skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what's your opinions on starting a service business vs starting a product business?

I like celery, and I like peanut butter, and despite them not being obvious complements they work together in a way better than even the sum of the delicious parts. I sort of feel the same way about products and consulting. I enjoy nothing in my work life so much as I enjoy making and marketing software. It affords me an unbelievable amount of freedom in arranging my day-to-day and month-to-month affairs. I get to pick everything I work on. Yay.

In consulting, I occasionally have to do things I don't really enjoy. (Contracts -- bah, not fun.) On the other hand, I get to work with very smart, fun, good people, which is something I genuinely miss when I'm in the BatCave working on my own stuff. The challenges are new and different as compared to working on my own stuff, and I get to take a look at something entirely novel every month or two instead of once-in-a-blue-moon. (Last big win for BCC? May-ish. Last big improvement to the state of the art, for the narrow art-field of small software devs? Hmm, years ago. Last big win for a consulting contract: last gig, and happens almost every gig. Last big improvement to the state of the art, for the narrow art-field of B2B software companies: last gig, and happens maybe every other gig.) Also, there's the money thing. I'm not terribly motivated by money, but I'm now a recently married man, and the combination of consulting + products is even more stability than products alone was.

But the obvious downside is that a service business isn't scalable.

Not scalable like Oracle/IBM/SAIC are not scalable, or not scalable like charging only $20k a week is not scalable? Because both of those strike me as accomplishing many of the goals I could ascribe to the word "scalable."

What's your opinion?

I suspect that there's a real fundamental values gap (or a vastly different collection of weights and terms in utility functions, if you swing that way) which make my opinion less useful to you than it might otherwise be.
I had a fantastic internship many moons ago concurrently with my studies, which could be a synonym for an apprenticeship. If not for that, I'd probably be teaching Latin somewhere. I still keep in touch with a couple of the engineers from there.

Mapquest does not currently have anything like that, and I'm not sure we're set up well for that sort of thing at the moment (I'm not sure what they'd do). We have interns in our marketing department and I think the new, very young looking dude in finance is an intern, but nothing in development.
Feel so wrong in... CoffeeScript? Or JavaScript? I think ternaries and callbacks are both much cleaner in CS (with the exception of "callback, something-else" which does end up a little funky unless you add parens). Just naming a variable to return it seems a little wrong to me but you can always leave the "return" in. "Optional" is very different than "never use".
Isn't it annoying to program without syntax highlight? Or is it just some false rumor I've heard that acme doesn't have that feature... it looks a lot like wmii. I have to try it though, emacs and vim really sucks, too bloated for my taste, I'm still not that hardcore that I use ed for programming so I'm searching for an simple, minimal and correct alternative to emacs and vim....
I'm not arguing that it is a wrong comparison, I'm arguing that it is different. My claim is that Google works hard to make sure you see Google+ results regardless so explicitly searching for them is not well represented in the trends Google reports on searches. It might be interesting to compare those trends from Bing for example. My reasoning is that Google has a vested interest in surfacing G+ results and they don't have the same interest in surfacing Twitter results. I can be completely wrong here, let me know that by telling me why my reasoning is flawed or why my premise is flawed.
From the looks of it, everyone on HN is currently downloading Plan 9 from User Space. It's a 51MB download and the download speed is currently 3-4kB/sec!
Do I count as 'active' if I only use the photo backup from my Android phone?
Except that the iPhone 4S (and iPhone 4) - are very much alive. I'm sure if we look we can come up with a relevant example - but, regardless of how we look at it, the meta point "The old reign is gone, but the new reign begins, ensuring uninterrupted persistence" - is quite likely true of hardware. Every generation or so, the themes associated with hardware will die, but they will be replaced with new ones.
My first piece of advice is that screenshots & videos are good.

Picture is 1,000 words. A video is 30,000 words a second.

I dream of a MAB/MVT combo solution. I have a project coming up that I might try this out on.
They went through this rigamarole because it's an animation and animated gifs aren't great.
on which metric do you base it on, to be widely accepted?
Don't give in so quickly - your use was fine, and in keeping with the concept of "X is Dead, Long Live X"
Well that's just a personal skill/attribute. I have met with people one on one before and they are incessently checking their cell phone. Very rude when you're trying to get thing done or communicate with them.
Make tools for yourself and others around you
Russia reveals secret diamond field containing "trillions of carats"
Thank you. I didn't know there was a direct influence. It's intriguing, because the two cultures share a similar design style: "aggressive use of a small number of abstractions" as Ken Thompson put it. I like that design style.
Pair 1.4 - Fast, Beautiful, More Features
Right. You're one of the people who claim to like the naive simplicity of the free market but have no idea how inhumane the free market actually is, and when asked to justify your beliefs you pull away and yell "psyche!".
cool. thanks.

