skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think he has to have worked at Zynga to understand the problem. Zynga is hardly the only one, but they are one of the biggest of the new crop of startups that grew huge and IPOed to the benefit of very few employees.

Back in the "old days", even when you move the "old days" up to include Google's IPO, a company with such a massive liquidity event could be expected to result in a lot of wealth spread out among early employees. Even receptionists, chefs, etc could cash out big paydays.

With the way things are now, companies are often structured such that unless you're a founder with an ironclad paper trail of equity ownership, you probably aren't going to be walking away with much more money than what you'd get from a particularly good yearly bonus at a large company, and that's absolutely best-case. More likely is that a liquidity event will occur where nobody but preferred stock owners will see a single dime.

This perception is absolutely a problem for the overall startup ecosystem and plays into why everyone involved wants to be a founder and not just an early employee and this in turn plays into why all these startups all these founders are founding are having massive problems hiring non-founder employees.

As a potential startup employee, your biggest concern shouldn't be whether the company fails spectacularly. Failure sucks, but that's easy enough to get past psychologically. Your biggest concern should be what if the company is extremely successful and you get screwed anyway. Because while this is statistically less likely than spectacular failure, it is much harder to deal with and more common than a lot of people think.
E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf
I like a 'TL;DR' button which scrolls with the page on the left side and whenever I think 'PLEASE KILL ME THIS IS BORING' I can press it and it jumps to the TL;DR part.
>Your righteous incivility is, ultimately, profoundly _boring_.

All passions are boring to those on the outside. To enjoy the incivility, you need to join in. Now that you've jumped in, you must be having fun.

If HN decides to censor tech fights like Stack Overflow, I won't mind at all. As long as we can engage in meta-drama, my dramatic e-penis will have plenty of material to engage with.
Playing With Matches - The math behind this year's Nobel Prize in Economics
Feedback: I expected the arrow at the right of the screen to take me to the next article, not to a navigation/contents menu.
"Europe's ridiculous labor regulations do more to strangle startups in the crib than almost anything else"

Or alternatively, and this is just my opinion here, you could say that Europe's labor regulations help protect employees from unscrupulous employers seeking to take advantage.

I just don't buy the argument that EU labour laws "strangle startups". Firstly, the actual laws vary from country to country. Secondly, most labour restrictions are phased in over the course of employment. For example, in the UK employees can be dismissed without reason for up two years from the date of hiring. I doubt this is "strangling" start-ups, especially when you consider that in the start-up space many people work less than two years per company.

Perhaps you personally have had some bad experiences, but I don't go to meet-ups around Europe and hear people saying "if only we had a labor market that favoured employers more, then I could get my start-up off the ground!"

Let me put it another way: last month, the UK government put forward some proposals that would drastically reduce employee rights in exchange for companies offering employees small (£2-10k) amounts of equity when they joined. If what you say is true, you would expect companies to jump at the chance. However, the CBI (the main lobby group for British industry) was very luke-warm towards the proposals. They felt that labor laws in the UK were not "strangling" business in the UK, and were in fact an issue of secondary importance when compared to tax incentives and other financial matters.
Yeah, no. IDEs are tools. There are great dynamic IDEs and great statically typed IDEs, and some are great at both (IntelliJ).

That being said, I have a theory along these lines. I wrote a song about it. Want to hear it? Here it go:

Dynamic languages are so hard to deal with that libraries with complicated external APIs die quickly. This ends up exerting a hell of a darwinian pressure on them, where the libraries that survive are complete-enough-to-be-useful but have very tight external APIs.

The statically typed languages, with their naval-helicopter-whop-whop-whop-ing IDEs armed to the hilt with code completion, navigation, code-gen and thermo-nuclear refactoring tools, do not put nearly as much pressure on the API designer to keep the external interface tight, and thus you get the baroque J2EE-style sh*t shows.

