skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like how when I signed up for redbeacon, it gave me incremental input fields.

When I signed up for Safeway, I hit an input wall, of the same size, that almost made me close the tab.
Yup, my mother doesn't now her real birthday, and she was born in '57 in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
I disagree.

Hunger may be a driver, but too much hunger can start to be consuming and distracting. Too much hunger and it would be tempting the next time someone offers to acquihire.

Yes it's important to take a Senecan long view and prepare yourself for the hardships you'll encounter, but to purposefully create hardship isn't a wise thing.

You should earn as much as you need, as little as you can take to give your company the best chance. But you shouldn't be broke, too hungry, and as a result distracted.
I wish someone like Bill Gates would stop doing sisyphean third world do-gooder junk and fund some long term, large controlled studies on humans instead. It seems to me that to do actual science on human health you need space program like money. So instead we get all this observational garbage.
Ratchet.io adds real-time search for exceptions and errors
To a certain extent they can be, however generally speaking the very tops of this set tend to have both good luck, good genes and good lifestyle. It's hard to get to right near the very top of lifespan without all three, and the population from which we select centrenarians is extremely large. Statistical blips (good luck or unmeasured factors) can be relevant, even highly relevant, but unless you're overlooking very important things it's extremely unlikely to rise to the top without favorable outcomes in other factors.

So maybe we observe things that are 95% of optimal instead of the best genes in the data set. Or maybe we observe diets that have 90% of the performance of optimal diets. We still learn a hell of a lot.

By optimal I mean best-performing in terms of life expectancy from among the total data set (people) not just among centrenarians.
You might think we've all moved on from price being important because everyone you've talked to has a lot of money. But there are plenty of hardware nerds who are also price conscious.
There are a few things you should take into account:

1. You determine the 'dominant' colours to be the centroids of your clusters. The centroid is the mean of the points within the cluster, this mean is not necessarily a colour that is in your image. If you, for example, take a picture divided into four different solid coloured squares, and use this to find the 3 dominant colours it will average 2 (or more) colours. (The same might happen for more complex images with a a lot of contrast).

2. When randomly initializing k-means there is a good chance you'll find one of the local optima, so running it more than once will return different colours. In general it is good practice to run it several times and choose the outcome with the lowest cost.

3. K-means can take a long time to converge; limit the amount of iterations it can do.

These things aside, very cool usage of k-means on image data!
Loren should do relatively well out of this game though.
I've been having a lot of success with phantom.js for converting browser rendered svg to various formats. I imagine there are a ton of svg>image options but phantom is nice in that its nearly WYSIWYG output vs chrome.
Clearly the votes for this article are not legitimate.
"Yes, but the system attempting to mount the Fusion Drive in Target Disk Mode must have OS X Mountain Lion version 10.8.2 or later."

Implies that "Fusion Drive" is already part of CoreStorage in 10.8.2. :)

That's exciting.
Unfortunately, I don't have concrete data. I should have been more careful to recommend that the author start testing with one post per day, and measure from there.

It does depend upon the page, though. If your posts get high engagement, it will have higher distribution. Of the author's 55k fans, only 14k fans are "talking about" the page, so they'll have less than full distribution. To be frank, their posts are not getting many likes. Thus, my recommendation to just do one great post per day. Also, I would suggest to the author to experiment with photos and not just links with photos. Facebook's push toward bigger photos in the feed is no accident -- they work.

There are definitely brands that have multiple posts per day, and it's largely because of the high engagement their posts drive. Two examples that I follow are "I Fucking Love Science" and "Humans of New York." They both have fewer fans than talking about, and both post multiple times a day. Because their content is highly shared, it gets great distribution. It also depends on your own engagement with the page too, as I understand it.

The best practice I hear about Twitter is to indeed publish multiple times a day. Because it acts more as a true feed and not a digest, repeating the same content at a different hour is considered to be good.
Barry, many thanks for the kind words, LONG time no speak. :) CalendarHub was ony of my very first investments, an angel investment before I really became an angel investor so to speak!
I wonder if there are ever applications that caused you to ask "what does that even mean?" which also turned out to be from successful groups.

If so it'd be great to hear about them.
If you take a sample of successful founders, then I dare say the ones who were broke are indeed particularly ambitious, determined, impressive, etc.

This doesn't mean that being broke is an advantage. Quite the reverse: it happens because being broke is a disadvantage, so people who succeed despite broke-ness have to have been better in some other respects. (In some cases they might just have been luckier.)

I bet you'll find that professional basketball players who are short are especially fast, that professional academics who score worse on standard intelligence tests are more creative, that expensive houses that are in nasty areas are particularly large or beautiful, that successful singers with unimpressive voices are especially gifted musically, etc., etc., etc. None of this means that those features are advantages.

