skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the analogy of walking through a dark room with your hand on the wall. As long as your hand is on something you recognize, you know where you are in the room, what ground you've already covered, and you may have some idea of how you're going to reach the other side.

I started a rails project very meticulously. I had recently read through the 'Agile' book which closely tracks the development of the framework. I had a decent idea of what I was going to build and how.

It would be a tight ship, and code would be kept clean from start to finish. Before even starting the project, I invested a ridiculous amount of time and effort learning all the tools I would be using, evaluating every case where I had a choice between popular and well-supported tools. For each tool I chose, I thought about why using it was a good idea and how exactly it would fit into the workflow. I was determined that every commit would keep tests and documentation up to date with any code changes in that same commit.

All that is to say that I came into the project with carefully considered, but fairly rigid, opinions on most aspects of how to do the project. Perhaps not surprisingly, the other developers on the project did not share these opinions. They did things that ran against my idea of how to keep a project organized. Perhaps I also did things which ran against theirs.

Eventually, the state of disorganization reached a point that felt to me like letting go of a piece of furniture in a pitch-black room. I no longer had a sense of how the whole thing was put together. I no longer knew what all the 3rd party libraries we were using did, or why they were included in the project. I had planned to keep all libraries up to date but, for various reasons, we were falling behind in that regard and various roadblocks stood in the way of bringing things current. We had started using esoteric features of the database I didn't know very much about. I would do a deep dive of research to try and catch up my understanding, and then I'd fall farther behind in keeping my finger on the pulse of changes in the project. Soon, the codebase had dependencies on various servers in our organization that prevented me from simply running my own isolated instance of it.

I don't know a solution to this, yet. Right now I'm still trying to feel my way through that dark room.
for people (like me!) who didn't know, this is happening may 23 at the GAM (the place on alameda that burnt down a while back (central santiago)) and will be streamed live - http://www.demodaychile.com/eng.html

is it possible to sign up to attend? the sign-up link isn't working. is it not yet open?
I came here just to write exactly the same thing. I'd add that in this case, I personally don't find the product beautiful at all. It's not ugly, I don't find it visually offensive, but it's fairly generic and uses too many cliches for me to find it beautiful.

Of course, beauty is mostly subjective. In order to wield it like, say, Apple does sometimes, you have to make something that a strong majority will find unusually beautiful.
Our current goal is to make positive impact on TC39 (the only group working on the spec) and not to create an alternative.

However, your comment is applicable to the whole ES.Next and I share it as well.
I'm doing something similar and I'm using the Fujitsu Scansnap S1300 which comes integrated with Evernote support.
I think you could fake this proposal with triggers. It might be worth seeing what the additional cost is.
Create an issue!
X220 is really nice, as long as you use an external screen. Apart from being small, the screen (although bright) has a big aftereffect problem .
Looking for a past article - lost and found
Few months ago I read a article on HN front page about a guy's blog post in which he had shared is journey about finding out he had two weeks to find a place and a job in silicon valley. He described how he used each interview as a stepping stone and dealt with the typical puzzles questions;and then as he gave more interviews he started asking some of those puzzles he had encoutered in other interviews back to his interviewers to 1)see how smart they were and 2) make a strong impression. If anybody else read this article and has it bookmarked can you please share the URL . Thanks.
You can argue that's it not technically inconcievable but if anyone were to implement it this way, it would likely become a nightmare of usability and broken expectations.

If I'm 'downloading' or otherwise 'exporting' data from any service, I expect it to be all the data. Not a diff wrt the last time I clicked the button.
It might be worth seeing what the cost of this would be in practice. I suspect if the answer were this easy the developers would have just done it by now, but you never know.
The XPS13 doesn't really seem equipped to appeal to professional developers, but Dell might be specifically targeting the entry-level and enthusiast markets. I would have enjoyed having something along these lines in high school, for instance.
No, I do not know what the conventions are. But I do think that it's either a bad name or a bad convention. I submit as evidence that this mistake was made.

I'm not always a good judge of what adds to a conversation, but here's another attempt: Projects that have good naming conventions are likely to have fewer bugs.
I think there might be a lot of things that we at LATAM need to learn BUT, you guys are feeding a monster of tech developing. We are just, NOT WELL CONNECTED and we don't know the right people, but we are capable of making amazing and astonishing inventions. So be patience and keep the high value critics, cause we will never give up until we move to perfection.
Members of the TC39 committee include representatives from Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. Javascript engines from these vendors will almost surely implement the standard. Firefox has prototypes for a few new things already.
Have you tried one of the website selling marketplaces like Flippa.com ?
Life teach me that is always better be transparent and go upfront, then there is nothing wrong on show how much they want to raise :)
Powdered human baby flesh pills discovered by customs officials in South Korea
This is going to kill paypal.

