skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You forgot 9GAG and Mth Sense, we should work on this together. Been running this list for a while: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29465655158/yc-s12-c...

And a list of YC S12 Rejects: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29900354472/the-forg...

Hope this helps.
The Ultimate Guide To Marketing Your App With Two Dollars
It isn't an "appearance" of protection. NAT is the best thing to happen to security for home networks since their inception. The push to remove it with IPv6 and to force home users who don't care about these things to put their entire home network directly on the Internet is going to wreak havoc.
Strong AI startup Vicarious.com raises $15M from Good Ventures and Founders Fund
Universities have to assign professors to courses, and if the quality of teaching is poor they generally don't pull them. Online education sites are almost picking the person they feel is best for the job across the 20+ universities they partner.

In a lecture one person answers a professors question, in an online setting everyone does. Many online programs are now using a standard course format with deadlines and grading (even the humanities with peer grading). Grading is also overrated as a learning mechanism, most of the important work done in grad school isn't graded. For that matter, little of the work one does as a professional developer is graded. People learn programming faster by writing projects till they work, getting feedback from a combination of software pieces (debugger, compiler, etc.) than they do by writing a project for a university course, to be evaluted by a TA at about 10 minutes a student.
You don't need need memory or CPU power for streaming or backups, unless you are doing on the fly transcoding. You do need storage connectivity but even USB2 has a theoretical throughput of 60 megabytes per second while you'll get practical throughput of ~35 megabytes per second on gigabit ethernet.

The only time I saw my ~2005 era system have non-trivial CPU usage was when doing encryption, and even then it would peak at around 25% of CPU.
Formally speaking, the US hasn't been at war since World War II [1]. The use of military force by the US government without a declaration of war has rendered the concept rather meaningless. We are left with the colloquial acceptation of "war" which certainly includes the conflicts with Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but probably not Cuba and Venezuela.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unite...
Nope, just changing their slogan from "Painless Billing" to "Cloud Accounting".
Have you checked this line of reasoning with an actual lawyer?
I would disagree about console gaming. A stretch this long happened before between the original NES and the SNES, as well as the original Gameboy and a more powerful version. From then on there was the 4 year like clockwork release of a new console system from every major manufacturer. In this cycle, none have any definite release date, stretching this generation to 8 or 9 years.

While I agree games propel hardware forward, I believe it's the combination of a graphics plateau, diversification in gaming, and the end of the free ride on Moore's Law, which the article pointed out. This generation of AAA games run arguably the prettiest graphics ever seen. But this comes at a cost of complexity and sheer hard work to build the environment and models, without the wow factor of a major leap in graphics quality. Crysis is still the Gold Standard in what gaming graphics can do, and that was released five years ago.

We are also seeing a large and unique divergence in gaming in the form of indie titles. Indie games, by their nature, could never compete pound-for-pound on the graphics of AAA games. They made up for this in experimental gameplay and embracing a unique graphics style. Before now it was very difficult to get an indie game exposure and the art of building said game was difficult. Now the game development toolchain has improved by orders of magnitude, and the advent of app stores on tablets and smart phones makes distribution and monetization much easier. Tablets and smartphones likewise bifurcated gaming. Tablets couldn't render the graphics or use the raw computational power found in the latest PC and console titles. This made them a natural home to indie titles.

There is also something to be said about Zynga, Facebook, and the whole crop of casual games that sprung up in the last five years. Suddenly the gaming market had many more diverse demographics they could effectively target. It's no longer the 18-25 year old male that was the prime gaming market. These titles don't need the raw computational power of next-gen consoles or the latest PC hardware. They run fine even on netbooks and tablets.

In all, I do believe that gaming was a primary driving factor in hardware development. In recent years video games have become a much more diverse ecosystem, many of which don't require the raw hardware power.
The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of RAM, not exactly on par with a current PC gaming system, which can easily have 16 GB.

I would argue that the rising production costs to produce games that actually make use of ultra-advanced hardware are more to blame for the slowing of the graphics race.

You can always do things faster by doing things in parallel. It just gets much harder to program them.
If you spend your time worrying about downvotes you're going to have a bad time. You've given us no context for the comment you're referencing so we can't really answer your question about that but I can tell you that you will be much happier if you worry less about imaginary internet points and just focus on participating with quality content.
Selling Source Code
As many as 72 in the PoP era. Which is crazy looking back on it.
I would counter that "Kiln" is a four-letter word that's even more difficult to say out loud.
I was a bit hesitant to click the link, but I'm glad I did.

"As it turns out, the ones who do it well are rare and far less visible because - like good programmers - their work is a lot harder to notice."

