skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously popular:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4147907

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150596

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152659

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152965

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154270
The reason I still have trouble understanding a $B acquisition even in spite of these numbers, is that the tech market is so slippery and fast moving. It is a hotbed of continual disruption and I don't see that stopping any time soon. An investment of > $1B is not paid off overnight, but rather takes a great many many years. Will Yammer still be relevant and providing a competitive advantage for Microsoft ten years from now? Will Microsoft in ten years from now even look anything like the Microsoft we know today?

For example, one world I'm somewhat familiar with is financial planning businesses. In selling a financial planning business, you'll give it a back of the envelope pricing of several multiples (say 2x - 5x) of the amount of revenue the business is generating/expected to generate annually. That way, the buyer says to himself "Well, I make the big investment now and then I reach breaking-even point 3 years down the road" and from there it's all profit. 2x - 5x is a reasonable valuation, because both the buyer/seller can reasonably expect the business fundamentals to remain solid for that period of time. If the seller feels the business may be solid for longer, then he may push for a higher multiple. Conversely, a lower multiple may be justified in the opposite situation.

Back to fundamentals, dollars to donuts, a valuation north of $1B for a company earning a fraction of that in revenue is to me making the statement "We expect the fundamentals of this business to remain solid practically forever" or "We expect this company to accelerate from zero to infinity" - because you would literally need it to in order to recoup your out of pocket *

In the tech industry, that just seems a laughable proposition.

* Of course, there are many other considerations (people value, etc.) but at its core the dollars have to add up or you're just upping the ante on the bubble.
I haven't used Chatter, but Yammer is extremely smooth and polished. I've been really impressed with it.
Tekpub has a course on node, it's fairly recent (I think it has been around for 3 months, give or take). The Tekpub site was rebuilt in node as well and the videos talk a little bit about somethings Rob Connery encountered during the process. The series taught me a lot, but my only other exposure was the peepcode video.

http://tekpub.com/view/node/1
If "other treasury notes will perform better", then by definition, TIPS isn't keeping up with actual inflation. Keeping up with the treasury's definition of inflation doesn't mean your savings isn't losing value.
It's just as well that 256GB is enough for anyone. Maybe I'm pre-empting the next part in this series, but it looks like simply scaling NAND flash geometry might be a dead end:

"While the growing capacity of SSDs and high
IOP rates will make them attractive in many applications,
the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase
capacity while keeping costs in check may make it dif-
ﬁcult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some
applications."

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFla...
I'm working in big company. Our company was experimenting with it as well but it was too much and later company dropped this experiment. Everyone was using it as corporate facebook and dropped back and forth various links about technology news and etc. Knowing that colleagues I barely know from foreign countries join yammer was not of much of value either (unless your are creepy type looking at nice girls/boys in your company). I have run from it as fast as I can. From other side I don't have Facebook account either so maybe that just not for me. I am glad that our company decided not to invest into Yammer (I think corporate accounts have free quota).
JQuery Ajax Example With JSON Response
PadMapper using PadLister: No Craigslist No Problem
I actually own the domain modernperl,net, for trollish reasons actually (www.modernperl.net redirects to Ruby) but if anyone wants it / wants to do something useful with it. I'd be happy to transfer it to you for free.
I don't see the super-thin air-gap as an issue. In fact, it is probably an asset. As an example, when we build the 1500W LED array we used a very thin insulating film to transfer heat from the LEDs to an aluminum clad circuit board. If you have surface area (the stationary disk in their case) a thin gap can be surprisingly efficient at transferring heat from one element to the other. Ad to this breaking up the boundary layer within that gap and now air becomes a "better" conductor.

There is no difference between spinning the heatsink and moving air at the same velocity across stationary heatsink fins. It's about molecules of air at a lower temperature going across a surface with at a higher temperature. N molecules per unit time "absorb" some of the heat and come of of the process at a higher temperature. The surface temperature drops by a similar amount.

What kills you in both cases is a very thin boundary layer of air that sticks to the surface and has a velocity profile that goes from zero at the surface to whatever the air velocity might be. This boundary layer isn't good for heat transfer from the surface to the moving air molecules, which takes a toll on the overall efficiency of the process.

There are techniques to help break-up the boundary layer in stationary fin heatsinks. Some break-up airflow to introduce turbulence. Others use raw velocity to break it up (air impingement cooling).

I don't know how well the rotating aluminum impeller breaks-up the boundary layer surrounding the fins. It won't eliminate it completely but it certainly could be much improved from the case of stationary fins with low-speed air going across them. If you had a heatsink with stationary fins and air moving at the same speed as in the case of the rotating impeller (by using fans, of course) you'd probably get similar boundary layer effects.