Sorry, but this is just stupid.
The krebsonsecurity site is pretty awesome. I was at a talk where they discussed the hard part isn't discovering the skimmers, its catching the crooks when they cash out. So some enterprising folks are noting that the skimmers are installed and then logging all the customers who use the ATM, once they have customer records they then flag transactions on all of those accounts and wait for the crooks to try to cash out. They have caught folks with literally a bag full of cards with pins written on them trying to pull $200 - $500 out of each account.
Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working 
I have been bootstrapping a startup for about a year. The startup has pivoted twice but it is not monetizable as I see it.

My original idea:
My concept is to help people solve their emergencies (not life or death but something that defines a motivated buyer) in finding products or services.
I go on Twitter and search for tweets like “back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor” or “my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed.”
I would call or email the businesses in their area that could solve their problem.
In this email I would say that I have a lead and ask them to reply.
All the replies would go on a page where the buyer would be able to easily send messages to the vendors which I had hoped would turn into a chat.

The problems:
Maybe I am finding products for people that are priced too low because people are not willing to pay for our searching and businesses are not willing to pay for the lead. If I could validate the lead it could help but thats hard to do with people off Twitter.

Looking to the future:
I would love if I could somehow transition from people off Twitter to the corporate market where I could hopefully charge more and when the products/services searched for would be more repeatable. Do you think a corporation has any needs/emergencies that could be filled regularly?

The value I provide:
I save time and frustration in searching, calling, and emailing. I also provide multiple vendor options during an emergency. At one point I had hoped that I could even get the people to negotiate on prices with the vendors or maybe that the vendors would compete a bit for the lead and offer discounts.

Any help is appreciated. If the answer is drop it and move on to something fresh, it is welcome if you could provide a new possible startup idea. Thank you.
Capturing the "ghosts" of World War II
Fancy hands isn't even automation, and tbh Amazon's service isn't that useful unless you're running a business...

....But both allow referral links. Call me a cynic, but it strikes me that this person had a referral link to Fancy Hands, threw in Amazon's obscure service because Amazon also allows referrals, and gave it a catchy headline of "automation".

I didn't think Refer.ly had any target market, but it appears we found one potential customer.
They should both be called fraud (the part where the financial institution inflicts damage on a third party doesn't change the fact that the impersonator is defrauding the financial institution).

I think it is important to make the distinction because calling it fraud directs attention at a party that can actually do something about the overall problem.
This article's title is a textbook example of "The Grass is Greener" mindset.

Believe me. I've been broke before. When you are broke it's not an asset and much of your time is spent thinking about how much easier everything would be if you had money.

Alternatively once you have money, from time to time you might think about how much simpler and less stressful your life was back when you had fewer responsibilities and fewer people depending on you both personally and professionally.

This article fails to take into account the dichotomy I have just described. Perhaps in a few years the author will look back at that particular post and wonder what he was thinking.

Interestingly enough, though, the body of the post doesn't really unpack that title in any meaningful way. Selling for 1.1 million dollars is meaningless compared to what well-funded companies are able to sell for (assuming they do well in the market).
If you don't use the GC, then you can use stack allocation, unique allocation (like std::unique_ptr), arena allocation, or reference counting with smart pointers. You don't give up memory safety; it is still not designed to be possible to have dangling pointers, wild pointers, etc. As an example, I wrote an MP2 decoder that didn't use dynamic allocation or unsafe code at all, and it wasn't particularly unnatural to write in this way.

The reason why GC pointers are built into the language is that GC really requires compiler support to do well (with stack maps) and, in particular, to interoperate with the parts of the language that don't require GC in a safe way. You can't just add GC to a language that wasn't designed for it and have it work as well; the best you can do at that point is conservative GC. If you want good GC, that's a decision you need to make early on, and you need to bake it into your language to some extent. (That doesn't mean you need to rely on it though; that's exactly what Rust is trying to prove!)

There is very little that is not planned to be able to be shut off, relative to C++. One of the biggest is failure; if your functions fail, then you have to arrange to run all destructors on the stack while your thread exits. (This is similar to C++ exceptions, and are in fact implemented with C++ exceptions under the hood right now, although we plan to change this.) I suppose we could also have a mode whereby we just leak everything on failure to avoid this overhead (basically like -fno-exceptions in GCC; this is pretty much exactly the same tradeoff as C++ offers). I don't think it'd be popular though :)
Maximizing Monetization (lots of data from Kongregate)
To be fair, pretty much anything you do in Pakistan can get you drone bombed, even if it's as simple as going to a wedding party or working in a hospital.
FWIW, you can also find an absolute ton of examples of startups that had plenty of money, and failed spectacularly.

Having too much money is probably worse than not having enough.