So, while I don't view IDEs as a language smell, I do think that they have, indirectly, contributed to the observable sanity-gap between the libraries for dynamic and static languages.
Less is More and More is Less
When I first saw the title, I was thinking it was an implementation of the ADOMAH Periodic Table. But alas, it was not.

http://perfectperiodictable.com/home031909.html
It's currently using a Google Fonts font, so you could easily swap it out (or use a system font) if you were so inclined.
"Abstract"! That's it! I'm not a native English speaker, and I was wondering what already existing (and more positive) term could replace "TL;DR". I had simply thought of "summary", but "abstract" seems more accurate. I guess people avoid it not to look pretentious... though the semicolon in "TL;DR" could also be perceived as such.
Gold Record (the Code)
Very good theme, but should html5 push State when possible, it would make it near-perfect.
I think this article makes a great point, but there might be other, more unpopular reasons fewer people are editing. For example, in my opinion, the barrier to entry has gotten much higher. Fanatical editors revert aggressively, red tape holds up even great changes, and the rites & mores of the Wikipedia community become ever more convoluted & impenetrable to outsiders.

It's a myth, albeit popular, that one can just read an article and quickly edit a mistake (whether major or minor). Perhaps this facade is crumbling a bit, and more people are realizing that "contributing" is not actually all that easy. I actually love Wikipedia, so don't take this as petty sniping, it's just what I've experienced.
I'm aware of a few different JSON parsing libraries for C.

* Metaparadigm's "JSON-C" library (see https://github.com/json-c/json-c/wiki)

* Jansson (see http://www.digip.org/jansson/)

* yajl (see http://lloyd.github.com/yajl/)

All of those are licensed extremely permissively (BSD, ISC, etc) yajl seems kind of SAX-like, which I'm not really a big fan of, but I guess some people might like it. It would be good if you had a humungous JSON stream, for the same reasons SAX beats DOM in those cases.

json-c and Jansson seem pretty similar to me. Jansson seems to be more full-featured than json-c, with stuff like a json_equal method, a json_deep_copy method, and the ability to specify custom memory allocation functions. But for most use cases there isn't too much difference between the two.

So I guess my question is really what is the use case you're targeting? It would be nice to have some context about what you see as the niche you're filling.
Devil's advocate: what if locked-down devices can open up new businesses that would not exist otherwise? Say, free cell phones in the developing world which are forcibly tied to a particular carrier and ecosystem to make up the cost?

Ownership is a fuzzy concept, especially in the days of intellectual property. It's a mish-mash of natural law, social contract, precedent, and state violence. If I "own" an MP3, why can't I remix and share it? If I "own" a piece of software, how come I don't get its source code to alter as I wish?

We have a historical bias that customers own the atoms, but creators own the ideas. But this is an arbitrary line that culture invented as an economic compromise, not an intrinsic law of the universe.

Having said all that, I'd prefer our culture side more with consumer rights, even at the cost of closing business opportunities. I'd love it if Apple-style vendor lock-in was illegal, fair use was more rigorously defended, copyrights were shortened, etc. But in any case, we should take ownership of our cultural trade-offs, instead of assuming that our animal instincts regarding "property" are inherently correct.
Dave, not at all. Just signed it with name as habit. Hope that clears it up... see above deleted :)
Did you even read to the end of the story? He found the cause.
There is nothing to investigate, from the screenshot of the excel file I can deduce what has happened.

Someone put up a service/application/website which required facebook login. The user logged in with his facebook account. The service/app/website may request the email address to be part of the authentication information. The user is informed about this before when he accepts the service/app/website into his life. The provider of the service/app/website was dishonest and sold basically the login info for $5. How do I know? I have developed applications with facebook login.
I haven't flagged any of these posts.
Recognizing The Right Of Plants To Evolve
I suspect many articles are approaching a local maximum, and it will be very difficult to do a significant reorganisation of an article in order to reach "the global maximum".

