of the numbers, women are in tech, and they're doing amazing things.

Though, since you brought it up, I'm starting to wonder if it's not a West Coast thing -- there are quite a few women in tech on my side of the continent. I honestly don't know the numbers, but the StartupWeeked I referred to before had about a third of the teams end up led by women.
Link from your blog post goes to https://www.bullethhq.com (extra h)!
Seems redundant, Outlook has that feature built-in.

(try deciphering a mail that went through multiple outlooks)
I had the same coming from working similar hours at a game company. I took two weeks off between jobs and had a massive crash, which took me months to recover from
Jogos de meninas
Well, you could pursue legal action under the DMCA for those sorts of actions in principle, but other than that, there is no need for a question mark on your first statement.

It is, if you like, the exact problem that copyright enforcement and digital rights management (DRM) have. No matter what you do, if you send me a threat and I really want to forward that to the police department, I can always hit "Print Screen." Simply showing X to me enables me to copy X. If you let me play music out of my headphones, I can always in principle connect my headphone jack to a computer's microphone input and get a lossy-but-acceptable DRM-free copy, because my headphone jack does not implement DRM. (In the early DRMed days of iTunes we used to do this with burning music to CDs, which iTunes allowed.

Just allowing a kid to enter the movie theater allows him to smuggle in a camera and post the video on BitTorrent. Just seeing is always sufficient for lossy copying, if only because we keep a lossy copy in our memories. (I've discussed this elsewhere but I'd prefer not to linkspam myself.)
Because they haven't hired the engineers yet.

A couple founders raising money and taking pre-orders can be cash flow positive. Then they will build out the team, it likely will be cashflow negative for a while (or else they wouldn't have raised money), and then hopefully it will be cashflow positive again.
Been 7 years, been burned out for nearly 6. ;) And I've been here since I've graduated university in 2005.

And to answer the next question: it's a bank. Every time I've contemplated leaving, there was some major life-changing event that prevented me from doing so (i.e. getting married, wife losing her job, buying a house, moving abroad, having a kid...). Likely I'm making some excuses here, but my point remains: I know a lot of hard-working hackers that simply don't have the time to build a decent GitHub profile.

Those hackers - whom I work with - all read HN extensively to stay abreast of trends, and toy around with side-projects. But all that "side coding" happens whilst at work. And therein lies the problem. If you have ever worked as a programmer on Wall St. you won't need me to spell it out for you, but for those who haven't: your firm owns your intellectual property. Even if it's not related to the firm's business, if you do that work on the firm's premises, it is theirs, and you are not entitled to export it. If you try it is generally considered as grounds for termination.
New Age Business Development: BD + Dev Evangelist
"First DO use packages that come with the OS."

I'd go middle ground, and start here, but consider a self-built package where necessary. It depends in part on the focus of your distro.

virtualenv. What problem does it solve? Different python version/environments? Wouldn't that be better solved with another (virtual) server? I understand if an extra $20/month is an issue, but otherwise ...
The Big Deal About Big Data
IPv6 now deployed across entire T-Mobile US network
I think these posts are something like productivity porn for life hackers or 4 hour work week people.

I definitely agree that 4 truly productive focused days of works beats 5 lackluster uncreative and unfocused days and I applaud creative work/life balance ideas. But, I think 5 truly productive focused days of works beats 4. As PG says, if you think of a startup as a chance to compress your whole working life to just a few years, you can probably attain that prolonged productivity at least for a few years. Yes, worry about burnout, give yourself time, etc... But one of the things startups do to beat big companies is outproduce them.

Obviously for lifestyle businesses and probably a variety of industries this may not apply. YMMV
What will be the shovels of the future gold rush? Maybe it would be a good time to develop mining robots? Rockets are completely out of my reach...
Thanks for the heads up - working now :)

https://www.bullethq.com/
Books are physical things, programs are not. Physical things are often thought to have more intrinsic value than virtual things because the money was transformed into something you can touch and feel versus a vague collection of bits somewhere on your gargantuan hard drive.
Aren't most (all?) knapsack solvers greedy?

That doesn't seem like a good idea just to arrange some images (battery killer?).
narcissistic personality disorder?
> First DO use packages that come with the OS. The OP says that you should not have the distro maintainers dictating what you use. I say, use what is widely available. It takes the headache out of a lot of your deployments. If you are looking for a library that converts foo to bar look in your distro's repos before going on GitHub. Your sysadmin will thank you.

The sysadmin will have no part in the game if you use packaged virtualenvs. OTOH developer time is expensive. Do you really want to pay your developers to implement functionality that a more recent version of a package has already implemented? A good example is IPv6 support in Twisted. It’s getting implemented right now but I guess (and hope) that I’ll need it sooner than it lands in major distros (please no “lol ipv6” here, it’s just an example and the support is growing).

> Second, DO NOT use virtualenv. It fixes the symptoms (Python's packaging system has many shortcomings such as inability to uninstall recursively, poor dependency management, lack of pre and post install scripts, etc.), but not the problem. Instead, use distro-appropriate packages.

I’m not sure what your problem is, but mine is that I don’t want to develop against a moving target and need to run apps with contradicting dependencies on the same host.

That’s how I started using virtualenv years ago BTW, I’m not talking ivory tower here.

> Integrate your app into the system.

Yes. And I prefer supervisor for that. If your prefer rc.d scripts, be my guest.

> You also get the ability to very nicely manage dependencies and a clean separation between code and configuration.

I don’t get this one TBH.

> Lastly, DO use apache + mod_wsgi. It is fast, stable, widely supported and well tested.

And nginx + uwsgi/gunicorn aren’t?

> If apache feels like a ball of mud, take the time to understand how to cut it down to a minimum and configure it properly.

