skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a rambling discussion, which Stack Exchange is not really intended for. There are lots of good places to have rambling discussions. We focus on answerable questions with specific answers, not long-winded, open-ended conversation starters. There are plenty of other sites for long-winded, open-ended conversation starters, including Reddit and Hacker News.

After a decade or so of operating sites for programmers on the Internet, I've learned that, left by themselves, ALL programmer online sites will rapidly deteriorate into:

* I hate my job, woe is me ("I hate my job too!")

* I'm not productive any more, oh dear ("Oh my god you took the words right out of my mouth!")

* And some nonsense about H1B visas.

These kinds of conversations are endless because, I'm sad to say, they represent a common problem among programmers. Discussing it as a means of therapy is a wonderful thing, but DO IT SOMEWHERE ELSE, because Stack Exchange is 100% focused on questions with specific factual answers.

This hard and fast rule is actually WHY you love stack overflow so much. It's WHY the network works. It's WHY you click on the stackoverflow.com link in the Google results even if it's third. If we weren't strict about this stuff we wouldn't have such consistently high quality ANSWERS.

Just because "moderators" (actually, users) have deemed to close a question on Stack Exchange, doesn't mean it's a bad question, or that the person who asked it is bad. It just means that Stack Exchange is an edited, curated environment, not your livejournal. The very moderation that people complain about every time a popular question is closed is what has been making the site work so well.
Widow Maker: a super-agile DIY quadcopter
Intelsat signs first commercial Falcon Heavy launch agreement with SpaceX
How to overcome “years of experience” requirements when applying for jobs
> "then it is understandable that he would prefer they didn't have the right to vote."

Woah, that's a big leap. I disagree vehemently with pretty much every stance of the American religious right, but I wouldn't dream of depriving their free speech rights or their right to vote for whoever they damn well please.

Disagreeing with someone and condoning their muzzling are two entirely different levels.

It's funny that, further up the thread, someone suggested than Libertarian arguments against the seatbelt center around the notion that, once legislated, nothing potentially better than the seatbelt could ever be tried, thanks to the heavy hand of government. It's egregiously incongruent to hear that argument, and hear another that suggests the permanent muzzling of 50% of the population would lead to a better world.
Is COBOL still used by banks? The people I know who work in two different major UK banks suggest everything is Java now, with Oracle as the preferred database solution.
Some things simply don't add up still for me.

How did 38 Studios not have a better idea of their runway? Did someone forget that the loan payment was due?

Why did Schilling report on Twitter that sales of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning beat expectations, but it sounded like it needed to sell 2x as many units to break even? Was it expected to take a loss? Why was there talk of a sequel (which he was apparently trying to raise money for) immediately upon release? Its a good idea to run multiple projects concurrently and diversify, but it still strikes me as strange.

It also sounds like they were building an incredibly ambitious "WoW-killer", and that the funding wasn't enough to do that, no matter how you ran the math.

In my mind, you don't start a company to create jobs. Its a nice economic goal, but it should be a side effect of need internally, not the stated goal of the company. In doing that you're going to hire too many too early. Maybe the concept of 'lean' doesn't apply to game companies?

Why the last days were they still advertising new jobs on their site? (currently 18 open jobs listed on the site)

Why was there not greater transparency with employees? It seems like they were using brinksmanship as a managerial strategy and it bit them.

I'm also not sure why Schilling wasn't doing more to help employees find jobs. Yet, Jen MacLean (even after stepping down as CEO) is all over twitter (@JenMacl) helping place employees.

I can't really blame investors for not wanting to jump onboard. MMOs can be incredibly hit and miss, and Schilling being at the helm didn't really inspire confidence for many.
Unfortunately redhat based distros don't support keeping the install minimal past installing the first few things afterwards. There is no --no-instal-recommends --no-install-suggests for RPM based distros and no (easy) way to acheive that either.

It's for this reason that I have, over the past year, discovered that my favorite server OS is debian minimal (with those above flags entered into apt.conf) while my favorite desktop is without a doubt Fedora / gnome3.

This is exactly the opposite of the norm I think, but, fedora pushes the desktop boundaries far further than ubuntu and debian is so highly optimised for minimal server setups.
Sir, your story is absolutely amazing. You, your wife, and your son deserve to be recognized for your struggles that will undoubtedly help others in the future.
Even hitting another one of these or a similar super-light vehicle, you both still lose. For survivability there is absolutely no replacement for deformable structure aka crumple zones.
It's present in 5.14, though the use of hash operators on array references with automatic dereferencing has some weird potential corner cases.
You can write readable Perl, just like you can write secure PHP. The fact that a large number of people don't is not necessarily a failing of the language.
Game Closure Poaches Zynga’s CTO Of Mobile To Lead HTML5 Game Development
> Before you have children, understand that it's for the rest of your life. Really understand the impact.

