skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't you just shoot them a polite e-mail.

Say you're bringing your pricing structure inline to be fair across the board.

Give them plenty of notice - say 3 months. Give them the opportunity to cancel if need be. Even go as far as to recommend another service they can migrate to.

At the end of the day your company would be more profitable without these users than with them. If you can turn them into a profitable customer - bonus!
Sounds like an excellent idea, I think. I've often thought the HN model could be applied to different fields as long as you attract the right kind of user and gain the critical mass necessary. Good luck!
I've come to learn that people will copy everything. I once built an iPhone app that seems to have topped out at around $500/year in income; barely enough to secure a developer for a day. Yet, I found two apps that I would consider clones of mine with many similar characteristics, not just someone trying to enter the same market.

I was quite flattered to see them, but I remain curious why they'd go after such small potatoes? It seems like copying something that has a sustainable business model would be the better choice.
That reminds me of this classic tweet:

Your mobile phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. NASA launched a man to the moon. We launch a bird into pigs.

Instagram or omgpop or space travel, its all about priorities.
This article serves to fracture the community in a manner disturbingly similar to that in which the 'smug functional programmers' he complains about do. I can't help but sigh.

I think the recent rise in popularity of functional programming is a sign that more people are beginning to approach computing from a 'computer science' perspective as opposed to a 'programming' one. That is, to say, that the industry has matured to a point in which a significant portion of industry programmers are getting excited about some of the more abstract concepts brought to us through functional programming.

Few people will argue that the concepts underlying FP don't take some time to internalize, but the number and quality of FP learning resources is increasing at an incredible rate. This, alone, makes me skeptical of the author's points — people are going out of their way to create accessible learning resources so that they might share something they find to be useful/interesting. In any movement of any kind, there will always be evangelists. Some (read: most) of these evangelists will be overly aggressive and preachy, but they are rarely (read: never) representative of the larger body.

In the past two years I've become quite a fan of Clojure, and I have found the community to be tight-knit, welcoming and eager to share.
This labelling (501 or !501) is pointless and arbitrary. I'm a self-employed developer with four children. Some days I work until 11p or even as late as 1a. Some days I quit at 2p and take in a child's soccer game. This isn't a label as much as a choice every day. Both choices come at a cost. Big deal. All choices come at a cost. If I choose family over work, in all likelihood the perception of my dedication will suffer. Contrapositively, if I choose work over family, my relationships will need repair. The labels are meaningless, and perpetually choosing one side is simple indicative of a life out-of-balance. This is all just a side-effect of scarcity of time, and the labelling sounds like an attempt on both sides to justify choices. Ultimately, if I want to be done working at 5:01p (or any other time), then I am, and I take responsibility for those choices and the potential damage to my career. If I want to work until midnight, then I do, and I take responsibility for that choice and the potential damage to my relationships or the hinderance of my pursuit of other goals. Call it whatever you like. Why do we need a manifesto to categorize daily personal choices?
Square is one of the few startups in recent memory that truly have a 'killer app.'
Is it me or do Euro austerity measures seem to drive a certain segment of economic commentators nuts? The number of articles I've seen raging about "evil" Germany forcing Greece / Italy / Spain to the brink of destruction with austerity measures. It's like they're afraid of something. What if austerity measures work? Is that going to burst someone's bubble?
I sometimes use data, but normally that's for a specific purpose - when I have a function that takes a void* in order to fit to a generic function template, which I then cast to something in every function of that type.

e.g.

typedef void (*function_t)( void* );

void someFunction( void* data ) {
myStruct_s* myStruct = data;

// do something with myStruct

}
I agree. I did not mean to marginalize the other issues, just emphasize the very negative effects of labor policy. Spain has been an unemployment leader for 20 years, long before this recent bubble and even the Euro, so in some fashion policy has to play a larger role than outside influences.

Spain has become a victim of the "perfect storm" in regards to internal and external forces.
Facebook Introduces Groups for Schools
Gross vs Net
Fantastic. I will definitely use this. Very relaxing.