What I learned is that there really is very little magic in heat transfer. I have seen some really wacky ideas brought to market that always seem interesting but have never proven to beat the simple solutions. Funny enough, other than materials, most of the focus is always around dealing with the boundary layer, an issue that disappears (in terms of its significance) once you move into fluid-based cooling.

Caveat: I have not studied rotating aluminum impeller/heat-sinks, so I could very well be missing something that I simply don't know. My opinions are based on thousands of hours of research and FEA work in looking for solutions for the aforementioned project.
Email isn't going anywhere (anytime soon), but I do think news-feed style posts with threaded comments for lots of group communication is far preferable to cc:->ALL. Smart buy for MSFT.
(I don't work for them, but I have worked at small and large ISPs.)

The law enforcement agency will ask for a subpoena that will ask for "all records, logs, files, documents... relating to or describing the subscriber(s) using the IP address $dottedquad at or around $date(s)". The config file that keeps your static IP associated with a MAC address or whatever will certainly be turned over.
I just checked my profile and I saw that my facebook e-mail address was shared with 'only me', likely due to other privacy choices I made and that it stopped sharing my real e-mail address. I think this might have had the effect where people wouldn't see any e-mail address shared. (Although one can easily derive the @facebook.com e-mail address anyway.)

Also, this change just generally makes it harder to make use of other social sites. Need the person's e-mail address to add them on LinkedIn? Need to scrape e-mail addresses of your friends to invite them to another service (as was talked about a lot a few years ago)? Can't do either in many cases if your friends just show their @facebook addresses.

Edit: Well, for LinkedIn that would only work if the person associated their facebook.com address with LinkedIn, which I don't think people do. For the latter, it could still work but the person would strangely hear about the other service via Facebook (which I suppose Facebook could 'lose' those messages if it became a problem) and it could be hard to look people up by their more common e-mail addresses.
Did anyone else try out and use Yammer for awhile and then ultimately switch away from it or off it it in favor of another tool or just back to email?
Disclaimer: Always Be Testing (ABT)
Earlier discussion, from 2 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

Here's some discussion and a link describing how to fix it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157589
Economics was aware of overconsumption of underpriced resources before Thomas Malthus. It's not really a Malthusian observation to say that if a good is priced lower than the cost of acquiring it, it will be over-consumed.
Indeed,

Craigslist not only has a low-cost producer advantage, it serves a vast, vast market of people who only want to consume its commodified services at this nearly-zero cost. And who now expect such low-cost services to exist.

The article said: If you are trying to compete with Craigslist in any of the above listed categories, you have to make life amazing for the seller. If that means driving a truck around “buying” couches and bookshelves and iphones for a year, consider it the cost of user acquisition.

Lol. Yeah, that's what you'd have to do. Somehow stand between multi-billion-dollar river of buyers on craigslist and similar multi-billion-dollar river of sellers and somehow re-route the results. And that would cost unlimited amount of money once people figured out they could take couches from the dump and sell them to you!
Specially if they can integrate it with Sharepoint and Office Suite

As a person who uses Yammer on purpose and Sharepoint only under duress, I would prefer to keep them distinct.
Earlier discussion, now 2 days old: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

Here's some discussion and a link describing how to fix it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157589
Bounce HTTP requests around with bouncy
If Microsoft's Surface and/or Windows 8 RT take off, then we may see an increase in Windows Phone 8 marketshare. Why? Because of syncing, similar interface, possible app sharing, etc.
Super simple 3D file sharing app
I'm still a bit confused by #1.

why would you test the apple for cyanide?

I haven't read Hodges. The story I've always heard is that Turing killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple. If that were the theory, it's obvious why you'd test the apple. So you seem to be saying that the apple theory was always bogus: because the evidence was that he killed himself by drinking a cyanide solution, there was no need to test the apple for cyanide any more than anything else in the room. Am I getting your point?

(In which case it's odd that the apple story ever got going in the first place.)
It sounds more like they're providing an email to every user with the options set to public by default. While that could be construed as bad, it shouldn't override another email if that other email is marked as public.
>>matched against java -server, which (unlike -client) does extra optimizations<< FWIW On a quad-core machine -server is the default.
I would argue that Kickstarter in its current form is not as scaleable as Craigslist is. If they would follow an anything-goes policy as Craigslist does, the same problems would appear i.e. illegal content, scams, etc.

In regards to Kickstarter for politics: Might work better if these were bi-partisan "internetsy" themes, i.e. ACTA, SOPA. But the problem with politics is, that there might be not immediate results.

