skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Four ways the Internet could go down
It's a brilliant strategy, isn't it?

User acquisition costs for a product like Dropbox can be fairly significant, especially if you're going toe-to-toe with everybody else in Google.

On the other hand, a gig of storage borders on free for Dropbox, but the marginal utility of that storage is pretty significant for the user, providing a strong motivation to actively recommend (an admittedly excellent) service to their friends.

You get more storage for 'free', Dropbox saves a bucket of money on advertising. It's genius.
almost all enterprise companies use exchange. The thing is though that iphone and android have supported exchange for a while, there really isn't much reason to go to the windows phone just to get push email.
Dropbox is paying $0.055/GB(http://marcgayle.com/how-dropbox-is-printing-money). So paid users pay $10/mo for 50GB storage. That means, Dropbox's cost for that account is 50GB X $0.15/GB = $2.75
It seems to be a bug in the latest beta of Chrome when using backbone.js (which we use):

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136381
Peking Duck
Peking Duck is a famous duck dish from Beijing that has been prepared since the imperial era, and is now considered one of China’s national foods.
I'm not sure how this really addresses anything in the parent post. Sure, interoperability sucks, but surely you're not suggesting that the solution is to glom everything together into a single monolithic app that does everything?

By all means, fix the fact that tools are painful when you want them to work together. Maybe unify a few of those communications tools.
I wanted to love these guys, I really did. I had a b2b operation all set up and just needed some help with the payments. After going through their API I realized I could technically do everything I needed.

But they insisted that each customer have their own account which didn't make sense in my circumstances. I couldn't even get them to return emails or have a phone call to discuss.

Pro tip to startups out there: it never hurts to talk to potential customers.. they may be your next pivot.
Uhh. Rails on a mac is incredibly easy. And I'm a Django developer who's never really used it much.

Got new MacBook Air. Install Xcode. Install homebrew. Install rbenv followed by ruby 1.9.x. gem install rails. Dunzo.

SQLite comes with OS X. You can install Postgres pretty easily using homebrew.

If you're gonna be a web developer and complain about something being more difficult than double-clicking an exe ... well then you might be doing it wrong. hah.
Right, but in my case, it would have been one file at a time.
I mean, you should be handling errors, that's the point. But if you want to ignore them, it's almost always the last return value so you can just write:

foo, _ := DoBar()
"articles about how Dwolla combats fraud now?"

Links? Nothing obvious I am seeing even with a search for "how Dwolla combats fraud"

Additionally is there any difference (for a merchant) in how Dwolla handles chargebacks vs. a credit card company?
I have great sympathy for your point that pragmatism has tremendous value. I disagree in a trifling way with statements like “The world needs C not Lisp,” it is obvious to me that the world needs both C and Lisp. Or it did, and both have contributed in various ways to progress, and C continues to be a useful tool.

The interesting thing is that insanely great progress requires operating at all levels of the hierarchy. Consider the oft-quoted maxim, “Real artists ship.” This does not suggest that there is no room for dreaming, but rather that the highest form of artistry is the application of pragmatism to manifesting our dreams.
If my memory is correct, when they merged it back into the Live brand they also downgraded the standard storage space to 7GB. If you logged in sometime during the transition period or clicked on a special link that they sent out in an email you got to preserve your 25GB of storage.
Opposum protein protects mice from poisons and toxins
Stack Exchange Favorite Users Browser Extension
I'm kind of surprised they haven't tried a sort of kickstarter model.

E.g. People commit to buying your title, and when you hit the threshold they get billed (and get the game), and the game instantly gets approved to into main Steam. The required minimum could be based on revenue rather than sales , so that a $1 game requires a lot more potential buyers than a $40 game.
Do You Qualify For a HARP 2.0 Refinancing Package?
Harp 2.0 changes for 2012- Get financial help from the government to get a mortgage refinance through a harp loan..
Typo: http://www.vanschneider.com/wp-content/themes/vanschneider/i...
Submit Entries for The Computer Cooking Contest
I'd bet it's because they don't do it themselves, they subcontract it.
You also forgot the proprietary drivers needed to actually use almost any of the devices on the market (including Google's own that they sell directly now).

While the original poster was being somewhat disingenuous, let's be honest here, Android isn't a completely open platform. To obtain full functionality from Android devices requires more than what Google distributes source code for.

I say this as a somewhat angry and disappointed Android developer :-(
This is an overestimate because you don't need perpetual income. You only need income till your death. So for the case when portfolio return is 3% higher than inflation, 21x of your spending is fine (assuming 30 years of life after retirement).
The problem is that it requires 2,311 clicks to restore those. There's no ability to batch restores, to my knowledge.
If I send 50 SMS to someone who is charged 10c per message, I have cost them $5.00. So I should care whether I send them an SMS vs. an email.

