skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's interesting how Kickstarter has transformed donations for innovation into a shopping cart experience

I've been going back and forth about this, and I think the phrasing of the particular Kickstarter project controls whether it's more a donation or shopping cart experience. Think about the conversation like this:

- "Hey, can you chip in some money so I can spend a bunch of time making a really cool piece of software?"
- "Sure, I'd love to! I can spare $25. When do I get to play with your build?"
- "Oh, $25 isn't enough for you to access the software. That's just a donation. But you can buy a copy when it comes out."
- "..."

If the pitch is "chip in what you can, and we'll make a cool thing for everyone," then you set the stage for donations for innovation. If the pitch is "pay enough, and we'll give you a license to our cool thing," then you're offering a shopping cart experience. Which is fine, I use shopping carts all the time, but it's a different and less exciting thing.

This is maybe different with physical products -- if there's a cost per product, there obviously needs to be a minimum donation to get one. But with a virtual product, the reason you set a high donation threshold to get a copy is that you're selling a product rather than asking for a donation. Again, that's totally reasonable, but it's not as exciting to be part of.

As I keep thinking about it, I think there might be an uncanny valley effect here. If a software company I really like, like the Omni Group or Macromates, said they were doing presales of a revolutionary new product and needed me to buy in so it could get made, I would be psyched to do it. But this is halfway in between -- it's neither "donate to my cool project" nor "pre-order my cool product," but "donate to my cool product." I think that's where our gears start grinding a little.

I'm still up in the air about whether to donate to/purchase this one or not. Interesting stuff.
That's nothing.

In Portland, ME, where I grew up there used to be this huge blue drydock in the harbor. Occasionally I would see whole Burke class destroyers[1] lifted up out of the water in it. The end of the Cold War meant that the navy was downsizing, though, and eventually it was decided that there were better uses for the place. It was sold to a city in Croatia, and they somehow put floats underneath and just sailed the whole thing across the Atlantic. Then they built a few oil rigs where it used to be, and sailed those down to Venezuela.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_class
I can't help thinking that most of the programmers who program (a lot) in their spare time do so because they aren't satisfied at work.
These people you're talking about...they are called: "programmers".

That's how some programmers's brain being wired: category, structured, organized, etc. I'm guessing it is mainly because of the work we do every single day, single second, of our life, i.e.: that's what we do and we, fortunately or not, applied it to our daily life.
We made it easy for musicians to get people to their shows
I had a friend that made it through, he said they were told to keep it under wraps. There is precedent for teams that reveal it to lose their interview spot.
Okay let's take passion out of the way because the reality is Saas products are really boring. Let's just go with familiarity because I'll be the user of my own creation.
How to Beat IT Career Burnout
With all the 0x10C stuff that has been produced lately, I remembered I saw a game where you have to program AI to battle your opponents, but I couldn't remember the name.

Now I may have something to do :)
Almost a dozen years ago, I took a friend to a jam session. It just so happened, that one of his musical heroes, an Irish Uillean piper was on tour and decided to sit in. They hit it off well, and my friend became a protegé for awhile. Anyhow, the touring musician told my friend, "Don't try to play music for a living. It'll kill you."

Sometimes having to do something, especially if you can't do it exactly the way you like, can kill feelings for it. Sometimes having to do something for long hours can do the same. I'm not so sure having or lacking these tendencies makes one person better or worse than another.
Points for Zippy caps :)
That's what Starter Edition is.
I'm getting a bit tired of seeing bootstrap popping up almost everywhere I look, so a new UI toolkit like this one is welcome news. Variety and competition are good for everyone.
Your worldview differs from that of others. This happens a lot, no need to get all upset about it. "501 Developer" means absolutely nothing outside a very small group of people -- try not to sweat its significance.
Yeah, there is a 0.25 second CSS transition on it. It definitely feels sloppy. I tried 0.1s and that feels a lot better. And actually, 0.1s on :hover and 0.25s on the base selector gives a neat "sticky" effect.
If publishers can't cover costs w/ $10 ebooks they deserve to go out of business
Most user friendly device before iPhone was probably Danger's HipTop aka T-Mobile Sidekick. It was actually fun to use, and innovated smartphone usability in huge number of ways. But it seemed marketed as more of a toy, too bad.
I hate their stance toward SSL. When one of the sites on Cloudflare needed SSL the only thing you could do was turn off caching for HTTPS.

Since then they've added an SSL service where you can get an SSL cert from them. It only SSL's the traffic from the client to Cloudflare, not from Cloudflare back to the server so you've still got part of your transport not secured. I wonder how many people bought into that service without realizing that. (You can have Cloudflare connect HTTPS back to your server, but they still offer that partially covered option for some reason).
I went to the article expecting a "windtrap" design. I came here expecting a "Dune" reference. Got disappointed on both counts.

