skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The famous "everything that can be invented has been invented" quote attributed to Charles H. Duel, a late 19th-century commissioner of the US Patent Office, is apocryphal (http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-ev...) but remains a comically potent response to this sort of short-sighted bullshit.

There will always be new problems to solve. There will always be better solutions invented to existing problems. And solving problems experienced by a lot of people, and solving them well, will always be worth a lot of money.

I run a 20-person webapp design and development consultancy, with employees all over the US and no central office. Group communication is a constant problem for us: we use Campfire rooms for most project communication, but frequently have to drop into Skype for ad-hoc video calls. I wind up in Google Chat several times a day with employees and clients as well. Campfire is great for realtime-ish team conversations, but if you want to ask a question like "hey, anyone want to go in on a house for SXSW?" you're probably better off sending an email if you want everyone to see it and have a chance to respond. We keep a lot of company docs in Google Docs, stuff which would really be more useful in the company wiki we don't have setup currently. I could go on, but the gist is that our communication tools for project teams, the company, clients, and 1-on-1 conversations are pretty fragmented.

Theoretically Yammer should solve this problem. It doesn't. We've experimented with it in the past, and it's a poor fit in a thousand tiny ways. We're a bunch of geeks living all over the country designing and building software products, not a division at Big Co.

But, y'know, everything's been invented. ;)
I came here to say the same thing. I had to do a CTRL+F to search for "Michelle" to see if I had missed where "Me:" and "Kyle:" turned into "Michelle:" and "Kyle:".
Really excited for the BufferBox and Plivio guys !
The idea that big players are Borg-like (#) in their perfect ability to anticipate and assimilate all great and threatening innovations is at odds with my own experience. The current crop of behemoths may be better than their predecessors, but it's still the case that they are much slower and less efficient at deciding and doing things than startups are. They are still myopically focused on current profit centers and fraught with strategy taxes. They are still arrogant and inflexible. (At least in my experience.)

Having helped build a startup (ITA Software) up to 500 employees, I was struck by the degree to which even companies whose leadership tries to do the right thing accrue politics, time-wasting, heavyweight processes, and outright antibodies to good ideas. And don't even get me started on working with other, much bigger companies.

The cost basis argument might be right; maybe it does take more money now to get a fully-formed, defensible product to market. That's exactly the phenomenon that has lead to the consolidation of the video game business; it takes 100+ people to make a AAA title now. I don't see the same thing happening with consumer internet startups, generally though -- in fact, it seems the opposite: with iOS apps, for example, the entry cost is low, but upside is also relatively limited (compared to, say, Google).

(#) a phrase from one of David's own replies
I disagree.

The essay you link to is absolutely fabulous and I couldn't agree with it's conclusions more, but I know that I want to be a programmer. I 'always' (since 10) knew it and now, nearly twenty years later, which were filled with programming and little other than programming I'm still the same. I want to be a programmer, I struggle for mastery in nearly every aspect of my art/craft/... and I don't mind spending another twenty years in ever more obscure corners of it.

Now, this doesn't have to be the case for OP. Maybe he want's to create something which he can sell, or maybe he just wants to be literate in computers. There could be lots of reasons one wants to learn programming in 21 days (or 8 weekend, or whatever).

What I want to say is that although programming could eat your whole life in one bite not everyone wants this to happen and such people are perfectly right to try and learn a bit and then stop.

...sorry, I had a hard day at job today, I just needed to write something. Don't mind me :)
Change a culture and you've changed the future
The rent subsidy is ~$600/month after tax.
I think he's right for the wrong reason. The Valley has gotten unimaginative, and Mr Sacks is suffering from the ambient lack of imagination.