Someone without a data plan doesn't have constant access to email. Maybe they only check it on a computer every few days. So if I want to send an instant message, SMS might be necessary.

Randomly sending an email vs. an SMS does not "just work". Nor does forcing each person to communicate to a computer some elaborate policy for how to reach them best.
Kyle Bragger joins Fancy Hands
The take away here should be, if you're going to spend time redesigning email clients, you should take an equal or greater amount of time laying it out on your website. So much for sharing ideas. When half the comments trash your WordPress template before they even get to the subject, you know it's a tough crowd.
1) "they're not actually unfair"

So don't say that they are!

2) "The nice link you posted sums it up well"

I agree - but then I wrote those words.

3) "there seems to be a bias in selecting the problems solved in the benchmark games"

You still haven't said anything that suggests they are "targeted at low-level languages".
Xbox will probably be refreshed next year, though.
If I would buy such device I would want big games and emulators. You easily fill up 8GB with emulators.
Yeah, take a real close look at that case, and read about what Dwolla did to Tradehill. Read both sides, Dwolla's and Tradehills. Believe me, Dwolla doesn't come out looking too good. Dwolla rode Tradehill and Bitcoin to viability and prosperity, then turned around and destroyed Tradehill when they started getting some negative press about Bitcoin. It's too bad, because I was an avid Dwolla user and was impressed with their approach to technology.

But this is my biased opinion as a Bitcoin user (and former Dwolla user). Please go read about it yourself. Perhaps others will come to a different conclusion.
I'm not sure what you're giving them a pass for here, why wouldn't an internal email be more clear?

I don't believe this was an "internal" email at all. It was sent out on a Friday, they knew it would get out. We were the intended audience.
I'd much rather see 4GB or even 2GB with some sort of expandability over a non-expandable 8GB. Capping the console at 8 subtly defines the scope of future games that it might run.
Yes, and then be left with N copies of your Truecrypt image, because it turns out that its was mounted on two machines a couple of times. Been there, done that.
The Social Pitfalls of Working Alone
1.08 Billion Smartphones in the World
This reward level wasn't available when originally posted.

I wonder what they're going to do if/when these 5000 sell out, which looks like it will happen soon. I would guess that the bulk of their kickstarter money will come from people at this level, so they'd reach $1M sooner by expanding this offer or adding a similar but slightly higher priced one.
Can developers really affect change from the ground up? Didn't turn out so well for Jenna in this story, but I bet all the developers were better off having been exposed to new ideas.
Uh, I used to live in the DC area so take this comment in that spirit:

The Local DC City government is one of the most dysfunctional, corrupt, and ineffective local governments of a large metropolitan area. There is nothing pretty about how "governing" gets done in DC.

Go take a taxi ride in DC and tell me about your experience. For grins, try and get a LEGAL taxi ride from Union Station at 2am that conforms to the taxi regulations. For bigger grins, try and get some action/resolution to the blatantly illegal behavior of taxi drivers from the Taxi Commission that was the subject of this whole effort.

In DC, you really can't do better than the Taxi Commission as an example of regulatory capture.
I don't like the idea that it needs to watch us do this first.
The problem is, very little other than emotional appeals and rhetoric get through to the political class and to very many of the masses.

Der oylem iz a goylem, as it says on my coffee mug.
Oh come on, you love the multi-tab whatever that was forced on everybody. Thunderbird has definitely had some Gnome3-caliber failures.
This puts Dropbox into a useful range for me, and re-invokes the dilemma: trust Dropbox, or continue waiting patiently for an AeroFS invite.
This may be true if the group has fixed membership, but if participation is open to all there a limit to the returns of educating newcomers. Picture a advanced sports practice that attempts to include those who have never played before, or an graduate seminar that spends its time answering basic questions for the benefit of whomever happens to be in the room. The benefits for the existing group will be reduced. It shouldn't be a black and white "us and them", but a certain amount of elitism can elevate the dialog.
Right there with you- as a current UW student who briefly considered CSE I decided against it because the mentality (the vibe, even) of the department clashed against my startup aspirations and the learning mindset necessary for creating a startup.

I was instead drawn to the Informatics program, which is less technical but provides a much better environment for entrepreneurship: we trade project management, information organization, and a web design/development focus for computer science theory and engineering.

A tragic design/planning flaw of UW is that the engineering departments are on the opposite side of campus (~8 minute walk) from the business school. Collaboration is isolated and leaves little serendipitous idea exchanges that could very well develop into potent startups. I can only imagine how things might be different if UW had made the two neighbors...
If I may just say: I have Google Drive, and am loving it. It's much cheaper than dropbox, as I pay only $5 and get 100GB of space. That's WAY more than I need, but it syncs to all my devices.

However, I will be the first to say that DropBox has some really great features that Google Drive lacks. For example, there is no public folder for Google Drive, like there is for Dropbox, and I cannot throttle the speed at which Google Drive syncs. With a new laptop transferring 20+GB of data, I unwittingly maxed out a 100mbit connection.

