skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Something simple, that does its job well"

Exactly. And isnt it what this thing is trying to do ?
Q&A with Elon Musk - Tesla, SpaceX and the rest of it
Group Behind DDoS Against WikiLeaks Hits Russian News Agency
EVERYTHING can be put in a distribution. Showing that something is X standard deviations away from the mean does not explain at all how they got there.

Take SAT scores for example. Are the top scorers just lucky? Luck may explain one’s 1500 relative to a 1490 or 1510, but luck doesn’t explain the difference between 1000 and 1500 except for maybe some extreme tail case. More importantly, the fact that SAT scores fit on a distribution does not in any way show us how they got in that distribution.

Whether fund managers and artists are lucky or not is not proven or disproven by this blog post.
"I don't speak spanish"

Really? I think you mean Portuguese.
I'm far more distracted/upset by large groups of people laughing or yelling - teens/adults/whatever - than I am by someone talking on their phone.

People really have a highly selective ability to be annoyed by things that they are judgmental about/think that they are better than -- or even worse that they think make people better than them -- especially if it triggers their jealousy/resentment. If someone is getting texts or calls, that's incredibly annoying to someone who gets no texts or calls for obvious reasons.

Some years back we took our young children out with their grandparents to a family restaurant. It was mid evening on a Saturday night and the place was full and very loud, with escalating conversations, people having fun, etc.

My infant daughter dropped her fork. I happened to catch a woman nearby -- likely barren and fervently vengeful -- giving the most hateful, glaring look I've ever seen, and I would imagine she went forth to declare how her night was ruined by our much quieter than average table. I recall this experience whenever I hear some railing about children on airplanes, etc -- I imagine that much of it is selective, desperate clutching for offense, and it's much the same regarding people and their anti-smartphone spiels.
First off, This is Mark Cuban, who is in my top 3 list of intelligent public figures and influential enough to me that I definitely feel the need to defend him a bit here.

I think what he meant by "job skill" classes is more along the lines of codeacademy because this is a very direct skill that can be applied instantly to industry problems, whatever those might be.

The author feels that universities should promote these types of resources with some sort of incentive because what's working in the job market now is real applicable skills... something a Business Admin/Liberal Arts major might not have.

Having Javascript on your resume is looking attractive to more and more employers.

Also the premium on personal relationships with employees of a firm is decreasing in the sense that the best customer support relationship I can have is none at all, the product just works.
> in a situation where oversight is difficult to impossible.

That excuse no longer washes.
Some people don't want damages or restitution. They want specific performance of the contract. In this case they may be in a position to get it.

We're not discussing labour laws here, the slavery argument doesn't apply. This looks to me like straight up contract + equity.

> Could a court really order Joyent to keep providing this service against their will?

That's what an order for specific performance is for.

I've emailed a self-described law nerd of my acquaintance. She geeks out on equity law, so this sort of case is right up her alley. I'll be interested to see what she thinks.

Of course ... IANAL, TINLA.
> points scoring

Why else have moderation points if not for scoring? :p
I just noticed this. Um. Sad. Really sad.
Saying that your explanation doesn't make sense is also not a conspiracy theory.
This 'system' only has one node and thus can only cover one room and so would only be practical for retail, not homes. As the great statistician patrick has thought us, businesses will pay if you can demonstrate a ROI. This system only has to prevent half a robbery to pay for itself.

The ironic part is the businesses already have real security systems which do everything the laser system could do. The real security system will already phone the police and ring an alarm.
On the right sidebar, under "Facebook (c) 2012" should be duplicates of all of the links at the bottom of the page. For the "Create a page" link, you have to click "More".

This is clearly unintuitive, but at least it exists.
My father-in-law once got a call from a security system rep.

They had a long conversation about his current system, which seemed to have ALL the features (would go off if any window moved, any person came near the house, always on, very little maintenance, could programmatically learn which people were welcome / not welcome, etc).

Try as he might, the salesman couldn't find a single way in which this current system was deficient, and finally he exasperatedly asked how much the system cost (thinking it must be very $$$, top-of-the-line).

"About $50/month in food + occasional vet fees. And he's one of my best friends too."
> This is essentially the same as an argument from authority on your part.

True. It's ironic to hear an argument based in sound scientific logic emanating from an advocate of philosophy -- but refreshing.
How about the gaming demographics' parents?
You could use a Quasi-Turbine.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/quasiturbine.htm
> There is a 5.3.X and a 5.4.X version happening concurrently?

That's not uncommon, and useful for people in production who'd still need bug fixes but don't want to risk breakages due to new features (and potential grammar changes) and the like. Language versions often have end-of-life dates which follows the release of the next version (and even the one after that) by a significant amount of time (Python 2.6 will be EOL'd in October 2013, even though Python 2.7.0 was released in July 2010.

