skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should ask yourself why the developer went AWOL (and no, I am not the developer)
(all of these questions are for you, and probably not suitable for discussion here)

Was it you?
Are you overbearing? controlling?
Did you incessantly email, call, or text them?
Did you insult them, perhaps even without knowing it?
Did you give them an endless list of requirements?
Did you give them a list of bugs without fail cases to reproduce? (Many developers will not debug something without steps to reproduce the issue).

Was the pay sub-par for the work being done?
Was there an equity promise that wasn't fulfilled?
Was there something on YOUR part that you didn't do that you said you would?

Many developers are introverts and will NOT get in someone's face about things that should have been done. They will just walk away. If you get a good developer, it's going to fall on you, the BOSS, to make sure you follow through on your promises and keep them happy.

Cheers!
How the fund raising markets are changing
Sometimes I do want my friends to wake me up in the middle of the night:

"I'm drunk, I need a ride home."

"Can I stay at your house."

"$emergency"

"Hey, I really just need somebody to talk to..."

etc. etc.

I don't want to have to go through my entire contact list, individually setting people who can and can't wake me up at night. There is already a mechanism for this, it's called "human interaction". My friends know who can and can't wake me up; they know this because they're my friends.

By giving them my phone number, I'm trusting them to respect that, and only wake me up if they need to.
I haven't had any problems with it yet (as a single user); I have had weird problems with dropbox when shared with lots of users actively editing files (conferences). Not really apples to apples comparison, true.
>>Those benchmarks are fairly useless, because it doesn't compare idiomatic usage of those languages...<<

You seem to be complaining that the programmers were not forced to write slow programs :-)

>>I did an experiment once...<<

And you used libraries.
Until I see how they are dealing with fraud instead of just shafting their merchants I won't touch anything Dwolla no matter how pretty they think their api is.
I think it's just a point of diminishing returns, really.

Range keeps going up. Now you can fly a big airliner between pretty much any two large airports on the planet, if you can sell the tickets for that route. The trip takes a max of, what, 20 hours or so? Cutting that down to, say, 6 hours just doesn't win you that much. Sure, there are some people who would really benefit, but I'd wager that the vast majority of travelers either get almost as much benefit from the 20-hour trip as they would from the 6-hour trip, and the vast majority of people for whom the 20-hour trip is too long to be useful would also find the 6-hour trip to be too long to be useful.

The world is only so big, and at some point, making the stuff go faster doesn't get you all that much. Personally, if I magically had the choice, I'd much rather fly on an airliner that traveled at current speeds but was more comfortable and didn't have security nonsense surrounding it than on a hypersonic airliner with the same ergonomics and security nonsense we have right now.
Why would you announce new prices prior to the new price page launching? I immediately went to see the new pricing options only to be met with the same old prices.

They squandered my click-through this blog post earned.
I'm sorry, I didn't really want for my remark to become the top comment.

I left it intentionally brief and shallow because I didn't want to give the impression that the sentiment expressed reflects my opinion of the entire article. I think the expletive helps convey that it was a unrefined first impression on that single aspect.

I do think that pointing out unnecessarily bad accessibility is a valid statement. Maybe I should have clarified that the content was entirely invisible without javascript enabled, but I am a bit disappointed that we're just stopping to see full-page flash applets masquerading as websites, and are immediately transitioning to reimplementing that same user-unfriendly approach in javascript.
I thought of this, but I think it's OK in the context of the joke. (And technically, Speedo might stereotypically be associated with men, but they make stuff for women too.)
I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Kudos foe the increased storage though.

Not having the pricing page live yet is kinda weird.
> or those of you who need even more space, a brand new 500 GB plan is also joining the posse!

Do they mean that it's happening in the future? I don't see the plan on the pricing page.
My problem with Dropbox is that they aren't good custodians with my data. The password glitch could happen to anyone, but Arash's nonchalant original response was pretty shocking, and Dropbox haven't integrated anything like two-factor authentication.

