skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since the interest graph is so hot, why not take a dip ‘At The Pool’
It also feels like a thinly disguised way to send traffic to NSFW Corp.
If you're based in the USA, if your business is largely with Americans and conducted exclusively in USD, then: yes. You're in luck.

What's that? You're one of the 6.7 billion people who don't live in the USA? You want to conduct business in more than one currency? You're not an American company?

Then guess what: you're still stuck with PayPal.

Nobody seems to get that PayPal's killer feature is not its userbase. It's that it's everywhere and has multi-currency support.

I would very much like to use Stripe or Braintree or whoever there is who doesn't resemble the truly and sincerely Kafkaesque[1] experience of dealing with PayPal. But until I, as an Australian, can do business with foreigners in their currency then Stripe and the like are basically useless to me.

All I can do is lick the windows.

[1]: I'm semi-serious. Read The Trial and tell me it wasn't written about having a PayPal account frozen.
Heh, this story was amusing in many ways. Storing passwords in a spreadsheet is eye brow raising, and I'd venture that the first lesson after losing a passwords file should have been to figure out a better backup strategy. Going to the cloud seemed to be quite a reach, but apparently Richard Branson didn't think so. RB's a smart guy, but I'd agree that $1m is history, more or less.
Revolving around infinite channels
Hi I'd like to show you some stuff I've been working on. I started with the idea of a site where you could type anything, any word or phrase and it would take you to a page where you could post something, then other people that typed the same phrase would see the posts and add something. I started playing around building a working prototype. Over time it morphed into something different, I added and deleted features and changed the site's layout and mechanics constantly. It ended up being a more complex application with a private messaging system, comments and command driven operations. The concept is simple. There are 3 columns, the left one is where the pm's reside, in the center are the posts, and the right one are for the comments. There is a single text input field, you type something and you enter a channel with that name. In a channel you can see the latest posts and their comments, you see only one post at a time and change switch between them with the on-screen or keyboard arrows. To make a new post you paste a url and some optional text. The url is automatically converted to the appropriate media (imgs, videos, links). To comment the post you're seeing you type ! at the beginning and some text. There is no friend system, you can pm anybody. To pm someone you type @username and your message. I added other commands like a calculator (calc Math.PI * 54 /567), whoami and seen. You can save personal notes (note some note to save) and see them by entering the notes channel. The color theme of the site can be changed by entering the theme channel. You can filter posts by (top new and fav) There is a summary of all the commands in the help channel. Also it's worth noting that everything works in a single page load, everything is handled underneath by ajax.

Check it out at http://radnation.com

I made another site that also uses the channel concept but it's much simpler, without pm's or comments and posts are shown vertically with scrolling. Commands available are written in the left column. I couldn't decide on what layout I liked the most so I created both.

Check it out at http://gsick.com

About the channel concept. I see them as a way to go somewhere were you expect to see certain content, or certain users. Over time channels develop a culture of their own and users visit the channels they find pleasing. There's also less cohesion since there is no following system to maintain.

I had a lot of fun and learned a lot developing radnation and gsick. Although I haven't received much traffic apart from a few friends. I realized getting users to find and use a website is much harder than I thought, or I'm really bad at it.

This is why I write this with excitement because maybe one person out there will read this and try them out.

Any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated!
If you're going to promote yourself on HN, is it too much to ask that the link contain some useful content? Otherwise it looks like your main skill is self promotion.
For a book, I would keep the text itself as something very simple, such as a big old list of lines. A chapter is a range of lines. A section is also a range of lines. Adding subsections is a matter of adding a field to Book and it is (surprise) a range of lines, too.

You could implement this as a byte offset if you wanted, but you get the idea. If the text of the book is data, the rest is metadata. IMO it should live with the data, preferably in as lightweight a fashion as possible. Adding more metadata is a matter of adding fields, but as long as you stick to a basic form of representation, you should be fine.

Your helper methods help connect interrelated pieces of data. If you want all the chapters in a set of pages, you check for which chapters either overlap or are a subset of the page range you got.

If you want to add footnotes to pages, for example, you might define a footnotes field. That field has the text of the footnote and the line that it points to, perhaps with an offset to denote specifically which word it wants. (Maybe this is an argument for using byte offsets in the first place.)

Is this roughly what you had in mind, or have I completely missed the mark?
Australia is partly to blame for its own woes there -- Amazon have said in the past that they won't set up a .au subsidiary while there are parallel import restrictions on books.