I think the difference is that HN is primarily venture backed "silicon valley" startups. Mixergy is more about bootstrapped businesses.
The many who live near the disputed border, like myself.
FloJack: Bringing NFC to iPhone/iPad (kickstarter)
Notify Me Not
This will give you a basic animation. Click on the first frame to expand that map, then enter this into your browser Javascript console to make it animate:

a = function(){$('#next').click();b()};

b = function(){setTimeout(a,500);};

b()

Or as a one liner:

a = function(){$('#next').click();b()};b = function(){setTimeout(a,500);};b()
Sadly I'd edited something just as you posted this, so I'll reiterate here:

What about building up arbitrary concurrency mechanisms from scratch such as is possible in C and C++? The impression I had from the IRC channel was that very little beyond tasks and a couple more lower-level tools for concurrency would be accommodated.
Boeing's CHAMP Missile Knocks Out Electronic Systems
Maybe you should be asking "can we stop upvoting this now"
Looks to only be Visa/MasterCard, not American Express. Any idea if Square is looking to add Amex support in Canada?
Thanks for going out on a limb and providing some additional insights here, especially since it's clear PG and others in YC saw / reacted to your thoughts.

As applicants, my co-founder and I have certainly striven to balance the kinds of advice you lay out here ("Focus on things that can be useful in a startup" and generally being "impressive") with also providing "human" responses that demonstrate our personalities. Hopefully both sides shine through.
Out of curiosity, do you know of any other ways to get an image from AI into an SVG besides Illustrator's SVG output?
Chrome hacked at Pwnium, "Pinkie Pie" does it again
I think perhaps you're the wrong audience.

The advice is great for bootstrapped businesses who are looking to get profitable. It's probably not so great for "raising a round" venture backed "startups" who are playing the startup lottery.

If you're building a business, then being broke is a pretty great incentive to make things work.
In the UK, regardless of manufacturer's warranty, the manufacturer is bound to replace the device if it begins to fail within a reasonable time period due to manufacturing defects. For electronics, this is generally accepted as being 5 years. This clause is one of those cited by electronics firms for the 'treasure island' tax applied to things sold in the UK.

Of course, it requires that you spend a whole bunch of time writing letters and threatening legal action. Frankly, for the sake of £150, I'd rather just stop buying things from Amazon; it'll do me good to explore other ecosystems, I guess.
The point that interested me most was how instead of a quick fix or a band-aid approach the whole being healthy is interwoven in their lifestyle. They don't exercise to reduce a few kilos, rather it is impossible for them to not exercise because there isn't any other way of getting around. Same with food, they're not trying to eat healthy like us but the food they know to cook is just healthy.. it's not as a quick-fix to reduce weight.

This point is interesting to me because I was recently reading a book called 8 Weeks To Optimum Health and the author (Andrew Weil i think) mentions that it is good to add a little turmeric to your diet. Now having been lived in India all my life, we all have been eating turmeric all our lives without ever giving much thought to it. It's not something we do to remain healthy, but rather something without which you can't food here. I don't remember not eating it for the last 30 years. Unfortunately, we counter-balance it with fried samosas, etc but still the point to take is when a society as a whole develops good habits it often becomes way too easy for everyone to follow through without missing a day of that (for decades).
10 commandments for attracting and keeping great developers
Ask HN: What's the best tool for downloading youtube videos for mac?
What about the most vulnerable part of credit cards, the fact that the card information is printed right on the front (and back) of the card? Someone in line at the grocery store with a pen camera in their pocket can catch a glimpse of the front and back of a card. That is generally enough information to use the card online.
Finding personal services professionals sucks, but I'm unsure of how I'm supposed to use redbeacon. I load up the site (in Los Angeles), and find maids, set 1 bedroom, see it's $114 avg, see comments for deep cleaning, find the "reoccurring" checkbox, and get no results.

Automation would imply a scheduled event to me, but it looks like this is more for one-off transactions?
Quite a sad view of humanity. I don't think people are stupid, I think they just don't care and shouldn't care about the browser. It's a tool used to get access to the information they need.

I am reading HN on chrome, but unless I go looking for what browser I use, I wouldn't know.
I'm sorry, why?
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-trunk/roadmap#2.0.0
I'm not commenting on this article specifically (not least because I haven't read it), but there are plenty of articles that deserve little more than "middlebrow dismissal".

Very likely one could find plenty of more interesting things to say about those articles. One can find interesting things to say about anything. But if an article is about an attention-grabbing subject, is superficially plausible, but is just plain unsound in the sort of way the grandparent of this comment is alleging, the "middlebrow dismissal" -- predictable as it is for the cognoscenti -- may still be the most useful thing there is to say about it, and a comment thread that didn't have "please note, this is probably wrong in the usual way" near the top of it would be a bad and misleading one.

