skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking as a 27-year-old, it seems fairly reasonable to me. This is the age where you've had roughly 5 years of career experience in software or web development (if you went to college), and in the adolescence of your career you may have encountered a problem or a market that seems interesting and may also have a desire to be your own boss and avoid the tedium/politics/etc. of the places you've been so far (because, naturally, you won't make the same poor decisions!).

Not sure that I can speak to the prevalence of social startups in this age range, apart from the obvious "kids these days" take on it. Bear in mind, though, that it's not purely a representation of what 26- and 27-year-old founders are doing -- it's also reflective of YC's position.
Today, E.B.White would just set up an auto-reply

I disagree. In fact, White himself disagrees in the letter. He could have set up an auto-reply by letting his publisher handle his mail, but found that "evasive and unsatisfying".
Excellent!

Here in NZ a lot of professional contracts have a 'no salary disclosure clause' that prevents you from discussing your salary with coworkers.

We've generally worked around it by using things like tax and student loan deduction rates to work backwards. Against the spirit of the clause but nicely works around it.

On the other hand, we could just start a union...
I'm pretty sure that's not a precedent set by the failure to extradite Pinochet, who was a genocidal tyrant.
This is a great tool! Nice work. I posted a similar tool on HN a while ago, which can be helpful if you want to click into the spreadsheet to see the calculations.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4263459
I'm not sure about what you're saying... but if you're saying that the fact that ECHR considers judgments in absentia to be of no legal repercussions... means that a State can pursue charges in absentia even more easily... well... I think, in my understanding of Law, that you are wrong. It means that pursuing charges in absentia... is of no legal repercussions (duh). So the accused is entitled a right to a full fresh re-trial... not an appeal. Because it's like if nothing was done. That's why States try to avoid this... It's waste of ressources, because a sentence is of no use... Anyway there is going to be a full retrial of the first instance.

And there is a lot of things changing in French procedural law... but this is not changing. Judges of Instructions are not considered against ECHR and the rule that make it a requiremnt to present a suspect before the judge before any indictment... is actually more respectful of ECHR law than otherwise (see. 5.3 of the European convention on Human Rights).

And btw you know, China is not the UK or Sweden...

Oh and please ? Are you serious about the "adopting names from the US System" isn't that a proof of submission !" No it's not...
As a member of that age cohort (but not a founder, much less one funded by YC), I feel qualified to speculate wildly about this!

We were exactly the cohort who got facebook off the ground - I joined in March of '04, spring of my freshman year - so while we may not be "social web natives" depending on your interpretation of such a noxious term, we're definitely well-acquainted with it. Probably well enough acquainted to feel that we know what features are missing, what niches are underserved, or something along those lines, with existing social services.
This is just content locking with lipstick on, which was up until now among tactics such as cloaking and keyword stuffing, at least in my view. Hopefully they'll make it less scammy. If I could just do a 1min survey to access premium content that would be fine, but my fear is that I would have to go through 1min surveys for stuff that I now get for free.
Open source != a company's core business.

Not that I think Twitter's recent announcements are smart; quite the contrary. However, a false comparison distracts from the real problem.

I also think your comment is funny.
Thanks! Would love to see other models too!
Very true, handling accessibility issues is a challenge when using icon fonts. In certain browsers, the ARIA specifications suggest you could do something like

<button aria-label="Close">X</button>

to deal with screen readers to an extent. There's also the (pretty much completely unsupported) ACSS property

{speak: none;}

in conjunction with

<aria-hidden="true">

and then describe the icon with an offscreen span, pretty much as described here: http://css-tricks.com/html-for-icon-font-usage/#jump-alone. Still not even close to a good solution, though. If you have any insight into better handling icon fonts, I'd love to know.
You should probably start realizing that there are more devices than ever before.

They are all different and iOS/retina is taking smaller and smaller shares of it. Designing for that is designing for last generation platform-specific web and has little future.
It was 9 years before his next children's book came out, although he did have time to write Strunk and White between the two.
"Business" person needed - Disrupt the music promotion business with us
We're disrupting the way artists promote their music by getting their songs played on the air. The artists we've spoken to love our service but can't afford the price. We need a solution to this. We've thought about either lowering our price (not sure that's a good idea) or extending credit to these artists (via a third-party). In either case, we need help getting our service off the ground, proving our business model, and then taking it to the next level.

Initially this will have to be a a commission-only position. But if the service grows, you grow with us.

Please get in touch if you believe this is a perfect role for you.