When I have to double authenticate in order to play Diablo 3, but I don't for all my data, I find that odd.
Cool idea: I'm curious why you need a talented developer though. Shouldn't shopify be good enough for you?
It's not the ratio of interest to inflation that matters, it's the difference.

The easiest way to conceptualize it is to consider an inflation rate of near-0, or even negative. The ratio would imply a months salary would be sufficient FU money if you could invest it at even 1%.

A slightly more mathematical example:

Consider $100 in today's money. Invested at 10% annually, it will become 100 * 1.1^25 = $1,083 in 25 years. If inflation is 1%, it will require $100 * 1.01^25 = $128 for every $100 in today's money, thus the $1,083 is worth $846 in today's money. If inflation is 2%, it will require $164, or $660.

Despite the F/I ratio doubling, the difference is only ~22% after 25 years.

If you use ((1+I) - F), you can achieve the same $846 and $660 numbers with a very straightforward calculation: S_0 * ((1+I)-F)^N

e.g.
$100 * (1.10 - 0.01) = $846,
$100 * (1.10 - 0.02) = $660

EDIT: Also, you mention the it is very hard to get r below 0.9, but it's not really. Or at least, it hasn't been for the last 100 years (I am not able to predict the next 100 years as accurately as the past). The average inflation rate of the US Dollar for the past 100 years is roughly 3% and the average annual return of the S&P 500 is 10%. That would produce an r = 0.3, well below 0.9.
The app is about exploring new information, drawing the user towards connections he or she doesn't yet understand. We wanted a way to encourage ourselves to explore Wikipedia further than we already do, to satisfy our curiosity or simple desire to learn something new.

We also highly valued the reading experience and put just as much effort into making the presentation of the content better as developing the web.

However, that's not going to be for everyone. It's been a joy for us, and we're simply hoping others will find value there as well.
Parallel Universe open sources a novel in-memory data grid
USB1.0 and 1.1 could do 12 MBit/s at most, and pretty much died off with USB2 in 2000. I doubt that you have a USB1 SSD.
It's time to cook something! How about an omelette? You need to scramble the eggs first-- thankfully, there's a tunnel between your fridge and the scrambler. You press the button, and 4 eggs roll into the bowl.

While that scrambles, it's time to chop vegetables. You'd like to do onions, but the tube from the fridge to the chopper only fits carrots and asparagus. Not great for an omelette, but good enough.

Time to cook. Unfortunately, your chopper is out of date, and it doesn't work with your pan model. The scrambler, well, it's actually a mixer and was only meant for cakes, so it goes directly into the oven.

So you put special bowls in the fridge, suck the scrambled eggs and vegetables back through the tubes, take the bowl out, store it on dropbox, and give your pan a link.

God, this sucks.
I have the $99 plan. The one problem I have is that one of my computers has an SSD so I can't move more stuff to Dropbox on my desktop because it would kill my laptop, which is the reason I bought it. I do much of my work on my laptop out of my Dropbox dir. With so much Dropbox space, now I don't want every computer to have all my pics, videos, etc.
To Clojure-curious people: please ignore this article. It is misinformed.

Others on this thread have pointed out that the Alioth benchmark takes startup time into account. Yes, this imposes a startup penalty on Clojure.

More importantly, the implementations of each individual benchmark vary significantly in performance quality. High-performance Clojure requires a couple of tricks in type hinting, using unchecked arithmetic, and preferring native Java arrays.

I looked at a couple of the benchmarks, and the mandelbrot example uses those tricks. Notice the performance there: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/performance.php?test=m...

Notice that Java 7 and gcc run at about the same speed, and Clojure is only about 2.2x slower (than C). Scala is about 1.9x slower (than C). gcc is about 1.5x slower than Intel Fortran.

To make the benchmark more fair: (1) all timings should disregard startup time; and (2) all JVM languages should have the opportunity to run the benchmark a few thousand times before timing it. Otherwise, it measures JVM startup time, and then it measures how long it takes the JIT to achieve maximum optimization. By comparison, the C and Fortran code runs at full speed almost out of the gate.