It is possible to have two very dissimilar, balanced and detailed articles on the same subject. Wikipedia makes an arbitrary choice and this is difficult to undo. I can't think of any articles that I can point to and say "this was the wrong choice", but it's certainly something to think about.
pjax would work today on several browsers with graceful degradation.
Ostensibly secure boot exists to foil bootkits (bootloader rootkits) which (in theory) cannot be detected or removed by any antivirus tools. Secure boot also prevents bootloader-based activation hacks (e.g. "Windows Loader") that make it easy to pirate Windows (these hacks can be seen as a special case of "benign" bootkits).
I think that if Anonymous want to protest dodgy labor practices there are certainly far more compelling targets in the US.

However, I would say that if as a CEO you're laying off 5% of your workforce due to poor company performance you should really evaluate your own compensation package, because as a CEO you're meant to stop that kind of crap from happening. I doubt that's going to be happening for Marc Pincus.
This is a general problem with terminal I/O, not just a Python thing. I've noticed many times that C programs that write thousands of lines of debug output to the terminal run a whole lot faster when you redirect the output to a file.
This is really interesting although a little dense/cryptic as slides. Does anyone have a link either to a slightly more leisurely exposition of the theory behind it, or perhaps a more user-focused summary of what kind of features and optimisations this new magic might enable?

As I understand it from a quick non-expert skim (please correct!): the idea is to use a fairly flexible and expressive metadata language under the hood to specify the physical memory layout of a multi-dimensional array -- more expressive than numpy's existing support for strides. Sounds like this will allow arrays to be reshaped and joined together without copying, support arrays larger than core memory, etc.

I wonder if the language is too powerful, if this could make memory management (e.g.: can I free this contiguous chunk of memory?) quite hard to reason about.

Also: seems like this makes it easier to push the cost of array layout manipulations in a somewhat lazy fashion from the producer onto the consumer of results. At which point does one decide that traversal is now excessively complicated and the thing should be copied into a flat layout. Especially since this might affect one's ability to use certain BLAS routines, take advantage of certain hardware optimisations etc. Is the idea that a compiler makes this decision for you, or you make the decision explicitly or implicitly?

Interesting stuff anyway, look forward to hearing more about it!
... and the corollary is that effective employees should seriously consider getting out before assholes like this show up-- lest one end up on the wrong end of a "snap decision" (it happens all the time).
Great suggestions, thanks. This is very v1.0, I'm going to keep tinkering.
Off-topic: can someone provide a good reason why SSH w/ the HPN patches is not the default for every SSH install on every platform?

Today, people are relying on SSH for binary transfer more than ever. SFTP and SCP are the new defacto file transfer standards between machine to machine over a secured connection. Source control like GIT (or even SVN) make heavy use of binary transfers over SSH. The performance benefit to the entire world is immeasurable. Yet unless you explicitly go out of your way to manually compile and install SSH-HPN, you don't get it.

That said, given how slow SSH is on Windows (GIT pushes and pulls are exponentially slower than on *nix or OS X), does anyone have a good link to a Putty HPN build?
This is the other end of extrapolation. There is a lot of stuff in the world, but its finite stuff. And information, like lots of things, has its own inverse power law. When building a search engine folks say "Gee you don't have nearly the hardware that Google does, how can you ever hope to compete?" and the answer is the inverse power law. Looking at queries that are served out of the index vs being served off the long tail it drops off dramatically.

How many companies are there in the world? 100M? Give them each a a megabyte for a pictures and their information, that is 100 TB of data, 50 disk drives, 150 if they are triply replicated. And what are the net new businesses in a given year? 2% annual growth rate for the worlds economies over the long scale, that's maybe 2M new businesses a year, or 2TB of data, or 1 (or 3) new disks a year?

A billion people on Facebook? 1/7th of the world population? What a megabyte for each of them is PB of data? The Backblaze guys can put a petabyte of storage in a single cabinet.

For a long time the Internet was playing 'catch-up' now it is asymptotically approaching 'caught up.'

