skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, I don't think this is the right approach. Development time is a sunk cost at this point, and doesn't have any impact of the profitability of the app in the future. John's only concern now should be maximizing profit, and profit's going to be a function solely of the market for his app.

The type of analysis you've described is more applicable to consulting work, where there's a hard limit to how much output you can produce.
I firmly believe we shouldn't ridicule people for mistakes. You don't have to feel like shit to recognize and learn.

People who occasionally behave idiotically are not idiots. People who repeatedly behave idiotically are the true idiots.
lol. Don't give away our secret sauce!!
I was referring Florian Mueller, I think.
Pedant alert, hashing is still a form of encryption. Take a look at what crypt(3) used to do ;)
Maruman Prestigio Irons
Simple Network Ping Tool with Shell and HTML
Will be my first time. Looking forward to meeting everyone.
Part of the taunting now is in response to his past behavior.

Florian repeatedly refused to talk about his funding and insisted it was irrelevant (he has a history at lwn.net among other places). Now that we know the full context, people on the other side of that argument naturally want to underline it.
Do you think dynamically adding the data-bind attributes might help with the separation of concerns or maintainability of knockout? If not, what do you think the biggest obstacle to maintainability is?
I like how it collapses quickly and tries to remain as lean as possible. But there is something fundamentally wrong - my browser already has a search box on top right..why did Yahoo think adding another one on bottom left would make me happy?

May a right side panel that reads from browser search box and completely collapses when I don't search would have been nicer.
Lessons from the MilitarySingles.com Hack
"It amazes me how many people will list something for sale on Craigslist without publishing obvious facts like model numbers."

Doesn't surprise me really.

It's not hard to be a solid seller on Craiglist because everyone else mostly does a terrible job at it.

Even something like photos for a rental are beyond some peoples capabilities.
I think that it's a very nicely formatted product. You've done some really interesting things with laying out the content. That said, I have a few issues:

Mobile - I often consume this kind of "clippable" content on a mobile device. It's limited in usefulness since it's just a browser extension (which doesn't exist on my Android)

Clipping UI - It can be frustrating to try and clip just the parts of a page that i want. The clipping box moves around seemingly randomly. I'd expect it to work similar to how a screenshot tool works, (a rectangular square on the screen) but it appears to be scanning for parts of the web page and then offering those parts as suggestions. This makes it difficult to just clip what I want.

Readability - On the "pinterest" board view (sorry - that's how I think of it) - the text is dramatically shrunk, and the headlines are often clipped. So I've got no idea what some of the clipped articles are about, unless I click them.

If there was a way to summarize the text instead of showing a thumbnail of the whole thing, it might be more useful. That technique (thumbnails) seems to work well on pics, but not on text oriented clips.

When I do click them, they appear in a lightbox view. The URL doesn't change unless I click through again to another view. It'd be good to have a linkable URL in lightbox views so I could share easier.

Nice work though, good luck with it. Also, I would love to hear more about developing your site in NodeJS .
No Facebook. No Twitter. No Google+. No Tumblr. None of it.
Usb numpad
This is true, but if you actually look into these "incidents" that linus and rms et. al have been involved in, instead of just reading the trashy tabloid blogs /about/ them, you'll find that they are not in fact, stepping outside of that basic principle.
Both Chrome and Firefox can sync between desktop and android.
Show HN:ThemeIQ.com, Mobile App Theme Marketplace 
I'm getting ready to launch a new marketplace for mobile app themes and designs. But before I do any feedback that anyone might have on the copy, design, concept, execution, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Background:
I have a web development background and have developed a some mobile apps over the past few years. Although I know my way around Photoshop/Fireworks/The Gimp, I am by no means a designer. That being said, while developing my latest app I was thinking that it would be nice to just buy and download a nice theme for the app just like you can buy stock photographs or themes for WordPress. ThemeIQ was born.