For Dropbox users my question is: is Google Drive not worth it? Do the features offered by Dropbox make it more worthwhile than Google Drive, even if the raw storage costs more?
NO. I live in NYC now and the taxi service is WAY better than the service in DC.

For one thing, if you make a complaint against a driver in NYC, there is going to be some action taken. Not so in DC.

That said, I used Uber almost exclusively in both locations.
Meant to upvote, fat-finger downvoted instead. My bad. Hopefully someone can compensate.
I'm sad you guys are in New York and not Boston, I love me some good coffee! beautiful website too
Uhm, I wasn't giving a counter argument. I was replying to your question. What you want to do with that is up to you.

Any demonstration in the vein you propose will rely on a measure of caveat emptor. I would guess I am willing to accept a greater degree of this (trading strict consumer protection for better competition leading to better service and lower prices) than you seem to be.
Ask HN: A fake pg would say (what?)
Looks interesting in the vein of Robocode. One thing I noticed that slightly turned me off was that it takes 7 lessons before you get to move around, and you don't get to start eating anything until lesson 10. I understand that there's a lot of ground work that needs to be laid before you can really create something, but it does seem to miss the mark in my opinion.

How many teams of programmers are there that need to learn Scala all at once from a base skill set of 0, are able to/interested in taking the time to use a simple game with each other to learn it, and already have a good understanding of Java and/or C++?

Maybe I'm too far removed from the programming world, but I would think a better implementation of this would be for teachers helping an entire class of high schoolers/college kids learn Scala together. Not teams of professional developers.
My initial reaction was that $1 million seemed low to replace their advertising revenue for a year.

I don't know the site statistics, but they have a large staff, and are a very popular site. Gaming/entertainment is a solid area of advertising.

Looking at their site though, they don't have a ton of ads, so I guess that helps explains it. And their primary source of revenue seems non-ads (expo, etc...), and probably see their site as their advertising/lead generation.
Behind the Scenes: The Hardware that Powers Basecamp, Campfire and Highrise
I'm sure you could guess at it if you had to, its all publicly available information.
I kind of agree with you, but if I was walking by a warehouse of typing monkeys I would by default assume all of their articles are not useful. 37 Signals seems like a successful company to me. That is why I think the articles they write might have useful content.
From the study: On the other hand, LTNF is effective against the venoms of all species of snakes. Therefore, LTNF can become a universal treatment for snakebites. Furthermore, LTNF is effective against scorpion and bee venoms, plant-derived ricin and bacterial toxin botulinum. Therefore, LTNF can become a universal treatment for toxins derived from animals, plants, and bacteria.
It's nice to win the battle, but the war of over regulation and crony capitalism is far from over. We need to elect representatives that understand that markets work, that change is good, and that not every existing interest should be protected by the government for eternity.
T-shirt That can Charge Your Phone
True but (unless I've missed something) it's insanely tedious for more a few lost files.) There seems to be no way to first select all the files to restore and them have them restored in one action.

I've had similar lost files situations, such a setting up a new machine, where dropbox mistook an empty folder as the most current state and proceeded to delete things from other machines.

Whether or not this is what one should expect given the circumstances, or if these mishaps could be avoided with some care, it's still a little too easy to lose things. My fear is something will vanish and I won't realize it until it's too late to restore it.

The Dropbox Web site offers an RSS feed for your account activity. I've taken to watching this to see if there's any unexpected deletion going on. I've half a mind to write some cron thing that filters the feed for deletions and alerts me somehow.

Downside to this is that Dropbox has a way of updating files by deleting what's there and then adding back a newer version. Perhaps I just need an RSS feed of deletions that I scan periodically or check when I've done something potentially dangerous (like restore a drive or VM or something).

Makes me wonder if there's a business in here, helping people safeguard (select) Dropbox content.
Buzzmedia Buys Spin Magazine
Well, yeah, that's almost a truism: if your app needs to run on OS X, then it needs to run on OS X.

I think very few Rails apps need to run on OS X, however.
So, this investments signals a shift in focus. Up until now, github was a long term growth company, a much more stable (if slower growing) setup? Ie, they've shifted gears, more towards a hit or flop kind of scenario, where they have to get fairly big fairly quickly, even if the process means they're at a higher risk of permanently failing.

It doesn't look to me like the people who love and use github have been using it because it looks like it will be stable, and stick around for a while. They seem to have been won over by popularity effects and performance/cool tech factors.

