skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completely disagree with this, this isn't an echo chamber, and no-one's buying into that ethos.

Let's be frank, b2b is boring as shit.

It's not even vaguely interesting.

The only challenge to setting up the ultimate competitor to Sage/Quickbooks is that it's so mind numbingly dull. B2B programming is an utter pile of mind-numbingly boring crap. It's not sexy because it's incredibly simple with a colossal amount of edge cases. B2B is mindbogglingly complex simple software.

B2B is just the edge cases.

It's not in the remotest bit interesting to most people. It's often bound by the most ridiculous laws and covenants.

But it'll make you a lot of money.

Do you want to read about it? No, because it's so ridiculously shallow and dull. That why no-one talks about it.

(disclosure: I am also writing b2b software)

EDIT: There was a very recent post by Intuit about the 10 million lines they've written for Quickbooks and how they manage it. That says it all to me really. 10 million lines means something has gone very, very, very wrong to me. Would you want to write a 10 million line essay about accounting? Think about your average words per line programming, that's nigh on a 50 million page essay. Just to do accounting.

Joy.
Preventing XSS attacks when embedding JSON in HTML
"the only people EA seems to screw over are the people dumb enough to work for them."

Or buy from them, but yes. They only screw you over if you choose to associate with them first.
From what I've read Valve's use of stack ranking is for compensation bonuses only, not about who to fire.
That's not what I'm saying at all. Every shuttle was designed the same. Every F1 that failed had a different design, and the company's policies and practices changed drastically over that time as well. You can't compare it to an established program with intermittent failures.
valve's people aren't very young, mostly they hire senior people. the narbacular drop kids were an exception.
SimCity Social was released almost a year before Zynga's game.
It was lazy of me to inherit Dalton's term 'bully.' It should have been his expectation to only be compensated for EVA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_value_added) and not count on Facebook's stewardship of its developers.

And, when I don't like the tone of a meeting, I politely leave. Facebook's offices are physically difficult to enter, not leave.
It's the lack of full-scale, realistic tests of complete systems that cause problems. There's just not the money for it nowadays. For example, Orion's crew vehicle had budgeted 2 aeroplane parachute drop tests. Apollo's landing module had over 230. Interestingly, they recorded anomalies on over 210 of those.

I would argue that modern designs that learn from the mistakes of past designs require less testing. Maybe it takes 230 drops to understand the aerodynamics of a falling capsule, but once the knowledge is obtained, it only takes 2 to verify a new capsule works as good as the old one.

As for simulations, well one of the catch-phrases in the rocket engine business is 'plumbing never leaks in simulations'.

So why not simulate leaky plumbing? Computer modeling has come a very long way over time.

'You ain't tested it till you've tested it', he said.... The space of possible failures rises exponentially with the number of parts, when you consider all the ways they can interact.

True, but each new failure requires a series of events more complex than previous failures. You're using a bunch of examples of old failures to imply that new designs will fail in the same way, when the reality is that new designs have the benefit of learning from every single previous failure, and every subsequent failure further increases the reliability of the system.

I'm reminded of Asimov's essay, The Relativity of Wrong[0]. Despite your experience in the field, it seems you're too eager to assume that every new idea can be just as wrong as the previous one. Sure, new space vehicle designs like those from SpaceX may fail in ways we couldn't predict, but that is completely different from saying that they'll be less safe or less reliable than their predecessors, or that they have to fail in all the same ways as their predecessors first in order to prove their success.

[0] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Is Your Neighbor a Democrat? Obama Has an App for That
I'm also interested and have submitted a request to FireCore who provide a jailbreak for Apple TVs. Their bug tracker also indicates that they were considering signing recently.

I have not received feedback, yet, but will monitor this closely.
It's hit or miss. One thing I do like about it is that its commenters include somewhat more non-Valley engineers, people from aerospace companies, petrochemicals, civil engineering, NASA, that kind of thing. Not a large percentage of the commenters, mind you, but there are some good ones now and then. HN probably has a higher percentage of knowledgeable commentators, but they're very skewed towards a certain kind of technology.
Unless you're really going crazy with your dedicated mobile design, it's not going to cost 100% more than a desktop design. I suspect that it many cases, it's probably the same 20-30%. In my mind, the main benefit of being fully responsive is that (in theory) it's easier to maintain a single code base and (in theory) it's more future proof.
You can be vegan and like bacon. You just can't be vegan and eat bacon.

...I'll show myself out.
I can never commit to a book of blank paper. So when I find scraps of paper, like receipts or a page to tear out of something, I write everything on those and staple them together as I go so I'm not carrying around excess weight and it fits in my pocket. And I'm always sure to have free, ugly paper surfaces to fill with my ugly writing for the rest of my life.
Why exactly is my character relevant here?
Cross-browser testing used to be to ensure layouts wouldn't break, now it's to make sure fonts don't look abysmal.
The acquisition price for Instagram has been falling with Facebook's stock. The budget for these spacecraft is bound to be much, much higher than initial estimates (based on historical precedent).

