skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be clear, this is after controlling for income? It's not just about poverty?
"This man was apparently very smart and motivated, there was nothing we could have realistically done to prevent this. Look at Norway, they have stricter gun regulation than we do, yet they still had a mass shooting with a death toll that dwarfs anything we've seen."

I don't think it is wise to come to that conclusion so quickly. If his AR-15 hadn't jammed, this probably would have been the most deadly single-man massacre in history (he hit 70 people with a shotgun and pistols, and his AR-15 had a 100-round magazine), and I think that point merits some consideration. From what I understand of AR-15s, gun jams are somewhat common, but that isn't really a problem for adept users. It is too early to say exactly what was going on with this guy, but I get the impression that a growing insanity drove his actions more than rational planning; he probably would have been practiced if he had more of a plan as Brevick seemed to have.

It should be obvious that guns aren't going anywhere, but there is a clear distinction in policy between methods violence that affect a few people and those that affect a large number. It seems like Holmes' goal was closer to killing 100 people, and he came very close to doing so. And he obtained the means to do so without what you could even describe as a speed bump. If he had used a bomb instead, would there be an uproar over attempts to curb bomb making? I don't see why the use of a gun should make the case so easy to dismiss.
Yet for some reason this model works well on Fark (and, I agree, nowhere else.)
If I write a blog a post about how I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon then the techniques for attracting those billionaires might be considered useful, the fact I was restricting my hackathon to mainly billionaires doesn't negate the benefit of those techniques.
So I can have two titles 'How I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon' or 'It's easy to get 50 billionaires to attend a hackathon just refuse anyone who isn't a billionaire'.
The trick here isn't to limit attendees, that's easy, the trick is to encourage the attendees you would like to attend. If it's billionaires then you should definitely check out my upcoming series of blog posts on how I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon (possibly fictional), if it's women (who are massively underrepresented at hackathons, much like billionaires) then perhaps the linked article would be valuable.
Ask HN: Is it sane to keep your business plan secret?
Some say that if you don't reveal your startups's business plan equals to having no business plan. But if one exists and you feel that it's a great one, while there exist also enough competitors that could steal your idea, is it sane to keep it secret, at least in the early steps?
Remember. The "changed yardstick" is 100% conjecture. It's undeniable that taking outside investment increases the number of people who expect a return from your venture. However, we can't presume to know what the investors were really thinking. They may have known that a talented web and mobile email team will always be a talent buy irrespective of revenues and just sat back and waited to double or tripe their money in 12 - 24 months. Point is - we really don't know if that changed the game that much for them.
This is pretty much exactly what OAuth does - enables the user to authorize a web service to access another one on their behalf, with per-app, per-user constraints.
So true. For example, I love gmail but can't believe how many times a day I download an attachment just to upload it as an attachment to another email. It's ridiculous.
> The days of paying for e-mail clients is long gone.

I'm not sure I totally agree with that. My first example is the ridiculously wide-scale enterprise adoption of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange -- sure, there's a bunch of features that are piled onto those "email clients," but at the heart of it, people are still paying for this stuff.

The second example is Sparrow itself. If people weren't paying for e-mail clients, then would Sparrow have such a huge, dedicated userbase? Or is this just the vocal minority we're hearing from?
Oh, and for all the SaaS-for-desktop-haters, Adobe has recently launched Creative Cloud where anyone could pay $40/month to access any of the Creative Suit softwares. It works great and it 120% worth the money. No reason great companies (like Sparrow) couldn't get together to be a part of a 3rd party store like that (oh! a free startup idea). Alternatively, Apple could simply enable monthly subscriptions.
Clickable links:

• Photos: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gjxjp6bqqrvcquf/A5l3GZh0fK

• Location: http://goo.gl/maps/dACr

• Apply: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEJQN2o...
If you buy the cloud version, you get the cloud stuff. There will be a standalone version that works like it's always worked.
E-ZPass here in PA.
At the time she likely got her clearance, it would've been a ding.
Blue skies, Miss Ride.
While it's safe to assume the Model S could be bricked, we actually don't know. And if it is suitably difficult to brick, it is no different from a regular car being rendered inoperable due to mis-maintenance. Finally, 10 years of decent use would outdo many Audis (certainly my own).
It should be stated that all of Peroni's claims apply to the Roadster and not necessarily the Model S.
Are Indian High Schoolers Manning Your IBM Help Desk?
I automatically assume "Hacker News"-related is not sanctioned / 3rd party. If it had Y-Combinator somewhere in its name I think that would be a bigger problem.
And yet Mailplane continues to pay the salary of a sole developer. Maybe Sparrow's aspirations were too big for an email client? The interesting thing about Mailplane is that it targets an arguably different user base (gmail power users?) at a higher price point ($24.95). Personally I'm a Mailplane user because I prefer gmail's web-interface and I have three accounts to juggle. I never saw the appeal of Sparrow over OS X's Mail.app. And I'm still waiting for something like Mailplane for the iPad.
Funny, but I just moved to the Bay Area and I've thinking about exactly this subject for the past two days.