So, if github fails, it may not really be as big of an issue. Github could fail as an investment or company, and still leave a running system behind, up as a non-profit even; the risk to its customers doesn't seem that big. And the potential rewards, depending on how they invest the money, can be really big. There's lots of good work they can still do, that everyone will benefit from.
Ask HN: What type of challenges do you like to code for fun?
We're building HackerRank.com with the core part being fun challenges with a social component around it (add your school/company network). We just put up a launch page last week with an interesting game and we had over 500 bots with 2.1M games being played till now. Completely surprised that people from Facebook, Uber and Hulu had so much time and interest in coding bots.

Gearing up for our beta launch, we'd love to hear from you on what are some of the kinds of challenges you like to code for fun? (game bots, scraping stuff, heavy-math problems, quick stuff like 4clojure.com, etc) Your feedback will greatly help us in building. Feel free to ping me off list. Appreciate your time.
I have a teams account for my business and it is fantastic. I have to admit though, I was hoping it would jump to 2 TB when I saw the headlines today.
How Venture Capitalists Talk
Post Acquisition Rights for API Developers
>if they wanted enthusiasts they really need to bump up the hardware.

It looks like this thing is aimed squarely at indie game developers, and the type of people who play indie pc games. Indie gamers aren't really known for their craving for top of the line graphics.

Using android saves them a lot of time and putting it on an arm platform allows it to easily run all of the popular android games.

There isn't a commodity SOC that comes with a desktop class GPU, so I don't see anyway they could realistically do that--it would require a whole lot more than a million bucks to develop it.

>...most popular titles on the platform and strike deals with the developers to port them over to their platforms.

This would a lot of time. Since these games are written for android a port will probably be a complete rewrite (see minecraft for x-box), and take a year at least.

Why wait a year to play a game when you can get access for only $99?

Sure eventually console makers might make tools and processes to make it easier for indie developers to get android games onto their consoles, but that would be fantastic (and would accomplish the goals of this project anyway).
A $45 billion kickstarter for 2013 should do the trick for the US market.
You're not understanding the facts, online notarization IS legal in California... the notaries themselves can't be in California, but the signers can.

Signers can notarize from anywhere in the world, including California, since the notaries follow Virginia law. It's like how lenders and credit companies often use Utah law (but can lend elsewhere) or corporations incorporate in Delaware.
Not to me.

setX is reminicent of Java to me, and of small talk attribute setters/getters before it.

Both of those languages elevate state to the point of godhood.
Ask HN: State of the art of machine translation?
What are the best things currently out there?
2GB of core memory is definitely not enough. My old Nexus One only had 512MB of base memory, and I was constantly shuffling apps to make room. Moving an app to SD only moves its assets, the app's core doesn't move.
I'm not looking for official citation, but it seems unjustified to state that "treating [love and happiness] as engineering problems will generally lead to greater success." I am open to that possibility, but it doesn't seem at all obviously true to me. For many people, I feel like letting there brains run on instinct works well for many problems. I feel confident there are certain problems where conscious decision making can actually get in the way.
Far too high a proportion of the questions in #ruby are about installation.

Often people come in having (naturally) tried to install it from their distro's package manager. First we have to explain to them why this is a bad idea and persuade them to remove it. Then, often they have tried to install it from source, passing some fucked up value to --prefix, and they have to be helped to clean that mess up.

Then we tell them to use rvm, but someone pipes up about rbenv and friends and we have to explain the differences. Then it turns out that they didn't have openssl-dev or something installed so they have to recompile ruby again, or someone has to try and remember the magic spell to compile the openssl bit of ruby separately, which nobody ever can.

THEN it turns out that all they want to do with ruby is run redmine, which has some other specific requirements that nobody in the channel knows or cares about.

Basically, when yehuda katz finishes that project of his, freenode will be measurably happier, although the problems with OS packages will remain, I imagine forever.

The real root of the problem is that a lot of the things which make the ruby ecosystem highly dysfunctional are the same things that make it so great. Primarily the fast pace.
That's the real problem. You can find stuff like libfacerec out there, which OpenCV just added to their latest release (2.4.2) a week or so ago. Maybe we will see more face-recognizing software come from this.

http://docs.opencv.org/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/index.htm...
SPDY for Rest of Us
For mature developers the choices here are not about innate skill but about tradeoffs. This blog post makes the error of projecting what is a multi-dimensional problem onto a single dimension.

You can have a pretty abysmal code base with beautiful design on top and amazing UX and be rolling in piles of money, and be perfectly aware that the code sucks but made the decision that beautiful code was not the priority or competitive advantage of the business.
This seems to be a trend in recent political workings -- lawmaker introduces naive and ignorant piece of legislation to support some part of his/her constituency, faces enormous online backlash, quietly backs off. For some reason these legislators still get reelected, though.
From the FAQ:

Advertising paid for rent, wages, health insurance, utilities, all the normal stuff that you pay for when you have fourteen souls working together. That money keeps the lights on while we do the things people expect from us: thrice weekly content drops, two annual shows, the scholarships, Child's Play, etc.
Yes, this is what happened. I have the 25 gig as well.