skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a terrible idea.

Makr.io is a new kind of meme generator

That really misses the point of what a meme is.
Ask HN: What's the best book to learn software Engineering
To conclude my Graduation, i need to develop and present a software. I know how to code (PHP, Ruby, Java) but never made a software before. So, what's the best book to guide me on the process of producing good software?
Add an Instagram-like experience right into your apps
> I definitely wasn't expecting that because Jason Fried didn't give his company a month off. Jason Fried just gave his company a new role for a month.

Yeah, like a lot of other people, my expectation was that everyone got a month of paid, mandatory vacation. A month-long hackathon is a lot less interesting.
Okay, sorry, let me spend some more time and give you an example.

One big problem with a unified dashboard is that not everything in your life should be monitored on the same frequency.

Here's one example: You probably need to check your email several times a day (if not, god bless you!) but checking your 401k balance several times a day is almost certainly harmful to your well-being. It probably doesn't make you happier; contemplating your money rarely does. Instead it will alternately make you worry (as every dip in the stock market causes nightmarish visions of a retirement spent in a cardboard box), or make you irrationally exuberant (as every good trading day makes you dream of buying a second home). The net effect is that it will subtly encourage you to trade, because if you don't trade your 401k is the most boring thing imaginable, and you feel the subconscious urge to tinker with it to make it do something. But trading is a disaster, because churning your investments makes other people rich at your expense, and because timing the market doesn't work, and telling yourself not to time the market usually doesn't work, either.

For much more on this topic see the work of e.g. William Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing, The Investor's Manifesto) or any of the so-called Bogleheads, or try Ramit Sethi:

https://wordsofward.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-single-best...

Here's another example: The ideal amount of time to spend monitoring your weight is none, unless your weight is unhealthily large or is increasing significantly. (If you're prone to anorexia, a continuously updated dashboard showing your weight is potentially dangerous. You need to avoid playing that game.) And unless you're some sort of edge-case athlete, by no means should you monitor your weight daily: You should either weigh-in weekly, or weigh yourself daily but compute a running average (and have a deep understanding of what a running average is and why you're computing it). Otherwise day-to-day fluctuations are likely to destroy your confidence in your diet. (I'm told that, for this reason, Weight Watchers explicitly trains members to weigh-in weekly, not daily.)
JavaScript video technology only 17 years in the making
point is, by following 37signals advice, you will not be 37signals. You probably won't be successful either.
I'm afraid you are attacking straw men.

This specific case, this specific correlation, is not really ready to go into the popular press as headlines for the general public to take home.

It is easy to do controlled experiments regarding gravity which are not completely loused up with confounds. Nobody needed to go data-fishing in order to find gravity - it's a very clear and strong phenomenon.

Are you sure that there are no possibly relevant systematic differences OTHER than age, between men who have children early and ones who have children late?

A 'proposed' mechanism cannot substitute for understanding of what is actually happening, in the context of popular publication of data suggesting that autism is caused by having babies too late... this is a month away from the women's magazines and two months from parents being blamed for their children's autism. It would be more responsible to actually demonstrate a causal link before running to the presses.
Heh, when I mean 'fake shitty', I mean the filters themselves are meant to make the photos look aged, blurry, etc. "Fake shitty." Wabi-sabi.
What talks do you want to see at PyCon?
Purchased!

I'm launching my first book next month (http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com), which, like SideProjects, is based on many, many lot of conversations I've had with the freelancers/consultants who use my SaaS product.

The idea that developers don't pay for things - including infoproducts - is bunk. My book has netted just over $2,000 in prepurchase sales in the last week.

Kudos to the author for putting this together (the list of people you've interviewed is OUTSTANDING)
I've always wondered if you could combine a sod farm and cattle ranch? You've got to cut the grass anyway.

I'm sure there would be problems such as trampling the grass, over-grazing, but maybe they're solvable??
The used-fuel problem is already solved. The solution is just effectively permanently blocked by NIMBY-ism.
Open sourcing an Instagram-like camera with filters for iOS
From the PR:

> "Thousands of years later, Albert Einstein assumed that space and time were continuous and flowed smoothly, but we now believe that this assumption may not be valid at very small scales," Quach said.

My only source of knowledge is having read a pop-physics book or two, but I thought it was well-accepted that at "small scales", the universe is very non-continuous and chaotic?

And, reading the PR, it doesn't seem to be that breathless nor does it say it's overturning the Big Bang. It read more like "hey there might be another thing that happened during the Big Bang and that might make 'cracks' that we might be able to see".
Not true regarding 46 ancestors - chromosomal DNA is swapped between the homologous chromosomes during meiosis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis#Prophase_I

You are correct about mitochondrial DNA.
The journalist writes "we know that nuclear power is safe".
I think you may be thinking of the relationship between down syndrome and maternal age, which I have heard estimated at "thousands of times more likely". However, perhaps this is a slight exaggeration as well:

http://pregnancy.about.com/cs/downsyndrome/l/bldownssyn.htm
Seems developers can candidate for a free Leap+SDK if they like your project idea and think you can deliver.

