skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The solution isn't to expect girls to play with toys that were designed and marketed specifically for boys, as tinker toys were and are. At least, not without putting the same onus on little boys. If boys were eager to play with pink tinker toys, after all, they would already exist.
Those are certainly great points.

With regards to technical debt, I feel like it's trading one form of dying for another. Eventually bugs and performance issues will bring product quality down to the point where it starts to affect your brand. I heard a quote at Mongo Seattle along the lines of "customers will forgive delay, but they will not forgive a bad product."

Obviously 10gen has been around for a while and has a sustainable product, so their notion of survival has shifted more to quality than velocity.

In the article, I am hoping to at least raise awareness that technical debts exist when there are trade-offs. This would hopefully save developers from the awkward conversation when the co-founders come around asking why the site is so slow.

Addressing your last point, that is what I was hoping to drive toward with "A good developer will know the right questions to ask about a problem, so be sure to provide as much information as you can."

At Startup Weekend, we don't have PM's, so it is my job to ask lots of questions about "who, what, why." Unfortunately, I have worked with folks who find it unfathomable that I should ask questions about use cases and customer goals.

So the point here, is give developers specifics about the customer goals and scenarios when they ask for it so they can accomplish what I think you are saying.

Thanks for your comments though! I'd be interested to hear more about your experiences with dev teams in startups. My experiences are mostly from working at a 2-3 year old company as well as some freelance work I've done.
It's also a self-serving attitude -- in a practical way, not a bad way. Part of maintaining a successful relationship with people is to understand what might piss them off, and avoid it. 99 times out of 100, being considerate is the smart choice.
If you spent billions comming up with a linked list where old records are automatically removed on traversal, then you got so big troubles that not even a goverment can save you.

And yeah, that is the level on innovation in software patents.
Whoa, he went away. I still have the response saved on my desktop if anybody is curious about the context.
They should just license it. I think all the people who are saying it's analogous to the Apple/Samsung debacle are reaching though. No one is going to walk into a store with the intent of buying a Mondaine watch and leave with an iPhone instead.
Facebook Backs Down on Face Recognition in Europe
Researchers create single-atom silicon-based quantum computer
From Wikipedia:

Safari 4.1.3 is the final version for Tiger as of 18 November 2010.[9] Despite not having received security updates since then, Tiger remains popular with Power Mac users...
Hacker News (and Reddit) has voting ring detection, if the same people vote for each others articles regularly they'll get penalized for doing so.
Here is what I am confused about with regards to diagonalisation:

Start with binary non-negative integers:
000
001
010
011
100
101
... (goes to infinity)

This set now includes all possible bit strings of infinite length since the way these are iteratively generated includes all possibilities.

This is also an enumerable set by definition.

Let's now reverse the bits and put them after a decimal. These are just real numbers now going from zero to one. (This step is actually unnecessary I think.)
.000
.100
.010
.110
.001
.101
.011
...

This must be enumerable set too.

Using diagonalisation argument, .111111 is never to be found in this set. This is exactly where I am stuck. This number comes into the set from flipping of infinity in the original set, which includes all possible stings of infinite length.

I immediately read into your message on treating these as bit strings instead of real numbers. I still am stuck though. (Do you also see a connection to 0.99999... by the way?)
I keep trying to read the singularity is near. It just feels like a a drag so it gets put down. So much repetition and irrelevance, diversions etc. I hope his writing has improved.
Highly recommended. It's a very quick read, and gave me multiple tips that more than paid for cost + time invested reading the book.

As a Canadian, much of the investment advice was irrelevant to me. But I switched to ING direct as a result, which simplified my banking (big time saver) and eliminated a lot of fees.

He also has very good scripts for dealing with customer service reps. Various other small tips have been useful, such as better tracking of recurring expenses.

Conservatively, I've probably saved at least $1,000 since reading that book two years ago.
That's a pretty interesting scenario, though it sounds difficult. Is there any possibility of hearing more about what specifically you are offering? I would ask because it sounds like there would potentially be an opportunity to get those who can afford to pay more to do so and then in a way use that to subsidize lower-paying customers. This all depends upon the nature of the business, of course.
I almost had that point in there, but cut it before publishing.