All-in-all, considering that Clojure is an extremely high-level language I consider its performance impressive [1]. Yes, the inner loops need to be coded in a slightly un-idiomatic manner, but you can do all this in the comfort of your REPL, which makes the process of making optimizations reasonably painless.

[1] Don't forget to scroll down the mandelbrot results and look at the stellar performance of other popular high-level languages.
Malware Checkpoint for Facebook
This is a problem with monopolies, though. Their competitors can't gain marketshare by being better but not better enough. Take Microsoft's monopoly in the 90's. There were competitors and it could be argued they were better, but they weren't better enough to justify switching to them. Even being of the same quality, the monopoly will continue to gain marketshare not because of being better but because of being bigger.
Have you read their new procedure and dispute policy?
He's right. I'm not sure what your 'simulation' involves, but it's possible you just happened to pick numbers where the ratio produces similar results to the difference. Try inflation = 0.0001% and interest = 10%, for example.
You gotta to hand it Salesforce for inventing news ways for employees to waste time in their tools and still qualifying it as work.
You were absolutely right. I've got leiningen running in one swat (sudo apt-get install leiningen). Will mosey out to get clojure-swank running on emacs next. :)
XCode is free without paying $99 for anything, and I don't remember a time when gcc and friends were not available for OS X.
Listening to the Higgs boson
The human hands are notoriously hard to design for; controllers are a very hard to improve design, much like computer mice.
Thanks for the response!

He had personal and financial issues. The pay was cash + profit share. When the cash was fulfilled he had to make ends meet because the profit share was negligible. He was a good developer and a good guy and I don't blame him for going AWOL.
It's much easier and humane to accomplish this with multiple applets with different characteristics.
excuse my ignorance of US corporate law, but why would FB owe them $200M for a failed buy?
Forget about font-faces. How about supporting the default fonts and sizes that I selected, so that I don't go blind trying to read the page?
Zaptech Solutions best experience Review - Zaptech Solutions best experience
You can exclude certain directories from synchronizing to your laptop if you want to.
You can selectively choose which directories to sync per computer (https://www.dropbox.com/help/175/en).
DHH, the creator of Rails, and the team at 37 Signals (the company behind it), install Rails on their development machines, (with Pow: http://pow.cx/ ).
San Francisco Officials Plan to Block Apple Procurement
Are there any good tools/frameworks for HTML5 games yet? Every time I see a rundown of how a developer made an HTML5/JS game, the common complaint from that dev is that the tools are far from mature and they had to recreate X and Y by hand.
I take it you have not worked in such an environment before

Does AOL count? I built the mail system. It was kind of a big deal. We pushed 4,000 TPS through servers less powerful than an iPhone. I also spent time at Akamai, though I admittedly worked on a tiny, isolated test lab (150 servers or so, a fraction of a percent of the "real" server base).

I have worked with some amazing people, at all scales, and I have never seen a deployment that managed to completely avoid manual logins. No, you aren't logging into a few hundred hosts manually (well, there was this one shop... but let's not hold that up as exemplary). But you're probably logging into a few to test things out manually before you decide what your automated deployment script will be rolling out.

Even when you do deploy a fix, with a large sysadmin team it's good to know WHO exactly ran that one-off deployment script. When I said "auditing", I wasn't even thinking of PCI, or auditing against malicious actions of any kind - just simple troubleshooting forensics. But we have a great, robust way to see exactly who modified a file and when; it's the file system. Why reinvent it? (I just spent the last day trying to figure out who edited a script. Why, "postgres" did.. of course it did.)

Should you aim to do these manual config changes in the test lab first? Of course. Do you always succeed? No. Some things only get tested in the big lab. Reality intervenes. I try to plan for it.

