skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I phrased the thought that way, but that doesn't mean that only hyper-logical people feel like that and everyone else agrees with you. Quite the opposite: most people would think you're crazy if you suggested that they want to go to the office in the morning rather than say spend the day chilling out by the pool. It's precisely the software engineers from Silicon Valley who more often embrace the flavor of denial you are advocating.

What you said about being happy is no doubt true, but so what. No doubt there were happy slaves and unhappy kings. Did the happy slaves not do things they didn't want to?
> Mono is awesome but it's not perfect by any means.

If by perfect, you mean doesn't implement whole of .net, then yes. For me, this is good enough http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility I am not looking to play catch-up with MS's implementation(good to see mono mentioned WPF as no plans to implement)

What I don't like about .net in general is it's still catching up on package and dependency management.
People need to spend some time understanding their architecture before just blindly moving into a PaaS provider. There are pitfalls and I bet we see some startups go the PaaS route then pivot later on.
real marginal tax rates that will approach 50+%

Can you elaborate on this? It seems to me that the proposal for restoring the highest bracket's marginal tax rate to what it was prior to 2001 would restore it to 39.6%.
French website reveals waiters' tricks to make customers part with money
True enough, and I'm probably abusing terminology here, sorry for that.

It's more me wondering out loud if there will be some alternative to OSX, largely built off of OSX in order to get around limitations like sandboxing.
Smart Time Ago, JS lib to updates relative timestamps more efficiently
I find the whole we (investors, "founders")/they (non-generalists who can't move up and down the stack) kind of jarring, especially since I somehow managed to fall into the gap between founders and employees. Programmers are generally opinionated, especially about the domain they work in. My impression of Kevin's problems with programmers when I was there (inception to October 2007) is that they gave him too much shit, criticized his ideas, and generally created hassles for him (all good things, IMO), and he didn't really handle that well (IMO). Forget "moving up and down the stack," they wanted to _architect_ the stack.

If you're non-technical and come back from some conference and say we're now rearchitecting in Rails/Node/Brainfuck/whatever cool new tech you just heard about, you're probably going to get some pushback. And that pushback, from the other side's perspective, could be presented as "you're just a non-generalist who can't move up and down the stack."

Its important to remember that Kevin isn't really technical.
Femtocells now outnumber cell towers
Painless multiple repository management
We're not speaking English, we're speaking math.
No, see GHC here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

A lot of work goes into getting it that performant, but it's entirely doable with the right knowhow.

(Before anyone gets pedantic, I realize that languages aren't slow, just implementations of them, etc.)
Creating Higgs-like excitations using ultracold atoms
And Kevin Rose hasn't been successful? How long does a company you started need to live on after you've left for it to be considered successful (Digg)? Was Digg not the go-to, poster-site, of web2.0 a time? Is that not a success?
This is a topic near and dear to my heart; I am a developer who tried to take up marketing but gave up.

So this post's call to action is to read/listen/watch various resources; in sum they are probably dozens of hours of learning. With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours.

So my question, similar to the one I posted almost a year ago [0], is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material?

0. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010
Who knows, the value of say 100 or even 1000 less powerful, but by no means powerless, investors might be greater than that of 10 VCs?
Here are two related books that are freely available (and that I haven't read):

The Haskell School of Music — From Signals to Symphonies, by Paul Hudak (pdf available at http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/hudak/Papers/HSoM.pdf).

Music: a Mathematical Offering, by David J. Benson (pdf available at http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/mth192/pages/html/music.pdf)
So you would be long Microsoft? If no then one wonders if you really effectively disagree with Hempton.
Yeah, it's interesting that it has become OK to say these things in the open. In the past, any doubting of MS was smacked down by simply pointing at Windows and Office, as well as MS's cash pile and market cap. It has been sort of painful seeing their series of sizeable blunders treated with something akin to a shrug, but I guess those chickens are finally coming home to roost.
Cool. I completely agree that using PHPBB for a startup blog would be "strange".
4) Modern OS's do a terrible job at making folders understandable, because there are drive directories, often hidden, and then multiple user folders, and their Documents directories, and then things outside their Documents directories (like Desktop, Downloads, etc.), and fake folders that show the content of multiple other folders, etc.

This is a particularly salient point -- in further particular:

fake folders that show the content of multiple other folders

I'll add to that, widgets that are not intuitive and/or don't clearly express the hierarchy.

My parents understand organization just fine. But then they encounter this interface that keeps breaking the basic rules and UI of same. They stop trusting the machine and themselves to interpret what it is presenting and doing.

