skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comment isn't clear, but you make a few good points.

Short-run profits are maximized by producing at the point where marginal benefit = marginal costs (I think you state as much: "If unit sold goes up by more than the lost per unit profit, then that's a winning proposition."). Apple might want to produce these if the cost equation works (it might not--see below.).

You're also addressing the halo effect ("If people convert to the Apple brand, then Apple is going to make tons more than just that first sale.") This is anecdotally true: after I bought my first iPod in 2004, I purchased my first Mac in 2005 and now purchase Apple products as I'm happier in their ecosystem.

With that being said, what will Apple cut back on to generate large margins for a $800 MBA? Do they decrease storage? Produce a smaller (9.6") laptop? I really don't see how they go to $800 and preserve margins.
It's a consideration, what with the terms 'geek' and 'nerd' having negative connotations (geek much less so).

'Brogramming' feels like a knee-jerk reaction to boot out the socially awkward, reclusive stereotypes ignorantly associated with being technically proficient.

Interesting to note that in its attempt to do this, it's merely exchanging one set of stereotypes for another. It doesn't really solve the perception problem these people seem to have.
Gaseous emissions from dinosaurs may have warmed prehistoric Earth
This is exactly it. It's very easy to look at a field we only have a surface understanding of, and conclude it's all fairly straight forward after and expert in the field makes it look easy. I've found that in construction, as in software, there really is a very wide range of expertise too. Some of the tradesmen really know their art, and some are just slapping something together because by the time the customer realses it's probably too late.

Perhaps the biggest difference with software might be that physical reality places greater constraints on the solution space. With software it's easy to innovate the constraints of the pieces to a greater extent, which can easily have unforseen consequences. The difference is not so much that working around constraints is harder, but with every project they can be hugely different. A problem that I suppose design patterns attempt to ameliorate. If only design patterns could be foisted on designers the way physical reality is.
Show HN: My 62yo dad's online dating help site
Correlation is not causation. One could just as easily argue that it was the intervention of western powers (France and the US) in Southeast Asia that gave the communists legitimacy which then lead to the holocaust in Cambodia. Liberalization in Vietnam had more to do with changes in China and improved relations with the United States, than the Berlin Wall.
And then combine with a motion capture system for your hands to be able to manipulate virtual 3d objects that give haptic feedback.
The reason is that Clang does not support all architectures that HelenOS needs support for.
Pelles is a very nice IDE and (LCC based) compiler with C99 & C11 support: http://www.smorgasbordet.com/pellesc/
The same thing that made scorched earth so popular. Simple, addictive gameplay.
It makes perfect sense to simply purchase 1 lottery ticket. Takes your chances from 45,379,619:0 to 45,379,619:1, for a negligible cost.

Beyond that your time is wasted, statistician or not.
Backing up your Twitter account with the t ruby gem
The even more famous one was Hoover, who were offering free flights to the USA if you bought a vacuum cleaner.
They were shocked(!) to discover people were buying 100GBP appliances to get a free flight worth 500GBP.

Then they decided to get 'creative'. They offered people flights that involved multiple inconvenient changes, or gave passengers in the south of England flights that left from the North of Scotland and v.v. They set up fake call centers who would ring customers up and tell them that the flight had been changed and send them to the wrong airport, they would send others long complex legal forms to sign which in the small print actually waived the prize.

The result after paying out a few million quid in tickets, several 100,000 in fines and a lot of annoyed customers - is that 20years later the company that was the generic term for vacuum cleaner in the UK is now known mostly for the con.
Debugging node.js memory leaks
3 Observations For Other First-Time Founders
Seriously? That went to the front-page? more and more shit make it on hackernews...
I like that their documentation quality is the first of their four big selling points on their landing page, that bodes well. Cheers, I'll check them out.
Value creation is somewhat orthogonal to motives. Monsanto is generally considered evil, they also help feed a large chunk of the worlds population.
Maybe YC should pivot and give founders 7% as a royalty for their idea?
I take offense to the notion that Elbonia is just a hypothetical country.
Sounds like red dwarf. Good show. Sadly dry wit doesn't come across well on HN. Sorry.
Get to the "ask" earlier in your meetings
Crappy design + twitter bootstrap default = tab closed. If you are serious about releasing a product ffs make sure it's polished. If the attention to detail I see in the splash page is similar to the attention to detail in the actual product (which is what I assume automatically), my faith in it is close to zero.

This is ESPECIALLY important when I'm authorizing you with access to my emails -- and there is no way I would do that for someone that I assume is not serious about their product.
It's working on my Apps account.
I think people familiar with command-line tools are already probably doing what I do, which is to use mbsync to sync a remote gmail imap account to a local maildir. It even easily supports multiple sync account/maildir pairs via its somewhat confusing config file format.

http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html
I tend to agree that the actual code writing phase is easy if the spec is very thorough. But the spec can never specify everything and tons of little decisions are left up to the developer. There are always people on the team who will create little messes. Those messes start to pile up unless there is a very strong leader who refuses to let any inconsistent code through (and is given the time to do so)
I suppose it's because, whilst there are a wide variety of backend languages, JavaScript is the primary frontend language, at least for the web platform.

