skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps someone should file a patent for assigning values to a variable!
The iPhone 5′s Greatest Inside Story: Chipmaking Maturation For Apple
Ask HN: For the YC Application, is shorter or longer better?
Especially for those that have got into YC:

Is short and to the point better in my application answers?

Or should I answer in detail?
You feel there are there are enough crowd-sourced hardware startup failures to warrant any action? I know the interest from this site is primarily tech products but it seems to have grown in proportion to the site which is still heavily arts/crafts saturated. I don't believe the sample size is really close to large enough to be come to the conclusion that that vaporware is as big a issue as the article claims. Providing failsafes for investors ruins the unique accessibility that Kickstartr provides for aspiring project managers.

Of course people want to see their projects realized but I believe that far more good will come from disappointing projects. The horror stories will serve to remind people that these are still investments and as such: it would be best to consider funding these projects with non-profit-esque expectations rather than some hipster product marketplace.
Gemma Rose Foo
Black Mesa: Half-Life's Wholly Amazing Source Engine Remake
Well, but Tcl blocks are nothing more than strings that you pass as arguments that then get eval'ed using uplevel. Ruby blocks are "real" language constructs, and are real closures, in difference to Tcl blocks.
Nah, the problem with drug cartels is that they aren't cartels, as can be seen by the body count they're racking up against each other south of the border. They aren't cartels at all in the economic sense of the term, but rather firms competing against each other.
Seriously, beginning? Patent-a-geddon has been on-going for a couple of years now. Its like a forest fire though, the more stuff burns the vortex effect sucks in more fuel and causes even more burning.
Well, I'm big GNU/Linux proponent but I will never ever use on Linux on my laptop or desktop unless it will support Linux out-of-the-box. I just got fed-up after 14 years of trying to do that. There are machines that work really well with Linux (e.g. Thinkpads) but a lot of cheaper machines is royal pain in the ass.
From the actual Wealthfront page:

"I illustrate the importance of growing the size of the pie to one’s share of pie to my entrepreneurship students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business by reminding them of the formula for a circle’s circumference versus its area. The formula for circumference (a proxy for share of pie) is linear (2 πr) vs. the formula for area, which is exponential (πr²)."

It seems to me that the value of growing the size of the pie as well as one's share of the pie is pretty easily understood and not in need of an analogy. But yet, this guy has decided to use one, and it is terrible.

Not only is it quadratic, not exponential (a relatively minor detail), but what on earth, exactly, is the radius meant to represent in this analogy?
Google Teams Up With Harris Interactive To Launch Consumer Research Tool
Ask HN: Who Should Yahoo Buy?
With the $1.3 billion that's not going to shareholders who should Yahoo! pick up?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-completes-first-stage-alibaba-182600111.html
That may be partially accurate, the large park in the center (Boston Common) was originally a public grazing area. But Boston was originally a small round island at the end of a long isthmus and many streets are spokes or perimeter arcs around the waterfront or older obstructions. Incredible amounts of landfill in the 1800s changed the borders of the city but by then core roads had been long established.
I doubt this will ever be fixed by Apple because this issue affects so few people. The overwhelming majority of iOS devices in active use can run at least iOS 4.3[1], and I’d guess that the users that don’t upgrade to the latest iOS version are the same ones that don’t update all their apps through iTunes. I’m guessing that the number of users who update their apps through iTunes but don’t update their device (or can’t update their device) to the latest iOS is very small.

I wasn’t particularly thrilled that I was forced to drop support for iOS 3, but looking at the number of active users of my app[2] that were running the current version, I saw that none of them were on iOS 3. This was probably the right time for Apple to drop support for < iOS 4.3.

[1] I don’t have stats to back this up, but seeing that iPhone 3GS is the lowest hardware to support iOS 4.3, and they’ve sold way more devices since then than original iPhone and iPhone 3G, I think it’s fair to assume that the vast majority of iOS devices in use can run iOS 4.3 or later.

[2] https://ironmoney.com/ios/
Preview App Icons on Your iOS Homescreen with Previ.co
Nope, we have a 100% cash back guarantee to the employers if the recruit doesn't work out (not just a credit for future services, like most headhunters/agencies).
Hm, my impression is more along the lines of, "this probably was hacked together in a weekend and might be discarded in another." It's not a fair impression, but my snap judgment is that if somebody is invested in their product, they'd put a little time into differentiating its look.

However, the homepage for this product emphasizes its use as an API, so I am not very concerned about look and feel at all, and am much more interested in API docs. It looks like these are not ready yet.
Hi neya,

I understand well the points you make and I can assure you they've been irking me these past weeks as well. But like my brother pointed out, the lion's share of our time recently has been devoted to refining the actual app as much as possible along with all of the other tasks that revolve around releasing a product. Within the next week or so, we'll have a MUCH more refined web presence. Hope you enjoy the app and thanks for the input!
I've said this here before, as a long time /. reader.

