skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dotcom/SF stories I'm reading in this thread are better, of more interest, than most of those I see on HN of late. What's up with that? I've always liked MeFi whenever I visited there - maybe I should start an account.
So true, but have to add a bit more...

1) ... but those that want and realized the cost of achieving that decided not to.

2) ... there are only a few handful that decided to pursue it regardless the cost.

Cost here usually means family.
Which guys? The democrats or the thorium and nuclear advocates? Would you care to elaborate?
Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during that same time, they were extremely hands-on about preventing us from hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.
The Venezuelan limbo: detention of Maria Lourdes Afiuni
I'll start with one from my side: I started this project which was essentially a social networking site, but focused on Indian parents. Signed up some 500 plus users, but then realized that I had to keep getting content up, to keep the site interesting - I had some 5 users out of the 500 that contributed any content whatsoever. which did not make a lot of sense. The site is now offline.
PUT MORE ADS! In between each row should be an ad unit! Contact all the Food Truck owners and get them to put up an ad on a monthly basis. Food Truck owners are relatively easy to sell to (I have experience here) because their business is small. Take that money and reinvest it back into generating traffic and build your own list of food truck customers and then charge for blasts etc...
I want to read this post but will have to in the morning...the right margin is broken for the iPad...at least in portrait mode
How to attract talented people?
Saying that it's popular because it's trendy is
wildly misguided- how do you explain all the developers
that use it?

Trendy, popular, whatever... The original comment is spot on. Products becomes trendy and popular mostly because of great marketing. The reason you prefer OSX (or almost anything else in your life) is because you've been conditioned to. We make decisions based on a complex cocktail of facts and feelings, most of them external to our own thinking and, therefore, susceptible to clever manipulation.

Every BMW owner buys an "ultimate driving machine" (with an automatic transmission) and most OSX users believe they're enjoying "the best UI/UX" (and obediently squeeze their life into ~500 vertical pixels leaving the rest to the Dock and global menu).

It does not make sense to look for a technical explanation for why "Linux desktop" is not popular. Technology has nothing to do with popularity. Moreover, Linux Desktop is indeed widely popular among people who're pre-conditioned to like things it offers.

Here's an anecdote: I have introduced younger relatives to computers in mid-2000s using only Ubuntu. After years of daily Gnome 2.x use they find both OSX and Windows incredibly "retarded" and hard to use.

Don't kid yourself thinking we're far ahead of Pavlov dogs.
For those who would like to read them, here are all the Apple patents in play in this case:

5,946,647 (the “’647 Patent”), System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data
6,847,959 (the “’959 Patent”), Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system
8,046,721 (the “’721 Patent”), Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image
8,074,172 (the “’172 Patent”), Method, system, and graphical user interface for providing word recommendations
8,014,760 [Part 2] (the “’760 Patent”), Missed telephone call management for a portable multifunction device
5,666,502 (the “’502 Patent”), Graphical user interface using historical lists with field classes
7,761,414 (the “’414 Patent”), Asynchronous data synchronization amongst devices
8,086,604 (the “’604 Patent”), Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system*

- Short form summary of the IP. Useful for reference.
http://testplanmanagement.com = $2,000/month

http://courtdatereminder.com = ~$100/month

http://enigmatic.me = ~$200/month

http://jobs.consultutah.com = ~$30/month

http://rubytoolbox.com = ~$10/month
Using fdr's example of a cat program, it consists of an open, a sequence of read followed by write and a close. I would like to point the language/environment at that and say "test it" with no further effort.

OK, so I suppose the next question becomes what “test it” means.

Perhaps you want your test system to make some kinds of automatic deductions about the intended behaviour of your code and then to verify that the actual behaviour matches? If that is the case, what kinds of deductions would you want to be handled automatically for you?

Or maybe you’re thinking of some sort of automatic simulation of possible failure cases when you get to the open/read/write/close operations, serving a similar roles to things like mocks and stubs in unit testing?

Some of these are the kinds of problems I’m hoping a good effect system will help with. If you know that the operations of opening, reading, writing and closing files must occur only in certain orders, you can automatically detect violations of those rules. And if you know all possible types of cause and effect that can be relevant within each part of your code — that is, you can identify all stateful/impure/externally observable results — then you can identify any of them that aren’t handled according to some set of rules. As long as you can figure out what you want those rules to be, that is...
This is exactly the mechanism that pt-online-schema-change from Percona uses.

http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.1/pt-online-sch...
This is very clearly not the sunk cost fallacy. In this case, they are delaying making money (thanks to collusion + patents most likely) and they are still going to recoup their currently 'sunk' costs.