I love it.

Going to become a customer soon.
I have at one time, but not being a PHP developer myself I have always had to contract out the work. Ultimately it has always been a side project and not a passion of mine. I have other iOS apps that take up my time.
Not yet. I wanted to see if HN readers were interested.
Maybe Dell should have consulted their target market first.
Jessica Alba for Honest.com is another great one.
Ignorance =/= idiocy.
Does it allow me to keep a budget and track expenses/info/receipts against that budget?
Love this post, I definitely focus on TC too much. Love seeing how to maximize press outlets.
FWIW Sahil applied to YC with an iPhone app called Dayta
> The obvious objective criteria is past performance

Considering that this criteria has been debunked for prices of public companies, I'd be amazed if it were true for private companies.

I'm gonna take a flying guess that the correlation studies have not been done like they have for public, due to the opaqueness of private pricing.
I think the grandparent's gripe is both valid and contributes to the conversation: it helps remind us that when people without institutional knowledge are encouraged to get up to speed and contribute to a project (i.e. the whole idea of "community open source"), verbose and logical variable names are valuable.

Asserting that size_ is always an objectively terrible name is difficult, as yes, there might be some sort of convention around underscores. However, I have trouble disputing that verbose, plain-English, logical variable names help enhance code quality and reduce barriers to contribution.

I'd certainly feel much more comfortable getting up to speed with and contributing to a code base which used more verbose and logical names than say, size_.
Intriguing - women send your wife their babies placenta and she makes it in to capsules for them??
Yes, the old-school ThinkPad keyboards were the best you could get on a laptop. Chiclet keyboards are made for non-touch typists, the kind of people who need to hunt and peck with big fat fingers. My fave keyboard is my Unicomp Linux model, with the Caps Lock and Ctrl keys swapped...but best of all, with positive keyclick and actual mechanical switches under each key instead of dopey, squishy foam like what you get with modern, cheap keyboards.
C++ as a teaching language.
That was a waste of 5 seconds.
Great interview, but I feel there was a missed opportunity when the interviewer asked about Zuckerberg's comment "we don't build services to make money, we make money to build great services."

The panel acted as if that were an iconoclastic, even blasphemous thing to say. That attitude, that only focusing on quarterly results and "building shareholder value," is of course just the attitude that has gotten the business world in so much trouble. There have been some great articles of late exploding the myth of "shareholder value," from Steve Denning's brilliant Forbes article "The Dumbest Idea in the World" http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi... to James Allworth at the Harvard Business Review talking about Steve Jobs and the Innovator's Dilemma: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/steve_jobs_solved_the_innova...

I thought kn0thing had a great answer when he described that as part of the ethos of "builder culture," to be sure. If only the panel had taken a moment to ask themselves whether that approach might actually lead to stronger profits and stronger companies overall, such as one of the best examples around, Apple.
I don't see much beautiful about it.

It's a plain chat layout with too much whitespace for my taste.

You know what's beautiful? A chat that I can theme and customize to match my definition of beautiful.

This one doesn't even meet the minimum requirement of not being trapped in a browser. I want working keyboard shortcuts, I want detachable windows, and I want to copy/paste properly (browser chats give a garbled mess because your fancy CSS layout does not survive the process).
It's not a matter of ought versus ought not.

It's a matter of evidence. If we have strong evidence against hypothesis X, we should require at least moderately strong evidence for hypothesis X before we accept it. We can continue to explore it, but we shouldn't give a lot of weight to weak evidence (such as likely false positives) in the face of considerably stronger evidence against.

This does, necessarily, obscure certain types of surprising results when the data supporting them is limited. That's OK. Science sometimes converges slowly.
Europe at Risk and What it Means for US Startups
An Entrepreneurial Success Story
Scripts for writing papers
"assuming it's investing in traded securities"

Which is only a percentage of funds under management. The hedge fund industry invests in wildly diverse sectors, securities etc. VC'S can be treated as just another hedge fund sector.

If you can't get basic facts right (e.g.: lockups are not ~2 year - corrected by mdda), it is difficult to pay any attention to your opinions.

The other major problems arising out of "black box" investing also applies to hedge funds.
Implementation of Abstract Computation Model - RAM Machine
I think dell gets subsidies from installing all that crapware, so I would expect it to be offset by that.
Old media discovers internet feedback,
becomes introspective, publishes introspection.

