skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree with the parent comment above yours, but here is something interesting to ponder:

What if he'd taken that 3 million, put it in a big pile and burnt it?

The "free market" doesn't want you to do this, because it needs that money to be back in the market somehow (investing, start up, salaries, purchases, whatever)

Doing 'whatever you want' with your own money is not exactly what the free market wants you to do.

As a slight aside, while I'm not burning my income, I'm not a good "market citizen" in the eyes of the free market. I have no debt, no cell phone, no car. I grow and hunt my own food, live off grid (no bills) and spend the least amount of money possible. This, the "free market" does not want. Imagine if even 25% of people in developed countries did this from now on. Market collapse.
I strongly disagree with that slogan re: complexity.

Complexity covers so much, its definition so sprawling, that the phrase has no meaning.

I'd rather focus on the language's real strength, fast, concurrenty, portable computation in very well tooled managed environment with a large number of quality libraries.

I don't want to get into a situation where people think that clojure is the universally 'best' language, which is were certain people in the community are.

That POV horribly damaged ruby's popularity after Rails' rise, and I'd hate to see it happen again to another language.
Politics and the English Language [1946]
Ahhh I see. I misunderstood you. Thanks.

PS. and pardon me for being rude - it was late and was filled with too much cheap wine.
On iOS I've done it before it was cool :)
https://gist.github.com/3152851
Ways to Monetize 100+ million app downloads, please see video from Nokia
Great video made for IndiaGames, Pico Brothers and Inode Entertainment (our team) If someone can give us advice on what to do next with the 100 million downloads we will appreciate it. We are looking for partnerships. Any thoughts appreciated!!
The real problem with "The cloud"
Thank you for the clarification about the PostgreSQL terminology. That will help me keep track of the progress. I am very pleased that the PostgreSQL community has finally started implementing native logical replication, which is really one of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption.

Slony, in a word, is awful. It's probably as good as it can be given the limitations of working within a trigger-based world, but in the 3 years I spent maintaining Slony clusters, I lost count of the number of times that I had to take a site offline (sometimes for hours) in order to rebuild from scratch because of a failed schema change. Many times, I was able to recover by careful manipulation of the sl_events table, but far too frequently, the error was unrecoverable. Slony is slow, unreliable, not tolerant of high latency connections, and fragile. It was always one of my greatest frustrations that the PostgreSQL community saw it as a solution given how completely unreliable it is. Perhaps things have changed in the 2 years since I last touched it, but I am skeptical.

Please try to understand that my few objections to PostgreSQL come from actual real world experience with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, not from reading blog posts. Both products have great features as well as unpolished turds...it's just a matter of deciding which color of poop you are willing to clean out of the diaper. :)
I don't understand this assertion that desktop software is going out. My desktop mail client is almost completely superior as a single unified place to read all my mail over various different services to log into.
Digg ads existed that were placed in the feed at slot 3 and 14 which were introduced in v3: http://about.digg.com/blog/ads-you-can-digg%E2%80%A6or-bury

They were ads that were pieces of content. Digg was in front of this trend with promoted tweets / stories.
I'm still not following, why would a period ("sys: commit message. (issue XXX)" be a problem there? If anything, with your example I'd argue the period makes it more readable as it makes it clearer that "(issue XXX)" isn't part of the message.
Well, congrats to Marco for having a successful and sustainable business where he has the option and leverage to decide what he wants to do when these offers come knocking.

Most startup/bootstrapped companies are not in that position. Most end up failing and winding up with nothing, but there are some that will end up with these talent acquisition situations.

Remember, both sides (the acquirers and the acquirees) have to agree to the deal. Google doesn't just come along and say "we want to acquire you for your talent" and the other side has no say in the matter.

In this situation you are faced with a choice. Talent acqs happen because a) the acquire target is not really doing that well, and b) they have a group of people that work well together that the acquiring company wants to keep together to do great things under their umbrella.

Given the choice between: keep working on your low-to-modest traction product which isn't producing a lot of revenue and wonder how you might pay rent next month OR a multi-million dollar check/stock offer at a large, successful company... which would you choose? I would take the check in that situation. Sometimes you can't achieve your world-changing vision before your investor and personal money are gone.

The goal of a company should be to succeed and be self-sustaining, of course. But sometimes that doesn't happen, and these talent acqs happen for a reason.
There is no "free market" apart from the desires and actions of its participants. If he decided that burning the money was the thing he wanted to do with it, then that's what the "free market" wanted to do with it too.
"Furthermore, honest participants will have picked their addresses uniformly at random, so the process of sorting automatically constructs a random permutation between these participants (dishonest participants must be excluded, since they can generate addresses from a skewed probability distributions)."