I used Bootstrap because I like the fonts and subtle graphics - plus it sure gets things going a lot quicker.

Although it is a fully functioning marketplace, it is an MVP that will be iterated after fully validating the market. I just want to get something out there. I have already received some preliminary validation from designers & developers I know and will continue to expand on that. Again any feedback would be fantastic.

URL: http://themeiq.com

Cheers,
> I'm glad <insert name here> is a jerk because it allows him to spend more time doing <insert cool thing here>.

I'm convinced that's a fallacy.

Is "[Github's] pull requests and the online commit
editing, are just pure garbage, go file a bug report with them" that much easier to voice than "[Github's] pull requests don't provide the flexibility or formatting we need for the kernel, so please read up on the proper pull request procedure. thanks!"? Plus such courtesy eliminates the inevitable outrage of the anti-prick crusade.
I don't believe it is possible to get into a hub position without being a prick, because all else being equal, you will always get beaten by someone who /is/ willing to be a prick.
Here's a question: where is all this caching taking place? I understand caching in the context of processors but not so much what you're describing.
It does completely redefine the way you search the web. It's changing search results from text to thumbnails. That will be totally useless in many circumstances, but could be useful in some.
Dropbox 1.4.6 Final on Downloads App
Yes but this has no need for the bitcoin economy.
I can't speak for others, but I don't think PJ is impartial or independent. We all know who she's rooting for in these cases and she doesn't try to hide it.

The reason PJ is respected here and in other places is because more often than not... she's right (especially from the perspective of helping programmers understand the foreign and alien legal system).
Yahoo is a dying company, quickly converting itself into a patent troll, and suing competitors in a desperate attempt to stay relevant long after they are. This is a dying company. I have ZERO respect for any employee of a company like this.

The executives of this company that decided to become a patent troll should go hang themselves, or at least quit their jobs and save some semblance of self-respect.
/sbin/init never needs to be the root process in a Linux system. You will end up in a messy situation if your init replacement allow you to spawn processes without wait()'ing for children now and again (e.g. some daemons will "double fork" and wait for the immediate child to die, and then expect init to take care of the real worker later), but that's pretty much it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

Note that the first cause listed (At the time of writing) is business pressure. This happens quite often. Sometimes you have to produce slop code to get anything out the door at all.

As an example; this whole demo is a hack of the worst sort:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_y3cbIV-Xg

There was a series of posts on the Bungie website about the development of halo2 outlining just how hackish this thing was.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/99883-Halo-2s-Deve...

And some interviews.

For the sake of disclosure, I've never done a startup. But if I've been reading the right authors than the right thing to do in this situation is to go ahead with it and fix it later once you're off the ground.

EDIT: I also like jeffbcross's advice if that is at all possible.
It also works with all versions of Firefox and on older versions of Android.

Incidently the new beta of Firefox for Android is incredibly much better than the older Firefox too. And that works on older Android as well, of course.
How a Waiter's Pad Saved My Life
Yes, because nobody can calculate in advance the thousands of ways any particular utterance might be interpreted by someone. It's rather neurotic to try, and much easier to just say what you mean, and accept that haters gonna hate.
I'm not entirely sure that data binding is a good approach in general. I spent quite a bit of time on a Silverlight MVVM project too, and the data binding there got to be more trouble than it was worth as well. Seems like data binding separates the what (user input causes model to update) from the how (markup bindings magically translate to updated model) and that just makes an unmaintainable mess.
In order to be the leader of a successful project, there are two key skills that you need to have: (a) you need to set very high standards for you and your development team, (b) you need to be able to rally talented developers to want to work with you and your team.

How you treat the less-talented people is not terribly important (at least not in terms of how it effects the success or failure of your project in a direct fashion); and if you are someone who has very high standards, and someone who does not have very high standards but which insists on wanting to "help", it's not surprising if you will end up giving them a short, even brusque answer.

