skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Edit: ... what your PEERS/friends make ...
How does this compare to human beings in general (and then for men vs women)... I would imagine if you looked at data outside of developers, you'd see pretty much the same results, especially when taking into account the male bias in developer culture.
My last startup flopped as well. But honestly I couldn't be happier - I think a lot of first time entrepreneurs make similar mistakes. But you wouldn't be able to learn them by heart until you've made them and seen what'd happen after each and every thing you did. Learning by screwing up is 1000x better than learning by reading Hacker News or Venture Beat.
Great story. On the verge of launching my own startup, and I've definitely struggled with whether or not to incubate (this, of course, is assuming they'd have me). I've heard from countless people—and I now agree—that the loss of capital is nothing compared to what you gain. After all, 100% of nothing is still nothing.

I also think it's great that you were able to recognize the mistakes you've made; And now that I'm sure you've learned from them, hopefully one day you'll have another opportunity to put what you've learned to use.
If anybody would like to run something like this at Hacker Dojo in Mtn. View, let's discuss.
I read your comment as: Brand building advertising is under priced because people think it can't be tracked.

My point was once it can be tracked well it will come to light that it's not very valuable. Because that's the pattern we've seen with online display.

But, as I reread your comment I realize that I'm thinking TV style mass broadcast advertising here, and if you mean branding advertising on online platforms then I agree with you that in that context it's under priced.
Not related to the content of the article, but

they should just invest in responsive now

I always get weirded out when adjectives turn into nouns for the first time. I think, "Did he mean invest in responsiveness"? "Invest in a responsive design"?

I'm sure the weirdness will go away, though. I'm almost comfortable with "mobile" as a noun, and "multiplayer" as a noun seems perfectly natural to me (though "online" as a noun in gaming contexts still has a ways to go).
This article was absolutely fascinating, in particular because it compared traditional worker co-ops with Valve's unusual horizontal-style organization.
I'm a former worker-owner at a tech startup (we were organized exactly as he described traditional co-ops, basically we all owned the firm but were hierarchical) and based on my experiences there I think the only way a truly spontaneous structure such as Valve' could work is in the high-tech or "professional" sector; I think the average person (especially those lacking college education) has a very difficult time deciding how to best be productive. I'm not saying they couldn't co-own a business - on the contrary, I think it is the way many businesses should be run! But a strict managerial structure is essential in organization differently-minded individuals (in my experience).
curl -s randomfunfacts.com | grep '<i>' | sed 's/.*<i>\(.*\)<\/i>.*/\1/'
What a great article...
Facebook ships code twice as often now.
Plenty of people who don't have children don't want to put in 80 hrs per week at their job. Should we accomodate them as well?

Yes, why not? "Think of the parents" arguments may just be a pretext for letting everyone work less. As productivity increases, the amount of available work decreases. We can either concentrate that work among a few, leaving many unemployed (e.g. the would-be 50hr/wk CEO), or have everyone work less.
Did this happen yesterday? Did the client happen to be in Tokyo? We had a temporary issue in our Tokyo data center (related to our rollout of SPDY) that would have caused the symptoms you describe. It's fixed now and there's a check in place to confirm that SSL is answering properly before a server starts receiving traffic.

Sorry for the problem! Thanks for reporting it.
> But they are subjective.

So is the application of most of our laws. I don't know what your point is. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is the most subjective thing I can imagine but does that really matter?

The answer is, in reality and not in fantasy, NO.

> What qualifies a religion as sham?

If you made a religion that was "It is a commandment that one shall not be taxed more than 10% and that one cannot work more than 4 hours" it will be clearly seen that you do not "sincerely" hold that belief and that you are just trying to game the system and you will have put, under any normal person's view, an unreasonable burden on the employer.

This is a distinct question from objectively makes a religion a sham. We were talking about what you could actually get away with in the real world right? If that's the case then what I said is true and holds.

