skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice idea. I see this benefiting influencers and folks with larger number of followers on social channels, but everyday folks are unlikely to see any significant revenues here IMO. The fact that influencers are more likely to adopt it means it has good odds of taking off in popularity though.

Someone like Pinterest doing this implicitly and crediting users (with non-monetary perks even) might have a better chance of impacting the average user I think.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this progresses though. I hope the team shares how it's working out for users a few months down the road.
That doesn't remove the duress. :)

However, before we get to a point where people are being uploaded into a system, we have a lot of legal president to set. The legal rights of the bits that are copied from your consciousness, for one.
Portfolio Evaluation in Functional Programming
The interesting part is that CSS variables are inherited unlike in SCSS/SASS. That means you'll have to assign all your variables to ancestor nodes if you want to reuse them everywhere on the page.

I can see the `:root` selector getting pretty crowded with variable declarations.
Ridiculous. To say that a top-tier university produces a better employee, or business leader, is to say that a person's individual personality, upbringing or work ethic plays no part.

A high GPA - that's an understandable requirement - but to base it arbitrarily on a 'top-tier' university is depriving qualified, talented employees from consideration.
Amazon Locker http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
>Just because you don't like what irb has to offer doesn't mean you get to define what REPL is.

If you did it 50 or 30 years ago, as Lisp has, you do get to define what it is.
Hulu, Living Social, All of 37 Signals, Groupon, AirBnb, Scribd, Zendesk, Soundcloud, etc.

Twitter's scale is unlike nearly every single web app online, so I think the real story with Rails and Twitter isn't that "they had to move away from it for scalability reasons," but rather it's amazing that they were table to leverage Rails for as long as they did."

Also, Twitter is more dropping Ruby all together rather than just Rails specifically. Again, this isn't to say that Ruby isn't a great language that works for most people (it let Twitter grow quickly to where they are today), but at their scale with their demands it doesn't work well.
It's interesting but mysterious that you would bring up sales commissions here as that is a very different scenario.

(A)

I go to the Ford dealer to buy a truck. The salesman, Frank, is on commission. He tells me that Fords are the best trucks and when I ask about Dodge, he says their trucks are badly designed, dangerous, and lack power.

(B)

I then go to the Dodge dealer to buy a truck. The salesman, Don, is on commission. He tells me that Dodges are the best trucks and when I ask about Ford, he says their trucks are badly designed, dangerous, and lack power.

(C)

I then check in with someone who is a truck expert, Tom. He points out that one of the brands is much better than the other based on his personal experiences.

What is the difference between A, B and C? Are one's expectations about the objectivity of the data different between an interaction with Frank and Don who are clearly identified themselves as professional sales agents whose primary vocation is profiting from each sale that they negotiate with a customer? What are the expectations here and how are they different with a customer getting information from an independent reviewer versus a salesperson who is known not to be an impartial and independent reviewer?

What would the response be of most people, after buying Brand T of truck, and finding it to be a lemon, to discovering that impartial expert Tom was actually receiving commissions or free products from the company or companies whose products he recommended?

What I am saying here is not mysterious or bizarre feats of stretching reasoning to its limits, but just absolute common sense that everyone is familiar with. People know that a salesman working professionally at a car dealer is not an unbiased source of information. No one is completely shocked when it turns out he exaggerated or flat out lied to get his commission, for unethical behavior for profit is common in the sales avocation. This is why people turn to independent, impartial reviewers, and expect them to have actual experience with the product, to voice their true opinion, and not to be receiving kickbacks, presents, or special considerations from the company's whose products they review.
Most students do not spend 100k on a degree. While some are under massive amounts of debt, most have a much more manageable level of debt, but still can't pay without a job.
I would say that any good web developer should know how caching works - not just in browsers, but also proxies, firewalls, and every other link between your language parser (which may also cache) and the user's browser. It's "domain knowledge".
I agree in theory. In practice, programs evolve and code gets reused. Omitting free calls because you expect the code to exit rapidly is a recipe for disaster once you change your mind later. It's much easier to put this stuff in from the start than it is to retrofit it later.
When GIFs become art: a trip to the Museum of the Moving Image
AFAIK Twitter still uses Rails for at least part of their app, perhaps just not for directly serving consumer requests
Of course, it's trivial to write request methods that bypass the rack middleware in Rails.
Thank you for your reply. Your responses here are consistent with the ethics displayed in your articles.

I strongly recommend your article for detailed reading by anyone who feels that anything I have said misrepresents the situation as you are stating.
On "Intuition 2":

> At time t, if it is true that the probability of the marble being under a given box is 0.5, then if I guessed randomly, I would be correct one out of two times on average.

> The fact that the probability is 0.5 is completely independent of whether or not any particular mind believes that it is 0.5. But this is the definition of an objective truth. Therefore, probability must be objective.