Dealing with incompetent people who pester you with github pull requests with crap code or crap commit descriptions is an interesting problem. It's not like a startup, where you can fire them, or put them through a very careful interview screening process and refusing to hire the less talented. So combine this tendency towards perfectionism, and interactions with someone who is more persistent than competent. What do you think will happen?

So in answer to your question: Can you get into the hub position while being a prick to talented developers? No, of course not. Do you have to be equally nice and perhaps have to show even more patience to the idiots? No, of course not. And if taking the time to try to educate every single idiot which crosses your path and wants to "help", means that you don't have enough time to push your project ahead, ultimately that can end up hurting the success of your project.
You should send that to him as a suggestion. He loves it when his readers suggests things they'd like him to write about.
Yes, that's one option. But the question is then "who do I ask?" If you don't understand the field yourself (at least to some degree) it's just as easy to get suckered into asking the wrong person for an opinion.

It's hard to say, though, what "to some degree" should be. How much do we expect judges to know about automobiles, or construction, or medicine or whatever other fields they need to make judgments on? It seems to me you can't expect a judge to be completely ignorant of a field and still make valuable judgments on it.
I'd say Larry Wall has done a pretty good job in his "Benevolent Dictator of Perl" role.

I also appreciate how near this piece comes to channeling Philip Seymour Hoffman's rebuttal to Robin Williams in "Patch Adams."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNN6FI1Gcr8
Why use BB to represent billion, as opposed to one B? Seems unnecessary.
The History of Clock Making to The Building of The Cuckoo Clock
Not an untypical predicament you're in. Best advice is to minimize features and release something to someone asap. That takes a lot of discipline to do, but starting simple and iterating has lots of benefits. Just a few:
1. Instant feedback, so you can validate your assumptions about the product. (see: Lean Startup, Eric Ries)
2. It's easier to keep releasing once you've already released.
3. With a simple, limited feature set, your product is easier to understand to your early adopters.
My first thought was that it's not the manifest, it's the list of everyone who is currently logged into the site. That would make more sense to me.
Microsoft Passes Apple in China as Nokia Cheers
I like writing apps too (iOS), although I'm slowly letting go of the idea that I can sell enough on my own to support myself. The job market for iOS/Mac developers seems strong enough, so you probably can pay the bills with those skills and consider your own apps as a portfolio.

May your tail be long!
"If you receive resumés from India you probably receive these blanket career objective statements that make no sense"

I'm afraid you'll get these kinds of resumes from lame people from anywhere, not just india...
Well, I never thought they were going to write their own renderers or whatever. I thought it would be FF with the chrome heavily redone in a manner that made sense.
Why is it that nobody notices the selection bias? Linus sends hundreds, if not thousands, of e-mails every week. Does it really surprise anyone that we've been able to find fully four instances in the past six months in which he sounded somewhat angry? Is there anyone here who can claim a pristine post history?

This certainly applies to RMS as well.
Things No One Tells You
Why would any "revolutionary" company (aka any business, regardless of the marketing-speak) NOT be working on the "most important product yet" every single day?
So it turns out they accidentally included their certificate private key inside the Chrome extension package:

https://twitter.com/nikcub/status/205489752684765185

Edit: just created a fake package and signed it:

https://github.com/nikcub/yahoo-spoof
Quinolinic Acid and Autism Treatment
Biomedical autism intervention specialist physician, Dr. Kurt Woeller, explains the importance of quinolinic acid markers as indicators of issues with appropriate tryptophan metabolism. Elevated quinolinic acid can be problematic for children on the Autism spectrum.
This is kind of important. I will reserve "big deal" for other infractions, but it's far from harmless. It's important to protect your users passwords regardless of whether phishing them directly is the more popular attack. If you don't know why, just ask Sony and Valve.
I'd rather see him call out HuffPo for promoting dangerously idiotic quack bullshit.

http://www.scienceduck.com/2010/07/08/the-huffington-post-ha...
Yahoo? No thanks. Just go away, patent troll.
Anyone non-US is able to try the iOS version yet? In Canada here, the iPad app doesn't show up on the App Store and the direct link from Yahoo throws an error.
I belive we should criticise ideas, not people. It's one thing to have an idiotic idea. Having an idiotic idea is OK. Saying that someone's idea is idiotic is OK.

