skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying that this isn't the case, I was hoping for more clarification. The way that the OP writes it is that this "side note" was included in the final briefing pointing out the flawed hypothesis.

The OP doesn't say how conclusive this "side note" was, or if it was one such note among many others. If it is the latter situation, then yes, it's understandable that it was seen as an acceptable blind spot.

But the situation, as the OP describes it, sounds pretty clear cut: The foam issues could come from poor installation procedures. But testing found that the defective foam "could not have been liberated from an internal installation defect"...

So I'm just interested in knowing the level of conclusiveness in that sidenote.
I got sick to my stomach when I read that.
11. The stock price is too low

The stock has been sliding in recent months. This sucks because stock options granted to people being recruited now will have a higher potential upside than similar grants made around the time of the IPO. New recruits should be the have-nots on the totem pole.
I actually like this idea. The idea of Flesch-Kincaid tests. There was a guy on reddit who analyzed the words on different subreddits and he came to the conclusion that the average word was 'because', and average word length was around 6.7

I would think we could modify the scoring system a bit where common English words are penalized, and uncommon words are weighted a bit more. The only problem I see is, if someone plans to post code, that's going to wreck their score. Another thing would be that most of our programming names/terminologies contain very few letters. So, an exclusion/inclusion list would definitely be needed.
What I learned from applying to YC S12
I enjoy Collections as an idea, but despite the pretty interface, everything they've done so far has been buggy or half-assed. First beta launch and not only could no one connect, but they exposed information that would allow anyone to access anyone else's docs. Last launch they add instagram, but no ability to remove accounts, in addition to being very buggy. Now this launch and still buggy (I can't even use our google spreadsheet we use for a test matrix). In addition the beautiful new site broke (for whatever reason) and all the text smashed into on lump of overlapping mess.

You guys have something that is incredibly close to being awesome, but sloppy execution will put a sour taste in everyones mouth and scare them off from each successive release. Spend a little extra time and make sure you're releasing stuff that is bulletproof and your company will grow.
Honest question - what does modern slavery have to do with white guilt? According to the wiki entry on modern slavery "Most are debt slaves, largely in South Asia, who are under debt bondage incurred by lenders, sometimes even for generations."
The Myths of Startups (Excuses of the Wantrepreneur)
I love this thing, ever since you've announced it. Just wondering if it would eventually support Common Lisp?
YC S12 Companies - 51 and counting
Mars Curiosity Rover First Road Trip Plan
Maybe a couple times a month?

I don't think Ask posts should be penalized in the rankings. They contain great information & original content, plus they hint at the overall climate of the community.
If you self-hosted the script then it wouldn't be able to communicate with their servers, I think (someone can correct me).
> ... in a hurry

But that's exactly it - if you are in a hurry, you'd be more willing to create a dependency on 3rd party and take on the risks that you can avoid otherwise. I'm sure there is a market for filepicker-like webapp component services, I just suspect that their user base is going to be highly transient (edit - or hard to monetize on).
I like the idea of contributing but it would be nice if I could give a simple up vote rather than having to add a full comment. You may get weighed down by "me too +1" comments.
not sure if that says bad things about Vim or good...
Is anyone actually using MariaDB in production at a reasonable scale? Our DBAs tried to convince us to switch from MySQL to Maria a few months ago. All of the devs on my team looked around and couldn't find any testimonials, use-cases or benchmarks that weren't done by someone on the Maria dev team. I realize Monty is behind it but I don't really feel like being an early adopter based on fear that some day Oracle might do something bad with MySQL.
Gawd, I hope not. You should punch whoever said that in the throat.

But in relation to the scenario you mentioned of picking up an item on the way home while your partner was at Whole Foods, yes, a simple SMS saying "I'm picking up cheese, is that cool?" just works.

If what you meant by that scenario is that there are many people who co-habitate and frequently and simultaneously do grocery shopping at different stores, then I can't really comment on that.
(Sorry didn't realize this was actually linked to the github discussion/thought it was an Ask HN)

Forking the specs sounds good.

Meant the lacking in answers for API docs in general. Especially facebook in the past; though Graph Explorer is much nicer!
If the western world (re)colonized all the dysfunctional nations run by warlords that prevent relief from getting to people that need it, that would be very helpful. Strangely, nobody seems to consider this solution. Imposing order and good government on areas with pathologically bad governments seems obviously good.
Sorry, but what are the metrics being used here? If academia is as slow as to "get" the Internet revolution as the OP claims (and I have no doubt that this is the situation), is it possible to make a service that easily impresses academics even if that service is nothing more than a check-bit.ly-to-see-if-this-hyperlink-has-been-tweeted wrapper, with some basic full-text searching of the obvious research abstract repos?
AnyList isn't a great name unless you have a lot of brand recognition with AnyLeaf. I don't know if you do I don't live in sfbay.
pngtocss: png with gradient goes in, out spits the CSS for that gradient
How would you deal with the issue of having to respond to everybody's comments, this could end up being a time sink.

