skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, dogs can swim but that doesn't mean I use them to pull a barge up the river.

I will not shut up about the ground truth I and many other people know about Microsoft and their software.
Name, code, documentation, dependencies, browser support, test coverage, etc.
If the creator is reading this, a word of warning: Although I know of no instance where Mojang have pursued anyone for it, the Minecraft brand guidelines state:

We are less relaxed about commercial things. You may not
therefore use the Minecraft Name in or as the main name
or title of commercial things.

You may wish to reconsider your name choice, although it's unlikely that anything will come of it they are in a position where you're violating their requirements.

https://minecraft.net/brand
Running analytics on a database is both "really straightforward to do" and at the same time, I "really doubt" that anyone would actually do both analytics and transactions on the same database instance in production.

Why? Analytics are CPU hogs, tend to access tons of data in random fashion (blowing caches and hogging the SSD drive), and given that RethinkDB has no secondary indexing, are likely to be especially slow.

That's why people have separate machines dedicated to analytics. What I think a team would actually do with RethinkDB is the same thing people do with Cassandra: include a separate cluster (in the same or a remote datacenter) and replicate data to it from the transactional cluster(s). They would then run analytics on the analytics cluster.

This approach won't impact transactional latency, and also allows you to have different hardware altogether for running analytics (e.g. tons of cores and RAM that might go wasted on the transactional DB machines).

This is all Big Data 101; it's not controversial.
Maybe it's a security issue? With some sites you might not want that information saved, perhaps.
This is quite amusing, boiled down "Apple has released a product that I don't like that much, so I think Apple is done. FYI, Steve would have hated this". Except unless Apple had an astonishingly quick run on this the prototype was probably blessed by him at least 18 months ago.

Guess what Apple also did when Steve was alive? They sold an iPhone that didn't have a retina display, to large numbers whilst selling one with a retina display. Guess what Apple did when Steve was alive? They sold an iPod Mini that a lot of people thought was pointless as the storage space was so small.

Apple will happily sell a product that has trade offs because they believe in the product. I had a choice between buying an ipad 3 and an ipad 2, I quite happily picked the 2 and off I went, no regrets. The Retina displays are utterly fantastic but for a lot of people it's an optional extra. Apple isn't doomed because they've made a product with a feature you don't like, they're going to sell these hand over fist.

Postscript: I saw an iPad Mini in the flesh today, the display still looks fantastic unless I shove it all the way up to my eyeball and declare I can see the pixels. They're also selling second hand for an £80 markup. Seems consumers are still keen.
That sounds interesting. Are you building on SMS/USSD or J2ME?
Actually, growing your own is still illegal in Washington. Colorado limits each person to 6 plants. Will be interesting to see how the difference effects the markets.
Opera saves forms when possible. It also has instant backward navigation from cache. I guess it saves forms on cached pages.
Java Helps Twitter Outmuscle Massive Traffic Surge
ouch. Spot on. The lack of Retina Display is a deal-breaker and a weird backslide.
HN Art: No Bad CODE #geekart #streetart #creativeCommons
> It seems that everything requires jQuery these days

And there's your answer: The "cost" of depending on jQuery is small since so many things depend on it that most potential users probably already pull it in.
This seems to be the new 'cool'. Why jQuery whine, whine, whine. You've got jQuery on your own site. Why are you moaning about it?

The source is here:

https://github.com/guillaumepotier/Garlic.js/blob/master/gar...

The code is pretty much idiomatic jQuery js following most of their style rules, layout rules and standard constructs so it's obviously been written as a jQuery extension. He must know jQuery well, hence why not use it?

As for why, well I spotted a bit of sizzle, jQuery.data and the event framework in one pass of a small code base. Given the nature of the library I can even guess what they're all for without reading the code.

Quite a lot more than the inevitable each that is also in there.
"However, their position regarding the non-ECMA components like ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows Forms (which are the bone of contention) remains unclarified."
Yes of course, I just think it's unhealthy to focus on selling a company early, when the ideal result would be to be a grow to a point where you have a choice of selling or expanding. I'm sure in your case this wouldn't apply, but focus on an exit at all costs can distort perspectives and encourages companies like color which spend a lot of money without bothering to produce anything people want.
A quick look at the ASP.NET MVC source shows that it uses the Apache license, which is OSI approved:

http://opensource.org/licenses/category

So yes, I'd say that is sounds like open source, using a very permissive license. People can (and do) deploy ASP.NET MVC apps using OSes other that Windows. The vast majority choose to deploy on Windows servers, but that does not make the source any less open.

