skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it's someone who already knows how to program (3+ years experience), they can probably get through LPTHW in about a day, and start writing Python without too much issue.

I still put semicolons at the ends of lines once in a while, though.
Most of the discussion here is focused on skill vs luck. Those are far from the only two variables is success, however. There's Networking, the ability to sell yourself and the ability to target a specific niche (which in art, means not being too different, but not being exactly the same as everybody else, either). These factors influence success more than skill and luck combined.
I'm just impressed he tells the story so honestly. He could have characterized what was said differently.
Speaking of Amazon, you may enjoy: http://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Day-Selling-American/dp/15...
We'd like to build something that people find indispensable enough to pay for. How exactly that works: we're still thinking about it.

Not sure exactly what you mean by 'stack up', but they're all fairly comparable. Some are easier than others. We built a lightweight meta-API to deal with them all uniformly.
The US DOJ has released this excellent memo on why child pornography is illegal, despite the lack of an "obvious" victim (you've probably seen arguments along those lines for why it should be legal if you read Slashdot or Reddit at all):

[HUGE TRIGGER WARNING FOR DESCRIPTION OF ABUSE]

http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/downloads/ReluctantRebe...

The basic reason why the "give them a safe outlet" arguments don't hold water is because it normalizes the behaviour as they discuss it with like-minded individuals, which leads to easier rationalization and more abuse.
The reason: they found out that it's hard to make money when users can trivially strip out your ads.
Relax buddy. No need to get so defensive. It's just a notable coincidence when debating the merits of age-weighted voting.
You sound so sure of yourself with regards to DU. Do have a PhD in it?
Principle Component Analysis
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1... --

I'm so much as saying they were two equally suitable choices, who both worked equally hard, but one happened to audition right after lunch. Regardless of the uncanny observation skills, we're still human and in the case of two great choices, even superficial differences such as the serotonin level of the director at the time of the first impression can matter.

However, the one who got the part, by nature of the increased experience, is now a better actor. This doesn't at all discount the hard work of the one who made it, but suggests that luck matters as well.

This doesn't discount those of us who work hard to create our own luck. As mentioned to another reply, you may have to roll yatzhee, but it is your hard work that gives you 1,000 roles instead of one.
Ah, interesting. In natural DNA this is achieved by using a more complex encoding scheme (3 base pairs -> one amino acid), combined with the vast majority of DNA not encoding genes directly.
All great advice. However, it's a tad amusing that someone still has to put in the effort to get these points across, points that the rest of the business world would find obvious. Are these business practices still perpetuated in the Valley?

Generate revenue? Of course!

Show the revenue growth slide? I'm not sure who that makes look worse: the fundraisers not showing it, or the investors not expecting it.
It seems to me that the (arguably) best discussion sites are those governed by benign dictatorship: firm moderation and clear guidelines. Yes, there are edge cases where judgement must be made but clear guidelines make this easier.

Whenever I think of a good example of a community that has managed to stay pretty high-quality for some time, I can't help but think of Matt Haughey's Metafilter. I'm sure the nominal charge for membership helps, but the (paid) moderators are very good.
Opening up your browser's JS console and typing
alert("hello, world!")

is way easier than running GORILLAS.BAS
A point the article misses is that design is very conceptually similar to code. If you can design something it can almost always be coded and you will have a fantastic understanding of how it all works. (I'm thinking more towards UX design than aesthetic design.)
Why does the caption under the baby tiger in in your demo read "Say what Nigga"? Was that supposed to be funny?
Electric Flight of Fancy
There's a very good reason to make it run only on Facebook - it's a "Facebook game", through and through.

To be clear, this isn't a real-time strategy game. It is no different to any of the hundreds of "skinner box" games already on Facebook. I let the app access my Facebook, but refused to let it post anything to my friends (make posts from this app available to: only me). Every time I reach an action where it wants me to message my friends or post to my wall (these are frequent) the app crashes and I have to restart it to continue. Probably not a coincidence!

In addition you can click on buildings in progress to speed them up, initially for free but I've played enough of these games to know soon that resource will become limited, unless I spam my friends or fork out cash.

From a gameplay perspective, you just click on what it tells you you need to be clicking on next, and then do quests to unlock more items that you can click on. You collect resources from your resource harvesting buildings by clicking on them periodically when they are full, an absolutely classic FB game feature that is completely absent from any actual PC game or RTS game.

Lastly, it doesn't even leverage the HTML platform well. One thing I expect from HTML is for things to be at least semi-usable on many devices, and in particular I expect sites to work well on reasonable resolutions. I'm on a MBP and even in fullscreen mode, I couldn't get the whole game to fit on screen, and so had to scroll in the browser to be able to click on some of the buttons. This really negatively impacted my experience of button clicking, especially as sometimes it took me a long time to figure out which button I was being told to click.