It's quite another thing to be an idiot. Calling someone an idiot is not OK.
With MongoDB, there's a concept called Sharding, that divides a collection based on a property in the collection the developer selects.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Sharding+Introduction

Each shard can be either a single node, or can be divided among nodes in a Replica Set for distributed reads.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Replica+Sets
I buy a lot of tickets on United's website (formerly Continental's), and it isn't a great experience – but the idea that this list is the flight's passenger manifest just doesn't make sense to me.

The screenshot shows the point in the ticketing workflow where you give the name (and basic TSA-required details) of the passenger purchasing the ticket. If you're logged in to the website, you can add as many passengers as you want to your account, which might be handy if you purchase tickets for your family or for coworkers. My guess would be that somehow the session got into an incorrect state and is showing the passengers from one or more other accounts.

Also, the form is the same whether you're booking a one-way flight with one manifest, or a roundtrip with many connections where each flight has a unique manifest. I don't understand how the system would be able to deal with these diverse sets of data.
Here you go:

http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/videologger.php?target=120...
For those who missed the webcast:

http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/videologger.php?target=120...
The only thing Apple's control of the app store achieves at this point is keeping out blatant malware. Maybe that alone is worth it but scams and cheap clones abound.
Gofigure configuration library for node
Most software is built by people being employed by someone who has enough money to pay for them to build whatever they want. If that person with the money wants to build a shitty ripoff then a shitty ripoff is being built.
Ranker ~is~ a top 1k site.

Personally I've looked over the data for a number of successes and failures and I don't believe the conventional story about Panda.

Adding the data in this article to everything else I know about Ranker just confirms my model of what works and what doesn't.
I assume you assert that out of ignorance.

No, however I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume we have a vastly different view on what small quantities entails. You have farmers who are basically drenched in the stuff and then the general public who get's 1/1000th of those doses. Most of the time toxicity is not a linear relationship, feel free to go swim in a vat of phosphoric acid an ingredient in Coca-Cola Soda Syrup if you survive feel free to report back to me on what that was like.
Every Go article explains this, but it doesn't answer the higher level question of why not use exceptions. Even worse you are forced to return data values along with the error code/flag/object.

I've not seen a standard error object either which means every place that looks at an error has to be intimately aware of what it is looking at. There is an os.Error but that appears to be string only so there is no errno equivalent value inside.

In languages with exceptions there is a base error/exception/throwable that has reason fields as well as methods to get tracebacks which are extremely useful.

I'm now 85% convinced Go made a mistake not using exceptions.
He is a handsome guy, and right usually, oh yes, I'm straight. Snap. I agree too, I hope Larry grows some wisdom instead of the usual hair he sports. It's bad enough Oracle owns Java already, it should have been IBM IMHO.
Null means "match all" -- everyone knows that!
That's not a redefinition. It's a modification. The hyperbole of "completely redefining" something is nothing short of presumptuous.
Couldn't agree more! Here's my feedback:

If I see a big page that tells me "first things first - you need to create your account" before I even know what this site is, you lost me. The next website is just a click away, or in this case, the closing of a tab away.

I've also tried the http://clipboard.com/site/news.ycombinator.com link another HN'er posted here, and I get an empty page. Oh, right, that must be because I'm using NoScript, but it would be nice if you had some kind of fall-back for such a case?
How Has Diablo 3 Changed
Axis countries during WWII.

Axis of Evil.

Axis Chemical, because early adopters are Batman fans.

Why this name? What positive associations does it have?
So would I. But why? Because I don't know anything about quantum physics, and he's supposed to have a good grasp of the truth of the subject, so I would just take his word for it (a small act of faith). But his word is not what makes it true or false.