This is bad UI.
No worries, and thanks for your comment! I'm hoping that a couple of people will respond with ideas!
Physical Mail Revolution Comes Knocking: Introducing Outbox
OS 9 -> OS X was supported by the Classic runtime for years.
PPC to Intel was supported by Rosetta for years.

I suppose if the announced that this was the plan, and gave people years to migrate across, it might be something they'd do. But it would kill basically any technical use of the platform (development, scientific computing). I find it much more likely they'll evolve iOS "up" to support users for whom a closed appliance approach is helpful, whilst adding options to OS X to cater for those who want a more traditional computer but need a bit more help.
The earlier drafts were much more like that. They were largely a collaboration between a few web companies who had deployed OAuth 1.0 with Dick Hardt who had written WRAP at Microsoft. One of the major design goals was producing a protocol simple enough that client developers would not have to use libraries.

I was pretty happy with this result since we could write a simple page like https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/server-s... which conformed to the spec (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-12#section-4....) and was an easy to implement explanation of authenticating a user.

But the OAuth 2.0 spec we were working off of is now eighteen months old and as Eran said the vast majority of those contributors have drifted away from the effort over this past year :-\
Twitter is Currently Down
I get this fantastically helpful error page:

Title: Twitter / <%= reason.capitalize %>

Twitter is currently down for <%= reason %>.

We expect to be back in <%= deadline %>. For more information, check out Twitter Status. Thanks for your patience!
I love ack, I've never looked back.
Smart Time Ago: a new JS lib to update relative timestamps more efficiently
Yeah, but that statement applies to pretty much any language really, not just C#.

If you code your Java app to expect to find documents in /home/<user>/ or link your Java app with binary libraries that are platform-specific, then you're going to have the same trouble.

Cross-platform support is rarely (if ever) a matter of just compiling into a new binary.
Introducing Anypic: an open source clone of Instagram
To be honest, I think at some point the user-base and comment section just became too much for me. There was a certain strain of conversation that everything inevitably devolved into, and I left and I know a lot of other people left when that became too much.
Google earnings report – more money with less ads
Google Earth 3D imagery now available on iPad and iPhone
I agree with everything except "3. Pick a real programmers[sic] editor."

You should use what is easiest for you to use (whether it's nano or a gui app -sublime!) and not feel pressured to be shoehorned into the emacs v. vi v. vim v. whatever, just to feel like a badass. There's a reason for this comic: http://xkcd.com/378/ , and that is that the entire debate is silly.
Skype handing over more chat data to law enforcement
Sorry you're right, on that aspect I was mistaken. But the caveats listed in the thread and the weakness of the assumption of a uniform distribution in each bucket makes it difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions beyond what the original article had. That is, I don't think the mean is useful at any level.
The concern is not the user experience of developers. As you point out, that's a small crowd with little market significance.

But sandboxing cripples, besides our ideals and personal experience, the apps we make. Users (of powerful, hard-to-sandbox apps) will suffer from this. Those users far outnumber the developers, and have great market significance.
Twitter is down, very down. Not even fail whale
Twitter down... but this time it's more embarassing
"I like seeing them fail."

PG was just talking the other day about HN'ers who have feelings like that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4293786

I'd be curious if you get a chance of your comments to that thread (particularly what I said I felt was a possible reason and PG's response).

Of course no matter which way you slice it it does make interesting watching. As they say in news "if it bleeds it leads". People love a good train wreck.
Is Zynga Just a Fad?
Here is how you can paste the word under cursor to the command line:

C-r-w

Handy for renaming variables with :%s/oldname/newname/g, for example.
Go Couch to 5k
Ask HN: Is there room for a responsive ad network?
As a web developer I know the pain of integrating external libraries and code into your website.
Insert a single ad network, watch the number of requests double. Insert a social sharing app and watch them triple.
Often their Javascript is far from optimised, altering the DOM multiple times adding more latency and causing your browser to re-render the page for each alteration. So I've started what I'd hoped to be a weekend project. Writing a fast ad-network with the idea that 90% of the money spent of the advertiser would be passed to the publisher and everyone will be happy.
Do you use a blogging engine? Which one? (I'll write you a module/plugin!)
So - advertisers and publishers out there; What do you require from an ad-network? Now is the time to shape a technology that many sites (perhaps including yours) rely on.
Yeah, and with a pretty epic error message: http://cl.ly/image/0e423k050x1T
I thought it was interesting that it was down in a way that I was receiving raw ERB.