Mind you, I'm arguing this partly to see if I can be talked out of it. I think I believe it, but I've been wrong about way bigger things. If you've achieved my automation nirvana, and you roll things out to a few thousand servers, never manually, and never wondering who did it, tell me how it works.
Why we created The Tech Block
The ability to place pre-defined patterns with a mouse click is pretty neat. I haven't seen many of these patterns, and have no idea what they're called.
Thou shalt not break working code. This is negligence of an engineer, though it's probably imposed by management (and thus not quite his fault) rather than an accident.
Dropbox's Selective Sync feature would solve this problem for you, no?
Seldo said they run their own DBs, no that they run their own MySQL instances. Being able to run other engines (e.g. PostgreSQL) is no doubt a benefit of running your own DBs.
Doing ruby dev in a VM is pretty nice for some things, and terrible for others. In general, I think VM's are great if you have a team and need to get environments setup that work on any machine (windows/mac/linux). Where it falls flat is in some weird places like if you want to use Guard for automatic file change actions. Otherwise, it's pretty awesome.

If I'm working on my own projects tho, running ruby local on OS X is the way to go. Much less overhead.
Have We Observed the Higgs (Imposter)?
Mashable story here: http://mashable.com/2012/07/10/startup-corkboard-dropbox/
Ask HN: How to make sales to companies?
Hi..
I tried to find any books or training about how to sell products to companies and businesses, but I could not find any!

My products are designed for small businesses, and I'd like to know how can I drive sales, and what are the techniques to use?

Thanks so much in advance.
Rule of thumb: If any part of your pitch sounds like Microsoft marketing, you're not ready.
How Close Are You To Success?
Actually part of the reason startup is slow is that the JVM's JIT compiler doesn't optimize its compilations until it's determined that a given method is in a hotspot that would benefit from the optimization. Because it relies on runtime information, it's able to perform much better-informed optimizations than it would with a fully up-front compiler, but the price you pay is that the optimizations are deferred.

So in this case tax is exactly the right word.
Sounds a lot like Klout, and we all know how useful that is.
Predictions for the Next 10 years via Reddit
Do you have any facts on that? I'd love to hear stories and accounts of anything like that happening…
This is a bit self-serving.

Food can be art. Both visually and through taste and smell. But 90%, no, 99.99% of food is food - the ingestion of basic nutrients so you don't starve to death and die.

You can be at the top of the pyramid posted here (teaching, publishing, "innovating"), but if you don't understand utility then the reason you can't have a conversation with someone at the bottom of the pyramid (I see he takes a back-handed jab at Automattic, producers of one of the most successful pieces of software this century) is because you're a masturbatory pedant who lacks context, doesn't understand the historical role of technology in business, and doesn't understand how to fulfill people's direct needs.

In short, only someone sitting in an ivory tower staring at his code and thinking "This is the best thing ever." could write such an ignorant blog post.
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If you're looking for some work in this area please send me an email through my site, http://mastermatchmakers.com.
Simplify your analytics with one funnel
AppScreens
Right, the enterprise product has been around. But the process to actually sell enterprise-level products to big companies usually involves long, high-touch sales cycles; as well as quite a bit of initial consulting. My guess is that's what Github will use their $100MM for.
Why was the title changed from OUYA to Ouya? OUYA is the name.
If you run your own stack, you get lower prices and more flexibility. On the flip side, if you don't know how to administer MySQL, you'll have some learning to do.

Dedicated server pricing is 1/2 or less of what Amazon offers you, and you get better performance to boot. Seems like a no brainer to me (but then again I've been doing "dev ops" stuff since the late 90s and learned many lessons the hard way).
The truth about MacKeeper (MUST READ)
Google set to pay record $22.5M fine for violating Apple users' privacy
Excited for iOS 6's new features? We sure areLenned
Gumroad Stories: Last Call at the Oasis
The Future of Mobile Payments Will Be ‘Artificial Intelligence’
Dwolla puts a lot of attention towards fraud. Have you seen any of the recent changes on the site, articles about how Dwolla combats fraud now? If you want to have a real conversation about it- feel free to email me at Alext@dwolla.com.
The plane is made primarily of composite materials, allowing it to be an efficient enough proposition for the airline for me here in Boston to go direct to Tokyo. No layover. I can feel that from the passenger seat. Ok so it isn't the successor to the Concorde, but 20% efficiency is not insignificant.
"2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems)"

Is the abstraction a plus or a minus in your opinion? I'm asking because on one hand you're asking for a unified communication app, but on the other, the way you wrote that part, it sounds like a bad thing.