Cheers,

Erik
Btw, are you using WebGL?
Obama vs. Romney: Analysis of Android native apps and mobile landing pages
Show HN: Help beta test our new app
We're building a web-app for designers to save images, crops and tabs in private boards and share them with clients and team. We would love to get your feedback early on. How is the pricing? Would you pay for it? What would you like to see?
http://board.creonomy.com/

Thanks!
It would seem so, when I visit in a non-WebGL enabled browser there's an indication saying it is required.
No problem, I'm glad you're getting value out of the responses. In response to your questions:

1. When I first started Vagrant, I was a full time Ruby developer, so Ruby was really the obvious choice for me. I don't really see language as a barrier for using a tool, my opinion is generally use the best tool for the job. And as a Ruby developer that at the time had 4 years of Ruby experience, that was the best tool for the job since I'd get the most productivity out of it. To date, I don't regret this decision. There are some things Ruby is bad at, some things it is good at, but I think I can overcome the bad with time.

2. I think the difference is that Vagrant is a tool focused on user experience and workflow. i.e. it'd be possibly to build Vagrant on top of libvirt. I think libvirt is technically stronger than Vagrant, but Vagrant provides a better overall experience. The overlap is small, we both have a lot to gain from working with each other.

3. A handful of people keep saying that Vagrant is just a "VM setup + provisioning" tool. Vagrant does quite a lot more. The main example I always use is networking because it is usually the most complex. Vagrant makes networks work across Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and sets up the hosts and guests properly. VeeWee doesn't do this and won't do this. VeeWee at its core was built to be a VM image creation tool. VM lifecycle control was bolted on later. VeeWee filled a major gap in the Vagrant ecosystem for a long time.

I'm good friends with the creator of VeeWee and we talked all the way back in Oct, 2011 of merging the functionality. He was all for it. Its almost been a year but this work is finally going to get started.

I don't want to talk too much about it until I really start coding, but I can say that no one in his thread has really seen the true scope of what I'm trying to build here. They will. :)
"The world's most irritating not-quite contract"

The Big picture is often a function of fine details.
I want a good 3D Printer!!!
Hi! Yep, the viewer is WebGL. We're using the Three.js library (http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/) to handle the actual rendering for us, and there's lot of programming magic behind the scenes to customise the meshes and textures on the fly.
This reminds me of a book we used in grad school in the mid-90s. Taught us methods of estimation without knowing all the facts. Something about a cow, etc. FWIW, Google didn't help me find the book. The book discussed techniques of estimation that sound like the typical Google/MS/Facebook interview. This was pre-Google, so we had to use our intuition and estimation skills. Very valuable
I thought Siracusa had a really good take on this in last Friday's Hypercritical (http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/81)

One point he made that resonated with me was how it was offensive to say that people wanting to support App.net are doing so to "flee from Twitter" based on the service being populist.

Even discounting the fact that the entire way you experience Twitter is exclusionary (based on the asymmetric follow model), it seems willfully disingenuous to ignore the main reason people are wary of Twitter (mainly, the companies current decisions around controlling the experience, and people's fear of what they will do in the future).

And catchy headline aside, if the "revolution" you're trying to start is one where people pay for the services they use instead of being at the mercy of advertisers, a country club isn't as bad a place to start it from as he makes out.

And I say that as someone who doesn't think App.net has a chance in hell of supplanting Twitter (which to be fair, isn't even their goal).
This looks great! One minor suggestion: make the toggle button non selectable for dragging. http://jsfiddle.net/SWqw3/ show's a basic way of doing this.
The Bozo Event Horizon
Notice that he writes and manage to steer clear of proprietary intellectual property. Seems a shame that the very concept of "intellectual property" (doesn't mention what kind, patent, trademark, copyright, trade dress, trade secret) can intrude on reporting. We're seeing "intellectual property" begin to override freedom of speech. This is a very disturbing trend.
Vest his 50% equity but instead of using time, use "customers" he bought on board(or define a different way to measure his value) and decide an amount of customers he should bring in order to make it worth those 50%.

Give him them the equity that he deserve based on this performance. :)
Not to mention Panda 3D. On another note, time for a code audit, I guess!
That blog post strikes me as a little fishy. I'm not privy to the internals of FB's engineering structure circa 2007, but I doubt a few engineers working on gifts (which even then likely brought in $millions/year) seriously detracted from development elsewhere.

Given the date, I think it's more likely that gifts were removed to help support the growing FB Platform rather than competing with its apps. (In 2007 people had profiles that looked like this: http://yflcsandi.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/facebook-profil...) Either that, or something along the lines of focusing less on revenue-generating activities.

That said, I believe it's better to nurture traditions early, especially if those traditions involve payment. It's also rare for a company to generate significant amounts of revenue from multiple channels, so I'm not sure it was a wise decision to just kill off the Gift Shop.
Good.

I think it's an important milestone to build something end to end, no matter how simple or imperfect.

On a related note, I was recently looking for a todo app for my phone and found myself wondering how it is that there are so many (hundreds) apps, many of which have their own ardent fans.

