skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks great, well done.

One nitpick I have is that earthquakes are no longer measured on the Richter scale, but rather the Momentum magnitude scale. See http://www.usgs.gov/faq/index.php?sid=54684&lang=en&...
Not always though. I'm inclined to trust younger doctors more (because many doctors don't keep up to date), have found that older executives alarmingly often seem to be okay with the status quo and if you've never heard people in the news industry complain about those old journo geezers who refuse to learn anything new, you're not listening very carefully. Teachers and sometimes even professors nearing retirement, same thing.

(I'm simply trying to show that "age is wisdom" is very dependent on the industry. Whether older programmers are, as a rule, more or less valuable than younger ones, I dunno.)
Well this is different and unsettling: "Calls to You; Mobile Telephone Numbers. Section 1.10 is being updated to state:
By providing PayPal a telephone number (including a mobile telephone number), you agree to receive autodialed and prerecorded message calls at that number..."
I've looked at Celluloid. It offers a much nicer paradigm than eventmachine. It also provides a nice way to distribute actors over multiple machines (DCell). I strongly agree with this slidedeck. Callback muck is maddening.
Are Rack-based middleware affected by these vulnerabilities (or did I lose the plot)?
You should read Atlas Shrugged instead of bashing it. Who knows, you may learn one thing or two - like the basic principle of refusing to live at the expanse of someone - and to let no one live at one's expanse in return.

> Laws don’t exist merely to frustrate the business ambitions of coastal hipsters: They also exist to protect the more vulnerable members of society

No. They exist to skew the odds in favour of those who are already "in the business", or to line up the pockets of the friends or financial backers of those that make the laws.

(EDIT: some of them also exist to get reelected, and very few of them for what laws are really needed for - protecting private property)

The market is the only thing that can beat some sense to a politician - but only after he's used your tax money to fight back, and until after reality can not be denied any longer.

Take any eco 101 book to learn how the NYC medallion scheme is damaging and learn for yourself. Here's a good read which requires little domain knowledge:

http://www.worthpublishers.com/Catalog/uploadedFiles/Content...

(EDIT2: Downvote as much as you want. An article with that much politic biais deserves IMHO at least a matching response.)
tl;dr programming (almost 50 too)
I had an issue where an API call was failing for Googlebot and other crawlers. I was worried about this being seen as "cloaking," so I was trying to figure out what was causing. Couldn't be my code. The API provider said it wasn't them. I finally realized that it was WPEngine when I visited my staging server as Googlebot. The content that was supposed to show up showed up!

Part of their caching setup was causing the API request to fail for a select list of bots. The issue was escalated to a Sys Admin who figured out what the problem was. He tweaked my server and fixed the issue for me within a day. I think that is pretty good.

My point... if something is broken and you think it might be WPEngine's caching. Try it on your staging server.
There are people I know who I would never hire at 50 because what they like to focus on is what's trendy and what their friends are talking about and what's getting posted here at Hacker News and places like it.

There are people I know who I would hire no matter their age or personal hygiene because they have such an incredible clarity of understanding of computation or software architecture that I am constantly in awe.

I hope that by the time I'm 50, I'm leaning more towards being like that second set of people, regardless of whether it gets me a job or not.
Kindle Fire has a lot of promise for developers in general, but the last time I looked at it Amazon's setup for actually getting your code in their store sucked (even by comparison with iOS and Google's Android store).

Has that improved?
What I find interesting is that I often learn/gain or notice something from these middlebrow dismissal comments. I am not saying they are all good - but many here make legitimate, logical and scientific points. With the rise of blogging and other open/free channels of self publishing, these comments are often necessary rebuttals to the overhyped tones present in many articles.
Fred Wilson on ed tech: Takeaways for educators and entrepreneurs
> Am I going crazy HN?

That's very well possible but not because of this posting. Here is probably what you remember:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611337
Ah yes, the bitter sting of diving down too far in the API. I remember my first C++ Win32 app, written using Borland's OWL. I made an "hello world" pop up, then started poking around under the hood.

What the hell is all this crap! I spent a day trying to figure it out. Then everytime something went wrong there I was, diving through the same crap all over again.

Or the bitter sting of not diving down far enough. Remember that app where you wrote code all around the barn and farmyard, only to realize that a couple of API calls would have done the same thing? Ooof. That hurts.

As an older programmer (who doesn't code for a living), I enjoy the challenge of finding the right abstraction level and skating into a solution. When I wrote my first COM server, I used an MFC book, a Doc-View type model, and then copied liberally from MSDN. Worked like a charm. It was a lot of work, but rolling that sucker by hand would have been brutal.

And it's gotten even easier. When I wrote http://hn-books.com, I thought "I wonder if I can write a static site that looks like a client-server app?" Compared to all that C++ and COM nastiness, it was a piece of cake. I love creating web art (apps, content, mixed-mode) but shit, it's not even work.