Now, if you want a defense of religion or why Judaism is any better than Scientology, you certainly won't get one from me. But if you try to play games and expect a judge to agree with you under EEOC laws, I doubt you will get very far. :)
This was a something people claimed? I demand another poll that asks if they've heard of the phrase 'all developers love beer' and think it's a common belief!
I think that anonymity when there is some friction to publication is great. But anonymity + frictionless publication becomes more problematic.
Apologizes, I didn't mean 'advertisement' as in 'CLEARLY SOMEONE BRIBED THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE' -- just that, yes, it was someone writing with the intention of persuading others to use it.
So what are you going to do next?
I thought the myth was developers love maryjane? Beer would seem to be a near universally loved adult beverage...
There is. We actually have a really early version in the works. Email me (yuranlu@quicklychat.com) if you'd like to help us beta test it.
Likely. But we don't know which iOS/Android apps have 1MM DAUs, and so this makes this debate kind of pointless... unless developers share their stats.

There are lots of apps with 20+ million downloads (total), and if they're good apps they might be pushing 1MM DAUs (of course, tough to tell unless developer reveals that). All I'm saying is that some of them are hits and VC's are clamoring over, but some might be good lifestyle (or less scalable) businesses and VC's aren't "knocking over doors" to fund a Series A with them.

I'm just calling out the assumption that 1MM DAU = guaranteed Series A funding.

Come to think of it, I should retract what I said about most of them not being VC-fundable. I just don't know cause the stats aren't out there.
Build wealth progress report 4
Using -> and ->> in clojure also feels pretty close to this, and can clean up over-nested blobs very quickly.

Eg:

(reduce + (take 10 (filter even? (map #(* % %) (range)))))

Can be expressed as:

(->> (range)
(map #(* % %))
(filter even?)
(take 10)
(reduce +))
Movie Disasters That Could Have Been Avoided with Cloud Backup
Yes, it is an argument against JITs. For a little while, OS builders were making progress on mitigation techniques, then the browsers all got together and decided it would be cool to allow attackers more control over the executable parts of the address space.
Very well said.

I've been a victim of #1 a number of times and it sucks. It breeds annoyance at anyone you suspect of abusing the policy and every level of management.

If you approach your immediate supervisor with the reasoning of "that's not me, how closely do we need to follow it?" you've put them in an awkward position of "punishing" you or not enforcing it closely and you being an exception. Generally, exceptions are not good and complicate things further.

If people on your team aren't getting things done, go to them directly. We're (mostly) adults.
The problem is how to get exposure to B2B processes as a software developer. Unless you have previous work experience as a sales guy/marketing/inventory procurement/etc. or a MBA or already developing B2B tools, how can you learn about the needs and opportunities?
i wish people would stop distilling their experiences into pithy blog posts. the experience is the valuable bit; if you just supply the lessons learned, no lessons are actually learned.
What are some things I'd be shocked to learn about the outside world?
You may be grouping "arena shooters" all together (one of my favourite genres, btw). Examples include Quake 3 / 4, Unreal Tournament series, Serious Sam, Open Arena, Nexuiz, Xonotic to name some popular ones. It's somewhat like calling the Battlefield series a clone of Call of Duty.
I think coffee is the universal stereotype. I'd wager that most of us prefer uppers to downers, at least while we're actively developing.
well, rgb is 16777216 colors. Lets say not all of those are acceptable skin tones, but there's a broad spectrum that's allow. for the sake of argument, lets go with a million. Not to be crazy racist, black white brown red and yellow are all adjectives used to describe skin color. skin color is a big slice of the color spectrum.

so, out of a million colors pick 8. what are the odds i pick the same 8? (if you don't remember combinatorics, a million choose 8 is on the order of 10^40).

Even if you dispute the full million colors are available, restricting our choice to just 100 unique skin colors, choosing 8 is over a hundred trillion combinations.

