skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a fantastic article with a lot of in-depth interviews and analysis. This is an example of what tech journalism should be.

Another note: the beauty of YC isn't that Paul & co. pick home runs every time -- they don't -- it's that they pick teams that eventually hit home runs. Justin.tv is doing okay, but YC's investment in Justin in 2005 has netted it Socialcam (acquired for $60M) and Exec. YC's investment in Reddit also netted them Hipmunk.

And I'm only scratching the surface here -- YC founders always recruit great people into the YC program.
Do you really believe Facebook is not sending all their data to CIA?
This is great, I'm so sick of seeing nothing but a plethora of useless stupid games, the world has gone entertainment crazy, this is really a great direction, I wish there were many many more useful apps, creative uses of the mobile platform to do something other than entertain the masses.
I agree that rangeCheck is trivial and needn't be protected, but I'm not sure I understand the "high school programmer" argument. A highschooler could also write Rebecca Black's "Friday" (indeed, one did), but it's still protected by copyright.

Is any code written by a High School student automatically uncopyrightable?
Yeah, they pull a credit report in real-time and then will do something like show you three cities and ask you to pick one you lived at in the past (with a "none of these" choice also). It's a good idea but I'd think often hackable for targets who are heavy social media users and basically have their life story online and public.

Still pretty good for now, though.

Edit: anyone know what the cost is per query for these services? I assume it's not free, thus likely not feasible for services that don't stand a good chance of providing enough revenue to offset the cost.
On OS X, I just put a "drag stuff here" folder in my Dock. Worked pretty well.
I, as a former farm boy, would support this. Contrary as it is to the spirit of HN. My dad, and his father before him, ran a dry-land wheat farm out west. When he finally decided to sell, and get an actual job, the level of stress reduction was quite amazing. For example, the growing season for wheat is about 101 days, while the growing season available was 99 days. The rain was 12 inches a year, and you had to leave half the land idle to get enough moisture to grow a reasonable crop. As a young boy, I saw one year's crop destroyed in a 15-minute hailstorm.

The risks inherent in farming resemble those of starting a new business, but without the potential upside.

Monsanto is going to do what they will, with our without your small (to them) farm. Better plan of action is to remove the distortion in the marketplace caused by the farm subsidies.

But as daeken says, take the money and do good with it. Like start a small business helping small farmers.
There isn't a misunderstanding, Oracle initially made a lot of other copyright and patent claims which were thrown out by the court. Now instead of just yielding the case they've fallen back on arguing that they should be awarded for the copying of a trivial function that any programmer could have written in 2 minutes.
Watch the landing of NASA's Curiosity Rover
The fear might be shared when there are wolves around, so they might be analyzing more than 1 animal.
Not everyone has a cell phone.
Show HN: Jackpotbuddy.Com - Online lottery pool
I was half of the team that created the instapaper-like functionality on bostonglobe.com using Erlang. It fit the bill perfectly and has run (mostly) untouched since it launched. Features like being able to get a REPL on a production node and quickly add and remove machines from a cluster were quite nice to have.
I don't see anything remotely disturbing about that sentence. On the other hand, I'm disturbed by how readily you condemn other people by something they never said.
What an incredible world we live in if this system is cheaper to operate than owning a guard dog.
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> Erlang doesn't seem to have a good image manipulation library/interface to Graphics/ImageMagick

Ordinarily this would be a problem, but ImageMagick (since you mention it), in my experience, is something you do not want to link directly to. Despite being a quite old and (theoretically) mature project, it's quite brittle, leaky and buggy, prone to segfaulting and weird freezes. These days I just fork and exec the `identify` and `convert` libraries to do image conversion (and simple manipulations), and for graphics drawing I use other, less buggy libraries such as Cairo.
I'm seriously suggesting the underlying technology has nothing to do with politics. One can discuss buffer overruns and CSRFs and what not without any political overtones whatsoever (or should be able to).

There is no area of human life that hasn't been impacted by technology and very few of them actually involve politics in the traditional sense.

Forgiving tech media that covers political stories in the guise of "tech" news because tech is "inseparable" from politics is naive, at best. It is separable and should be. But then again, I understand media is indeed inseparable from politics.

"...people are inherently connected to politics."

I disagree. This varies from society to society - it might be true for America, not true for other places. People in those places know what the sphere of influence of politics is and many areas are totally separated from politics. In the US, in contrast, almost anything can be (and routinely is) made a political issue.
Not only that, but the concepts as stated are 1) so bad that people can already hate the books without having read them - so it's not only part of the conversation at parties, but also the loudest, most contentious conversation at parties, and 2) so vague that they have to be referred to by their short, pithy names, loudly and repeatedly, or else everyone would forget what they were arguing about, and 3) those names are also old tropes that everyone has heard or the essential words in old tropes that everyone has heard, so people feel like the books or concepts must have been around longer and have more basis than they actually do.