>How can I get a free developer kit?

>We’re distributing thousands of kits to qualified developers, [...] register to get the SDK and a free Leap device first, and then wow us.

Apply here: https://live.leapmotion.com/developers.html

I like the small size and reasonable price.
Might be cool as a 3rd input device, or for specialized terminals.
Tell that to http://memegenerator.net/, which gets over 20 million PVs a month.

http://www.quantcast.com/memegenerator.net
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

If you stop refactoring. So you know what? Don't stop.

At the beginning is the project when you know the least. About your tech, about your product, about your customers, about your competitors and partners. The best design decisions are made with the most information. Ergo, all design decisions should be delayed as long as possible.

The only question is how we responsibly delay design decisions. The answer for me is lots of automated tests and a willingness to refactor as we see ways to improve our designs. Plus a bunch of other agile technical practices.
Fat is also not evenly distributed. Lots of extra fat on beef is cut from the carcass, ground, then remixed with lower fat ground beef. IIRC, 93/7 is standard, and 80/20 is just cut with fat.
Ah, completely understand. Valid point.
You would rather that food unsuitable for human consumption were thrown out to rot rather than feeding livestock?
thousands of times more likely

This is the sort of thing you should check before you post. It only took a minute to find a well-sourced overview of the clinical literature on wikipedia, with results clustering around a 40% increased risk of autism for the offspring of men in their forties (vs men in their twenties), though one study from Israel found the the risk to be almost 6 times higher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect#Autism_spec...

To blithely suggest that the probability is 'thousands of times' higher is misleading to the point of irresponsibility. Think of the confusion and anxiety such misinformation can create in the mind of an uninformed reader.
The myth of doing “that one thing”
Ubuntu One ftw :)
It may not make sense today. Amazon is notorious for betting on the far future. They're also raising the bar on what archival data storage services could offer. When you ship your bits to Amazon, they're in 3+ DCs, and available programmatically.

Separate from the play for replacing tape, there's also the ecosystem strategy. When you run large portions of your business using Amazon's services, you tend to generate a lot of data that ends up needing to be purged, else your storage bill goes through the roof. S3's Lifecycle Policy feature is a hint at the direction they want you to go - keep your data, just put it somewhere cheaper.

This could also be the case where they think they're going after tape, but end up filling some other, unforeseen need. S3 itself was originally designed as an internal service for saving and retrieving software configuration files. They thought it would be a wonder if they managed to store more than a few GB of data. Now look at it. They're handling 500k+ requests per second, and you can, at your leisure, upload a 5 TB object, no prob.

But maybe you're right. The thing could fail. Too expensive. After all, 512k ought to be enough for anybody.
You can do this very easily by putting your data in Google spreadsheet and use https://my.infocaptor.com to track it. Here is how you would connect to google spreadsheet http://infocaptor.com/help/google_spreadsheet.htm

A while ago I built a similar tracking tool for my kid and then introduced to his friend's parents in our neighbourhood and they love the concept. We still use but haven't checked if his friend's parent still use.

Basically it is a google form, so we trained my son to go in and add the time and note down the activity
http://www.infocaptor.com/help/kid_activity_dashboard.htm

And here is the sample google spreadsheet
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQUzbm48k2ydDJ...
PHP drops world domination from TODO list
Ask HN: Exercise Price For Options At A Startup
I am considering joining a startup and would appreciate if someone could tell me if I am getting a good deal in terms of stock options.

First a bit of back ground: The start up is related to my PhD research area and gives me a chance to build up on my back ground as opposed to a standard industry job. So, I am considering this seriously.

The company has 1 million stock outstanding with a stock value of ~60$ per share at a recent valuation. The CEO is the majority stock holder in the company ~60%.

I am being offered around 7500 stock options with the strike price at the fair market value (~60$/share). Since the strike price is so high, it basically makes it impossible for me to exercise the options without selling the stock at the same time (when the stock is vested).

Is the strike price for the options normally equal to the current market value or is it usually a discounted price ?

Thanks !
Cows will eat most anything. It doesn't mean they should.
http://www.hulu.com/plus
I read the article, hoping the farmer was feeding the cattle Candy Corn :(
I'm interested in doing something like this (not same topic, just structure). Could you share something about your approach to convince the founders and the technicalities of the interview process.
RIM releases roadmap of BlackBerry 10 features for developers
I was trying to build my own for an app I'm building and all I can say is it's pretty hard. Thanks for this!
He's putting the fertilizer in the tomatoes exactly as much as these guys are putting candy in cows. In both cases, the material is presented to the organism which then takes it in on its own.
What is your concern about the cow eating old chocolate?
Was thinking the same. "Not again", but pleasantly surprised.
It doesn't make much sense that Google switched languages when you wife told it to? You are kidding right?