I'd say the odds of you and i picking the same 8 colors are pretty darn small.
"it works".

what a destructive attitude. many things 'work'. insider trading and extortion work too, does that mean we can't 'hate' on them?

just because something happens doesn't mean it 'should' happen. you filter options through your values to really decide if 'it works'. good insight into your character.
Reading the first few sentences, I thought you were going to criticize the media for playing into the "Apple will fail without Steve"-bit.

I don't know what will happen at Apple, but I don't like lynch mobs. Give Tim Cook a chance... These are very minor items.
I could even forgive all that if they at least showed the same results for the non-dev population for comparison.
It's a good point that we probably shouldn't seed the values just to avoid someone from accidentally using "deadbeefdeadbeef" in their production environment. I'll also investigate if we can reuse the transformation instances (and make the change if we can).

We didn't use the machine key as we'd have to pick one of two paths: 1) Using the [`System.Web.Security.MachineKey`](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.security....) class to perform the encryption would probably leave us with the same issue we wanted to resolve (the class only exposes methods for encryption, not the key itself). 2) Parsing the configuration file manually is error-prone and makes us rely on the current format (and while it's unlikely to change given Microsoft's dedication to backward compatibility, it's an unnecessary dependency for an independent solution).

Our code serves as an example and while some will probably copy the code right into their solution, I expect most people will adapt it to suit their needs*. [Poul-Henning Kamp](http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/md5crypt_eol.html) recently wrote "Please notice that there is _no_ advantage in everybody in the world using the exact same algorithm, quite the contrary in fact." (relating to the application of well-known encryption algorithms, not designing such algorithms). We believe it's beneficial to share a solution that people can build and improve on. If nothing else, using different solutions prevent a single attack from affecting us all.
Man, in trying to discredit the value of government and highlight individuals he's getting dangerously close to wrapping back around to the fact that the government IS individuals - all of us US citizens in particular.
Sadly no Tokyo customers. Any similar US issues? They had problems last Fri through this Monday with U.S. customers before shutting Cloudflare off.
Try to make a lot of friends in college. You'll gain exposure to more industries that way and will eventually come across something that needs a better solution.
Nice site. One suggestion:

“Simply send beautiful emails to people _who_ matter.

Both are technically correct, but "who" is usually preferred when referring to people. Plus it feels more personal :)
Like Moleskine only way better: http://www.leuchtturm1917.com/en/content/medium-notebook I love the dotted ones. Hard to find though.
Hands-on with Microsoft’s new tablet-oriented keyboard and mouse
Fighting against natures clear and obvious intent of gender roles will not ever lead to a happier and more fulfilled life.
IMHO what weights are the right weights is very subjective - reducing all these colleges to a single comparison is stupid.

For example, if there is 100% graduation, I consider that very suspect and probably a bad sign. It's natural that some people don't finish college. WRT Caltech, they are desirable BECAUSE they offer such a challenging environment.
So there are two things that remain unclear from this analysis:

1) Moving between Valve projects may be like a "market" where the "buzz" around a project is like its "price"... but then the analogy breaks down, because in a real market, you'd have to pay to be on the hot team.

But at Valve you don't, so in this case, why doesn't everyone just drop their project and move to the hottest, most interesting team? Obviously in real life not everyone will, but if a team only needs 5 people, and 50 people want to join, who determines who really joins? Well, the project manager will have to choose, and now we're just back to managers choosing. Or am I missing something?