The value of /. is that occasionally the clueless masses will piss off someone with actual knowledge, enough to set people straight with a long, detailed post.
You can sleep on the weekends
>When did the shift that makes this okay happen?

Now that there are millions of programmers. Programming shifted from a fine art to a pop art, to crib something from Alan Kay.
A mail app company
Developer of RocketShipIt, thanks for the kind words!
Isn't the content that is being generated coming primarily from journalists. Even if there were more amateur writer producing content, there is still no guarantee that the content is free of bias. Aggregation can only help so much that the end reader must be able to fairly evaluate the contents and come to a reasonable opinion. This is a problem that content aggregators cannot solve.
I have a Galaxy S3 and I wish it were a little larger.

With 1280x720 pixels I use it a lot now instead of my iPad and laptops. A 5" device would cut even more into pad and laptop use time.

BTW, the 1280x720 pixel display is so very useful. That should be the minimum for a smart phone.
The best dev tools for PHP
CSV, ODS and JSON formats available on that link.
Do engagement rings have a large resale value anyway? This is a whole article about the marketing push for diamonds. I can't imagine what "second hand ring" would say....
Wyden: Protecting Nuclear Power Plants Is Different Than Protecting Facebook
Curious about something - if you had to do a new project from scratch today on top of the JVM, which language would you choose: clojure, scala, jruby (or anything else).

I ask because my brain really cant absorb too many languages, and I want to make some kind of pseudo-optimal choice. I'm not just talking about some shootout here, but about the the next 5 years outlook.
I feel like the last Humble Bundle might have set the bar too high for the following bundles.
A close friend of mine defends major smartphone companies as well as other tech companies. He's told me the average presiding judge has no idea how to connect to the Internet, much less understand JPG compression (an actual case my friend worked on).

It's probably both.
This has been going on at the veteran's hospital in SF for quite some time now. Great potential for PTSD treatment progress.
Show HN: Appgage.io - mobile app automated engagement tool
Only if it's not already in your cache or in /etc/hosts

You can put hosts file on RAM disk.

With some servers it's also possible to save and reload caches.

Assuming you're not doing hundreds of thousands of new lookups (sites you've never visited before) every day, it's very easy to configure a system for yourself that is faster than any open resolver.

There is one trade-off: if sites switch IP's without telling their users (preferring instead to wait for ttl's in open caches to expire) then for those sites that like to hop from IP to another unexpectedly, you need to monitor for this. This is rare though, and you can try to safeguard against it by "pinging" less oft visited sites periodically, but it does happen occasionally.
If an employer is smart they'll calculate the hours wasted interviewing candidates * avg hourly pay and likely realize that this cost is far greater than the $15K fee they'd pay a recruiter. Not to mention the delays in your projects as a result of your best engineers being distracted with interviewing candidates.
Zoho Mail?
This sale to Alibaba has been in the works for a long time, theres no chance that the Aliyun OS incident has anything to do with it. The timelines just don't match up.
Can you tell me how you made it work?

Adding a keyword for that field uses the following URL: https://github.com/search?q=&type=Everything&repo=&#... which ends up as a regular search.
So typing "g @mojombo" doesn't bring me to his profile but rather triggers a regular search.
Just as an FYI UPS and FedEx both use the USPS address verification API in the backend.
I think you might be misguided in thinking that people should work twice as hard or as long. Isn't the most important factor how much and what they're putting out?
If it's just you, then you can even postpone incorporation.

Or you could just form an S-Corporation, which is intended precisely for small companies, convert to a (classic) C-Corporation if and when necessary.

As for tax - that's a nice problem to have, but it's not one that's going to loom large on day one (or even year one).

Taxes will loom largely from the very first quarter, especially for unincorporated individuals. Income and business taxes are owed at least quarterly; sales taxes or VAT are owed biweekly, monthly, or quarterly depending on the jurisdiction. In this regard, incorporating is definitely a benefit, since any penalties for failure to timely pay taxes will accrue to the corporation and not to the individual owners.

When you do hire a lawyer, get an estimate up front, make clear that you want to know in advance if the bill is getting anywhere near the estimate, and require monthly interim billing if there is something ongoing.

Or just hire a lawyer that provides services for a fixed fee, as most startup laywers and small business lawyers already do. Monthly billing is standard practice; indeed, many malpractice insurers actually require lawyers to invoice clients monthly for risk management reasons.

If you can fit in some scornful laughter at the idea of billing for photocopying and phone calls, that would be good, too.

If you are paying hourly rates, this is a legitimate issue...unless you are the one initiating most of the phone calls. If you are paying a fixed fee, this is a non-starter.

Many lawyers pay lip-service to the idea of fixed fees for defined projects: think about calling their bluff.

