skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I should add that, yes, SES Americom may have committed insurance fraud if they didn't disclose to their insurance company that the satellite was recoverable for $50M(the cost of dropping the lawsuit against Boeing)

I'm pretty sure that insurance companies can't consider the estimated cost of a civil suit as a fungible asset like that. They could no more insist that SES comply if Boeing had asked them to kill Boeing's mother in exchange for a trajectory license. After all, it costs less than $50M to kill someone.
this isn't a concept - I got to play with the Fruit ninja demo as well as the point cloud when I interviewed there. It really is that fast.
That article struck me as a bit of an extreme and luddite take on the current social networking trend.

VC is chasing social networking right now because consumers are moving toward social networking vs other forms of entertainment. Some VC will make good guesses at the direction things are headed and make some money... some won't and will suffer the pain of being wrong. A lot of hype-sensitive VC will make the mistake of overplaying the social networking trend and that's a good weed-out mechanism in the economy of the Valley.

It doesn't mean that funding for cancer drugs has stopped or even slowed down as a result. Even if you could attribute a slow-down of cancer funding to FB, it doesn't mean that funding for cancer drugs won't resurge and maybe increase after this trend subsides.

Another thing to consider. The author mentioned Elon Musk as being one of the few sources of a "disruptive startup" in the last few years. Well where did Elon Musk get his money? Hint: not in the Space or Automotive industries. He is a brilliant guy who made money on the Internet then applied his problem solving skills and vision to other fields where he thought he could make a difference.

Likewise, Facebook has converted a whole bunch of smart people into rich people in Silicon Valley. It's likely that some of them are going to take their money and apply it to new ideas in non-social-networking endeavors and we'll be referring to them years from now as innovators in those industries.

Money flowing into Silicon Valley smart problem solvers is a good thing.
The flexibility which backbone provides is a big thing for me.
Secondly, Choosing "CoffeeScript" is a turnoff me, as it require additional learning curve.
Romanticize? Not at all, I think they have a right to be outraged that they're practically supporting an idle class on their backs already. Nonetheless it's something I can't or won't do, and that's a flaw on my part.
Context for those who don't know: jashkenas created backbone.js, a competing library to spine.js.
Mike Moritz Stepping Back From Sequoia Due to Health Problems
Something's amiss in the article.

First there's this:
"Result? Two! €160 quid for two clicks, each of whom looked at two site pages."

Then:
"Clearly something is not right, so I decide to view the profiles of all those who clicked the ads. They hit one common spot – they were all in the UK. But they were aged from 13 to about 70, many were unemployed or in education, we even had a Muslim fundamentalist who is very concerned about things in Pakistan. Lots and lots of doting mothers with FB pages full of cutesy little life mottoes. "

Wait: is it 2 clicks, or 200 clicks??!?
Also check out json:select http://jsonselect.org/#overview It's more like css selectors than xpath
A Dutch friend of mine said watching English-language TV was a great help learning english. Just hearing the language a lot does wonders for recognising the sounds of words. Plus she said a lot of shows would have Dutch subtitles, so you get the link between sound & meaning.
Everyone seems to thing the path is: build something cool, get funded by VC, profit!

Why not bootstrap it?
Gov. petition: Free access to journal articles from taxpayer-funded research
Higher stock price makes it easier to use stock to buy other companies.
It's a bit of both with a healthy sprinkling of Nokia, Samsung, and quite a few others. In reality, WebKit has been driving the standards process for quite some time now (especially considering its unrivaled dominance on mobile).
Twilio do transcriptions as a built in part of their service. IIRC you have to declare the requirement as part of the dial verb. They've got very good walkthroughs that you could use to make an answerphone and have the transcriptions of all calls sent to your email account or wherever.
Not to be cynical, but this reminds me a little of Alan Kay's comment:

"""
By the way, Sketchpad was the first system where it was discovered that the light pen was a very bad input device. The blood runs out of your hand in about 20 seconds, and leaves it numb. And in spite of that it’s been re-invented at least 90 times in the last 25 years.
"""

from http://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987 around 7:10
Summary for anyone who can't listen:

* Dan says John emailed him and just said it was time to move on and try something new. Dan says he has total respect and understanding for that.