FWIW (and ignoring the 3.x timeline) here's the CPython relase history for 2.6 and 2.7:

2008-10-01 22:05 +0000 v2.6
2008-12-04 02:59 +0000 v2.6.1
2009-04-14 13:16 +0000 v2.6.2
2009-10-01 23:39 +0000 v2.6.3
2009-10-26 01:48 +0000 v2.6.4
2010-03-18 22:14 +0000 v2.6.5
2010-07-03 13:57 +0000 v2.7
2010-08-23 23:37 +0000 v2.6.6
2010-11-27 14:40 +0000 v2.7.1
2011-06-11 09:50 -0500 v2.7.2
2012-04-09 19:04 -0400 v2.7.3
2012-04-10 10:59 -0400 v2.6.8

(yeah I know it's missing the 2.6.7 tag, not sure why it's not in the repo, it should be right before 2.7.2, on 2011-06-03; also the last 2.5 release — 2.5.6 — happened between 2.7.1 and 2.7.2, 2011-05-28)
Twitter keeps piling up requirements on developers using their API to maintain their brand identity. App.net is going to allow developers to do whatever they want. So it's everything technical you can do with Twitter, plus everything they shut you down for doing.
The fact that you have been downvoted clearly indicates that the majority of people's browsers still don't implement the brand-new <sarcasm> tag in version 7.1 of the HTML specification.
Youtube bans 500-year old Japanese festival (Obon)
Unexpected burst of star formation re-ignites the Phoenix Cluster
Agreed. It's good to be aware of it as a developer.

In our case it was lucky that we happened to view a page with a vulnerability, and there happened to be data that would be interpreted as an HTML tag. However, I believe in probability. Nothing is certain and so we try to put in place practices that will increase the probability of finding errors, etc.

The 3D view is just another little wrench in our toolbelt that increases our odds.
YC-Backed Markupwand Takes The Pain Out Of Translating PSD To HTML And CSS
What projects are you working on now?

If you're still stuck with a long commute and you are looking for something to build, you could try your hand at a Hacker News replacement. There are certainly enough people here jaded by the toxicity that would make the jump someplace new.

My only piece of advice, if you decide do this, don't post it as a "Show HN". Reach out to smart people privately to beta test it.
The official version of Calibre doesn't support stripping the DRM out of the file, does it?
Isn't Amazon S3 now running with a 5 terabyte limit now[1]? But still, shipping drives is far more sane than cross the t'interwebs for things of that size.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_store
You can't get ANYTHING done if you're the smartest person in the room and everyone knows it.

I do feel the same way you do, and I love not being the smartest person in the room, but sometimes you need to take a back seat approach.
> The price ($10k) is good enough that it's under my impulse buying threshold for cars.

I'm not even sure where to start with this.
The big challenge no one speaks about is the auto workers' unions which will change the cost structure to produce these cars. This cost increase is coming in the next few years.
Sigh.

Personally, I don't have a problem with people being negative. 99% of startups fail, and I think it's worthwhile reminding people of that every now and then. Hacker News shouldn't live in some magical land where everyone is going to make the next billion dollar company.

If you truly, genuinely, believe in your idea then you can take the negativity in your stride. There will be plenty of constructive feedback buried in there somewhere. If you can't take a little negativity directed towards your project, then maybe you're in the wrong business. And maybe it is a bad idea. Sometimes it's best to find that out and move onto a new idea, rather than bathe in the vague compliments of your peers.
I worry about that too. I tried to look back at your older posts as I've been around a while myself. What was your old username?
I can get where you're going with this, but as someone who uses underscore everyday I have to say in this particular case I don't agree with you.

Underscore as a production library is 4kb. The functions are terse, and its extremely easy to understand what they're doing - nothing is generally hidden (this example is pretty easy to understand, yet one of the most "complex" uses of underscore I've seen).

At the end of the day on a production javascript app of multiple thousand lines of JS, it likely actually saves me bytes over the wire from not having to write "for(var x = 0...." every time I want to iterate through something or filter an array or find if an array includes something etc (There's around 70 bytes removed in this single example).
If I'm understanding, this is a stored value card or something like a debit card the employee can get paid on then spend from.
Can you please make bitorrent mirror. It would benefit us all.
I doubt it, it's hosted on tumblr. It handles far more traffic than HN.
This is one of the most sensible comments I have ever read on Big Data. I sent it to a bunch of clients and people in large organizations and they vigorously nodding their heads.
The Downside of Network Effects
Still somewhat under the radar (and it's not mine, nor am I even a user) but https://lobste.rs/ seems to be something along those lines.
Chinese fisherman spends 8 years building himself bionic hands
Raspberry Pi used to supercharge a Canon 5D MKII
That's right. I only use Calibre for converting. I use the Python scripts from here [1] to remove DRM. The newer versions have GUIs; they should be friendly enough for most readers here.