If you sign an engagement letter providing for a fixed-fee, that is not a bluff. That is a binding legal contract, and a lawyer who violates that contract can get disbarred. If you mean that the lawyers market fixed fees but instead try to negotiate hourly fees, I suggest you call your local bar association and report them. Deceptive marketing is serious ethical breach in nearly every state, and can even result in disbarrment.

This will be like pulling teeth, because lawyers are pretty terrible at everything in business except (if you are lucky) the legal stuff.

Your lawyer is a businessman himself. Think about it: he runs his own (legal) consulting business. You are his client. He acquired you either through marketing, networking, or referral--in other words, the 3 primary means that any service provider acquires a customer. He handles his own costs, taxes, staff, everything. Unless he's brand-spanking new, he's almost certainly a better businessman than you, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. He's already making a profit. (In the real world, success is measured by profit, not eyeballs or signups.) But the economics of legal practice are different from those of a startup, so make sure he understands your economic concerns and can tailor his services to meet your needs.
I don't worry about OS as well. I have at least 14 years experience with Linux desktop, a little bit more with Windows and 2 years with OS X. I simply got fed up with Linux Desktop.

I'm from Eastern Europe therefore I'm person who looks for cheaper machines usually. Cheaper machines (e.g. not Thinkpads) don't work properly with Linux. E.g. check out GMA500 thread in Ubuntu forums.
This still happens. Saw it last year at the company I was working for at the time.
"The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that"

For consideration. Two counter examples--(1) A great engineer working on a shitty project is not worth much. (2) And a great project can be executed with competent engineers. People are only as "effective" as the problems they solve are potenially valuable.

Now imagine another variation:

"The top [founders] are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that"

Is this more or less likely to be true? And does it have anything to do with engineering and or Job titles? or is this phenomena something else altogether?
We just had a similarly great experience with redesigning FamilyLeaf's homepage. We weren't sure exactly what we wanted except for the general style, and we picked an awesome illustrator and let him run free.

Folyo (http://folyo.me) was also a great resource that helped us find our designer Paddy (http://lefft.com).
These games look pretty good, unfortunately I literally can't spare any more money this month.

Would it be a dick thing to do to pay $0 for this bundle and promise myself to pay a lot more for the next bundle (even if the games suck)?
For engineers in Silicon Valley, it very nearly is.
>It seems that the government might consider a better negotiation strategy //

Strategic acquisitions for government? Perhaps they should buy them out and nationalise!
I'm amused by the irony of the name "Red Herring". Perhaps the idiom isn't familiar to non-native English speakers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring
We're building Divshot to be a tool that professional developers and designers use every day. I totally understand the "I would never use it for more than playing around" approach, but that's how it starts (see e.g. http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...). All I can say is give it a chance, watch how it grows, and I think you'll change your mind.
I can't view the link because it's expired, so I'll just post my rant here.

The entire point of patents, as delineated in the U.S. Constitution, is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So patents are a means, of securing an end, which is "the progress of science and useful arts". Is anyone actually arguing at this point that our current patent regime is accomplishing this end? Would the world be a better place if git and github did not exist, and the only entity that could use the technologies in these patents were the patent holders?
I was on the SF.net "Ignition" team (and am still close friends with 2 of the original 4 project team) and what Sourceforge aspired to be versus what inevitably was done to it...to what it has been sold to...God, what a depressing fin de sicle.
Good question -- we're basically trying to fulfill the role of your recruiter, but at-scale. Auctions only last 14 days, so the turn around is really quick. After that, your profile is yanked from the site. We're only approving candidates who intend to switch jobs in the near future.

We offer a cash-back on our fee (which your recruiter probably doesn't) and we'll present you to a much wider pool of vetted, venture-funded companies than a single recruiter will. And because it's a competitive bidding environment, the offers you get should be the same or higher than you would get through the other process.
Very cool! This makes me think that an editor plugin for visualizing these functions would be very nice. Something like what dabblet.com does for colors (display a 'tooltip' previewing the color next to its definition), but which recognizes the SASS color functions.
I've been thinking about block implementation off and on for a while (hobbyist language designer here) and I'd like to try implementing them so that they are never values in the language semantics.

That way, a class of errors becomes impossible; namely, those errors that involve returning from a block whose method has already returned. I would have closures in the language but they would be just like Scheme closures: they would be independent of their creation context except for lexical bindings. I would compile blocks right into the method in which they appear.

Unfortunately, I don't have experience with any language that uses blocks. I'm quite familiar with closures but not blocks. I'm wondering if any Ruby or Smalltalk (or ...) programmer can give some reasons why blocks ought to be values.