This is begging the question. The two things combined is like saying "At time t, if it is true that probability is objective... therefore probability must be objective."
> Stored procedures, triggers, etc. are going to be viewed as ancient technology back from the days of yore when people didn't understand how to code properly.

You may be right about perception, but nearly every system I've worked has contained a big ugly mess somewhere because the author didn't know how to use a SQL DB properly.
Um, how so? Kickstarter doesn't dispute the facts and has in fact responded?
Github, Airbnb, Groupon.

Three reasons people think Rails doesn't "scale":

(1) Earlier versions were adopted by applications with anomalous scaling requirements. So, the project had to "learn to scale" on its feet in a very short amount of time. There were predictable hiccups. Or, put even more simply: it's a young framework that got adopted quicker than people expected.

(2) There's an expectation that web platforms can accomodate near-automatic horizontal scaling with maybe just a couple config-file tweaks. That expectation is unrealistic on any platform for which you can easily hire developers. The reality is that scaling to Twitter or even Github's volume is extremely difficult, and the developers who can reliably accomplish it on any platform are extremely hard to find and extremely expensive.

(3) Rails attracts a kind of junior/casual developer that Python just doesn't have, and (weirdly enough) also I think attracts systems developers like myself that aren't steeped in web scaling folklore, which long story short means lots of projects start out by making lots of embarrassing mistakes.

In our practice we see much more Rails today than we do any other framework (there may be some selection bias there, but probably not too much) and for the most part Rails just works. It is definitely not the case that we see lots of startups go out the gate on Rails, go "oh shit we can't scale", and switch to something else.
Why are we so bad at estimating software development time?
This is all very nice, except that users often do want to work on individual records (at least when updating them). Codd's simplifying assumption is for mathematicians, not users.
Why your startup’s culture shouldn’t be ignored
Staying Awake When You're Tired
Mezzenger - Simple messaging system built with ZeroMQ
"fragrant abuse" is sadly one of the better grammatical issues with this post. I might use it somewhere...
Show HN: TinyDb, a simple ORM for PHP which doesn't try to do everything for you
> NodeJS is suitable for apps that do plenty of short lived requests.

I'm confused. Isn't Node's event-loop style programming ideal for long-lived requests? I.e. ones that, under a synchronous i/o, block other requests?
Fair use (mostly) triumphant: Judge exonerates campus “e-reserves”
Yes. What does it say about my 'moral character' that the question made me smile?
tell HN: finding the right startup for your personality
I've been reading HN for a couple of years now, and got bitten by the same startup bug as so many others. I work as a developer in the financial industry, so I started thinking of web-based services to help consumers invest more wisely. Some of the ideas were likely very good, but I always seemed to burn out after a couple of weeks and move onto the next thing.

Then I read a puff piece the NY Times published about tech executives wearing colorful socks. I had been doing so for years, and the article made me realize there are many others like me. For whatever reason, I started to dream of the perfect retailer for such products: constantly rotating selection, only a few options that are carefully selected, etc. That was a few months ago, and today we launched http://www.northbranchmerchants.com

The road here has been interesting to say the least - I had never worked in retail, and had to learn all the logistics of working with distributors and building relationships with brands. Most importantly, I realized that it's best to work on what keeps you interested - I never gave up on this idea like the others. Unfortunately it seems like the only way to get there is through trial and error. Do others have a similar tale?

PS Any tech feedback on the site is very much appreciated, since I'm new to web development. We're using Shopify as the platform, with Stripe for payment processing. Both products have been great so far.
Visual game creation tool gets Windows port.
Report: Zynga Buys Mobile Gaming Startup Wild Needle
"Size 1.12 Gigapixels"

There was a down-sampling step somewhere between the source image and that Gigapan image.
I know Twitter kind of had to move away from Rails due to scalability issues.

Is that true? I know they replaced their Ruby Starling system with a Scala-based solution, but that wasn't Rails to begin with. They also built a new search engine that didn't use Rails. But as much as I can ascertain, the core consumer facing product still does use Rails today.
Something that seems universal: dropping off a courier delivery card without actually attempting delivery.

Why is this? Do they do this more often for residential addresses? Are they incentivised monetarily to power through as many "deliveries" as possible in a day, and residential deliveries take up too much time?

I don't understand it, it seems a failsafe way to get a recipient to enter rage mode to drop off one of those cards when they've done something like taken the day off to receive the item.
Nature's Mathematical Formula For Survival
I understand the question quite differently. The question of objective probabilities is a question of whether the world is deterministic.