As a father with a son with severe autism, and remembering the time before you were a father, do you think that anybody can imagine what it's like?

I have a healthy daughter (16 months old), and that alone changed my live beyond anything I could have imagined before.

I don't want to belittle anybody's imagination, but in my experience imagination only works well for envisioning things happening to you in short time scales.
People also got "spectacular" results from antibiotics. Initially, optimists announced that we were ushering in an age free from disease. Fast forward a few decades and we now have frightening antibiotic resistant infections to contend with.

I am not claiming there are zero short term benefits to be had. I am only claiming there is a long term cost and I deem it to be too high since there is no known means to reverse silver poisoning. My genetic disorder is deemed to be degenerative and fatal. I have reversed a lot of the symptoms, gotten off eight prescription drugs and gotten my life back. I recommend against colloidal silver any time anyone asks me. I am clear the build up of poisons in the body is why my condition is degenerative.
clojure has some great features but syntax is just disgusting (not because of parentheses, i like scheme)
Your landing page should, as quickly as possible, tell the user what you do. If you need bells and whistles to accomplish that, then you should use them. Generally though a simple message is best.

My favorite landing page is http://www.weebly.com/. Within a couple of seconds you know exactly what they do and how to sign up.
I think a lot of people start out this way including myself. As you hit your late 30's I think is when even some hard-core no-kids people start to re-evaluate their thinking.

I still don't have kids but I'm not anti-kids anymore so if one day it happens I'll be ok with it. What changes is that you go around year after year and you start to see things become a bit repetitive. Holidays with the family, celebrations. Your family starts getting smaller. You start to see how much fresh new energy kids bring to life in general. You start to chill out about the crying and hassles that babies bring and not see them as so much of a burden. All of the things that you've done a million times are suddenly new and exciting because you have somebody to share them with and pass off all of your knowledge, show them all the tricks you've learned in life. I didn't really feel any of that until I had nieces, but I really love hanging around with them.
Moral priorities will always be subjective. There isn't much sense to prepending "I think" to a sentence when it's implied by the context.

Being tolerant doesn't mean that one cannot be critical.
Companies are extracting oil from their products to cut costs
Kids are a lot of work, but you don't have to make it unnecessarily hard on yourself by raising them American-style.

As long as your child is healthy, it's perfectly possible to wean them early, send them to child care, get them to sleep through the night by not rushing to their side every three seconds, train them to play quietly by themselves, teach them not interrupt their parents when they're busy, get babysitters whenever you have a social occasion, and put your relationship with your spouse first and foremost. Your kids will be just fine.
I understand lunch being a distraction, but anything less than 3 meals a day is AFAIK know bad for health. I know it detoriated mine. So I think a good lunch break is important. I'm still in college, so have no idea what being in office is like.
This is the way Facebook ends
Vim is the most natural choice for me. I learned how to type when I was a kid, so using Vim for me is the best way to make use of these skills. It's so nice to be able to delete a line by pressing d-d instead of having to grab the mouse, underline the line and press delete. It's like playing piano, Vim is an instrument of pleasure, a drug and what's probably going to kill me.maybe not that much...
I'm happy to lose karma fighting this fight. It's something that appears lost on the internet, and especially amongst hackers. This is, in effect, standing over his body pondering whether bullet proof glass would have helped. Does it matter? Where is your empathy? Where's your perspective? I don't demand you feel any way, but I will always demand respect for other people, and this entire discussion is distasteful and disrespectful to those suffering loss.

It's fine to wonder about your own security, but have some sense of context. Go do some research and find out what the real best way to protect yourself from events like this is. Go write an article about it and post it to HN. Those are all constructive things to do, but have some respect for the loss here and compartmentalize the discussion a bit.
Why Google Should Be Worried About Facebook
On the other hand, they also require charging infrastructure, and there is some loss in transmission, so you don't get to keep all of that efficiency.
I dunno about the Chromebox. I can't see many of my friends setting up a monitor, mouse and keyboard for a computer that only runs Chrome OS.

It's interesting, though.
My thoughts... I think it's a pretty good idea.

1. I could tell what it was, it was pretty clear, although at first I thought it was foundmeals.com which is very different.

2. For something like this, if you gave the first week free, or even a short 3 day set of recipies free I think that would help - I'd have real trouble paying for this before I could see an example of what I am getting.
Also, will you account for different dietary requirements (keeping in mind that different people have different ideas of 'healthy)?