2) There's a lot of grunt work in software development. Bugfixes to maintain a year-old product, writing documentation, etc. If nobody wants to do the grunt work, then who does it? Because there's usually more grunt work than people who want to do it. Everyone wants to work on the new exciting sexy stuff, but that's not always what generates revenue and pays people's salaries.
I think I read that Firefox might be ditching the favicon in the location bar for some reason?
Please, please do not scrape the HTML pages. The XKCD admin has put a JSON API (http://xkcd.com/json.html) in place for people who want to do things like this. Thanks.
That's entirely because Apple doesn't have a monopoly.
I don't know. In twenty years of owning many, many laptops of all kinds of brands and designs I have never had one yanked off the table like that. I have never even had anyone trip over the cord and break-off the connector. I've used them at home, in the garage, at the shop, at the office, on airplanes, at trade-shows and while camping. To me the mag-safe idea is simply a "feel-good" marketing checkbox rather than a real need. Again, that's my experience. I've seen people that are simply not carful and don't take care of their stuff. And some that might be more accident prone than others. So, I'll admit that this is just one data point.
It's about as similar as a fish is to a bicycle.
Apple are showing themselves as patent trolls - noone else is allowed to create a smart phone that has black glass and rounded corners, which is about as generic as you get.
On the other hand, if you read the link above (the complaint), you will see that detailed feature, after detailed feature is copied (colours, layouts, mannerisms, interaction, selection screens, even the exact RGB colors of skin on characters). This is a complete clone superficially and in detail.
I have lost a lost of respect for EA over the years, but they deserve to wipe the floor with Zynga over this case.

One caveat - Samsung clearly copied the phone icon (although this was obviously taken from the keypad of existing mobile phones), packaging and connector from Apple. This is more obvious, but -FAR- less significant to the product than what Apple "borrowed" from Sony/Jony.
For instance, part of the reason governance in Washington is so bad is Congress in general, but as he points out, one should not discredit Rand Paul in particular for being a large part of the problem.
Or, depending on your age, sugar-free red bull.

(I'm a hopeless caffeine addict and find that switching up my source helps.)
I've never heard the term '3 figures' before :)
I did, with some cofounders, went through an accelerator, rounded up investors. Sitting in our office right now. So yes, I am familiar with this path.

Now the answer is to create your own company? I thought the answer was not to play the game? If you think you don't have to play the game to start a company then you haven't done it before.
Then people will start advertising for Toshirô Mifune Developers.
No really, I get the "cold-hearted businessman," thing. However, you're describing preparations for an unknowable situation: "you should have predicted the future better."
Astro went from the only decent file manager to the defacto worst. It's awful. So incredibly awful I wanted to write this comment in case any Astro dev sees it. For shame.
Deletion erases data.

Yeah, I'm sure it does...
Do people not know this? Or just not care? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_norris#Political_views
We're being pedantic here of course, Google has a wonderful mandatory training course called "Keeping it Legal" which our employee would have attended so that he could attest to that fact when he signed his personal copy of the code of conduct, and it would caution you against firing folks for reporting violations, however Random Worker here didn't report a violation, no, they played the 'labor law' card without ever having gone to a meeting where lunch was provided. And none of the mythical company behavior had any impact on their ability to take a 30 minute break. So really it what was happening here is that a mandatory meeting was called, and this employee decides to be rebellious (which is totally within their rights of course), and the company can sever their employment relationship with this person which is totally within their rights too.

No what Random User did was self-identify as someone who wasn't really signed on to this whole "The guy who pays you is the same guy who gets to put requirements out there which you have to follow to collect the pay." part of the equation which is where the 'at will' part of the law comes into play.

I realize that droithomme was just being snarky but if you're thinking about sending this kind of message to everyone in the company, even if it is in response to what you think of as a morale killing policy change, I would advise against it. That was the point I was trying and failing to make (and be clever at the same time, which perhaps is the root of the failure).

The "at will" statues are really broad, and as most employment lawyers will tell you, once you are actually suing the company you work for, you probably don't want to work there anyway, so just quit.

The bottom line is that if you feel compelled to threaten to unionize or quote labor law at your manager, you really should think about working somewhere else. Those are big warning flags that you are not a good fit for the company.
If I remember my history correctly, the original shuttle objectives were compromised by US intelligence interests that required the shuttle to attain certain latitudes that were good for launching intel assets? If so, the shuttle program could have been a lot cheaper?
> More so the vehicle is designed to be able to withstand an engine exploding, even at launch, without damaging the other engines and without preventing the launcher from reaching orbit.

