skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rather reminds me of this:
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/episte...
We are basically under constant surveillance by our peer group and family, just not in an Orwellian sense.

It's incredibly common for people to grow up afraid to say many things, having massive restrictions on some parts of their personalities due to those kinds of pressures.

We see it most obviously with the single big things such as "I can't tell my religious family I'm an atheist" or "I got ostracised for dating someone from another culture" or whatever, but it's almost certainly going on for a huge range of smaller personality facets - or ones which were blanked out before they developed.

Who would you be if you'd never had any restrictions on what you could say other than moral ones? If any interest you had, you would have been supported in following up, any comment you made would have been taken seriously and never laughed at, any attempt to better yourself was encouraged not mocked.

Maybe more and more surveillance such as you imagine will actually make it more obvious that others opinions are their largely their own problem and don't affect you all that much, and you should develop more confidence sooner.
This is very attractive. What's the "flock size" slider? Is it the number of neighbours it keeps track of or the neighbour distance?
Cinnamon 1.6 on Ubuntu 12.04 has been very pleasant for me so enjoy :) (the only thing keeping me from switching to mint is that they don't have a distro upgrade method like ubuntu does and I like keeping current)
Speech Recognition on Arduino
So I had an idea the other day for a patent reform: property tax on patents.

As long as a company wants to keep the monopoly rights over a patented invention, they are taxed a percentage of the patent's market value each year. They can choose either to pay that tax or sell the patent to someone else.

The government would offer to buy any patent for its market value, using tax revenue gathered from other patents, in doing so putting the invention into the public domain.

This would discourage companies from building large 'defensive' patent portfolios, since they'd be expensive to maintain. It works for the 'lone inventor' scenario too, since the market value of a new, untried invention would be low.

Once a patent's value is proven by developing the patent, its value will rise. At some point, the benefit derived from the patent's monopoly rights will no longer be worth the cost, and the rational thing to do is sell the invention.
Well if you recall Microsoft took an additional step, not only did they bundle their browser with windows, they put language in their contracts with OEMs that forbade them from putting other browsers into the system. Had Craigslist stuck with their idea that you couldn't put your listing anywhere else, then yes you could have argued they were using their position to restrict trade, but they stopped doing that fairly quickly (according to the article after talking with the EFF).
As the saying goes, "Don't fight the Fed." Technical Analysis is voodoo and tea leaves.
But if you do, be aware that occasionally they get reset to the defaults, just for shits'n'giggles. As happened to my partner this morning. Facebook simply cannot be trusted with anything of consequence - it's up to you to decide what that is, and whether it matters that you're telling everyone you know, plus all their friends, plus having that information sold to any company that wants it badly enough.
Which companies designed to grow very fast are not startups?
Wow, perfect timing, I am just writing a contract proposal this weekend!

This (novella-sized) article definitely resonated with me, will try applying some of their advice soon...
Would love to see Emoji support in there ;)
I love this refernce: http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/#9/33.3282/1.3815
As society speeds up, Eric Hoffers great quote becomes increasingly relevant:

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
This would dramatically increase the profits of HFT, and cause more people to do it.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_whats_broken.html

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/subpenny_rule_respons...

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/bigger_ticks_more_ren...
Findings, October 2012
I do want Canonical's well being in the long run. Just give me a "special" paid version and I will do it.
Great story. I was a little disappointed that in the end god actually moved the mountain. I can see religious people missing the entire point of the story.
Life as a Backward Clock
Oh, I agree. A startup I've been advising is in the GIS space, and the old OSM license meant they had to use other map sources instead.

On one hand sharing modifications to base layers would not be an issue, but the business model revolves around allowing clients to upload their own layers, many of which they can't release for business reasons or in some cases legal reasons.

The old license meant a lot of effort was wasted on producing own base maps which could've gone into fixing issues with OSM instead (e.g. areas covered by customers include sparsely populated areas where both OSM and Google's maps are severely lacking, but where getting GPS traces of all the local roads that they could release would be easy).

The new license seems to be sufficient for their usage. The problem currently is just that it's vague. E.g. I think it's safe to assume that your example would be ok, but there's still a lot of grey areas. For the company mentioned above, I also think the new license is probably ok, but it'll take some time to review.

While on one hand the new license gives more opportunities for keeping data private in some instances, I think it'll actually result in more data released for the reason that it allows a lot of people that previously would never dare touch OSM data to actually use it, and so gives them a reason to contribute fixes and improvements.
Thanks for sharing. The growth part that Joel writes about is very interesting.

