skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But consider a question like "What are the pros and cons of Sinatra vs Rails?" This sort of question (IMHO) absolutely has value as someone experienced with both could enumerate the relative merits of each in a pretty objective fashion without making an absolute determination. This is something that absolutely could have value to anyone evaluating Ruby Web frameworks.

I guess, but Zookeepers could also potentially talk about "What are the pros and cons of Gorillas vs Sharks?"

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/

> Database development mistakes made by application developers

This is a discussion, not a question. The entire text of said "question" is, quite literally, "What are common database development mistakes made by application developers?" If it can have infinite answers, is it really a question?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/621884/database-developme...

Great post, indeed, but it belongs on your blog.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Stack Exchange is this idea that discussion is, in and of itself, a net good to the world -- and therefore we are monsters for not allowing discussion. I do not believe this to be true. There is, and will always be, an infinity of discussion. Like Jay Leno once said about Doritos, "type all you want, we'll make more". If something can be had in infinite amounts, what is its value?

Stack Exchange supports only the minimal subset of discussion necessary to get practical, useful answers to specific questions. The goal is not discussion, but science-in-the-small. Back up your claims. Show us references. Show us data. Share your specific experiences.

Otherwise you end up with Quora, a system where everything is a discussion, and all answers are opinions. Thus they can only be evaluated based on how famous the poster is, or how compelling a yarn they can spin.

Nothing against Robert Scoble and great storytelling (I used to work with Joel Spolsky, after all), but I've seen where that system leads. Given a choice, I'll always take tiny science. You should too.
Famous Inspirational Bill Gates Quotes You Should Know
>It starts with a quick toolbelt check: do you have proper access to ... the internal documentation Wiki?

Another tip is to make sure you have secondary/hard copies of the most critical things. If the wiki is inaccessible (e.g. a mass network problem), you still need to be able to fix the issue. You won't be able to check the wiki for the procedures.
>Competition in the PC market have driven hardware profits to zero. MS and their clone makers have painted themselves into a corner.

this might serve to explain why the latest version of windows seems to be tailored for mobile devices, TVs, and other consumer electronics instead of traditional PCs. You can't sell somebody a new desktop every year anymore, but you absolutely can sell the same person a new tablet every year.
NYC may have been high then, but it isn't near SF now.

http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/nyc-cost-of-living-is-...
GIFs Infiltrate Advertising, March Toward Total Domination of Communication
The problem with votes being weighted upon previous upvotes of content submitted by that user is as follows: The chance of upvoting a post is related to its length and complexity. One-off puns or silly remarks are much more readily upvoted than long, insightful but demanding comments on complex matters.
Cheap, Pressure-Sensing ‘Electronic Skin’
Ask HN: Help redesign a Comp Sci major
I have the task of refocusing the Comp Sci program at a small liberal arts college, with an even smaller Comp Sci department. The trad MIT/CM/CalTech theoretical program just doesn't work for these students. Emphasis should be on employable computing skills that can be delivered almost entirely by 1 prof. What should I teach? What can be cut out? What would you call the major?
Good point. What you can do though, is to use media queries to load up different SVGs based on the screen resolution of the device. With a progressive enhancement approach you would load up the icons minimized for small displays by default, then work your way up.
" get really frustrated with the complexity"

I am a relatively new git user as well and think along the same lines at times. Do you mind sharing what specifically frustrates you about it ?
I would guess you're thinking about

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/10/what-category-do-haskell-type...

http://dorchard.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/subcategories-in-ha...
I am sure that a lot of it is specific to me and what I am used to, so many other people probably have a good experience working with Python on Windows. The main thing is that I am just not comfortable using Powershell and the directory structure on Windows. While I am still somewhat new to using the command line on a unix environment, I feel that a lot of commands are almost muscle memory, so I was quickly frustrated when things didn't work correctly using Powershell.

I know there are a ton of arguments for Visual Studio, and I actually use it at work on a daily basis (I am a front-end designer and am usually split 50/50 between VS and Photoshop/Illustrator), but I honestly just don't like it. It always feels too bloated and the stuff I do code, I usually do by hand anyways so I don't rely on intellisense or any code-completion. I do use Sublime Text cross-platform as well - but like I said in my article, I prefer using vim on a linux box via ssh from my iPad. It is familiar and portable, which is what I want at this point.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. A lot of guilds can barely fill their raid roster. They manage by strongly pressuring all raiders to show up every day on time, and to give advance notice if they need to be out.