That is absolutely incredible. Gives new meaning to the phrase "over-engineered" (and not in a bad way).

Do you know off the top of your head what's the failure rate for a generic launch? How much is it saying that the Falcon is at 100% so far?
Keep in mind, I meant it in an abstract sense; we could just as easily use existing government IDs (state driver's license, SSN, etc) rather than create a new one. Hardware biometrics are an option (in theory), and would also eliminate the terrible security practices inherent to email+password.

What matters is not the unique identifier; the real benefit is the threat of punishment for fraud, and the "single source of truth", whether that's a government, or something else. We have this, for better or worse, in other aspects of communication infrastructure (names, addresses, phone numbers), but there is no equivalent for the web (except perhaps for domains). I'm glad that an anonymous information-sharing network exists, but I think a non-anonymous flavor (AOL : www :: Facebook : ???) would be a societal boon as well.
No favicon change in Opera 12.
You completely missed the point. He's not saying that Zynga's actions are moral or should be socially acceptable, just that it's easy to see their motivation. It's not hard to understand why they do what they do, no matter how reprehensible.
curl -s randomfunfacts.com | sed -n 's/.*<i>\(.*\)<\/i>.*/\1/p'
By the way, Zynga usually beats their competitors because in the long run their clones are better than the originals. Like it or not, but thats innovation.

I think cross-advertising through their other games to their massive existing user base has much more to do with it.
Sounds great, ping me when you're in Vancouver next (allen at steamclocksw.com).

And yes, decaf, half-caf and tea are essential tools for this approach. :)
I'll give you that, indeed networking (in conventions, general friends-making and so on) as resulted for me in ideas and opportunities in sectors I have no prior experience in.
you don need to use grep, only sed -n
I've been wondering about the same questions as well. I hope someone can answer.
This post struck a nerve with me as I'm agonizing over the decision of moving to the US while my daughter is about to enter her final year of GCSEs at a great school.

I really worry that moving her will seriously damage her chances of going to university in the UK, but the thought of leaving her here while the rest of her family move to the US is just too heart breaking to contemplate.

The area around San Francisco we're looking to move to has great schools but the final 2 years of the US high school curriculum is totally different to the UKs A-Levels and I fear she will struggle to adapt.
Reminds me of a list version of a mindmap -- which is great. I am addicted to mindmaps to organize my thoughts but navigating the elements by panning around a giant map can get cumbersome. Looks like a good alternative.
Very nice read.
So if I launch at the same time internationally, then they won't copy me - you seem to be suggesting?
They still have it in the tab. Don't worry - the favicon won't disappear!
I totally agree too, but can't help wondering how much different this is from the (relatively) old forms of social interactions in the online world. For example:

SMS has a receipt option. iPhone doesn't support it, but my old nokia does. I could easily see that my SMS was not only sent, but received by the other person.

Even on facebook, without any seen/read features (which I wasn't even aware of), I can send a message to someone, and then I might see that they posted some updates, added a friend or made a comment on mutual friend's post. Obviously they have seen my message then. Same would happen with email as long as I'm also connected to the same person on fb...

Chats / Skype / Online status - I tend to turn my chats off completely unless I need to, but when I'm online - people see it. If they see me online (e.g. google chat) they can assume that I got the email they sent me...

Don't get me wrong, I'm not justifying making things even more public. Quite the contrary. I wish there were better ways to maintain privacy and what people see about me and when. But the problem is very much already there.
PostgreSQL support is now live on AppFog
Yes; they publish degree-specific rankings (at least for grad school). However, it remains that people will still consider UW inferior to grad schools even if you went there for CS. When you tell people what school you went to, they're not going to cross reference it with your degree.