All hail the luvvies, who made all books more expensive for all Australians, so they could protect a handful of novelists, playwrights and poets.
I wonder why "growth hacking" is so in vogue. It might be that more people know how to build products well, so getting distribution is more of an issue. It might be that more companies have taken a rigorous approach to things, shining as examples for the others. It might be that the avenues for growth are more democratized than ever, so instead of having a good rolodex for PR or BD, anyone can hack it.

Either way, it is a good thing and I look forward to reading some interesting stuff on this blog. I've found the most interesting stories are told privately, but hopefully Danielle can divulge more about Twilio & Referly internals because she left the former and runs the latter.
You, being merely a single example of an individual who does not fit her statement, does not invalidate her point that it's a marketplace that an older demographic audience uses.

If she (and you) could demonstrate that as being true (or false) with research and statistics, then she (and you) would have a leg to stand on.
Irrelevant, WP has a mechanism where biased articles eventually reach an unbiased state.
Consume More Content When Convenient
I for one wish every working programmer would watch and understand this presentation.

A link, for the lazy: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
Abstraction:

* Haskell typeclasses
* Clojure Protocols, Multimethods
* Erlang Processes

Abstraction is not limited to Objects. Objects are just one way of expressing abstractions.
There's also renaming entire companies to shake anchoring bias: Worldcom -> MCI.
Given her experience at Twilio and the successful launch of referly (or do you think the press comes by itself?), I think your comment is one of those "why is everyone so negative on HN?" comments.

Please try to be nice. This is an announcement about a new blog. What did you expect besides an announcement?

But to give you the benefit of the doubt, I will say this: as someone who has used the title "Growth Hacker", I find it meaningful but cringe whenever I use it.
The relevant parable: http://www.ckwop.me.uk/Meditation-driven-development.html

Looking at the Slashdot, there's a lot of No True Scotsman remarks turning up.

Saying whether agile "succeeded" or "failed" requires a number of things. You need to define "agile" (good luck) and then define success or failure (good luck).

Then you need survey respondents who can answer those questions accurately (good luck) and honestly (good luck).

Perhaps you could come up with a list of practices and indicators that show how "truly" agile a company is. Call it the Agility Maturity Model, and ...

Oh drat, I just reinvented pre-2000 software engineering literature. They'll kick me out of the cool kids club for this.
Firstly, yes, I was confusing the international versus american. My apologies.

Secondly, fuck you for that second statement (and somewhat implying that my morals are twisted). Those kinds of judgement calls are exactly why the Red Cross and MSF are apolitical. "Fuck those guys over there, they're -foo-" is precisely what these organisations area against, a core part of why they were formed.
Reading the article, I don't think the author quite understands OOP.

The original author is Joe Armstrong (http://www.sics.se/~joe/), the creator of Erlang.
Anyone know if this impacts nodejs?
You have to feel bad the Baker's, but I have to say that they and Dragon's board did not do its job. In the end, they are the ones that approved the all stock deal with a shady company in the midst of a full blown tech bubble. And they are the ones that hired and fully trusted a middle man to do his job.
I think there is some fascinating skill set collision happening. Marketers are saying, "oh I can learn to code - its not actually that hard". Developers are saying, "oh I can learn to do marketing - its not actually that hard". Arguing whether one is harder than the other would be missing the point, its the cross-disciplinary magic that is happening that I want to capture. I think we had a lot of that at Twilio, and I'm trying for even more of it at Referly, and I want to encourage this to continue in other people's companies.
Yeah I cringe too, but I can't totally figure out why. Are we just grossed out by being put in a box? I am still not totally sure why it bothers me
I'd say many products with 500 page spec docs never even get to the release stage.
So, basically what you are saying, as far as I can tell, is that there is absolutely no difference between the OO approach using the Law of Demeter and the FP approach. (Though with an FP approach, you are perhaps more likely to make things immutable, which is a good thing.)

If so, perhaps this isn't surprising, as Demeter was layered upon Scheme.

Regarding writing to databases or to screens, decent OO programmers do not put methods to do this sort of thing into the domain objects. For i/o to a database the typical OO approach is to use a separate DAO class, and for GUI i/o the typical OO approach is to use an MVC framework, or some such.

Also, I'm not sure why anyone would want a mathematical formulation for the Law of Demeter. I think that anyone would be hard pressed to formalize every aspect of good design, as what is a good design isn't a mathematical property, but more one of cognitive psychology and the art of engineering. The Demeter system did, however, automate implementation for the Law of Demeter based on specifications you would give it, so The Law of Demeter isn't just some touchy/feely thing either.
Who Stole My Tweet Lets You Find Tweet Thieves
Why aren't capes still around, then?