[1]: http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/hello-world/
I believe you've misspelled "plausible deniability" over two whole sentences.
A visit to Hacker School
So you're wanting to reinvent XMPP?
The registrant is probably an artifact of Superhuman Ventures doing the web work for the non profit on a paid or volunteer basis. Small non profits tend to be pretty disorganized about stuff like this.
... or, perhaps, that vacuous snark does nothing to improve the quality of the conversation, regardless of whether it's intended to be trolling or pandering sarcasm.
Stock options were a key tool in hiring practices at Facebook. The morale of those employees will be taking a nosedive along with the stock price. At the very least this makes it harder for Facebook to hire new employees based on stock option grants because new hires will discount the value of the stock options until the price stabilizes.
"Don't encourage others to catch up to you, slow yourself down to their pace."

Fuck that. I've been doing that all my life, and it leaves me unsatisfied.

How about, "Surround yourself with other smart people and change the world."
sure, check your email
On a related note, is there an easy way to find other free or dirt-cheap (US $0.99) E-books on Amazon?

The Amazon site likes to group things into "As low as <price>" sections, which means there's a least one item at that price, with most things costing more.
I just keep my mouth shut and do everything while they all finally figure out what I knew, I have the solution done a lot faster, and I look better for it. There is no need to and try to be bossy and push someone into an answer if they aren't ready. Just have the solution done for when they realise it.
I think you underestimate two things:
- hipster web people who will sign up for anything without thinking
- $50 which are a small lottery win for a 3rd world family

I am sponsoring an eight year old boy from Kamrabad Uchcha Vidyalaya (East India) for 20 euros monthly. That includes school material (for the whole class), health insurance (for his whole family) and nutrition support (again for the whole family). And no, I've never seen him personally.

But my sister did when she was a volunteering doctor for one year in his area. I really don't want to argue with you, but I believe that it is less naïve to at least try to help with $50 than not to try it at all.

Now let's back those awesome 3d glasses on kickstarter...!
I'm Norwegian. We're at #2. Finland leads by a large margin, though.
> can foreign key chasing handle composite primary/foreign key joins?

Yes. The only requirement for foreign key chasing to work is that it uniquely identifies one record in the foreign table. Whether that key is atomic or composite is of no consequence.

(internally kdb+ stores a pointer to the foreign record when it verifies the existence of said record on insert, so it doesn't have to do a join query - it always knows exactly which record to bring in. So in practice, it is very efficient regardless of what kind of indexes you might have in place, the size or the composition of the foreign key field)

> So yeah, kinda, if you build your own. I would be willing to bet you could make an implicit join operator of this sort also but I haven't done so.

pgsql is a wonderful beast. I really like it. And I would be even happier if they adopted some kdb+/q syntax and semantics, though I don't think that's likely to happen.
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth but my TL;DR assessment of the first few pages makes me think this book is pretty poorly edited. None the less I'm looking forward to reading it and honing my vim skillset.
The punchline is to show you a video about ending slavery along with a comment about how spending money on that is more worthwhile than a social network.

The video was created at TEDx in Maui. TED is one of the most expensive social networks in the world, charging thousands of dollars to attend the main conference, which is the foundation of the TEDx programs.

Accidental endorsement of Dalton?
Agree 100% on nontechnical founder thing. And the sad thing is, though the level of skill needed for sustainable application development is very high, for building MVPs you need to know very little.

Like not 6 months worth, but on the order of a for dummies book. The fact that someone doesn't do this shows me they lack the desire and courage to achieve their vision.

Not sure how I'd tie it into Twitter, but my 2 cents.
The top tiers of actors have the money to purchase additional coaching, can attend more auditions because they aren't holding down another job, and can generally devote more of their life to the craft.

I'm sorry but I don't think this is true or a valid argument. If I may rephrase your assertion: are rich programmers better programmers because they have more resources to attend job interviews and can program more often? Whatever your craft may be, time (or money; same thing), doesn't necessarily mean anything about level of skill. Can it be a contributing factor? Perhaps, but there are plenty of examples on both sides of the coin to say one way or the other.

Take two actors competing for the same part in an audition for an independent role. They are nearly equal down to a flip of a coin, but one just happens to catch the director's eye a hair more that day.

It sounds, to me, like you're confusing luck for someone making a decision. Your assumption, that a director makes decisions on how the actor's hair looks that day, is extremely flawed. The truth is: there aren't 300 actors each coming in and doing everything the exact same, looking the exact same, and performing the exact same. Hell, there aren't even 2. Each one is an entire collection of skills, experience, head shots, and each one will deliver a different performance.

Professional and successful directors are, for the most part, incredibly skilled; masters of observation with uncanny abilities to find the right person for their vision.