Of course, this is really the list of the biggest benefits to publishing Gladwell books:)
I don't see anything remotely disturbing about that sentence. On the other hand, I'm disturbed by how readily you condemn other people for something they never said.
You know, as much as I laughed at your comment I think you have a point here.

The long times it takes for them to even answer a mail (if at all) would probably give a heads-up to anything fishy going on in your account. Secondly, unless your account is actually worth the wait, they would probably try to attack an easier target instead of Google or Facebook.
Hehe.. I'm not new, just not active :) http://cl.ly/IYX9
Sorry yes, I got the asymmetry the wrong way around :)

The problem this causes (for me) is that if I have commits in other branches, 'git push' will fail (as other branches can't be fast-forwarded), but 'git pull' won't fix it. Of course, I can get around it, but it's annoying.
How Kansas Won the Google Fiber Jackpot And Why California Never Will
I made sure to setup my G/FB/T tags to load async. They show up on the page when they are done loading and don't prevent the rest of the page from loading as quickly as possible.

That said, I agree, they are slow to load and it is crazy how much extra stuff they load into the DOM.
I wrote another comment above questioning whether some of the early multicore promises of Erlang have become less relevant with the rise of single-emulated-core VPS servers. That could have dampened the hype.

Also, I'm not an Erlang expert but Erlang does seem to have had a much larger influence than just the uptake of the language. Scala and Clojure have certainly borrowed heavily from it, and that has had a further trickle-down effect into other higher order languages (eg, the actor model).
I don't see why using a fictional character to make this point is harmful. A much wider range of people know who Indiana Jones is than who (take your pick of experts consulted with by a government) is.

Because he chose a more widely known (albeit fictional) example, more people are able to better grasp the idea he is presenting. It's just good communication.
The relationship won't be linear, immediate, proportional or unary. But it will be causal.

So... you agree with the comment you're replying to, then?

No one disputes that a body cannot burn more energy than it has taken in. However, other factors can swamp a "mere" 25% percent reduction in caloric intake. IF has been the most effective weight loss strategy for me, but it doesn't work forever unless you keep reducing the amount you're eating. Eating only every other day worked great for two months or so, but eventually the loss tapered off (this was 2010), and something else must be done. The body doesn't need nearly as much energy as we typically give it, apparently, and varying the amount discarded can affect weight gain or loss greatly.
Ya, I thought that was interesting too. You can basically tell which benchmarks are used as internal metrics by each dev team (which makes sense, since Google and Mozilla created their own benchmarks), but I wonder how much they look at performance in the others as well.
You are correct, but I think in this case there are only so many different ways to write a range check function, and probably a few obvious ones. If you get 100 programmers to write a range check, there will be a lot more overlap than if you get 100 songwriters to write a chorus... even if they are teenagers.
Taraji vs Etoile du Sahel en direct
(disclaimer: I'm ex-BioWare/EA and work for a[n awesome] gaming startup)

Social games provide tremendous value, just not where most people think. It's not the "social" features, it's the ease of access.

"G2" is not about delivering better social games. It's about delivering "real" games in the browser. If instead of downloading and installing an 8GB package, you could play Diablo 3 by simply going to a website, would you ever choose the former?

iTunes revolutionized music delivery, just like Steam did for games. "G2" is about going one step further. Think Spotify. The same [quality] games you'd download and install will instead be instant-on and resumable from anywhere.

Facebook and Google+ get it. That's why Facebook developed App Center (to showcase top-quality games), and why Google+ is putting so much effort into Native Client (Bastion, anyone?) and Play.

Adobe gets it, too. They're doubling down on Flash development. Stage 3D gives you GPU access - this means 3D in games (see trailer: https://www.rumblegames.com/kingsroad -- disclaimer, I work here, and let me know if you want beta access: mike.babineau@rumblegames.com).

Zynga understands delivery. But could they build a quality game? This takes a different approach to game design, and serious investment into a 3D pipeline and rich game tech.

BioWare, Ubisoft, and other big-name studios understand how to build quality games. But their games are delivered through traditional channels. They need to shift from box products (and from current "digital delivery") and figure out how to build and operate what is essentially highly scalable web tech, and how to operate games as services.

I agree with the author: the companies best positioned to deliver "G2" are a new breed. Look for hybrid teams, people who have built traditional games alongside those who have built high-scale web platforms. This is what will turn the entire industry on its head.
How many kids want to go to school and how many are told by their parents that 'this is what you do so you can be happy and successful later.' I suspect more of the latter.

But like leaning Git, earning your education will pay off. Does that mean Git is without flaws? Of course not. And if you want to work to improve it, and release a better version, go for it. But anybody that sticks with SVN and refuses to learn modern DVCS is not somebody I'd hire.