I am looking for the following in a company, in this order:

- A culture of morality
- A culture of respect
- A culture of good listening
- A modicum of intelligence and talent

If a company has all of these, with just a bit of luck, they will succeed, and do it by truly generating value. Lots of companies headed by jerks will also succeed, but I'd rather not be in them.
It does seem to be the case in much of the media reporting, that with white supremacist terrorists, the loner aspect is generally played up, where as with those of a somewhat darker hue, grand conspiracy and existential threat is more on the agenda.
The price of the desktop app seemed too cheap to me. Why only $10 for such great piece of software? So, it seems they made around $1,000k in two years. That's about $100k per employee per year. Google bought them for $25,000k which gives $5,000k per employee. That's 50 years of work at the rate they were.
Besides the direct extortion that NTP just extracted, they're going to cost the industry a lot more in the future. The NTP-RIM case caused RIM to become much more proactive in acquiring their own patents, which are going to come back and haunt the industry when RIM blows up.
38 Studios Business Postmortem
From the article:

> Couldn’t we apply the exact same principles of github, but to a markhub (for lack of a name or creativity)?

Sure you could; in fact, I'm sure it would work pretty well. If you look at the StackExchange series of sites, you'll see everything from programming to mathematics, parenting to gaming. There are a lot of sites on that network, all of which provide an excellent resource.

However, here's the key element that would keep 'marketers, advertisers, and product peeps' out: competition.

GitHub works because people are sharing their code. If you worked on a marketing campaign, are you going to release your market research with what works best to your competitors? If you create a product, are you going to ignore patents and release that design/schematic for free?

In a perfect world, the answer would be yes, but a lot of people simply aren't open to the same level of sharing that a lot of developers are. Why did open source software take off, but not nearly as much "open source products?" I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with the culture of shared knowledge, and the satisfaction of someone else using your work.

You can still make a profit on open source software -- $RHT is an example of that -- but would you be able to do the same if your product itself was open source? I personally think so, but this is why GitHub clones haven't spun up in every possible industry. In my opinion, anyway.
I have a 4 year old, so naturally the idea of rat birds and raining food comes to mind. Kids movies, oy.
Didn't try on mobile.

The pointer was over the pictures when the site loaded, so it's sort of immaterial whether I had to hover.

Not a big deal, just wanted to let people know...
Random comment about the laughter at the ~2:30 mark: I am a developer, but I am not a gamer. We are few, but we exist.
Hotel safes are there to secure insurance protection for your belongings.
Steve Blank and Eric Ries might say that, on the whole, it's not sane to keep your business plan a secret.

Their reasons are that by not sharing your business assumptions with anybody (especially potential customers/users), then you're violating the fundamental principle of Customer Development and Lean Startup by cutting yourself off from early and valuable feedback which you could be using to rapidly iterate better versions of your product. In other words, you'll be secretive, but (probably) slow and operating completely in the dark, often to your detriment.[1]

However, you may be confusing instead the need to keep secret your long-term plans for world domination if you read/listen to Peter Thiel's CS183 Startup class notes[2] (kindly provided in essay form by Blake Masters), which espouses that coveting instances of certain classes of secrets help drive startups to success. I can't do the essay justice, so I highly suggest reading it to get a better answer to your question.

[1] Search for those terms - they are highly SEO'd

[2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels...
Great post - if anything, I think this problem goes way beyond just real-time dashboards to extend to the vast majority of analysis done today (both by web and more traditional companies).

The statement that particularly resonated for me was [figure out] "if you’re looking at stats now because you’re curious and impatient, or because those stats will actually drive business decisions", but I'd take it one step further.

Analysis and stats are incredibly valuable when:

1) they are applied to a real business decision that is tied to actual value

2) you are willing to change what you are doing based on the result

3) you don't already know the answer

4) you have sufficient confidence in the result to act on it.

We need to get more used to stopping and thinking before we start analysis by laying out the decision we need help making, the different paths we're willing to take, and the amount of confidence we'll need to change our decisions. I could definitely be a lot more disciplined about it.

(I actually wrote a blog post last week on this same topic that lays out the above criteria in more detail and might be useful - though that was a reaction to the profusion of ads out there calling Big Data and Analytics "hot", that ignore how they actually drive real value. Blog post is here: http://www.klaviyo.com/blog/2012/07/16/the-curse-analytics-b...)
2) It's 227*0.22; you still get the original 100% too. If it were 27% oversubscribed you'd get 28%.

