skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gmail and Google+ came up under the communications menu, and last.fm was integrated with the sound menu. App menus and features seem to be available from the HUD. Seems pretty well integrated to me.
"There is a disparity between giving money so that others can continue to do work and being the one doing the work. I want that distinction clear, and to remain clear. The doctor who flew down to Haiti to personally help is infinitely more valuable than someone who donated."

Really? Let's say I donate enough money that the Red Cross can afford to send an additional doctor to Haiti. How is that not in the same ballpark as volunteering your time as a doctor to go work there?

We should care about the effects of our actions, and donating money to effective charities (see http://givewell.org) is one of the ways we can have the biggest positive effect.

(I take this seriously; I give about 1/3 of what I earn as a programmer to the most effective charities I can find.)
I'm from Seattle visiting Winston for the summer. I was hoping to do some networking here but I haven't been able to find anything industry related. Aside from a few graphic design firms it seems to be a bit of a ghost town. Any ideas?
Yep, just a mockup, nothing works, it would take me months to have it all working.
I didn't do it for traffic. I'm there answering questions the last 2 hours.
The article summary is #ccc on white.
Campus Bubble, one the mentioned startups, is the first undergraduate venture of Emory OTT. </involved>
Their cost/risk analysis plays out. If the new patch somehow introduced a new bug, it's going to cost them yet another large amount of money to fix it.

And if you say "well just make sure the new patch doesn't break anything, duh!", then you clearly haven't been in software engineering long enough.
Are you you assuming they won't pivot if necessary?
Hi Gus. While I was reading the description, it seemed a light Wolfram-Alpha, but then I tried it and it gave me always "Voke doesn't have an answer to this question yet.", for everything I asked.

Do you have any answers yet? Or they are all user-contributed?
The 19 most important file-system tools in Perl 5
I don't mean to be critical, but how does this differ from WikiAnswers? Your explanation could just as well be describing that. Also, I think having the question input perform a search, and return similar questions, would be a necessary improvement.
I think someone here quoted Bezos: "If you have a bad manager, then quit." Companies can only detect bad managers when their direct reports leave.
New Cybersecurity Proposal Patches Serious Privacy Vulnerabilities
Mukena Dubai 1C
A job at Joel's company doesn't pass the "Joel Test"
Value.js: Strict, immutable value objects in JavaScript
The benefit is mostly for the bloggers.

They get a UI which is custom-designed to focus on writing and little else. Dustin Curtis explains it here - http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle
> isn't google doing something like that?

Exactly, if this can be compared to Google (without ads or search) then we're on the right path.

> you probably would need more developers&funding

Funding is always welcome, but I can build it all on my own given enough interest.
Daftar Tipe Wajah Paling Di Inginkan Di Jepang
Look at the bottom to see the "Joel Test". 10/12. Lol.
The vendors are intentionally not a part of MS, because they're lower margin operations.
They all are, GP has chosen to be unfortunately sarcastic.
I wrote a simple choose your own adventure game in Pascal. I felt like I had created another world.
Looking forward to that :) .

I've noticed you've made great strides with the latest versions, and Microsoft support here in Uruguay has always been great (in particular Pablo Garcia which now moved to Chile).

Keep up the good work :) .

Edit: I'm not on the team, but we're doing one of our main new projects with EF v4.
Anyone who claims, like this author does, that energy companies such as ExxonMobil aren't heavily invested in diversifying their portfolio of technology solutions to include solar and wind power is either mistaken or intentionally misleading. Anyway, they got a page view from me.
PostgreSQL 8.4+ has recursive common table expressions. I don't know if they do everything that CONNECT BY does, but I know that they do everything that I've ever used CONNECT BY for.
People often ask us at Heroku -- why Postgres?

The short answer is: we needed to do something, and it's the best.
I'm not clear on how that makes your code more maintainable though. The first case makes it explicit that any of the actions can fail to occur, whereas the second one, on first glance, seems to have all the actions occuring. I, as a newcomer to this code, will almost definitely make that mistake, which will make debugging or maintenance harder.

The only way the second is even -as good- is if I'm constantly holding in my mind the various idioms you've used in the code, in this case that your function pointers are never null but will instead refer to an action that might do nothing. As far as I can tell, this is more work for me, for no gain.

I would love to hear your reasoning why this way of doing it is -better-, as opposed to just -more object oriented- (or -marginally less typing-).
No need to worry about being critical. The problem with WikiAnswers is that it sucks. It is essentially a spam site and doesn't offer dynamic answers (Voke doesn't yet, but I want it to). User queries can be dealt with in a much better way, for example like Siri. The problem with Siri is that it doesn't have many features and often just redirects to Wolfram Alpha.