UI could use some polish. What if you had a "big" featured track at the top and then more options below?

http://imgur.com/5IBlu (MS Paint copy and paste)

The columns below would be channels/categories.
=˜=ourstage
He already does - check out his recent Daily Show interview: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-april-10-2012-...
Light Table IDE plegde levels are more affordable after Hacker News criticism
Awesome, you sir have just gotten a new pledge! I am much more confident knowing that you'll listen to feedback.
In PHP, I sometimes giggle when I see $hit as a variable name, or when people catch exceptions as $ex.
I must add then that it was just below 0 degrees C! Don't fancy minus eighteen at all.
Or from another perspective, the entire cost of SpaceX's history to develop all these technologies is less than a SINGLE launch of the Shuttle by NASA.
I'm not terribly versed in board voting policies. But if Zuck has 57% of the voting shares is there a way for the board to block this if they wanted to? Or I guess more precisely, aren't all the FB board votes symbolic?
I seriously doubt he makes a move without Sandy's approval.
POF passes 100M weekly messages, 2 Billion Pageviews/Week
Not quite. The rich people have insurance policies that put the screws to the hospital to get an amazingly good deal. The make-up money comes from people who have crappy insurance policies and/or just enough money to pay. If you can spend the rest of your life paying off your hospital stay, you will.
Not all the G+ streams are empty, so that dilemma only really has one horn. Bot-posting would raise the noise floor so as to swamp the current (small) signal. Better to attempt growing the signal itself before adding in a bunch of noise that the users will have to sort through.

Now, if one could separate off each user from their bots... that would be neat. Maybe default to only circling a user, but show that they have some bots which one can also subscribe to, if one wants.
There are definitely problems with GDP, but you didn't just identify one of them. To keep things simple (at first) assume that in your example, all of the man's income otherwise goes under a mattress, doing nothing to improve the economy. The case of the man giving a job to maid is definitely worth more to the economy than the man who sticks it all under the mattress.

In the real world, the money doesn't go under a mattress, of course. It gets spent, invested, etc. Your example doesn't represent reality at all, because both men, whether giving money to the maid or not, add way more than $200k to the economy, because by buying goods and services they are basically giving fractions of jobs to workers all across the economy.

GDP tries to measure the economic activity of a nation. Saying it's a bad measure of individual wealth, while true, is completely beside the point. It was never meant to measure that. Someone who puts themselves into debt building a business will have a negative net wealth for quite a while. Doesn't mean they aren't adding value to the economy.
No need to install/use any app besides my web browser? Well done, sir!
Sergey Brin Loves Apple Products
Avi Bryant is the original creator of Seaside - an acclaimed Smalltalk Web framework.

He was active in the Ruby community.

The company he co-founded was acquired by Twitter. Then he worked in Tumblr ...

So in a nutshell he is well known in the startup world. Or at least this is my impression..
.
When has quarrels between the board and the CEO of non-public companies ever been the concern of criminal law?
OpenEducationFormat?
This is still a privately held company. Everyone who owns shares know damn well that Zuck holds a controlling interest and can has the full authority and right to do these kinds of deals with minimal oversight. They've conceded fiscal oversight for a big payday.
Instagram In The Hands of Facebook: My Prediction (Haz Mockups)
Apple's Business Model Vulnerability, Exposed by a French Upstart, Free Mobile
The European crisis has nothing to do with the inflated public spending. That's just the spin that American and especially conservative media have pursued for obvious reasons. Greece does less public spending than Germany, for example (check the OECD data).

Things that actually caused the crisis: a flawed shared currency system that lacks risk sharing mechanisms, an unregulated government bond market riddled with moral hazard, state corruption.
Keynes would say that non-productive work is not valueless, because it still stimulates the economy by enabling those diggers to be consumers. Not that I subscribe to the theory, but there are many well-respected experts who do.

I think that if they're intelligent in their austerity, then it'll be this non-productive stuff that gets cut. And what the big-government Keynesians so frequently miss is that the government spending crowds out the private sector. If the government frees up those resources (people, money, etc.), then the private sector can use it to produce something that people want to pay for.

But even if Spain isn't so intelligent in their austerity, well, just because something needs to be done doesn't mean that it's the government that must do it. There will still be every opportunity for private industry, or even Spain's underground economy, to fill in the void.
With the new early beta access for $50, I'm in.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not saying, "Hey, to hell with your kids, we've got commits to make!". I actually got hammered pretty hard a while back for defending the stance of fathers telling VCs/bosses/etc. to fuck off when asked to choose between family and code. That's the right thing to do.

But, there is a real problem, right? We can't really judge a person by anything other than their programming value--and the vast majority of us, here on HN, are only somewhat qualified to do that much.

Even in a seemingly simple case such as whether or not we should ascribe personal value to somebody who has had kids, we can't assign value easily. Do they support their kids? Do they beat their kids? If yes, is it for good reason? If yes again, how often do they beat them? Even something as seemingly clear-cut as that is a transparent as mud.

Are they homosexual? Are they polyamorous? Are they racist? Are they sexist/genederist? Are they a fan of classical music? Do they play an instrument? Do they like the Yankees?

All of that is stupidly subjective in terms of valuation. Why bother?

Programming, though--and more particularly, how they contribute to the community of programmers--is something that we can at least try to reason about. Something we can attempt to quantify (and yes, you can game lines of code, you can gain commit counts, etc.).