Perhaps the self-referential pieces begin to reach
past introspection? Here are some others:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep...
This is a news website article about a scientific finding

http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/incendiary/
This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4
How To Report The News
> Are there ready examples of what makes the usage of Perl a security liability?

The `open` function used on untrusted input allows arbitrary code execution (I've gotten privilege execution via setuid perl scripts many times this way, as well as getting a shell on the box via web apps allowing this).

While there are many other common things I saw in real world apps, e.g. perl scripts using backticks for command execution and allowing me to run anything I wanted, the `open` one is by far the worst. It's insanely pervasive and incredibly easy to do.
Not exactly shocking, reading Eric Goldman's blog [1] can show you how litigious Perfect 10 can be.

[1] http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/08/catching_up_on....
CTO search for new music start-up.
I'm the founder of Gopherscout.com, an online music service that exposes unsigned musicians to a main-stream audience and empowers users to judge and share their discoveries. The mission is to redefine the way unartists are exposed to new listeners, by creating a platform where both users and artists coexist and artists' fate is determined by user curation. Think of it as American Idol meets Pandora.

I'm looking for a technical individual who can transform a prototype into a launch ready web service. But more importantly, I'm looking for a person to share my passion about the Gopherscout with; someone to share the ups and downs of this startup journey, someone I can bounce ideas off, someone to tell me I'm wrong and convince me to be right, someone who knows more than me but is humble about it; someone who knows the difference between reality and grand vision and has ideas to connect the two; someone who wants their passion to be their work; someone who wants Gopherscout to succeed; someone who has traveled, played organized sports, has their own personal culture; someone who is almost OCD to detail and analysis, yet isn't crazy; someone who isn't a skeptic; and someone who loves music and understands its human impact.

Skills required:
+3 year of Ruby on Rails or Python/Django
+3 of JavaScript
JQuery or similar front end library
Database knowledge like MySQL or MongoDB
Experience building web apps from the ground to released
CS Degree or heavy experience contributing to open-source project
Must love to lead and inspire team members

Learn more about Gopherscout here:
http://www.gopherscout.com/pitch

If interested, contact me at
frangalvez@gmail.com
So, what is ‘Water-SCRUM-fall’?
Wow, that's awesome. I wish I had heard about it earlier!
Security error in OS X 10.7.3 exposes passwords for legacy FileVault users
If don't want/unable to get, Tangled Web, similar useful information by same author at "Browser Security Handbook" http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Main
Facts are facts and opinions are opinions. I don't see a reason to confuse them at all.

However, Mueller's opinion has been considered to diverge from reality in very specific ways, always favoring whoever is paying for it at the time and always being presented as an unbiased expert opinion.
This is going to sound strange at first, but hear me out:

Facebook, if it wanted to be really disruptive, should buy evernote.

The reason is that FB only offer superficial utility - the social utility layer of being able to track your friends lives and comment on them will atrophy over the next ten years.

FB will need a way to really bring together the daily activities, information, interests etc of its userbase and make it matter on a wholly individual level.

It seems that what FB does is interesting to its users on an individual level, but it is not. Without any friends at all on FB, the platform is useless.

There are two directions that FB can go to solidify longvity; make the platform useful to an individual even with zero contacts/friends and to make the platform a utility that ca be used by a group of people. Think, the ability to create a company/group effort, with tools in the FB platform that the team can use to manage those activities.

(There was a company called Huddle which was doing this - they seem to have good traction, though zero marketing/hype as I haven't heard anything about them in a long time, though they seem to be alive and well)

Evernote would allow FB to build on the actual actions of their users from a data-mining perspective.
I have had a special love for music all my life.

But I sometimes wish I did not know what I now know about the Recording Industry in America and how they do "business".

I simply do not see music the same way.

These people are disgusting. They are a taint on something that should be pure. They are like drug pushers, and music is the drug.

Even if they paid my "salary" as an artist, I could not sleep well knowing what they do. I need to read that quote from Jagger again to remind myself musicians, despite supporting the RIAA, do recognise music is more than an "industry".

The RIAA's short-lived empire will someday fall. And music lovers in the future will look back and realise that, like those who loved music before there was an "industry", they are much better off than we were.
Yep. The T40 series had those too. I did a lot of programming on ThinkPads.
Sh*t﻿ 'Tech' Entrepreneurs Say
Maybe you missed the article it linked to:

http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-your-first-...

I searched and though it is over a year old it does not appear to have been previously posted here. Yeah, the summary is a waste of five seconds but unfortunately it appears that without an HN top dog to espouse it, the actual original article would never see the light of day. I considered bitching about it myself but didn't, wondering in part if my motive is mere jealousy or something since I do plenty of original writing that never sees the light of day either....etc..etc.