* Dan says he thought if they weren't doing the show anymore, they would retire it together. Surprised and disappointed that John's doing the show on his own and re-using the name.

* Dan wishes they could have done one last episode to reminisce (120 previous episodes) and to thank the fans.

* Dan encourages fans to listen to the new show at muleradio.net.

* No other sordid details, just some personal anecdotes.

I've never listened to any 5by5 podcasts on 5by5, but Dan Benjamin comes across in this audio clip as a total class act.
As mentioned by others in these comments, it's when you "like" something that the owner of that page can see who you are. If you click an ad they can't. I think.
Foxconn Building New $210 Million Production Line for Apple Products
The 100 most important outdoor inventions ever
You have the philosophy right, but political reality has left that behind.

While the President doesn't have any official power over the legislating process, he can wield significant political pressure as de facto head of his party, via shaping public opinion from the bully pulpit and with the threat of a veto.

Presidents have, for some time now, been very active in setting/driving legislative priorities.
Apple is just one of several companies and developers of the WebKit engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
Crowdsourced Wargaming
European Physicists Smash Chinese Teleportation Record
Please help with training resources for new grads
I will be starting my first training program for my company, and I was hoping to get some HN feedback on what resources would be most useful.

I am strongly considering a group membership at team treehouse for some web dev and web design training.

Our shop uses JavascriptMVC, jQuery, java, spring, iOS, mule esb, linux, web services, jboss, apache

Any suggestions would be appreciated!
On the other hand: MS also spent ~ $3B providing a floor on Friday by buying up FB shares in the open market. Since FB is down 11%, they've already lost about $330M on that. Not chump change even for MS.
Except that large chunks of Chrome are not in fact open source....
Stop labeling everything as an impedance mismatch
I'm glad you did the teardown because, despite the amount of people who are using any one of the MV* frameworks, few are authoritative on the differences/subtleties between.

Spine's "features", to a novice, are indistinguishable to Backbone's, which is probably what prompted the author's post.

In the world of Javascript frameworks, devs seem to pick a side based on the following:

1. Naming convention (Mootools' getStyle()+setStyle() vs. jQuery's css(), Router vs. Controller, etc.), which is admittedly personal preference.

2. Lowest barrier-to-entry (Spine.app, TodoMVC example)

3. Debugging (see: compiled Coffeescript lineno debate, compiled SCSS/LESS debate)
The first refers to people who visited the website from the Facebook page.
‘Hack weekends treat coders like monkeys in a cage’ — European technology news
Google's business model does in fact involve around locking people into Google's services. To the extent that lockin into a particular system makes that easier, they are quite happy with such lockin.
Regarding point 2, I pulled together a boilerplate that my group uses as a template for new apps, and I'm working on creating a file gen in python. We make heavy use of AMD, and rely on a handful of legacy non-RESTful backend apps we need to overwrite sync to use, so I'm not sure an out-of-the-box backbone.app would work for us, anyway. Spine looks interesting, but backbone is working incredibly well for now.
>It’s a great thing for both companies and developers.

I disagree. People in the real world look to these events to get an idea of what platforms and frameworks are out there that they should use for their next projects (that's why Mobli is willing to offer this prize). It is not good for developers if that perception gets skewed by which platform has the most cash behind it rather than which platform is actually the best choice.
> Was it not obvious in advance that FB was being priced such that the shares would be either flat, or decrease?

Funny thing: All IPO's are priced by the sellers. If they get it right, all of them should have prices which then stay flat or decrease. It is the buyer's interest for the price to increase, a fact that seems to have been forgotten since the bubble V1.