Edit: Played on for a few more minutes, and sure enough, time, money, or friends. I can really, really recommend that anyone on HN who hasn't played one of these games creates a throwaway Facebook account and tries one out, just to see how vacuous and manipulative these games really are.
Thank you for saying this far more eloquently and admittedly less emotionally than I had originally written in the reply I decided not to post. I love LCTHW, but as a designer, this post was a little offensive to me - it read as "Well, if you can't do the hard stuff, do the easy stuff."

Basically, my gist was that web design is already overwhelmed with people that used it as a backup plan - be it print designers, graphic designers or general artists that realized the former two were all moving into web and that's where the money was. The outcome of this can be seen across the web; information hierarchy and complementary interaction design take a backseat to overdone graphics and bad UX.

If you're going to be designing for code, you're going to need to understand code, particularly CSS/JavaScript capabilities and fallbacks. It will make you a better designer and possibly help you transition into the dev you wanted to be.
In that, the Shuttle was very much like the Concorde: a unique and complex system beyond the edge of knowledge (at its creation), full of flaws and working through a combination of sheer luck and heroic efforts.
Stop Calling it a $600 Phone
The proposal is about sharing your charger -- is it going to be a sleep-over? Hey, that really would be like Airbnb.
The demo pulls real data. Sorry for the offensive content! We felt it was better to give in to the unpredictability of the live feeds.
I think that's someone's live tweet.
A Descent into Limbo -- Brian W. Kernighan
A judge ruled that an IP is not a person: http://techland.time.com/2012/05/07/you-are-not-an-ip-addres...
> Can't we all just act like adults and learn to deal with the negative comments - possibly even learn from the? Do we really need to protected from snarky comments?

Being able to function in the face of people making negative comments about you on the Internet is one of the basic survival skills of the 21st century.

> People need to start learning to cope with the real world and not expecting 'the system' to protect us from ourselves.

This perspective directly contradicts many HN'ers political leanings.
I see. Yes Twitter can be unpredictable at times... At first glance I thought that were canned images and text; didn't realize they were just random people on Twitter.
Using the Load Function - Introduction to jQuery UI - Part 18 (free video)
Google, Oracle deny direct payments to media, bloggers
As the OP was suggesting, I'm just trying to provide my feedback in a more pleasant way. On the other hand, your feedback seems to be rather harsh and all negative. Unless you were trying to be ironic. In which case I say brilliant!
we don't ever assemble; we are reading 115bp (96bp data, 15bp address), and pair reads using seqprep to reduce errors; a few other things are done, but the basics is that we just take all reads at a particular barcode and call consensus by majority vote. 10 bit errors in 5.27e6
My suggestions/issues as I test the app:

- As spikefromspace says, it would be very good to see what are the actual capabilities of the app before downloading it.
- Tag suggestions would be great.
- Is there any way to save drafts not only in local, but also in the Wordpress blog itself?

I didn't find any bug, although the preferences panel opens in a different screen when in full-screen mode, it's a little bit annoying but no big deal.

With a bit more of work (for example, supporting rich text editing is a must) it could be a great app, and I don't know any other desktop Wordpress editor. Keep going!
I managed to make it to CUSEC 2011 but not 2012. Looks like I missed some really great presentations. It's unfortunate when this conference is in another province.
Looks cool! When I first saw it I thought you where this guy:
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
http://vimeo.com/36579366

Planing to support Octave/Matlab at some point?
Make upvotes and downvotes visible (i.e. not the final number the actual list of users). Knowing that no one will know fosters petty up/down votes.
Ha yeah I mean my advice isn't exactly revolutionary, but many people don't realize that they're going to need it in their Series A now, when they wouldnt have before
Can't recommend Filepicker enough. If your product involves any sort of document/photo access, you should try them out! I've been using it for a few months and have been pleased with the integration friendliness for a web-first developer like myself, the enthusiastic support (of course, small team, we'll how it scales), and variety of services connected. I especially like the "filter services by mime type" feature. The "save to" is massively useful from a consumer perspective as well.

Edit: A bit more context more my enthusiasm.
They might be taking the view that when Twitter sees that their third party apps are showing the adverts Twitter is sending out, a lot of the pressure on the relationship will come off. It's not like this policy has to be static, in a year the policy could change completely.

And on the flip side, they have to stay positive and at keep motivation up if they're going to work on some other revenue streams which aren't dependent on Twitter.
The electric cost of a charge is ~2$, and you get ~250 miles a charge x 500 = 125,000 miles for 1,000$. Assuming 3.5$/G gas + 30MPG + 125,000 miles costs 14,500$. That leaves ~13,500$ to pay for the next battery pack and the overhead charging.