Different problems and different opportunities for folks now who are basing their endeavors on the net.
Curious to know people's experiences at incubators
"I would move json_*_t structs to the header file and eliminate a bunch of API functions that service the access to these structs. It's a C library after all, everyone knows how to shoot one's own leg."

I strongly disagree. The author did exactly the right thing by hiding the internal data representation behind accessor functions. This makes it easy for him to change the internal data representation in the future without breaking binary compatibility.

See the libabc REAME for a fuller explanation:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/kay/libabc.git;a=...

Summary: "Do not expose any complex structures in your API"

Unrelated: please don't be one of those people who typedef every struct. It's really ugly and obfuscatory (see Linus' remarks on this).
This is awesome! I want to use it and have been toying with building so,etching similar except using Dropbox. The one problem is that if it really is a solution for clients who send you information in all manner of outmoded or inconvenient ways I doubt it'll solve that problem. I've learned that clients don't learn and don't want to. It makes life easier to jus say "yeah sure" and do your job however you see fit. Regardless, this is a sweet project.
Because they do not have to worry about locale. For a fair comparison the Haskell programs must be rewritten with a different toUpper function:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/text-icu/0.6.3.5...

See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12537377/in-haskell-how-c...
Show HN: Fluent Automation for .NET
I think the Koreaboo thing largely supports my culture argument for what determines sexual desirability. While most Asian men don't look exactly like those two guys, they certainly are repping the more Asian traits as they do not resemble the traditional Western style of masculinity.

I'm sure most white guys in Asia don't look like George Clooney or Brad Pitt either.

I also want to point out that the West exports more of its culture out to other countries of the world than do Asian cultures out in the West, so that also creates more desirability for Westerners.

My relatives in China know who Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, and Brad Pitt are, but I doubt anyone in the US knows anyone who's famous only in Asia.
When clicking on the arrow to see the list of other posts and then clicking on one of those posts, I would expect the URL to change. Instead, of
http://tomcreighton.com/2012/09/getting-something-off-my-too...
I get this:
http://tomcreighton.com/2012/10/chipping-away/#/getting-some...

Other than that, I like it. Good work.
Not much?
Just press the right arrow key once, and it will start playback again.
Similarly, pressing the left arrow key will cause it to play beats in "reverse", which sounds like a totally different song in some sections.
I am not a biologist but my recollection of high school biology is that photosynthesis is basically carbon dioxide + water + light energy = oxygen + glucose. So saying, "About 300 to 500 plants would produce the right amount of oxygen, but it's much harder to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide the plants absorb" is wrong - the quantity of oxygen produced will be exactly proportionate to the amount of carbon dioxide consumed. (There is also an issue of how much oxygen the plants' respiration would consume but let's not get into that).

And finally, some plants only "breathe," at night in order to save water - I also remember this (many if not most plants control water loss through transpiration by shutting down their stomata during , but I'm pretty much sure that no plants are able to photosynthesise at night! That would be an interesting species...

Overall, seems like some relatively serious misunderstandings of the basic science if even I (not a great GCSE mark in biology...) find myself wringing my hands...
Luckily for you, you can link objects files produced by the C compiler with object files produced by the C++ compiler. Crisis averted.
"Intuitive" is completely dependent upon audience, in this case.
Thanks! Yeah, appending a hash is not ideal, but it got the job done - I'll be updating it with pushState or similar in the future.
I'm somewhat surprised this is still controversial. The value of an IDE is entirely commercial: instead of spending company (or school, or personal) time and dollars taking the time to learn a language and its common libraries, or taking the time to understand the structure of a large project, the IDE lets me jump in and start coding and will happily do code-completion and doc-displaying on request.