And you think you are being fair!!!
I know that exists, and I've used it myself, but makr.io seems to be missing the point of what memegenerator.net is used for.
Personally, I've consistently found that the best predictor of whether or not I was going to enjoy a movie was the NUMBER of ratings, not the rating itself. This also works for restaurants and other things on sites like Yelp. It almost seems that a movie should come with a simple "recommend!" button that simply counts recommendations.

But ratings are a tricky issue and I think they require a more sophisticated mathematical treatment and modeling if one wants to get it right, not just a few histograms that treat all people equal.

There are a few modeling challenges that come to mind: For example, people disagree on quality of movies based on their taste. This could be modeled as a latent variable that must be inferred for every person in some graphical model. Another example of a relevant variable would be person's rating habits: some people rate movies 5 or 1, some people have a gaussian rating centered at some value. These should be explicitly modeled and normalized. Every rating could ideally be used to make a stochastic gradient update to the weights of the network, and since we are dealing with very sparse data, strong priors and Bayesian treatment seems appropriate. Ratings could then be personalized through an inference process on the graph.

Has anyone heard of a more sophisticated model like this, or any efforts in this direction? I'd like to see more math, modeling and machine learning and less silly counting methods.
In Michigan this is not that unusual. I worked in the fertilizer industry as an agronomist. I have routinely seen animals fed cereal (Kellogg's and Post are headquartered here), day old bread and even cupcakes.

As long as the overall ration is balanced it doesn't make a difference in the final product.

http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/compute/balance.htm

FWIW I bought my dad (who was a feed salesman) a TI programmable calculator in the seventies that used magnetic strips to run programs and wrote him a feed balancing ration program. Far as we know he was the only one in the world at the time who had a hand held ration balancer!
"Since the Fukushima meltdown - as a result of which, not a single person is set to be measurably harmed by radiation - we know that nuclear power is safe."

It seems to me like the primary danger from radiation like that leaked from Fukushima would be an increase in cancer. I think it's a little early to be claiming that Fukushima will cause no increase harm to humans. There is already evidence that it caused harm to the surrounding environment, though butterflies are admittedly much more fragile than humans.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/14/13274288-study...
Prime-time shows are aimed to appeal to a broad audience, making them much more likely to exacerbate your echo-chamber problem.
Mendeley’s Open API Approach Is On Course To Disrupt Academic Publishing
I'm pro-nuclear, but I can't take this writer's hand-wavey dismissal of the risks seriously.
I guess for a startup, it would hard to track what was done on company time, and what was done as a side project. For example, coding a side project on my 9-5 job would require a consent form signed by my manager to claim they had no ownership on my project. But a startup founder working on the weekend on YC's project only to realize a need for something else that needed to be coded and monetized. That's gray area of who owns the assets.
I use a service like Mint.com. I check it about once a month. That may well be too often, and a sign that my automation and budget aren't fully mature; once a quarter would be more ideal.

A continuously-updated Mint dashboard? If I needed to micromanage my money that closely it would be a sign of trouble. And it would certainly be stressful.

Most of the money-management advice I trust emphasizes the role of automation. If your budgeting system requires constant mindfulness it's not working well.
There's a reason the chicken poop causes your tomatoes to grow bigger and taste better. I don't imagine you'd feed that poop to a cow thinking it would grow bigger and tastier.
Nothing specifically about chocolate. Any non-grass diet is demonstrably worse for the cows in overall health and final meat quality.
ah.. so 80/20 is cheaper because it is "cut" with basically throw-away scraps. That also makes sense.
That was addressed, though a bit off-handedly. The given time estimate assumes reprocessing. With sufficiently good reprocessing, there is no used fuel; there's just inert end-chain fission products that have had all the energy leached out of them.
I don't think anybody, including Leap, thinks the keyboard and mouse are going anywhere. Also, this isn't minority report. If leap can deliver on the sensitivity of the input, then small, precise gestures can be made without moving your hands from the keyboard. That makes it useful in cases where switching from the keyboard to a mouse isn't fast enough for my taste.

I can envision opening certain applications with a gesture (save you from typing the name into quicksilver or finding and double clicking on the icon). Tasks that you repeat over and over could be assigned to a gesture with great effect, like swiping a finger left and right to change windows.

3D editing could be interesting, where you move an invisible object in 3 dimensions with your hand. Anybody who's done 3d modeling or game development in unity can attest that a mouse and keyboard are limited in 3 dimensions.
Setting up banking and accounting for your startup
Yes that is what they are supposed to be eating. Their digestive systems have evolved over millions of years to eat grass, and if they eat grass they will be healthier animals, and their meat will taste like real beef and not like tasteless cardboard. I pretty much stick exclusively to grass-fed beef. There are all these complex chemical compounds in grass that flavor the meat and give it rich and distinctive notes -- as the other commenter said, read Omnivore's Dilemma. The cattle are supposed to be able to walk around, too.