FWIW I am not complaining about the budget for these or the virtually guaranteed overruns. I think a strong space program is essential if the US is to remain technically relevant over the next 50 years.
https://github.com/lipka/piecon

Browser Support

Piecon has been tested to work completely in the following browsers (older versions may be supported, but haven't been tested):

- Chrome 15+
- Firefox 9+
- Opera 11+
Currently the library falls back to title updates for the following browsers:

- Internet Explorer 9
- Safari 5
Performing ajax calls with jQuery, Mootools and Dojo
When somebody asks me if I want a Budweiser, Coors Lite, etc. I reply I like beer, not alcoholic water.
I usually tend to go for beer in the category of porters and stouts, and ales some times. Negra Modelo is what I drink when I don't have so much choice, but I live near Portland, OR. so beer selection is usually not a problem around here.
One thing to consider is that the teams may not be totally ordered by "buzz". So everybody won't naturally gravitate towards the team with the most "buzz" because no team has the most "buzz"! There are also other factors: everyone has different preferences and teams are interesting not just based on what they do but on how they do it and on the people comprising them.

There is, of course, a decent amount of grunt work. However, a lot of programmers don't just enjoy programming as such but also enjoy making something cool. I know I'm certainly willing to spend time ironing out the bugs in my hobby projects because having something that works well is just as fun as writing something novel. Also, I suspect that everyone at Valve puts effort into minimizing the grunt work as much as possible, meaning they probably have far less really boring things to do than most other companies. So a bit of cleverness and forethought combined with a passion of creating something of quality can get good programmers to do the grunt work.
This is also one of Apple's better design decisions. With an Apple brick, you just need to glance to the side to see if your brick and laptop are connected correctly. If it is the green LED is on.

With every other brick I've seen the LED is on the brick itself and there is no LED indicator on the connector. You need double the LEDs and have to look under the desk.
Space Radiation is low harm to astronauts says NASA
from the blog post... "For us, this is just the beginning. In the coming months, we are planning on adding support to a number of other data storage technologies, including Redis (which is now one of our very highest priorities)..."
You speak as though you are not a fan of SpaceX. Care to explain why?
Not only are dairy cows mistreated, their babies are also slaughtered because of milk.

Like any mammals cows only produce milk when they have babies. To keep their milk flowing cows are impregnated constantly. When the babies are born they are taken away from their mothers. Male babies are slaughtered. Dairy cows are also slaughtered at a young age when their milk production drops.

Many people mistakenly thought no animals are harmed in milk production. That is not true.
Google Should Pay $750 a Book, Authors Say in E-Book Suit
This culture was pretty active at Google and it had some interesting downsides. The fact was that people were recognized for shipping and not for 'finishing' and so a lot of shipped but unfinished things clogged things up. When a bazillion people were being hired, new hires would be dumped on a project as their 'starter' project, and the smart ones would figure out it was a dead end and move on quickly to either their own project or one that was about to ship.

During the crisis in 2009 when hiring froze, and the new hires dried up, this became unsustainable and folks had to be 'incented' to work on less glamorous jobs. Really good project managers made a group feel good and the community aspects kept people around, but they hadn't solved the problem before I left.

I would expect that for games or anything which has a relatively short life after being shipped, you could extend this sort of thing for a long time.
Except it's not. Example: women who expect to have custody of their kids no matter what are perfectly reasonable, men who expect to actually be allowed to see their kids are demonstrating their male privilege and acting as though the kids are their property.

This doesn't just apply to non-law areas either. A few years ago the British government consoldated all anti-discrimination law into a single Equality Bill, and as part of this they had a consultation period where interested parties could submit their thoughts. Several really well-known and respected feminist organisations submitted complaints that some local authorities were only offering funding for services to rape and domestic violence survivors if they offered advice to victims of all genders who rang up, and argued that in order to achieve equality the Government should force them to direct all their funding to women-only services. Equality can be used to mean a lot of things.
That's a little unfair on the Titanic designers.

Prior to the Titanic sinking, most ships didn't carry enough lifeboats for the passengers on board. This is was because the SOP was to ferry passengers to nearby boats if a ship was in trouble.

Now, the problem with the Titanic was that there were elements of hubris in the first sailing, and probably recklessness on that part of the captain. Like any big disaster, it was a cascading failure. But they didn't underquip it with lifeboats because they thought it wouldn't sink. They underequipped it because that's what was the norm at the time.

