skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i believe the "donate" model works in certain instances, but it's nothing you can count (or depend) on; at least not from the beginning. "certain instances" might be very famous artists who use it as a marketing stunt to get a lot of free press. this might cease to work when the novelty wears off. most likely it doesn't work for unknown artists at all.

but: counterexample! dwarf fortress! this unique game finances one dedicated full time developer since (felt) decades (though i'm not on top of developments in recent years). it works because it's a niche product with an incredibly dedicated fan base. and the developer puts them under pressure: he'll work on the game as long as he can live off the donations. as soon as people stop donating enough ...
The root of polymorphism: The Anti-If Campaign
It is exactly as you describe, we start with targeting the underserved low-end market and will work our way up from there. Hope to become a compelling service for your needs soon.
I don't know, bitcoin is nice as it makes an easy international currency, even for financially isolated countries (aka "axis of evil"). I can see bitcoins being used as well to buy chinese goods/services without having to deal with currency transfer costs.

Also, they might get some business via this, as bitcoin businesses need some sort of arbitration system. Perhaps this could be a court for large scale elicit businesses, though I don't know if they want to tred in those waters.
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WSJ: You Call That Innovation?
I'm sure this is true of other schools too, but I can confirm that some psets at MIT can take upwards of 12 hours. It's not even a matter of organization at that point - the amount of thinking and planning to just come up with the idea can take a long time.

But of course, there are also classes in which I spend way more time than I should, simply from procrastinating or not paying attention in class. So I guess the original advice is sound ("be organized", "study early") but the reality is much more difficult than the article makes it out to be.
A friend of mine prefers the word "bet" or "gamble" to "invest" when it comes to stock markets.

Sure, as much as in horse tracks, knowing more increases your odds of winning, but, overall, it's a sport better left for the professionals.

That doesn't preclude you from playing, of course. I do and it's very entertaining. I just won't bet everything on stocks.
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And that's the key. If these are bizdev people, it could mean a much more vibrant Apple ecosystem[1]. If they are project managers, Apple is screwed.

1. As an example, gaming on OS X has traditionally sucked (it has gotten better in spite of Apple). The primary reason: Jobs didn't care about gaming. Put some bizdev people who are analyzing it for what the users want and what will grow OS X adoption, and there could be a very different outcome, including more M&A activity.
You think that innovation, whatever the hell that is, doesn't require a lot of incremental optimizations?

As has been endlessly observed, the Mac drew heavily on the innovative ideas at Xerox PARC, but it added many refinements, including affordability. Similarly, there were other mp3 players before the iPod, and other smartphones before the iPhone, but part of what set Apple apart was bringing all those capabilities together in a way that was greater than the sum of the parts. That doesn't mean that the parts are unimportant.
The problem with this line of thinking is that you are, in a way, supporting the efforts of people that produce a inferior product. By downloading and using the inferior product, you aren't supporting products that do meet your needs, but might not be as popular.

So, stop supporting these products, and instead, support products that are meeting your needs.
Do you earn your living off this WTFPL software?
1) Let go of the guilt of not being productive.

2) Let go of any other guilt or pressure to do something more valuable with your time or improve something that you already know how to do.

3) Accomplish a small goal that is unrelated to your larger goal. The more unrelated, the better. If your goal is to start a company, teach yourself calligraphy instead or learn how to prune a fruit tree.

4) Once you're feeling good again, you know, where you feel good doing stuff after your normal work, take a look at your original goal. Can you start working on it again? Has the break given you a fresh perspective on it? Can you break it down into small achievable chunks now?

5) If yes, do that. If no, go back to 1.
I would argue that Apple's innovation is also in the operating systems and the applications they provide. iOS and Mac OS X is for my use far superior to any of the alternatives. Not everyone likes them, but everyone around me (90%-95% or so) have switched to Apple operating systems and hardware due to ease of use. This together with the fully integrated experience: OS, app store, media store (iTunes), hardware is why the competition is floundering. This stack is costly and hard to compete with.
`apachectl -t` checks the .conf files for syntax errors.

For this reason, there's zero excuse for ever having an Apache install crash from a typo.
I've switched to http://tungle.me . It's a lot better, and it's free.

The appointment slots feature was just not solid enough - lots of weird bugs, the time zones sometimes got screwed up, and lots of double-booking.
CPU DB. A Database of Computer Processors.
>Why would you say that? It works well enough here.

Well, both projects are rather new and changing. So not a very stable base to base a business on.

Node.js is best suited for long-running, evented type web apps (games, chat, interaction etc), so a CMS would not be a good fit.