Edit: Or perhaps it's because JavaScript is finally becoming more popular, despite being old. Lots of new libraries and applications are being written in it.
Programmer friendly native code interception with Deviare 2.0
Isn't what they said about tanks and horses?
Microsoft already filled the world with "C++" programmers by letting/making C programmers use Visual Studio. All of a sudden they could put "C++" on their resumes, even if they were really still doing C coding. That rather muddied the waters, then. Now, C99 is undercut. what about C11?
I would disagree that most people won't benefit from an SSD. If I were building a computer, I think I might set aside money for one before even considering the other components. Thankfully, SSDs are now relatively cheap. It would cost me $200 to get 32GB of RAM. A good 60GB SSD can be had for around $75.

Fast writes do make a different for normal desktop workloads, and fast reads are noticeable despite OS caching. If nothing else, you always have to read something from disk at least once, and you always have to write your dirty pages to disk eventually. The difference becomes more noticeable as the contention for disk access increases. No matter what I'm doing on my computer with a SSD, I never feel like I have to wait. On my other computers, even browsing the web while performing an `apt-get upgrade` can feel unbearably slow.
How do you go about buying Facebook stocks as a Canadian?
Am I the only one that's tired of the absolutist arguments without any substantive evidence that seem to plague social news sites?

We have no idea if Y Combinator's "No Idea" thing is good or bad. I suspect YC doesn't know either and once they do, unless they let us know how it worked out, we still won't know. No amount of prognostication will answer the question. It's a real pet peeve of mine when people who don't know what they're talking about not only answer questions, but go above and beyond that to answer them definitively.
Looking forward to Anonymous TV....hack the planet guys. =)

And if Google puts commercials in these things, I hope they die a painful death.
hahah win.
Gesture Control System Uses Sound Alone
Most of the hype about this is that it plays against type - "you thought programmers were shy neckbearded nerds? Ha! In reality they are hard drinking, hard caffeinating, woman disrespecting fratboys!"

Both are stereotypes (with some basis in reality here and there). But of course it makes a good story for the mainstream media. <sigh>
Video cuts off at the end while he's still talking
Color launches new features on Verizon only
What is the switch to encrypt the archives? gmvault -e? I haven't been able to find it in the documentation.
This seems to be an unpopular idea but I completely agree. I don't mind the Bootstrap default theme, but the icon is bad enough that I lose trust in it.
Changing how CSS works: Hitch
Ah, so this is the value-added proposition.
In my opinion this is just like the way record labels started creating bands out of thin air without any substance.

They gathered potential talented people, form the band write songs for them, decide their image, their sound, etc.

This doesn't mean that this model won't work, it just means that they are not really artists.

The same thing is happening here. How can you be called an entrepreneur if you can't even come up with an idea?

Entrepreneurship is not for everybody. But if you don't have an idea, then you really should not be looking to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs undertake something; "The French infinitive 'entreprendre' translates as 'to undertake' " (from Wikipedia).

If you have no ideas to undertake, then undertake other people's ideas by joining an existing company.
Its certainly possible that the universe will end in a crunch or a rip, and all this speculation will be for naught. But thermodynaics is still a perfectly valid way of looking at these things, and hasn't been changed much by the addition of quantum mechanics except that we now talk about probability distributions within phase space instead of points. Its basically the same stuff, with the same consequences.

Entropy is much more than just dS = dQ/T. I mean, that equation is mostly valid the same way that Newton's laws are mostly valid, but you won't be able to get any sort of feel for it approaching the subject that way. Imagine a mathmatical space with six dimensions for every particle, three for position and three for momentum. The state of the universe is a single point moving in this space according to pre-defined rules. Now, we don't know which point or microstate corresponds to our universe, because we can only make crude measurements of statistical aggregates of particles like temperature and pressure and so forth. So by making these measurements we can narrow which universe we're in to a set of these microstates, a 6N-k dimensional region of the 6N dimensional space that we'll call a macrostate. The entropy of an observed macrostate is proportional to the log of the number of microstates that a macrostate contains, S = k log W. In a sense, Entropy is a measure of our ignorance of which universe we're in, which is ultimately why Maxwell's demon doesn't work.

Please note, the above does contain simplifying assumptions which don't change the main point. For the full story, go get a physics minor at a good university or start reading Wikipedia[1] and asking your physics major friends questions until you can re-derive the laws of thermodynamics yourself.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_thermodynamics
Someone winning the lottery is more likely than someone getting hit by a bus while being struck by lightening. You specifically winning the lottery is probably less likely than you specifically getting hit by a bus at the same time as being struck by lightening.
That's a good point, and a tool like this probably really should be verifying the host.