My first language was PHP, I can still type out in vim most things with few trips to php.net because when I first learned it I just used a basic text editor that didn't even do syntax highlighting, and so I had to memorize most of the standard functions because it was too annoying/time-consuming to keep referencing php.net. Some years ago I learned Flex and to this day I can still only get things done with the Flash Builder IDE, coding with just a text editor is strenuous and Adobe's docs aren't as good for quick reference as PHP's. Could I do it without Flash Builder if I tried harder? Sure. But the point the author gets at is that for some languages the first suggestion is an IDE, and that says something about the language and its common libraries (and programs written in it). There's also an interesting (to me) difference in the way *nix C programs are written and the way Windows C programs are written; the presence of an IDE can't be the single determinant of a language's complexity.

Among other programmers I know I'm one of the few who doesn't use Visual Studio for C or C++, nor do I use Eclipse or Other for Java. I think this is due to my fortune of learning the languages in similar fashion to PHP, whereas with Flex I learned on-the-job. I use those IDEs only when I have to, i.e. for a school project. I have nothing good to say about Visual Studio after using it some dozens of times, though I hear it's nice from C# people who have embraced Microsoft's offerings completely (which are admittedly nice so long as you don't try to do things differently). The only thing I sort of like about Eclipse is the environment around the Java debugger--oddly I like gdb but not jdb. Though I only use it when judiciously placed print statements aren't helpful enough (such as in projects so complex I can't understand the control flow without stepping through with a debugger).

Anyway, the tradeoffs are known. I wouldn't tell companies to jettison their IDEs, I'd just say let me use vim+Linux if I happen to work there and am already familiar with the language (I bet I'll be more productive than IDE users) or else get me the best IDE money can buy if I'm not.
How about you give your retarded ego some rest and implement WebP support in Firefox first?

If you cant, then how about removing WebM support as its also just another video codec ZOMG!
Co-Founder/CTO at Librato here, just wanted to say thanks for the kind words, and include a link ;-): http://librato.com
Why enjoy the captured moment when you can enjoy capturing the moment?
This is excellent news, thank you. I've heard many good things about this book (mostly on HN!) and on first glance it looks very interesting indeed.

Edit: since this is the launch it must have the tutorials that turned into the book which I heard good things about - having read a few of them, I'm looking forward to the book version.
This is an impressively content-free article.
Seems like a similar technique to "motion graphs" in showing motion capture data (http://research.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Gallery/kovar.vol/MoGra...).
There has to be a lesson somewhere about posting stuff on your company blog that targets your company's market instead of HN.
Wow, great news! I was following his Kickstarter progress for some time, and was waiting for printed book, but online and free, this is great!!! Can't wait to check to out...

His site is down at the moment for some reason...
Here's a link to all the tech used: http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=OMGIG Including a new Javascript library for pulling Webm videos from YouTube: https://github.com/endlesshack/youtube-video
Can anybody think of an explanation why the 'bug' happened only after the 576th byte?
Add up 10 people on a conference call and all of a sudden the cost of calls is pretty hysterical to watch.
You are in SF? I'll drive up and go with you to get it..
sure - totally agree re: passwords/unsubscribe/etc. I'm not saying LinkedIn has the best product or user experience or retention/engagement - but they have done a great job growing the userbase.

as for flakey - maybe you're smarter than most of the Growth Hacker Conference attendees :) when Elliot surveyed the audience about which channel they'd focus their time/effort on, the vast majority chose the channel with the lowest conversion rate (i'm assuming they thought it had the most potential upside?) - which is exactly the opposite approach that Elliot took (focus on what's working, let engaged users do the work, reduce engaged user friction), and what actually allowed them to grow.
Also: spam your user base with irrelevant stuff on a daily basis even when they've opted out of every email possible. Pretend it's an "accident".
> The service is not available. Please try again later.

Great stuff.
> I suspect it won't be resolved in a comment thread on HN.

Nor will Anonymous hacking some company whose employees, in the grand scheme of things, are pretty well off.
Mobile Apps Have a Ravenous Ability to Collect Personal Data
I love how the internet world thinks it invented the concept of summaries by coming up with a ridiculous abbreviation.