skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, this is a good catch. I pulled the data from techcrunch (they were out of date, added reference above).

General direction of the comment is distilled, still as follows:

1) valuation is 7x invested capital

2) The invested capital is large, requires large exit

3) This is going to put pressure on the team ($10-15B exit?)

4) Thats a requires lot of $$/head for the team to bring in
Hey, it worked just fine in The Mosquito Coast, Fitzcarraldo, Into The Wild and Apocalypse Now!
It is used in high end CAD systems where tolerances need to be exact, there was also a wonderful decimal package for COBOL which was doing financial computations. Unknown to many (most?) people some early IBM Mainframes [1] were decimal machines.

If you work in 3D modeling you will be familiar with the effects of binary floating point as 'gaps' between polygons where they shouldn't be. Sometimes those gaps only appear at a certain scale because that is where the rounding gets it wrong, or if you compensate by always rounding up you get overlaps or texture issues.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_700/7000_series#Decimal_arc...
Research into the performance of medical doctors shows that their skill follows the normal distribution: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?cu...
Did I suggest that it was a function? If so, I didn't intend to.
Their website (getpebble.com) states that they will ship in "early 2013".
You put the cart before the horse (which was actually your first mistake). When you get out of college - get a job, work a while - then start a side business. Your startup success odds will more than quadruple following this advice.
This is just my own testimony, but there are numerous features in tweet bot which Twitters own app doesn't even attempt to provide. Such as conversation threading in both directions (twitter only let's you see In Reply To). The app is also quite a bit more polished and better behaved (Twitter Mac triggers my discrete gpu, Tweetbot doesn't). Twitter Mac doesn't even support gestures.

As for the website... Twitter loses all its value to me if I have to open a browser every time I want to read content.
I have an old idea of mine about a web service (aka "startup") that would roughly do what you described plus some additional features to boost learning/memorizing the most useful bits of knowledge.

But for now we have to live with ReadTheDocs, these days I barely have time to browse Hacker News!
This seems to be really similar to https://github.com/highgroove/grocer ... but grocer may even do more as far as I can tell (feedback API and fake test server).
Find how you're connected to investors
I'm pretty sure that if our founding fathers were writing the Bill of Rights today there would be an amendment against dragnet electronic surveillance. It's too easy to turn into a panopticon, driven by people who like panopticons such as my mom with an attitude of: "I'm not doing anything wrong and it's worth it to protect against terrorists". Wait until they redefine what "wrong" is.
Castellano or Catalan, perhaps?
Two words:

Kool Aid.
I agree that learning the nuances of languages is important, but to demand this aspect of learning to someone who is just beginning to code is actually harmful in my opinion.

As students of computer science, we have strong tendency to learn things bottom-up. We take care in learning the fundamentals before applying theories in real work. This is not a bad thing. Better quality codes are shipped and become more maintanable.

But for someone who is just starting out, the bottom-up approach becomes an insurmountable obstacle. As a result, many give up too soon and never end up enjoying the joy of creating real working applications.

Look back to when we first started to code. I wrote some bad BASIC code in high school abusing GOTO and GOSUB everywhere I could. I knew nothing about programming language paradigms or memeory management, but I had a lot of fun coding without reading any book on CS.
No, because HK has a long and established history, as well as powerful backers in the West who don't want to see it fully integrate into mainland China.
I may be beating a dead horse here, but I anticipate a similar outcome for the Ouya. Missed ship date after missed ship date.
To be clear. I'm not the one who said anything about Cython or cross-compiling or anything. I hadn't even heard of Cython before and I don't have any strong opinions about it.

I don't doubt that you're right about all of the facts, that hand-rolled C will be faster than something cross-compiled unless the C coder did something profoundly wrong. I'm sure that lots of people are surprised and annoyed that all systems and kernel-level work is done with a language as out-of-fashion as C and ask stupid questions on other forums. You're right. The original poster was wrong. You win. Hooray!

But, here's the thing, I don't care how right you are, I care that you're violating the #1 commenting guideline and the thing that I generally like about this community, which is "be civil". So, even if you're the sort of person who wouldn't be civil to my face, please be civil here.

If you can do that much for me, I'll gladly buy you a coffee or beer if you're ever in Seattle and you can be as rude as you like to my face. Fair?
Houston is still early in development. It will soon be adding an extensible, Rack-mountable webservice to manage device registration, and perhaps eventually support for Android or other platforms.
Hooray for A/B! I like that you include the written acknowledgement that you sound pretentious, I think that actually adds credibility by having a sense of humor about it and recognizing that it's a thing people are doing. Something I didn't mention is that when someone sort of takes the piss in that manner, it actually positively affects the way I feel going through the rest of their site because at least I know they've got a good attitude and are probably fun to work with.
Adian - native iPhone client for App.net
"You're still accessing someone's private (albeit unsecured) network."