The sunk cost fallacy is continuing to put money into something explicitly because you're counting the previously sunk costs instead of justifying it by "the remainder to be spent < the expected return value." In this case, that's not the calculation that's being made at all.

Anyway, still enjoyed your comment :)
Looking forward to it if I ever have the chance. There's an element of contentment to this approach that I really appreciate.
Short rant ahead:

Why should Linux be doomed (or killed as wired puts it) just because Windows & MacOS have more idiots using it? For a desktop there are certain design choices to be made. If one wants to target users, then one should use sensible defaults and try to hide complexity. If one wants to target hackers, then one should have a lot of easily accessible APIs, preferable accessible via a CLI. That means exposing complexity. For the two groups consistency in a UI does mean two different things, users want a "intuitive" UI, whatever that means. Hackers want a UI which is based on principles, such that one can deduce the proper operation, even if it is complicated and takes some time to learn in the beginning.
The list could go on, but in short: I have different needs on my desktop than the average user. And if Linux would become a sensible desktop OS for the average user, then I would likely move to BSD (or Plan9 or whatever).
That's cool, but if everyone works out, they run out of money. I realize that is unlikely, but it is a system just asking to be gamed.
How do you handle the size of the table (which I assume has many rows). Do the inserts start to slow down as it grows? How much RAM did you have for a master DB instance? Thanks for any input!
Memristors have the interesting property of adapting their resistance over time as current flows through them. Thus they can mimic Hebbian learning, a fundamental property of synapses, in a way that other electronic components, cannot easily do.

No one knows what the architecture of the first AI will look like. However, our current architectures have a big problem (for creating AI) in that they have a very clean separation between data and code. Code is run in the CPU and alters data on RAM and disk. Brains don't work this way -- there is no separation between data and code. For this reason I think memristors -- while not a silver bullet -- might represent a step in the right direction.
Funny concept. Re-arrange the layout so that the ad units are on the left and right of the photos, not all the way down on the bottom. Also, allow for tagging so that the ads are more closely related. Also, after clicking the vote, it just takes me to the next page after quickly displaying the score, I want to know if the person is actually homeless or hipster? There are a few directions you can take this, and while I doubt it could ever be your main income source, you have potential to at least bring in a few hundred per month. ..
I have to agree with the commenters on that article that JavaScript is the next big language. With HTML5 it's pretty amazing what you can do with JS. It's reached the point of being nearly as powerful as any thick client technology yet with ubiquitous browser and OS support.

It performs fairly well too: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/javascript.php . I'm not sure why one test is 100x slower, but the rest are < 10x slower than Java.
The Strange Ruby Splat
I make about $200 per month from Android app sales. $30,000 and counting over the last few years.

Back when Android had no apps (2008-2009) and all you could do was check the 'new apps' list for new releases, I noticed a spy camera app was released. The app was terrible and there were many comments asking for various features. I took a day off work, repackaged some camera code I had from a work-in-progress app, implemented the requested features, and blew the competition out of the water.
Good answer.

I've been doing mobile for the last 18 months or so but I'm strongly considering going back to my roots on the web for a lot of the reasons you describe. The lack of insight into user behavior and acquisition is really crippling.

It seems to me that people have gotten a little too caught up in the momentum of mobile. Certainly it's a very important and rapidly growing platform but I also think, as you say, there's still plenty of room for viable businesses on the "traditional" web.
Bouncebacks and inertia scrolling help the user experience because they're closer to real world behaviour. On a subconscious level, people more easily interact with something that has a little weight and closer to real physics to it.
How do you code around it? A tablet in the shape of a parallelogram?

- She got you | Rhetorical questions != Not False Statements.

[Edit: Agree she could have been more informative.]
You can't trust airport security
They were a surprise because I got suckered in by the direction of the filmmakers.

Here's Jiro. Jiro is successful, and let's explore what he does. It's so freaking simple when you look at it, right? He practices and practices. He's meticulous, he's a perfectionist. And wow, look at those Michelin stars. And look at how people line up months in advance to eat at his restaurant.

I was so dazzled by the simplicity and success of Jiro that I totally forgot there could be any cost to this. And the filmakers never took us there. Like Ebert points out, we never got to meet his wife. And what other damage was caused by this drive to success? Was there any at all? Again, something that fully deserved to be explored. Or was the movie just a tribute to the success of Jiro?