Maybe this is a problem on IT-department, line-of-business teams (where most software developers work) but if Bay Area tech companies are a leading indicator, a big majority of Engineers I work with use and love DVCS's like Git and HG and there's not this groundswell of resistance.

And while this isn't related to my previous comments:

To anybody who has tried Git and ended up "losing work" because of a misunderstanding of the commands, let me assure you: It's actually a lot harder to lose work than you think.

Anything you add to the Index (eg git add foo.py) or commit is stored in the Reflog (which is just a DAG). The reflog is garbage collected periodically -- see below for details. Within that window, you can recover any lost state from the reflog.

So how long does Git keep things around by default?

Intermediate products of conflicted merges - 15 Days

Unreachable commits (do a git reset --hard HEAD~1?) - 30 Days

Intermediate products of a resolved merge conflict? - 60 Days

Everything Else? - At least 90 days.
In general, I'd say that if you are getting a lawyer involved, you need to have fairly solid evidence of real loss of a value more than about $20,000, otherwise the fees are going to eat up any award you might eventually get (don't forget even if you get a favorable judgement the other side can appeal, and will if they have staff lawyers who are getting a salary either way).
Apollo 8, 10, and 11 had all already used "free return" trajectories, which would have caused the spacecraft to "slingshot around the moon" and return to earth in the case of main engine failure. Mission Control would not have needed a cold call from a hippie physics student to remind them they could try that with Apollo 13.

This could be a garbled version of some other piece of critical advice coming in a cold call. But it's also possible that some hippie grad student thought he came up with the idea of free return trajectories on the fly, and assumed that long hair was the reason he never got credit for telling Mission Control what it had already known for years.
No, of course not. The legal argument here is to determine if these lines fall under a de minimus exception. Quoting: "Courts find a use de minimis only if it is both quantitatively and qualitatively insignificant."

As there's only 9 lines of code, that's quantitatively small. The continual references to 'high school programmer' is to argue that it's also qualitatively small. Hence, de minimus.
I know "lifestyle businesses" are perennially unpopular

I would like a private forum for people building lifestyle businesses.
Well that's about as far from a valid analogy as you're likely to get. Rebecca Black's "Friday" is the entire work, and if you told any high school student "write me a song" they'd probably never come up with that exact song.

But something like the rangeCheck function is what you'd get if you asked a junior programmer "before you're going to access that datastructure make sure your within its range". Furthermore it's a completely irrelevant part of Android as a whole which gave Google no competitive advantage whatsoever.
Ruby/Rails and Python/Django seem to be the most common choices among YC startups. They are pretty much interchangeable on the development time, costs and maintainability fronts.
I would also argue that with iOS, they have the safest (big) mobile OS available as well.
ASLR and DEP have long been implemented and with iOS 6 they are also implementing Kernel ASLR.

Almost everything is sandboxed and there are no known viruses out there (for devices that haven't been jailbroken).

Jailbreaks are still possible (like you said nothing is perfectly secure), but have been slowed down to a point where hackers wait for a big OS release, before they decide to burn the exploits.
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Tweet anonymously (French)
I never saw the Shame Project, but after reading the above link I think they're over-reaching way more than Gladwell's worst stories.

For example they say, "In 1990, a Gladwell article in the Washington Post warned that laws banning cigarettes could “put a serious strain on the nation’s Social Security and Medicare programs.”"

I read the article (as they link to it), and frankly it's not as inflammatory as their quote would lead one to believe. Gladwell brings up a reasonable point that smokers tend to die younger and hence may reduce total costs in the health care system. And he, rightly IMO, says that we should move the anti-smoking movement as a health issue rather than a cost-cutting issue (And 22 years after this article was written his position has been borne out. Few people view smoking as a cost issue.)

Regarding the American Spectator -- this was apparently one of the few places he was offered a job. This "3rd Party" list he's on also includes Penn Jillette and I suspect many other names we know. Being an open ear isn't the same as being a shill. John Gruber is a shill, while Nilay Pital is an open ear.
Honestly, the bank protocol is overkill for 90% of users. Most people using iCloud are using it to sync photos of their cat. The number who are keeping "their life" in the cloud is basically confined to techno-geeks.

Your average iCloud user is not necessarily going to want to a) prove their identity initially or b) do so again to get support.

I think you are better off taking the approach of "don't put something in the cloud if you can't afford to lose/expose it." Yeah, that pretty much limits its usefulness, at least or now. So it is.
Git is a tool. You use it if it solves your problem. You can certainly use it the same way you'd use Subversion and it's not any harder - it'll just behave as a version control system that can buffer commits offline with two "levels" of commit - local and remote.

If you want to use the more complicated stuff, then there is no way to avoid learning the more complicated ideas.