I also had a point about "your code generation tool isn't good enough."
For all the problems there may be with Apple's maps, the directions to my house have actually improved. Google maps has recognizes a road that has been closed for about 15 years as still open, and it uses the closed road for most requesting directions to my house (and probably anyone else in my vicinity). Apple maps got it right.
Failing Shamelessly - Customer Development and Failure
I wouldn't fight it or turn them off, just saying what I would rather have. The space is almost certainly most valuable to recruiters (see sourceforge ads)
Exactly,

It really does not tell me if I can use it to do freelance contract, which is the base of the question...
Children of the Mind is on there but none of the previous Ender Game series? I would say include all of the previous, but stop at CotM.
I'll be at the Startup Weekend event in NYC tonight/this weekend. First time with this hackathon, excited to see how it goes.
I appreciated the recommendation to learn how to read a balance sheet. I want to keep my expertise grounded in the technical side of things, but I know I will get a lot more done if I can speak eye-to-eye with the business folks.
OStatus, BuddyCloud, Appleseed, Diaspora, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

Tent really really needs some justification docs.
A Mature Role for Automation: Part I
you should check out http://secushare.org/
Please explain how customers are locked into the "new monopoly." If Screwitall-A can now be made generically and works just as well as the newly made and patented Screwitall-B, customers are totally free to switch to -A if they care about the cost.

(Customers usually don't care about cost, which is certainly a problem for holding down prices, but this doesn't seem anything like "patent abuse.")
Vinimum
Vim distribution mainly aimed for Rubyists with the best tools to use ctags
This is of course much trickier because to define z^w for complex numbers requires that one choose a complex logarithmic function. There are infinitely many choices for this. Everyone has decided to use the principle logarithm but it could be consistently defined using any branch cut.
"When is gaming actually cheating?"

Honesty, cheating etc. is defined in relation to what one's behavior is that is making the judgement. Someone who crosses a line that you wouldn't cross is viewed as a cheat. Someone who doesn't even do something that you would do is viewed as being "honest". (Religion also works this way you tend to view people in terms of what you yourself do.)

Nothing that you are doing to me appears to be cheating.

"then I pounce with an upvote, giving it a second vote"

One of the things I've noticed is that the posting of the same link someone else has posted will also increase by 1 vote.

So if you post your own link and then someone sees it (not by way of HN) and hits "submit" and it's been posted it will increase by 1 vote.

I've see several things that I've submitted go up in value because others see them after and submit the same link (and there is no discussion and it didn't make page 1 or 2.)
On a personal level, raising my rates has let me outsource lower value tasks I used to have to do myself. Or buy a better computer + scanner that let me do my work faster.

With all this extra time, I've been able to do more higher value consulting. It's a virtuous circle.
Yeah, it's a complete non-answer. It does not explain at all what might cause AppC to contact clients and demand license agreements.
OStatus, used by StatusNet, the software behind identi.ca. It even has Twitter compatible API, so why Twitter devs aren't flocking to it is a mystery.

There are also a few projects using XMPP, like BuddyCloud, Jappix, Movim, OneSocialWeb etc.
pretty awesome. it’s really interesting looking at old advertising like this; puts things into perspective and shows just how far technology has progressed.

from these, i find it especially amazing what was considered 'portable' back in the day, whoa!

imagine what computing would look like if in 25+ years people looking back to something like the iphone woud be thinking the same.
I found it interesting that this announcement said nothing about what Tent actually is. Without reading other pages on the site, all I could tell was that Tent involves "protocol, apps, and servers" in some way.
The perceived need to cheat is inversely related to the value your product brings to customers with money and desire.

The more we hackers focus on the latter, the less we want to talk about the former.
Google doesn't have an incentive for you to buy a new Mac, I seriously doubt they have that as a motive. At its most basic, it's tedious to go back and check on 10.5 for every release. If you're not able to support new features on the old OS, there's a lot more testing involved. They likely ran the numbers and said it wasn't worth it.

Here's a discussion from some FireFox developers about it. Sounds like they want to drop support for 10.5 as well:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mozilla....
Take a matrix M. This is a linear transformation. Look at what happens to the unit cube, and ask what volume the result has?

The answer is the determinant of the matrix.
I find the copy on the website to be rather vague or off-topic.

From the homepage:

Tent is open, decentralized, and built for the future. Tent changes everything.