PS: The real issue is it's not a smooth transition, but if you assume the 2nd battery pack is not worth it you get 250,000 miles including 1 replacement pack.
At the risk of being a negative nelly, the Soyuz design is even older, and overall probably fundamentally safer. Also, the Shuttle is only ostensibly "reusable", in reality every single flight required months of refurbishment which included meticulous inspections of the TPS tiles, complete replacement of the payload bay liner, complete purging of all fuel in the system, and even replacement of the engines.

We certainly learned a lot from Shuttle operations but in terms of spacecraft design mostly we learned what not to do.
it's at the start of the first read.
Metafilter seems to be doing alright with its $5 membership fee, but then they also have pretty hands-on moderators (as opposed to community votes)
> accountability is required for high safety

It's not. That's complete bullshit, and the On-Board Software Group demonstrated it by being as flawless as can be during the whole history of the Shuttle: as far as I know there was no personal accountability in the OSG, the only thing accountable was The Process supported by a strong culture of adversarial testing.

Personal accountability in such a system brings politics and career advancement in focus and leads to issues being shoved under the rug when inconvenient and energy being expended in finger-pointing and blame games rather than fixing problems.

> So it's not a personal, vindictive "your fault", its an impersonal "the problem is here, lets fix it".

No, it's not. Accountability is very precisely "your fault", that's all it is. That's pretty much the definition of it.
Plan9 doesn't replace Linux-the-kernel; it contains its own kernel, but there exists a port of the Plan9 utilities to the Linux kernel, replacing the GNU utilities (I'm not sure if this is complete).

For what it's worth, I use wmii on Linux, which uses the Plan9 model for configuration. It makes it super-scriptable and really easy to use.
I'm sure you already do, but just to get it off my chest: please use unusual amounts of caution when implementing a technical solution like this.

My gut feel is that your example of the voting system tweak will make users like me might not count. Granted, I don't comment nor contribute directly by providing links.
I have various reasons for my silence like the fact English is not my first language (nor even my second language, so it takes me forever to compose something in English, and I still run the risk of my comment turning into grammar crit, with the point I try to make being lost in that noise), a lot of people on the site is intimidatingly intelligent, my points have already been made, etc, etc.

But. I do vote. Due to my non-existent karma I cannot downvote, only upvote. It's limited power, but I try to use it wisely. I cannot downvote the horrible negativity I saw, for example, in the wikipedia design thread (a submission I found fascinating even though it was flawed, as it was lovely to see how their thought process worked as they redesigned the visuals), but I did upvote one or two comments that I thought were thoughtful and added to the discussion. I would like to believe that I made some difference to the tone of the thread, even if it's in a very limited way.

Those that see the world as all shades of gray are not generally very vocal - you don't see a vocal middle ground in most arguments. But this doesn't mean we don't exist. And I don't know how "negative" comments will be classified, and I think people like me run a very real risk of silently becoming false positives when we stupidly upvote things using our own dodgy rules.

So - please consider unexpected side effects such technical things introduce. I guess what I'm saying is I'm already put off by some of the unwritten rules I perceive on this site, if the voting system is also rigged to make some people silently powerless I don't see how to be useful at all. It is off course your prerogative to decide that my type, the silent-but-voting user is unwanted, and if so, that's fine. But I hope I contributed something from time to time.
They might have seen this: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/ (You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do)
not true, plan9 as of the 4th edition has a OSI/FSF approved license.
Most people I know couldn't give two hoots about talking to random people on the internet, even interesting random people. All they care about is their friends (and maybe famous/notable people). If your social network contains < 100,000 people, chances are it doesn't contain many friends, so most people will discount it. Now, us techies are used to a degree of anonymity, and are used to interacting with people we haven't met, so I don't think it is impossible that app.net will be successful in that demographic. I think it is akin to Netflix: some people just want to watch a movie, it doesn't really matter which one so long as it is a decent one; these people might like Netflix. But others only really care about that specific movie their friend said was good; chances are Netflix doesn't stream it, and they will be disappointed.
That is okay, they don't have to do that.

So long as it is a group norm to do adhere to the guidelines those who don't will be downvoted and their conduct will have little influence on the community.
Yes, that's approximately correct. The shortest-range S gets 160mi per charge. 500 * 160 = 80,000 miles, which isn't bad for the first scheduled maintenance. In fact, Tesla guarantees their batteries to 100,000 miles. If the battery costs $20K to replace, well, a gas engine + transmission + exhaust system in a $60,000 car depreciates as much in that time, too.
I once interviewed a potential hire in person and at the end of the process he asked 'How did I do?' then pulled out of list of questions in the expectation of forensic debrief as to where he could improve his interview technique!