The "moneybombs" many candidates use to drive up cash in certain timeframes could be seen as somewhat similar to Kickstarter. They are often affiliated with a specific fund rising goal, some (made up) reason for the "bomb", and often even list contributor names and messages.
Not to sound condescending, but use a little common sense here. Even people that work 40 hours a week aren't on task 100% of the time.

In a given day I'll take a couple coffee breaks, maybe go outside for a couple breaths of fresh air, and use the restroom at least twice, in addition to my lunch hour.

That said - those 40 hours that I am in the office aren't hours I am free to use however I please, so it is customary to say that you work 40 hours a week, not 35.8 hours per week, etc.

It's not hard to conceive of a situation where it just works out to be easier to be in the office every waking hour, particularly working on startups. This doesn't mean you don't stop to watch a funny youtube clip or set up a good music playlist- it just means its time fenced off from any other major commitments.
The Anatomy of Sales or How Andrew Warner Became Our First Paying Customer
http://www.quora.com/Craigslist/Why-hasnt-another-product-di...

but the more important graphic is this one - http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qz...

ill leave this here.
"XXX - Bloomberg Businessweek cover" - Be careful how you label your content
Automatically Adding Remotes For GitHub Forks
Foolish consistency is foolish
estimate the number of hours you expect it to take to build, then triple that, and multiply by your hourly rate. Break down the cost of the project by each major feature as a line item, and if the client pushes back on the price, DO NOT LOWER YOUR HOURLY RATE...instead, remove features to lower the price
Thank you both.

We are currently looking for the best possible partner to provide credit checks directly through Rentobo. One of our top criteria is finding a partner who can provide a complete tenant screen (credit check, background check, and eviction screen). In keeping with our core values we are also committed to making the screens available with as little work on the part of the landlord as possible.

Please keep an eye on our blog or FB/Twitter feed for an update once we have that relationship in place.
The Four Attorneys Your Startup Should Have On Tap
Are you saying there are 200,000 Fortune 500 companies? Numbers really lose their meaning, nowadays..
> Is there some reason why those with modest savings can't buy treasury bills?

From a purely moral standpoint I think it's wrong for a government to force an inflating currency onto the public, in order to incentivize the public into buying the government's own debt. I mean, this just seems obviously criminal to me if anyone but the government were caught doing this.
Basecamp: How To Build Product People Love
Why is it asking for permission to my private repositories? Is it possible to try this with only giving access to my public repos?
I suspect that's more a result of a response to the low-productivity spiral that burnout seems to be. You lose productivity, so you push yourself harder, so you become less productive, so you feel the need to spend more hours, and soon you end up drained and unable to accomplish anything.

If you're in this spiral, then you need to step back and think of what you need to do to recharge. That might become a realization that "I've stopped spending time with my family; I'm going to make sure I'm at dinner with them every Thursday".

I'd find it extremely strange to hear that someone at Google was prevented from making time to spend time with family on a regular basis. I wouldn't be surprised that an employee in the process of burning out needed encouragement to step back.
Is the local pizza shop going to be able to purchase sauce, cheese, flour, and pepperoni with it?

Unlikely.
Seth Godin's Project on KickStarter
well, it's not just the "plumbing" thing. I still have to worry about animation, loading the application, playlists, etc.

I understand Python could be a good choice and, yes, I agree it would be "easier". But jeez you know.. I just want to use C damn it. I want complete control over the memory. WHY CAN'T I JUST USE C?!! haha
> Is it sort of like a try/catch for error events?

Yes, but it's also sort of like a try/catch for thrown errors.

d = domain.create()
d.on('error', function(e) {
console.error('an error: ', e)
});
d.run(function() {
throw new Error("whoops")
})

would console.log, rather than crashing the program.

When an EventEmitter is bound to a domain, their error events and any errors thrown while emitting an event on them will be handled by the domain object that they're bound to.
It sounds like you were using liquid cooling, did you ever try phase change cooling? Something like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_X_hgtlJpA&t=36)? I saw a demo of it a couple years ago, really cool stuff.
If every car before it needed both an engine and a car, and now there's a car that is its own engine, I would give them some leeway to call it an engineless car. The big draw here is that the heat sink is the same as the fan, instead of needing to buy both a heatsink and a heatsink fan.

"Fanless" is still weird, I'd prefer to call it integrated.
Ethical Hacking Center of Excellence newsletter
LOVE foundd, and this feature is awesome
> If real money becomes a "hot potato" how does that encourage long-term investment?

Because, for example, building a business that achieves steady positive cash flow would be better than a short-term one-off opportunity, since that one-off would only delay the issue of demurrage.

> And if the wealthy transfer their stagnant wealth to something other than currency, like gold or real estate, their dollar value will skyrocket over time as the value of the dollar plummets.