Again, allow me to make the programmer analogy: if two programmers came in and wrote the exact same code, in the exact same amount of time, and produced the same output, on the same problem, where does that leave the decision? In the hands of the many other possibilities that the person hiring will take into consideration. Luck? No, it's someone making a decision.

Could that decision be based on whether their hair looked good in a certain light? Perhaps, but that would be absolutely silly for the person doing the hiring; they would gain nothing from it. They certainly wouldn't be a director working on a successful blockbuster movie if they really were making their decisions as haphazardly and with such flightiness as you assert they are. They will hire based on a multitude of reasons from, profitability, to talent, to personality, and all kinds of things in between.
Same thing happens in the UK, to the point that I thought you were talking about UK chuggers until I got the last sentence.

VISA's tactics don't surprise me. What is sad is that we think it's OK because you can do anything as long as you're maximising shareholder value.
How long have you been using the Internet? sniping and negativity is the norm and I just ignore it. You should too.

If your app truly is good, your users/customers will be the only thing that matters.
I agree. Perhaps ppl need to preface their posts by saying they're doing a project for fun, and not to make money. That would soften some of the comments. But if ppl really think a project is doomed as a business, I'd prefer it they tell me the truth, even if it hurts.

If anything, the quality of the posts here are starting to suck because very few actually help you make money. I don't care about the latest PhantomJS technology, etc. There needs to be more ppl like patio11.
Agreed. I'd still love to have a Delorean.
JQuery Is Used on Half of All Websites
How has it become so popular?
Steve, I wish you all the best for your project. Could you please tell us more about your latest project?

(A thought: if you launch a public-facing project and announce it here on Hacker News, most of the reactions you get will be like reactions from the general public. If your code base is not exposed to view of hackers, as it would be as a GitHub submission, many of us will only be able to comment on, for example, whether or not we see typos in the copy on your public-facing Web pages, and not on how cool your technical solutions are. That probably generates mostly negative--or at least, consumer-oriented--feedback, rather than hacker feedback, but maybe that is helpful too. I can say as someone who has written for a living in a journalistic organization and also has worked as an editor that every writer needs an editor, because every writer overlooks some of his or her own mistakes, if only because of being busy and tired.)

For what it's worth, I continue to find interesting (and uplifting) things to read here on HN after 1369 days here. But I don't read every thread here. I don't suppose that anyone reads HN exhaustively anymore. Maybe reading a different sample of threads here will help you get more enjoyment and encouragement out of HN again. Good luck.
Picplum acquired the assets of picwing and essentially relaunched the product, but with the same business model.
What do people think of the permarment portfolio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-Safe_Investing). The proposal is to diversify your investments equally across stocks, bonds, gold and cash equivalents. The idea is that for any particular market condition (inflation, deflation, stagnation and growth), 3 of the asset classes won't do too well, while the fourth will do spectacularly well and average out the losses in the other 3. The other benefit (unlike simple stock/bond investing) is that the portfolio seems to be pretty immune to variance from start date (ie, while investing in the S&P has consistently yielded around 7-8% real returns, their is pretty high variance in this number depending on when you start the calculation). For example, here are some backtesting results showing that the portfolio averages 9.7% - http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-..., which is pretty competitive with 100% stock allocation.
Oh. Thanks, I get it now.

I guess while syntactic sugar is usually considered a functionality of the language itself, it surely is used in the way I meant it, too... random search result:

http://www.developerdrive.com/2012/05/an-introduction-to-und...

"In this part of the tutorial we’re going to take a look at some of the syntactic sugar that Underscore gives us to work with array-like collection."

And of course, even if I had been utterly wrong for using the term, my point would stand unmoved, but you know that :)
Personally, I don't have a problem with people being negative. 99% of startups fail, and I think it's worthwhile reminding people of that every now and then. Hacker News shouldn't live in some magical land where everyone is going to make the next billion dollar company.

If this is the case, why even allow for comments? Just have a bot that auto-responds a bunch of times with randomly generated comments that 99% of the time is "Your idea sucks. You should do something else that is worthwhile."
There's nothing inherently angry or controlling about what nagrom posted. I feel the same way nagrom does, and I don't waste any of my time trying to change others and it doesn't make me mad if they need Facebook open to make it through dinner. I just avoid going out with them as much as possible, in exactly the same way that I avoid eating with people who don't close their mouth when they chew.
Gartner Hype Cycle - Emerging Tech
Services Pricing Spreadsheet (see impact of small price changes)
> Because a social network without people isn't.

Then the question becomes, why support app.net over Twitter?
Anyone else not getting the 3D button? When I inspect this page, for example, I get the DOM hierarchy/breadcrumb at the bottom, but there is no 3D to the right of my current selector.

Running FF 14.0.1.

http://imgur.com/5b3hy
Hate this, it's pointless. :p