I think there are other communities waiting in the wings, who don't yet compulsively chase VC funding and TechCrunch news cycles, who have intelligent, creative people who still have some spare time to start new projects (possibly because they are underemployed, unlike in SF where talented people all work at least 40 hours/week)
I think we're in agreement here. There's plenty of advancement: it just isn't in desktop horsepower because that's not where the demand is. I never meant to imply there was no advancement on the desktop at all. I was just trying to get the gist of "advancement tracking demand" out there.
"At first glance I thought you were selling that first example of a crappy tee" - that's a very good point... I should probably make it more obvious that I'm making fun of it.

"I really like the B-tree design" - very cool!!!

"More examples would be good." - My wife did just finish up one more design, so we could post that one up now too. We're kind of building this up as we go. Related to your point here, would it hurt or help if, instead of the current shirt images we have, that instead there were real images of the shirts? We've just ordered some singles of the designs and in a few weeks should be able to show the actual shirts themselves.

"Put it on reddit, on a smaller subreddit." - This may sound lame, but I've never signed up for reddit. Are there specific topics on there that you'd recommend posting in?
ReadyForZero.com and Light Table both use Noir.
Its 2 people sharing an apartment(Im assuming from them being engaged), so that is easier). Also rental insurance is fraction of what you mentioned, especially if its part of your auto insurance coverage.
Kickstarter employee invites 20,000 strangers to a picnic in Brooklyn
I wrote a tool a while ago to do this math:

http://options-vs-salary.com

This is based on various blog entries I've read on the subject.
I have to disagree with the statement no on is pushing PC-only experiences. Epic is pushing UnrealEngine4 as potentially PC-only unless the console makers step up.

Then there's Arma 3 just around the corner.

From my point of view, as a PC gamer, the reason there's not so much investment in using the PC graphics capability we have cheaply available right now is because of the influence of the console market. Most big budget games right now are made for the current crop of consoles which PCs outpaced years ago. Too many times the PC version is just the 360 version with UI changes to support the mouse and keyboard. You can look at the graphics mods that are being made for games such as Skyrim and GTA4 to see the wasted potential.

Also, it's really, really expensive (as you point out) to make a game that truly pushes the capabilities we have right now and very few developers are willing to do that, it's a huge risk. Part of UnrealEngine4's development are attempts to address this by providing tools to help reduce the time necessary with the creation process.

But not all games need high graphic fidelity, that's not the whole story. The true waste is the pure amount of cheap computational power we have available with both the GPU and CPU that's being wasted. Screw photo-realism, I want more physics and AI.
Is ‘Daily Deal’ Brokering An Unsustainable Business Model?
I was surprised to see 9GAG in there as well but the reality is it's probably going to make a good amount of money. It's a magnification of all the worst parts of reddit which are also extremely popular.
This makes sense, but from what I can tell, in virtually no major XML-based systems is the basis for XML files an underlying text extended with markup. Most XML systems, since the dawn of XML, have been top-to-bottom structured data.
Inside Intellectual Ventures, the most hated company in tech
A collection of modern (2012) front-end dev interview questions
Social is Just Like the Rise of Television Advertising
Those of us that got heavily into EverQuest "back in the day" recall raids that involved these kinds of numbers (50+) and took place over 8-10 hour periods. It was possible to achieve with sufficient planning, a dedicated guild, and a compulsion overwhelmed the need to sleep, eat, or view the sun.

I'm not proud of those days, but it did help me realize the key to managing any large group of people: make it feel like work, make everyone believe that it is a job and not a leisure activity so that you feel obligated to stay despite a complete lack of anything resembling fun.

So, yeah, I can imagine this actually happening. If you could do it with EverQuest, you can probably manage to achieve it with Minecraft.
I do like the idea of choosing a reason from a short list when you hit the down vote button. For that matter, I like the idea of doing that for up votes, too.
I've used it _alot_ especially for scripting. Really powerful support for quickly write dynamic code to run transformations, connect to db's, connect to mq's etc. It's easier to read than python (for me) and you can just drop a lib in groovy_home for support to whatever dbdriver (like oracle). Seriously give it a go, before you call it senseless. But you know, use what you know and what you can be effective with to solve a given problem.
The Consequences and Repercussions of Wanting To Want-Away
Also, Michelle mentioned that she was "friends with all of the founders of Keen." No small detail there.
What HN and the "startup scene" has taught me for the most part is only that there are a huge number of pretentious CEOs / VCs / Lead Devs who all think they have some unique insiders only membership to startup businesses. A business is a business is a business. It doesn't matter if it's a website, a mobile app or a brick and mortar store. If you are a business that is just starting out... you are a startup.