There is a lot I don't understand about Git, but, as far as my usage patterns have gone, I'm very satisfied.
I don't know, I have mixed feelings about this. It's akin to building even more inscrutable captchas or tightening up airport security measures every time a new breach happens. At best it might close one particular loop hole but at what cost and incovenience to millions of people and billions of transactions?

I had the misfortune to lock myself out of my bank account once or twice and the process for unlocking it was so dreadful (a 30 minutes interrogation with questions like "when and where did I make my last ATM transaction") that
since then I keep the required sensitive info in a GPG encrypted file so that I never have to call them again. Other equally frustrated but less tech savvy customers are probably doing the same with post-it notes. Is this an improvement?
Depo.sh: Deploy node.js apps to a server with ssh, git and virtualhosts
Korean Starcraft II Players and Addiction
Interesting fact, everybody goes just one day at a time. That's how time works!
What you mean when you say "you can get around it" is just specifying the branch you want to push. Just sayin'. It's not like you have to muck with settings and jump hoops.
Huh? What is your definition of "politics"? What society are you thinking of? North Korea? Even there (maybe especially there) politics plays a huge role in technology.
Too bad they didn't patent it.
This is a great initiative. I wonder if there are any plans to bridge sections with WiMax or similar and/or break out from 1G fibre to Copper GigE or wifi in population points to reduce the client-side install and equipment cost.
The Real Tech Wives of Entrepreneurs (Audio)
Your body adapts quite quickly. I don't eat until noon, and am full of energy in the mornings.

My brother tried, and it only took two days for his system to adjust.
Well... the post IS amusing...
That's the UI used in Safari 6. It's pretty terrible, in my opinion; it hides too much information in a single button. It's roughly equivalent to Chrome's download bar, except with less information.
>It's unlikely that an open source language is both "secret", and has oodles of libraries - things don't tend to work that way.

That is true, but, at the same time, irrelevant. For example, at my company we do e-mail archiving. Does Erlang have any libraries to facilitate that? No. Not even close. But Apache Lucene does. So, what we do is use the Erlang OTP Java interface [1] to allow Erlang to handle the message passing and parallelization, while Lucene handles the actual indexing and search.

The way I see it, Erlang makes it very easy to add a message passing layer on top of whatever single-threaded process you currently have. This allows you to scale your applications without having to muck about with their internals too much - you launch multiple instances of your existing single threaded code and use Erlang to handle all the messiness of message passing.

I think that is what makes Erlang such a secret weapon. The fact that you can very easily add a message passing layer to anything with Erlang greatly simplifies the job of parallelizing existing programs.

[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/jinterface/java/com/ericsson/...
In addition to fasting on the month of Ramadan, Muslims are “recommended” (i.e. it's considered virtuous but not obligatory) to fast on Mondays and Thursdays of every week. That sounds eerily similar to the 5:2 diet in the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawm#Days_for_voluntary_fasting

Muslims also know what's called prophet David's fasting, which is to fast every other day. However, considering that includes water, it's considerably difficult to maintain. I'm not sure I heard of anyone other than David himself do it for a long period of time! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_view_of_David
Get rid of the guilt
This reminds me of The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator:
http://malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/
What I found more interesting than the SMS is the auto-release of a wolf-repelling chemical. The sheep gain a weapon of sorts, though not fired under conscious control. Sort of a cyborg-ish extension to the sheep's natural ability.
Stateless and Proud in the Realtime World
The author of this post writes smbc [1], an extremely popular webcomic, among a variety of other things.

[1] http://www.smbc-comics.com/
I've been doing this for two months, works great for me. I'm down six pounds, and ~%40 stronger. And I was already fairly lean.
Git is alright. You can learn it just like anything else. Yeah, it could have been simpler. Agreed. It comes from Linus, who judging only from the talks I've seen online --don't know him personally, can be very opinionated and "asshole-ish" at times.

My pet peeve with Git is that it stopped once it supported Linux kernel-type projects. If you are working on anything other than that it is likely that you are going to run into all manner of non-text resource files and Git sucks at helping you maintain these. Case in point: Graphically intensive iOS apps.
To be fair, though the error I'm seeing blames the database (エラー: データベースに接続できません).
That's 'Internet Recovery', which is just enough to fire up WLAN and grab a recovery image to netboot from in the event your disk is totally unreadable. Unlikely it'd still be able to trigger a wipe this way. Recovery itself is still it's own partition (from my mid-2011 Air):

apaulin:~/ $ diskutil list [13:38:41]

/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 120.5 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
Goweb, Gongo, falcore, go-fastweb, go-start, mango, web, web.go, wfdr, Tideland, Twister

http://godashboard.appspot.com/project
One thing you probably overlooked: fat cells add to BMR.
I can still write software, discuss ideas and think about architecture etc etc. while totally ignoring both of those guys.
Security through support obscurity?