Anyway, shouldn't this thing use a bigger collection area?
Some interessting points from Elon himself from the SpaceX homepage on that:

http://www.spacex.com/usa.php

Also includes some costs and so on.

The major points here for me are:

1. Fast and cheap development

2. Profitable since 2007

3. Three own lauch sites at existing locations
That really wasn't my point, but I didn't do a good job of developing it. In a nutshell: if nothing is done to stem the tide of entire industries being shipped from North America to China one has to wonder how long it will be before there's no economy to speak of. Yes, yes, I'm aware economics pundits would have us all believe that the glorious shift to an "information economy" is the grand way forward and anything that smacks of isolationism is to be roundly rejected (for reasons that are entirely mysterious to me), however the unemployment numbers in the US and the decline of real wages over the last 30 years suggests something else altogether.
Fear and Loathing in Infosec: A Savage Journey
Definitely some good points. I can relate with, "But the second part makes it sound like your days of learning and creating ended when you got your diploma. I can’t respect that." I have a friend (an EE with several jobs offers out of college but who chose to take the most cushy government job that was nothing but paperwork) try to make me feel guilty for spending my spare time working programming a side project rather than going out. He claimed "we graduated, we're done 'really' working" and after talking to him made me realize that he hadn't ever really enjoyed the classes in his major or what he's doing now. I understand there are a lot of people who find satisfaction in their lives outside of work but I think that there are many who never make finding their true passion in life a priority.
Reminds me of this oldie but goodie:

Good umpire: "I call 'em as I see 'em."

Better umpire: "I call 'em as they are."

Best umpire: "They aren't anything until I call 'em."

Same thing:

Good programmer: "I am a <501 or xxx> developer."

Better programmer: "Watch what I do. That's how you do <xxx>."

Best programmer: "Whatever this project needs me to be, that's what I am."
I am always shocked that this tactic isnt used more often. Everyone loves a freebie, and as the article explains- doesn't need to cost the earth!
I was confused by this at first also. Open source means you can look at the source code. Sometimes it means more than that (often depending on who is using the term).

GNU's criticism of open source: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...
The Perils of Paying for Status
There is nothing innovative going on here. She is simply restoring an old GM product. This has been done as a right of passage by many youngsters as a way to get behind the wheel and show their parents responsibility.

Building an electric Jensen while retaining the dark princess's electronics, then I would be impressed.
Guess what will be the first thing to go upon sale of the patent? As soon as there is a modicum of financial pressure to unload some patents saddled with this albatross, the buyers will have the power to strip this out.

Call me cynical, but this will never work. Frankly, I'm not sure I think it should work. It smells of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I think "invest" is the correct word. In the context of the financial industry, "invest" usually implies that you have purchased actual stock in a company. But in general, the word means that you have committed something of value to someone else, and hence, your well-being is tied to theirs. We also say that a teacher is invested in their students success because they have committed their time and effort to help those people succeed. In this circumstance, NASA has given SpaceX money, and if SpaceX does not succeed, that will hurt NASA. If SpaceX does succeed, that will help NASA. NASA could have, instead, used that $381 million to try to do it themselves; that money is now gone, and if SpaceX fails, NASA won't get a do-over. For those reasons, I think it's accurate to say to then say that NASA is invested in SpaceX.
I wonder if it's related to odd traffic spikes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3856364

I usually get flagged when following popular links from Twitter. I just find it highly annoying their support doesn't care. When this happens, I just get told to wait 72 hours or whatever and go back to the site. I wonder how many users sites lose because of that.
IMHO this is one of the most complicated questions to answer. Probably ranking just like the TechCrunch hyped "Stop Looking For A Technical Co-founder" article from 3 days ago...

Finding the right people is always super-complicated. Not only in regards to startups but overall... where do huge, global companies get their talent from? How do they find the right people? Probably interviewing dozens of people (or many, many more) to find one good to great match. However for them it might be easier because they have way more resources to do so...

For 'just two people' it's way harder. Where to look? Who to ask? How to get the word out that you're looking for somebody?

I think the overall answer is probably also the most obvious one: get out there and tell people i) about what you're working on, and ii) who you're looking for. Go to all the startup events, and meetups, etc., tell your friends about it and ask them to spread the word further, post it across all the social networks out there, ask questions like this here on HN, or Quora, etc. Make noise and hope to get people interested. Let's hope at least one person will be so interested in what you're building that he wants to get involved to help you market it.