Hardcore...

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As a MacOS virtualizatiion user, I appreciate the value of these comparisons. But the graph coloring is crazy-making.

First each product has its own rainbow color, then everything is blue, then BootCamp changes to VirtualBox's purple, then Parallels8 takes Parallels7's blue and BootCamp takes Parallels8's green?

Please, please, please use consistent mappings of colors-to-products throughout your graphs.
NOODLES  MCDONALDS Not IN ASIA IN AUSTRIA? WTF
So now beside salads, wraps, coffees, burgers and BubbleTeas there are Noodles on the Menu at MCDonalds Austria and asian style stir-fried noodles will be seen on the streets of vienna carried around in cardboard boxes eaten by chopsticks.
I'm no Google enthusiast and deactivated my G+ account a couple of months ago, and absolutely no one I'm friends with at FB was using G+.

It's one of those Google things, "normal" persons, not related to IT won't use. They already have a FB account, why more social stuff?

And Google in general boils down for most people to search and maybe mail. The whole Android story pulls in a lot of "normal" people, but I doubt that those will spontaneously start to get involved with G+.
F-i redesigns USA Today
White House confirms cybersecurity order in the works
"a wandering bee doesn't give a damn to humans dancing"

You cannot judge them by that. Humans didn't give a damn about bees dancing for centuries, either (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Frisch)

Also, I think we can almost equally well judge whether a whale is lonely as we can whether a human is. With almost any emotion, we cannot do much better than "if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck"
Question: am I the only one who's driven nuts by "if"s that come after the "then" part? E.g.:

do_something(with, these, args) if im_supposed_to

I mean, the processor/interpreter always needs to evaluate the "if" first, so what purpose does it ever serve to put it after the "then"? To me, it just confuses things because it feels like code is getting executed backwards -- like crossing an intersection, and then checking to see if the light is green.

I know it works "in English" ("do this if that"), but when I scan other people's code I'll sometimes completely miss the "if" (sometimes it's just off the screen).

Are there any examples where this reverse-if actually helps, instead of harming, code intelligibility?
Thank you! I added this, as well as checking for VERIFIED\r\n and it worked. Thanks guys!
What are the odd things - I only scanned the article but it seemed pretty much to show expected results. The whole is more than the sum of parts.
Looks good, but:

- Java: 0 results
- iOS: 3 very junior positions, only 1 London based
- Python: 5 results, 3 of which are very junior + 1 discloses zero info about the opening.
for what it's worth, https://github.com/michaelficarra/CoffeeScriptRedux/issues/4...
Yet I truly prefer windows update to chrome.

Oh, so you wanted to SSH over your GSM tethered connection? Here, take this chrome update too! Don't mind that you'll never get it down this session.

Also if you don't restart your computer you probably won't restart chrome either => no updates.

Yes, chrome is probably more efficient but we truly need a way to signal that this connection is slow/expensive so don't do any heavy updates on it. Especially when we have no way of saying that we aren't interested in an update and don't care about any security issues within an application that won't be executed anyway.

A friend of mine had a bad experience with steam which ate his 1 GB monthly quota in mere minutes (internet was down so he used his phone instead, didn't think much about having steam running in the background).

Hopefully app stores will be in charge of updates. I don't feel like having a separate update service for every application running all the time.
Warp Drive Like That On 'Star Trek' May Be Feasible After All
White House Letter - RE: Executive Order Draft
I disable the automatic updates as soon as I install Windows. I find them very annoying, and unless there's a serious issue with that version of Windows, I'd rather just wait a couple of years for the next service pack or something, before I install the updates.
While not on the topic of aggressive listening, I often find myself the 'target' of aggressive listeners (who listen a lot, ask a lot of questions and get me talking a lot).

I often go to meetups for people who like to travel and it seems like the majority of people don't create moments for them to be the receiver of a question (meaning it's hard to ask them a question). Perhaps it is a nervous thing where, instead of the possibility of there being 'uncomfortable silences', they just keep asking (me) questions. I never know how to handle this because after the conversation has gone on a bit, there's the feeling that it's time to excuse oneself in order to talk to someone else/new. If I use that 'closing' time to ask them questions then the conversation goes on and on and it becomes harder to meet a variety of people. What it seems to come down to is directing the conversation and creating openings where the end of any of my sentences should probably be immediately followed by the asking of a question. Basically, not allowing for the other person to ask their next question.
Let's make an important clarification here: When the word "hardware" is used in this article (and this thread) it is really to mean "commodity consumer hardware". There's far more to the hardware business than what you can buy at BestBuy or Walmart. That said, even industrial and specialty hardware is under pricing pressure in markets where reasonable volumes can be had.

That's the secret, really. Any market where product can be manufactured in volume is a market that can be targeted by the benefits provided by the Chinese manufacturing machine. Limited volume products are not a good fit for this system.