Probably the thing that changed the most with the Titanic sinking was the fact that plenty of important people went down with the ship, plus the sheer number of people lost.
Apple's iOS chief recalls iPhone's 'Fight Club' beginnings
I use Workflowy [1]!
Looks like a simple notepad and work great with bullet points and indents. Probably the best and simplest tool I've found to keep track of brainstorming and to-dos.

[1] Ref link: https://workflowy.com/?ref=6c6be5d :)
Isaac Asimov - Nightfall
Let us know how building that space elevator goes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2M73aXuORI
Sorry, no, popping up a window on my screen is not comparable to a co-worker walking up to my desk. Not even remotely close.

This is so contrived, it hurts...

And then, on your homepage:

This is a big part of the reason teams are much less productive when they're spread apart.

Nonsense. I've worked with many distributed teams and there simply is no correlation between productivity and location.

I don't think you're doing yourselves a favor by pushing the age old "it's just like being there"-fairytale. You can insult the intelligence of your audience like that when you're a Vodafone or a Samsung, but not when you're trying to sell a product (and likely to a largely technical audience).

The question that you have to answer on your homepage is: Why not Skype?

Do that in bold, front and center. Don't bore me with marketing lorem ipsum...
Scoble: Filepicker.io helps you offer great cloud-handling features
> my point is that making cash isn't the only condition that needs to be met for something to 'work'.

To make cash, you must make cash. This is a simple tautology. Insider trading and extortion work. Again, fact. Denying reality does not make it go away. We 'hate' on them because we have larger goals that are sabotaged by these things: a free market, a trusting society. If we are to succeed at our better goals, then we cannot do so by pretending things are other than what they are.

I probably hate Zynga more than you do, since they basically killed my dreams of entering the industry on my terms. But I don't let my hatred make me blind and stupid to the point where I no longer understand what it means for something to work.
Hmm... will look into it more. Thought it was an easy explanation since we had that issue yesterday in Tokyo.
Check validity of credit card number (Luhn’s algorithm)
This is a case where Windows is more of the problem than any individual touchpad manufacturer. If you Hackintosh most reasonably recent laptops, the touchpad acts predictably in OS X. The biggest thing Apple does right in hardware is that they make the touchpad comfortably huge.
You may misunderstand the case that you're referring to. They bundled for free that which cost money otherwise, as well as using undocumented APIs. When they were found to be a monopoly, their actions, which would in many other cases be perfectly legal, were a problem.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I originally wrote "results" in place of "influence" but that sounded overused. I do believe that emails with better content, better design, and better accessibility will drive more visibility (and opens/clicks/etc), and that is what I was aiming for with influence. If you want your email to be seen and read then a focus on content and design will go a long way. I'll rethink how to express that better.

Also yes, totally agree on showing more templates. When the public beta opens there will be a handful for customers to play with, and we do intend to do something that stands out, and especially hoping that the community gets involved too.
That's what they say, but what do you think really happens when you are consistently rated lower than your peers?
So the take-away is never build something on a platform that a company like Google or Facebook or Twitter is capable of making (or may want to make) themselves, because they will steal your ideas and you should have known better before you used the platform they offer so people can make things.

Note to self: Patent way to use an API to not write code.
Best Currency Trading Strategy? - Learn One Unfailing currency Trading Strategy
Mukena Dubai Lengan 1C
This sounds very good, but many sensible ideas don't work in practice. Any practical experience to back it up?
When I used Windows laptops, I appreciated that Dell did something similar to what Apple does - there was an LED ring on the plug.

Of course, it was a tasteless giant bright blue LED ring. So...yeah.
Thanks for that clarification. I too was under the wrong idea that B2B were somehow guys involved in connecting businesses to each other though their solutions. So B2B and enterprise software are the same? Does 37signals/Tello count as B2B or B2C?
The myth of the “modern browser”
I feel like this would be rather annoying and distracting. I could just imagine my 10+ tabs in Firefox having a pie chart or something blinking instead of a plain image.

It feels like were devolving to the old websites of flashy and blinking images trying to lure people in. Don't get me wrong though, it is neat! But... Where is that disable favicon extension now?
What hardware do Full-time Linux users use?
I have been trying forever to search and find the best hardware for linux as my primary OS, and running virtual machines of Mac OS and Win7x64. I have come to no solid conclusion based on my findings. What do all the Linux gurus use for ultra portability and power. My current configuration is:
MBPro 2011, SSD, 16gb RAM, core i7. Work assigned, but I customized it. Linux and Win7 virtual machines
I want to swap my VM of linux for the host device and swap in a vm of OSX. Thanks!
You get what you ask for.

Ask for hours and you get hours.

Ask for greatness instead.
J. Carmack, M. Abrash and P. Lucky talk about VR live at QuakeCon right now
> your implication that reusability is a done deal.