I know Apache pretty well, because we’re running thousands of customers on them. I’ve already written modules for it and been more than once in it‘s guts. And my impression is not a good one.

My point was to look around before you settle. If you think Apache is da best, knock yourself out. However stuff I see daily on IRC lets me think that it isn’t very unproblematic.

I’m not going to start a “vi vs. emacs”-style holy war here. That’s why I wrote “shop around before you settle” and not ”don’t ever use Apache”.

> When it comes to infrastructure, making boring choices leads to predictable performance and less headaches more often than not (at least in my experience).

Absolutely. nginx is way past the “new and hacky” state though.
You’re right, you shouldn’t need to clean up after the first failure. I was thinking, say, new_a() succeeds and new_b() fails: you don’t need to free_b() but you definitely need to free_a(). The calling function is responsible for coordinating error handling amongst those functions it calls.

“…you should never need to unprepare_stuff”

I was just poking fun at the useless names.
Raspberry Pi onboard serial connection = kernel messages to a microprinter
Why should the goto be to one single target? Multiple goto statements are good for multiple clean ups without adding indentation levels and without having artificially long logic ands. For example:

int init_abc()
{
if (!init_a())
goto err_a;
if (!init_b())
goto err_b;
if (!init_c())
goto err_c;
return 1;

err_c:
cleanup_b();
err_b:
cleanup_a();
err_a:
return 0;
}

seems to be the cleanest way to do what it does in C. For what it's worth, it is the way a lot of error handling is done in the Linux kernel.
The problem with your multiple device solution is that it puts burden on the recipient, who's highly likely to have any idea what NOFWD is. The fingerprinting solution you outline next is highly flakey as well, as it would require a critical mass of users to gather the necessary data, and even then the kind of algorithms you'd need are orders of magnitude more complex than the ones Facebook etc. use, as those catch instances of users logging in from foreign countries (or perhaps states), and would not catch cases where the 3rd party is in the same city, a very likely case.

A typical scenario I imagine is that the recipient will lose the message, and end up emailing or calling back for the same information, which will annoy all parties (or possibly worse, they'll lose the information and ignore it forever), as well as require the information be transmitted more times than usual (something someone security conscious probably won't like).

I hate to be so critical of this service, but I just can't see this being useful. I wouldn't call this hitting a nail with a sledgehammer, it's more like hitting a nail with a six foot ceramic feather.
Fashion Styles Trends 2012
Fashion Styles Trends 2012
Teratogenic Effects of Pure Evil in Ursus Teddius Domesticus
Um, no, they don't. They're desperately trying to find a proxy for "is a good hire" without spending a lot of time on it. GitHub is just the latest in a long line of such.

I have some sympathy with them; recruiting is hard, vital to get "right", and susceptible to gaming by unscrupulous individuals. It's also hard to get rid of people once they're in (at least in the UK). However, this is WHY you have to spend a lot of time on it. There are no shortcuts. Adding another checkbox "Has GitHub account with code in it" to the process is futile. You know, it won't surprise me to see "faked" accounts with lots of (scripted) commits showing up. Easy to do. Or better, I'll sell you a convincing looking repository with some code and a cheat-sheet of what to say when asked about it at interview. Hey, cool new startup idea!
Firefox kills off favicon in URL bar
I do the same thing with my code, but I think it clutters it up and it's hard to follow the logic this way with clean up code all over the place.
Google Is Buying Friends In Congress
I can work with ROR for $15/hour(I live in a shitty country) and I'm interested in it(would rather get some equity and create a business with you :) ).

Add me on skype: art_is_t or e-mail me: t at art-is-t.me

Thanks.
Thanks, I'll try to address as many of these as I can. I've broken a few of these into groups below, as I think they have similar solutions.

====

I) Where's the utility of this tool?

> Right-click -> Save Image as -> forward to anybody you want

1) The purpose of this demo is just to establish if anyone finds this type of service useful. There are many ways to expand this technology so that it becomes far more complex to defeat.

2) Perhaps I've sent this information to many people, but I've automatically watermarked each image. Now I can track the information leak back to you and carry out some more traditional corrective procedures...

3) Maybe this product just isn't for you? Perhaps this product is best suited for companies and government organizations, where clear policies and penalties already provide effective deterrents. This service would just supplement these policy-instruments with additional automated protection, auditing and watermarking.

===

II) Minor technical challenges:

> Most email readers block images by default

It's easy enough to turn images on, in the most widely-used clients. Just looking at my inbox, embedded images are far from uncommon in emails.

> Answering by quoting your email just got really hard.

Answering by quoting email works great, if you're alright with quoting everything. The SMTP integration supports full HTML emails and shows the quoted email very similarly to the way that Gmail does.

====

III) Accessibility vs data protection tradeoffs. These are fine:

> Disabled persons who rely on screen readers and other assistance technologies just got screwed, thanks.

> Your email picture service is down or has server trouble, no recipient can read such mails anymore.

====

IV) Solvable problems:

> I've read your email at the office, now I can't read it at home, or on my iPhone, or vice versa.

This is solveable. See my other comment.

> Searching trough email by text will never find those emails because they contain no text.
Devices with small screen sizes (iPhone and the like) can't re-layout the text (as in word wrap), making such image emails really painful to read.

NOFWD keeps an archive of the messages you send through it (which you can choose to delete or disable if you wish.) You can search this.

====

V) Are these really a problem?:

> Some email services download images for you and don't link to your server.

Really? I'd like to know which. Haven't seen this happen yet.

> Cryptographic email signing becomes meaningless as the recipient can't parse the signature and message body to verify the hash.

> A lot of spam filters might screen out emails that are nothing but an image.