One of the most important things about Crossing the Chasm/Inside the Tornado is knowing where your company and your market are in the TALC. At first blush it'd seem like you always have to hurry to grow or else you end up crossing the chasm too late and are relegated to monkey status forever. However, when you mix in some insight from Innovator's Dilemma, you see that you get a new market TALC curve whenever the market's primary feature requirement changes. So for a "mature market" like photography, we are trying to figure out what the next shift in feature needs will be, and hopefully pivot and cross the chasm to catch that wave.
UDID Replacement APIs in iOS 6
Are those of us who spend their day in Hacker news really building startups?
WhatsAPI taken down
Well, for one, special-casing _ allows for an unused-variable warning in the future (although I have no idea whether Ruby's semantics allow for this).
My iTouch can't friend you on my Facebook, so I texted you a reminder to pin my latest blog.
"pg's definition of a startup is just one kind of startup."

Most important is that PG's definition of a startup (or Fred Wilson's or Steve Blanks or pmarcas or Doug McClure's etc.) is to serve a purpose of what is good for them in their business model which is to make money off of people who take chances with their time hoping for a certain outcome.

It's not about what is good for any particular person or for society. Guess what? That's not what business is about either. And YC is a business. It's not on a mission to help the world although that could be a by product of a successful investment.

That's fine as we all tend to do what is in our best interest (in varying degrees of course), but it needs to be recognized and considered when one makes a decision to go down that path of which the person taking the journey is the one who has something to loose (time or impact on family).

Possibly the parent poster is jesting or perhaps they didn't realize this before, but it is quite obvious that what people write is self serving in so many ways. PG is no different.

Notice also that PG didn't exactly do anything "ambitious" with his time. He choose a path of certainty (Harvard and YC was certainly not "bet the ranch" in any way it's an excellent idea that in retrospect anyone can see had an excellent chance of working with a smallish downside). Viaweb was not "ambitious" either. I was around when that was founded and it was fairly obvious small business needed online stores and there were multiple companies doing the same thing.

Before you downvote, this is not in any way to rain on Paul's parade or take away any of his achievements at all. Or to try and make a point that there is anything wrong with what he is saying vs. what he has done.

There are always the "to be sure phrases" sprinkled about. PG does this quite early (in the fourth paragraph) by stating "because most startups fail." which of course is slipped in there the same way financial firms say "past performance is no guarantee of future gains" in their advertising (while taking out expensive full page ads in order to tout their past performance - at least they did back in the day..)
> Something being open != you cannot make money with it. This notion is stupid, false and dishonest.

In fact, open source is the money-making arm of free software.
The discussion of expected return sounds good from an investors perspective, but founders have no diversification, so a 1% chance of $100m or 99% chance of wasting five years sounds pretty lousy. This is my biggest issue with the VC world from a founder's standpoint. The situation gets even worse once you throw the decreasing marginal utility of money into the mix, because now the expected value of $100m is not worth 10x as much to me as $10m. In terms of ability to change my life, $10m provides probably 50-70% of the value that $100m provides.

So if my odds of succeeding with a $10m payout from a bootstrapped business are 10%, and my odds of succeeding with a $100m payout from a VC business are 1%, those expected returns are equal in math terms, but not utility terms, and I'd be crazy to raise money.
[screencast] Quick Haskell walkthough using gtk and the web
The new font is much more readable. Cheers.
ah, ok, thanks (not an american speaker; never heard that expression)
Has Apple Peaked?
I'd say there were 3 kinds: the timeless stuff is actual computer science, y'know, the hard stuff: maths. The long-lived knowledge is things that have stood the test of time, e.g. languages like SQL and C (and its toolchain) - but I wouldn't gamble on C being around as long as say, the quicksort algorithm. C++ and Perl and Python probably fall at the outer edge of this category, we'll know in 10 years. People who know these things well won't have any trouble finding work in the near future, even if they don't put any extra effort in (but show me this kind of programmer who doesn't anyway, just because it's fun).

Then there is stuff that you need to know right now which is really just the whims of fashion, the latest abstraction layer over Javascript (JQuery? Coffeescript? I lose track) or web framework and the latest fad methodology (Scrum, TDD or whatever). This is stuff that ages very quickly, in just a year's time your skills could be obsolete. I pick up just as much of these kinds of skills as I need, but there's no point investing serious time into them. These guys are running flat out just to keep up. It must be exhausting.

5 years mastering C is an investment in your future. 5 years mastering MongoDB probably isn't.
Or use Lubuntu.
Public Twitter feed to JSON using APIfy without Twitter API restrictions
Stop Using noreply
I'm pretty sure the implementation of lenses in the Unity dash is conceptually similar to pages in a web browser. You would have to switch to the shopping lens before your keystrokes were pushed to the search provider (Amazon in this case). So perhaps roughly equivalent to adding extra default tabs to your web browser minus the initial load privacy leak.