(They were made for horseback riding, too)
I don't know the context of the post, but remember that Erlang is a community effort, not a dictatorship. He has to expose his arguments and motives in order to keep using his favourite methodology.
You may enjoy learning a language with decent module system. Abstract APIs are not exclusive to OO. The confusing part about OO is that it conflates modules with data types, which causes even experienced people to botch their designs. Tongue in cheek: As long as you have enough discipline to write OCaml in whatever OO language your project happens to use, you are going to have a good time.
I think openly claiming to be a hacker, of any sort, is cringe worthy. My bet is that for the most legit hackers (like really good developers I know), this is especially true.

I'm reminded of Boris from "Goldeneye": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl0LZsyi_tA
My favorite part of the video is when he advanced the slide, and you realize you are looking at an overhead project with printed transparency instead of PowerPoint.

1994, simpler times.
I'd ask, I suppose, why he wants ints from 1 to 3 in the first place. Why are these semantically important, and what's the intended meaning?

If you just need a set of numbers which only has those three, a helper function with a modulus seems easier. Or an infinite list of [1,2,3]. But it's not clear to me what the use case is, so...
Find Out Who Is Talking About Any Topic on Social Media Sites
Agreed. And Joe Armstrong himself used this argument here: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
I really don't get the level of enthusiasm for this device, and struggle to see it really taking off mainstream (which may not matter, since it's just an android box).

Yes, we haven't seen an android device targeted for gaming yet, but AFAICT, there is nothing this will do that you can't already do with something like an mk802[0]. Similarly, decent tablets can be had for $100[1]. Now, both of these have slower GPUs (mali 400, as SGS2), but come 9 months when this is actually meant to be available, i'm certain there will be better-than tegra3 hardware available in that price range. Further, most people could just connect their phone via hdmi and a PS3 controller to get the same result.

Another angle of looking at it could be as reference hardware, like a nexus device for gaming. That would have advantages.. (better dev support etc etc) but its userbase is going to be a drop in the ocean compared to other android devices- take the SGS3 for example-- 9m pre-orders. This is currently at 0.05m.[2]

I do wish these guys luck however.The fundraising is impressive however you look at it. I do see ARM devices taking over a large chunk of the conosle space[3], and i do see a mobile OS involved. A greater degree of freedom than the big boys (although not than android) is welcome, as is the competition. I really hope we get some quality in-room multiplayer back-- and this could help to spur that-- which hasn't been a first class citizen since way back in the n64 days(!). But there is no guarantee that anything will change.

Ultimately, the success of the fundraising could be its own downfall, attracting google/apple/microsoft to compete. We all know how much they want presence in the living room.
OUYA's interface is more suited for a game pad, but it's nothing that couldn't be matched with an app, or an android update.

--

0. $74 USB-stick PC.

1. I would post retail links but i don't want to come accross advertising. Check out cnx-software.com or armdevices.net if you wish to learn more.

2. based on a lazy $5m/$100. Extrapolate linearly over the 30 days and you still only have 0.3m.. a case which would smash all kickstarter funding into oblivion. People buying this would be expected to buy more games.. but we are looking a 30:1 ratio to match the big boys in the most optimistic case.

3. IMO the days of the monolithic console are numbered- mobile OS's have made gaming on an upgradeable platform as simple as the consoles, which will be soon out-dated by the relentless pace of progress in the ARM/mobile GPU world.
Let's grow with Facebook
This changed my whole perspective on the nuances on the comment...
Did You Know? HTML5 Tag Omission
"Has anyone under 30 ever bid on something on eBay?"

I'm under 30, and I just won two auctions in the past week, bidding on many more to buy at the lowest price.

Really, we're posting articles from Pando? And it's from Sarah Lacey to boot. This article can't be anything but accurate. Oh, hold on, never mind...
As far as I am aware Amazon is taking a larger percentage of the end sale, so could in fact cost more than eBay for businesses depending on how many products you are listing and how many are actually selling.
You're wrong.

There's only a mild correlation between fame and skill set. I can name a few dozen 'famous' internet developers, and have even interviewed a few of them, and most weren't anything special, other than being good bloggers.

Meanwhile, take someone like Jeff Dean (who I just learned about a few days ago). Designed and implemented BigTable, MapReduce, Protocol Buffers, etc. I'm not sure most people outside of Google have even heard of him.

Sometimes your work finds the limelight but you aren't credited for it. We all know Elon Musk but who knows the guy who actually wrote the code for the rockets? I don't remember the name of the Amazon Dynamo guys, and have no idea who designed EC2 and S3. These are awesome systems used by millions of people, but the creators are (relatively) unknown.
We are right now doing all these mistakes.

Currently, we have the problem that somehow majority of people signing up to our service are not at all potential customers.