Speaking personally, until very recently my regular raiding guild only had about 26 or so raiders who could show up every night (and another 3 or 4 who could show up for 1 or 2 of the nights). And yet we still managed to clear 8/8H.
For me, I found it a pain to get easy_install and pip working, which made installing packages frustrating. After figuring that out, though, it's fine, with a command prompt and Notepad++.
Device obsolescence is also encouraged by subsidized phone contracts, aggressive marketing and the craze new hardware cause in the tech press.
Why Is Peter Thiel Still on Facebook's Board?
I was thinking the same thing. The negotiation was interesting, but 70K in the city, even with a rent subsidy from the company is tough.

Hopefully they don't have a lot of overhead beyond eating.
Wow, that should give us all some perspective. Crazy how things can change!
I still don't feel confident that I can reboot a linux system and have my device nodes be the same ones they were before

I'm sorry to hear that? udev lets you match devices by their serial number, so there's no reason why device symlinks should be moving around on you unless you've written overly-general rules. (Expecting something like /dev/ttyUSB0 to point to a particular device is rather optimistic, of course, which is why you write a rule to make that /dev/avr_programmer or something.)
Worth a try in the name of science, but I'm pessimistic about the ability of machine learning to measure subjective "quality" of a question.

In the best case you'll end up with a txtspeak and Proper English detector. But I knew that already.
Ask HN: Why don't people share our viral page with their friends?
I'm a web developer. I love dev and I think that I'm pretty decent at it. I am definitely not a marketer, which is why I bring this question to you all. My wife and I are starting a fun side project together called Happy Nerd Shirts where we will sell shirts with designs specifically targeted at developers, blah blah... I'm not here to make a pitch, I just need your advice.

Since we're trying to follow in the footsteps of the startup greats, we've made a Launchrock page at signup.happynerdshirts.com where we are offering what we thought was a good incentive. We have it set up where their incentive increases in value as they get more friends signed up. The problem is, people are signing up but they really aren't sharing their viral links out with anyone. Is this because our infographic isn't good, is it because our incentive sucks, or is it because people want our products only for themselves? I'm at a loss, so I'd really appreciate your insight. Thank you guys!
I was lucky enough to give a little talk at BarCampCharleston, in Charleston, SC, last year.

I spoke on the same topic, but from a less generic standpoint (focus was on Rails): https://railsneedtoknow.heroku.com

It's not perfect, but it helped a lot of people :)
The irony is that a site that says "someone needs to come in and turn me on" must already be turned on. They've already written an app that has 100% uptime, they just use their uptime to claim the system is down.
I would hope he's talking about direct connect (http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/) as otherwise, you're correct.
I wonder if 9GAG spoke to the Reddit founders at all during incubation /karmaconspiracy
Wait, what? Firstly: She's engaged to the founder. Secondly: This is on the company blog (which indicates she might not be 100% forthright). (And what am I supposed to learn about Keen.io, here?)

Finally (and most importantly): Did she run the numbers about what that 1.25% might realistically be worth? She compared the offer to her current position and (without the equity) there's a ~$55,000 difference. That's a shit-ton! How much of an exit would Keen.io have to have in order for that to pay off if she's on a reduced income for, say, four years? She'd have to get a couple hundred grand off of that exit. Will her share of equity get her that?

Anyway. This isn't a negotiation. And she didn't fully run the numbers.

[Edit]

I also wrote up my experience negotiating with a start-up [http://auscillate.com/post/238]. I'm pretty naive about this stuff, but at least I attempted to answer some of the issues of the value of equity.
IBM squeezes more power from new solar cell
Wow, you actually need to eat now? Minecraft sure has changed since I last played it. Back then, food was only used to restore health, and even then I'd usually just strip bare and jump off a mountain to respawn.
10Gbps EC2 instances start at $0.742/hour. Welcome to the cloud. ;-)

I assume the cost is in retrieval though and counted per the Job Creation API, regardless of whether and how quickly you download the data.

but you're right that the 3TB/hour use-case is very hypothetical. Internet archival is just not suitable for those kind of volumes. I think the point OP was making that mistakes like using archives that are too large, or requesting many at once could cost you a lot.
An unhelpful contribution to an open source project
Yup. Mobile computing devices are the PCs of the 90s. Even more so with the two-year contract extension device subsidization. $100 for the latest and greatest iPhone every two years? Absolutely!

Eventually the iDevice market will "settle down" just like regular PCs, and so I think Apple's strategy of software and design lock-in makes a ton of sense. In the long run, it's much easier (comparatively speaking) to innovate on the software end than on the hardware end. Once the iDevice gold rush is over, the software lock-in will keep me in the Apple family.

With more and more things moving to the "cloud" I think that will continue to make phones and tablets "disposable" in the way PCs aren't. Apple is trying to get there with the App store and iCloud, but they are still long off from "buy a new MacBook Air, sign in to iCloud, and it's just like your old computer!"