When there are so many competing apps and such parity between them, what's the lure for using one over another?

In my case, I tried several and ended up using the one which felt most intuitive to me - the app which allows me to record and organize things the way I think of them with the least effort.

So...I wonder if the relatively low barrier of entry to creating sufficient functionality in such an app has worked with the myriad, individual ways of thinking about time and tasks to feed multiple many successful apps in the same space.

If this is the case, how different would other spaces, which are currently dominated by just a few players look and feel if the mechanics were easier to implement?
having a curator decide APIs and standards (OS X) certainly wins over an mashup of billions of packages (Debian).

That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it, but it certainly doesn't make it true. To me, Debian has always been the most elegant of operating systems, with a lot of thought put into how things are laid out and making sure that literally thousands and thousands of programs play very nicely together, not to mention compile and run properly on a multitude of architectures. And while I'm sure you can drag up some anecdotes about how Debian didn't detect some guy's wireless chipset, I can find complaints of things in OSX (right in the replies to this article!) that I've never had a problem with in Debian. Not to mention I don't like being told what I can and cannot do with my hardware.
Show HN: Open source version of Instagram's iOS filtering/camera
FreeBSD grinds on one until it definitively works.

And what happens if it never works?
Al Pacino.
That's not just short-sighted, it's wrong now: the number of high density mobile platforms means designers should be very worried how their site looks.

And, for the most part, sites look terrible.

It’s not that simple, though. While mobile (a.k.a. small) devices have been leading the way in higher pixel densities, they also tend to have Internet access at speeds rivalling a carrier pigeon, and the amount of data included in their plans before insane pricing kicks in is frequently still measured in megabytes. All those double-resolution assets might look great, if (and only if) you have a screen that can render them, but they are also slowing things down and eating up people’s data allowance. Not everyone is going to thank you for that.
I get this at
Mon Aug 20 2012 23:00:37 GMT+0200

Not Found

The requested URL /ripping-oauth-tokens-or-other-secrets-out-of-tweetdeck-twitter-app-and-other-apps/ was not found on this server.
Show HN: Loading Indicator Innovation
You'd be surprised at how well a bazaar fits _inside_ a cathedral :)
Google Translate Turns Obama Into Bush
Maybe it's just me but I find the two week problem to be less about configuring my dev environment. Give me a sufficiently unix like box hg and I'm configured in less than 5 minutes.

It's more about getting up to speed the system I'm developing on and I have difficulty seeing how that can be properly abstracted out into a general solution.

Oh and of course the obligatory "You can have my emacs running evil-mode when you pry it from my cold dead hands".
I give up. You're like a little kid. Codesize or verbosity doesn't matter. Quality is a keyword and it resulting in sustainable pace. If you doesn't understand this, nobody can help you. Your arguments are like as "Why I should use TDD, if I can write code directly".
Wow. Textbook prices have gone out of control. 25 years ago as a comp sci/math dual major, the MOST I ever spent in one semester was $300.
And here's a simple story of how we did it over 2 days http://www.backspac.es/r/EtZtSJyJRB
So the number 1 complaint for this seems to be that most courses are abandoned mid-way through by the teacher for various reasons. If 80%+ of courses get only 2 lessons in before abandonment, this isn't going to really catch on as a learning medium.

The UReddit teachers are volunteers from the reddit community, not vetted in any way. You're going to get a wide-range of quality of instruction. Some people might not even know the topic they volunteer to teach, and plan to teach themselves as they teach others.

And it's a time-intense process creating interesting course content, and most people underestimate that up front. "Hey I'd love to teach a class on PHP" and then they realize it takes 20 hours a week to prepare each lesson... Uh oh.
I was the youngest in a tiny family, and never had much exposure to children younger than myself. As such, I grew up not liking kids very much - I thought they were obnoxious, loud, selfish little creatures.

Then, about 10 years ago, I met my now-wife and got pulled into her gigantic family, complete with dozens of nieces and nephews. Not really knowing how to interact with young children, I just talked to them like adults - not dumbing down what I said, making jokes and references that there was no possibility they would understand - I found it kind of amusing to talk to a child like that.

But, the funny thing is, they really responded to being treated that way. And, it was fascinating to see how they reacted to my comments and questions. A lot of times I would say something I thought was totally over their heads, yet they would inevitably furrow their brows, and come up with some kind of response - often showing an amazing level of comprehension. It was really interesting to see how a child's thought process works, and how it changes as they grow.

As a perverse revenge against someone who didn't like kids, they all grew fond of me. I guess they liked being treated as people instead of dumb little kids.

Epilogue: I actually grew to like children... or the mostly-well-behaved ones, anyway.
This only happens in places run by people who do not value systems administrators.
Unnatural Link Building Issues and The Small Business
If you're an experienced developer, but the project you join requires a different toolset and/or set of executables than a previous one, then it'll take you a good while to get up to speed on it.