Tent allows every user to run their own server, but like email and the web, most
users will use a hosting service to handle it.

and the blog:

The documentation for Tent version 0.1 is now available along with a reference
server, tentd.

From halfway down the homepage:

What is Tent?
Tent is a protocol for open, decentralized social networking.

I understand that the creators are busy building the product, but some marketing can really help create an excited community.

Is this project like Diaspora? How is this different from the competition. I'm excited to hear how this is unique and to see where the project goes.
I hope these guys are able to get some traction. Distributed social networks that can replace twitter and facebook are the only way forward.
Create infinite Wallpaper patterns using Symmetry groups
Google the term "bear attack," you aren't accounting for the possibility that the algos can (try to) kill a company.
Apparently pg already has implemented vote ring detection.

http://www.quora.com/What-does-Y-Combinator-do-to-detect-vot...
This is a very good explaination of why it is wrong. It all boils down to the fact that patent examiners apparently cannot be well-versed in every possible domain and therefore don't realize what is trivial or not. They give patents to each of the ten guys, when a patent should only be issued after ten guys' research of many months (if at all).
Saw the link header bit and was instantly reminded of Riak - is that what the servers are running? Makes sense I suppose..
So.. does that mean that we committed "acts of war" without any congressional approval when we unleashed Flame and Stuxnet on our "enemies?"
Microsoft launches Google-is-evil campaign targeted at Safari users
I'm deeply suspicious of this article, because it could have been written and published any time over the past several years, but Holiday chose today. My cynical impression is that he's just riding the wave of iPhone news and using a sensational headline to drive traffic. Oh, and what's this?

"Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers."

It seems ironic to me that someone would lambast Apple for getting a free ride in the media, only to end the article with an advertisement of his own.
Drugs are very easy to reverse engineer and it would kind of defeat the point if you created them and then didn't release them.

You have drugs at one end of the spectrum and software and business processes at the other. There is a huge cost associated with medical research due to the inherit complexity of the human body and the requirements governments put on proper testing. Any patent solution has to address that problem as well.

(And, yes, drug companies are doing a horrible job at doing real research, but that doesn't alter the substance of the argument.)
Its nice to see traditional debugging made easy, this is stuff that you try to teach people as a sysadmin/opsguy and they never pay attention. Yay!
DockYard's Narwin redesign
I think there's a bit of a self-fulfilling effect going on: readers know that stories by these sites do well on Hacker News, so when they see an interesting one that hasn't been published, they submit it.

I've seen this first hand: many of my blog posts are submitted to Hacker News shortly after I tweet them. Sometimes I know the submitter, and sometimes I have no idea who he/she is.

This of course is independent from what the article discusses. It's possible there are sites who make an effort to get hundreds of votes on HN but I doubt that's the case with TC, the NYTimes, etc.
It seems that someone can create a new sockpuppet account, and everyone in the ring can vote up the sockpuppet. This would probably be a lot harder to detect.

Maybe if there was a 24hr waiting period before a new account can submit articles or comment, it might curtail this, somewhat.
It can't just be pattern recognizers at every level of the hierarchy of abstraction/organization anyway. I mean, eventually, after I process inputs and come to understandings of them, I also produce patterns, sequence them, compare them, prune them, and occasionally produce them as outputs. Unless that phrase "of pattern recognizers" is supposed to be labeling only the lowest level of building blocks that go into the self-organizing hierarchical system, in which case, it is much like saying a jet-engine is just atoms arraigned somehow... not a very complete explanation.

Also, self-organized? I know the way he meant it. But it irks me, considering all the structured inputs that a child gets, training material for the programming of neural connections, different at various stages of mental development, tailored toward particular chosen outcomes using centuries to eons of human experience on building minds in young brain matter. A modern person's mind is also quite constructed by, if one is lucky, one's good parents/family and cultural environment.

I know, I know, I'm picking on a promo-speak blurb, there no doubt better ways for me to have spent this time.
Brainiacs by day, cheerleaders at night (video)
Note that 2575.97 also has the property that raised to the ith power gives i. There are infinitely many such numbers.
> Start with binary non-negative integers:
> 000 001 010 011 100 101 ... (goes to infinity)

> This set now includes all possible bit strings of
> infinite length

No, it only contains the strings of finite length. There are infinitely many of them, but each one stops after a while. In particular, then n^th one only has log2(n) places before it then becomes all 0s.