Mongo is also known to lose data, and needs several (3 at least) servers to be somewhat stable with this.

A CMS is also not particularly read or write heavy, so a standard DB would fit even better.

I assume the data already have some specific form, so the free-form (schema-less) of Mongo doesn't buy much (and you have to replicate some relational-es on top of Mongo anyway, if you want to avoid inefficient queries returning tons of unneeded data with the response that happen to be on the same level in the "tree").

In a CMS you also have a power-law distribution of read articles, or even worse, with the top page stuff getting the most hits, and older pages being statistical noise. So some caching should provide very good speed with very little memory needs.

(Funny aside/rant: once I've implemented a custom CMS for a large bank in my country, with plain ole Java and DB2. The bank people had fallen for some IBM crap, and wanted the backend to be Domino, which, at the time (2003) was, well, let's say, inadequate. Our team implemented a CMS on top of Domino, and, as it naturally was slow as molasses, I convinced them to let us rewrite it in a sane way, which I did by myself in 1/5 the time it took to build the BS Domino version (about 2-3 months). It even had fancy things like being able to have them just upload an Excel file and automatically populating currency rates and stuff from it, with proper Decimal support, fail-rollback, etc). Hah, I also used Lucene for FTS, which was at version < 1.2 at the time IIRC.
This in my face forcing me to read and think when all I want is the Scottish news is an impertinence.

Do we really need this awful constant nannying to death that is such a feature of modern life?
How to make a Big Red Button, complete with Python libusb code
If you only need one hour a day to get good grades take more courses, that's how I do it :)
Kickstarter's TOS states that if the project owner can't provide a tier's reward to someone, they have to refund the money. And they must make a 'good faith effort' to do so on time.

I am not a lawyer, but I suspect the backer could take them to court for failing to follow through, since this is basically an agreement between the backer and the project owner, and the project owner didn't do their part. It'll be fun to see it tested in court.
And both sides can usually readily find an expert witness to argue their side of the case. Unfortunately, deciding which one's got the plausible story and which one is just blowing smoke and mirrors might be something that only an expert is competent to do. Judges and juries, maybe not so much.
Craigslist for Daily Deals? Goodool Announces...
I can relate to this article, but I have to say that not all older people know how to code. I'm pretty much at the age mentioned in this article so my peers are all "old farts" in the tech industry. Some of them evolve into excellent programmers with valuable experience. Others are very change resistant and possibly never had good practices in their career. Some have had cushy jobs at corporations and move at the speed of a snail. Others crank out solid code at inhuman speed.

Basically I think older coders need to be evaluated the same as younger guys. Some are good, some are not. However I do agree that older guys with families are not going to work 24/7 for 6 months in exchange for free pizza.
5% after inflation is a rule of thumb he has for a long term investment portfolio. He talks about it more here: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/10/post-4-what-am-i-s... . I'm not sure what the US saving rate has to do with anything.
I still look back to the old old days when stocks actually meant you owned a part of the company and could expect to turn your stock back in for a payout from that company in the future. Those are stocks that make sense to me.

Nowadays you're literally buying into the opinion of a company. Sure we use things like P/E and future growth to form that opinion, but in the end it's a lot like Bitcoin, it has value because people believe it has value, many of these stocks have no hard requirements that peg their value. You as a stock holder aren't entitled to any of Facebooks profits, and voting rights are worthless.
"The digital divide isn’t merely a binary chasm. It’s a divide of convenience, attention span, and logistics."

That's not all-- it's also a divide of knowledge and interest in digital technology. Particularly, the kind of technical knowledge and interest that allows people to innovate and build on these platforms (as opposed to just turning into consumers).

This is where I think the difference between Desktops and Mobile devices stands out on this subject-- Desktops are way more tinkerable and teacher-friendly. I can show someone hands-on how the hardware and software of a desktop computer work together much easier than I could on a mobile device (where are the form factors and modularity?). And I think that makes a big difference in terms of getting people interested in _building_ versus consuming.

So as the gap of Internet access narrows in some communities, I see more people embracing tech as consumers and less people understanding or learning about it. Mobile penetration figures are a little misleading because it's not marking close of the Digital Divide as much as just making it look a little different.

While I think mobile devices are an excellent way to get previously-unconnected people on the Internet, access is just one of many issues that make up the Digital Divide. In many ways, its an issue of future socioeconomic progress moreso than an issue of getting more people online.
"APIs are UX for developers."

This simple statement just changed the way that I think about API's.
Google Pays For Arduino and Raspberry Pi in UK Classrooms
I feel like this is ignoring the tough decisions Job's made when they didn't have the supply chain. The original iPod was priced at US$399 and US$499. It had very few features and most people called it lame.