And a similar questions feature is something I would like to add, but this is just an early prototype and I think the autosuggest does a decent job. Definitely a good idea, though.
Study more anthropology. Small communities have existed without hierarchy, but they have been murdered (literally) by nearby hierarchical societies.

There's something about hierarchy that makes us humans more efficient. Perhaps it has something to do with specialization.
Nah, Standard Oil isn't coming back. There are so many logistical nightmares and legal problems with merging two major oil firms that they won't want to repeat the process they went through ten years ago, nor will smaller firms be willing to buy the parts the DoJ forces the big guys to spin off. Just look at how Valero screwed itself by purchasing a good chunk of Exxon's California assets.

I don't think we'll see the domestic players merging but rather an increase in international joint ventures that effectively constitute a merger. Petrobras and Shell, TNK-BP and so forth.
Addons have to copy out the data they want before the page closes. It isn't acceptable to keep around all data on a page just to keep a few little bits of information.
It's all user contributed. I know there isn't much right now because no one uses it, and it just opened up. Try things suggested by autosuggest for a better idea of how the site should work at this point.
My example is not newbie programmers, rather, much code written by experienced OO programmers who don't have a Smalltalk background. I can't say what it looks like now, but I recall Rails active record implementation being heavily procedural in nature when I first looked at it way back and DHH is hardly a newbie. Decompile most classes in the dot net framework, and you'll find a fuck ton of procedural code even though it presents an OO API. 500 line methods are not uncommon.

When you learn OO in a procedural language like ruby or java, you tend to have a slightly odd idea of OO. Just because a language supports objects doesn't make it object oriented, it just allows object orientation.

I thought I knew OO until I learned Smalltalk, and discovered just how deep the rabbit hole can go. If's, foreach, while, unless, switches, these are all procedural constructs. You don't truly grok OO if you can't write a program without using procedural constructs (as an exercise).

And who knows, maybe someone will invent a language that nails the balance, I won't bet on it soon though.
There are C#/XNA games on Steam. The developer, Phil Fish, claims it's built specifically for the "console/couch" experience on a Saturday morning (seemingly unaware that many people connect their PCs to televisions and sit on the couch).
Very clever. I like this.
I use search to find friends that I'm not Facebook friends are, and to quickly jump to someone's page.
Dynamic languages typically also have to pay a price for carrying around type tags and having everything be heap allocated.
All points are valid advice. Thanks for your feedback.

In the long run it may become a platform but I would like it to be small and private, so users don't feel like they are the product.

Privacy and security are paramount and won't be traded for anything. Total encryption could be a feature. Backups and data portability from the get go.

The whole idea is to make a thousand people happy without compromising their trust in the service.

If I decide to go on I'll start building a framework to make modules plug and play, then dedicate time to each, one by one.
More succinctly, if you're able to build a $20M business on a $250k investment, the money to build the business came from your customers -- you've used customer financing, which Chris described in his blog post as the most desirable form of financing.
I've totally added this to my calendar for July 2015 and will be calling you guys on it! ;-)

BTW, congratulations are in order for you topping the 100k!
At least with PostgreSQL, most of the features are really shortcuts, rather than kludges masquerading as features. E.g. - extending a table as if it were a superclass, rather than creating a supplemental "joiner" table and creating a writeable view on top of the "super" table + the "sub" table.
"Debasing real photography."

Whose definition of "real"?

According to her, she uses software to edit her images, which some photographers would claim to debase real photography. Digital cameras debased real photography because people could snap thousands of photos to end up with a few keepers.

Everything "debases" something for someone whose objective stance is basically "the way I do things is the only correct way."

For instance: DJs complained for years with each format change and advancement debased the "purity" of vinyl. "Real" DJs didn't use CDs/mp3s/Ableton/etc.

The nostalgia here isn't limited to grainy Instamatic filters.
That's ridiculous.

MSFT made some decisions without really A) thinking about or B) caring about the consequences. Their MO from day 1 is to screw everyone else and become fabulously wealthy in the process.
So you think 300 years from now Ma Bell is still going to be around? Had I said my statement "This too shall pass" & "No strategy works forever" back in the 90s you guys would have said "Look at Microsoft, it's growing and growing".

Again, no strategy works forever, they work for varying lengths of time.
That's a pretty good gig.
If you overlook a number or two here and there, this could be confused with any offer letter for any job from any company in the industry.

I'm not sure why that surprises me.
App.net, Vested Interest and Why it Matters
https://github.com/stephank/orona/
I wonder why it's a curated list then. If the pull is that the blogging tools are really nice then it seems counter intuitive to not allow people to pay some money to use it, and instead require them to be this cool to ride the svbtle-coaster.