> This is also an enumerable set by definition.

Yes.

> Let's now reverse the bits and put them after a decimal.
> These are just real numbers now going from zero to one.
> ... .000 .100 .010 .110 .001 .101 .011 ...

But not all of them, since these are only those numbers that have a finite number of 1's in them.

> This must be enumerable set too.

Yes it is.

> Using diagonalisation argument, .111111 is never to be
> found in this set.

Irrelevant.

> This is exactly where I am stuck. This number comes
> into the set from flipping of infinity in the original set,

"Infinity" was never in your original set. And if it was, it wouldn't be produced by the diagonalisation argument.

> which includes all possible strings of infinite length.

No it doesn't.
Microsoft doing what it does best: attacking others instead of focusing on their own stuff.
Hardening node.js for production part 3: zero downtime deployments with nginx
Let's start by defining cheating: "Cheating refers to an immoral way of achieving a goal."

Is it possible to cheat a system that has no rules? (remember, there are only guidelines here, there's a difference). I don't know how to assess the morality of HN, but clearly the goals of the general populous of HN has shifted. The community was started by a group of people looking to share information with each other, not promote their companies (although clearly that has been an indirect benefit).

Point is - who cares if it's immoral, or if it's gaming, or if it's cheating, it detriments the original intent of the community. I want the motivation of scoring to be a meritocracy. Within this meritocracy you are more than entitled to your own upvote.
"Is cheating these websites rife? Probably."

Just what evidence does the OP base this claim on, esp. for HN? The proof seems to be: Well, the motivation is definitely there, so it must be happening. That an a random email from a scammer/spammer.
If those two were the most important smartphone features, Nokia would have never have gotten to the trouble they're now in. They've had pretty much the best camera and navigation features ever since the circa 2007 N95.

So, camera and maps are clearly not the primary features influencing smartphone buyers.
I think you're trying to do both business and charity at the same time, and that doesn't really work I think. If you run a great business and make lots of money (by providing even more value to customers) you can then put that into any pet projects you may have. It will even go much faster.

You can now commit to help 10% of all your customers for free, for now into the future, and charge a sensible rate to everybody else. Your business will do better and it will grow more quickly. The 10% portion you help for free will soon be much larger than your total customer base now.
Which part? The landing page? Those are simply a cached result displaying as a ticker to make it looks real time but it actually loops through the result.
It doesn't have to be features that are required. Another OS version just requires more development time and more testing resources. There are lots of little things that you discover break if you develop on the latest OS, and then test on the older one (or vice versa; neither forwards nor backwards compatibility are perfect). At this point, 10.8 is out, so developing on 10.5 means you need to test on 4 different versions, each with their own quirks, just for Mac OS X.

Obviously there are no features that are required to display a web page that are missing on 10.5. Browsers were developed and ran perfectly fine on there. Some newer features might not work, or some newer optimizations. But remember, keeping around all the old code paths, that check for particular features, can lead to more development cost, more testing cost, more bugs, more security vulnerabilities.

Another example is security features. Snow Leopard (10.6) introduced some new security features, like stack protection and more sandboxing. Chrome is heavily focused on security, and they may not be able to provide the full isolation that they would like on 10.5.

I develop software that should by all rights work fine on 10.5. And nothing that we do can't be made to worth there. But it takes more work; I develop on 10.7, we test heavily on 10.6 and 10.8, and when we go to test on 10.5, we find things that are broken not because they're impossible, but just because some interface is different so we need to add a new code path to handle that case. All that extra testing and development is expensive, and there are increasingly few people still on 10.5, so the benefit is continually shrinking.
Makes sense! I didn't realize those companies use OSM. Thanks.
I'm not so sure they are the way forward. They're clearly the way forward if you dislike being "locked-in". But is being locked-in always a bad thing? Nope.

We could easily have a distributed web search engine to replace google. It could run on everyones machine, and it'd be awesome. But what would be the advantage?

Also before twitter/facebook, we had email - a distributed social network. How is the "new" distributed social network going to be better than email?
Yeah id have linked tent.io as well. clicked there and it's explained after a few buzzwords.
Totally agree to you, By doing this we now know who the "REAL_EVIL" is...
Thanks! I'm quite happy about the design as well. Trying to create a unique personality with skeuomorphism. :)