The main problem for us that majority of blogs and advices we got are actually about how to acquire customers in consumer segment.

There is very little blogs on how to acquire customers which are small businesses via internet.
this does nothing, nothing at all, it's fake.
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Thanks for your honest response, though.

(Sometimes when it's hard to put into words an exact reasoning for something you feel it turns out to be worth investigating.)
Ask HN: how to acquire customers which are small businesses via internet?
We are building a service to help small business manage data they have in the cloud. We got to point that we are profitable but growth is anemic.

We have the problem that somehow majority of people signing up to our service are not at all potential customers.

Majority of blogs and advices we got are actually about how to acquire customers in consumer segment.

There is very little blogs on how to acquire customers which are small businesses (real estate, etc.) via internet.

Any ideas?
Draftable isn't getting paid to peddle anecdotes though.
The level of funding popular KS projects are getting almost leads me to be concerned that someone is going to game the system and promise the earth, and then just run off with all the money. Which, AFAICT, would be perfectly legal.
Here's a 2011 article:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/245856/chrome_...

Summary:

* Study (commisioned by GOOG but methodology is open for inspection) puts them #1 out of 3 (being IE and Firefox)

* Patched faster and more often than others

* Untouched at least year's pwn2own

Edit: Oddly enough, this was the #1 result for "chrome most secure browser" on Google. One should really do a cursory search before throwing the citation flag.
100% agree. The poster just wasn't thinking. But nor was the Author. I just bought 6 Computer Parts on Ebay! I am only 28. The Computer parts were by far the cheapest place to buy them and they worked 100% out of the box. I saved nearly $1,000 by buying them on Ebay.

Brand New goes to Amazon and Sometimes Ebay. But Second Hand items, I always hit up Ebay.
1. I do agile at work :-p

I write some code and we release it next week. Our manager prioritizes work for us and protects us from the rest of the company.

2. I don't do agile at work

We don't have stand up meetings, There is no KanBan nor User Stories, We don't pair program unless we feel like it.

Take your pick both are true.
The reason listing fees exist is to reduce the amount of dumped crap onto eBay. Besides, for individual sellers, listing fees are basically gone (or de minimis) anyway. There's a perpetual 'promotion' for your first N listings a month to be free of listing fees.
When you consider that estimated North American internet usage makes up less than 20% of total internet usage[1], I don't think PayPal has anything to worry about for a long time.

They are the almost defacto standard for personal payments online will keep them in the top spot for a long time due to network effects. Without a serious shift in usage, its hard to see that changing any time soon.

As an anecdote, my grandmother passed away last week. Her 86 year old sister back in Germany asked us if we had PayPal this week so she could send flowers for her funeral. It may not be a "hot" company in the US, but its still highly relevant to the vast majority of internet users, even ones that are only just venturing onto the web.

[1] I don't know the actual number as everywhere I've looked suggests between 13% and 15%. I figure less than 20% is a safe bet.
LOL!

Poe's law! Poe's law!
> Note in my story I specifically said I was able to compare or contact previous tennants, look at the property on a satellite map, check references,

Cool. Do you check for "Number of patrons who've died in a fire"? Because having working smoke detectors, or adequate fire escapes, are not the kind of things that work for market forces.
Your point? Using inheritance the way he's suggesting is a rookie mistake.

Either that, or I'm completely misunderstanding him. He can't be talking about hating composition, though, can he? He uses it in his own Erlang examples!
Being unaware of a detail in a specific field does not imply lack of intelligence, but lack of intelligence probably does imply ignorance of field-specific details. Perhaps the commenter is truly claiming to be unintelligent.
> Is this roughly what you had in mind, or have I completely missed the mark?

Maybe, but I'm not sure. If you don't encapsulate the data behind an API, then I suspect that you will eventually be sorry. And if you do encapsulate the data behind an API, then you're doing OO.

You may be right that your design for the representation of the book may be better than the typical naive OO representation, but there's nothing that forces an internal OO representation to be naive, or for an FP one to be sophisticated.

I guess what I'm saying is that I still don't understand how the FP approach is supposed to be different from the OO approach using the Law of Demeter. With the law of Demeter, methods only return data, not other objects ("two dots: bad"), so it's not as object-filled as a more naive OO approach. And in a case such as your FP representation for a book, where the representation is bound to be rather complicated, it seems that you will surely want to encapsulate it, in which case, the FP approach has adopted some OO. I.e., the FP approach and the OO approach have met in the middle and have become the same.
I'm not sure this is true for discrete cards. Onboard GPUs will utilize good chunks of system memory (and this is configurable in the system BIOS generally), but discrete cards don't use any afaik.