If you believe the world is governed by physical laws and you further believe you understand those laws (physics), you consequently must believe that with sufficient information about the past you can predict the future (determinism). So if I was to throw a dart at a dartboard, with sufficient information about arm speed, humidity, wind etc you could perfectly predict where on the dartboard it would land. The problem is that the mathematical / computational complexity necessary to achieve that is still beyond our means. Enter Probability, which we use to reduce the computational burden of predicting the future. As probability will always be model dependant (ie subject to someone's view of the world and necessarily wrong some % of the time) - it follows that an objective probability cannot be consistent with a deterministic world.

So is the world deterministic?
Going to college to study liberal arts is a respectful thing to do if you either pay for it up front without loans or have a reasonable path planned out after college that should pay the loans back.

Studying something in college that will not lead to a future career is a hobby, not an investment. Spending large amounts of loan money on a hobby that cannot pay the loans back is a very silly thing to do.

Liberal arts degrees are great, and a good learning experience for students. But they aren't worth taking out loans for if there are not jobs to pay those loans back.
This is stupid. Do people really think Thiel is personally managing every job opening at every company he's associated with?

Non-sequitur "gotcha" reporting at its worst. I expected better from Yglesias.
If you search HN you will find a wealth of comments on the Accelerate. If you are writing such a library, or you plan to use it, be wary though that the number that a pragmatic user is interested in is the wall clock time. Speed-up plot hides this information. It turns out that it is surprisingly difficult even to beat single threaded array manipulating C code if the code has been written with the cache architecture in mind, the loops judicioulsly un-rolled etc etc.

If you are constrained to remain within the Haskell runtime, or the .net runtime, then speedup curves are fine and informative, but as a metric of comparison with other solutions, it is a bit deficient.

BTW this is by no means an effort to diminish the achievments of the accelerate framework. Writing efficient code using a high level code is an incredibly important and worthy goal and any progress deserve to be cheered, but lets not forget that there are miles to go.
What's the difference between the two versions?
The problem with most colleges is that the extrinsic cost doesn't equal the intrinsic value of most degrees. People go to college because of the "truth" that a degree will lead to a better salary, but the bubble pops when you graduate with a $100,000 in debt but can only get a minimum wage job.
Why New York’s Proposed Angel Investing Tax Credit Is a Bad Idea
A Swiss start-up helps investors to understand stock markets
Let me pitch you this scenario. You run Facebook, and you have all the software and all the data. A catastrophe occurs and you lose everything, and due to a mistake in the way backups were made, you can choose to restore the software or the data, but not both. (Somehow, restoring the software will destroy the data, and restoring the data will destroy the software). Which one do you choose?
git playback
Hackers need to become more well rounded and learn business skills, which will help them filter what to build, when, and why.

"Business skills" seems to encompass an amazingly broad range of available knowledge. I've seen people refer to this idea occasionally, but it's always a vague allusion to "business skills" and nothing really concrete.
Straw-man straw-man straw-man. Jeremy disclosed his relationship with the company, on the reviews and personally by e-mail with each and every referral. "Tom" did not.

There's nothing unethical about this. There's no mystery here.

We don't shun realtors as unethical when they recommend a mortgage broker to get you prequalified with, a contractor for a home inspection, etc. that are no doubt paying them referral fees.

We even purposely go to independent agents to shop around for insurance policies, when we know they're compensated purely by their commissions from the companies they'll place you with. There are 40,000 independent insurance agencies in the US -- that are in business because people specifically turn to them for advice while EXPECTING them to receive kickbacks from the companies they're giving advice on.

We also read reviews in magazines containing ads by the companies being reviewed. We watch news coverage on channels running ads by the companies talked about in the news. There are clearly other ways to establish reputation and trust than separating yourself from compensation.
Thanks! I think non-monetary and group rewards will be huge, because unlike cash they are something that can be made available to a very broad set of users.

We plan to be as open as we can week to week about our progress, and how our users are doing with earning cash and other rewards. We'll be blogging...
Wild Elephants gather inexplicably, mourn death of “Elephant Whisperer”
This seems like the closest - from a UI perspective. The screen shot indicates the ability to design a room in 2D (rather than 3D). App appears to be windows only and closed source.
Bring this to the UK right now. It'll be easier to scale over here. Plus, I'll give you all my business.
Is there not a US equivalent of Quidco (http://www.quidco.com)?

For genuine friend-to-friend recommendations, I'd rather refer a friend of mine to make a purchase through Quidco and have them claim back the full referral fee themselves (minus a £5/year subscription), than pocket the referral fee myself.

If I was linking to a larger group, why should I go through Referly and not set up an affiliate account direct with the merchant? In the UK, at least, there are large networks like AffiliateWindow, CommissionJunction, etc. that allow you to sign up with numerous merchants using a single interface...
Gotta love using your referral link when linking to dropbox.

Get that free space!
I was really close to going with Heroku, I decided not to as I wanted full customisation options and I've been hosting rails apps for a long time and know what I'm doing.