So I picked up FP a couple of years ago. Easy to pick up, difficult to master. Made my entire brain explode. What a great ride.

So no, I don't mind the complex work. In fact, I can't tell you how much I really crave that feeling of "Beats the hell out of me how we're going to do this, let's go do it" No feeling in the the world like that. It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle where you cut and color your own pieces, and there's no picture on the box. Fun stuff. Hope to be doing that kind of stuff when I'm 70.
Only one UART :-(
There are three kinds of work:

1. Owner

2. Manager

3. Worker

Most of us start out as (3), and some move on to (2). Entrepreneurs are immediately (1+2+3), which explains why it's so difficult.

When we're young we have a lot of energy and not so much wisdom. 3 is a natural fit. As we get older we gradually have less energy but hopefully more wisdom and experience. I'm 46, and I just can't do the all nighters that I did so often as a young programmer at Apple. So the goal for me has been to gradually move up the scale.

I realized this about 15 years ago after hearing the expression "the men who manage money manage the men who manage men". That expression describes the three types of work.

EDIT: For example, I'd put pg in category 1. So category 1 doesn't necessarily mean managing money.
Thank you, now I know there is at least one hacker news user who knows how markets work. Faith in humanity restored. Not really.
Um...am I the only one that would chalk this up to usage? Obviously not 100% of your fans are going to see your posts because 100% of people don't use Facebook every day, not to mention within the 2-3 hours your post would even be seen in their news feed. For the people that log in a day or two later, they most likely won't be scrolling through pages upon pages of updates in order to see yours.

This isn't Facebook scamming you - it's simply that 100% of your fans don't check 100% of your posts 100% of the time.
No, Mr President – how the FBI bosses the White House
Google Headhunter’s Recruitment Email Reveals Huge Email Security Flaw
Impala does not seem to be using MR at all, see note: https://ccp.cloudera.com/display/IMPALA10BETADOC/Impala+Freq...
> Using the card info online requires knowing the cardholder's address.

US (and Canada, UK) issued cards are verified against the billing address (AVS), in most cases. In other countries (e.g. Australia), this is not the case.

The card number and CVC are typically sufficient; you can put any other address you would like. My Amazon billing address is my work address, which is not the address my bank has (my home).
You're argument is specious. Lots of very smart people work on Google Maps. You can't just buy good software by throwing more warm bodies at it. Fred Brooks was writing about that almost half a century ago.
It would be great to have a drop-box like solution, but I am wondering if the scale (@ say, ~100GB+) works, though? Consider this guys experience with the data limits on Comcast: http://chris.pirillo.com/comcast-250gb-cap-avoid-dropbox-or-....
Yes. I just expect to be able to program more by coding less. Plus the 3D printing revolution that will take place soon is going to make programming much more interesting.
I'd like to read more about this.
I know it's based off D3.js but is the rest of the code open source?

I'd like to use it for a project and credit you. The most advanced I've found open so far is just a base rotating D3.js globe (http://bl.ocks.org/d/1246403/).
DKIM/SPF is used. However I believe both gmail and hotmail use a whitelist for the showing the padlock.
I find the recent onslaught of changes in policy to be insulting to myself, and your admittance of how you are undeserving of my business. I'm sad it has come to this. I require this account to be closed.

I further require the removal all of data related to myself from all records and systems where permitted by law.

Regards,

Brian G.

> You have successfully closed your account.
Telcode: Australian telco-as-a-service now open for beta registration
The animated GIF mentioned above probably is more correct: http://i.imgur.com/5wZX0.gif
Does dynamic compilation really that much better than profile guided optimization? That is, I suspect that in the situation you describe a C++ compiler using PGO would do just as well at detecting which of the implementations are present. In theory this might change between runs, but I can't believe that's as common as it being the same.
How to use class invariants to make software more reliable
To me, the implication here is that you can no longer bank everything on one title. Your first title may need to be a loss leader for a second and third title, to follow shortly thereafter. Hopefully you build a fanbase with the first title, and you try to convert those fans to the subsequent games. This is not cheap, by any means, and for true garage-style indies, it will mean either raising some capital, partnering with others who have it, or being incredibly savvy with PR and guerrilla marketing. Or it may mean a really long, slow strategy, building up a loyal following over the course of a few years. (That's the way a lot of fledgling studios had to do it in the early console days, and it may be similar in the future.)