Also, (referring to the post) does anyone know why rb_block_t was not embedded in rb_control_frame_t? That's the usual idiom in C and I can't think of a reason not to use it.
I am kind of discouraged by following post by Guido on scala : http://neopythonic.blogspot.in/2008/11/scala.html?m=1.

but perhaps this course would be sufficiently generic to not get bogged down by scala's peculiarities...
Basically anyone likely to be able to afford to pay up.
Is this really how SASS deals with colour? I tried inputting #DEADBE (a slightly violet shade of pink). Here are the results:

1. darken 10: #c09f62 (light brown)

2. saturate 57 (max): #ffd68a, a light, slightly golden yellow

3. adjust_hue 302: #deabbb, virtually the same color.
I did re-read it.

But where's the proof they used DNS? Upload a packet capture and let us be the judge.
How to Handle Price Objections
I don't think unemployment is caused by out of work programmers. It's more the folks who have no or low skill jobs and those effected most by the recession such as construction workers.

It's hard for me to imagine a construction worker being able to transition from the blue collar culture to the white collar culture that most of these jobs fall into.

Again, It's not so much that construction workers are stupid, but if the ones that reroof my apartment are any indication, insulting each others mothers and swinging hammers at each other when one pisses the other one off are standard fair.
>These customers go onto our blacklist that we graciously introduce to our less-capable competitors.

Why not keep them? Doesn't sound like anything that can't be addressed. Insert language defining scope as only in contract with verbal, email, and other communications besides formal change orders not binding.

Rude? Imperious? Browbeating? Fine with me. As long as I can lock you down on paper I'm fine with it. You can corral most customers like that and shrug of the distasteful personalities...as long as they are paying their bills. That's the deal breaker right there.
Even lying on what they have for competitive offers. It doesn't matter what they say as long as you know your margins and make your decisions based on that. Psychologically it can be painful to know that you took money off the table for what turned out to be non-existent competition, but it won't bite you as long as you are negotiating with a solid grasp of your costs and profit potential. This type of behavior is so standard that it doesn't even bother me. Really, they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't do this in a lot of cases from one point of view.

If you suspect your customer is lying about competing bids and you feel your margins are dipping close to below acceptable levels, try a large increase in margins on a smaller sized order or project to test the waters every once in a while. It really gives good feedback that you can use to make decisions when confronted by that behavior in the future.
I have a couple clients who like clockwork, ALWAYS try and talk the price of a quote down after submission. I look at my margins and decide if I'm willing to do it based on that alone, but every once in a while when we're really busy and I get a quote request from them for a medium or small sized job, I will increase the margin to 20% past my ideal rate to see if they bite. They usually do. So now when they try and talk me down on a larger project I just 'see if my distributor can move at all on the pricing'. Turns out he can't. Sorry. I tried.

Most of those games are rare though. Our firm is often subcontracted out, and I openly discuss my margins and those of my customer that is requesting a quote. Being open, honest, and transparent really goes a long way. I'll often send a quote along and follow up with a phone call that goes something like this: "Hey xxxx, I just sent that number in. Take a look at it. I've got about 20 points on it, -how much were you planning on marking my number up, -is that going to leave you enough margin?"
9 times out of 10 they say yeah, and appreciate me asking if they are set on their margin. When they ask for a price reduction, it's usually with the sense that we're both in it together, and they aren't looking at me as an adversary, and they are more honest about what number from me is the HIGHEST they are comfortable with. That information is golden, because I am usually bidding against other firms (at least to start). I've had many contractors stop competing my bids just because of this type of communication (as well as the execution of our firm as well).
Does anyone know how to initiate a web compare between to branches using this thing? If I could have that + Alfred (or whatever launch bar / cli one uses) that would be amazing.
The Opensource Software From an Indian Startup, Now Powers 40,000 Institutions
Looks very nice, but i will never use something like this as SAS.

This needs to be downloadable and embeddable in a private product (like a CKeditor), otherwise i'd never use it.
Show HN: YourTrove - The First Truly Social Search Engine
Great post. As a guy with almost no gift for design, I've struggled with how to hire a designer and work with them effectively, and this help a lot.
Comparing Go and Java, Part 2 – Performance
Would love to get some feedback from app devs.
It would seem that Level3 has a chance to be a hero by licensing these patents to whomever for a nominal fee.

Edit: replying to the comments. Licensing for a nominal fee isnt pure, but it is practical. It would certainly discourage the trolls. I dont think you can put something in the public domain if you are only a partial owner.
DNS was supposed to replace hand-maintained hosts files. And I don't think running my own DNS is as reliable as using a professionally-configured endpoint like Google or OpenDNS. Plus it's inconvenient. Plus I don't see how it prevents DNS poisoning?
The man has a fundamental unit of physics named after him. He is not obscure. Can we please stop with the hero worship?
The last time I restored an iCloud backup, it actually redownloaded older versions of the apps (specifically, the versions I had installed when I made the backup). So I think the answer is "use iCloud backups".