Maybe now people will again recognize the IPO for what it is: A company begging for money.
I don't think that's fair since neither party had said anything about the split before that went live.

Now that Dan's expressed his thoughts, I wonder if John will do the same.
Everyone responding to these stories says that the advertiser did things wrong. If that's the case, what I'd really like to see is a story by someone who's run a successful Facebook campaign. What they did and what measurable impact it had on their business.
It would be possible in the US for something to be enacted by an Executive Action, basically a directive to agencies from the Whitehouse. There is also legislation at the moment in the House and Senata (FRPAA) that would also achieve the same thing. If there was Whitehouse support the chance of the legislation passing is higher and if the legislation gets support there is more chance of an Executive Action so this is going from both ends.
The owner(s) of the company only gets paid at the IPO. That's the only time he gets money from the stock market (unless and until the company issues more stock later).

So of course he wants the IPO price to be as high as possible, because that's the money he gets to put in his piggy bank.

In fact, the real goal of a public company is not to increase the stock price, but to maximize the value of the stock to shareholders. In some cases, this means maintaining a flat stock price but paying healthy dividends (in other words, giving some of the profits to the shareholders). This was actually the dominant model for many years (link below, take a look at the growth rate during the '70s and '80s).

The somewhat more recent trend toward increasing share prices is just another way of maximizing shareholder value. In this case, it is done by increasing the market value of the stock being held by the shareholders.

It is quite common for companies today to pay no dividends. Since the shareholders don't get a piece of the profits, the only way to make money on the stock is to buy low and sell high (or buy low and hold for awhile, perhaps until retirement, and then sell, however you want to look at it).

So there really isn't any intrinsic reason for a company to seek a higher stock price. The point is to maximize value, which doesn't always equate to price.

Of course that isn't going to cheer up people who hoped to buy FB on Friday and flip it for a huge profit this week after the "bump". But risk is the whole reason there's money to be made. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
Really, it's always struck me as odd that Microsoft hasn't thought about open sourcing IE. Presumably there's a tangled mess of proprietary code that they would have to sort out first, but it's already the case that the majority of users are browsing the web using open source browsers. There's no longer any hope of financial incentive for being closed source. In fact, it's more of a liability than anything these days...
Turn off for me, too. Not to mention, I can imagine debugging being more difficult.
Zynga's lock up period ends next month too... kinda sucks for employees with options.
EVRST Inc. Business Plan
There is very little, if any, perceptible lag.
None whatsoever apart from to say that it's acceptably fast for whatever data set I happen to throw at it. Another poster here mentioned in an email that he'd tried it against arrays of ~50000 object structures and it was fine.
Actually, I find it somewhat concerning that advertisers can see the exact profile page of those clicking on their ads. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Twilio's twice-monthly hackathons were explained to me thusly: how much money would you pay annually for someone to scrounge up 300 good use cases and 100 really excellent use cases for your API product? It turns out $24k is cheap for this kind of data.

It's not about buying developers off and chaining them to your platform (in their case, anyway), it's more about evaluating the boundaries of their product in service of making it better.
Yeah, let's sacrifice individual liberty for larger government revenues, and justify it using class warfare.

Only winner here is Singapore, with a tax policy that makes way more sense than United States tax policy.
That's one guy. There are millions of unemployed people.

Anyway, this kind of business would have been possible in the past with local newspaper ads and the Yellow Pages.
PT BANYU BIRU SEJATI - Indonesia
You are basically admitting that Zuck didn't build a valuable company, but instead he conned investors (and Main Street) out of billions (coming days and weeks will tell exactly how much). So, congratulations to him I guess.
The Mozilla Public License v2 is a good compromise, as it is less aggressive than the GPL on links (it operates at the file level)
I posted this in the thread from Friday, but think it's worth mentioning again - if you listen to the last few minutes, starting with where Dan mentions the t-shirts, it seems like John was offended by the jokes made at his expense (e.g. not wearing a shirt). Maybe it was the kind of thing that had been accumulating, as I know Dan has made offhand cracks in the past, and perhaps this was the last straw. I believe John felt disrespected/unappreciated, for the last time it seems.
I want to play Modern Warfare 3 (or more likely BLOPS2) with that thing.