(aside: device subsidies never really worked for PCs, wasn't ePC some sort of a leased computer model?)
I hold that the hostility is not really contingent on how good you are, but rather on perceived weakness. Most programmers intentionally try to make others feel and look incompetent, while trying themselves to come off like badasses. Partly a matter of being socially inept, partly of a macho culture in the field. And it's only aggravated when you have those programmers interviewing candidates... This is independent of ability - there are plenty of morons calling themselves A-players. You have to play that game or you will be seen as weak and torn apart.

That is NOT a good thing. For example, it is actively driving women who are interested in computers and good at programming away from the industry. Who wants to deal with the boys' club?
Early stage is totally not worth it unless you join as director level or above.
The best way to deepen your knowledge is to buy books as a complementary. If you were interested by the AI class, for example, a good complement is Norvig / Russell's AI book, and if you want to know more about robotics Thrun's book is excellent as well. For every subject, even highly specialized ones, you can find a 600+ pages book which will cover the basics of that subject.

I think people just don't know the amount of quality knowledge you can find in technical books nowadays. You will hardly ever find the same quality material available online — although from time to time you can find freely available PDF drafts or papers, but that is rare. These kind of books cover a lot of depth usually up to near-research level; if you want to dig even deeper you'll have to explore research papers.

They (usually) cost between 40 and 80 euros / dollars; if you're on a dire financial situation, check out your local public library (or your university's if you're a student), they will most likely have the one you are looking for.
Everything I've seen has shown NYC is still slightly higher than SF. Do you have any sources other than this one guy's personal experience?
As we move into a new world of education, our goal should absolutely be mastery. Trying to group students by arbitrary aspects like "age" don't help education. Forcing students into more advanced topics before they are ready or simply telling them "You suck. give up", isnt't helping, either.

I really like the schools the Khan Academy is working with that use the videos to describe and drill on the topic at home and classroom time to work through the problem sets where the teacher and other students can help.

Combining the mastery of this article with the Khan model means any two students may not be working on the same problems or watching the same videos, but they are all working at the level they understand and are able to progress as a result.
This is not the case. I've tried and they absolutely will not sign you up unless you have an iOS device, even if you don't intend to use mobile features. Very frustrating, since I too waited a year for an invite.
51 Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have
I was using OpenTok for video recording and wanted to export videos to my blog. This helps me do that easily.
Looks like www.bootstrapcdn.com has already updated their files.
I'd like to add a pointer to OpenHAB, which has been released in Version 1.0.0 some days ago. It is an open source Home Automation Bus (HAB).

https://code.google.com/p/openhab/
+1, but to be fair to the discipline, I think there are fair number of posers in any important line of work. Programming is plagued by the same affliction, as anyone who has ever had to fill head count will tell you.
I'm friends with seekely, and we have gone back and forth about the idea of framing the "winner" as the "least popular", which as a negative connotation, vs. using terminology like "unique", which has a more positive connotation. It could be that by using the more negative language, people would believe that the free t-shirt is a consolation prize for having bad taste, as opposed to being excited about being special somehow. However, it's a completely subjective assessment in either direction. What did you all get as a first impression (or did it even register with you in that way)?
Looks great! I'd tweak the UI a bit to show more photos of the product prior to signing up.
Agreed. Just pointing out there's a workaround.
It feels like her role is an auxiliary function, like Office Manager or QA, so I think her generic analysis works. If her role was central to the business, then I don't think she would be valuing her contribution with a one-liner like 'Employee’s value-add to the company (I used 15%, which I think is pretty low!)'. Instead the question of her value-add would be the starting/central point of the negotiation.
That's awesome, are there any compatible pieces of hardware yet?
That's a big assumption - perhaps they can solve this problem and actually make better algorithms.
BTW port 25 is not SSH, it's SMTP. SSH is port 22.
Nautilus still crashes on me and Ubuntu refuses to find calibre when I click an epub file.

Windows is still better at these things.
I think this problem would be solved with after_create. Is there a reason not to use this?
Please!!! I'm a very happy Arq customer, this update would be awesome!
If nothing else, I think power consumption is a dealbreaker for a 20-year desktop PC. In (say) five years, there will be an iPhone with the same specs, and then you'll be running a desktop PC for 15 years at 100 times the power consumption for no reason. A good analogy is the way otherwise perfectly-good CRTs disappeared so quickly in favor of relatively expensive and low-contrast flat-panels. I'm using extreme numbers, but at that timescale even small efficiency increases will make it worth upgrading, and efficiency increases are a huge focus right now.

The place to look for a 20-year computer is probably the same place they are now -- embedded systems with minimal power consumption and ample specs for the limited job they're designed for. E.g., cars.
No, credentialling should be separated from learning. If I need to prove I can safely build a bridge, I should just be tested on that. If I want to learn how to build a bridge, my education should allow me to do whatever I need to do to master the subject.