(the style of those blogs as a reader is OK, I've seen better and I've seen worse. If a blog has good content but is hard to read there are plenty of ways of fixing it, so design is not a big deal).
Often these sign-up processes will call the number you give and an automated voice will verbally tell you a PIN type code (numbers or letters) which you have to type into the sign-up screen to continue the process. The voicemail would never be heard by a human.
Okay, they knew what the policies were when they signed up. Big deal. It's not like the devs predicted that they'd botch a patch for some 1% or so of their users.

The developer is just saying, "Look, the cost-benefit analysis just doesn't support making a new patch." That's honest. It doesn't sound like a policy to me (you'd have to so something more than once before I'd call it "policy"). The devs don't owe it to the affected users to pony up the cash to Microsoft. Devs don't have unlimited liability for lost save files.

Microsoft's policy makes sense from a "Look, it costs money to make sure that your games don't crash on users' systems." So maybe Microsoft will change the policy so that a small enough patch goes through a less thorough review process. That's what happens when your policy has unintended consequences: you reevaluate it.
Based on Curtis' explanation of Svbtle[1], I took "the essence of blogging" to be more in the graphical design sense. I wonder what Curtis (and who else is behind Svbtle?) imagines "the future of news and opinion" looks like, and whether he's/they're thinking about it in the socioeconomopolitical sense as well as the graphical design sense.

[1] http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle
Still no sources cited, but it makes sense what you're saying.

Some tablets in the $50 - $700 range: (excluding used tablets, price rounded to the nearest dollar)

$60-$80 Archos 28: 2.8" 320x240 16-bit LCD, Android 2.2, 4GB flash. Junk: nobody wants a tablet with a 2.8" screen.

$65-$204 Coby MID8120: 8" 800x600 16-bit LCD, Android 2.3, 4GB flash. Junk: Resistive touchscreen. Android 2.3 in 2012? Can't run Netflix.

Ok, here are some that are not as junky:

$130-$300 Amazon Kindle Fire: 7" 1024x600 24-bit LCD, not Android but like 2.3, 8GD flash.

$190-$591 Samsung Galaxy Tab 2: 7" 1024x600 24-bit LCD, Android 4.0, 8GB flash.

$215-$600 Asus Transformer TF300: 10.1" 1280x800 24-bit LCD, Android 4.0, 32GB flash.

$399 Apple iPad 2: 9.7" 1024x768 24-bit LCD, iOS, 16GB flash.

The Kindle Fire in particular is selling well, primarily because the Amazon media experience is almost as good as Apple's. I don't think that's tautologically useless: there is a market there, but apparently you need to spend a _lot_ of time writing the software - Apple had a decade to get iTunes to where it is today.

Amazon seems to understand that and has taken total responsibility for the software on the Kindle Fire, to the point they forked Android. I think that's a mistake long-term but short-term they get this one thing: Apple's hardware comes with Apple's software, and it is the combination that is so valuable.

P.S. It took me forever to research these tablets and post this list. The experience of trying to find a decent Android tablet is incredibly frustrating (unless you just go straight to the Nexus 7). The prices are all over the place, which to me indicates junk marked up to catch unwary buyers. The reviews are pretty scathing about poor build quality, unusable Android builds, and horrible customer service. All of that has an effect on the marketplace.
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"IF IT GAINS ANY POPULARITY"... you've got a huge chicken-and-end problem here my friend.
Love the design of the blog. It's brilliant. So swish. The problem is they all look the same, and it kills the branding aspect of it.

Still, there is a very clever plan unfolding and it's pretty cool. Look forward to seeing more.
I wish there were a convenient site to do bets like this. (My charity would probably be MAPS, but PiH is in my top 5).
17 Year Old Builds a Better Search Engine
Ask HN: How to set the objective for a machine with consciousness
How would you set the objective for a machine with consciousness?

Assume the following conditions:

- The machine has achieved the same level of consciousness and intelligence as a normal human being.

- With constant power source, it can run forever, but not destructible. It can also shut itself down.

- No fixed purposes for the benefits of human beings can ever be set. (i.e. The machines is not created to solve any human problems or to generate commercial interests for human. In other words, it has zero concern for human's well-being)

How would you set the objective for this machine (without violating the aforementioned conditions)? Here are some examples of valid objectives:

- To increase its intelligence,
- To protect itself from destruction, OR
- To search for objective
How about the fact that you simply want to see the idea succeed? That was enough for me. Even if it fails I know I was a part of the community that tried.
Depending on your application and how you're taking advantage of your database, you could drop-in replace a database. For example, people using some sort of abstraction on top of their database (an ORM) often switch between databases.