I don't mean to come across as a Microsoft apologist; I've worked with .NET, Ruby, and Java...and find them all acceptable ways to get things done quickly, once you know what you're doing. I just feel like if we all spent less time navel gazing about whose language/tech stack is the most awesome, and spent that time creating things instead, we'd all be a lot better off.
As someone who has developed in Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails for web projects, I must say what sells me on RoR is the nature of the language and ActiveRecord. My god, ActiveRecord is AMAZING. Sometimes I just don't have the option to build something in Rails(for example building internal API's that have to be written in Java for a number of reasons), but given the choice I will choose a Ruby or RoR app every single time because of ActiveRecord and the way the language functions. I know there are lots of ActiveRecord style clones in other languages, but they just feel completely lacking when compared to the real ActiveRecord and all it's extensions.
That’s what happens when people are idolized beyond common sense. Everyone now believes that a multibillion company with some of the greatest minds in the market can’t keep their shit together because the enlightened leader left for greener pastures.

Apple had flops with Jobs around also. Stop assuming that he had the answer to every problem because he didn’t. Many of his predictions were way off (as it should, no one is God to know everything). Steve this and Steve that. Well the guy is dead, get over it.

Assuming that the market will devalue Apple to the point that would signal their demise is utter nonsense. Microsoft have had a decade of flops and they’re still alive and kicking. Apple will be around for many years to come and I’m sure they’ll be as innovative as we’ve come to expect them.
Rails calls themselves MVC:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#the-mvc-a...

I don't see the issue with calling it "ASP.NET MVC". The Visual Basic event-driven style of programming is fundamentally different from MVC. Calling it MVC provides context.

Would you have preferred they come up with a "cute" name that doesn't explain what it is?
In addition, talent acquisitions rely on the high cost of getting engineers. That means there has to be high demand relative to supply. In SV there is high demand right now even with a large supply, allowing talent acquisitions of $1.5m per dev.
Framing Political Messages with Grammar and Metaphor
Ideally this would be solved in a similar way as when you statically link to libraries in C - the parts of your dependency are pulled in and users don't have to worry about it. (There are other issues with this of course, but they are well understood by now that someone could develop a system to mitigate that by now)
I think the author actually adds to the confusion about TSP by being unnecessarily vague.

Both P and NP are classes of decision problems. That means they only contain problems that ask for a yes/no answer. So because TSP asks for a route, it is not just a decision problem, and can't be in NP. However, as the author mentions, NP does in fact contain the TSP-DECIDE problem in the way he defines it.

Moreover, the problem TSP of finding a lowest cost route can be solved by a polynomial time Turing Machine that can use a TSP-DECIDE oracle (i.e. call a constant time function that solves TSP-DECIDE). It is in fact complete for that class FP^NP ("= function problems solvable in polynomial time with an oracle for NP problems"), which means it is one of the hardest problems there. The class FP^NP contains all of FNP (NP for functional problems) and is believed to contain more problems -- so there is a good chance that TSP is not in FNP.
The solution for that exists, and is called Paypal, but the general perception seems that that service is shady.
Running circles around Eclipse and Netbeans is not tricky really, they're both horrifying to use on a regular basis.
Ask HN: Your press strategy
Hello HN - what is your press strategy/approach? Do you do an online press release? If so, what distribution method/website do you use?

Any other related tips would be great too.

Thanks :)
Tarek
There's no need to abandon something you've paid money for to utilise features which are otherwise free...

http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html

https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage

If you're fortunate enough to be using Sublime on OSX, finding a shortcut is easy as:

1. Opening the help menu - "Command-?" (Command-Shift-/)
2. Entering search terms

Here's a screengrab of the process for your particular query (moving lines up): http://i.imgur.com/j226q.png

And here's a screengrab of CheatSheet (http://cheatsheetapp.com), a utility for quickly reviewing shortcuts in any OSX app, being applied to Sublime: http://i.imgur.com/HPUB4.png

Alternatives for these are available for other platforms, should you not be using OSX. Seek and you shall find :)
Our internal database does too (with a different design than Spanner, but stuff still comes "online" atomically for everyone across the globe at the same time, with similar latency). Unlike FoundationDB, and like Spanner, we're doing it with complex object graphs, not just key-values, and we also do it with consistent secondary indexing (I'm not sure if Spanner supports this or not).

This isn't "the future", this is now. People are doing it, and have been for awhile. If you're going to "rethink the database", distributed global consistency should be at the top of your list today. RethinkDB seems like its merely "rethinking" Mongo.

The main benefit of global consistency, of course, is ease of use. Global consistency is so much easier to reason about and write code for!
Mashable is a silicon valley operation, I just assumed... Plus the same goes for Windows and the command prompt, but in the valley, unix is ubiquitous, and yet non-existent as far as the press knows.
Why writers should learn math
Interestingly, Oleg Kiselyov recently argued for not including full, undelimited continuations in new languages - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4586
Tenfold increase in scientific research papers retracted for fraud
Probably not worth the trade off, however, I think that financial knowledge can be passed on while always stressing humility & not advertising what you make or how much you have.

