skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yea but Facebook is relying on their massive userbase as justification for the additional reach cost per post. I guess the $3k is the "price" for having access to all of those subscribers in FB. They're welcome to take their posts to Twitter or G+ but are they going to get the same value?
Lessons learned from meeting Richard Branson
they are required to deduct 20% plus a 10% penalty. It is unlikely, if you have any other income at all, that you will not have to pay more come tax day.

The 10% penalty does not count toward your tax liability, so really they only witheld 20%.

I know if I did this right now, it would be closer to 40% for me. Plus the 10% penalty, so I would only get to use 50% of what I withdrew and stash 20% for tax day.
Basho: A Fresh Start For riak-js
I've got a script checking the site, and it's been back to "Add to Cart" a couple times since it was initially down, though I've never been able to buy it. I have a suspicion that Google hasn't sold out, but the site is just melting, so they are only allowing purchases periodically.
Show HN: Visualizing Big Data in Realtime on Mobile Devices
Great article. Thank you.
Purely informative but it seems you can add commit hooks to your version control to connect to theirs: http://blog.appfog.com/553/

Seems pretty stupid to drop support of git in favor of their own product.
Just one data point but I had zero problems. Refreshed the page and saw "add to cart." Went to checkout, entered my info, and clicked purchase. Guess I just got lucky.
Argh.

PHPFog was my goto place for self-hosting Wordpress blogs, is AppFog as simple?
The Bathsheba Syndrome
I guess we'll see an increase in robot suicide rates.
It is strange to me that we should need a native client for performance reasons. There are numerous html5 games that have "native" feels. I understand the security concerns with exposing lower level access like OpenGl to the web and I understand why on browsers (both mobile and desktop) some hardware is not allowed to be accessed directly (and with good reason) but it is frustrating that performance is still the major driving force between native and web considering the obvious cross-platform-ness of web based approaches...
There are laws in the US which require you to ship a product within a certain time or offer a refund. I agree that the 'sold out' buzz is a popular marketing technique, its one of the persuasion tools that works well, scarcity, but I think that is a side effect here.

So take a moment and imagine you are in the product manager's shoes at Google and you're tasked with forecasting how many Nexus 4's will be needed. If you guess 'high' you end up with HP's Touchpad fiasco, or Motorola's Xoom, too much product. Since you've probably borrowed the money to buy the parts to build the stuff and you have to pay it in 90 days, you need to get stuff, sell it, and then get the money to pay off the money you borrowed.

Building a million phones like this probably costs in the neighborhood of $200M - $250M. That is a pretty sizable chunk of cash to be hanging out there 'in the float' as it were. Sloshing around that much capital is like driving a fully loaded big rig truck on a wet highway, you don't want to enter any turn with too much speed, the 'bad' outcome is really bad.

So of the two options, "leaving money on the table" because someone who wanted to buy your gear couldn't, and "missing your wall street guidance" because you're carrying inventory for longer than you wanted, the former is the much better choice. At the limit its horrible but if you're going to err, and your error bars are large, you want to err on the negative side not the positive side. On the negative side you just don't make as much money as you might have wanted to, on the positive side you don't make the margins you need to make on the product.
It would be great to see the source posted somewhere. Is this a fork of MediaWiki?
Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks (by Jeff Dean et al)
What would be more likely is a "people only" Facebook clone.

The more a particular company or service (or musician for that matter) deviates from the original product that attracted its user base in the first place, the greater its susceptibility to clones becomes.

I think all people want is simple and private social networking among their friends.

Facebook no longer offers this. Google+ certainly never did. There is a strong case that Myspace fell because at the time, Facebook offered more simplicity and more privacy.

Myspace was being deluged by spam during the summer of 2008 and that marked the beginning of the end for them ( http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook%2C%20myspace... ) Facebook is becoming equally noisy, except they are getting paid for the "spam."

As Facebook continues to aggressively attempt to increase its monetization, both on desktop and mobile, I think its going to get worse.

There is clearly an opening for a competitor coming along. I'd like to think of them as the Dropbox of social networking.
the argument you're replying to doesn't require that the explanation be correct, does it?

what they seem to be saying is: feeding someone a little extra information that is entertaining somehow helps make the recommendation to use a 3rd party library more convincing.

and i think there's something to that argument, even though i've presented it poorly above. people don't like to be simply told to do something. they like to be indulged a little.

i realise that goes somewhat against your personal style, but it's not obviously wrong...
How To Hire A Data Scientist
Update at 10:30 AM PST -

16gb model said 'In Stock', I added to cart and the message says 'There was a problem with your order' with a big blue button saying 'GO SHOPPING!'