It also seems natural that in some big cities (like San Francisco) you could pair up with restraunts or delis and just have the food delivered, instead of the recipies.
Reading this post makes me fear for a bubble -- when I read stuff like this it brings me back to 2000 all over again: "401(k) contribution matching, 100% matching up to 6% of your salary + Full coverage for medical, dental, and vision". I'll grant you that this isn't quite on the level of "your own private sushi chef" but it makes me uncomfortable that a company that's a startup would do this. I realize that good talent is hard to find, but this scares me...
The favorite argument of the weak programmer. Some people act like if it's not spelled out for them letter by letter it's not readable. Perl is no less readable then HTML5, given that there is proper indentation. Get over it.
Disagree.

Readability and reasonable shoot-self-in-foot protection are not optional. See the article from earlier today about not catering to power users. Same concept. You can't really design a language for the top 5% of programmers and expect it to gain any sort of acceptance. (See: Haskell, Ocaml)
I sit down for a weekend, get my computer working exactly the way I want, and I'm set

I think the parent poster is arguing not spending a weekend to setup something. It should just work, fast and great.
Motorcycles don't have "amazing fuel economy": small cars do <100 g/km and sadly few motorcycles beat that.
Is COBOL still used by banks?

Short answer: Yes :-)

Still the backbone of many banks, building societies, credit card companies, etc. See http://www.careerjet.co.uk/cobol-jobs.html for some of job adverts. This old 2009 article http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/09/cobol-inter... is still pretty much true AFAIK.
A great example of the tyranny of the App Store. Call me cynical, but Airfoil is clearly disruptive to Apple's plans to control all of your playback devices with AirPlay, and I don't think it's a coincidence that they've suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the "law". Extremely disappointing.

As great as Apple devices are, I fear a future where Apple controls every device in the home, because interoperability will be dead.
The Jack Principles
That article doesn't discuss the details of the implementation, but it could very well be the Adsense js that is tagging the cookie with the referral data. Any ad network can implement that.
Why I Don't Give a Damn What You Use
She let me take the computer home
I can see it being perfect for my parents who use Facebook, email, and write documents.

Also, I could be great for schools for the same reason or for some office workers that just need email and Google Docs.

I think this fits with that other item on Hacker News today about targeting the right user. In this case, for a non power user, this has great potential.
Can anyone explain to me how the P/E ratio is a meaningful metric for a company's stock price and what it "should be" at when that company does not distribute earnings to the shareholders?

There are two ways to gauge the value of a company. One way (the way to which you allude) is to buy it and hope that in the future, someone thinks it's worth more than what you paid for it. Some people call this the Greater Fool theory.

The other way is to treat owning shares like owning part of a business. (You might hear about this as the Graham-Dodd or Graham-Dodd-Buffett model.) In this case you consider the value of the company as the current liquidation value of the company's assets plus the total amount of free cash the business can produce over its useful lifespan.

The math of that valuation gets a little bit interesting, because if you project the free cash growth into the future ten or twenty years, you can use a present value calculation to get a fair price for the company right now. Divide that by the number of outstanding shares and you get a target price per share.

One of the flaws of this method is that you need to have a sane sense of the growth rate of free cash, so you'd better base that on a stable and measurable history, and you have to verify that against sanity and the company's published plans.

Graham's real insight was saying "If you do all that work, also add a significant margin of safety to account for any flaws in your calculations."

Of course you shouldn't use reported earnings for these calculations; they're far too easy to manipulate under GAAP and accrual accounting. Even so, finding realistic numbers and ruling out most stocks as overvalued is relatively easy.

(I'm working on a financial analysis site right now.)
Friends, no. Workplace IT, yes.
The article makes a good point. But, the title (and comments here) infer that there are a mountain of reasons why people don't use it. Is there a compelling argument against that mountain, or is this just a reminder that Ruby/Python/Closure/Scala communities would be well-served to try and improve in this area?
It's not that is hasn't "managed to monetize," they haven't even TRIED. Very big difference.
Finkle and Einhorn... Einhorn and Finkle... Finkle is Einhorn... Einhorn is Finkle...
Where are the ARM based Chrome books ?
Kickstarter of the Week is an All-Female StartX Company
I think reliability implies readability and even impossible without it.
ARM versions for half the price, please (preferably based on the latest Cortex A15 CPU and Mali GPU).
Xamarin abandons its Silverlight for Linux technology
This visual view of talks reminds me of RSA Animate

http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg
Now take the 9 million sites with the Like button and throw in some extra Javascript for a 'Social Adsense' product. Now they have implicit and explicit data to target off of. There's your 10x growth in revenue.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/slick-new-chromebook-...
I'm not really trying to be secretive but there are several details about my business you would need to know to understand my specific "selective denial" method (as strategy consultants call it). But the general gist is this:

Many startups are so desperate to find customers that they are even holding on to the ones that cost too much support. (Note that in a startup support cost often takes away valuable time from the founders and thus is more an "opportunity" cost than a monetary cost, they should have spent that time growing the business with more valuable customers).