This sums my experience perfectly. It takes a long time to be able to understand who is good at something and who is not.

Pardon my language but many marketers are charlatans. When I first started in marketing I thought the charlatans were the ones who were good (incompetent people [me at that time] are the least competent at recognizing those who are good). Now, after a decade at it I can firmly agree with the statement above and I think it bodes very well for the author.

I believe the 2nd point is the most important to understand when trying to get good at marketing. The rest is ancillary to doing a great job, but having the data is essential to knowing what to do.

I believe great marketers are like methodical scientists. They can put aside their own biases and test their hypothesis and analyze the data. Beyond that, they can look at the data in front of them, identify what they need to know more about, and discover things they did not expect. Through this they can affect change that improves the entire organization.
Added Delight.io thanks to Kevin's comment below. Any one doing a live feed or blog?
Indeed. In the end someone has to pay, and/or someone has to make some money to pay. It seems close to a zero-sum game - which is the point of capitalism and innovation, allowing technology to reach 100% of people and/or make the next unit of production equal to $0, and with digital software, it comes pretty damn close to $0 benefit for the next user.
Apple's strategy makes sense for Apple, driving down the cost of software makes their hardware more attractive.

This doesn't make a great deal of sense for Microsoft, what does is driving down the price of hardware. Their strategy has always been to treat the hardware as a commodity because it is in their interest to do so.
>When I worked in marketing, I felt like I was a character in "Game of Thrones." The constant alliances, shifts, backstabbings, feints, etc., were exhausting.

This sounds fucking awful.
It's mostly commoditized work where I am as well as throughout industry. The glory days of being a branch maintainer are over but there are still device drivers to be made for custom hardware, but a lot of consumer hardware is covered.

But it's mostly patch slavery. You ever wonder why old android phones don't get newer versions of android on them? One reason is that maintaining device drivers across kernel patches is a serious problem. I know of a product that is still using the 2.6.10 kernel because they have changed so much code they can't port it. iPhone doesn't have this problem since there are only, what? Five of them at any time? I guess they could but that's too much effort (slightly above 'breaking a sweat') so OEMs won't do it.

Doing anything with an embedded system always takes a long time. Even moving, adding or changing a single file into a packaged file where a bootable system lives can take a good 20-30 minutes depending on how much has to be rebuilt and how crappy the build system is (always). The deadlines are always short and immediate, too.

My job is mostly herding patches with an antiquated versioning system that never makes any sense, trying to herd machines to duplicate a 1:10,000 bug. Stuff I could have done when I was in school. I think I made a mistake agreeing to work here.
A raiding guild for 40 players is typically composed of no less than 60-70 regular players to deal with precisely this problem. Top guilds will often have enough players to fill three or more raid groups in order to have enough prepared players for the "main raid."
There are any number of modifications people can make to cars that make them more dangerous through no fault to the maker. On some cars, not making modifications is something of an exception, think of Wranglers.

The difference I think is that if someone modifies their jeep and ends up killing themself, it is rather easy for Jeep to prove their innocence; no matter how wrecked the car is the modified suspension or whatever will still be rather apparent. Imagine the nightmare that would be for a software company though.

Of course proving innocence is not how things are supposed to work, but...
I agree with hoax just due to the fact that there's a lot of fail in this article.

First, grass doesn't matter. Wheat matters, and you don't need grass to grow wheat. For those that don't know, you need to eat or you'll die and wheat can be used to make bread. But there's plenty of stuff to eat, including renewable zombie flesh.

Second, while there are a few blocks that aren't renewable, there are plenty that are. Wood and cobblestone are completely renewable. And a lot of blocks aren't renewable but never used up. You should have just as much dirt in the world when you end as when you begin, unless it gets blown up by creepers or thrown into lava.

And you hardly need to build on a mountain and then cut away the mountain. Just build up and outward.

Eventually you should end up with people using only wood tools and be completely out of interesting materials. It would just be boring at that point.
"I believe great marketers are like methodical scientists. They can put aside their own biases and test their hypothesis and analyze the data. Beyond that, they can look at the data in front of them, identify what they need to know more about, and discover things they did not expect. Through this they can affect change that improves the entire organization."

GREAT quote. Bravo. Way to put into words what I struggle to say. Thanks.
Ah, I think the confusing line in your long letter is:

"So here's the news: from this day forward, FreshBooks is Cloud Accounting".

That turn of phrase is normally used when you are rebranding a company, not changing its tagline; the confusion is reinforced by using capital letters for Cloud Accounting.