Taking this specific example, I think it shows that aggregating communication media is difficult and maybe not a good thing. In Messages, SMS and what is pretty much IM is mixed and I don't know which is which anymore.

I do find the idea of a unified inbox interesting and worthy of being explored but the thing is that each of these have different expectations from the users. If I send an SMS, it's typically because I expect a response fairly quickly: pretty similar to IM, except that I want to reach the person right now wherever they are. An email has a longer reply timeframe: if I don't hear back for a few days, it's usually fine. A tweet or Facebook status doesn't have the expectation to be read by everyone. (because it's one-to-many)

And I think the expectations go both ways: when someone receives an SMS vs. an email, they know the time to reply is different.

There are also different expectations in terms of half-life of the content. SMSs are sent and forgotten for the most part, while emails are archived for years. (though it's probably true that these archives are most likely not as useful/consulted as we'd think)

So I do care how I send my messages to people.
That's nice, I just started an account about 1 month ago to try out the technology. My wife has a shoe shop in Viet Nam which I thought we could use as an easy switch to internet sales... and I've been interested in Shopify since they're next to my university and are pretty much the only interesting business around. That's just yet another incentive to try it out!
Serious question: why not use Backblaze to backup your important things?

Dropbox is primarily a sharing and synchronization tool: using it for backup is very expensive.

IMHO. YMMV.

Edit: They now match Spideroak's pricing. If anybody from Spideroak is reading this: you have an awesome service, but here are a couple of things you might want to do. I like your commitment to privacy and hence use it, but sadly, IMHO it's not easy enough for my spouse to use, and I wouldn't recommend it to them.

1. simplify the client.

2. sharing is not intuitive

3. default setting should be that all folders are synchronized: the opposite of the current one.
Nice. Are you trying to tell me that that example doesn't appear to try and avoid state?
I still think this is not cheap enough for the amount of storage you're getting. I'd love this service to displace products/services like crashplan where safely storing stuff becomes more of a live backup process so to speak. At this current price point most people really can't afford to back up their media in its entirety. I don't really mean pirated stuff either, I'm talking about home movie raws, photo dumps from DSLRs or even point and shoots.

I think sitting on top of Amazon is really hurting their pricing and for a company of their scale and funding they should be looking into custom/owned data centers to drive down the price even further.
There was a program like this, specifically for Wiki articles, for Mac OS X, called Pathway, but it seems to have been abandoned. It hasn't been updated since 2007.

http://pathway.screenager.be/download
What I miss in Java is the ability to compile directly to native code as part of the official SDK, instead of using expensive third party compilers.

The problem I see with Oracle is that if they push too much the community, companies might abandon it the same way they did with Delphi when Borland did too many mistakes. On the other hand, I can speak from my experience in the enterprise world, corporations love Oracle.
It might not be, but our Rails heads sure do like talking about PHP a lot.

If a technology is truly supposed to be accessible it needs to actually, be accessible instead of carrying an air of superiority, otherwise software continues to suffer.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/involver/ind...
Sounds like Uber was up to shenanigans when they whipped up the internet rage machine. There was some conversation going on between Uber and Cheh, I don't think we're getting the full story here.
Why isn't Google making every single Google TV set top box like a mini-Android console? It's not like they would have to change a whole lot about it. Just make sure it has a high-end ARM chip, 2 controllers included, and they actually try to give incentives to developers to port their games for it, which should be a minimal amount of coding if they already have an Android game.