E.g. you write a beautiful proposal on some new feature and then joe schmoe comes along and shits on your idea without taking time to consider it.

Now you have to either ignore his comment, leaving it there for other schmoes to read, or respond to it which takes time away from doing something constructive.
A couple questions:

1. Why not assign karma by running something like pagerank over the vote graph? I think giving overwhelming weight to high karma old-timers would make HN more like them, which would be an improvement, right?

2. What about assigning karma not by your comments, but by the responses to them?

I figure karma-from-replies would shift the conversation to "what should we be asking about this", whereas karma-from-comments incents "what can i say that the masses will like".

Given commenting has a higher work threshold than voting, it might be "manipulated" less. Gaming it would be more obvious. And subjectively, posts that are questions seem to lead to higher quality discussion (more genuine?). Maybe you'd have to put more work into getting users to not feed trolls and assholes, and ask/reply more to excellent comments. Not sure if practical...

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.
Also their selection of games was really poor.
craigslist soft launches maps
Are you still using it? If not, why?

That's valuable info.
Well in every joke lies a bit of truth: http://www.scribd.com/doc/25450984/Freedman-Compliance-WITHO...
So what? Someone else invented lots of things, like smartphones and tablets. Has no bearing on whether they are aggressively pursued for profit. And sucked, past tense.

There are any number of better strategies Kodak could have taken besides "waiting to die," as you appear to recommend.
If you can end slavery for $50 I'd love to hear that plan.
I assume you are talking about "drug markets."
Making your Drupal themes Retina Friendly
The way the Customs Service sees it: you claim that the package does not contain goods that are subject to customs or import duties.

Cross-border issues are tricky. Normal (U.S.) legal rights tend to disappear when a transaction becomes cross-border (excluding NAFTA cross-border traffic). My suggestion? If feasible, ship it through Canada or Mexico.
There may not have appeared to have been any personal accountability, but make no mistake if anything had gone wrong with the On-Board Software the EXACT same accountability process would have been initiated to ensure that the same human error did not occur for a second time.
So how would I use light table in building a django app? I'm trying to envision some real world use cases for myself.
10 sec maker: Mauke Moviestarplanet
"+1" or "yes" appear to be the norm on GitHub. Example: https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/pull/443
GitHub lets the repo owner/maintainer delete other people's comments. Strangely, they appear to also allow the repo owner edit other people's comments, which I don't really get.
MySQL is as popular as it is because EVERYONE is using it.

Which means that all of the really hard scalability and management problems have already been solved every which way. And all available for free by companies you know and trust e.g. Facebook, Twitter.

If I were looking to become a DBA today I wouldn't bother with PostgreSQL at all. I would learn all of the NoSQL databases because that is where all of the interest is right now. Due to the increase use of agile in software development databases need to be flexible with the schema controlled by developers not DBAs.
Currently the Dashboard tracks pageviews of your papers, broken down into various dimensions - by traffic source, by country etc. It also shows search engine keywords that drive traffic to your page/papers.

The key thing here is that if you ask a Harvard professor, with, say, 200 publications, how many downloads she got in the last 30 days, typically she will have no idea. The web is where most scientific research is being read and consumed, but scientists don't have easy ways of tracking metrics around their online influence. This dashboard is trying to change that.

The dashboard been in beta for a few months, and many users have written in saying that they are taking screenshots of the graphs, and are including them with their tenure track applications. Hiring and grant committees are increasingly keen to understand the broad impact of research they fund, ideally through a variety of different metrics: journal titles (which journal you got published in), citation counts, and now, increasingly, metrics that measure online influence, such as downloads. Something that surprised us a little was that it turns out that hiring and grant committees are increasingly interested in 'international reach'; i.e. they want to know that the research they fund as impact beyond the immediate region of the researcher. The dashboard helps a researcher to understand how international their audience is.

Previously a scientist only had an anecdotal of their audience: they would bump into people at a conference, and someone might say 'I read your paper', and them saying that produces a very warm glow (I have been there myself!). This dashboard is about putting numbers on your audience and reach, showing you which are your most popular papers. Some of our beta users also mentioned that the analytics are motivational: more people are interested in their work than they thought.
A bit of support to that: it used to be common to send plasmids (circular strand of DNA) to people on paper. You'd take a drop of the plasmid, put it onto the paper, and let it dry. When the recipient got the card in the mail, they'd cut out around your dried plasmid and put it back into water. It would be perfectly functional, if needed.

If you needed more, you could then transform E. coli with the plasmid and let them do the work for you.