I would expect better E-Commerce management from Google, who claims to have the brightest people working for it.
The new site looks great! We use StackMob and it works very well for enabling mobile web services apis.

- Hamilton
Thanks for the feedback! We're working on plugging into other products like Google Calendar. Those additions should make it a piece of cake to have a reservation system.
That's kind of the point though. If you're trying to decide your MAC mode you're already doing it wrong and should be looking at something higher level that does it for you.
Without belaboring the obvious: 80h/wk is over 13 hours each day of a 6-day workweek. Assuming 0.3h/day exercise (across the week) and 6h/day of sleep, you're left with 4-5h/day for everything else in your life. This is obviously a tradeoff you'd want to make iff everything else in your life is not something you want to allot any time.

Edit: This reminds me of a discussion a friend had with the partner at the white shoe firm where she worked at the time. The partner said "...friends, family, and outside interests are all important. But you have to decide between them and success here." Obviously a paraphrase; this was ~10 years ago.
The Play Store is selling a Nexus 4 Bumper - it's like the iPhone 4 all over again. Why do designers always pick form over function? What's the point in having a great looking phone that needs to be bubble-wrapped?

Still, the good thing about Android is you can choose from many manufacturers. This new Sony phone is waterproof:

http://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/phones/xperia-g...
A lot of people ended up with duplicate orders from the madness this morning, and I expect they're cancelling. My co-worker ended up with 3 N4's despite only seeing one confirmation.
I don't get it, so I need someone to explain something to me. How can the iPhone consistently blow everything else away in performance AND battery life, despite having a smaller battery and seemingly lesser processor. I understand that Apple had a time advantage by getting into the touchscreen smartphone game first but how has nobody caught up yet? I am a huge Nexus fanboy but it seems that the IPhone is objectively faster and more efficient, even with googles full efforts to keep up.
Tweet Street. Fantasy stock market game with Twitter accounts as the commodity
Congratulations! Makes sense to invest in yourself. I do agree with the other commentators about how risky this is, but looks like its worth the shot [you sound super-committed to not end up regretting it, irrespective of the outcome :)]

Best of luck
Why shouldn't people be hacking together kernel modules? That's one of the awesome things about FOSS :)
Annoyed that they never sent out the email notifying that it went on sale despite having signed up for that.

The cynical side of me thinks that they're out of stock, it shows that they didn't believe their own statements about how great the product is and so didn't secure adequate supply. It makes me question just how much they believed in the product.

I suppose it's possible that the current order limits are based on how many orders they're able to handle versus physical supply, but I remain skeptical.
How We Won the Hackathon
Wow, it has about a 50% bigger battery than the iPhone 5 but has considerably worse battery life.

2100 mAH battery vs iPhone 5's 1440 mAH, but iPhone 5 can browse the web for almost twice as long.

How is there such a big difference? Or are these stats not 100% accurate?
You can't use the Buy-it-now price, since that's the I-wish price.

Check auction prices.
Agreed. It sounds whiny coming from Cuban, but imagine you're a small business owner who relies on your Facebook page to communicate with your fans. You put a lot of time and money into gaining those fans organically, and now Facebook is essentially holding them hostage. What was that little blurb that Facebook used to have on their sign-on page? "It's free and it always will be." Hmmm. Don't promise a free service and then reneg. Perhaps businesses wouldn't have been so eager to get on Facebook if they knew that access to their fans would come at a steep price.
What is the most in demand position in start-up?
Non-programmer background, so freaking tired of being seen as a liability to any start-up.

Will learn how to code.

What is the most in demand position nowadays?
- front end?
- iOS App?
- Android App?
- Windows Phone App?
- Business analyst?

I don't think I will ever be good at dealing with very hard problems. Just want to get started and join a start-up.
Create your own mobile app
I would not have written the same post Tony wrote.

Generally: I'm comfortable writing about crypto when the subject is "how you would practically break a system that makes mistake X or mistake Y". I'm not comfortable about posts with prescriptive content.

I am also not comfortable with posts that condone building cryptosystems out of primitives, even when they limit the solution space to well-regarded tuples of those primitives. If I had to write a prescriptive post about crypto, it would state clearly: you cannot DIY this, and you must use a vetted cryptosystem; your choices include NACL, Keyczar, and PGP.
"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."

- from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle
Fair enough - usually I just say "Learndot, dee oh tee" and it's no problem. Though I agree it's not perfect. The other factors balanced it out (spellability, MVP-ness and so forth).

You're right, naming is hard.
> because inflation is higher for things they purchase.