Lastly, note the attitude of the ancestral post:

"I'll never put in 80 hours in a week for you. I'm sorry, but there are more important things in life than programming. Maybe I'll never be the best programmer, but I think I'll be a better person."

That's a little high-and-mighty, yes? Didn't even bother to qualify "more important things in life than programming". There are, but that was an unsupported statement that we can't expect anyone who values programming above all else to agree with. The "better person" bit, too--better than whom? Themselves having chosen to value programming more? Us, the hapless codemonkeys who see a chance to make progress for everyone? Who?

I don't begrudge people that are punchclock coders. If you ignore what I do outside of my day job (which admittedly is secondary to my startup efforts), I qualify--and I come in late and leave early!

What I cannot stand, however, are people that make unsubstantiated claims, that come off as holier-than-thou, and that seem to be unable to grasp that they can insult a whole group of people without meaning to.
Live Stream from AWS Summit
Tim Berners-Lee: Tell Facebook, Google you want your data back
Cutting spending frees up cash to repay bonds, that money then makes its way back into the private economy.
My gut tells me that smart email isn't a web-based solution - it's a local one. What matters is knowing about how you work, and the information to do that isn't on the web, it's on your hard drive.

Web processes cannot afford to work on optimizing results for you in the background, they are focused on getting your answer quick and then moving on to the next customer. On the other hand, right now I've probably got 98% idle CPU on the 8 cores of this machine which could be figuring out when and how to deal with my email by looking at the terabytes of local data I've collected over the past few years.

It's a shrink wrapped product, not a service. Given how well Google and Facebook can serve individually targeted ads over the web based on a handful of CPU cycles, odds are that a dedicated local service could handle email if utilizing idle CPU cycles.
Show HN: Curated videos for HN Community
Does Kickstarter get a cut?
Man I wish this could be replicated in train construction - Florida is exploring this. One downside however, is you get what the private developer wants - so they're ending up with a train station at Orlando airport instead of downtown Orlando where it should be. Government is uniquely incentivised to do that right because they gain from increasing property values near where the train will go. Unfortunately local developers won't be so nice as to pony up more for that kind of thing even though they will reap disproportionate rewards. Another example - here in Reno, we're trying to build Bus Rapid Transit through a main corridor that is undergoing a pretty great revitalization. People in NV are especially not cool with traditional way for raising taxes for this kind of project (a la 1 cent sales tax just for BRT/streetcar).

It begs to ask, if the developers nearby are going to gain so much, why aren't they building it themselves? Too many groups that won't take risk... I mean probably 1,000 people who own buildings there will benefit disproportionately... you are never going to get them together to pony up for a streetcar. But the proof is there... look at Portland for a US example... also Seattle and SF and San Diego. Its just easier to get the government to do it. They should put a local surcharge on property values. Its only fair. However, they will f- this project up I'm sure... just like NASA spent a kabillion extra dollars just to build certain parts in certain senator's home states... and my other local train is going to have a snack bar so the Sonoma County housewives that will never ride the train can get a snack; instead of more seats and bike space.
I suspect FP will have more resistance to cargo-cult application. I suspect far fewer people who have a partial understanding of FP will be able to hold a job doing FP than was the case for OOP.

Heck, I know of one programmer who not only held an OOP programming job, but got to write a major subsystem -- with all long deeply nested class-side methods with 4 to 5 temp variables acting as merge-sort style incrementing indexes and not a single instance method or instance variable in sight. Last I heard, she was promoted and has great job security.
Here's one... give it an upvote... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3858109
This 1 hr podcast is a great example of that: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/04/burkhauser_on_t.htm...

Basically, by changing the way you look at the numbers, the story changes from "The middle class has disappeared over the last 30 years" to "The middle class has done great and become wealthy over the last 30 years"
Oh, stop. I'm tired of hearing about "smug" being the worst thing ever. Too easy to toss this insult around.

Instead, personally my issue with functional programming is the aversion to side effects. It seems to cause a lot of weird contortions, when the whole reason we make software in the first place is for the side effects. Programming in a functional style brings with it a lot of wonderful, powerful ideas. But that one has always struck me as unfortunate.
Pebble killed it on Kickstarter. Now what?
Getting Fancy with the Console
I disagree - choosing a language is not choosing a placebo. Languages are tools, and need to be chosen appropriately. Often the exact choice will not matter (compare Java/C# or Python/Ruby), but sometimes it will.

"it's not for me" is not a valid excuse, it means you cannot handle the tool. This is your fault. A valid excuse is "it's not for my application domain".
Disrupting Dust
Right, that's what I meant. You only get scalability as long as you don't have cross-partition transactions.
My guess is that the biggest hurdle isn't the technical challenge but professor retention. I would imagine that some professors sign up but then a big grant or other obligation comes up and they just no longer have the time.