Thank you for putting better words around what I've had on my mind for a long time.
Couldn't they have stepped outside the bedrock wall after building a nether portal, or does it extend "underground"? Finding another portal in the nether would lead you back to a different point on the surface.
Each country in Europe has their own systems, which are provided by the local banks. Pretty much every bank has their own solution and you have to integrate with that. If that sounds crazy, you'd better go with PayPal as long as Stripe is US only. However, payments through the bank systems are usually preferred over card payments.
Part of me thinks that communities have a lifecycle. I feel like I caught a few on the way up - 4chan and facebook - and some on the decline - K5, plastic, fark. Only /. seems to go on and on like it always was.

Sadly HN is feeling more and more like it's in its twilight years, if only because of all these endless posts on how to "fix" it. Particularly since I'm seeing people suggest a $5 signup charge. That killed K5 stone dead.
Twitter phrase Heat-Map Demo
Silicon Valley != The Internet (The CEO of Yammer says the darndest things)
I think that 50k/1% should be considered only as a 'hobby occupation'. Or, if one is trying to change a field of work.

Because this early employee 1% is a) going to get diluted; b) it is over 4 years; c) most likely will result in $0 - $5000 cash-wise. And 50k (without benefits I assume) is.. well nothing.
Having had my own revenue-positive "startup" called a hobby, a toy, a blog and various other diminutions, generally by people who've never managed their own company's budget or, if they have, have blown millions in startup capital, this was great.

Whether your company's a startup or not can drive you up semantic walls, when the the focus should (for some people) being on building something of value, whether that value's for shareholders, investors, or just yourself, and to hell with all the labels.
Sounds great, if done without testing, it would have had only a moderate effect:

When presented with a gadget that could be grasped, some (18%) pulled, a few (9%) pushed, but 40% tried to turn it like a doorknob.
You're exactly right - as long as the portal was rebuilt far enough away (or take down the first portal), it's literally a way of generating more (obsidian) blocks in the world.

Or work with a friend, have that person take out the portal's nether entrance, then just restart the normal portal = boom, 14 more bricks.
I use arrow keys for movement all the time. Not always, but I found no value in forcing myself otherwise.
I like Kippt. I just wish their was a service like it where I didn't have to worry about any of my saved content becoming public. Or that it might be acquired and then I have to start over (I'm looking at you, Spool). For now, I suppose I will continue to use Kippt. Their search needs some work, though.
I really like this. I found myself with a gradually widening smile as I realized the ramifications of the whole concept. The brilliance from the commerce standpoint is that the freebie is by definition minimized by the number of shirts sold, and a typical loser product will see more activity than usual. From a customer standpoint, you have effectively 20% chance of getting a freebie, making the perceived purchase price 80% of $25, or $20, a very reasonable price for a graphic t-shirt. However, since it's the least purchased number getting freebies, I'd expect your actual revenue to be more like $21 per shirt, thus creating profit out of thin air. Customer pays a decent marginal price (for a hopefully quality product), you get a built-in profit from the mechanics, and the game mechanics nearly guarantee a larger volume of purchases than normal. Overall, a great strategy!
I think she used a valuation of $5mil when doing her calculations. What are the odds the company will exit at that number? What are the odds it'll exit higher? What are the odds that it'll flame out and be worth nothing? Will her shares dilute? How much more does she feel she should earn to make up for all of this extra risk she's assuming?