With that being said, if you're actually designing a complex database back-end for an application you will likely want to spend time becoming very familiar with the database of choice, learn the advantages and then exploit them. This could prove to be pretty difficult to just replace on a whim later on.

edit: Switching between an RDBMS and a "NoSQL" database would be much different though. Switching between one SQL server to another is one thing, but switching from a SQL server to a "NoSQL" server is going to be depend on what kind of model you're changing to. For example, MongoDB & Riak are both "NoSQL" databases but they are both quite different fundamentally.
Oh good, she has vision.
I would characterise your comment as FUD. And now you are questioning the licensing.

There is NO evidence that MySQL has licensing problems otherwise we wouldn't have the Facebook, Twitter and Percona forks. It's as simple as that really.
On another, unrelated note, I'm excited to see a company whose first hiring post on HN is for writers and reporters, not engineers. Interesting times!
Anyone who gets upset at stack ranking has never heard about how management consulting works. They advertise stack ranking in order to RECRUIT.

Life as a management consultant is a perpetual job search, networking internally to get placed on the best projects to get the best performance metrics to get the best bonus. It makes sense, because your job is to give advice to large bureaucracies. If you can't figure out how to navigate corporate politics, you aren't qualified to serve your clients.
I wonder why MS decided to take the $6B write-down at this moment (from a 5 year old "investment") to engineer the report as a "loss"?
As much as I hate Oracle you're right, they are very much in the Cisco "makes the easy things hard and the hard things possible" zone.

Nearly every situation I've used Oracle under would have worked fine in any free DB (including SQLite3 in some silly instances) but I don't doubt there are situations out there where it excels.
New 37signals Status Site
At every company, and in fact in every village, there is both a formal, extraverted, hierarchical organization, and an informal, social, graph-like organization. Much is made of "networking", but I wonder how many understand that the social network is where the real power is.

The hierarchy gets things done that need doing. The social network transcends, not only moving people between divisions and teams within the company, but also between companies. One might even see this as a principle behind the ascendancy of the likes of Facebook, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

Make no mistake, there are people at Microsoft operating to make things better, and the competition, both internal and external, plays a part. We who like to read, like to practice reading the writing on the wall, as we did while focusing on the chalkboard from our desks, now replaced by the whiteboard from our bouncy balls and standing desks. But we also know that a company lives until the last person turns out the light.
6 code snippets that crash IE6
Facebook API removing offline access permission, likely to break your app
Can someone who understands all these terms tally up what she gets paid, and under what conditions? I find it quite confusing.
Plenty of Fish and Justin.TV
would be cool for anonymous or twitter login options depending on the type of poll.
I'm very aware of this. It has good potential to grow through SEO and since answers are timeless the chicken and egg problem should diminish a little as time passes. Not really sure how to overcome this problem, I guess all I can do is hope I get picked up by a blog or two...
I think monetizing their search in this method is a bad idea.

Google advertising uses second price auctions and rewards sponsors for having high click through rates and relevant word matching. In short, the ads are helping people find what they're looking for anyway.

These ads in the facebook search are just annoying and get in the way of what the users are trying to do - hurting the user experience.
By protocol relative, are you referring to the // urls?

(http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/)

Because they wound't be so PITAish would they?
Why are there so many people here on HN to reflexively find Svtble pretentious and whatever similar adjectives they use??

When it was first shown, there was a common feeling in the posts of not being picked by a kid at school to play in the lunch time soccer team. :P

The internet, and I guess I'll say life in general, needs more curation and less dumping. We speak of design and other wonderful things yet we encourage mindless undesign dribble in apparent content creation, relationships and other ways—it strikes of me being partial whores.
Oh look, Google: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0309/Budget-hawks...
Best PR strategy for a brand new startup?
Hello,

Our Team has been working very hard in the last few months to develop a new concept of social network. We have almost completed the beta testing and we are very close to the official launch of our project. We are eager to see if the public will appreciate our ideas.

Given that we are not experts of PR, I was wondering which one is, in your opinion, the best PR strategy for a brand new startup. Our guts tell us that we should prepare an press release, detailing the innovative aspects of our project, we should attach some screenshots and a demo link and we should send this email to the main tech blogs and websites, such as Techcrunch, Mashable, Venture Beat, Silicon Alley Insider, etc.

We wonder if this is the right approach or if it would sound unprofessional and if we should hire a PR agency to write press releases on our behalf.

What is your experience and advice?

Many thanks.
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