The reason it's not done is cost. Grass fed beef is easily twice as expensive as corn-fed beef. The cheapest way to raise cattle is to raise them in a CAFO, and feed them the cheapest possible feed, which has been corn for quite a long time. The farmer who is feeding his cattle candy is really just feeding them yesterday's corn, as most American candy is made from high fructose corn syrup. Walk into a supermarket sometime and count the number of products that use HFCS -- it's staggering. The price of corn going up is actually really big news -- if it's a sustained trend it's going to have a far-reaching impact on American agriculture.
Did anyone read the book yet? Would you recommend it?
Yeah, I'm actually pleasantly surprised that there are no caveats on HN yet either. Will wait and watch I guess.
Ah, yeah. Changed, should be clearer.
What is the permanent solution?
>" This time the startups not only have a good product; but developed business models, customers and revenue."

Chicken or egg?

Does this speak to an increased quality in the new batch of startups? (ie. the newest startups are "getting it")

Or is it a change in the selection criteria biased towards the things you mention, since it seems to be something that PG is, rightfully, promoting?
For those of us not on Ubuntu, care to explain why?
Los Angeles SEO Workshop By Brick Marketing
Being a meat product is also horrible for the cow's overall health. Nearly a 100% fatality rate. :)
> Scala's on top of Java and the JVM; not a reimplementation of it. Oracle appears to be okay with this, and sometimes encourages it.

Oracle could change their mind at any time. Some people at Sun appeared to be Ok with Android and sometimes even encouraged it.
"It's not like banks get a choice"

Right you might want to go watch Jamie Dimon's testimony to the Senate Banking Committee two months ago.

It's fair to say that the senators in control of that Committee absolutely ingratiated themselves to the JP Morgan Chase CEO, falling over each other with offers of "improving regulation" and questions of "how can we make things better for your company".

I think it's absolutely fair to say that in this business-is-a-god-capable-of-no-wrong idea some subscribe to in Washington absolutely leads to banks effectively having an enormous amount of choice and control in the regulation process.
In A First, DOJ Seizes Illegal Phone App Download Websites
I think a major thing you're not admitting to is that most of these people and organizations were fucking people over, including me, and then using other's unwillingness to speak the truth to keep it all quiet. If more people outed these community leaders when they screwed people over you might not have this kind of thing happening.

What your sentiment does is simply perpetuate the situation by allowing bad actors in a community to use their popularity to harm individuals, and the individuals then feel like they can't tell anyone for fear of being a "gossip" or "tattle tale".

So, if my problem with someone is between me and them, then I do keep it quiet. But in this case, no it was not kept between us, many of these people actively slandered me, and until I spoke up they did it to many other people as well.
My business is part of this ebook. Had a chance to read the other interviews earlier this week and must say that there is a ton of great content in there. Definitely worth its price!
My only concern is if Product A is failing, and you want to work on Product B, there would be a conflict of interest in killing Product A (there's people vested in), and it'll be hard to split your time to work on both products. There's the option to incorporate under the umbrella, but the fear of spreading yourself too thin. A dilemma nonetheless.
"A number of theories have been proposed over the years to explain why there are four dimensions (three space, one time) instead of some other number..."

Time is not a dimension. It is a property of space, hence "spacetime".

http://m.phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimensio...
Yeah, that was not my point. These aren't but idiosyncrasies of Perl's design, and to model itself on constructs which evolved without direction and which take years to master, just to save a keystroke or two once in a blue moon, is a rather questionable road to take.

Seriously, in what other language don't you ever finish discovering what's on the default namespace, what side-effects any given statement, or hell, expression has, or which syntactic forms are supported, and on and on?

Well, PHP, but we know what the connotations of that are.

And by the way, I'm doing rather 'fine' in Perl, if not for the ever-present worrying about type mismatches (particularly arrays), the frustration of how dirty many operations are (unless you are using a recent version, regex substitution must mutate a variable), the laboriousness of the stock error handling mechanisms (make your own stack trace!) and so on.
Credit card, bank account numbers in HTML5 forms
BYOD makes employees work extra 20 hours unpaid
nice book. I've only glanced over a couple of the chapters but I'm looking forward to reading it!
One of the interesting things about the pale grass butterfly results is that until now scientists considered such insects to be fairly resistant to environmental radiation at a genetic level, notwithstanding their physical delicacy. There are some references to this in the Nature paper. Those findings must be very disturbing to prospective or recent parents that lived in the vicinity of the nuclear plant.
It's a bit smarmy too.

My apologies.