I don't know if this is done very much anymore, but this helps to show just how robust DNA can be. I want to say that a few years ago, someone tried to sell our lab an archival tool for DNA that was essentially this. You dried your DNA samples onto blotting paper in a grid, then when you needed a sample, you could go back and reconstitute by punching it out of the paper.
Do you don't ever make a large single molecule like you'd find inside cells? You're saying you create the fragments and then read back the same fragments?
I think they're mentioned when new users sign up, and also when they make their first post.

I'm not keen to make a new account to test this out though.
Apple is the company you'd choose to take over this technology? I'd vote Valve.
I read this article and imagined computing in the first half of the 20th century. Undoubtedly when some programmer first managed to get his room sized computer to add, subtract and multiply someone was present to scoff about how he could already do such things on his slide rule.

It's not about where the technology currently is, but where it is going.
Some Lessons From Forth [2005]
Rather than trying to answer this here I'll point to a great definition of what UX design actually is. Hint, it's not "laying out a page" or "painting the picture".

http://uxdesign.com/ux-defined

If you can do all of the above and you are a rock star developer, my friend, you are a rare breed.

Why not go straight to code?
Iterating through conceptual ideas via sketches, wireframes, research etc to get an experience correct is a million times more effective and efficient than iterating through it in code.
http://33bits.org/about/
Revenue-less companies in silicon valley regularly get acquired for millions - sometimes hundreds of millions. Does that happen anywhere else?
Maybe you could attack this directly. Put a field the profile form for "something I've made." Don't allow anyone without an entry there to vote.

Half of the benefit would be from filtering out people who aren't really invested in the community. The other half would be from making people think about the magnitude of their own contributions before they criticize someone elses.
Same; when I've read whatever looked interesting on the front page, I generally go over to see what's new in ask.
This idea is almost always expressed in terms of number of cells: some 90% of "our" cells are not human. But what about mass? What fraction of "our" mass consists of human cells vs. nonhuman cells?
In financial practice, asset-level PCA isn't as common, especially in systems where covariance estimation is fraught with misspecification errors. Instead, individual securities first condensed to factors (e.g., for equity some examples are book/price, momentum, large vs. small cap, etc.).
Why is there no IRC interface for HN?
In other words it's become more left wing.
You should still try it out, because a) you shouldn't trust just one person decrying something and b) because everyone should witness the awfulness of skinner box games first-hand at least once!
Real Names. I believe that I am much less a jerk on HackerNews than I am on Reddit, where I post under a pseudonym.
If I exchange a propane cylinder, I am capable of judging if it is what it's supposed to be. No rust, clean valve, correct weight. I cannot judge whether I'm getting swapped in a battery that is going to die. A propane cylinder costs about the same as its contents. A $10k battery holds less than $1 worth of energy.

This is not a valid analogy.
Ask HN: Does anyone have experience scraping dynamic content?
http://www.nfl.com/scores

For example, for this URL, there is a section on the right for "Big Play Highlights" and the first one listed is "L.Brown 7-yard TD pass from..."

It looks like this data is being loaded via some kind of AJAX call. Do you have any ideas on how I can scrape this stream of highlights data? I've never tried to scrape any dynamic content in the past.

Ideas?
Blog spam. Original that it links to: http://hortonworks.com/blog/pig-as-connector-part-one-pig-mo...
Thanks, Brad, for the feedback. We addressed many of the bugs people found in prior releases, but will look into this spreadsheet issue (perhaps you could describe it in a bit more detail at feedback.collections.me?). As for the site, please refresh and it'll self-correct, but we're aware of that bug and are working to make sure it never happens.
Clever (YC S12) is hiring a full-stack engineer to hack education
Steve Jobs described education as one of the final frontiers still untouched by modern technology. Clever (https://getclever.com) is building the data platform for modern technology to get in the classroom. Just like Stripe has made it simple for developers to build payment processing into their apps, Clever has made it easy for developers to build applications with student data.

We're a small team of highly technical hackers with deep experience in education. Since releasing the Clever APIs in June, we've signed up the most innovative educational companies as partners and deployed our product to over 1,000 schools. Clever moves data for over 350,000 students every day, and that number is growing rapidly.

Our growth has created some exciting problems around scalable systems, innovative APIs, and big data sets. We're looking to add a versatile engineer to the team to take on a wide range of technical challenges.

Things we're looking for:

+ Experience with consuming and creating RESTful Hypermedia APIs

+ Experience with a variety of languages (we use the best tool for the job, everything from Node.js to bash scripts)

+ Experience scaling up systems on AWS

+ Passion for changing education

What Clever offers:

+ Competitive salary + significant equity stake

+ A chance to revolutionize education

+ Flat & close-knit engineering team with lots of peer code review & pair programming

+ Great benefits - healthcare, dental, beautiful office

To apply, email us at jobs+n@getclever.com, where n is the number of students in the Clever sandbox API data set with a last name that begins with the letter 'V'.