That said, I don't really understand the surprise or revelation perhaps implied by the author. What is so special about a tablet? In terms of the hardware involved and the manufacturing process, well, nothing. Absolutely nothing. A tablet is no different than any other electronic device.

And, yes, while a stereo amplifier or a CATV tuner use different components, a tablet is subject to exactly the same manufacturing process and obeys the same economic rules. Any product that can be manufactured in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of units per month will, eventually, race for the bottom in terms of pricing. This does not necessarily equate to lower quality.

The question that we should really be asking is: Why are we paying so much for tablets in the US?
Some 30 minutes before reading this, I was outlining what could be a good -- on features/simplicity balance and usability -- free software class platform.

The APPY Notebook [1] looks pretty good! Is it free software?

Also, I don't know if I got it right: is Phyzix Labs a kind of APP store for APPY notebook?

Is there a way for me to keep track of this? I don't have time to contribute to it right now, but it's a really cool project.

[1] http://appynotebook.com/
Two opposite thoughts reading this article (I was Sonora user since its 1.0 beta version till current 2.0 beta):

1) Their decision gives another cool project open source as TextMate 2. On the other side iTunes 11 seems to take a lot from Sonora application and all iTunes users win from it.
2) Corporations copy key ideas of small developer groups and such developers aren't protected from losing their revenue.
Beautiful indeed. I'm trying my hands at iOS development and am wondering how do you build the UI for the chat screen? I'm struggling with doing it in a View-Based tableView.
I think it is a very rare thing to encounter someone who truly listens.
Sounds pretty accurate to me. It's the "unreadable" problem that boggles my mind.

"OMG it's change, run away!"
The 7 R's of Hypermedia
Comments are the radioactive waste of the Web
Trees - A Primer
I'm confused - all of the workshop and small-group work I've ever done in classrooms (including college) involves an epic amount of shifting, moving, digging for materials, talking, talking loudly, and sometimes shouting. Someone checking a smartphone in that environment would actually be reducing the distractions in the room.
I know three separate communities of varying technical prowess who have ended up on Google+ and seem to be functioning quite happily (Members of the open data/open governance community, an extended science fiction community featuring some rather well known members such as the authors of the Expanse and SMBC, and folks like Yehuda Katz).

Every last one of these people is based in the USA.
Ballfights: gambling on who has the mightiest sperm
Very cool! Can't wait to play with it. Been a fan of Squarespace for years.
the industry is worth hundreds of billions globally

Source, please?
I find they are useful for shortcutting out of functions:

throw 'error' if badness

return null unless goodness

Since it doesn't make sense to return or throw unconditionally it is makes it pretty clear that you should look for the if/unless.
Google Buys Developer of ’Snapseed', Apple's 2011 iPad App of the Yr
How about giving the brand and model a plug then?
Ask HN: Responding to a C&D
For a little over a year, a classmate and I have been trying to launch a travel website that interfaces with a few regional bus companies and would ultimately direct students to their site. However, upon reaching out to these companies, we've received a cease and desist of any "automated access" of their site instead of them being interested in opening a dialogue with us. Is there any hope to salvage the situation?
I strongly suggest you consider the legal implications.

Suppose you're about to hire some guy. You ask for his Facebook page, and it turns out from the page he's gay.

You then turn him down for the job for some completely unrelated reason - maybe because his SQL skills aren't good enough.

However because you asked for his FB page, he could then claim discrimination because you discovered his sexual orientation.

Would you win in court? Maybe, but then you and your company have been dragged through the mud. Think of the press coverage, boycotts etc.

More to the point - you'd deserve to lose. You don't own your employees. What he does outside office hours - as long as it's legal - is his own damn business and none of yours.
I won't argue any of your points but one. You can use whatever system fonts you like on OS X. Here's some Comic Sans for you: http://swtch.com/~rsc/hackernews.png
What do you mean by "...has a M, a V, and a C."?
When I see headlines and webpages like this, I am instantly turned off. I know I'm in a minority spot, but there are conflicting claims.

Screen-sharing and plugin-free are not compatible. This is webpage-sharing or DOM-sharing. A very cool take on this, but until I read the comments here, I was scouring your site for that detail. You don't need to hide it, or call it "DOM-sharing", but something.

Even just a screenshot example... your "learn more" page has everything but a shot of it in action.
Whoops--I had no idea! And I was shocked to see that it had this much traction myself.
Would love to hear more about this. There are a couple of things, first we have to forward predict what an organ transplant will cost when things like flying a kidney in a helicopter from LA to SF is unnecessary. or the previous owner's body is maintained on life support. I've heard horror stories (but not seen the bills) for recipients being charged for that which grossly inflated the cost. So lets start with say 2 months of space in a tissue reactor to get the organ grown, and an 8hr surgical procedure, full team with 3 days postop care. For things like kidneys/spleens/bladders I would think it would be a lot less than say a heart or heart/lung transplant.