I've already started thinking about some gestures that could be used for this, but I'm wondering, how hard it's going to be on the hand(s)? I mean with the mouse and keyboard (supposing PC gaming) the hands are resting on the table 90% of the time, with this the hand(s) will be up in the air.

...unless someone puts a nice glass table on top of that thing so that my hands could rest... could this work?
I hope you make some good friends at Hacker School.
If you look at their latest numbers, you will see that the joke was not far from the truth. Once the growth phase is over, reality bites in, hard.
Right, I didn’t say we should. I was giving two separate hypotheticals. First, what would have happened if the Roman empire hadn’t unified the alphabet of Europe? We might still write English with a runic alphabet, which would mean you could no longer have typeset English with the letterforms you’d cast for, say, French. Second, what would have happened if European scripts were not typically alphabetic, but instead logographic/semantophonetic? Would the printing press have been adopted so quickly?
How Technology is Making Us Stupid and Destroying Everything Good
A timestamp and a timestamp with time zone are two different things and you need to use the appropriate one (which is usually time zone with timestamp). However, the argument is really not about attaching timezone information to timestamp which is an unfortunate but necessary thing, but storing times in the archaic multiple-base mixed format stuff humans traditionally use (because it's human-friendly) that computers simply do not need. An ISO timestamp mixes bases 60, 24, 12, a weird mix of base 28, 29, 30 an 31, and a weird mix of 365 & 366. This is craziness.
i don't use facebook so correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't liking a page have a similar effect to following on twitter, in that people who have liked your page will see your updates in their feed? the number of people who like you is irrelevant maybe, but if they're all subscribed to your marketing updates that's not nothing.
Note that it's "Deploy (Django on Nginx and Gunicorn over HTTPS)" and not "Deploy (Django on Nginx and Gunicorn) over HTTPS", which looked like quite some fun.
We have to pay something now, make up for the lost revenue. The government could have probably made a lot more off Saverin over his lifetime if they had a sensible tax policy. No wonder Saverin is fleeing to Singapore.
Hugely overvalued, of course. Having wiped out competition, there is no room left for them to grow.
Planit interiors
How to automatically test Java Console
Idea: Localmind, Color and Foursquare would have a pretty baby | Māris Antons
No suprise, because their support came in the form of a Greenshoe Option, which is an instrument specifically tailored towards the first day.
http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=odec#99
if you think economy lives outside a state, you are not paying attention to the number of laws you have to respect. And, by the way, there is no economy without States.

Well, if you think fishing and hunting are economy, go with that.
It's a shame, but they'd had a long run of shows, Gruber clearly wanted to do something else which is fine. Could he have handled it better? Sure, of course.

Plus they're still friends on Twitter, and we all know that it's only serious if you unfollow.
I think there's plenty of opportunity for exponential growth in Revenue. When we start measuring that in users, I think something is broken.
FB only released not even close to 1/2 of their stock. The investors are still stock rich and won't sell off their shares yet. If they did, the price would tank to less than $20.

The investors will cash out, but they'll gradually release the stock to the public.

The problem is that the sheer number of shares that need to be bought won't have enough humans in our population to buy it at the price. So you're going to see this stock gradually tank as investors dump their shares into the public.