3) It is an assumption, though one that fits with my experience of hackathons (they tend to be 15-20% women.) I wasn't saying it's guaranteed that women will want to attend, just that there are qualified women who could.

4) Department of Labor, 2009 numbers: http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-databook-2009.pdf Page 29.
The primary reason to use C for me hasn't been performance for a long time; if you want to interact with the OS or the hardware, C just flat-out works better:

Pretty much all unixes are written in C, and using the language of the OS means you can talk to it the same way the developers do, rather than through an FFI; even the best FFIs suffer from the fact that there will be some impedance mismatch between languages.
Was down for me. Cached copy:

http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2012/07/23/is-cc-worth-it/
I don't think they should use the word pixel to describe something that they're clearly defining as not an actual pixel.
How to avoid being a Groupon horror story
There are already builders out of China that you can approach for custom solutions. I also wouldn't expect Marvell or Intel(especially with their acquisition of Fulcrum Microsystems last year) to sit by idly.

Another interesting thing we'll start to see is the use of concurrent programming languages by the established vendors to stay heavily involved and dare I say relevant? Juniper announced a few months back they were going to start using Scala and Akka from Typesafe (http://typesafe.com/company/news/23506). It is not hard to guess this is for their SDN and OpenFlow plans.
Hi Bira,

Basically step 1 is we consolidate all the things you're sharing and liking on other networks into one place. Step 2 is we make your feed easy to navigate by organizing everything in it around topics.

Say that over the last year you've liked a few programming how-to videos on Youtube and shared a bunch of links to programming resources on Twitter / Facebook. We take all of that and consolidate it into the programming section of your feed. It makes it easy keep track of and re-share everything you've found about programming (just one specific topic example).

If you're able to keep track of all of this yourself across your networks then I guess we're not for you :) Or if you don't care to...
$0.25/week is not something I'd really consider a tip

Should weekly tips only be given to people whose work I use weekly? If so, then yes, I agree that $0.25/week is not a good tip.

But what about the person whose Emacs config files I read at GitHub and found somewhat informative? And what about the person whose personal wiki (e.g., Org Mode files) I read at GitHub and found somewhat informative? Should I give these people good one-time tips instead of small weekly tips? Maybe I should, but I think I'd like to have the option to give them small weekly tips. Or is there some reason I shouldn't have this option?
Here's how the original one should have been written:
https://gist.github.com/3167036

That's 11 lines of straight forward code. Unlike the 43 lines of structure-masturbation in the Backbone case.
Size isn't the only problem. Time is the bigger issue. The likelihood of there being something else out there is one thing. The chance that they've been active enough during a time in which we're looking for them is vanishingly small. Look at it this way, what if they died out just before the first telescopes were created here on earth? Or what if they're active right now? We won't see any signs of them for hundreds of years.

Space is big, sure, but time is even more vast.

Whoops, missed them by that much...
There are two things about the C++:

1) why use a class for the timer?

2) It's not clear if the order of operations ensures that the timer is stopped before the first print operation happens. Thus your C++ may be including some part of the cout print operation
Civil GPS spoofing attacks - practical use cases.
I don't feel they begged. They asked, I said no, they then asked why, and then I answered. Man that was simple.

I applaud Google. At least they don't do things without your permission. I'm looking at you Facebook.
In my cohort of 12 individuals, 4 are male.

And in my chair, 100% of mobile engineers are female. Woo hoo.

Now let's move on to your article. So much material there, where to begin!

We are feminising medicine. It has been a profession dominated by white males. What are we going to have to do to ensure it retains its influence?

Oh no, what are we going to do to ensure that medicine remains dominated by white males?!

There is a tsunami of women coming through.

Aaaaahhh... TSUNAMI! SOMEONE GET THE LIFEBOATS! Nope, doesn't sound hysterical at all.
I'm tired of merchants complaining about Groupon promotions that fail. It's your responsibility to do what's right for your business.
Show HN: A cool way to navigate reddit front-page through time
Hi, I am the creator, you can also use shift + mouse-wheel to navigate through time. And you can also put your mouse over the camera icons to see the pictures. It works well on Android devices.
I think IAP is a pretty kludgy way of solving the upgrade problem in a lot of cases.

As a user, I don't want to be nickel-and-dimed for every little feature.

As a developer, I don't want to shoehorn every change I make into an IAP feature.

Can you imagine if you had to "upgrade" OS X, Aperture, Photoshop, or Office by purchasing a bunch of "features"?
You posted the original link instead of a mirror.

It is down for me, too. You can read the article via Google's search results preview but it isn't linkable and there is no Google Cache link.
IANAL, but a careful reading of the case does not support the first part of your sentence. Anderton was convicted, and he did not "take the goods". He did not even complete the transaction, he just switched the bar code and went to the checkout.