Wait... how do we exclude dishonest participants? We're trying to exchange bitcoins with random strangers on the internet here.
And now you've gotten lesson #1 on why F/OSS solutions have one huge advantage over their proprietary counterparts: If the original developers of a F/OSS app decide to drop it, you have choices. In the best case, another group of devs may simply fork the project and keep it going, or you ('you' in the general sense here) may choose to bring development in-house, or contract with a 3rd party to maintain and upgrade the app.

Now you might argue that some of those choices aren't that appealing, or that it's not guaranteed that someone else will pick up the app and run with it... but look at the scenarios with a closed-source, proprietary app: If the devs drop it, you're f%!#d, end of story.
Has anyone considered that the LinkedIn hack (6.5+ million accounts, with passwords run through a non-salted SHA-1) could be responsible for much of this?

I remember a lot of people having their Diablo 3 accounts hacked and their items stolen right around that time.
The Mac No Longer Competes Against the PC
You're saying that they will make more money through being acquired by Google than by owning their own company that sells a popular product?
I totally forgot about the big "gaming digg" scene. Damn its been a long time since I've used digg regularly.
Nice site design, that's some good web design work.
This is fine as far as it goes, but -- ironically, given its subject -- I found it a little vapid. Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is my preferred commentary on English writing style: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4272608
> The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well.

No, it does not. The very notion that someone who always uses "its" and "it's" understands const-correctness is ridiculous.

Command over native language doesn't signify programming prowess. You are imagining things or extrapolating your personal anecdotes to absolutes. Please provide citations if it's a proven fact.

> For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself.

What on earth does cleaning up mean? I shower in the morning. I am not going to take a special shower for you. Whether or not I shave depends on my mood. I don't see how on earth an interview with you should affect my facial hairs. I am not coming in looking like a hobo, and anything beyond that isn't your call at all.

Why the hell people count on metric which doesn't indicate a person's qualities relevant to the job? Whatever the fuck happened to phone screening, checking up open source projects, on-site problem solving, having a conversation, checking up references. Where and why the fuck wearing a suit or taking a grammar test came into picture?
Review: The New Airport Express
> Don't give this test to people who speak AAVE: You'll be considered racist.

Perhaps, but probably not. In my understanding most AAVE speakers (and other "low-class" dialects, for that matter) are bidialectical with Standard American English and can code-switch to it in more formal situations. And, those who aren't able to do so likely haven't been exposed to the education and training necessary to even be qualified for a job like this in the first place - they surely would've picked it up along the way.
A talent acquisition signals something more than a job offer. It shows that you're able to conceive and build a product that people are willing to use. It also means that you've had experience negotiating terms. This is very important when/if you decide to take an entrepreneurial step after being at the acquihirer.

All things equal, future investors are more likely to trust someone who has had an acquisition in the past. You're more likely to get press exposure. All these things are meaningless if you're building something no one wants, but they definitely help if you're on the right track.
I read this slightly differently.

I don't think this was a plea to developers to not sell up, I think it was a plea to people to support small companies to make not selling up a more appealing option.
"I just saw that it's retailing for $299. It all feels rather cynical."

Huh? For a $99 pledge, you get the $299 license when it launches, it looks like.

This looks like every other product kickstarter, which essentially are saying, "We've invested considerable time and money. We're committed. We'd love to have you pitch in to help accelerate us and get us over the finish line. In exchange, your pledges entitle you to discounts and other favors."
If any site needs a "rethink" it's Reddit. It's like a garden that's overgrown with weeds.
I use unique addresses, and periodically am on the reporting end of problems like this. Once I started getting the same spam from two unrelated companies at the same time, and they tracked it down to a common email marketing company that was where the actual breach occurred. Another time it turned out emails had been staged in a less secure system in preparation for sending email marketing. So it must be pretty common that a compromise doesn't actually mean the core product or database has been compromised.

For the record, I haven't received any spam to my Dropbox-only email account, which means they probably didn't get the WHOLE user database.
Learning and Practicing with HTML5 Geolocation Element and Javascript
Looks cool. What are the benefits of RubyMotion over Rhodes: http://www.motorola.com/Business/US-EN/RhoMobile+Suite/Rhode...
If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else's too, and whether you get a "C" or a "D" may depend on whether the instructor reads your paper early when he is fresh and tolerant or late