Send us a resume and/or your github profile, and let us know how you solved our 'puzzle.'

This job is located in San Francisco, CA. You must be local or willing to relocate.
I have created a Propster fan tip jar for Light Table. When it collects at least $5, Chris will be contact and will get the money.
A few years back there was a theft ring in Boston that stole HID headlights from Audis. I put a sticker on mine...

WARNING: DEFENSIVE SPRAY MAY BE HARMFUL OR FATAL

Nobody touched them.
this comment is not only misplaced, it is (at least partly) wrong as well. postgres has great documentation. and had great documentation for quiet a while. see [1].

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.3/static/
Same here. That's pretty cool to see that this is actually working.
Ayn Rand: Why is she so popular?
If we look back: 2005 to 2007 was the heyday of user-generated-content companies (i.e. Mahalo, Squidoo). As the Google bubble ended starting around 2008 the excitement transferred to some of the leading UGC platforms that had grown into mass market distribution channels in their own right. Facebook mania in 2008 was followed by a similar wave of enthusiasm for the App Store around 2009.

All of these mini-funding bubbles focused on specific distribution vectors: Google, Facebook, the App Store. Central to them was a hypothesis in the potential for fast and easy exponential growth for companies, because this was how people justified supra-market valuations.

If the "social bubble" is deflating now, it's not because Facebook stock is falling so much as because it is increasingly difficult to achieve exponential distribution in these channels and nothing else has come along yet to replace them. And this is what Chris Dixon is saying as I understand him -- if people want to demonstrate that their service is genuinely viral the threshold is much higher since VCs are skeptics.

But advising someone who wants to go down the VC route to focus on revenues is still a bad idea, because you can't justify a supra-market valuation without the prospect of exponential growth. If someone is bootstrapping by all means collect money, but be aware that 10k a month is still only 1.5 million total valuation at ten times revenue, which doesn't give a lot of leeway for raising a ton of money by relying on fundamentals.
I'm not aware whether it is or not. But once I saw how easy it was to remove a sticker-stack intact using a razor blade, I adopted the habit. The effort involved is minimal (I keep a single-edge razor blade in my toolbox for utility reasons), so why not? Just another part of car maintenance, like changing the oil & filter...
Blessings: a pythonic answer to curses
I had an idea, similar to your suggestion, to vote on the link and the discussion separately. Although my idea would not separate children from adults (an idea I like very much), it would allow good links to rise without endorsing snarky and low-quality commentary on the link. Likewise, readers would feel more free to upvote quality discussion without necessarily endorsing the subject.

It is too bad that more than a couple voting toggles would be too cumbersome; otherwise both ideas could co-exist as four sets of up and down arrows.
Facebook's sub-zero datacenter
I'm going to resubmit an idea that has been brought up before (it's not mine- it may be yours, in fact): two buttons for voting. One for agreement/disagreement and one as a rating specifically for quality of the comment.

In the "old days," there was more-or-less agreement that the vote was for quality of comment -- feedback about the value of the participant to the community -- and agreement/disagreement was voiced (if necessary) in comments. As a rule I (and others) would upvote comments we disagreed with as long as they were thoughtful. There were exceptions, of course, as you have aknowledged, but this was a pretty good guideline.

Now I think things have turned around a bit, and votes have started signifying agreement/disagreement more than quality of comment. I think this takes the community in the wrong direction.
Or you could, you know, learn multiple things, because very few companies that need scalability are best served by doing everything in only one technology. Or, for that matter, hiring people who only know one technology.

There's a hell of a lot of useful stuff to learn (practical and theoretical) from relational databases. NoSQL has some useful ideas too. However, advocating that someone wanting to be considered a "database administrator" only learn/focus on NoSQL - that's just poor advice.
Valley of God
dba and nosql? sounds strange. note that scalability is not everything.
Gittip charts
They have (had?) a lot of great employees, so hiring feeding frenzy commence in 3, 2, 1...
Isn't this a problem that should be solved with a package management solution like yum or apt-get plus something for configuration management like puppet, chef or ansible? Git would still be useful, but only on the server side.
Probably not... If we were seeded by aliens, then the message would have had to have been in a very primitive form, so it would necessarily be seen in all living things, including prokaryotes. Unfortunately bacterial genomes are much, much, smaller than humans, so there isn't much room to waste for hidden alien messages. Additionally, presumably, these messages wouldn't be functional, so they would be under any sort of evolutionary pressure. This means that they would likely be mutated or lost to natural selection.

That's not to say that we weren't seeded, just that if we were, any message would likely have been lost. Unless... maybe they seeded mitochondria intact, which are in all (ok, most) eukaryotes. Maybe that might work... :)

Unfortunately, chrM is pretty small too... so no hidden messages there either :(
No. Free speech rights are limited.
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