When Job's decided to remove floppy disk drives and made iMacs that you couldn't upgrade the components from computers people called it lame. (This really upset people)

When the first iPad came out most people called it lame. (Has everyone already forgotten this? People were screaming it was going to fail, because it didn't run OSX).

To dismiss Apples success as only dependent on supply chain management is missing the mark in my opinion. Apples success in a large way hinged on Jobs ability to make decisions that in the immediate would piss people off but in the long term seem obvious.
Every time I've made numbers equities have underperformed gold and housing long term, esp. when considering commissions and tax. One would normally look for 20-30 years max. returns, as 100+ year periods will include one-off historical events that will change the picture completely. Case in point, the hindsight bias is strong on this one, because it's fact that these countries were chosen because they are the "winners" in recent history. What about the "losers"? you don't know where your country will stand in 110 years time.

I also work in the finance industry and I agree that Joe Doe outsider shouldn't gamble a significant chunk of his net worth in the stock market. Gambling being the key word here.
ASK HN: Sign of the Digital Times, Good or Bad?
According to a Best of New Orleans source, the editorial staff (at the New Orleans Times Picayune) will be cut by at least a third, "top brass will be fired and reporters who remain aboard will take sharp salary cuts and be expected to start blogging through the day."

It almost sounds like it came out of the Onion.
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Thanks for the suggestion - I'll check it out
Zynga Defends (OMGPop) Acquisition
Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88
And if you download something that you:
are incapable of attaining due to geographical or other limiting factors,
will buy after reviewing, or
have 0 chance of buying or viewing/listening otherwise...

where is the loss of profits?
Long experience in development is often more about knowing what won't work as much as what will.

Older developers can often rule 80% solutions out immediately - but a younger developer would have to work it out the hard way.
I think that the lesson is -- if you can get your expenses down to $20,000 (which is really hard), you have a chance. In real life, you'll have to make up the difference somehow

1. Work a little
2. Get expenses even lower
3. Find ways to get the 8% return you need (rental property?)

Even the site's writer admits in comments that he's not there. My biggest gripe is healthcare -- in the US, you need to factor in health insurance costs.
Bloomberg (8K(date of change in executive management) + bios(presence of "MBA" after exec without and at least a B.S.; finance, accounting, marketing, etc. excluded) | Jensen's alpha over IWM and sector SPDR over [0,2) versus [2,5)) -> R. Russell 2000 members 2006-2012. Bias may be introduced from these all being large, public companies - I don't know if VC-backed companies led by engineers v ops guys have a different story. I didn't dig very deep to try and see if I could remove noise, but TL;DR too much noise and drawdown at the outset.

Disclaimer: I'm not an MBA and don't intend on getting one. That being said, I've noticed Silicon Valley discounts solid operations knowledge as much as Wall Street tends to discount the difference between a hacker and an okay coder. Andreesen is a smart man and was probably making a rallying cry/culture call rather than an analytic one with this line.
The Great Gatsby First Look of Amitabh with DiCaprio &amp; Tobey
Facebook at $22 Seen in Structured Warrants
Now we can only hope that 37Signals sees it
Surely Chrome implements a cert revocation mechanism; the idea of using a cert to establish identity really doesn't work without it (for precisely this reason). Anyone have details?
> The theft is not of the physical product, but of the proceeds or profits.

Only assuming that I would otherwise (if I hadn't copied it) pay. Which is often a false premise. Especially for people like me, who simply cannot pay, even if we want to (I don't live in the US, so much of the online content isn't available to me).

I agree that not paying sometimes is stealing. E.g. when you don't pay a masseuse/prostituta after they have delivered their service. But, that is a completely different situation (you agreed to a exchange time<-->money, then you essentially broke the contract).

Car stealing/copying is the best comparison I could think of. Maybe a better one would be, stealing a car from the company that makes it, vs. building an exact copy at home. The second one might be objectionable (infringing of patents & copyright), but they are most certainly not the same.

I hope this clarifies my earlier argument a bit.
Very interesting that that looks more like a tech startup than a bank office

Especially in contrast to CS's NYC office, which is a very old fashioned investment banking/trading floor type office
Seems like decent advice but perhaps pretty library specific.

The only thing I'd argue with is: "Use semantic objects for parameters".