She doesn't appear to consider any of this. At least, I don't see any numbers that take this stuff into account.
XML is a smooth fit on strongly typed languages. You can easily translate an exact type into a corresponding XML encoding and know the type of what you're getting out on the other end. JSON on the other hand is duck typing in web service form. You can shove any data structure in on one end, and get it back out the other end, without writing any custom code, and without actually knowing the type of the data you've sent. You could say that JSON itself is weakly typed.

The popularity of JSON is tied to the popularity of weak typing. You can more rapidly iterate your API design and codebase without those bothersome types getting in the way. The flip side of that is the end result isn't "done done". It lacks full validation of input and it lacks complete documentation. In short it's more difficult to use and more prone to bugs and security issues. I suspect that if you compare "done done" API's JSON and SOAP are probably equally productive.

Having said that, I use JSON myself. It's too easy to get going in.
I can't tell what you do from the first page without signing up. There is no chance I'm going to give you my email address, Facebook account, etc, without having an iota of understanding of what you do.
Neal Stephenson interview: Kickstarter, swordfighting, and the big novel [..]
Cool idea. I read an article here a couple months ago about vim autocomplete and I mapped my tab key to autocomplete, but that was super annoying for, you know, adding indentation.

Now I've got my arrow keys mapped to Nop in all modes except I mapped my right key to autocomplete in insert mode, which has worked pretty well for the last 10 minutes. I'd really like to start using autocomplete more, so for me it's handier than text moving.
YC Demo Day Bingo Welcome the newest YC batch
here's a clickable link : http://signup.happynerdshirts.com
BufferBox looks really nice. I like that kind of thinking. Solving a real world problem.
Yeah, that was the big thing that made me wonder WTF. Really wish there was more data on that part of it.

Wonder if any of the original experiment data or executors are still around.. :)
Interesting. How long have you been using Vim?
JSON is data. XML is markup.

While so many key so strongly on the markup element of the name, XML is the structured markup of data into a document. Too many have some baggage that they think Markup means something like HTML, and document means English language text.

What this article is talking about is a bit facetious -- JSON seldom replaced XML, but instead was a greenfield choice for data packaging, where previously many used delimited or custom structured techniques. The single reason why JSON "wins" are ease of use, which is the same way that PHP and MySQL won. No one should confuse it with fitness for the task when really it's ease of getting started that defines its success.
probabilityOfClosing = (question) ->
text = question.text.toLowerCase()
return (text.length / (text.indexOf('jquery') + 2)) / 100
My account is fairly old as well, but I think PG is correct in trying to discover a rating independent of karma or account age. I don't want to start chasing karma just so my opinion is considered, and I fear a HN where uber-posters hold sway (even more). Similarly, a newish poster who adds huge value shouldn't be disadvantaged because they haven't been around for X years. If they act like PG wants us to, they should get more voting juice.

I'd like to see, as a result of algo changes, less nastiness and better thought-through discussions. Fewer me-too comments, fewer arbitrary no-value comments. I'll happily trust our dictator-for-life on this issue.
She's using the note valuation; she didn't just make up $5MM.

Those are all good questions to ask. Some of them are questions she considers, some of them aren't.

Ultimately, though, the question of how you --- a prospective employee --- value equity is orthogonal to the question this post engages with, which is "how do I take the valuation for my role that I arrive at and effectively communicate it to the prospective employer so as to improve my initial offer". And, in that regard, I think this is a very good and useful post.
My suggestion is to get rid of down-voting. Griefers that want to abuse the system would need to do a lot more work if their only tool was up-voting. Accentuate the positive!

This also reduces the problem of people down-voting posts simply because they disagree with an opinion.
What kind of database are we talking about? The kind of database where you can't reset users' passwords?

Someone asked a question similar to yours a while ago. Maybe the answers may be of help: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4076257.