(At least, I think it's erb; twitter still uses rails for the front-end, I think.)
Seriously? Do you remember what company this is? Apple does this every time and then corrects it down the road. Why? Because they receive more press that way. Come on guys, they are not stupid.
http://i.imgur.com/RWugz.png
The book does not assume its readers have any background in Scheme. Go slowly though the first few chapters and do the exercises. That will help acclimate you.
The conflict resolution service assigns a global ordering to transactions as well as pass/fail. Transactions that fail don't do any writes. Transactions that pass still aren't durable, they could be rolled back by a subsequent failure until they get on disk in a few places.

Each machine doesn't have its own commit log at the level of the distributed database. (The key/value store where we locally store data on each node happens to also use write ahead logging, but this is not an architectural requirement). Ideally transactions just have to be made durable in some N places to be considered committed. In practice, we elect specific machines to a transaction logging role, among other reasons because SSDs do better at providing fast durable commits if they aren't also serving random reads.

Each machine is authoritative for reads for some ranges of the keyspace and for the range of versions it knows about. It proactively fetches writes for newer versions. If it gets a request for a version it hasn't managed to get the writes for yet, the read has to wait while that storage server catches up. In practice this lag is very small, as you can see from our latency measurements.
They just announced "Google Fiber TV", integrated with Netflix and support for Android / ios.

On another note, this event seems super awkward...
Olympic gold medals contain only 1% gold; would cost $25,000 if pure
Ubuntu on Air: Your Question Answered
> I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.

Indeed. How about Fidonet? Fidonet developed as a network of interconnected BBSes, starting from 1984 and widely accessible by about 1994, without government stimulus. Fidonet had a backbone and a hierarchical structure for routing messages. It's not hard to envision a world where telecommunications companies got into that business, providing dedicated high-speed connections and lines for Fidonet (becoming an FSP rather than ISP), so that it evolved from an asynchronous modem-based network into real-time connectivity. So what we call a website could have developed from the BBS rather than from gopher servers, and what we call a browser could have evolved from Telix rather than Mosaic.

There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.)
That bubble texture at 2:48 is sweeeeeet.
It's not about where we buy our apps, it's about where we sell them.

If the App Store doesn't work for developers, it won't work for users. The users can't buy stuff that isn't there just because they outnumber the developers.
I have an incorrect understanding of the word sandbox in this context. So to clarify, what does the author of this blog mean by "the sandbox is restricted"?
No, OCaml and Haskell can be faster than C at times. Look at some benchmarks.
> I think we are assuming there will be more sophisticated organizational systems built on top of this abstracted file system eventually.

Yeah, the only problem is it's been 9 years since WinFS was demonstrated as a concept and we're still not significantly closer to mainstream database-like filesystems.
How much you wanna bet it has something to do with Mountain Lion?
The investors should demand their money back.
Their API is also down... maybe a cascading effect (probably from API to frontend, but maybe a lower level failure)?
The copy of the GPL in that folder might be there for the sake of texinfo.tex.
> really need a circle to look like a circle

Why wouldn't a circle look like a circle in both places? All pixels are square these days, yes?
Insights into protein folding may lead to better flu vaccine
I have the Crossover 27Q and the Ergotron MX works perfectly with it.
They are guilty for working for a evil company. Ignorance of the crime does not make you innocent.
If ever Betteridge's law applied...
FreeBSD grep is just GNU grep, it appears, up to but not including 9.0. Note the long --recursive option in the manual page snippet that you posted; no properly God-fearing BSD program would support long options.
I also decided that sed no longer supports regexes because I said so. And ls -l will now shows a list of print jobs instead of files because maybe that's what you meant. ... oh and ping no longer supports IPv4 because I want everyone to adopt IPv6 immediately because I said so.
How are you planning on drowning in the Yangtze River without first entering China? Or were you just planning on doing it within your first day?
With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours.

I'm sure it's far more than that. Especially if "a little searching" includes bittorrent trackers. Not that I advocate this sort of thing, but there's one tracker I know of, that specializes in business related topics, with a healthy dose of sales and marketing material. There is so much material (books, videos, reports, articles, podcasts, etc.) to watch, listen to, read, etc. that you could probably spend tens of thousands of hours on it.

, is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material?

OK, I'm not marketing guru, just another "developer trying to take up marketing." But based on a lot of reading, watching, asking questions, etc., I get the sense that material from Chet Holmes, Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham is usually regarded as pretty good. I'm watching some Chet Holmes videos now, and finding a ton of value in them, FWIW. YMMV, of course.

Also, the works of Jack Trout, Al Ries, Steve Rifkin, et al, are usually regarded as pretty important. Trout and crew basically created positioning theory.