That is easily disproved. It is quite easy to find periods where lower income people face lower inflation, but still estimate higher inflation. (basically any period with food & gas price deflation, which represents a larger component of a lower income basket)

The reason lower income people ascribe a higher number to perceived inflation is because when you live paycheck to paycheck price changes are simply more concerning.

Some of the highest inflation categories are higher eduction, and healthcare which are under represented in lower income baskets.
"If you want to find a Data Scientist, find yourself a disgruntled postdoc toiling away on brilliant scientific research, but failing to land a professorship because … all the professor jobs are taken!"

That quote is more than just humorous, it points out one compelling answer to the question in the title of the post -- Perhaps all scientists are data scientists, you simply have to lure them into a new domain of study.
As a current customer since 7/11 (over a year) I am SHOCKED they aren't working on automating a process to migrate over to AppFog. I guess they don't want my business - off to heroku and/or ec2.
In the military, we are expected to read a fair amount of ethics, this is a representative example and it strikes me as a good read for founders to meditate on as you look forward to the eventuality of success.

Just came across it today in the context of reading up General Petreaus: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/us/petraeuss-resignation-h...
E La Carte Releases More Powerful Version Of Customized Tablet For Restaurants
Yes. Definitely go with epigrams from works of fiction to guide engineering decisions.
First off: great post!

I've told clients similar things before. You need to be able to tell someone your website name and be able to have them find it very easily. Unless you're one of the only ones in your space and people will find your site searching for key terms, it's very important that your site is easy to find, pronounce and spell.

With all that said, I'm curious as to why you went with a logo that, to me, is hard to read? Before I even got to the body of your post, I was looking at the background on the header image and struggled with:

Leai ndot...

Why did I have problems with this? The dot is often used as a syllable spacer when you are looking at pronunciation guides. For example: mis·take.

I don't know if you considered this but I thought I'd mention it because I can't be the only one. It seemed appropriate to mention since having a logo that is easy to read and understand should go along with having a name that is easy to pronounce and understand.
> It was also more obvious it was only cause of the break-down (it seemed) because on one of the instances everyone was "Out", but then a "Shark" came back in after the break-down.

I remember that situation only with the fitness-dancer dude, actually the only one I was really sorry for (the FuBu dude chaced him because he just didn't understand the concept of distribution and was missing a deal that could change his life). but most of those 'my story is so sad and life is so hard' people are pathetic, you're right.
Good move, it was expected after they partnered with vayable.com . experience-based search is gaining more popularity.
19 Bad Habits Bloggers Need to STOP
> you can't ignore the fact that the N4 is half the price of other phones in its class.

You also can't ignore the fact that in the US other phones in it's class are subsidized by $400 or more, upending this comparison greatly. Yes you're locked into a contract but it's not like Nexus 4 users get some special monthly rate. For some use cases being off contract is a god send, for most though, a subsidized iphone 5 or galaxy s3 is a better option at $100 cheaper (and a higher resale in case you want to break that contract).
I'm always feeling lucky. I think this will be great. Trying it out for a while to see how I like it.
MediaWiki has an extension framework, so it's basically an elaborate add-on. Not yet publicly released ...
If you live in a covered area Mobilicity is awesome. I'm in Ottawa, and it's going to be $25 a month for text/talk/data (what Telus currently charges me $60 for). Even if you consider the amount of subsidy they provide, the price differential is so wide. They also recently added free roaming minutes every month (50 minutes), for when I visit my family.
Perhaps this is a good thread to pose this question.

I am a front-end engineer in my early twenties. Right now, 40+ hours a week is doable and I am paid well, but I don't need all of the money I'm earning. I would gladly take a 50% salary cut and work ~20 hours a week.

The only problem with this is that I feel like this is a risky thing to bring up with an employer. Has anyone ever had any success getting a good part-time job or downsizing your position at a company? Every listing for part-time I see seems to be for someone with a lesser skillset.
I think there is value in taking into account the starting point of various schools in setting goals, but I can't believe they would be dumb enough to use a suspect classification (race) as the metric instead of something like socioeconomic status or the original passing rates for individual schools.
I am wondering the same thing. How is the iPhone 5 battery smaller and yet still gets almost double the battery life?
There is little value in attending events with $3000 price tags. You get to hear Sean Parker speak, which is also posted online and they usually sneak speakers out of the back to a car or to the speakers lounge so that they don’t have to interact with attendees. There's nothing wrong with this, just that conferences can oversell the value.