I guess that's the whole issue right there - Is something that is being broadcast, possibly 40m outside my house, still private? At what point does a signal become so large that it defaults to a public broadcast? To me it makes sense that if I access your wifi, but can only get that signal by standing in your house, by all reasoning that is a private network. However if I can stand on a street corner and still access your signal, it's public. Of course I guess with strong enough hardware you could access both regardless, so I really don't know.
Some people are determined to never see any ads. I kind of understand that - having an ad for smileys that shouts "HELLO" if you accidentally mouse over it is infuriating. Some ads are obnoxious, or are vectors for malware, or are just very slow. And even if they're not malware, nor obnoxious, nor slow, they're often not at all relevant.

This, coupled with no other way to pay for content, (and perhaps a refusal from many people to pay for content) means that ads are a frustrating experience even for someone like me who is pretty ad tolerant.

Some people genuinely enjoy good relevant ads, and would be happy to have those displayed to them. And some of the people who hate ads would gladly pay to have ads removed.

Much worse that those ads though is the pollution of WWW space with vapid, empty, useless corporate sites that are just huge ads, and which do nothing to give me useful information. Combine that with Google's preference for some domains and web searching is a horrible experience now.

And using Google as a reference tool means you'll have weeks of ads served based on the one query you made to discover what a Widget is used for.
Interesting, didn't know that. I used to hack on the Symbolics and recall using Statice a neat OO db he did.
Interesting they choose JSONP (which is GET only, and can't return proper error codes) for such a POST-heavy library. It doesn't really matter, since they abstract it away. However, it's interesting they're completely ignoring so many basic REST principles.

Edit: I don't disagree with their decision, I just imagine it wasn't an easy one.
Trulia to go public at $369 to $422 million valuation
That's for pre-ordered Pebbles, e.g. the "second" charge after all Kickstarter Bakers got theirs.
Sensationalism. I backed Pebble ($255) because they had a solid product and working prototypes. This article (among a number of other "oh noes Kickstarter will take all our monies" scare-articles doing the rounds lately) misses a number of key points:

1. It's a new product and a new team. Delays are a normal part of any ambitious project and don't necessarily mean the product won't ship.

2. For instance, consider that forecasted sales determine forecasted timelines

Their original shipping dates are based on raising a projected $100,000. At $99 for the cheapest Pebble, one can imagine that their worst case scenario was to ship roughly 1,000 Pebbles within their original timelines. Their Kickstarter actually raised over $10.25 million and consequently they are supposed to ship 85x more Pebbles than that. It's not hard to understand that such a dramatic difference in actuals vs. forecasts will result in a dramatic change in shipping time frames.

3. More importantly, constant communication from the Pebble team shows they are making steady progress (current backers have until the end of the month to make their colour selections, and in the past month their team took advantage of their 70k backers to perform free market research into desired Pebble colours, which is a wise business decision); I really don't see much to objectively worry about.

4. Backers of the project weren't ordering anything, and are naive if they think they were. Anybody know the Latin for "backer beware"?
> "I don't know where I could go and cancel [my order],"

Doesn't that highlight a pretty broad dichotomy between what users are paying for and what they think they're paying for? As far as my understanding go, you fund something in the hope for an outcome (a clock, say), you don't place an order.
To be fair to the person I was paraphrasing was responding to a specific question about intelligent life.
Absolutely correct, brain fart. The description language was designed to represent any data structure you could represent in C, in XDR but more importantly insure that moving those structures across a network between disparate architectures would return them the natively 'correct' format when received.
Expectations. Set them wisely.
Libertarian government is pretty much an oxymoron. Libertarianism applied in that sense is anarcho-capitalism, where everyone is free to do as they please and the only controlling force (i.e. the law) is the free market - no gov't at all. There are some people like David Friedman who have tried to make the case for how such a system could realistically work, but I'm still unconvinced (largely because the wealthy will have a monopoly on force).

I'm more a fan of his father, Milton, who was very pragmatic and not totally against gov't.
This is like scrapping old code and starting from scratch, the problem of course being that all that cruft in the old code was there for a reason.
Awesome Developer page.
I genuinely don't see why there isn't more political migration in the US. I mean an effort by large companies like the credit card companies have done by all HQing in Delaware.
Democracy gives you the nice moral feeling that the government's power is legitimate because of the way the representatives are selected by the citizens. Maybe I'm not creative enough, but I don't see anything else that doesn't feel dystopian to me.
I met him @ International Lisp Conference in 2009 and within 10-15 odd minutes of our chat, he taught me so much about airline reservation system (& common lisp) that it will be safe to say that Industry has lost a gem of a person and top notch computer scientist. RIP Sir, you will be missed.
Human rights, mostly.
Just to keep score, people have tried to start libertarian utopias in New Hampshire, the middle of the ocean, and now Honduras.
Unfortunately, Pebble's 85,000 backers who prepaid for a Pebble have no legal recourse to receive a refund.