And then there's a whole separate world of material for people who are interested in the spammy(er), get rich quick, "Internet Marketing" stuff. I haven't studied any of his marketing materials, but Eben Pagan seems to be one of the more popular guys in that world. Whether or not his material would be of use to the typical HN reader is left as an exercise for the reader. Or, if somebody here is familiar with his work and could chime in, I'd be really curious to hear your take.
Heritage Lottery Fund routes £1.5 million into Mourne Mountains
Version control best practices - Git edition
Psychologists have reasonably standardized measures of addiction. I wonder if there's a place for regulations that apply to "any product that turns out addictive for more than x% of buyers"; that would also solve the "designer drugs" problem (where a chemist can tweak a molecule to produce a slightly distinct one with the same effects faster than legislation can catch up)
I so want to buy this book but I don't know if it's right for me yet even after reading the sample.

Is there anything practical I can expect to use as a result of reading it and going through the exercises?
I'm not sure the comment you're replying to views all startups as a con like PG was talking about. A lot of people just dislike Zynga because of their early shady business practices, and the fact that their games are seen as a dumbing down of the industry.

Zynga is sort of the Nickelback of the startup world.
Gotcha. That sounds solid to me; would be a good explanation to put in your feature list.

Sounds like your coordinators are authoritative masters for transaction ordering. Does that imply a single-machine limit to throughput in a given dc? Presumably the ordering process is much less expensive than the kv store itself, so this might not be a practical issue.

What happens when nodes are asymmetrically partitioned from the coordinator and peers? E.g. a node is unreachable by a peer, but reachable by a coordinator, or vice versa?
Speaking of which, who's going to be at Nerdapalooza next weekend?
Why not a "fat" app? Always include two major versions in one binary, instead of putting the new features behind a paywall. Have an IAP purchase that just configures the app to run "Side B" from then on.

edit: no, I guess that does not work per below.
Some idiot moderator is censoring Twitter is down stories from the front page. Probably the biggest tech story of the morning.
A good critique of crowd funding from Bill Payne
> since you'd miss out on the real treasure of chapters 4 and 5,

> so this is just advice for anyone considering reading it using some other language: Just use Scheme, the flavor that SICP uses is a tiny subset and it takes a single lecture from the videos for them to explain it.

I would say for anyone on the fence, use Ruby, JS... if you don't know scheme and aren't willing to learn it to read a book. By the time you will reach 4th chapter, you will already know enough scheme. The book doesn't assume prior knowledge, and since you are translating scheme snippets, you already are practicing scheme.

I am not saying scheme is not the ideal language for the book; it is. I am just saying you can dip in your toes with the language of your choice.
A very helpful setting. Thanks!

I've been using the "+ register intensively. Your tip will save me from quite a lot of keystrokes in the future.
Despite the (not great) title, I think it's actually a fairly interesting article, which isn't so much about the conclusion, but some difficulty and success points w.r.t. functional-language efficiency.
I sometimes wish that VCs had some legal responsibility when blogging about their portfolio companies too, specially when discussing valuations. They keep cheerleading on a clear conflict of interest, non-stop. Here is Fred Wilson:

"Pandora is at ~$1.5bn. LinkedIn is at ~$6bn. Groupon is at ~$15bn, Zynga is at ~$7bn, and TripAdvisor is at ~$3.5bn.

We can (and surely will in the comments) argue about these valuations. Some will say they are too high. Some will say they are too low. That's what makes a market. But in the aggregate, these valuations do not seem ridiculous to me. The public market investors are valuing these companies at prices that have some rationality to them."
Source: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/12/some-thoughts-on-the-ipo-mar...

When he says "...these valuations do not seem ridiculous to me." he is implicitly saying that their is (fundamental value) upside to the stock. Not in a million years could Fred Wilson sustain such argument with numbers. Implied growth rates just to value Zynga at ~$7bn means double digit growth (revenue and cash flow) for years, AND even higher growth rates are required if IPO investors want a return on their investment. Unfortunately his audience buys into the hype, regardless of the real economic value behind the companies, and for him to keep doing this on a clear conflict of interest demonstrates his low moral standards. These actions should not go unpunished, and are no different to any other legal "issues" that lawyers might pick up from the Zynga prospectus.
Google Fiber Plans & Pricing
Ask pg: Can you make the YC logo link to the HN front page on the submit page?
Users on HN probably visit the HN submission page and then decide to browse the HN home page more often than trying to submit and browse the YC home page; can you make it cost fewer clicks?
I guess this means BankSimple is in trouble, or not growing as fast as projected.
The speed of a language depends on it's implementation, not on the language itself