I think you meant:

"from this day forward, FreshBooks means cloud accounting"

I'm not a customer but you have some confused customers in this HN thread.
Organizing a 24x7 bullet-proof on-call rotation with PagerDuty
I think the key here is not to just provide a toggle for using Glacier instead of S3, but to have the historical snapshots migrated to Glacier from S3 and deleted every 90+ days.

I will gladly pay more money for Arq again.
Even with apps, it varies. My frustration is that it often seems to be used thoughtlessly, by default.
Idiomatic clojure does several things to improve matters, like minimizing mutable state, wrapping the remaining mutable state in good concurrency structures, and emphasizing constructs like map and reduce instead of manually looping.
Mars Rover Extends Robot Arm
So I take it you'd never hire someone who is just graduated either, based on your argument? Of course there is a learning curve to anything, even brain surgery. If he has basic ability, why not hire him? It seems the company knows what it is getting itself into. As someone else pointed out, it's a junior position -- they're not looking him to be a project manager or anything.

Not to mention that the consequences of hiring a noob programmer vs. hiring a noob brain surgeon are on totally different levels ....
I don't… I don't see much difference.

~$ python
>>> A = "<?php for($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) { ?><p>Foo <?echo $i?></p><? } ?>"
>>> B = "<? foreach($foo as $i): ?> <p>Foo <?= $i ?> </p> <? endforeach ?>"
>>> L = [A,B]; import re
>>> map(len, L)
[68, 65]
>>> map(lambda x: len([s for s in x if re.match('\w', s)]), L)
[23, 29]

Isn't it about the same amount of alphanum vs noise? About the same length too.

I'm not sure B is more readable than A in any way. Maybe more 'idiomatic', meaning 'way humans think'; but I'm not sure about that.
I also suspect, however, that PCs are going to stick around for quite a while because they're now cheap commodities, and people respond to cheap; I've argued as much here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/desktop-pcs-arent-... and elsewhere.
Could someone who knows a lot about these things tell me why JSON took such a long time to arrive?

JSON, at its core, is essentially a hierarchy of maps and lists -- which seems a very intuitive and useful way to store data.

XML on the other hand has always baffled me with its attributes and the redundant and verbose tags (why do I need <tag attr="data">data</tag>?). I'm sure there was a good reason at the time for this, so perhaps someone can enlighten me.
> Why do great poets and writers labor in obscurity, then be discovered hundreds of years later?

There are many scenes in the arts that are far under the radar of both the mainstream and the arts establishments but nonetheless are very real and vibrant. Much of art is an act of discovering the depth of your own perceptions, which is rewarding in itself.

Institutions, the conception of the arts in textbooks -- these are all by-products of lives lived. They are the mementos and communications of moments. Real art is in the listener, the viewer, or the creator.
Tragedy of the Commons - A Closed Map Experiment in Minecraft
DevOps AND 12FactorApp ~ some corrected & much explained concepts
Austin is a town I want to live in some day! I'm emailing you now.
So multiply it by your download speed. Let me know when you get to $22k.
I disagree. :-) It is that simple, at base! More stuff = more things to wrap your head around.

I posit that a well-written terse solution should say exactly the intrinsic needs of the problem at hand, and no more. The ideal language abstraction would explain exactly what needs to happen and no more. The key forms of the language (macros, functions, etc) should be built up to that point so that it is clear what is going on.

There is - in my mind - little difference between

(with-open-file (file-stream filename)
(do-stuff (read file-stream)))

and

stuffDoer(fileObject(filename).read());

Both say (to me) exactly the same thing at approximately the same level of abstraction; one does it with Lisp syntax and one in traditional C++ syntax. The question starts to arise after a while - what abstraction tools does the language make available. At what point do you need functions, classes, closures, m4 macros, lisp macros? Well, at the point when you need them. :-) These are all just tools to say exactly what you mean in as much code as you need.

If you have a social problem of a bunch of cowboys all whooping it up in your codebase, I don't think any technical solution is going to help you. :-)
Schools cancel classes all the time.

Schools teach bad discrete math classes not infrequently, I suspect. I took a bad one some years back--the instructor was definitely a sharp guy, but put very little effort into, sometimes (I suspect) glancing over a chapter before on the way to the classroom, once just not showing up.
Then you'd be punishing all newbies, not just the bad ones. Instead, hide low scoring comments from low-ranking users, but show them to high-ranking users so that they have the chance to upvote them.
We have hit it in the consumer space. A powerful processor from three years ago is still a decent processor today. That was not true in, say, 2000. This applies in consumer computers and high performance computers.