The niche strategy is the other option. I've seen certain niches that have really loyal, under-served fanbases with deep pockets and a high willingness to pay for quality. Take the RPG segment, for instance. Square-Enix (an 800lb gorilla, sure, but still) recently released an RPG for a whopping $30 on the iOS App Store, and by all accounts, it seems to be very successful. I'm sure you can measure the number of people who paid for it in the hundreds of thousands, and probably not the millions, but still, that's a successful launch. A small, hyper-loyal niche without much price sensitivity can be the basis of a very lucrative strategy.
Start menu for Windows 8
The first sentence is really not required.
Real-time plotting of android accelerometer data
A simple script to gather android accelerometer data and plot it in real-time.
Uninstall Microsoft excel xp
Slightly related, link to Peereboom's rant on the OpenSSL library (a bit dated): http://www.peereboom.us/assl/assl/html/openssl.html
Automated phone calls to a number you provide is one of the ways that paypal authenticates your identity. Welcome to the internet, where anyone can be anyone!
Using an App Analytics service? You are violating Apple's developer agreement
I think this is the first year that the videos are linked to directly from the startup school page. A much better experience than having to search through justin.tv, youtube, lanyard, etc. to find all of the videos. Also, nice to find the list of speakers on the startup school page, since I think it traditionally has been replaced with the most recent year's list of speakers each year.
Thank you! I moved the question up to try to get more eyeballs, looks I didn't have to.
Being broke is a huge distraction to most founders, having to focus on the distractions of family, sometimes a spouse and/or kids, and struggling to pay bills - none of that is a good thing for one's ability to focus on getting your startup to any kind of critical mass.

Un-fun things startups do when broke: Digging through your belongings for spare change to buy a meal while you're working on closing a deal is not fun. Closing your 401k is not fun. Trading in your car for an ancient beater is not fun. Keeping a straight face with clients while screaming inside is not fun. Staring at an empty cupboard wondering what you're going to eat is not fun. Coding on an empty stomach is not fun. Selling your furniture is not fun.

If an important deal gets delayed (which it always does), and you're living broke (AKA ramen profitable) to keep as much as possible in your business, you may have to do all the above and more to get through lean times. Far better to avoid the distraction of fighting to survive by not being broke.
But after the user downloads the app, it's a fixture on their home screen. They can use it now, use it later, use it repeatedly.

The web side needs a 0th step: "What was that URL you sent me last week again? I forgot..."
It's really cool.
Care to explain why do you have http://mbostock.github.com/d3/d3.v2.min.js in header that has only one line - links to actual d3 at http://d3js.org/d3.v2.min.js?
Am I missing some reasoning behind this? It doesn't seem very reasonable. Adds two unnecesary hops to two different domains? If you dont want to host d3 why not just reference it directly in header from d3js.org?

Edit: Oh, and how you distort svg to make it look spherical while dragging? This is very cool.
> I never have to backup those files because they're replicated to any running machine with Dropbox installed.

But you really should have a separate actual backup of your data though. What would happen in the scenario that somehow your drop-box data is deleted ? Won't this deletion also be replicated to all your synced devices ?
0 is the first element in the array; so, I bet that wasn't a constant, but honestly what the programmer did.

In either case, we have the bytecode; and shouldn't what is written above compile to the same bytecode?
"Hey lets all hate on PayPal and love Stripe"
- HN fanboy, does Peter Thiel have a stake in Y comb too?
I was broke for my first two startups, and I'm not broke for my third. Being broke was a terrible distraction. Not being broke is much better.
Content Curation: The Ultimate Guide
FloJack was conceived as a way of instrumenting spaces. Think point of sale, digital interactive signage, checkin touch-points, etc. So the general public would carry native NFC phones or NFC cards/wristbands that would interact with an iPad -or an old iPhone- to trigger a secure transaction. If that's not convincing enough, hit us up at info@flomio.com.
Learning to scale an email-based app
That or advertisements.
What I should have said is that the OP has made an observation, and your argument would be more convincing if you explained why that observation was incorrect, and what is the correct explanation of what he observed.
Thanks, much appreciated. So it is essentially a node.js VM with hooks that let you alter calls that already exist inside the big carrier networks.

My humble suggestion would be to get rid of all the marketing-speak on your website and lead with what you just wrote here. It is very frustrating to have to dig through statements about what this or that can mean to you without the basic understanding of what this is in the first place. Fire your marketing guy. ;)
October 22nd Hackpad Outage
5 Lessons Learned While Being a Freelance iPhone Developer
YouTube Easter Egg
If you have a hung video on YouTube, you have a "Snake" game to play. Just try the arrow keys.
> Callback muck is maddening.

Use em-synchrony…
Emptying Our Pockets
The downside of this, of course, is that photographers who shoot in RAW would only have a JPEG copy backed up. We figured this was a reasonable compromise.

-- The key bit (a/k/a Deal Killer).

This is a good writeup, though, with a lot of clear-eyed thinking. Worth the time to read in full.
"Ben Horowitz (recording unavailable) "

This recording will never be available? I would like to watch his talk...
Keep in mind that the agreement varies by jurisdiction. For example, the Australian user agreement is quite different and has not changed since August.