That being said, I also think that a lot of people are stuck in a bit of a vicious circle. These same people know they don't have a lot of financial knowledge, but they also don't know who to ask or how to ask primarily because no one around them would talk about money or finances.
Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586544 (58 points, 824 days ago, 26 comments)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427187 (14 points, 581 days ago, 12 comments)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847966 (10 points, 463 days ago, 1 comment)
Thanks for the comment. Monjang is fully aware of this product and has given a thumbs up on both the branding and commercial approach.
Apples’s Steve Jobs is awesome at compromising. It nearly always picks the right compromises. If all your products fit on one table you have to be.

Here are the trade offs involved in the decision of whether or not to bring a retina screen to the iPad mini:

Weight vs retina

Volume vs retina

Battery life vs retina

Price vs retina

Weight, volume and battery life are all related and weight plus volume can also be traded off with reduced battery life.

Apple seems to believe that weight, volume and price are preferable to a retina screen. To me that sounds like a pretty reasonable trade off, especially given that one of the principal complaints about the iPad (and also mentioned in the article) is that it’s so damn heavy.
Point taken... Thanks for the feedback.
If you use fullscreen, having to get to the URL bar can be challenging. I'd prefer a very simple navigation than needing to use the URL.
As a datapoint: when we (https://circleci.com) did our market research, we estimated that a development team spent about 12% of its time on the parts of testing/deployment that we would replace (mostly setting up a CI server w/ continuous deployment).
Ugh.... Thanks for pointing this out. Very much appreciated. Will fix ASAP.
This is fascinating.

I've been following, at a distance, the developments of AD research.

The culprit is not Amyloid or Tau in themselves, but their misfolded variants, which have prion-like properties: they can't be degraded (and thus accumulate), and turn their respective healthy variants into their pathological counterparts.

Misfolded Tau is intracellular, but it is known to propagate from cell [0,1], causing havoc on its way since its accumulation is sufficient to cause neurodegeneration.

Misfolded Amyloid may not be toxic in itself, but it probably acts as a misfolding template for Tau (it does in vitro) [2].

--

0. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22365544

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19282288

2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22965142

These may not be the best sources for these very points they're the first relevant papers I could find on the spot.
Related: has sharing financial information, either personal or about your company, ever caused you problems?

I am very grateful to everyone who showed me, through their transparency, that it is possible to make a living through self publishing books and software, so I've made a commitment to share my own numbers.

But I'm wondering what problems this transparency has caused as well.
In some cases, it's not just against company policy, but is included in the employment contract the employee signed when they were hired.

I guess the legality of such a clause will depend on where you live, but for people who have something like that in their employment contract, the risk may seem significant enough that it isn't worth violating it.
I don't see evidence in that article that the new pricing is better than the old. Did you test how well it performs before announcing that it is "fixed" now? Don't get me wrong, the reasoning for these changes makes some sense, but without validation that it really converts better now, it simply cannot be called "fixed".
Open Source Project Network
Hello Coders!

I am creating a website with some fellow developers. I’d like to get the opinion of the open-source community. The problem were trying to solve is how to make open-source development more centralized, social and open to new comers, but also how to create a useful tool to senior developers.

I’d like to develop a centralized recruitment and development community for open source volunteers. Anyone can start a project and have other developers collaborate with ease. I’d like to get your feedback. Would you use this? What features would you like to see?
Thanks for sharing! More useful than many generic articles that show up on HN frontpage.
Thanks for the comment Dan... Yes, X,Y,Z coordinates are a key part of establishing cool places and finding nearby friends, images, etc. Love to hear of any specific ideas you care to share.
> Why you'd want to be covered by TC is a different story.

The SEO benefit of being linked from a high PR site like TC alone can be worth quite a bit for a startup trying to get a new site ranking well.
I'm kind of scratching my head on this. This is little more than a secure system that tallies information, and generates work items, with a user base in the tens of thousands. Why is it so filled with fail?
My dog isn't going to like being called a pirate.
Who knows if it's accurate, but Buzzfeed is reporting that it may have been Anonymous as part of its Stratfor attack:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/anonymous-may-have-hacke...
Easy. Trivial, even. I set up a small organization with one goal: Get kids to smoke weed.

Pick a handful of communities in the legal states: Wealthy, suburban districts that went blue, but narrowly. Send a couple of guys to each one with ten pounds of marijuana and ten thousand dollars in cash. Have them recruit some bored 21-year-old stoners, give them each twenty bucks for snacks and a dozen rolled joints, and have them hang out at the skate park or movie theater or wherever and just pass out free weed.