My CEO will never be Jiro. He may think he's Jiro. Hell, he also thinks he's Steve Jobs. But when I hear him on the phone again for the nth evening telling his son he won't be home because some VC term sheet has an incorrectly-crossed T...I just have to sit back and think it's not fucking worth it. EVER. No matter how much we worship the IPOs and fuck-you-money-level-exits on HN, there are thousands of kids sitting at home wondering if their parents will be home to tuck them in that night.
The problem with running your own mail script is your inboxing rate. Your IP is not going to be white listed and it can really hurt you later on. Not to hate on the OP, but if you are building a serious business that needs to ensure deliverability of email to users, I recommend an outside provider like SendGrid, SailThru, MailGun, MailChimp, iContact, etc...
My biggest failures have been:

1. A sms polling site that I ended up selling flippa for less than I'd like to admit.

2. A component that made authorize.net easy for .net developers. Over the years, I made quite a bit of money off of it, but stripe released, I decided to sell the site and component off to someone for about one month's revenue.
Panda slaps are recoverable in most cases, you just have to change strategy...
If you have a master of a trade in your family, you will know the weight of the title master, and the respect that comes with the excellence in detail. You will also know by example that a master is a person of search and tinkering not unlike a child, while knowing the depth of the trade from both experience and learning from others. Jiro is lucky that he can continue his trade at age 85. We are lucky to observe a real master we can look up to.
This is a pretty common expression for the President of the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_World#.22Leader_of_the_Fre...
Go one step further and get the excellent codekit: http://incident57.com/codekit/

It is an essential piece of software in my workflow.
The iPhone 5: see how the rumors look and feel (video)
I remember a similar sort of story, though it's probably apocryphal. The Japanese ambassador was dining with Queen Victoria at a very formal dinner. Towards the end of the dinner, the guests were given a small bowl of warm water with which to wash their fingers. The Japanese ambassador, being unaware of what to do with it, drank the contents---a major faux pas. The Queen, seeing this, drank hers as well, and all the guests then did likewise.
Consider the hypothetical call chain of high, medium, low. If low fails and medium can't recover, the ball is in high's court. For high to handle the error, it must either do its job without any help from medium or somehow change things so calling medium will work and call it again. [...] The second option--patching things up and retrying--is tricky; for high to be able to change the state of the world so a second call into medium won't end up causing an error in low, it'd need an unseemly knowledge of the inner workings of both medium and low, contrary to the notion that each function is a black box.

<Devil’s advocate>

But if there was some way for medium to recover by itself, it had the option to handle the exception on the way back up the call stack and then to restart the computation that called low, hopefully under improved conditions.

Control will therefore return to high only if medium doesn’t itself know how to handle the error. At that point, the entire computation for which medium was responsible has failed.

Assuming the system as a whole uses reasonable functional decomposition and modular design, since exceptions have limited value under other circumstances anyway, shouldn’t any context that was known only within medium be irrelevant to any recovery action taken at high’s level?

</Devil’s advocate>
Maybe you're happy with that but there are others who want a decent package manager and don't want deal with the differences in OSX vs Linux.
It's an article from SIAM. Of course it's heavily biased towards applied mathematics. It's not only biased against computer science, it's biased against pure mathematics. Do you doubt that Buchberger's algorithm will reverberate down through the millenia? Even within applied mathematics, the list leaves out multigrid methods, the only linear-time algorithms in their class, which seem a shoe-in given their criteria for inclusion.

It would hardly be difficult to make a very long list of pure CS algorithms and data structures that could stand head to head against the likes of the multipole method in both industrial application and scientific value.

Your knowledge of computer science is evidently shallow. Educate yourself and you might think twice before making such ignorant pronouncements.
I was under the same opinion as the author. While the Apple Vs Sammy was going many ppl said every feature iphone existed before. But, iphone has the right mix of them in right proportions and that has made it Tick. W.r.t Patenting rects with round corners etc, I too disagree with Apple. Violating Trade dress by Sammy is not acceptable either.
There's a good interview from Mark Suster with Advance Publications recently. They talk Reddit here:
http://youtu.be/iXES4ITy7W8?t=22m

A little surprising to hear him dismiss the role Digg 4 played in Reddit's success, but overall, gives a good perspective on how they keep it hands-off.
Suppose the article was about the greatest boxers of the 20th century, and it talked about the Arab boxer Muhammad Ali. Would you object to someone pointing out that Ali was not Arab, but rather an American Muslim? His being Muslim is relevant not because it is his religion, but because it explains why an American of his era has such a foreign name--he changed his name when he converted to Islam.

Same thing is going on here. The article says al-Khwarizmi was an Arab. He was actually a Persian who followed the Arab religion (Islam), which probably explains the Arab-appearing aspects of his life and work.