It's really a legal ponzi scheme - Facebook only makes less than 1B in real revenue and their cap is riding at 90B and falling.
Thanks. I recognize now that I've heard all these before and yet we still made the same mistakes. Hoping to take some steps now to correct that, one of which being acknowledging them!
The shares they bought were just to cover their short position. They didn't loose a bit, they just didn't profit even more (which they would if the share price would go up).
"We Now Support Metric!" :) Haha, just added it in about 15 minutes. Currently working on getting the user's location by IP address. Thanks for the feedback.
Often I see UX boiled down to this quote from the article:

"To build a great UX, one has to step back and think about what’s most important, try to come up with the most simple and shortest path to get there, build, analyze what works and why(not), measure, test, rinse, and repeat."

This is the "left-brained" part of UX, while there is the forgotten "right-brained" portion, which is typically based on the psychological impact of copy, typography, and visual polish.

For example, I worked for a company that wanted to remove all "distracting copy" from the form page so that the submit button was above the fold (and fewer distractions, etc.). We ran multivariate tests swapping copy, removing copy, rephrasing copy, you name it, to figure out what our visitors were actually responding to.

Our original "assurance copy" (letting the user know what the information is for, what's going to happen next, etc.) more than doubled our average time-on-page metric. However, our conversion took a ~27% drop when we removed it entirely, and incrementally better the more copy we had.

The users that did convert spent half the amount of time on the page (they were already committed to purchase by that point), but the rest of the users obviously needed assurance in the process, not necessarily the cheapest process.
There's a number of 17 - 18 year old founders that applied instead of college. Not sure on dropout numbers.
Jonathan Mann wrote a song about the demise of The Talk Show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA2yG6FdfPs

http://www.jonathanmann.net/
This business of attacking Saverin personally is ridiculous. You do it, other people do it, and eventually it seems like the thing to do. Then when Congress starts to attack Saverin it seems normal. We have to go after those greedy rich bastards, don't we? But it's a very dangerous precedent. Do the words "bill of attainder" not mean anything to anyone here?
Can someone explain backtracking in layman's terms
Recently there was a HN thread [1] about the conservative garbage collection used in some 32bit VMs (the complaint started with Go), because the way their GC works is by scanning portions of process memory for 32 bit values that map to valid address space for that process. Those values are treated as pointers even if they're not pointers, so the data they point to is assumed to be used and is not garbage collected.

Architectures/ABIs with 64bit pointers have a much lower probability of arbitrary values mapping to active memory space for the process, so memory bloat caused by the conservative GC strategy is much more limited.

The x32 abi looks like it would suffer from this 32bit conservative garbage collection problem too. Short of changing the VM strategy, using 64 bit pointers is the only way to ensure that such VMs do not accumulate so much unused but not-garbage-collectable memory allocations.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3814020
Where a typical Rails app has a controller per model with all the crud actions for that model, we have used one Backbone router per model. It worked out so that there was one Backbone router per top level nav item.
No, I'd rather live close to work. Currently I have a 5-10 minute walking commute.
The funny thing is that the people making their money in software and entertainment: John Carmack, Elon Musk, Larry Page, James Cameron, etc... are the ones getting us to space and re-igniting the space program that the general population lost interest in funding a long time ago.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57419801/asteroid-mining...
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
http://www.spacex.com/

I say: Let the people with big ideas and great implementation skills make all the money they can legally. They're the ones we want to fund so they can pursue new interests and create new markets.
I actually don't think that advertising is Facebook's future. The intent isn't there in the same way it is with a Google search. However, I do think Facebook has a bright future with payments: imagine "Pay with Facebook" buttons throughout the web, with Facebook's business as essentially being the IRS of the internet. They could even require sites that integrate with Facebook Platform (which is very powerful and valuable) to use Facebook Payments in the same way Apple requires Apps to use in-app purchasing. No more credit card numbers to worry about: just one-click purchasing tied to the real-identity account you're already connected to. I have no trouble seeing that as a great business, and they've barely begun to scratch the surface there. They could even move into physical transactions if they bring back the Presence RFID dongle or start issuing pin/chip Facebook-linked cards.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg loses almost $2bn as share price falls
i liked aero... :(