The plan is full reusability, except for a few parts that are lost as each stage separates from the rest, and fuel. There is no plan B. http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=27574

And re: testing, I misspoke. By "part" I didn't mean component, I meant to say "system" but had in mind testing each part of the mission and contingency plan (in addition to end-to-end tests). I, and the engineers at SpaceX, are aware that most failures come from interactions between systems. And by "extrapolate", I didn't mean extrapolate from one part to the entire system, but from N tests to the N+1th test (because when you test as you fly and fly as you test, the actual mission is just another test).

Also, you conflate 'safety' with 'complete system success.' Apollo 15 had a safe, successful reentry, despite the single parachute failure, because there was designed-in redundancy. You can expect similar from SpaceX.

But you are right in that assigning any sort of reliability number is rediculous. On my project, we have analyzed every possible failure scenario we can think of, and come up with contingency plans on top of contingency plans, until we get to the point where so many things would have to be wrong in order for our plan to be used that it's not worth the effort, and we would think on our feet at that point. But still, nobody has bothered putting out a percentage chance of mission success. And nobody has asked the launch vehicle for a percentage chance of correctly inserting us into our desired orbit.
Unlimited free calls to Pakistan
Yes, it is self-evident to us men that the world works this way, because we as men designed it that way. The vast majority of societies in human history have been patriarchal, with men making the rules. These rules have, until recently, included things like "women cannot work" and "women cannot vote." And because this has been like this for a long time, we (men) have accepted it as normal and don't see a need to write articles about it.

But times are changing. Gender equality has huge societal and economic benefits, and is a goal worth striving for. To make progress in this arena, we must challenge the status quo. Articles like this are a good way of raising public awareness about the issues that come up.
congrats guys - looking forward to dropping it into my app and giving it a try this week!
I find it easier just to block the site.
we should merge :]
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bjkhdklfbghoadcaml...
your character is relevant because it's tied to how you choose to define what 'works'. i agree with your other comment making cash = making cash. but thats not what you said, you said works, which implies your only definition of working is making cash. i'm challenging that, i'm saying you get to choose how you define what works, and your choice of what 'works' means, is determined by your values.
Processing photos on demand with Photon
And the military itself, of course :P.

This actually reminds me of an interesting observation in Homage to Catalonia by Orwell. The book is about Orwell's personal experiences in the Spanish Civil War. The particularly interesting bit was about the organization of some of the anarchist forces fighting against Franco. Essentially, they did not have any centralized organization at all. Even a military force can be organized like Valve and not in an authoritarian manner.

Unfortunately I don't have the book handy to find the pertinent passage, but it really stood out. It makes me wonder how much of the military-style management is due to necessity and how much is due to tradition. Of course, the fascists won in Spain, so this is hardly a great example, but there were too many other factors at play (e.g. support from Germany) to make it conclusive.
anyone able to confirm - is this going to work with all major credit cards?
I don't think it's as much about not being a Quora hater but more the attitude of "they know what's best for me."
The sed doesn't work on my box, here's one that does:

elinks -dump randomfunfacts.com | sed -n '/^[┌│└]/p'
It looks good to me in Firefox 14.
Off topic but can a another Windows user can tell me if the text looks horrible to you as it does to me? http://i.imgur.com/rooNb.png

I know Chrome has bad font rendering problems on Windows but this is just atrocious. Also FF is a bit better but not by much. This usually happens to me with webfonts only. The fact that I see so little complaints about this online make me think that perhaps it has something to do with my system.

edit: an even worse example http://i.imgur.com/XTATn.png
When your phone rings, though, you’re forced to act. A ringing phone is specifically designed to take your attention away from whatever you’re doing. Even if you’re too busy to talk, you still have to actively decide to reject the call. And that decision takes you away from whatever you’re doing.

This is the reason why if you really need your work to be done, you got to turn off your phone, cancel your meetings, stop your emails from popping-up, etc.

The effects of interruptions on productivity is now well-known. They kill it.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201204/why...
http://workingmoms.about.com/od/executiveopportunities/a/5-W...
> Or maybe the USA gets attacked because it routinely decides to "FUCK UP ENTIRE COUNTRIES" ?
"We've made a hell of a lot of enemies," kind-of inferred that. You'd probably know that if you read what I wrote instead of thinking how you were going to retort to it.

> I was enjoying it until you ruined it
That makes me happy. :) kindly get out.
I'm doing an ad-supported B2B media startup now. So that's doubly unsexy since free ad-supported media is not a very trendy business model right now.

But it works because we understand our market, we understand marketers, and we've had a dedicated sales staff since day 1. You can make a lot of money with ads if you don't treat them as an afterthought.
Corona with lime is tasty on a hot day with Mexican food. Like jlgreco said, though, at that point it tastes less like "beer" and more like "Corona with lime" - good, but not good beer.