(To the author) See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1087227/validate-ssl-cert... for multiple options to accomplish this.
Every Major is Terrible
There were at least two versions of this: Chacha and KGB. The former I used extensively - you'd just send a text to CHACHA with a question and a real person would answer it for you. Some of the responses I got were quite amusing :)
There is some truth in this, as based on my own experience, there are more quality games in iTunes then there are in Google Play ... or maybe the Play store simply sucks for discoverability of interesting games. And when I did find some quality games, some of them performed poorly on my Galaxy S1, probably because of the slightly outdated hardware.

On the other hand counting the total revenue of Android games is very difficult, because some games make money from ads and some publishers are going selling through alternative app stores or are self-publishing.

For instance I'm willing to bet that The Humble Bundle packs that were self-published were not added to this count ... http://www.humblebundle.com/ ... although the developers did make quite the revenue.
OK I think I just understood something about "Valuation". It has nothing to do with the value the company brings to customers but it solely means the potential value (pay off) a company brings to investors.

That pay off occurs at IPO day and not a day later either.

This is probably obvious to everyone else, but it just dawned on me this way, right now.
How would one go about learning how to do something like this? Books, websites, blog posts?
YC views the idea as proof of experimentation and in turn a bias for doing and not only thinking. It would be like NFL scouts watching tape of prospects doing home improvements around campus instead of placing football to decide what they physical school sets were. The idea is a lense in which to judge talents they consider statistically more likely to produce a successful entrepreneur.

The other good point already made was that YCs investment best leveraged if you ready almost right away. No matter how you smart you are, identifying a problem, creating a solution and assembling a team takes time, valuable time. In most cases this process would put you a bit further out from some of the expertise that YC has to offer.
The right title should be: The rise of the brogrammer in media.

The thing is there's a huge difference between the perception that people have of a field and what happens in the field. It reminds me of how CSI (the show) shows police work: super high tech. solving of cases. Sorry to break it, it's not the case, it's long interviews with people and little lab work with overused equipment. In the same spirit slowly since the Social Network this notion of "cool programmer" has emerged in the media. The reality is that we're still very far from it, and it's mostly guys sitting in front of desks typing on keyboards (not so sexy, uh ?).

Anyway, this article is ridiculous, but I don't trust CNN anymore to provide accurate news. Let them read tweets live, that's their line of work now.
There is some truth to this, but not enough. Social Security provides a fixed rate of return, and provides benefits throughout old age, regardless of how long one lives. How? Not through investment, through fiat. And ultimately that's the core of the problem, because the only way to achieve that is to have more workers paying in to the system than there are retirees pulling from it. Whether it's dollars or government bonds sitting around in a vault somewhere the problem of making them multiply by fiat will always exist. And that's the problem that Social Security ultimately faces. Within the next decade we will face the "we've been stealing from Social Security" problem, but about 15 years after that we will face the absolute "Social Security can't pay for itself at all" problem.
Color reborn: video-broadcasting service bets big on Verizon
My taste for design is pretty weak, so I'm always interested in comments like this. The design looks OK to me. What are the problems with it?
I wondered that after I wrote the reply.

However, I bet some people do use google drive to back-up other google services. It's not ironic, just foolish IMO.
No, no, really. Flash was the tool used in ALL the jobs I was getting. And the UI changes from 5 to MX were completely flow-breaking; imagine that a new revision of your favorite text editor made you wait a half a second after every third keystroke, and flushed the typeahead buffer every time that happened.

And you HAVE to update to this new tool because the files saved by it are incompatible with the old versions; if you're gonna interoperate with other folks you have to somehow deal with this maddening new behavior.

I was already coming to feel that I would never have the joy of working on my own stories and creations because I didn't have the burning drive and social skills to claw my way to running a show. All that was left of animation to me was the joy of making things come to life. And this UI change made that a death of a thousand cuts instead.

The helper scripts are a lot of macros to automate common usage patterns, and a few plugins to create new palettes. I can't remember the exact details; this was a whirlwind tour of Cartoon Network's working methods when I was staying at their head Flash director's place for a funeral.
I think you are misjudging. What if he spent a lot of time in the product making sure it works well without too much care for "shininess"? If anything, using twitter bootstrap shows that he cared a bit to make it look usable from a splash site point of view. I think we should give feedback on how the product is actually working rather than complaining that he's using twitter bootstrap.
Is this how geography will be taught in classrooms in the near future?
David Heinemeier Hansson's Pagani Zonda HH Supercar
For the DOM element, it seems like you could just create the element once and then keep it around for reuse. Should be safe since JavaScript is single-threaded.
> I'd go further, and say that Apple is significantly worse than many other corporations in our industry, in terms of how they treat their people, how they treat their customers

If they treat their customers so badly, how come they consistently rate at or near the top in customer satisfaction surveys?
Show HN: mongo-express - A node.js web interface to MongoDB
> it makes far better use of the full screen.
Not for us poor laptop owners! It's actually the exact opposite :/
Also, this one
> We improved our operating margin from negative 134% to negative 14% for the full year.