Edit: another, similar article posted three years ago on hn:
http://www.vinnie.net/2009/03/10/10_ways_to_get_your_first_1...

Of course, that makes swombat far savvier than me since posting that link here does absolutely zero to develop my own following, web presence and so on. Story of my life/ clearly, I will never learn.
Previous submissions of this story, in case you want to read it from other sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3927666

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921788

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921226

None have comments.
YC never said they would fund no-idea founders. They said they would let them apply. It's an experiment. Maybe they'll fund them; maybe they won't. This is only the first step. When you consider how much experience and data YC has now, you should assume they'll use that wealth of information to determine if a no-idea set of founders matches the qualities they attribute to success in previous start-ups. They'll probably also talk to them about different types of ideas and projects in the actual interview.

People shitting on this idea appear to be assuming that YC is run by a bunch of idiots.
The muddled mess of the Oracle vs. Google trial
>He's basically a huge anti-google marketing campaign.

>his garbage blog

ad hominem attacks against Mueller. not me.
and how, generally, is this provable? (at least, to produce 'reasonable doubt' to a layman)

(ignoring that the guy seems to have said he copy-pasted here.)
The kind of discussion you (and I) would have liked to see doesn't happen on CNN.
As a man wholly dependent on Evernote, I hope to God they aren't bought by Facebook. I shudder to think how much insight that'd give them on my life.
I wish someone would always translate groklaw's cryptic articles to something understandable like that. :-)
So their target audience is developers that are incapable of installing their own tools and that are cool with the cheap look and flimsy build quality of Dell laptops.

Unfortunately, that market actually exists, and nine out of ten times that lack of caring for quality is reflected in their work.
Join Scott and Mark in their Epic new SpaceVenture
Pair programming [1] and collective code ownership [2] are great ways of getting everyone on the same page and keeping them up to date.

My experience is that only a fraction of developers are interested in keeping things clean and meticulous. The rest are more interested in cranking out features. Both are needed. In my experience, a ratio of 1 "meticulous" to 6 "git-r-done" programmers works fine if you're using collective code ownership & pairing.

(The real trick is getting the rest of the team to agree to it.)

[1] http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/pair_programming.html

[2] http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/collective_code_ownership.h...
The Sarah Phillips network of parody Twitter accounts
As far as a personal notebook that follows me everywhere, Evernote can't be beat. I have a folder for every sort of data imaginable, from camping checklists to common IOS commands and recipes I usually forget between times I need them.

Taken as an indexed, searchable, omnipresent notebook, it really has become my second brain.
The link is broken on the English version. If you go to http://www.demodaychile.com/ click on "Inscríbete para participar" (register to participate).
Yep. This would make evernote the perfect tool. I would love to pay for the privilege of running my own evernote server, keeping my data private.
Issues: https://github.com/JSFixed/JSFixed/issues

New issue: https://github.com/JSFixed/JSFixed/issues/new
Having recently been bitten by a 20 hour schema change to a very large table in MySQL I have been looking at Postgresql more seriously.

My biggest issue with it having used it for other projects is getting the dammed thing setup and working to begin with. I could never find a decent tutorial (or rather one that fits my mindset) of how to do the following,

1. Install
2. Setup users, including how to set it up on a local development machine with 'root' user who can do anything (saves time in dev)
3. Import/Export SQL/Backup files

I managed to do all 3. Once.

I'm sure its out there, and I would switch in a heartbeat were these steps much easier to work out. As it is I can just copy the table, run the alter in the background and rename the tables the next day. Slower, but doesn't cost me any time and works.
DISCLAIMER: I no way was I actually condoning this idea. But if FB had deeper vision, they would already be looking at this.

I was shining light on a dark spot in what I feel is missing in FBs roadmap.
Basic portfolio theory. There is no way to exceed the market in the long run given one of the many standard models for investing. Investors can go to the market or go to VCs. If returns in VC funds is higher, guess what---more investors want to go to VCs. This of course leads to VCs investing in progressively lower quality companies. Absent Wa-Tor style boom-and-bust dynamics, the market return and VC return converge.
Internet stocks too difficult to value properly, says Buffett
I often link to swombat's summary rather than the lengthy originals because I find the summary useful to determine if the original will be worth clicking through to. I guess not everyone feels the same.

FWIW, the original was submitted just over three months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498473

Personally, I found it useful to revisit these ideas.
Building a Mobile Site with GoMo (a Google initiative)