Does anyone know for sure?
Six months of unemployment per year of employment? Where are these figures from?

For unjustified firing, the employer has to pay 33 days of salary for each worked year (was 45 before the recent labor law reform)[1]

Not even the unemployment subsidy, which is given by the social security and paid for workers with taxes on their monthly pay, is that big (4 months for the first year, and 2 months more every 6 additional months worked, with a limit of 24 months).

[1] http://www.eitb.com/en/news/detail/828511/austerity-measures...
Can we stop saying "hologram"? It was no more a hologram than a movie shown at a theater is a hologram. The word "Hologram" has a very specific meaning; this isn't it.

It's exceedingly silly that people are freaking out about this, Elvis impersonators have been a cultural cliche for decades and I'm sure there are Tupac impersonators.
Do you use C++ for high-level application programming that has no performance requirements?

I understand this has been done a number of times.
There is the HCRA surcharge (at least in New York state) that gets applied to many hospital and physician services. Part of the money from that is used to pay for these hospital services.

Edit: Clarification
IE7 and IE8 both support Windows XP, but sans SNI. They could have shipped Vista version of their SSL library with IE7/8 but they didn't.
Good points. Space-X while super impressive is like Jet Blue or Southwest vs. a legacy airline with legacy costs and a wide territory they serve.
He's the original co-founder of Seaside, the Smalltalk framework. He then went to work on a startup called DabbleDB and at Twitter. He's like the Steve Albini of the tech world. Really brilliant guy. He also gave a talk that was called "Rails is obsolete(so's everything else)" in 2010 I think.Check out his talks here: http://blog.redtexture.net/2010/10/30/avi-bryants-presentati...
All Musk is saying is that they bid the project as a Firm Fixed Price (FFP) contract. Most contractors aren't willing to do that with untried technologies b/c of the possibilities of cost overruns. For instance when the government buys Humvees for the army they pay a Firm fixed amount per vehicle because the contractor knows exactly how much one should cost and charges more than that to the government.

For a brand new stealth fighter though, there are a lot of unknowns and a lot of development to do before they can build the first plane. The contractor can say "We think we can do all the necessary research for this with 100 people over 3 years plus $2 billion in additional costs for materials and to contract out the construction of new factories etc. All that added up would be $5 billion (plus $100 million per additional month beyond 3 years) and we expect a 15% return in profit on this development." This is called a Cost plus Fixed Fee contract. If they were to bid it as a firm fixed price contract they would just say "we want $3 billion per plane for the rest of time" and the government would likely overpay comparatively. The government agrees to the cost plus fixed fee terms because the know it allows the contractors to price their offering lower if they don't have to take on the risk.

So option 1: Government takes on risk of overruns but pays a lower price if on time and on budget.
Option 2: Contractor takes on the risk and makes out like a bandit if they are on time and on budget.
Like get glasses?
One Web App = One Language
Undergrad students build Montreal's only electron accelerator
Although many European countries also have generous policies, I think Spain is fairly unique in terms of the sheer level of generosity (and inflexibility) baked in to their labour laws. The only other comparable European state is Greece and their unemployment figures are running very close to those of Spain.

Edit:
And the reason Spain's overall unemployment rate is even worse than Greece is probably as you say due to the fact that they've suffered more than most from the housing and construction bust (since it accounted for such a large section of their economy).

Edit 2: I think that both my argument and yours are overly simplistic. There are so many other factors at play which make it difficult (impossible) to point a finger at one particular cause. Examples: corruption, over reliance on tourism, lack of focussed structural investment (e.g. infrastructure), byzantine business laws and regulations, large sections of society regarding tax evasion as socially acceptable (with equally lax enforcement from the government) etc. Also, in Spain's case, there's also the dynamics of the Catalan and Basque issues to consider (which have economic impacts as well).
We were talking about more long-term illnesses like cancer and the like, not emergency care, in that specific occasion.
"Facebook could have started an entire space program for less money than they spent on Instagram"

Space-x spent cash. Facebook bought Instagram primarily with stock.
It's all about comprehension. Can the code be easily comprehended? Here's an example from the jquery docs:

$.ajax({
url: 'ajax/test.html',
success: function(data) {
$('.result').html(data);
alert('Load was performed.');
}
});

Looks pretty easy to comprehend to me. And as far as $data2 goes, is it easily comprehensible? It's perfectly normal in functional programming to append a modifier to your variable name like so: data -> data' . To indicate that the contents of the two are related.

Finding absolutes in programming is a tough business. Rather than worrying about exact best and worst practices I find it more productive to just make things easy and fast. If using data or data2 makes your code easy to comprehend then do it. If not dont.