If HN is worse off for being full of middlebrow dismissals, the real problem may not be the middlebrow dismissals but the articles that provoke them.
Definitely under appreciated. Writing is everywhere!
K-means clustering is super cool. Myself and a friend used it a few months ago to filter moving things out of webcam video in JavaScript. It takes samples of video and puts the color of each pixel across all the recent samples into clusters, and discards the smaller cluster (for each pixel) because it was probably some object (like a person) moving across the frame without sticking around.

It’s not super performant, but the end result is awesome — after a few seconds, you and up with a picture what your webcam sees minus the moving things. For the curious:

http://sidnicious.github.com/longcamera/k-means/longcamera.h...

(I haven’t touched the code in a while, save for fixing a bug just now)
He already has a new post out:

Built out the XMPP push notifier; around 200 lines of code. Haven't tested it yet,
but it just might work. It's in the xmpp branch for now. (...)

http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/day_11...

That said, the future tense in my post wasn't an accident ;) but you're right, the Assistant is still under heavy development and lacks some parts.

Of course, git-annex itself is robust and stable, and awesome!
Why Indie Games are Getting Pushed Out and How to Stay Alive
Because opposing the government peacefully is not a crime.
The 'friends' referred to in the article are the 53,000 facebook users who have 'liked' the Dangerous Minds blog on Facebook. The article also mentions the blog posts 10 - 16 times a day.
Now that's holding a grudge.

Irredentism is a peculiar human drive that I've never fully understood.
Startup Allows You to Buy and Sell Links Based on Authorship
Bob,

Thank you for the thank you card.

With warmest regards,

John

-----

[Insert Unnecessarily Long Email Signature]
Some of the concurrency mechanisms are built from scratch today. For example, pipes (the new channel communication layer) are entirely written in bare Rust, with no C++ at all. They use atomic operations: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/blob/master/src/libcore/pipe...

Other interesting parts of the runtime that are built using Rust are task spawning (lots of locks): https://github.com/mozilla/rust/blob/master/src/libcore/task...

And implementations of mutexes: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/blob/master/src/libcore/priv...

The current plan is to implement the entire runtime in Rust itself. That includes the userland scheduler. So we will need all the low-level OS primitive mutexes, condition variables, pthread infrastructure, etc. There's no reason we can foresee why this would be particularly difficult; the only reason why it wasn't done this way from the start is for bootstrapping reasons.
Facebook doesn't owe you anything. It's a free service you use and they have any and all rights to change their model at any time. Stop whining.
Sprint Nextel aren't exactly profitable: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AS&fstype=ii&e...

I believe most of the others are.

The more salient characteristic of these companies is that they 1) dominate their respective markets (as monopolies or one of a small number of oligopolistic suppliers), and 2) are spectacularly unresponsive to customer/user sentiments.

"We don't care, we don't have to. We're the Phone Company".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o
Probably because your blog post reads like spam, it is pretty much devoid of content.
Apple defaulting the iMac to cheap, slower 5400 RPM drives is scandalous, as is their making the 21-inch iMac's RAM slots non user-serviceable. I've spent a small fortune on Mac hardware over the years, but locking the user out of doing their own hardware upgrades (while charging factory upgrade fees that are miles out of line from market prices) is just naked greed.
Let's look at the platforms currently in heavy use:

1. Windows
2. Mac OS X
3. Linux
4. Some form of BSD
5. Oracle Solaris/HP-UX/IBM AIX

Compiling for the top three platforms solves 99.999% of my problems, especially if my code is meant to be used on the desktop. For the windows platform's primary compiler to not have support for standard C++11 features is definitely a deficiency.
For whom will Jimmy Wales be voting in two weeks?
One thing that does concern me about these types of programs is trying to teach kids who are too young, inadvertently causing them to conclude "programming is too hard" and give up. I consider myself of average intelligence and I struggled with programming in high school. It was only because of my obstinate nature and love of computers in general that I kept pursuing it in college.
They could buy iZettle ;)
Not sure how much of this is true, but the story currently unfolding in Russia is fascinating to observe: http://www.euronews.com/newswires/1701658-russian-activist-s...

Summary: Anti-Putin activist fled to Ukraine to seek UN protection, stepped out of the UN office to get lunch, got abducted by some people who transported him back to Russia, got a confession out of him and turned him over to prosecutors... Reads like something from a Cold War novel.
Interesting. We were hoping to provide some context and clarity around the different types of automated website security by categorizing them - a lot of people (even engineers) we talk to don't really understand the difference between malware scanning and proactive vulnerability scanning, for example.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the article. Feedback is much appreciated. :)
post benchmarks cause the python community love those, and make it work nicely with gevent. Just make a little hello world Flask app and show us how it performs.

I use Passenger for my Ruby projects, but use nginx with gunicorn for Python - no reason behind that choice whatsoever except that is the stack that I found nice blog articles on how to get working with gevent