Those joints will inevitably wind up in the hands of teenagers and even young children. Ramp up the operation enough, and you've got a full-blown weed epidemic. Without any further prompting, parent groups will petition the state and federal government to intervene, and if not repeal the law then at least impose enough additional restrictions to keep an illegal operation cost-competitive with a legit one.

Of course, there are lots of ways this strategy could fail or even backfire.
There's a lot of speculation that the deal fell apart because Groupon's business was rotten deep down, and that Google either had already realized this or was about to have to be told.

I suspect with the accounting irregularities and the stuff I see lately as deals - laser eye surgery? toenail fungus removal? - that the $6B would never have gone through.
Rails claims to implement the MVC design patterns. It does not claim to be named "Ruby on Rails MVC".
Firebird Database Events and Message-oriented Middleware (Part 1 and 2)
Oh, I was totally unaware of this one. Never mind, it clearly shows that there's a lack here on this browser behavior. My project is juste a few hours pet project. I'll try to maintain it and make it as advanced & usefull as sisyphus, for fun :)
That's awesome! I've signed up to the launch list, I can forward it to our content team (I manage minecraftforum.net) at launch and they may be able to do an article on it.
We've added a temporary coupon code "take2" so if you sign up today it will lock in a 50% off price. (a very good reason to make an account today) It's totally free while you're developing, up to 50 user accounts.

Let me know if you have any questions about the service!
Good call. Not thought about that. At least, it is shown to the user, and not hidden and recorded secretly.
I'd be curious about the decision between freemium (free plan) vs free trial - what was the process for choosing to use freemium? That's something I talk about with lots of founders, and there are specific reasons freemium works well for us at Buffer.
I think this looks really slick. Good job!
It's not standard because people frequently do things like type a credit card number into a form on a public computer. Lots of potential for privacy breaches.
To add to what davycro said, entry level Android devices are becoming price competitive with feature phones. Phones are seen as a long term investment, so poorer families often make sacrifices to acquire them. It wouldn't be unheard of for one to spend up to half their monthly income on the purchase.

Mobile data costs KSH. 8/MB, about 10 US cents at its most expensive. This is still out of reach for a sizeable portion of the working population, but the situation is rapidly improving.
"In the interest of fairness, Fog Creek's compensation policy is open, public, simple, and accountable. Many companies try to obfuscate the rules they use for determining compensation in hopes that they won't get caught paying some people too much and others too little. Some companies actually consider it a firing offense to reveal your salary!

We feel that in the long run, this can only hurt us through negative morale, high turnover, and destructive office politics."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html
People attach a lot of emotion to it. If you make a lot, then it's bragging. If you make very little, it's embarrassing.

I think the more we talk about it, the more we have to gain. It only hurts bad employers.
Luvit – Asynchronous I/O for Lua
5) Not having a kinect
I was just reading that article this morning. At a previous company I worked at salaries weren't revealed, but rumors of salaries went around. Things like "did you hear that x just got a $10k raise?"

It really wasn't good for morale. A lot of time was wasted worrying about salaries rather than building products.
Is the current navigation simple enough? Or maybe bigger click targets for the top bar?
Interesting title. But... I wanted to try, but I don't want to sign in with facebook. Sorry.
We could talk all day about the various sociological explanations, but there is one very clear economic incentive for the salary taboo:

It enables companies to pay employees as a whole much, much less.

Doesn't need much more explanation than that.
There's decent tools like salary.com and glassdoor.com that give general information about salary ranges based on job titles and responsibilities.
Great if you implemented the thing with the GUI that you have to interact with. Not so great if it comes from a third party.

Even if your people did implement it, depending, getting rid of the GUI might be easier said than done. I remember an Access app that I had to automate stuff around. In the end the best solution to all of the different popups that were buried in their app was to make the machine it was on remotely accessible, and have a watching process page someone if it took too long. A human would then look at the screen, and press the appropriate button.
Why counterintuitive ideas have sticking power, right or wrong
Yep, there is a lot of self-worth attached to how much you make. Maybe that is something we should fix?

But if it wasn't for a few friends sharing how much they charge for consulting I would never have known it was possible to charge $250/hr (and much more). I would have been stuck charging multiples of the hourly rates I had heard about (Maybe I would have doubled the highest hourly rate I had heard at the time, which was $20 an hour).
Thanks! I am not a front-end guy and this is really an experiment and a learning experience so this goes a long way :-)
Nice!

You should gather that in a cool markdown file on a github repo that every one could fork and suggest / add their own good libs :)
The set of all possible costs is the set of sums of all N-sized subsets of the edges.

You only need to binary search that set, not the real numbers' axis. The set's size is exponential to N, but binary searching is logarithmic, so it becomes polynomial in N.
Latest Java vulnerability exploitation leads to ransomware
Competitor access to telco fiber would fix “net neutrality”
Help needed, Daniel Nicoletti (KDE developer) unexpectedly arrested
Very glad you like it (: