skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I predict this is going to be a serious love or hate thing. Lots of upvotes, tons of negative comments.

As hilarious as it is, it's all subjective of course.

Let's take some names we all know and love and apply the same thought process:

Amazon: A live webstream of some pretty trees and maybe a really big river.

Nike: Greek Goddesses are running companies? Awesome. Whatever she's selling, I've no doubt she'll be victorious.

ebay: Beachfront property on the interwebs?

Ok so maybe I lack the comedic talents of the author but my point still stands: The author has no point.
BigCalc (YC S12) Makes Hadoop Easier for High Frequency Trading Firms
this is wrong. Only because it's not that different from most payment mechanisms already in place.
Squares goal, it seems, is to allow vendors to build a better relationship with their customers, which can hopefully increase sales. In the longer term, it's a software play and I think Starbucks realizes this.
PayPal is just another method of paying for your stuff and leaving the store, maybe never to return.
Eh, maybe. You could not offer "good ice cream" for sale and instead deliver cookies.
Clustering across what you've previously "liked" ala Netflix is the solution to this problem, I think. The problem is fundamentally that single number ratings don't capture that people are non-homogenous.
There is an "emacs" written in pure CL - LispWorks - yes it's commercial, and not exactly the same as emacs - but very close. Some versions of LispWorks comes with the whole source of the editor, and the environment.
Why aren't people applauding Ubisoft for adapting their business and products to their audience (people that want to play games but don't want to pay -- and those that do want to pay, can)?

Because it is a "terrible dis-service to gamers"?

Suppose I pirate all my games, what do I gain from F2P? A worse experience with constant nagging about buying useless crap.

Suppose I buy all my games, what do I gain from F2P? A worse experience with constant nagging about buying useless crap.

A got sick to my stomach for buying Battlefield 3 Premium, why? What I wanted was the expansion packs but to get that I had to pay for having double XP events, strategy guides, ability to reset stats etc. etc.

If paying for something makes the play-field uneven you have effectively destroyed the value for both free and paying players.

Piracy is a problem (but one illegally downloaded game does not equal a lost sale, I'd also be interested in knowing how many hours are being played on pirated vs. bought games). DRM does not hinder piracy, but it hurts paying players. If you have no DRM then no one will suffer from it (also you don't have to implement it and you won't have to fear the backlash from it). Free to play is a terrible dis-service to gamers.

F2P is good for discoverability, it lowers the barrier to trying. In the old days we had something similar that we called a demo. The equivalent of today is to pirate the game and see if it is worth it. Now the barrier to buying is even higher since you'd have to take care of any progress made, uninstall, buy, install, redo all your settings and progress. Not defending it, but that is often the only way to try a game today - and with all the crap that's being produced wanting to try it out before buying is understandable.
He's shipped a lot of useful code, including the Mongrel web server.
It does sound reminiscent doesn't it. I tweeted the story because music/movie/software execs need to learn a new business model. Entrenching oneself in the old mind set is a good way to move into extinction.
Enabling FaceTime Over Our Mobile Broadband Network
Actually I still feel the guilt when I take time off too, I just learned to do it anyway :)
The Trial
Among other things, he wrote mongrel, the only non-terrible rails server for many years.
I wonder if there is a market for android-ready shells. Screen, webcam, keyboard, touchpad, battery, storage, and a slot for any android-on-a-stick PC. I'd buy that, knowing that I could "upgrade" the stick when I needed to.
I know what graceful degradation is.

I'm actually disagreeing with what you are saying: responsive design is such a poor solution to the problem of providing a mobile or tablet site, that it is actually more accurate to refer to it as graceful degradation, rather than as addressing a new use case.
Oh yeah, I remember all those Morning Stand-Up Comedy Meetings at Salesforce.
Rails is still a ghetto. Out of most programmers, Rails is the one with people with the least amount of CS degrees.

While there might be great rail programmers who know there CS basics. A lot don't
Asesores | Asesoramiento Laboral y Fiscal
For adults, this might be true, but for kids, i'm not so sure.

If you've got kids, you know they'll just watch the same flashy animated movies over and over again, even if their opinion of the content is "meh".

What would probably happen is that family films, especially animated ones, would have skewed results.
I think that what he is getting at is that you are taking it on faith that the logic is solid behind the theory.

If we believed that, how come we're constantly throwing away and modifying theories?

I think what is irrational is that science feels that it can explain everything all the way

Science is incapable of feeling. That some people believe that is inconsequential is not a failure of science.

We used to believe the proton, neutron, and electron were the smallest form of matter. What will be next? I have "faith" that something new will be discovered, which is where we step into an irrational realm.

That's a false equivalence. "Faith" as attributing a high degree of confidence in a event based on solid logical reasoning is not the same as religious faith. It's not even in the same ballpark.
tldr; AT&T says net neutrality doesn't apply to pre-installed applications.
North Sea oil tax revenues fall offers glimpse into a diminishing future
Statistically speaking, the "young" startup founder is a complete stereotype. The over-50 crowd which this article refers to as "having the stench of death" actually starts and runs more successful startups than the under-30 crowd. So, to be fair, those "hot" startups you love, that have a business plan worth more than just "build it and they will come" in it, are most likely run by someone over 40.

Also, anyone that knocks "Agile" has not had much experience in the enterprise sector. Yes, it has overhead - but in a larger (500+ employees) company that overhead is absolutely crucial to maintaining uniformity amongst all divisions and ensuring all "players" in the game are on the same page.
Debian. How would you do it on the shell?
I asked this in a thread on Slashdot once, and got a really good answer. Basically, there are a number of molecules that can have a left or right chirality. These happened by random chance at the beginning instances of abiogenesis, and were replicated faithfully since. So if it happened twice, a number of those molecules (or larger structures) would be backwards. From a macro perspective, things like the heart being on the left side, or the direction of other internal organs (i.e. appendix on the right side). At the molecular level, things like the spiral of DNA. There is some more information in Wikipedia, under abiogenesis and homochirality.
Facebook Has Been Hacked. What Will You Do?
Fry: Do you take Visa?

Clerk: Visa hasn't existed for 500 years.

Fry: American Express?

Clerk: 600 years.

Fry: Discover Card?

Clerk: Sorry, we don't take Discover.
Spotify coming to Canada, South America and some countries in Asia soon
I dislike agile and scrum not because I think they're bad ideas - in fact, there are some good ones in there. The problem is they're so doctrinaire. A "manifesto", scrum masters, agile consultants, etc are all there to enforce processes that don't always make sense for any given team or organization, and they detach you from the reality of actual productivity. Didn't assign the right number of points to your scrum story? Didn't break things down into tasks properly? Velocity fail? If these are your problems, then you're focusing on the wrong things.
There are two very different whys here.

One is based in the human psyche (God/philosophy) the other is based in our observations of the physical world.

Also, that statement that most of us prefer democracy is not backed by any facts here. Is there a study on this? It sounds like a guess. I'd guess that most people don't care otherwise we'd have democracy everywhere.
Monitor Any Cloud Or Web Infrastructure With New Rackspace Cloud Monitoring
Thanks, I will fix this for next sale.
Ask the user, remember preference. Possibly Accept-Language (note - not locale, as locale != language). But, ask the user.
I disagree. This isn't interesting. This is tantamount to the trashy gossip rags at the cash register. It's just negativity that doesn't really add to the community. This should've stayed dead. I've flagged it to do my part.

Let's stay classy HN.
How about new lifestyle business referring to themselves as new lifestyle businesses versus referring to themselves as startups? How should a startup call itself not to be ambiguous?
Yes. Some call it a Personal Data Service. There's community at http://pde.cc. There's the VRM crowd. There's http://eclipse.org/higgins/. There's TimBl's http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/CloudStorage.html etc...
It's got a demographic implication that isn't positive, isn't "us" for many younger people

Compared to what, exactly? What development management practices do have an "us" demographic for younger people? One possibility is that you will reply and name one or more named practices with a "young" demographic, and I will accept your point.

The other possibility is that there really isn't a development management practice that has a "young" demographic, that young developers just aren't into spending a lot of time thinking about practices.

If the second case is true, I really believe it undermines your point. If young developers don't really align towards any particular named repeatable practice, Agile is no better and no worse than anything else on account of the age of the people interested in it enough to attend events. It isn't worth "hating" agile for its lack of traction any more than hating PERT charts or Theory of Constraints.
Could you be more specific? Is the compiler promising more than it can deliver, or are you saying the compiler could check something but simply doesn't?

You can have 100% type safety in a straight jacket, but scala pushes what it tries to type check to an extreme limit; "safe" but then also not as conservative as Haskell or ML. I see scala as the c++ of statically typed languages, filling that niche where you need more from your managed language and are willing to take a leap, but this is controversial and a personal opinion.
This article posted here four months ago is much better:

http://evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html

Discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3792627
_why begs to differ
Facebook has it right with "Like" -- either you like it or not. This eliminates these review patterns:

5 stars - OMG I LOVE EVERY PRODUCT
4 stars - Love this product, but I am withholding one star because of _____
3 stars - Everything to me is just meh.
2 stars - I hate everything but this product earned 1 star for ___ and another for ____.
1 star - UPS drop-kicked my item and it arrived late, so this product is trash!

If you distill all reviews so the the reviewer has to decide whether they like it or not, then you have a less diluted overall ranking.
Correct. Nike is the Greek Goddess of victory. It was a poor attempt at a pun.
The reason startups do press releases about funding rounds is that news outlets write about them. The reason news outlets write about them is that people (like those found on Hacker News) read, upvote, and comment on those articles.

Most startups would prefer to talk about their product, but that's a much harder sell as news.
Visualizing How Much Energy the Sun Shines Onto Earth
The empire strikes back: Nikon announces Android-based camera
"work-life balance is bullshit, doesn't work. you can't switch contexts like that efficiently"

Efficiency is the anti-goal of a well-balanced life.

It's not efficient to drive four hours to Yosemite just to hike a new trail with my wife. It's not efficient to spend all afternoon trying to cook my own pizza instead of just ordering one for delivery. It's certainly not efficient to spend years learning to speak a new language for no practical reason.

However inefficient, all these "life" activities enrich and contextualize your work. There is nothing quite like a long hike to help you wrap your head around a difficult algorithm, or bringing a team together over some bad homemade pizza, or serendipitously running across a potential investor who speaks your otherwise "useless" second language.

This is what work-life balance is all about. It's about investing in yourself and, indirectly, your work. It's never efficient, but a lot of us find it necessary and rewarding.
The Nix (http://nixos.org/nix/) approach to package management really seems the future to me. To sum it up, it allows multiple versions of the same libraries to live side by side and therefore prevents dependency hell.

Sadly, Nix user experience is abysmal.
Oops! Thanks!
Currently the tool only supports Java but are looking at supporting the C family and more based on interest.
To be fair, I remember seeing a mouse demoed in the mid eighties and the fellow at the demo explaining that you'd never need a keyboard again. He then proceeded to write a short sentence by using the mouse to click on letters on the screen.

I think that every new HID comes with a marketer promising to get rid of your keyboard.
Great list. I'd add: rather than ask someone what they do, ask them what they enjoy doing.
Vast majority of the "copies" that Apple is accusing Samsung of doing in the exhibits Apple has shown so far are in the UI.

I do not think Apple has grounds in accusing Samsung of Hardware "copying". Design is nothing but organised copying and perhaps a little improv as well.

"Apple take ideas from Braun and put them into different contexts" -> that nailed it.
Yes, but you're going to run into the problem that patio11 pointed out. You are in a tiny minority and they don't want to inconvenience the vast majority just because your preference is 'better'.
Cornell's NYC Tech Campus now accepting applications
As an FYI to your last point - in Rails master (which will be Rails 4), you can active-record-ify a class by including ActiveRecord::Model, rather than inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base. In fact, that is all ActiveRecord::Base does itself - https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activerecord/lib/....
Yeah, someone should flag this. Dillon was apparently part of Sun making Java open source (http://www.opensparc.net/blogs/2006-11/michael-dillon-now-th...), but this submission is just plain silly.
That part struck me too.

On the other hand, agile is the anathema of good data modelling and it causes productivity gains early on which lead to ossification and inflexibility later. This doesn't mean that there is now room for agile development, just that it needs some boundaries.

One of the key areas we are trying to move with LedgerSMB is a solid, well-engineered database (not nearly there yet) with a framework for developing agile applications built on top of it.

I suspect that as we get older we start valuing conservative, iterative processes more and that may be a part of the age thing. However, regarding data management it seems like we keep chasing the same lessons over and over that we have been chasing since the 80's. In the 80's it was relational databases vs special purpose ones. Then it was relational databases vs object oriented ones. The object-relational databases started to take off followed by a backlash. Now it is relational (dumb relational) vs object-relational (smart relational) vs NoSQL (object oriented databases 2.0).

Yeah, this is a great idea. Let's speed up our development time right now by closing all sorts of doors for the future and ensuring that we have to handle legacy object models going back to whenever we started our project!
WebKit CSS Selector -webkit-user-select causes severe performance issues
Link to the Ember Data adapter: https://github.com/karmi/ember-data-elasticsearch/, link to the gist with Goliath proxy for Twitter @Anywhere authentication: https://gist.github.com/3369662#file_proxy.rb
Wow, very well written. I have a lot of respect for you.

Scientific models are man made abstractions on a reality that we cannot prove. You obviously put a lot of faith into those man made abstractions.

To say that a theistic god is a man made invention is an assumption on who created it. That would be distinctly eliminating the possibility of alien life forms.

Also you misuse Occam's Razor. It can't disprove anything without empirical data.

The bible is a man-made invention. The stories in it are disseminated by men. That does not disprove that there is a God who can interact with the real world in some way or other. It just means that as scientific knowledge refines their theories so must religion.

Also a few points, I'm an Aerospace Engineer. I know that there are tools that expand what our senses can observe, but they still must display information in a way that we can observe.

I'm curious though, would you mind clarifying this statement.
>>It presupposes a lot more to assume an intelligent being capable of creating universes who either spontaneously came into being or always existed than to assume the same thing about the universe itself (i.e. dumb matter).

What about a hypothesis of a deistic God makes it no longer needed? If you move away from the physical sciences into those that study the human psyche, you'll see that much is left unexplained. It could be argued (albeit blindly) that any such hypothesis is no longer needed.

Natural sciences and behavioral sciences have no business explaining away each other. Religion is a behavioral science. You may deem behavioral science as superfluous, but it can't be cut away.

At least not yet.
Country domain is the worst way to handle language preference. We already have a perfectly valid way to handle language preference with Accept-Language. There is no need to register domain under every possible country domain you could localize. And countries do not equal languages. Bilingual countries would be screwed if country domains were the only option.
If dropbox works well for you for source control, that is great. But frankly, if you get to the point where you have to start writing hacks to keep it working, it is probably time to move onto something designed for the task.
This post specifically is arguable. But Zed's an excellent programmer and teacher. I even heard a first person account that he is a very pleasant guy.
The title is accurate. The article states explicitly that 3000 years ago the common ancestor of all of humanity existed. It's just that 3000 years ago wasn't the point where one and only one common ancestor existed; some 80% of the population may have carried that distinction.
Have you checked out http://daytum.com/? Simple tracking for lots different things.
How to Build a Space Elevator
Do you mean atheist as in, not agnostic? Because the two are not the same; Dawkins, for example, is an agnostic atheist, since he doesn't claim to know for sure.
Meh, this could have been funnier. Startup names can border on the absurd, and it's good to lighten up a little. If people can get all worked up about "ipad", then some free association on "BufferBox" and "Everyday.me" before launch might be a good idea.
Does anyone know if the table of contents is somewhere online?
well, I guess that's 1 way to spread your seed across humanity...
Any feedback is highly appreciated.
Legal - Should users data be removed upon their request?
> "Who is rating the raters?"

Netflix does. By cross referencing your likes and dislikes against those of your fellow Netflix members, the company is able to create a meta rating system, in which the score you see for a movie is your own. You see that score because that's how much Netflix thinks you'll like it, based on how similar people liked it.

This is the only good way of going about this method. The trick is, it's easy to do this with movies, but much more difficult with product ratings and the like. Maybe this is an opportunity for someone to build something on top of Facebook or Amazon.
and the website's still horrible...(I'm a user)
Of the 10 most pirated movies of 2011, Zero are available to rent online. Zero.
If it ends up being too much of a hassle to make the photos bigger just making the design image bigger would suffice.

(I'm not sure if the photos/design image distinction is clear or the correct terminology. Let me know if it was not clear)
Not sure what the snark is for. Perhaps I didn't explain its usefulness that well. I may write a post about it because there seems to be some interest.
Unless you go to a molecular gastronomy restaurant where they are as likely to serve you good ice cream in the form of a cookie or a cookie in the form of good ice cream.

But yeah I see what you mean and in general agree with you.
Honestly, I don't really care if we are... I just don't want to know about it.. ignorance is bliss :)
I'm a non-iCloud user (well, sort of), and I can't fathom a scenario where I would ever be tempted to use it. However, it's completely understandable what happened here and the guy even states this repeatedly: it was entirely his fault. He corrupted his own data.

That said, the magnitude of problems resulting from this surprised me. What happens if an iCloud sync folders gets corrupted due to a technical problem one day? Isn't this fragility also kind of a nightmare for Apple's developers?
That sounds depressing... who you are summarized down to a status dashboard.

I think the OP's idea is great and can go further. The distinction is between what I am doing/need to do and who I am.
Good list.

Add to it: Get out of the building and talk to customers. Real customers. In other parts of the world.
Cushman's answer is the correct one. You simply need to have some children. It doesn't matter how many you have as exponential effects will quickly swamp any linear effects of having more than your share now.

What determines if you are a common ancestor is the particular genes you carry: do they give the carrier enhanced survival benefits? I can see someone like Kobe Bryant or Brad Pitt being a common ancestor.

Edit: thinking about it more, there is something you can do: have as many children as you can with as many genetically diverse women as possible. The key here is diversity, you want to pair your genes up with as wide a range of genes as possible. The reasoning is that we can't predict what environment will be exerting selective pressures in the future. Thus the important factor is genetic diversity. This is basically hedging against unknown changes in the environment.

Also, teach your kids to not be racist, so that they will do the same and pass that tendency onto their kids...
Google is beta testing a new version of google analytics specially made for apps, it's great. Unfortunately they're making it available to a small group of users for now, afaik.
One compromise (edit: on the performance problem) would be to use FactoryGirl to generate some type of (yaml?) cache pre-test-run, automatically refreshing only when the model changes.