You can add them to the home dash as well (or whatever their terminology is) which would send your normal search keystrokes, but that hasn't been the default for any other net based queries in the past.
minor corrections:

"What matters is not the abolute number of new customers ..." should be "absolute"

in footnote 13:

"Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a scale …" should be "acquisitions ARE sometimes" I guess?
> Edit: Just realized that I sometimes type keywords to find local files matching filenames and content that's personal in nature. Does this mean all those keywords are sent to Amazon and perhaps data mined to show personalized results?

Exactly my concern as well. It honestly seems like an awfully broad spray to have these results on every search – why not just make it a selectable mode instead of populating every time?
TomTom: Don't Blame Apple Maps Problems On Us
Ever since that first story showed up on HN, I have loved reading about this guy. When a guy with ambition has a work ethic like this, it is great to see them do well.
Yes, but what if they needed to stay working just to feed themselves and were unable to work as hard because of the chemo?

Just because a procedure is "free" doesn't mean it doesn't cost anything :)
It would be way more expensive with modern equipment because all of the politicians would need to get paid, years of debate, massive overcharging for the crew, equipment. Probably kick-backs to various parties. Opening ceremony where politicians cut the ribbon and take all the credit, etc.
Ah, I see your point. I was trying to address the more general "intuition" that people have about this, that 0.9999... falls short of 1.0, and that there's some sort of infinitesimal between them. You can use that to talk about the hyper-reals, but, as you say, it still doesn't "solve" the "problem" that people perceive.

So you're right, and I was answering a different (although related) question.
Because participating the stock market isn't risk free.

Even if you are 100% correct (an impossibility) that a stock ought to be valued at a certain price, there is no guarantee that you can place your orders at the right time in order to make a profit on it minus transaction costs.

There's a common saying that goes loosely: 'the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent'.

So given that likelihood, its not surprising that some choose to take a guaranteed payday by writing an article, instead of going forth and rolling the dice.
How does WhatsApp deal when you change your SIM card into a new phone? I mean, how does it know it's you on your new phone?
Scan Any Attachment on IOS with VirusBarrier.
Sorry to be pedantic, but "advise" is a verb; the correct form would be "advice", which is a noun.
Show HN: HTML5 Photobooth thingy made with Camvas (webcam to canvas)
7% weekly growth may seem like BS, but it happens. The arbiter of this growth rate is a function of need and reach as PG said. To say it is BS while there is evidence the phenomenon is possible (having experienced it first hand and seeing friends achieve it for long periods of time) and that we even know the factors in it -- that is a self limiting belief indeed.
Excellent, thoughtful and presumably experience-based reply. This gets my vote.
Skitch 1.0.12 -- the latest version prior to 2 -- is (currently) available at http://get.skitch.com/Skitch-1.0.12.zip

cudos to http://www.tuaw.com/2012/09/20/skitch-2-0-is-like-skitch-1-0... for pointing this out
or you can install xubuntu

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
that solves a lot of audio problems in ubuntu/debian linux
I really like extended metaphors. When done well, they tell you more about something, in terms of what you already know. They can also be affecting (a pedagogically oft-quoted example: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171781).

Another technique is reviving a dead metaphor, in which you extend a metaphor which has become a cliche, abstracted from its original concrete meaning. Like the word "dead".

Both these techniques can be used as cheesy special effects, but when used well, they affect you without they themselves being noticed.
Erlang? http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/modules.html

The lack of insane hierarchy is one reason erlang is great. When people see hierarchy, they inevitably want to put each section in its own directory. I scream when I have to traverse 8 levels deep (each directory is usually empty except the last one, obviously) just to get to one file.
To be fair, most of the "trolls" that are abusing the system readily admit to not really understanding it either. They pick their targets without understanding the business of those targets solely based on the fact that they "look like companies we usually sue". They often name multiple patents with dozens of irrelevant claims hoping there's something in there that will stick.

Clearly something in there is broken. I think the real contention on HN is whether or not there's a big enough baby in all that bathwater to be worth saving.
I am not terming that as BS because it's impossible - it's not. I'm saying it's not suitable for all businesses (it might be downright hara-kiri for some of them) - that alone should not disqualify them from being known or viewed as startups.
Facebook could expand or replace their customer base.

Currently their major (only?) customers are companies paying Facebook to place ads in front of people who don't want to see them and may in fact try hard not to see them.

Although ads has worked for radio and television, it seems shaky to me. It reminds me of the early days of television and radio, where shows on TV were largely plays adopted to TV, because that's what people did with the preceding medium, and news programming was an announcer reading the newspaper, because the newspaper was where news came from prior to radio and TV.