If the most celebrated nutritionist told me that eating nothing but baked beans was the healthiest diet in the world, I wouldn't believe him 'just because' he's an expert. I know enough about the subject of nutrition to consider his Baked Beans idea demented. So, I would ask him to show some sort of evidence.

P.S. I'll be reading more of your Value of Information: 8 examples article. Very interesting!
The nightmare of writing any kind of serious program in the shell was the inspiration for PBS https://github.com/amoffat/pbs
Do you have any references for this theory? If true it would influence my pricing strategy for my own apps. I have seen more sales at $2.99 than $4.99 but I haven't tried anything in between.
Mac App Store - Coda 2
Fair enough. I am interested in the general question "pricing software" and explained my reasoning for how I might go about pricing an App. If John is reading I would really like to know what his reasoning is. The data points we have from the article are "originally priced at $14" "Priced one day at $2" "Made $8000 which is more than they expected to make" these are all pieces of data regarding his reasoning but I'm truly interested in how he thinks about it. Why was $8,000 more than he expected, how much did he expect? If he had no idea how much did he guess? What reasoning did he use to inform that guess?

"App stores" are an amazingly disruptive power on software development costs. I find them fascinating both from a business perspective and from a more general economics perspective. Perhaps someone else reading this will some day post their experiences to HN as well and we'll another data point.
These posts (the one about 20ms for a memcached lookup especially) make me doubt the technical prowess of the entire ServerDensity staff, and thereby stopping me from ever considering this product.
I'm a lifehacker:

If I don't want to do it, it doesn't make me money, and its not a family obligation, I don't do it.

How I hack email:

Employees and close friends get my email address. No one else should have it.

How I hack my phone:

Employees, close friends, and attractive girls have it. I never answer an unknown number. I never return a call from a company, they have to send something in writing.

How I hack making phone calls to companies:

Personal assistant does it.

How I hack snail mail:

My lawyer picks it up once a week, important stuff I see eventually.

Lifehacking isn't about optimizing an annoying task, its about not doing it.
Diet Coda for iPad on the iTunes App Store
Beside Twitter and Facebook, where else is good to create buzz for a website?
New Prom Dresses & Wedding Dresses on Sale 55%oof & Free Shipping 
Wedding Dresses & Prom Dresses on Sale 55%Off and Free Shipping on Dressz.com

and it designs can personally tailored for you from scratch
People are not split into two buckets of talented and untalented. People learn, grow, get better (and worse) over time, and have emotions. That github pull request with crap code that "pestered" you could come from someone who turns out to be extremely talented in a year or two.
anti-humor mode: It's terse, but not necessarily to the point. Things like "| awk '{print $1}'" or "find . -exec sh -c 'fds' \;" or ""$(echo "$x" | sed 's/a/b/')""
are a lot of characters for their respective purposes; a modern shell adhering to similar principles could do better.
FWIIW, I downvoted that comment. It used inappropriate language, it was tasteless, uninformative, and clearly against HN etiquette.

I downvoted your post (above) as well for the same reasons.
How is that so when the article says "NOTE: Until we have user namespaces implemented in the kernel and used by the LXC we will NOT say that LXC is root safe"?
I dont think that long (buy) limit orders are ever meant to be used that way, you would place a long limit order below the market price and it usually ends up being executed at that price even if the stock nose dives a lot more
Did anyone else notice that Hacker News has changed?
The front page is flooded with start-up drama instead of more technical articles. I am not sure, but I am feeling less and less satisfied with the content here. Thoughts?
I guarantee this is the case. If their desktop effort at a "new browser" is a chrome extension, no way is the IOS version anything more than a wrapper around UIWebView.
I just hope they are still friends.
Well, his accomplishments and technical judgement should be respected. You don't have to respect a person's character to respect their accomplishments.