Then the second part is the costs associated with 'regular' care. So 10 years of dialysis + incidental infection care + machinery + visits is less expensive than the one day in the OR + 3 days post op?

I don't know, seems like a grown organ transplant should be less expensive, would love a heath care administrator to step in with some solid numbers.

Then
Patience. As the rate of technological change accelerates, patience is slipping away. How long can you wait for the next improved version with new features? From a technical point of view, it's all possible, so why isn't it available yet? I'd say that both consumers and investors can't wait very long, so businesses push out features (sometimes prematurely) to meet the demands, which fuels the impatience for new features. Vicious cycle started.
Coming from Python [...]

For example, in C-like languages, you can omit curly brackets
after a conditional expression if you only have one statement:

if (condition)
action();

But what happens if we add a new statement:

if (condition)
action();
action2();

Of course, that doesn't seem to be an issue in Python, the language he's coming from.

Most of his points are similarly contrived and could be equally applied to Ruby, a language which doesn't require parentheses and quite a lot of developers seem to like, or Python which is similarly whitespace-dependent and quite a lot of developers also seem to like. But inflammatory headlines do drive traffic from HN...

Given that CoffeeScript doesn’t fix any of the fundamental problems of JavaScript

I think most developers who are well-versed with both JavaScript and CoffeeScript would disagree that CoffeeScript doesn't fix any of the problems with JavaScript. It certainly makes it easier to loop through object properties. It makes code more readable in a number of ways; post conditions, list comprehension-like syntax, simpler loops, the existential operator (`foo?`), and the maybe object-like syntax (`foo.bar?.baz?.quux`) are definitely improvements.

You can of course write bad code in any language, no matter how structured it is. I myself am about to embark on refactoring a massive, terribly-constructed Python system that processes millions of requests each day. The author didn't follow the strictures of the Python community at all. How is that any different from someone who exercises poor judgment when writing CoffeeScript? It's not.
> The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

Uh, no. The "only problem" is that the concept relies on exotic matter, a hypothetical matter with 0 evidence for its existence (so far). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter
> Can acme run without a graphics layer (e.g. X11) beyond VGA?

It would not be hard to make the underlying graphics code work on top of linuxfb. I think a patch for that might be floating around.

> Why does it need more than VGA text if it entirely text-based?

Did you really watch the video? You can see that while acme is entirely about editing text, the UI itself is graphical.
Good point, gojomo. Sorry about that! I used Apple's Numbers app to make the graphs and it doesn't do too well at offering color customization. It's often an all or nothing approach.

I'll make future graphs with Excel.

Thanks for the feedback!
Istanbul's layout is downright Byzantine.
Agreed, but since the author implicitly ascribes this rare status to himself, he owes his readers the same respect. It's interesting that he begins with the worry that he might seem like a douchebag, but not the kind of douchebag that the post makes him seem to me.

I guess I'm emphasizing a lesser point at the expense of the greater one (how to listen), but somehow the two feel related. Both have to do with habit.
I never pre-clean dishes for the dishwasher. Just scrape the food off the plate into the rubbish bin and stick it in the dishwasher. No need to pre-clean anything. I don't get people who do. If you have to do that, then your dishwasher is worthless or you are using the wrong detergent.

After you eat, you should save what food is worth saving, and scrape the rest of the stuff off into the trash (using your knife, fork, whatever) and immediately place the dish in the dishwasher. Don't stack up your dishes and let them dry out so that you have to soak them and scrub them, just scrape and shove. If you can't do that, then you need to make it a habit to put away all your dishes before you cook dinner. Having less dishes helps.
The guy is getting such hate on the comments on his site, yet his opening line
is that his choice was ill thought. Let him express his issues right?

I choose MongoDB for my last side project and while it was awesome working schema-less and developing the client facing part of the project was certainly quicker to deliver, i feel pretty lost on the analytics/BI side of it and couldn't say it better than him:
"Not having JOINs makes your data an intractable lump of mud"

So coming from a relational/SQL background I found MongoDb awesome upfront, but frustrating later on...
and yes I'm off to learn http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/applications/aggregation/
I was baffeled when hearing that for the first time. I've attended a Catholic primary school, but it never occurred to anyone until the last few years that the story about God creating everything and evolution theory conflicted. We've been told both. I was amazed when hearing about the evolution theory not being believed on some (many? I don't know) schools in America (though it might have been anywhere I guess).
If you can write a little C program that speaks enough of the game's wire protocol to simulate a bot, send nasty packets, and also provide a vote of confidence when other bots ask if those packets are correct--and then run 100000 of them over a few machines--then 99.999% of your clients could be "cheating" while there are still people trying to play a real game.