[1] https://cms.paypal.com/au/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...
The currency conversion policy is either going to be awesome or suck depending on what kind of credit card you use with PayPal. Since I have cards that have no foreign transaction fees, I am guessing it will not be beneficial for myself. But it might be better for the majority of PayPal users since they might avoid the 3% foreign transaction fees that most credit card companies charge. Of course, PayPal might just pass those fees directly on to you with no way to avoid it... The lack of detail there is annoying.
What used to happen was that you had to enter the password to download the app, then for 15 (?) minutes the device remembered your password and would not ask you for it.

This blew up IIRC with the Smurfs kids game, one of the first really popular freemium games. A parent would download the game, hand the device to the kid, and the kid would be free to make as many in-app purchases (or other games?) as he/she wanted. Someone got a bill in the thousands and complained.

Apple changed it so password entry for paid content must be re-entered for each purchase. Free apps and updates still required password to download, but honored the 15 minute window. With iOS 6, updates do not require the password at all. Combined with the strict limitations for auto-renewal payments (subscriptions only allowed for music, magazines and video content), it's pretty hard now to spend money by mistake.
I think the point is right, but comparing is to web was a poor choice. They both have their own challenges that are unique to the platform.
FaceDancer board snatches USB firmware
> Linux comes to mind

Linux is written in C, not C++.
Musicalgorithms
Haven't looked into the policies of the other companies, but PayPal has gotten a lot of attention recently when folks on HN were complaining about their accounts being randomly closed/frozen by PayPal.

I don't know about you, but if my account was indeed terminated without reason, thus causing my business financial problems (or maybe even failure), I would want to take legal actions.

Mediation may not be the answer, especially when it is you vs. a giant company.
It can / will be. I just have a really messy commit log as I was editing files from Github manually from another machine (not a good strategy...).

Email me at boyd.greenfield at gmail and I'll get you the source if you'd like to chat about it. Otherwise I'll get to opening it up and adding an (open) license shortly.
The slides are out-of-sync for me, atleast for the Uber video.
The Germans Are Coming for Their Gold
Shhh, maybe no one will notice that we've been using these services for months (years?)!
Out of curiosity, who was the card vendor?

When my number was stolen my CU directed me to an online form with which I could dispute all fraudulent charges in bulk, and they were reversed two days later.
I hadn't noticed that re-direct. Thanks and fixed.

All of the SVG magic is D3.js and simply modified from this sweet example by Mike Bostock: http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/azimuthal.html

Edit: Oddly, I'm noticing that the title of Mike's page is "Afghanistan", which is the one country in the GEOJSON I'm using that doesn't render properly... (it shows empty like a 2nd Caspian Sea)
Can't PayPal just terminate your account if you opt-out?
Ask a banker: what's a derivative
NOBITCHASSNESS. Or at least that is what his shirt said...
On the point that is will not scale quickly. I wrote a bot that searches through various directories and pulls off email addresses, so its an automated process that does my work and emailing. I don't trust my bot yet so I still check over everything it does. The only reason I mention calling is if they want something done really fast and they are willing to pay for it. I understand completely that using a human to call is not scaleable. Its still a way to gauge my market and get customer feedback.
Why you should be a nurse, not a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school
But...the chart stops at "Open App", at which point the comparison is "Rrrruuuunnnn" vs "RunRunRunRun".
Seems up right now, and we (Site44) are hitting their API dozens of times a second without issues.
The telephone autodialer and SMS thing is... awkward.
Can you give me feedback on the?th iteration of my website?
I am trying to make a minimalist e-commerce website at www.tradespring.net. It may take up to 30 seconds to load as it is hosted on heroku and I am only using 1 dyno. Let me know if you can't even tell what it does/what you are supposed to do.
Fine here too.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/dropbox.com
Flash required? I'm curious - why? Is it easier to publish videos with a flash wrapper?
Yep, it's working fine here too (Melbourne, Australia).
Thats great! Hope this will work on 1.9.3p286 as well?
Are you me, but posting from 1996?
I wonder why nobody ever talks about drb, a distributed system that ships with ruby. It's active in Japan, and there has been an effort to make it better known in the rest of the world with a book dedicated to the topic in english (published by Pragmatic Programmers). Still, it hasn't stirred much interest. Even if it's less advanced than DCell, it's still a recommended way to start learning about distributed computing.
Maybe to avoid sharing away from the site? My other (half joking) thought is to stay consistent with the considerably dated markup and design that runs through most of the YC sites
Are you suggesting PayPal isn't rolling out awful policies, or are you simply upset that the status quo here is to embrace Stripe? I'm not sure what your intentions are.