I've spoken at a few startup conferences, mostly because it's a great way to meet investors, other founders and useful contacts. The ones I found most valuable as a speaker and attendee were the events that were less well known. My favourite for meeting great people was in Luxembourg and ran at the same time as LeWeb London, where most of the tech elite were. http://www.ictspring.com

I got to speak to Randi Zuckerberg, Hiroshi Mikitani from Rakuten but far more importantly a lot of great investors and founders from Silicon Valley that were actually creating value. The people that speak at the top conferences aren't necessarily the people building the best companies

Startup school is a great balance between both, you hear from some of the best thought leaders in tech that don't speak very often and get the opportunity to meet lots of people in a similar position to you.
Strong disagree. I think feeding people a little more information makes them feel more comfortable building their own systems.
Florida is doing something similarly horrible.
Yeah, that camera is amazing, but I'm not sure I could handle Windows phone. It looks smooth and all, but I'm pretty locked into the Google ecosystem.
If what my parents do, in their clumsy sort of non-technical way, in the normal course of taking pictures and videos with their $75 point and shoot and downloading a few movies to watch without having to eat into their monthly bandwidth quota everytime my mom wants to watch one of a handful of old movies is "data hoarding" and exceeds the capacity of the machine a "power user" is using, then I think that both of these descriptors have lost all effective meaning.
The "Install the damn extension" button isn't working for me.

Also, the big "Click here and in less than 30 seconds" button in the email you guys sent directed me to tldr.io/extension, which gave me "User doesn't exist" (it should link to /chromeextension)
Bootstrap for the Design Challenged: Templates + Editor
The HN title, "Grading kids by race" is misleading. It's not grading kids by race, it's setting different passing rate goals for different minority groups.

"Virginia's expectation is that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, will correctly answer the same number of questions to pass the state tests."
Computer Science vs. IT
- http://mashable.com/2012/11/13/yapp-public-launch/

- http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/video/yapp-app-making-app-1...

- http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/13/let-the-app-creation-era-be...

- http://allthingsd.com/20121113/yapp-launches-roll-your-own-m...
I think it would be more horrible to expect everyone to get 85 regardless of whether they're starting at 82 or 52.
With regard to online advertising - companies follow people, people don't follow companies. Facebook gets this.

Let's play worst case scenario here - Cuban convinces all companies to leave Facebook. Then what? Do you honestly think there would be a mass diaspora of users because all the companies left? Hell no. Sure, Facebook's stock would plummet, but they'd still have options, because as long as Facebook has users, it has a future.

Now, let's reverse the scenario. All your friends leave Facebook. Then what? You leave too and so do all the companies, because after all, Pepsi doesn't hang out on Facebook to advertise to Coke. If the people leave, Facebook dies.

Facebook isn't a charity, nor a utopia, it's a company that is required by law to maximize value for shareholders. Facebook is already a master of providing value, they've built an empire by doing so. Now they have to learn how to extract value, and it's very smart of them to begin by extracting value from companies in a way that doesn't significantly impact user experience.

But this is just the beginning. Soon, Facebook will begin extracting value from people in more obvious ways. And I'd bet the #1 question on Zuckerberg's mind right now is, "How much shit will people take?" How many ads until everyone leaves?

I don't know the answer to that, but judging by how much shit is forced down the throat of an average American during a 30-minute episode of MTV cribs, I'd bet we'll take a lot more than we realize.
While I think this is interesting in that the state is trying something new (I didn't even know states could get waivers for no child left behind) I can't help but think this will have a negative impact on the kids.

They're basically being told that because of their race they have a lower expectation. Regardless of what historic data says, is lowering expectations for certain minorities ever the right approach? This just sounds like treating a symptom.
Why Erlang matters
I once saw a tv documentary about the CEO of a big danish company. She worked 40 hours per week, and to that she commented: "If I couldn't get done what is expected of me in the allotted time frame, I wouldn't have the competence required for my position."
I think this should be judged on its merits (results and intent). In the end, is this system better able to track progress and lift academic competency for affected children? Arguably race isn't and should not be the best or even the preferred selection criterion. Maybe economics, entrance exam results, etc., should guide the classification and tracking, regardless of race.
And yet it still doesn't protect you from the stolen phone (or whatever -- bad password or password in email, SQL injection on the backend, bribed employee, etc...), which is I argue an immensely greater practical threat. So why do we keep reading blog posts about cryptographic minutiae instead of the real threat?

Obviously it's because the cryptography as a field is technically interesting and "security best practices" isn't. And there's nothing wrong with that from the perspective of someone looking for interesting links on HN. But honestly I feel like that kind of tunnel vision has reached the point where it's actually hurting security practice rather than helping.
Engineering 7: A view from the bottom (Steven Sinofsky)