There's nothing in that argument unique to a demurrage currency. That same is true for inflationary currencies like the dollar. You've taken a rather extreme case of a bank-run, which is disastrous no matter the circumstances, but doesn't prove anything.
Thanks for the feedback. Each week we will buy lottery tickets and start a lottery pool for everyone to join. If our lottery ticket is a winner, then any price we get will be equally divided between the members who have joined the group.
Show HN: New A/B Testing Service 
Hey Guys -- Looking for feedback, especially from developers, on an A/B testing service that I launched last week. It's a very simple API based service for calculating and automatically displaying a/b test winners.

Here's the URL: http://pixelgauge.com

The idea came about because I wanted to A/B test a number of things… different home pages, email body, email subjects, etc. and I didn't see anything out there that could accomplish what I wanted as simple as I'd like it to.

What I'm not trying to do is replace someone like Optimizely, whose service is awesome for making basic variations on existing pages… though you can certainly use PixelGauge for just that.
I don't doubt that they were productive. It's just that such long hours are frequently a way to cover up lack of productivity rather than increasing your productivity.
That 'relatively non-commercial' organization earned > $30 million for the founder so far. What proportion of wholeheartedly commercial firms have done that?

You shouldn't take a company's PR at face value.
Previous (interesting) discussion here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114546
Demurrage is a solution in search of a problem.

Where is all this alleged currency hoarding? Who's sitting on piles of cash? The rich certainly aren't. Does anybody really think that rich people keep vaults full of cash? They keep their money in stocks, bonds, and real estate.

The only people who do hoard actual cash are the poor and unsophisticated, who are often unable to take advantage of banking services.

The only other significant chunk of hoarding going on right now is actually being perpetrated by The Fed itself. They created vast quantities of new money in 2008 and gave it to the banks to patch up their balance sheets. The Fed is paying good interest on that money so the banks will keep it on deposit with The Fed instead of loaning it into the economy -- because that would obviously spark a firestorm of inflation.
UI looks OK. I like the idea. But if everybody is playing for free, who is paying the lottery? How is the business model?

The Forum and the Blog looks ugly. Don't take it personal. That's just my opinion. I would customize that, so that it looks more like the rest of the page.
I've used the CL package in Emacs (with the proviso that if you're using it to build an Emacs library, as I was, then you're supposed to restrict its use to compile time, which is weird and takes back most of the value). It doesn't make Emacs Lisp into anything much like Common Lisp. The two are very different languages. The CL extensions in Emacs are kind of useful if you already know CL, but they're also a strap-on and the result is predictably a monstrosity.

I think you'd be better off picking which of the two languages you're interested in and learning that.
As I said, my gut agrees with you, but I think that given the relative newness of this idea, that the programming community at large should be given some time to make the case that the benefits can be obtained without so much of the cost. There's only a bare handful of languages that have even taken a serious swing at it, like Clojure and lately D. I want more evidence before I call it.

Probably the most promising approach that might salvage conventional programming approaches is a process-based model like Erlang or Go, where each process is internally mutable (mostly unlike Erlang, though it does have the process dictionary), but strictly segmented such that one process can not mutate another's state. This hybrid approach might be viable, and while it's not exactly business-as-usual, it's not as far a trip as full-on IO isolation. (Still, that affords just slamming everything in one process, at which point you don't win much. Will be interesting to watch Go's ecosystem develop and see if goroutines manage to become something deeply and pervasively used in all libraries or a thing occasionally used when the situation is desparate.)
Absolutely. We started out in very similar fashion, working on our product on the side and only quitting our day jobs when we absolutely had to to progress further.

For the first two months we regularly put in at least 12 hours a day seven days a week. We progressed, but towards the end of it we were barely recognizable. The amount of stress it put on us, our family, and our friends was immense. I'd drag myself to a bar to see friends and I'd spend most of the time zoning out, thinking about what I needed to work on as soon as I was back at home.

We've since forced ourselves to adopt a more structured approach, and factored in time to go fishing, play snooker, sing karaoke, or just relax. We're still working like crazy, but with a little bit of balance it no longer feels like the drudgery it had become before.
That sounds like a really interesting market, is this first-hand information or have you read about it? I'd love to read a good article on this if you know of any.
Typed Racket is more like type annotations with a checking routine than anything, if you're writing a macro you want generality.

You achieve this by omitting the type annotation and reverting to normal Racket.

You can do macros in a statically typed language, but it would (and does) get ugly fast.
Gotcha. The research I've done so far leads me to believe that the real value in this kind of tech doesn't start to kick in until you get up into the hundreds of employees. Right now we're operating on the belief that companies that are a target for our product begin with the ones of about 500 employees (allowing for a few simplifying assumptions).
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/demo/compare.php?lang=csc