That's not true. In Kickstarter's terms of service it states:

Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.

Now, the tricky part is I don't believe there's a time limitation placed on this, but jumping up and down the very same month they expected to release is far from practical. In a year? There's a serious case to answer.
Yes, that's correct. If anyone wants to know more, an elementary statistics book will teach you all about the central limit theorem and the law of large numbers. Very useful things to know.
Seeing the support for this in these comments, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Exactly. Even in the "one-party" consent states (which is most of them), where a conversation, phone or otherwise, can be recorded if only one of the participants is aware of the recording, it's illegal almost everywhere to record a conversation you're not a party to.
Good points, although I believe "etc" is pronounced etcetera, or ɛtˈsɛtərə in IPA.
> I'm not sure why democracy isn't "cool" in of itself - sure, it isn't a be all and end all, and you can argue that X's implementation is wrong for Y and Z reasons, but fundamentally I can get behind Churchill when he said "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried".

I'm pretty willing to disagree with Churchill and say that democracy is actually an extremely good form of government. It's easy to frame it as the "least worst" by saying the problems with other forms of government are even worse, but if you turn it around and ask what it does right, it scores very high.
Yeah, I guess the NFL season has started - here comes the Arm Chair quarterbacks.

What did you expect from App.net. I think you are suffering from setting your expectations too high. It is designed to fill a niche - and it actually has a more sustainable financial outlook than Twitter.
TL;DR; JSONP is the only hack that is IE proof

IE6, as usual, doesn’t support postMessage.

IE6 and IE7 both lack CORS support, while IE8 and IE9 have broken implementations

Oh what mankind could have achieved by now if we weren't so occupied making our websites work in IEx.
> 4. Backers of the project weren't ordering anything, and are naive if they think they were. Anybody know the Latin for "backer beware"?

Kickstartus misleadum.

Kickstarter does not make it clear that the users are "backing" and that it's not guaranteed they will deliver. As you can see from the comments mentioned in the article (and the comments on the Kickstarter "comments" section of the pebble project) it seems a lot of people think they're pre-ordering and not "backing".

This is all that Kickstarter includes on the backing page: http://i.imgur.com/WQlBU.png
You can have a varied wardrobe that still takes zero effort. For instance I have a wide variety of t-shirts and collared shirts. And I have about 5 pairs of blue jeans. So I just choose a random shirt and jeans and go. It takes no more time than having a closet like Steve Jobs.
Only in a hacker forum can you read about people wanting to eliminate the need to dress themselves in order to eliminate inefficient use of time.

Let's be realistic: getting dressed is not cognitively draining. Most of us rarely have to dress out of our comfort zone. Get yourself some "go to" outfits that are business-casual and semi-formal, so when the rare time comes when you have to "dress up" (what is that, four times a year?) you know what you're wearing. Other than that, it's jeans and t-shirts. When they all fit, you don't have to worry about what you happen to pick that day. I've never spent 15 minutes choosing what to wear in my life, and yet I've never been compelled to wear the same outfit on consecutive days.
This is the type of thing I learned in my first semester of undergrad as a CompE. This information is not a revelation for 90% of people with programming experience unless I'm greatly overestimating our collective knowledge.
#4 is a BIG issue with Kickstarter and similar platforms. Especially if something get as "big" as Pebble. People read a blog and think "hey cool, I can pre-order it!". They don't even know what they're doing.
I find it amazing that people think kickstarter is like Amazon, and talk about "orders" - the person being interviewed talked about "canceling their order" - there is a reason why you are considered a "backer" and not a "customer". Kickstarter backers should fund a project with the understanding they are trying to encourage people to do cool things, and that their is better than even chance nothing whatsoever will come of the project. Then, the rare time that something gets delivered - it is a pleasant surprise. I was shocked when I actually got an elevation dock that was, if anything, better than what was described. I really don't think the planetary annihilation guys will be able to build what they say they are - but wow, if they do, money very, very well spent...
The difference between doctors and programmers is that programmers get to build/leverage tools that are abstractions of other tools, hence you can have orders-of-magnitude differences in productivity between programmers
who use the best tools and those who don't. I assume that there's not that much variation between the way two different doctors carry out the same task like there is with programmers.
As far as my understanding go, you fund something in the hope for an outcome (a clock, say), you don't place an order.

Kickstarter's T&Cs clearly set the expectation that you are placing an order. For example:

Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.

However, the issue is between the customer and the project creator as Kickstarter conveniently extricates themselves from the situation in the T&Cs (and chargebacks could be difficult since the payment is going through Amazon and Kickstarter who may not have violated the contract).
> Any conversation that mentions evolution triggers it.