But of course - and as mentioned before - this whole finding the right person thing, is one of the most complicated things ever. :) E.g. when using the 'going to events and meetups' as an example - what in my experience most of the time happens is, that people go there, who're looking for somebody to help them with THEIR idea. Usually there are almost no people looking to HELP with somebody else's idea.

That's part of the reason we came up with the idea to create http://Founder2be.com - it's a place for people to find the right person to help, e.g. a marketing co-founder, a tech co-founder, etc.

Full disclosure: I work for Founder2be.
Spain Is Doomed
Thanks for posting this... I just joined. It will be good to get some local hackers together that also happen to love the outdoors!
That's why I carefully said "implication". He doesn't come out and say it because it would be wrong; he just tries to slander by association.

Furthermore, the FAST data will not result in the refusal of travel (without further evidence) nor will it result in an invasion of privacy which we do not already allow at random. The author is purposefully confusing logically separate issues in order to confuse the reader. The author's argument, as stated, could be directed at any form of intelligence gathering by TSA whatsoever, an obviously wrong conclusion.
Can anyone help me understand the usage of these literals (2.1.1, 2.1.2)? Why and for what are they useful?
Amen, Brother Techdirt. That's been my thought when I hear about price-fixing, and how much an "e-book" costs. Criminy, some paperbacks are less than $10.
I wonder if they're thinking of going to a for-profit model where users pay to take a class and earn a certificate.

On a side note, who owns the course material a professor creates while employed at a university?
The problem I see with this is that it doesn't (and, I think, can't) really account for the future. Suppose you see that Twitter has a patent on buttons that you have to quadruple click, and you think they'll only use it defensively, so you make a free jQuery plugin called t4p, which implements quadruple clickable buttons.

Three years pass and now a new service, Blithr (like Twitter but messages are limited to 18 characters and all caps) has stolen Twitter's thunder and Twitter is facing bankruptcy. They are forced to sell off their assets, including their patents, and those end up in the hands of a patent troll.

And suddenly, people who used your plugin are having to defend themselves in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
There's a difference between programming for work and programming for pleasure.

When I program for pleasure, I'll do whatever I want and leave unfinished pieces all over the place.

When I program for work, I'm getting paid for something someone else wants me to do. I'm I'm not getting paid, then I'm not working on that code. If that makes me a 501 programmer than so be it.
what you say is true, but also that getting a good grade is a strong motivator and that is not available unless you follow the deadline regime. Perhaps what is needed are more slow paced courses that you could fast track and finish faster if you wish to do so.
This is the general category:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_game
But you don't get to be Mozart or Van Gogh by being well-balanced.

My translation: The actions and intentions of most people are aimed at not becoming Mozart or Van Gogh -- as in not dying destitute in your 30's and being buried in a pauper's grave.
If you're into this kind of thing, you should check out Battlecode (http://www.battlecode.org). It's primarily an MIT competition, but in recent years we've opened it up to the general public. Also, several YC alums are former devs.
"Programming through the screen" is still used today: http://www.aniomagic.com/sparkle/
What was happening in SK was that the hardware of the device started mattering more to consumers than the content on it. They tried to duplicate this in the US with Helio and failed. Unlike in SK, the bandwidth doesn't' make up for the crappy device, since our cell network is so far behind.

South Korea made content owners supper optimistic about things like "Comes with Music" (from Nokia) and the "dead-before-launching" Beyond Oblivion. Lock in via cell hardware was their last hope.
It's just a single paper by a single lab, and probably a pretty small lab. This isn't Merck running a clinical trial.
> In any sane world...

The problem seems to be that we don't live in a sane world.
Actually the law was written very carefully so as not to be tied just to cookies. Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) [1], after applying the 2011 amendment [2] reads:

(1) Subject to paragraph (4), a person shall not store or gain access to
information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user
unless the requirements of paragraph (2) are met.

(2) The requirements are that the subscriber or user of that terminal
equipment-

(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the
purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and

(b) has given his or her consent.

(3) Where an electronic communications network is used by the same person to
store or access information in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or
user on more than one occasion, it is sufficient for the purposes of
this regulation that the requirements of paragraph (2) are met in
respect of the initial use.

(3A) For the purposes of paragraph (2), consent may be signified by a
subscriber who amends or sets controls on the internet browser which
the subscriber uses or by using another application or programme to
signify consent.

(4) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to the technical storage of, or access to,
information—

(a) for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a
communication over an electronic communications network; or

(b) where such storage or access is strictly necessary for the provision
of an information society service requested by the subscriber or user.

No mention of cookies, and "information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user" would seem to apply to solutions that use HTML5 local storage, ETag headers, Flash LocalSharedObjects or any other similar technologies.