Frankly, interviewing is a game with many unwritten rules - one is if you don't get the gig, you are expected to politely accept the decision and move on. Another is the interviewer will often decide in the first 60 seconds if you're getting hired, so asking for feedback on where you 'went wrong' is a waste of everyone's time.

Remember, when you interview, your potential employer has every intention of hiring you assuming you tick a few boxes. This is also part of the game. Can you figure out what those boxes are? Put yourself in their shoes. What would you like to see in you? As long as you continue to land interviews, don't become disheartened - keep going and you will get hired.
> But what happens if the alarm does go off?

I wake up, curse, and go back to sleep, and so does every other person on the street.

This attack isn't about finding if a house has an alarm, it's about finding out if anyone cares if the alarm goes off. In most cases, no-one does.

If you ring the police in this country (UK) and tell them an alarm is going off, they won't go to the call. There are just too many false alarms!

They will however go if you actually spot someone on the property (and in my experience are pretty prompt about that), and they will go if your alarm is a suitable certified one (in which case, it's much less likely to go off {it requires both an entrance alarm trigger AND a motion alarm trigger to activate} and would have a direct phoneline to the police and/or private security company).
Hi there. We think it's super useful too and therefore really excited to help developers onboard.

We've learned quite a bit about how to email developers and still continuing to learn to to best serve you all.

For instance, we started out sending html email, like we've seen other companies do. It wasn't nearly as helpful as personally emailing our new signups in plain text.

We've also experimented with newsletters like AWS does and targeted emails based on weekly actives and other metrics. In this, we're finding that the most effective emails match the relationship. If you are a current user, a short personal email works well. If you signed up a long time ago, a newsletter is relatively effective at getting someone to poke at it again, but also easy for them to ignore.

As you have discovered, we're also playing with frequency. I'd have to look it up in our db to be sure, but it looks like you happened to be in a small a/b test group that we've termed "eager". That in combination with being sent the monthly newsletter means you may have been emailed many times. I apologize for that.

We aren't big fans of spammy emails and we've been careful to watch the number of "spam reports" and been proud that it has been so low. However, it's good to hear this feedback from you so we can continue to learn.

I'm always happy to talk with customers; my email is liyan@filepicker.io.
Well it's been sort of clear which way the wind was blowing for a while now, but definitely 3 or 4 years ago Twitter was bursting at the seems with developer support for innovation in all directions. It was an extremely welcoming platform compared to Facebook and iOS. Their developer PR has completely reversed that.

Of course if you're cynical you could have called it from the very beginning, but the point is it wasn't wholly unreasonable to believe that Twitter was willing to let developers capture real value in exchange for becoming gargantuan and providing critical infrastructure (ie. the old changing the world thing). Whereas now it's very very clear that Twitter is not willing to share any significant value. They want to capture it all, and they are adjusting the ToS to put them in a position to cut people off at the knees the minute they smell some value escaping from the ecosystem.
OK, here are some recent Show HN posts that I randomly picked (with more than 2 comments):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396195
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382846
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4381905
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396195
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4379278

Skimming through the comments I didn't see much support for the condescending, snarky attitude, many user seem to genuinely help the OP.

You can probably find examples of the other kind (but please do, rather than just saying "I feel like ...") but this at least shows, I think, that the attitude is not very common.
I'm sorry, can you clarify what that means? You wrote each piece of data 100 times? what does the 1000 refer to?
Final Advice on Rewriting
US intends to chase Assange, cables show
Sometimes an Apple Store can get comical if you just want to go in and buy a product. A nice worker who is emphatically not willing to actually sell you anything advises how to get your name on the queue, at which point you have to stand next to that table until someone frees up from some other endless sale.

I guess that's why they introduced the "buy online and just take it and leave" model, so you don't have to deal with anyone, but it doesn't work for stuff in the back room.
It's all about emotional intelligence, the problem is that there are no really good tutorials...
Actually the space shuttle is the safest launch vehicle to date. From the ones that have at least 100 launches (in order to be able to properly compute stats for them), here are their failure rates as taken from http://www.ontonix.com/Blog/Outliers_-_understanding_Nature_... :

2% US Space Shuttle

5% R-7 (Russian Soyuz)

5% Ariane 1-4 (European)

6% Tsyklon (Russian)

7% Kosmos (Russian)

10% Thor/Delta/N1/N2/H1 (US)

11% Titan 2/3/4 (US)

12% Proton (Russian)

13% Kosmos 2 (Russian R-12)

14% Atlas (US)
Jailed for using a nonstandard browser
Could you talk about the editor? Without knowing the editor specifically, it'd would seem at a severe disadvantage to either editors with much large communities (vi, emacs) or editors that are much more modern (textmate, sublime?).