A huge part of our problems in higher education and hiring have come because we've conflated the two.
Some great advice I got when someone comes back to you and says "We'll give you 16,000 shares" is essentially to ask "shares of what?"

One of the best questions to ask is "What percentage of the total outstanding shares does this represent?" Since 16,000 shares could be out of 100K, 1M, etc.
I've actually always liked the idea of XML at it's core- attributes and so on often make data structures easier to understand (just look at HTML), but namespacing and all that junk ruined the whole thing.

The only reason I still use XML every now and then is XPath. There are third-party alternatives for JSON, but XPath is ubiquitous.
It's definitely also a good argument to just use what's in hand!

It is actually also possible to connect to the internet using that module, using good old GPRS (The module contains a full TCP/IP) stack. Of course not near as fast as an average wifi connection.

I used it to create a set-up where you can send a text message to the module: "Where are you?", it would then respond with the latitude and longitude as well as the geocoded address using Google Map's Geocoding API over GPRS.
According to this post[1] they charge based on how long it takes them to retrieve the data. The hourly retrieval rate would be the amount of data you requested divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5 - 4.5 hours).

If it takes them 4 hours to retrieve your 3TB, then your peak hourly retrieval rate would be 768GB / hour (3072 GB / 4 hours). Your billable hourly retrieval rate would be 768GB - 1.28GB (3072 * .05 / 30 / 4 hours).

Total retrieval fee: 766.72 * 720 * .01 = $5520.38 (~180x your monthly storage fee)

The pricing appears to not be optimized for retrieving all your data in one fell swoop. This particular example appears to be a worst case scenario for restoration because you haven't split up your data into multiple archives (doing so would allow you to reduce your peak hourly retrieval by spacing out your requests for each archive) and you want to restore all your data (the free 5% of your data stored doesn't help as much when you want to restore all your data).

[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=374065#...
I suspect pg is suggesting that start ups don't need the distraction of dealing with a large number of investors directly. It seems FC solution is to combine and handle the "investor relations" for the crowd of investors.
Looks really useful at serving the stuff that you can't find anywhere else (and for whatever reason don't want to host yourself), but IMO it really needs a TOS / license - I'm guessing that I can use it on personal sites, but can I use it on commercial sites, can I use it on SaaS sites, or sell sites that use it, etc etc?
Somebody take a webshot of that page and send it to pg.

That's exactly what HN needs.

* http://i.imgur.com/xoMVr.jpg
As someone who's done a lot of functional and OO programing over the years, I find it very hard to believe that you have multiple projects that went from 1K+ lines of C++ to 10 lines of Scala.

Claims like this are the sort of thing that make make it hard to convince people to try functional programming, because they think that FP evangelists are full of shit.
As a very frequent t-shirt purchaser myself, the reason sites like TeeFury (which I love) do not sell at $25 is because their t-shirt quality, design, and printing style is not anywhere near as nice as Threadless or DesignByHumans. I am hoping Nifty will earn a reputation more like the latter sites than the former.

With that in mind, I will definitely test price points and appreciate the perspective from a fellow t-shirt buyer.
"Push code to github EVERYDAY"

Good advice; the title lends itself to initially annoy skeptics (including me), but it does look like you put a lot of effort into this. With that kind of sustained and public effort it's definitely doable.
Depends on OS developments. My 2006 Mac Pro is not supported under Mountain Lion, but it's still an excellent machine; 4 cores @ 2.66Ghz, 32GB of memory, and 6TB of disk. GigE, FireWire, USB, DVD/CDRom. I see no reason other than PC envy to upgrade to a different system. Eventually Apple will stop releasing security updates for Lion, and then I'll have to consider moving to a Linux distro. Short of a hardware failure I figure I'll get another 4-6 years out of it. Replacement parts for Mac Pros suck in price, but I bet I can find what I need on eBay. Heck, my system appears to be worth less than $500 according to my last search.
I'm going through this right now, sorta, tho I decided I need to be paid more at the start-up I work for. I'm paying for health out of pocket so my left-column is more like $80k. I'm basically looking for a raise to market value+ to cover out of pocket health costs. In my case, I feel like the stock options exist in lieu of company-paid health insurance and a bonus.

I know a few people that cashed out at successful but sanely-priced acquisitions (nowhere near silicon valley levels), and those vested options are never more than low-to-mid 5-figures. In other words, 4-5 years worth of bonuses at a consulting firm or agency.

The reality of a profitable acquisition is slim. You're better off getting paid market rate and treating the options for what they are: just a really good perk.
That's really cool, didn't even realize it could do GPRS - is it hosted anywhere?