[1]: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/contents/made

[2]: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1208/contents/made
I agree fully. Actually I didn't bother reading the original past the passage you outlined, about pity and respect. People who work on something they aren't passionate about deserve neither, and their sacrifice will go unnoticed. I'm yet to see great software developer who doesn't do shit the minute he's out of he office.
You forgot: make sure you can trust every admin who has access to read your mail, and trust that they won't have weak passwords. And all that still won't help you if someone in the federal government want to read your email, because that's literally a one-page request and they'll have it.
I'm satisfied with my work, but I also realize that because of the industry that I'm in (low-level embedded), I'll be writing about 90% of code in C. So if I want to dabble in something else, then I'll be doing it on my own time.
Here's something better:

-- The 416 Developer Manifesto --

* I get hired because I'm good at what I do, and excited about it.

* I'm good at what I do and excited about it because I get enough time outside of work to pursue my interests.

* If you want to maintain my value as an employee, make sure I get enough off-time.
But each person loses maybe $20 (a few other donate more, but the average I see on Kickstarter is $25).
If a scammer takes off with your $25, you are sad but not burned badly.

You probably will review the next 'investment' better, make sure they have a track record. The result is, only folks with some kind of reputation will find support at Kickstarter.

That's not exactly a bubble bursting. More like a market narrowing?
This definitely applies to me.

I'm in my first job, I've been doing this for almost 2 years now. Everything about this place screams "Mediocrity". Most of my coworkers are middle-aged programmers with average skills and no hope of ever becoming anything beyond average. All they want to do is work their 9-5 hours (in all fairness most of them stay until 6), and daydream about the next way to spend their 35day/year vacations (not to mention the ~20 days of public holidays. Yay France!).

I'm not satisfied, a better word would be "fulfilled" at work. I am the youngest of a 50+ programmer team, (not-so-)freshly graduated and I'm regarded as the best dev on the team. Because I love programming, because I don't want to stop learning, because I care.

The only thing that's kept me going for so long is the 2-3 hours of "real" programming I put in every evening. So far my gf's being very comprehensive about that, but I know things will change when kids will come into play. One of the main reasons I read HN is to remind myself that interesting, fulfilling jobs do exist. One day...
The world only had one Mozart and one Van Gogh. There never was and never will be a second Mozart or a second Van Gogh.

As such, the statement itself taken literally is extremely silly and doesn't have enough details to be interpreted figuratively.

Let's say for the sake of argument that you mean "genius that contributes works of art". One common trait of such a person, besides being incredibly talented, is persistence. This would imply in the minds of lesser individuals that such a genius is impossible to have a well-balanced life.

However, the pitfall of such a mentality is that having work-life balance does NOT mean diving the time equally between work and life and is extremely relative, being a function of the individual itself, his work, his culture and the society around him.

What this means is that the actual amount of time spent on doing something is actually less important than the quality. Say, if you're spending 5 hours with your son but being distracted by problems at work you're going to please yourself and your son less than a single hour of enjoying the present moment. This goes for anything you want to do ... top athletes and top violinists spend less time practicing than their peers, but the training is a lot more intense.

And to answer your implied conclusion ... quite the contrary, being a genius capable of creating things is correlated with a sane mind and a sane mind needs a good work-life balance.
Show HN: A Student's Twitter Search College Project
As a side-note, it is not just IE that is affected, any browser which relies on the bundled OS encryption libraries has the same problem.

It has been a while since I checked (I did a fair bit of SNI-related research for the HTTPS support in https://pagekite.net/), but at the time Chrome and Firefox on XP also lacked SNI support on WinXP for [edit: what I assumed was] this reason.

I think Chrome has since bundled their own crypto code so recent versions of Chrome on XP do work, but I am not sure about Firefox. I didn't test Opera.

This was also an issue on Linux desktops relatively recently, for alternative browsers like wget and KDE's Konqueror.
Have you considered the reduction in cross-license value that this causes to the patents? Cross-licenses may be ugly, but they are much better than litigation because they allow companies to get back to actually doing productive stuff.

Most of the companies I know would be much less likely to give full weight to a portfolio burdened with this sort of agreement, simply because litigation is the stick that brings companies to the negotiating table. If one party to a proposed cross-license has preemptively given up the ability to act offensively, that makes cross-license agreements either harder to get or more expensive.

I recognize that in a negotiation, a company could use clause three to "defensively" assert against a company that is also making assertions with an eye to a cross license, but then you get into the situation I described in another comment, where you keep the legal contract but break the social one.
RegExr Interactive Regular Expressions
I couldn't reply before to your post because the reply link was missing (guess the system does not allow too many post in a given period of time), so I used my former post and put an "EDIT+my reply" in order to comment on your words. I should have waited and replied properly. Thanks for your understanding.