It makes me wonder if, under UK law, it's lawful to eat part of a box of cookies (not measured by weight) while rolling your trolley thru the store, and then paying for the box at checkout.
I wonder if Sparrow had a subscription model... let's say you had to pay $2/month to use it across any platform. How many people would have signed up?

Sparrow seemed more complex than a typical 0.99c app, and it seems like they had their fans. I wonder if they followed the subscription model if their finances would have looked better and gave them the ground to stay independent.
What's North Korea's intent? (I thought unification)

What's Israels intent? (I thought unification)

Are they comparable? Seems, at face value, they are.

I'm not sure what you are getting at with the governance point.

> If Y there is no talking to you. Have a nice day.

Really? That's the position you want to take?
Re: 2, I am surprised if operations with side-effects get called out of order.
This will only work so long as services copy the contents of the URL you give. This opens up a whole slew of security and permission issues. Otherwise the original link becomes the weak link in a potentially long chain of links.

A pointer is handy and convenient until the resource it points to disappears.
Looking Back, is College worth it?
I hope this doesn't backfire on Bill.

It puts me in mind of a story I heard this past weekend (for the second or third time -- hint, hint as to the experience's effect on the customer, to any cable co. "image" people happening to read this).

The person I spoke with ("the customer") told me how, transitioning from an outside antenna to cable TV, he had been very careful to tell the Comcast order taker that his installation should be classified as a "new" installation and not as a simple hook-up (the latter implying a pre-existing cable line to the property). The order taker seemed to have enough technical understanding to understand this and indicate they were recording the order for service installation as such.

When the technician arrived, he seemed quite competent, quickly assessed and understood the situation, and began executing a new installation including a new line from the pole.

However, he quickly started receiving calls from his supervisor, who was nasty and who started shouting at him so loudly -- including foul language -- that the customer could hear the supervisor's side of the conversation bleeding out of the technician's cell phone.

Apparently, despite this customer's care in placing the order and the order taker's reassurance that they understood what was needed, the order ended up in the order tracking system as a simple "hook-up".

There was nothing the technician could do about this, and he remained courteous with the customer and efficient in his work. But he was totally, abusively berated and dumped on by his supervisor.

The customer felt bad enough about this that he actually apologized, saying he was sorry the technician had to go through that.

In retrospect, he told me he wished he'd followed up with Comcast support until he hopefully might get through to a manager with sufficient authority to reprimand -- fire, preferably -- that supervisor. Someone who should not be managing anyone.

And yes, the technician was a contractor. Personally, I see so much of this, I think Congress should be made to pass a law forbidding these (Federally regulated, quasi-monopolies, after all) companies from using any contract workers. These companies have obviously abused their positions, including in their labor relations. Make all their employees full time, with benefits, and put the companies directly on the hook for such abuses.

When they need to make up the differences in expense, take it out of those companies' managements' hide. If you want an argument for that, what premium do -- or rather, don't -- they have to offer and pay to get management capable of managing a fucking monopoly (or the next thing to same)?
Is that one feature worth every limitation of C/C++ versus the competition? Maybe in a few narrow problem domains, but not for the average dev, IMO.
Google scoops up Sparrow
Java is great - right upto the point where it isn't/

Do a similar example where you want to replace the values in situ and find that Java is making a copy of the entire array every time. At that point you are stuck, there is no way out. C may be difficult but it lets you do anything you want.

note: yes Java may have a flag that says do int array in place, in this case - but you know what I mean.
Does it really serve anyone to have another ridiculous language war every time someone posts a microbenchmark that shows their favourite language winning?
The value obtained from the application should mirror the value received by the developer.

For games, one-time app payment makes more sense: usually, you complete the game or there is finite set of game rules that is implemented.

For most apps one uses day to day, one-time-pay model works against the user by mis-incentivizing the developer, just like TFA said.

It's somewhat ironic that AppCubby itself is an illustration of the same problem: their GasCubby app, which I use several times a month, has been effectively abandoned. Now, I would gladly pay at least $4 a year for that app, if it were actively developed, as it continuously delivers value AND getting improvements is important to me. However, since I've paid for the app once and that's the end of story, the app's own development reflects the same.

Pay to get updates is really the way to go.

Now, I am afraid to go shopping on the App Store for the same kind of app, as I'm wary of another disappointment. If I were to develop a competing app that filled the same need, but was critically more usable on several subtle, but important fronts, I would have a very uphill battle against the established stalwarts, which have been reviewed and rated since the early days of the App Store.

Thus, we are stuck in a situation where, given a popular app category, existing/old school apps tend to dominate based on reputation, but stagnate due to the lack of incentive to update or innovate, and the new apps a tough time breaking through.
A lack of sales focus will destroy you - see why this startup is killing it