I chose to do only e-mail support because it self-selects out a type of customer that wants to use the phone (also phone support scales poorly, especially when expanding internationally). There are ways you can encourage the "dummy" user to desire phone support, and then gently point out that there are _other_ providers that have that. If you do this properly the dummy client will actually feel they've had good customer service (and you could argue that they have, we just weren't meant for each other) and your over eager competition gets stuck with the dummies.

Edit: I thought I should mention, for a startup it can often be unclear which customer is/will be valuable and you can learn a lot from the "wrong" ones, so be careful with "selective denial" unless you've run the numbers and are sure what you are doing
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This is, in effect, standing over his body pondering whether bullet proof glass would have helped.

Distance makes a difference. I don't feel any immediacy to this event or these people.

compartmentalize the discussion a bit.

I definitely agree. Tycho started another thread of conversation instead of responding to anyone here who knew Justin Ferrari. That's about as compartmentalized as we can get on this site.
> we’re about to hit 40 people at Treehouse and we’ll be at 60 in three more months. There was only seven of us 12 months ago, so we’ve grown very fast.

For a small company that's growing this quickly, it's probably going to take more than 12 months to know for sure if a hire is good or not. Declaring them as good does not make them so. I'd be interested to see a follow up post 12 months from now giving an update on retention rates and any hiring process updates they've subsequently made.
I may have missed something, but how does it stay upright when parked? Is there a kick-stand of some sort?
Does this raise the chances for a "Google Drive for Linux" release within the next weeks?
> do you think that anybody can imagine what it's like?

Oh, no. Of course not. But they should consider the possibility. You cannot assume that it's going to be 18-20 years and they are on their own. That it's diapers for only a couple years and then you don't have to change them.

No, there is no way they can fully grasp what it means. But they can't just assume everything will be fine. My wife and I did this, and we waited, and prepared, and we had kids once we were ready. Really ready, and I'd like to think it shows in our children, in our marriage, and in our lives. No, we weren't ready for autism, but we did understand that things could go wrong.

So yes, you are right. But it still can't hurt to think about it. Really think about it. More than what some people do.
Sounds like the world is your oyster. I'll throw my hat in. Recommend you add something about yourself to the public part of your HN profile to make it easier to gauge the fit.

Staying in college or dropping out?
So does this mean that if you use the Graham-Dodd-Buffet model of valuation, a company that pays a dividend to shareholders would get a higher valuation (all other factors being equal) than the hypothetical same company that does not pay dividends?
ColinWright, I have submitted URLs from properties that do not belong to me. Like a news article or interesting blog that I read and felt was worthwhile.

This time I wanted to post the URL: http://blog.bubbleideas.com/2012/05/what-is-letter-that-pape... which is an article on my own startup.

I submitted it once, but link never appeared live on HN. It was dead on arrival, and faded out immediately after submission. I used http://news.ycombinator.com/submit only. I got frightened and deleted the post assuming that HN had killed it for [dead link].

Now I am trying to resubmit the article, but it says "Stop spamming us. You're wasting our time." I don't want to spam. I want to "Show HN: My work".
Fair enough, so I'll suggest this. If you live in a crime-heavy area, accept that your life isn't something you want to risk on a hack (like retro-fitting bulletproof windows to your family minivan).

Securing an automobile against bullets involves some very specific domain knowledge that you're not likely to gain during a weekend project. Specifically, retrofitting your car with bulletproof windows isn't a very good option, because bullets (even a lowly 9mm) can penetrate the thin steel of a car door at close range. Glass capable of stopping the same round will not fit in the channels that support a standard car window, and will be far too heavy for the existing power window mechanism.

Cars that offer protection from bullets are purpose-built, have much more than just bulletproof glass, and weigh a lot more (because of armor plating) than your average automobile, which is going to equate to horrible gas mileage. It's simply not a viable option for most people.
7 Successful Tech Companies Started By Non-Technical Founders
As Zynga’s stock lockup ends, Game Closure steals a mobile game expert
Direct link to interview transcript: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/05/Miguel-Moonlight
"This will require them going from a niche advertiser to taking over a significant fraction of all worldwide ad revenue, this is no small feat."

But it is small for Facebook. They already have the footprint with over 9 million sites all running the Like button. Utilizing that same JS they can have a 'Social Adsense' revenue stream overnight. They can potentially grab the search queries from the headers and have implicit and explicit data to target off of (the holy grail of targeting).