E.g. you've got Visual Studio the way you like it, but the new project has different code organization and code conventions and requires a different version of C++. You were developing for Android on Juno and now you're using GWT on Indigo. The libraries aren't checked in, and also Bob built them himself because he wanted to patch the logging library. The build system depends on ActiveState Python 2.5, it breaks in subtle ways if you use another distribution or version, but no one can tell you because they just all happen to have installed their copy when that was the latest.

[Remembered another one: we're using a library, but it's broken, and the workaround involves setting up absolute paths to a number of files in your user directory, and no one has a complete set of the necessary because we're all working on a different subset than you.]

A repo with dotfiles ain't gonna help you with any of that. I suspect that these scenarios describe the vast majority of development environments by quantity. It's a luxury to have your build environment be describable by a few text files whose location are known rather than bundled up in binaries, Windows Registry entries, and cargo-culted tribal knowledge. Yes, that's a horrible state of affairs, but to point the finger at "new developers" is to miss the point.
Returns for brand-name VC funds
Moore's Law of the Mind: Technology is Not Making Us Stupider
Maybe I should have titled my app submission this morning "A crappy list of good domains that no one will ever use". A provocative title seems to be good for at least 28 more points than I got.
In that event there is always https://www.coursera.org/ or https://www.edx.org if the university of reddit doesn't pan out.
(To add: My point is that sometimes "shipping" isn't enough -- you need something else to grab attention).
Huh, interesting that NPR, bastion of journalistic integrity that it is, would bother publishing the words of this horrible hack.

</sarcasm>
How big is the ceramic figurine market?
Why I Chose Startup PR Over Corporate PR
In Desperate, Successful Ploy For Coverage, ShoutOut Turns TC Against Itself
Chris Eppstein (creator of compass) connecting his dots
While 5 bucks is nice.. You need a culture check to see if a patient needs antibiotics(most sore throats are viral). I'm guessing, because it is only a 5 dollar visit he doesn't do that test.

This causes 2 issues.
1. The patient receives drugs for which will do him nothing.
2. Allows for antibiotic resistance to be breed into microorganisms.
How does this work with hashed passwords?

Wouldn't any semblance of avalanche effect make this attack useless?
I agree that the lightbox experience is common, but I view the surveys as fundamentally different than advertisements. Part of our idea is that your attention is more valuable than a banner/video ad. If I had 30 seconds of time from a smart HN reader, I'd rather ask for advice than show a commercial. Hopefully getting at that valuable opinion will allow you to get better free content online.

And, just to be clear, we're keeping the surveys fully anonymous; so we will not collect or tie to an e-mail address or other personally identifiable information.
You know what's interesting? The immediate follow up to that first message, by Richard Chimera, mentions Randy Pausch. Does anybody remember him?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Small world.
It is more than that. Summer felt as long as a year feels now, it is not just a couple of days of difference.
I do have the sentence "This difference is enough to measure, even on web applications." in the fourth paragraph. Should I highlight that a bit, bold maybe?

I'd also like a good reference for that, and my Google skills were failing me. Do you happen to have a link to something show that off?
You "feel their pain" by tracing through this entire sub-discussion, desperately clicking down-arrow along the way, and then adding some masturbatory, zero-content noise comment to try to cluck with the herd?

This is, without doubt, the Worst of Hacker News. My original post mentioned the truism that commenting was a crutch (which to a non-idiot doesn't mean that all commenting is bad, but that when someone is bad at writing or reading code they need to lean on comments in a negative fashion: No longer do they need to write clear, provable code, but instead can inject lots of comments that may or may not correlate with the reality reflected in the code (more often it does not). No longer do they need to understand what code does but instead can just hope and pray that it does something similar to the vague description at the outset).

Cue the chorus of hilarious quacks making their utterly stupid, Reddit-quality posts to try to sing with the chorus.

Give me a break. Declaring someone a troll is the banal hubris of the intellectually broken.
You should probably start realizing that displays have higher pixel densities than ever before.

More and more devices will be providing high resolution displays. Designing for low-resolution displays is designing for last generation devices and has little future.

Of course, designers should aim for a solution that is as device-agnostic as possible. The linked article provides designers with a number of alternative ways to support high resolution displays. Perhaps their use of Apple marketing speak ("Retina") is self-limiting, but to dismiss the article out-of-hand for using that term is no better.
There are plenty of reasons other than people being unable to "Java right", though I'm not saying that Java doesn't get plenty of hate out of ignorance.

A good example of when you can't use Java would be embedded projects or projects where you need to squeeze even more performance out of your code. Java is fast but it isn't the fastest.

Feel free to love your language of choice but I'd recommend not letting it get in the way of common sense.