I don't think this is true. If a teacher asks 100 students for a paper on an assigned topic, they're not looking for originality. They just want to see if you can write or not. I always had felt that I should write something original and was worried constantly that I was re-hashing an idea the teacher had already seen dozens of times. But then I asked several teachers about it and they said they weren't looking for originality. After all you can't expect thousands of students of the same age in the same class at the same school with the same teacher to think very differently from one another.
You could try creating a conservative-bent social news site (as suggested here in 2008: http://mattmaroon.com/2008/10/11/conservative-social-news/). As the article mentions, it can be harder to do so since the Internet as a whole leans left, but as it continues to become more mainstream someone could maybe make it work.
Unrelated: an observation I keep on making is that convenience and security tend to be inversely proportional. A both convenient and secure solution (e.g. passwords) is the best solution to large-scale auth because it makes devs worry less and users do less.
So now that I've paid for instapaper for iPhone and iPad, I don't have to give Marco any more money. That means the only way he stays in business as the product grows (being that I am not a revenue source anymore) is by either a) figuring out an additional revenue stream from the data or b) discontinuing the apps I paid for and charging me for new ones.

The same goes for sparrow. These one-time purchase apps don't have continued revenue per user. So we can write rants on the internet all we want about "don't give in to the acqui-hire," but obviously the benefits of taking google's money greatly outweighed the future of trying to run a business by selling an app on the App Store.
I agree it's probably for internal loyalty, but I read the question as wondering whether it's this particular manner (give it to the CEO, who then chooses out of his munificence to donate it to the workers) that has extra effect over just changing the compensation structure.

After all, if the CEO really thinks, as he says, that this is just giving the workers the share of the company's success they deserve, he is uniquely well situated to propose a change to the bonus structure so that, in the future, that would actually be how bonuses are distributed. But it might be that a $300/yr bonus delivered the normal way (via HR, according to an official bonus policy) wouldn't have the same PR effect as a bonus positioned as a personal donation from the CEO, even if it's the same amount of cash.
I obviously can't speak for Marco, but I think what I take umbrage with is when developers plan this out from the beginning -- create a product/company that drives just enough attention to ensure an acquihire. The result ends up being pretty detrimental to the community.

Given the choice between: keep working on your low-to-modest traction product which isn't producing a lot of revenue and wonder how you might pay rent next month OR a multi-million dollar check/stock offer at a large, successful company... which would you choose?

I would also choose the latter. I'll be the first to admit I'm not trying to change the world or 'disrupt and industry' or anything lofty like that. But I think there are quite a few people who would eschew the big check for the opportunity to do something tremendous, and they deserve to be lauded.
Ehh, maybe the last sentence implied that (though it could be read both ways), but most of the article read like a humble brag about Instapaper being successful enough that it doesn't have to bother with this type of situation. That's all well and good, but it sort of rubbed me the wrong way.
This seems possible. People usually use the same email and password for every accounts they create so all the hacker needs to do is to try the username and password on accounts on other sites.
Using SSL properly is not particularly difficult in theory, but there are many moving pieces so that the whole thing ends up being hard. For example, it's often easy to forget a crucial step. To address this, I wrote SSL/TLS Deployment Best Practices, which contains 22 recommendations in 5 categories:

https://www.ssllabs.com/projects/best-practices/

I encourage everyone to read through it, and follow it. Once you know what to do, it's easy. Part 2, dealing with advanced topics, is coming in October.
Spam went to "unique email addresses for Dropbox".

So a compromised LinkedIn account wouldn't expose a user's unique Dropbox email address. There would be little to no reason to give LinkedIn a unique Dropbox email.

On the other hand, if you need to share your Dropbox email with other people in order to share private folders, or anything similar, then just compromising THEIR computer could expose your email address.
That's exactly my question. Read through the comments here and just elsewhere when it comes to Firefox memory usage and there's usually enough people complaining about how after leaving it open days on end with 20 tabs it uses a ton of RAM.
Yep often all the accrued "bug fixes" accumulated in the complicated solution are "fixes" for "bugs" like "Jim didn't know that the language standard library already had a solution for this, so he made it himself, poorly" or "Pam,Bob,and Dave each had to come back and fix Jim's naive solution by coding specific logic for the corner case they each ran into".

When the new hire Steve shows up and deletes the whole thing and uses the time-tested model of the wheel, he is not a villain, and anything to suggest otherwise is poor management philosophy that will drive Steves away, leaving you with a bad project, bad management and bad engineers (AKA 99% of every project ever). Even if by doing so Steve introduces bugs in the two-wrongs-make-a-right consuming code (which is simply a bug) and isn't polite enough to discover this on his own. The flexibility and resources to make systematic improvements like these which combat cruft and maintain or repair feature velocity are why QA - automated or otherwise - exists.

Honestly though, I don't think the article really means to cover such a scenario. There are many times that engineers decide to replace rather than understand a system which is complex-for-a-reason, this is written specifically with that in mind.