I guess you could run bcrypt on all your database's md5 hashes and do something like:

if entered_password.md5.bcrypt == stored_password:
stored_password = entered_password.bcrypt
login()

That way, you will only have to store the bcrypted md5 hashes, until the next time someone tries to log on - assuming that's the kind of back-end you have.
It's Mat. (I didn't recognize the name, but when spelled as Mat, I immediately know "oh, the guy hacked for his three letter twitter handle")
This.

Frictionless spending is your enemy. Oh that is a great book, click click click, $10 just whooshed out of your wallet into your kindle. There are so many good movies out this summer, blam blam blam another $50 - $60 GONE. Oh god I can't start my day without some caffiene pick up a vente latte half and half for me would you? Another $6 gone. It goes on and on. And it adds up.
Mendocino! It's the best
Education data startup Clever (S12) hits big milestone, makes new hire
Below in the comments, I mention I am very curious to find out if people will take buying the least popular t-shirt as a positive (I'm unique) or negative (Why would I want a trash shirt). You clearly fall in the latter category, which is very reasonable. I am very open to tweaking the game mechanics so it is perceived as a win win by everybody while still a sustainable site.

The shirt and printing style are of high quality. I need to do a better job on the site emphasizing that.

Sorry you did not like this week's designs. Maybe next week (or not based on your comment =p)
then, wow, she's getting screwed.
Call me crazy, but I think people should not be compensated better because they're good negotiators.
Interview with Jared Erondu of The Industry
The Bodybuilding Diet: How I lowered my Cholesterol by 60 points.
For slightly more amusing attacks on printers, there is an android app available - HP Printer Fun.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.angryhacke...
If you got it, watch out! Google took one of my domain names by legal force a couple of years back, since it had "google" in the domain name.
A startup usually comes with the connotation that you will scale it to some sort of ideal (whether that be revenue, the people or businesses you have an impact on, etc.). A site that pulls in a decent income via advertising is really just a lifestyle business with little chance of scaling. Now if you made a network of these sites or found some other scalable product coming from this site.. then you'd have a startup, no? No one says you have to build a startup though.
To be fair, Bearer Token is only one option for credentialing under Oauth2 (which also includes e.g. MAC, which is as good a authentication token as you could ask for).

And: Bearer Token is as good as the session cookies that are used in every app everywhere.

There's a valid criticism of OAuth2, and that's that there are lots of decisions that are left up to the Authorization server implementer, and they need to know what they're doing. And this is security: no one knows what they're doing well enough.
But least popular does not at all mean "shittiest". Least popular means the fewest sales; if people were buying only because of the shirt they wanted, then you would indeed be getting the worst shirt. However, some people are buying based on what they think will be the least popular shirt, which changes up the mechanics quite a bit. In the end, the only good strategy is to pick the shirt you want to have, but not everyone will think that way. Some will settle for a less desired shirt in order to perhaps win the freebie. I don't see the same negativity in the concept you do.
You do use hjkl and the others, right? As long as you do, we're good here. But if not, you need to block the arrow keys and use vim the 'right way'. I assume what you must mean is that you are using these in insert mode. Simply don't. Drop out of insert mode for navigation concerns and let vim handle the heavy movement work.
True about the money. I suppose that is why we still have Jersey Shore getting produced... AND a spin-off! double sigh
His point is that the methodology is flawed because of the unique circumstances of the author being engaged to the CEO. This skews the inputs upward in her favor.
An error on the index sends off alarm bells, and I bet others never bother to try the other pages - just thinking "this is broken".

I know where JS runs. I was conflating embedded javascript references as <script src="http....> style javascript. Typically when I am doing JS, the JS is marked up as being served from a domain - an initial assumption would be that it would be trying to pull the js from a server, but it's not (or not caring, or my stuff is cached).

I still side with the others who want/expect hosted and versioned docs from a project of this size/influence.
Referly (YC S12) lets businesses create their own rewards networks
Cool Facebook Covers for Lady Gaga Fans
Check this[0] out. Autocomplete when typing words, indentation otherwise.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/3418565