If you're inexperienced in server administration, go with Heroku I'd say. It's a great service and works really well and if you do get a load of traffic, it's really easy to scale up. There's a guide here to using unicorn to get 4X the performance out of it:

http://blog.railsonfire.com/2012/05/06/Unicorn-on-Heroku.htm...

You're correct in saying $40 per month for hosting until I gain more users. If someone would sign up to my "pro" plan I'd be breaking even :)

However I don't think that even if it does take off it will be as profitable as it sounds. It seems customer acquisition is going to be my biggest problem and so I'll probably end up spending lots on adwords and other promotional avenues.
Now, all I need is an API that a service like Ifttt.com can hook into.

I'd like to use this service in between the others I use. (When I Like something on facebook, it gets tweeted, for instance...) I want it to be able to shorten my link and it get tweeted automatically. Doable?
#3 I'm not undestanding. Are you doing async? I don't know the socket API but it should be something like this:

it("should wait for socket", function(done) {
socket.write("asdfadf", function(err, response) {
assert.ok(response.indexOf('token') >= );
done()
);
});

#4 If you need a new event loop then write the tests in another module, then simply run your test utility. `mocha` will run all tests in test/*test.js.

RSpec is DOG SLOW! I can run 100s of test in a couple of seconds. Can RSpec even startup in that time?
If the WSJ did anything more than what Kickstarter can reasonably claim the minimum required to confirm they had something worth reporting to Kickstarter (note: a very different standard than "minimum required to confirm a bug") then no: call it "white hat" or "security research" or whatever else you want, but under the law it is very likely unauthorized access, and it's merely community norms protecting anyone at the WSJ who took part in exploring this bug.

Do not fuck with other people's web applications unless you're sure it's OK.

It's OK at Google and to an extent it is OK at Facebook, because both have published policies. I think that's what you should do for your applications, too; if you don't, the other community norm is "no policy means report the bug to Twitter instead of your security contact".

You're obviously not going to go to jail (in the US) for not being careful about this stuff, but you can easily cost yourself 5 figures worth of legal fees and a whole lot of time and energy.
How to insert a checkbox in Excel 2010?
As an aspiring dictator looking to create my minimum viable regime, couldn't I also use some of these same (or similar) techniques to promote the creation of power rather than simply the maintenance of power? This guide is great for the Ayatollahs and Czars of the world who already have a claim to authority. But what about us little guys doing what we can to spread misinformation and dissidence?
Just added Dvorak compatibility. :)
Just added Dvorak overrides.
I relate to everything you said, and I've also read a lot of these posts on burnout. Everyone has the same list of symptoms, and the same mentality.

The unsuccessful seem to be the ones who do nothing, and wait to become unburnt out. I've been applying for a lot of jobs recently, and it's gone very well. I'm likely to have a few offers in the next couple weeks, but I find myself completely dissatisfied with the thought of taking another job. I'm nervous I'll be in the exact same situation after a week, or even the first day, of a new job.

The answer seems clear though, if you still like your job take a long vacation and come back. If you don't, quit your job and take the same vacation. Find a new job after.

That's such an easy thing to say though -- I know because I'm sitting here, still employed, and not fucking off to Australia for 6 months to learn to surf and relax. Sigh.
Nice observation, and 100% agree. Here's how one of the most painstaking explicators put it in the thread:

"I'm summarizing about 200 years of mathematics, almost none of which is standardly taught to undergraduates at almost any university."

which made me feel a little better.
FTC regs are covered in our Terms and FAQ, and its the responsibility of the sharer to disclose.

BUT that being said, I think there is a big opportunity here - to make the disclosure automatic AND possibly even user friendly. Right now disclosures are really ugly and create friction in the user experience, maybe we can fix this.

And if the refer.ly brand becomes widely known and recognized, that would help too. Definitely something we want to help sharers do in the most streamlined way possible
Kickstarter: Gooey Search for the Internet
Yeah Audacity seems to follow the traditional reverb and digital effects route. You choose a few parameters (frequency modulation, amount / time of delay) and a generic "room" is available to pass a sound signal through. There may be a way of getting more fine-grained with the inputs to exactly simulate a specific room, but this is not evident to me from looking at the docs.
From everything I've heard pvs-studio is great, but it only runs within Visual Studio. Would love to have an os x or linux version of it some day.
LastPass is free, you know...
We have a mobile web runtime platform also, though it is less mature than the native ones at this point. You can do a hybrid app approach with Titanium as well, if you like, and incorporate as few/many native UI components or APIs as you like.
Tech-related hobbies are great, but so are not tech-related hobbies.

I take questions like this to mean that the employer expects the employee to work outside of work hours, to not have a family, and and to not do other things. Perhaps that isn't the intention, but it seems to be the implication.