I regularly see this as I use/develop against/contribute to Drupal - a marvelously complex-for-a-reason(usually) piece of engineering that happens to be written in PHP - a language with a community that still celebrates simplicity-at-whatever-cost. "Nevermind that the theme/cache/localization/form/whathaveyou system accounts for what I need, it's more than what I need and I don't trust code more complex than I (or any single person with a single use case for that matter) could have written."

He doesn't make that clear, but it's the only sense I can make of the article given his degree of experience.
No point investing any more time and familiarity with a product that will no longer see updates or bug fixes.
If it's that easy to get a legit number, the crime rings would be doing it already.
Seems to me you are extrapolating an unknown and arriving at the worse case scenario ie they are so underwhelmed by your solution that they think it is ok to treat you in a shoddy manner by not following through on their promise.

That's one possibility. Another is life got in the way - for example your contact has taken leave for a family emergency or has even been hit by a bus.
"Maybe just put reddit in an iframe?" haha
I believe the concept of majority rules has worked well for America. Some would disagree of course but then they are just the minority.
Yes, of course. Each situation is different, and making a build-and-flip company from the start is another thing entirely. Usually they have free products and no business plan. In this situation, though, the two companies that are being bought today both had paid products and paying customers. My 100% speculative guess is that they didn't have enough traction or revenue to keep it up at their current rates.
Virtualizing Operating Systems
Walk Your Way Through Building a Backbone.js Application [screencast]
Maybe it is to the point now where it is disingenuous for a company NOT to have a banner on every page stating if they are open to investments or acquihire? At least users would know there is an intention/desire/dream to head for greener pastures if given the chance.

It is quite alright to disclose as a small business owner that things are slow or somethings are not quite going to plan. If you've got a userbase that loves your product, it is amazing what goodwill can do to help find a solution.

You guys go realize that it is ok to dissolve a company and in the case of a software company, release or open-source the code right? If the service was popular, someone will pick up the torch and carry on with it.
I feel like this is a very generalizable process. Using randomization and a fitness metric to randomly generate and refine something. Seems like it should have a name a few dozen thesis papers written about it. Anyone know?

Also, this seems to be a very clear simulation of how we think evolution and natural selection work together. Fun.
I want to share one specific thing that's helped me, in the vein of affirmations. I chose one specific compliment and made it a rule for myself that whenever someone said that to me, I'd respond proudly and affirmatively. "Yes I am!" No waffling, no modesty, no deflection: instead, "Yes I am!"

It's definitely helped for me.
I just want to point out that "we can observe that they are really similar" isn't likely to impress a statistician. It's possible to make a ballpark estimate of how close they actually are because there is a graph with marked axes, but the real derived parameters would be nice to know, and maybe even do the legwork and calculate the expected error for your sample size.
Consider that without some big changes, Yahoo's value in five years may well be zero.
I'll expand that a bit. In the same way that there is nothing inherently wrong with money, but there is with 'love of money', I would argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with religion, but that the 'love of religion' that could cause something like the crusades or jihad is definitely evil.

I don't think that's what you were going for, though.
As someone who sold his company last year and is now experiencing life as a salaried employee again, amen to this... Freedom > money in the vast majority of cases.
Sorry for the slow reply.

Studios might believe that digital distribution will eat the profits from theaters and DVDs, but that doesn't appear to be happening - at least, the "lost" profits appear to be recouped as part of digital distribution deals, and there is definitely room for improvement in this business model.

I should also clarify that I am not at all advocating digital-only distribution, I am advocating a model that is not physical-media-only. It must be possible to have a happy medium that allows consumers to get their hands on the media they are willing to pay for without having to decide between waiting for regional distribution deals or piracy.

Studios are shooting themselves in the foot by not implementing a more effective way of getting in-demand products to consumers using available digital distribution technology.
Apparently they've been taking tips from Google.
"Sometimes obscure icons with no names? We love that shit.' -- Google UI team
My personal all time mysql fave - values that are both null and not-null

http://use.perl.org/use.perl.org/_Adrian/journal/32627.html
I'll suggest that fragmentation - not having a single point to find all user data would reduce the impact of a breach. Dropbox is a higher value target than John Doe. So hackers are probably less motivated. The user system itself may not be as secure, it may not need to be because a breach is isolated and an attacker would be less motivated.

Just a thought that crossed my mind.
Facebook Fan Box + QR codes
I believe that market is already well covered (https://www.4chan.org/).
The other 2 5's are 5 statements that state the summary of the essay. They should convey the same message, but use different words to do it. You're giving the reader a summary of what they're going to read, then summarizing what they just read again at the end.