Isn't this stuff supposed to be worked out before you IPO?
Wow, very cool! This is exactly what I needed right now. I had bad dreams about what would happen if my Google account disappeared all of the sudden, but didn't do anything about it yet. Now I will be able to sleep better!
Kauffman: VC is Broken
market to determine the right price. I'm not saying markets always work well, but the telecoms market does.

While I agree that this may be true on a national level I disagree that this applies when it comes to roaming.

Example? I'm charged 4 Euros (5$ +) for 1MB of data. Overseas I may be charged as much as 17EUR for a MB.

This is not a reasonable price determined by a free market, but price gouging and I can't switch to an alternative service provider.

At least - thanks to the wide availabilty of WiFi - I do have an alternative to such obscene prices.

For voice calls this is not the case. So I for one salute the EU's efforts to curb an out of control market.

Your mileage may vary, of course.
That would be great. However the idea alone is enough to keep me hooked.

Just recieved my Beta invite, creating taskks right now :)
What is this blogspot theme they're using? Pretty cool.
For most people OOP is basically synonymous with earlier C++ and now Java.

Now wonder people are frustrated, modifying a large project or doing any thing trivial requires the help of a IDE loaded with Intellisense goodies to help you navigate through levels and levels of abstraction, often you will have no clue what each layer does. This is good for reading but bad both for writing and maintaining code. I have often had to end scratching my head figuring out what a certain middle layer of code does. I am sure most people are generally lost figuring out the layers below AbstractClassFactoryFactoryFactoryFactory.java and can't really understand why there is method Something.SomethingElse.AbsoulutelySomethingElse.WhereAreWe.finallyWeMadeit() like that.

OOP in principle in itself is good but unfortunately the languages that it gets expressed really makes it case very weak. Every time I see a Java application with 90% of the code being try/catch statements, get/set methods and XML DSL's - I cringe. Every time I have to spend 30 mins trying to figure how to configure and use a logger I get totally lost.

When I think of OO the worst parts flash in front of my eyes.
Offering different zipfiles for months/years wouldn't solve the problem. "The problem" is that when you have hundreds of millions of users, the easiest mechanism needs to be an efficient mechanism. Adding links for months/years would still leave the easiest mechanism as the least efficient: I know that I, personally, would continue to download the "all mail" zipfile just to ensure that I didn't miss anything. I cannot imagine my mother or grandmother doing anything different.
America’s Most Dangerous ‘Anti-Online Privacy’ Politicians
High Availability with MongoDB at Stripe
Interesting hobby project. Since there's no readme, a brief summary:

* Implements a minimal bootstrap environment (very small kernel and tiny libc implementation) which hands over control to Javascript

* JS code is precompiled to bytecode using TwoStroke, a JS compiler written by the same author

* Drivers are written in JS too

* No graphics support, it's text based
No rest until CSS is Turing complete.
Details on this: http://on.wsj.com/onLCZN
There's nothing wrong with Google Reader, just as there's nothing wrong with Google Plus. It is just so that Google Reader has not seen a mass adoption beyond the niche tech crowd, so it couldn't lift the RSS upwards.
Would you mind sharing that document?
Thanks for the reply. Your answer is confusing, but I see from your other replies that GMVault is supposed to preserve read/unread status.
The obvious answer is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

However, it's more likely that the customers weigh things differently than we do. They'd rather have something shiny and popular.
Stratiscape – A layered approach to HTML5 Canvas drawing
We've done things that seem like magic to some hunter-gatherer; that doesn't imply everything that seems like magic to us will come true. (does anyone have a catchy name for this fallacy?)

The boundary between things we know to be possible and impossible is in fact stronger now, because (for most of the events in this timeline) we're now basing this knowledge on the laws of physics.

Sidebar: future events that derive solely from thermodynamics don't really have a get-out-of-jail card; deflecting some of the others would require us to meaningfully harness much larger amounts of energy at the scholar system scale, bootstrapping that sort of thing would require multiple jumps of a few orders of magnitude which might be solvable as an engineering problem, but is economically dicey when we're already squandering the fossil fuel dividend on our current, unsustainable needs. That is to say, please solve politics or economics before dreaming of magitech.
So why not use gcc or mingw? Is it just the IDE or are there other complications? I haven't developed natively on Windows since the Borland TurboC++ days, so I'm kind out out of the loop there.
7 Tips for Getting Started with Developer Marketing
Google Drive Does *Not* Own Your Data