For a long time, processor architects were able to increase the frequency, increase the cache size, and increase the pipeline depth (to allow for more instructions in flight at the same time) to yield more powerful processors. As Moore predicted, processor architects kept getting more transistors to play with, and they were able to make processors more powerful by making designs that were "like the old one, just more so." But they've hit fundamental limits in the design: increasing the clock speed and the pipeline depth at the same time means that you have to communicate the same amount of data over a longer distance in a shorter amount of time in the silicon. We've hit the point where it's not feasible to do that anymore.

Hence, multicore. Processor architects are still getting more and more transistors to play with, so instead of using them to make a single core more powerful (as they did for a long time), they're using them to make multiple cores. But you no longer get the "for free" performance boosts that you did when you increased single-core performance. Now we need to change how we make software to take advantage of this new hardware. And some software can't take advantage of this new hardware.
> If you can't be bothered to get simple scientific facts correct, why should I think that you're accurate on other things?

Ahem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Radiological_h...

If you can't react like a mature adult, why should I think that you can debate like one?
When we think of marketing, we think of booth babes, commercials with bad actors saying awkward things, and airheads who don't understand their business or product.

That's covered under points 1 and 2 in the article. I found GoDaddy's "informational" videos to be even worse than the ads (at least the ads were just driving traffic, but the videos were incredibly condescending and treated the models as furniture). But I know that those were A/B tested with a lot of variations, and conversion is highest with "booth babes" and saying awkward things.
> There are testable positive claims - things like the mirror test.

Yes, but the problem with the mirror test (and all similar tests) is not the observation but the conclusion -- one in principle could program a computer to recognize itself in a mirror, but have no other properties we assume define "consciousness".

On could in principle create a list of properties of consciousness, then have a devil's advocate program a robot to display all the required properties -- just to prove a point.

In DARPA road races, robot cars manage to avoid each other and fixed obstacles, mimicking the behavior of human drivers. It's only a matter of time before a car will pass a sort of "Turing test" and be indistinguishable from a (sober) human driver, i.e. be "conscious".

> dealing with things that are hard to define doesn't mean something 'is not science'.

In fact, yes, that is a legitimate argument for calling something non-science. If independent observers cannot agree on their terms, if similarly equipped observers cannot draw the same conclusion from a given observation, this prevents the consensus on which science depends. Science is, after all, ultimately a shared, falsifiable theory about the world, therefore deconstructive post-modernism (the idea that all observations are subjective) cancels science.

> People didn't run around saying 'oh, the atom is just philosophy' ...

They had the right to do that until there were unambiguous observations, and testable theories about the observations, on which different observers could agree. Until then, atoms were philosophy.

Aristotle once claimed that women were inferior to men because they had fewer teeth -- hard to believe but true. It remained philosophy until someone started counting teeth.
Hi tlogan! Thanks for your feedback.
Regarding the target market, I've replied in one of the comments earlier:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407545

And yes, the initial idea was not to sell the tool to tech-savvy people but rather to people who need to understand software developers and need some data and statistics to support their decisions. You can think of it as DYI IT industry analysis and an alternative to industry analyst firms.
The Hacker News guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

have been updated pretty recently, as I see one significant change in the guideline text that responds to controversies that came up over the last two months. The Hacker News welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Hacker News FAQ

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

In recent discussion,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397542

several HN participants proposed further revision of the guidelines, and also proposed making the guidelines more visible during the article submission and comment submission process. For example, have the "add comment" form field prominently display a link to the guidelines, perhaps with a snippet of text referring to the guidelines most related to comments, and similarly have the submit form

http://news.ycombinator.com/submit

prominently display a link to the site guidelines and a brief description of what kind of submissions are most desired.

Weighted voting fixes based on user behavior signals do seem like a good idea (that is what pg is thinking about), and we might as well discuss how to make those fixes mathematically correct. The technical tweaks can best be reinforced by ongoing efforts at user education, including possible revision of the guidelines, and, in the opinion of several HN users, simply making the guidelines more visible to everyone who submits an article or posts a comment.

Edit to reply to first comment kindly made to my comment:

What kind of comment is most often upvoted, and by whom, is an empirical question. I don't have access to the data to resolve the question of what kind of comment is most readily upvoted. The bestcomments page here on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

shows a current snapshot of what the current community, based on current communication of the guidelines and current technical features of the HN software, has upvoted the most in the most recent several days.
clickable
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://agile.dzone.com/news/one-night-clojure-makes-scala
Using Chrome Extensions to Add Features to 3rd-Party Websites
Yeah. War over iron or diamond I could get, but grassland? Share and enjoy!