Does it matter if he was Arab or Persian? Some might argue that all that matters is what he discovered. The counter argument is that by mentioning things like nationality, ethnicity, religion, etc., in these kind of articles, it helps reinforce the idea that science transcends national borders, ethnic boundaries, religion, and so on. I believe I read something by Asimov once where he said that was the reason he always included the nationality of scientists he wrote about.
Erlang has a strong philosophy on this -- let your process (a microprocess inside Erlang, not the entire VM obviously) crash rather than pollute your code with needless endless crap... dozens of try catches just do log that an error happened... that is insane.

Death to defensive programming which is a massive endless blackhole to throw developer resources down!

Due to the supervisor / worker model of Erlang -- if you don't know how to explicitly handle an error -- YOU DON'T!

You simply let the process crash! You be tight with your pattern matching (you can think of them like assertions) and you let Erlang do its thing.

{expected_thing, 55, SomeVarToCapture} = function_call(..)

If the function doesn't return something matching {expected, 55, ...} it blows up -- it crashes... and this is fine. Because in most cases you don't know how to fix that problem anyway!

But, it doesn't have to Erlang has try/catch when you want it -- for those cases when you CAN handle an error, you do know what to do to fix it... which is the point -- when you can HANDLE the error, you do... else let it go SPLAT.
I make between $500 und $100 per month off my stand-alone cross-browser testing tool:
http://www.browseemall.com

The product was launched on february this year and it's growing nicely so far. Not real recurring yet, as every sale comes with one year of free updates.
Samsung will travel in Nokia way in India.
I don't disagree. Apple is among the best marketers in the world. But they didn't invent it - they just do it best-in-class.
Removing Fake Likes
How does LESS compare to Google's Closure Stylesheets?

http://code.google.com/p/closure-stylesheets/

"Closure Stylesheets is an extension to CSS that adds variables, functions, conditionals, and mixins to standard CSS. The tool also supports minification, linting, RTL flipping, and CSS class renaming. "
I'm sympathetic to the guy, but I don't think I agree with you (though I upvoted your post because I agree with your sentiment if not your particulars).

A lot of LoseThos's previous posts have been ranting about Jews, Muslims, black people, et al. and while it may be a touch uncivil of me to say it, there's much less value-add than value-subtract there. He certainly has a reason for his behavior, but I hesitate to call it an excuse (and I note that you didn't, but you compared it to the lack of an excuse for the post you replied to) and I strongly feel it shouldn't be tolerated regardless of reason.
I don't know, I'd say JavaScript is pretty close to reaching its peak at this point, if it hasn't already.
Lisp has a condition system that is very clever. You still have to write the code, but you are able to separate the problem, the handling, and the restart.
...
If you are big fan of open source, I would suggest you to consider diving into source and send a few patches. Because AOSP receives about 100 independent contributions every month and almost half of term are merged into the master tree.
Samsung India seems to be full of morons. First they deny payment to ppk http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/03/never_ever_d... Now they are threatening bloggers.
Exception handling exists in the problem domain, not just the solution domain.
To be fair, it's a sleep(0), which I assume is just the easiest way to get the process to context switch. I assume this is a speed improvement only when locks become ready sooner than a context switch.

The real fix would be to make context switches faster, this is just a data-driven tweak rather than a general solution.
> It’s also extremely important to not keep your less.js file operating during production mode.

I'm curious about this. Is it more than just a minor performance hit?
"Always call the script after all fontface fonts have downloaded. I’ve hacked this for the demo to enable you to see the headline transformation as the script kicks-in but you should always use google WebFont loaders active() and inactive() callbacks to launch the slabText treatment (or a similar "font loaded" callback feature from another font provider)."
> If you don't like Apple Open WebOS and MeeGo are interesting open options, I hope these will gain traction

And if they gain traction, they will be sued by Apple.
that's precisely the point. there is no empirical evidence behind the vast majority of comments like these.

Are you being purposefully vague? No empirical evidence of what? I'll counter that there is overwhelming evidence, but I'll share specifics once I know what your claim is. :)
They're not only fine they're normal. Most startups can be defined as "paying us instead of X" and it's even more pronounced with movies, games, music etc. You don't have to be first to win, you don't even necessarily have to be better.
That's just SV navel gazing.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that when I see a p-value of 10^-6 in papers, I expect that there's at least a 1% chance that the humans screwed up the models somewhere, so I don't see it as more persuasive than 10^-2. That is, p-values lose credibility once they start getting smaller than a few percent.

So I agree with you. If it were up to me, we'd all report evidence intensity in decibels, anyway.
The US iPhone scene: Options and trends
UberWriter | Distraction free Markdown editor for Linux
Maybe I'm missing some replies but I would have liked to have seen discussion of IP laws and the drug war.

For actual thread see: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obam...