I haven't had any trouble passing a null pointer and casting it. Your API is going to be expanding regularly and the more message-passing objects you create, the more message passing objects' definitions you'll have to expand as the API expands.
The article was July 2002, the events narrated were mid-90s.
The 4 Categories of Apps, and Why 3 of Them are Terrible Places to Invest
Yeah I was referring to advertising purposes. Even if they did use keywords in statuses for advertising I would imagine the the weight of those keywords verses the weight of a liked object would be significantly lower since the relevancy would be low.
I can't speak to Ive's personality in particular, but many product designers view their work as inherently collaborative.
I'm 38.

I've met older programmers that were exceptional (passionate programmers that keep up with the craft, eg. at least enough to be able to explain exactly why they dislike JavaScript but love Go and Python even if they use none of these languages in their "day job") and older programmers that were mediocre (these are usually the ones still using only the language they started with, programming specific types of apps in the niche industry they started in).

I don't think you can pigeonhole this demographic any more than any other, but there is at least one thing to keep in mind -- the exceptional "old farts" are really exceptional, because they have the same passion as any other passionate programmer, plus a boatload of experience. When you really want to ship something, no amount of youth-fueled semi-experienced 16 hour workdays makes up for a solid 8 hours from someone with decades of experience who still loves writing software.
This is fantastic, a few navie questions though:

1. Why not find some permanently-read-only media for the boot drive and then not have to be so paranoid about its physical integrity?

2. Why not leverage the PGP smart card for more things like signin via PAM, etc?

3. Will Wayland help keep processes isolated from an eavesdropping perspective? My understanding is that, worse than firefox having access to your user files, that any X window can read/write from other X windows?
Having enough money to live if you stop spending money isn't rich, rich is having enough money that you can spend and you don't have any long term concerns. $500,000 (or even a million) for the rest of your life is not rich, it's being secure. If you can't buy a new sports car on a whim you're not rich. The plan (save and then live off of the returns) is sound and if you're a careful spender it's great, but to say you're rich is a big stretch.

Pitching this as something that will make you rich creates terrible expectations of what the plan actually is.
Ask HN: Is my Android game Crap?
In March we released our first Android app developed at university and were really exicted about it. After two months it only has 80 something downloads. So please tell me, is the game crap or is it just bad luck it didn't go viral?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spreenix
I work so much with APIs I began to gather a list of top APIs by experience and usability. Stripe is right up there at the top of the list, everything about it is just plain beautiful.
PostgreSQL 9.3 Development Schedule (commit a patch, review a patch)
Facebook Camera – An Instagram-Style Standalone iOS App
+1, I have a daily habit that I do in the morning, and the alarm is set for later than I usually finish it incase I forget, however after complete for the day I still get the alarm.

* really liking the app so-far.
Does the 4% withdraw rate account for inflation? If not, 20K will worth very little in 30 years.
I use http://doodle.com/ for appointments (as well as it's original purpose of polling a group for the best time for an event). For appointment slots, set the options: "Participant can only choose one option" and "Limit the number of participants per option" to one. No one ever needs to log in to anything unless they want to (for setup or responses). It also has fancy options for linking with calendars, but I've never used those.
The problem is that older folks are very few and far between.

You're right about shipping I think. My experience is only anecdotal, but older people, for me, have been the difference between shipping and floundering.
> For anyone who isn't aware, the church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints (or whatever they're called) have extensive genealogical databases. They're friendly and welcoming to people who'd like to research family trees. At least, when my pa did that in London they made no attempt to convert me and provided him with help using their systems and computers.

Yeah, they really are interested in genealogy for its own sake, not as a recruiting tool. They just want people to do their genealogy and contribute it to the database so it can be used by others. They don't want to scare people away from doing that by using it as a sales tactic. It's part of their general ideology that stresses the importance of family.
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Cal Newport: I implore you to earn a 4.0 in CMU's 15-251 ... I dare you ...
For those of us who don't follow this site, is there a suggestion as to where the initial half million dollars comes from? That's not always an attainable goal for someone under about 40...
I don't know the story of all of these, but I know that Iger was at Disney for years before becoming CEO. He was promoted up, and not some outside former CEO that was brought in. Same with Cook, and I believe this same is true of Welch.

Maybe there is something to promoting from within vs hiring some former CEO?
I'm in the UK - I still get the message, but no mention of advertising.

"We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the BBC website. However, if you would like to, you can change your cookie settings at any time."
that would make some sense, but there would still be cookies for tracking what you see...
With the read-only media you've got a problem with upgrading the kernel, which, recently, you need to be doing quite often.

As for the PGP smartcard, I've posted a comment on the blog that it could hold the private key used for decrypting the keyfile for the Full-Disk Encryption.
ActiveRecord Callbacks are Unreasonable
Developers: Where do you store your iOS resources?
This is what's referred to by reporters as a "snow job".