I've noticed the same trend. Even if no one questions or faults the point(s) being made re: evolution, a vitriolic jab at religion (particularly Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism) is quite common in the comments.

This is a loss. To quote Richard D. Alexander (professor of Zoology at Univ. of Michigan and an evolutionist):

"...indeed, at this moment creation is the only alternative to evolution. Not only is this worth mentioning, but a comparison of the two alternatives can be an excellent exercise in logic and reason."
It's not interesting, if you read the post you would know that they did it because of IE lacking support for CORS.

> Unfortunately, that’s not quite enough for Stripe.js. IE6 and IE7 both lack CORS support, while IE8 and IE9 have broken implementations. IE10 is the only version with a non-buggy CORS implementation. Obviously, compatibility is paramount for Stripe.js — we want to support all major browsers, right down to IE6—and so we needed to look elsewhere.
Link bait title. I expected a new API release, a discussion of existing APIs, etc.

"APIs are the future of Manufacturing" or something is a bit better.
"Job titles do matter." I stopped reading here.
from __future__ import maturity
Practicality > ideology.

I'd rather have a functioning solution that "ignores basic REST principles" and lets me accept money from IE users than a principled library that requires the latest greatest browser to process transactions with.
I think the system at HN works as is, and I disagree with everyone who says that the quality of comments have been "sliding" downwards.

I'm a long-time slashdotter, and a recent reddit convert, and I still think that HN comments have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any other forum.

Of course you're going to get opinions you don't agree with, and some of them may be harsh, and that's perfectly ok. I haven't seen the type of garbage I've seen on other sites like reddit where they start developing their own inside jokes and a thread spirals off-topic. HN keeps a good job in making sure most topics stay on target.

If we're talking about improving HN, the only minor comments I have are:

1) I wish pg would add collapsing comments on threads, like reddit. Having the ability to collapse comments means that I can exit out of a thread immediately if it starts to degrade in quality.

2) The other thing I would do is not allow throwaway comments to post for 24 hrs. This way you don't get people coming in and shitting all over a thread, and leaving with impunity.

3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page.
Stanford Online Entrepreneurship Courses
I've been doing "Fancy Friday" off and on for the last few years and I've built a collection of a dozen or so vintage suits and sport coats. It's essentially "real adult" cosplay for me, but you know what? It's awesome. I look damn good, people notice me, and on the rare occasions when I do have to dress up, I already know what I'm doing.
Rocketships and Shotguns: VC vs. Accelerators
He probably means liberal democracy with a welfare state, which obviously is something more than a form of government to which Hong Kong-style libertarianism is an alternative. "Democracy" has become such a vague word.
Re: "how do you know how much money it takes ..."

I don't know how much it takes Twitter (even though it should be relatively easy to find out), but I do have an idea how much it should take.

Twitter presentations suggest 70 million messages per day. 800 tweets per second:

http://www.slideshare.net/raffikrikorian/twitter-by-the-numb...

It's not that much, actually. Some of us have processed 50-70 million transactions per day on a much smaller infrastructure (25..40 AWS boxes) - quite often designed and deployed just days prior to the massive traffic spike, with fancy features like real-time fraud checking etc.

It's not that hard to do what Twitter does. At least, with the amount of financial backing that they have, I don't expect them to be failing in a spactacular fashion periodically.
One question I still haven't seen answered. Are these new zones prohibited from running a drug based export economy? Perhaps knowledge that the US wont' allow it to exist that way will prevent them from doing so.
Using OpenFlow to "program" a network
Re 4: In Kickstarter's terms, it says Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.

It would be very hard work to actually enforce this but Kickstarter does at least set the expectation that payment == reward.
Web Browser Grand Prix: Firefox 15, Safari 6, OS X Mountain Lion
Bookmarked--thanks. How did you get access to all of this music (if you're the author)? I think more music startups would exist if it were clear how to get access to a mass of music.

edit: from the webstie, "Also thanks to Soundcloud for providing an amazing streaming service."
Why I don't wear the same shirt everyday:

I'm not married yet.
To be fair, Ouya hasn't missed any ship date yet and are backed by real investors too and a team of industry professionals. Plus their hardware is pretty common (tegra3+ARM chip). So let's give them a chance for now.
"Routine creates boredom, and boredom constricts creativity."

Somewhat out of the context of the OP, but I respectfully disagree with that statement. Routine also creates a structure or foundation on which to be creative. Although counterintuitive, in my experience it can be hard to be creative (in a productive way) when you're given total freedom or have to start out from scratch or in a new way every time. You waste your energy trying to explore too many different areas, whereas when you work in structured environment, you can focus on the just the portion where you want to be creative.