Ads worked for the preceding media, but that's no reason not to innovate monetization on the web.

Facebook could, instead or in addition, charge money to its users for access to Facebook. They could sell their mobile app. They could ... well, they're smarter than me, they can do their own innovation. :)

If your uses don't commit to use by spending money, then they're essentially transient, waiting for the next free thing. Make Facebook a service that people don't complain about at every changed policy and implementation, make it so good that people will pay to use it, and I'll be impressed. (Not to take away at all from the accomplishment so far.)
Someone's been reading the Quora newsletter.
The better way is to contribute to the debian community

http://www.debian.org/donations
EDIT 1): the right term must not be energy but odds. Please display on a page a news amount according to an odds threshold (and maybe a minimum of 30 news, it's not a problem in this way for us, maybe it is for you). Anyway, thx.
Still no way to contact human for a problem. No feedback or any kind of acknowledgement about anything.

And my only problem with Google only appears when I'm not logged in. The irony.
> Compare the amount of money spent researching erectile dysfunction versus malaria.

I don't think much money goes into researching ED. The father of one of my med school classmates discovered the principle of action behind sildenafil and the other nitric oxide pathway interventions. They were working on preserving blood flow to the heart during a heart attack.

Compared to the vast toolbox of medical devices, the reebok-pump style penile implants are pretty simple implant system, probably one the way out as the old smokers die off (Leriche syndrome is primarily a vascular problem of smokers).

If you have some data, I'd love to see it, but I suspect there's a lot more time and money spent on malaria than ED at the research level. At the consumer level, the reverse is probably true.
When you install you make a new password by sending an SMS to your phone to verify that you actually own the number.

If you change a SIM card in a phone it will keep using the same Whatsapp number
Somehow this link got renamed (not by me). The cover of Barron's says "Facebook is Worth $15".

See for yourself:
http://barrons.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ON-AY643_cove...
Lots of good advice in here. I lean toward the "run screaming" side myself.

The fact that they've burned through several contracting companies and still think it's possible to get large numbers of bug fixes in the first month suggests that they're pretty clueless. It's going to take you two or three months (if not longer) just to get your head into the code enough that you can fix anything nontrivial.

If I were advising them, I would say they need two teams: one team of just two or three people (or maybe just one) solely trying to fix bugs in the existing code, and the other team of three or four people doing a complete rewrite from scratch. As others have commented, complete rewrites are normally a bad idea, but this code base is so far gone I don't think it can be incrementally refactored into sanity. Oh, and they should expect the rewrite to take two years.

But despite their experience to this point, it sounds like they're still not ready to hear that. Which leaves you little choice but to run screaming.

EDITED to add: what these people need to understand is that their demand for results in a hurry is what got them into this mess in the first place. Until they get that I don't think there's any hope.
Look at this if you want an unofficial implementation of the Whatsapp API: https://github.com/tgalal/wazapp
Bitcoin would also make gittip international. Currently payouts work only in US. This severely limits the possibilities.
Not everything that grows like weed is necessarily awesome. Just saying.
OK... well I think your point is that PG's essay is "amoral", which is true. It doesn't say anything about whether hyper-growth is a thing we should value (as human beings, not as money making machines).

Actually ALL his essays are amoral. PG is very precise. He doesn't advocate specific things; he lays out a set of deductions. You will come to the same conclusions IF you have the values he supposes. IF you value this, then you should believe that. Which is a true statement regardless of what you believe.

My point is that amoral != immoral. But I think you are saying they're the same -- that all decisions must have a moral component or they are immoral.

I agree that hyper aggressive growth doesn't always produce the kinds of companies that society "should" want... but sometimes it does! It's probably impossible to separate the two, not least because everyone has different opinions on what's valuable.
You made me giggle in these bleak times. Thanks for that.
Meh, Lubuntu or just go Openbox.
Ask HN: Two-week contract to hire. Is this normal?
So I had an interview last week and I think it went well. No coding questions, but lots of questions about the technology (I read about it ahead of time) and the interviewer decided to offer me 2 weeks of paid work and then they would make a decision. This is for an early employee at a startup.

I'm thinking of taking it but I'm wondering if there are any tricks I should be aware of?
Of course that's not possible when dynamite isn't available (either by cost or by regulation). Given that the entire village benefits, one always wonders about other people helping out (or not). And of course it is a testament to people just doing what they set out to do, regardless of the personal cost.

I'm reminded of a more modern context in the shape of the Craigslist/Padmapper debate, one guy may have built a new Craigslist right now and is out there signing up people one or two at a time to post on it, and in 20 years that person may carve a new path into classified listings. But who really thinks about embarking on tech projects these days which might take 20 years?