skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Startup docu teaser #01: Michael Hartl
This is material from a 3h interview with Michael Hartl, http://ruby.railstutorial.org/. It consists of scenes that I probably won't use in the docu but wanted to share with folks anyway.
Blog about the docu: http://startup-dna.tumblr.com/
Twitter: twitter.com/@startup_dna

The docu is about startups, venture capital, programming and education. I'm bootstrapping this out of my own pocket and it's my first documentary. My ambition is to make this film as authentic and 3-dimensional as possible. I'm showing accomplished entrepreneurs and underdogs who just started their businesses side by side and capture their insights about startups on screen.

If you have ideas for people I should interview and can provide intros as well, please post their names below so readers can upvote candidates they would like to see.

Feedback is much appreciated. Thank you!
This is material from a 3h interview with Michael Hartl, http://ruby.railstutorial.org/. It consists of scenes that I probably won't use in the docu but wanted to share with folks anyway.
Blog about the docu: http://startup-dna.tumblr.com/
Twitter: twitter.com/@startup_dna

The docu is about startups, venture capital, programming and education. I'm bootstrapping this out of my own pocket and it's my first documentary. My ambition is to make this film as authentic and 3-dimensional as possible. I'm showing accomplished entrepreneurs and underdogs who just started their businesses side by side and capture their insights about startups on screen.

If you have ideas for people I should interview and can provide intros as well, please post their names below so readers can upvote candidates they would like to see.

Feedback is much appreciated. Thank you!
No. You (MG) are using the wrong tool. You're hammering with a ratchet.

The correct tool is code reviews, to tack his eccentricity back to understandable.

Refuse to submit to pedantic assholes. CC is being a pedantic asshole when he claims "there is or isn't a coding standard"

>Now typical escalations are NG assigns the bug to CC since CC won't tolerate his code changes. NG will reformat a big chunk of CC's code just to piss him off.

NG will reformat a huge chunk of CC's code because he can't tell if it's correct formatted in an odd manner.

You can do weird stuff, occasionally, when it's useful. Trying to do it all the time? No. That's not okay. That's dumping a giant pile of tech debt on a project and basically being a sloppy, unprofessional coder. If he doesn't become more professional, you give him the boot, and DON'T MAKE EVERYONE ELSE'S LIFE SHIT for that dipshit.

I hate working at places that never fire people because they tolerate, and eventually promote CC.
Just a rant. Don't bother reading.
There is a similar risk for "real" keys:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/nov/14/key-photograph...
did freelancer also acquire scriptlance??
Its interesting that theres another thread right now about how being unwavering on political issues. Isn't A/B testing about as far from that as you could possibly get?

If you are trying to get elected at the national level and you are A/B tesing, isn't wavering exactly what you are doing? Isn't it it essentially well-targeted and opportunistic populism? Isn't this very, very bad?

(this comment isnt aimed at pella, more aimed at the idea of politicians a/b testing)
Clickable: http://picirus.com/
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Who wants free copywriting?
Hey HN crew,

You want to make more sales for your business, right?

Well I want to build my portfolio & sales skills.

So, if you've got a business with a good amount of traffic to it, and are willing to share your before and after metrics with me, I'd love to increase your sales for free.

Just send an email to eddy.e.raza@gmail.com with your business name, and which pages you want written/re-written, and I'll reply back with a few questions to set it up.

Talk soon,
- Eddy
You must have loved Bush, then. George W. Bush looked like a great guy the get a beer with. He seemed to love to joke around. So much to the point that he was visibly awkward when he had to act completely serious, imho.
I'm not sure it would be so much a net gain in cost savings so much as moving those costs around to the users and local ISPs who'd upstream traffic would increase. Personally I'd rather the content providers eat those costs.
What I Learned At A Business Development Weekend
Well I mean it's a joke today... the fiscal cliff wasn't mentioned in any of the debates.
Except the second parsing does not seem to be correct under English grammar...
IN MOST RESPECTS
Toshiba Unveils Quadruped Robot for Disaster Response
The automated kite idea on cargo ships is very interesting isn't it. Yes, I saw that during my research. The problem is that you are still limited to where and when you have wind. It would have to be a hybrid.
Your comment doesn't seem grounded in reality. The situation has changed tremendously since rms started the GNU project. I own my own computer, and so does (literally?) every single person I know. The internet makes sharing with these people (and with people they know, and with strangers) trivial. At the outset, rms made money selling copies of GPL software for $150 each! The situation has changed!

Now, whether it has changed in a way that makes the positions held by rms less relevant or appropriate is quite another question. It sounds to me like you read my comment as some kind of attack on rms: it was not intended to be anything of the kind; I very much value the man's input to our collective discourse, and tend to agree with him more than not.
I don't do coding styles that aren't the "standard" for the language or aren't done by a tool (or at least done by a compile time add on program). I just change employers.

You're paying me 6 figures, you can make reasonable guidelines about things and expect professionalism but not mindful, constant compliance with arbitrary rules. It drains self control and concentration to follow huge coding standards with lots of minutia (Always put a contract with X Y Z above every function, always put stupid ass hungarian in front of your variables, etc).
A Faster Way to Secure Capital
Egyptian Official: Israel, Palestinians Agree Truce
Exactly! Policy is rarely the correct answer when firing and reprimanding the troublemaker work too!
I don't think it's safe to assume that a niche feature upgrade to a JS/CSS framework is inherently bug-free across browsers.
I read somewhere (can't find a quick reference) of a coating that resembles the structure of shark-skin, this reduces drag enormously by creating local turbulence which reduces the shear forces required to separate the layers of fluid adhering to a surface.

A coating like that on the inside of the tube and the outside of the vehicle would be an interesting component but the fluid dynamics of such a set-up are way beyond my abilities to calculate.

This whole thing is all about energy budgets, you'd have to take the amount of fuel it takes a passenger car or rail car to move from one point to another, then take some reasonable savings estimate and then work backwards from there to see how much energy you could expend on friction, drag and so on.

I have a hard time accepting that the friction in a tube while drafting would be that much higher than friction losses to a body of air that is mostly standing still and from playing around with a car and a friend of mine who is a trucker (don't try this at home kids) I've seen how low fuel consumption can go if you are properly in the slip-stream of another vehicle.

There has to be some way to make the numbers work on that. But unless 'no right of way issues' means underground (or ocean bound, which means it would only work between coastal cities and would have a pretty terrible failure mode) the whole thing is off the table anyway.

I can't stop thinking about it though :)
Actually ... no, he looked like a guy who would be incredibly annoying to have a beer with.

At least Obama feels like he could hold his own in a conversation.
My post was not a criticism of rms.
I was saying, "presume no moral consequence in a particular case until it's show otherwise," and you're saying "presume moral consequence in a particular case until it's shown otherwise." Or maybe you're saying, "don't presume either way until you have evidence." I think that at the end of the day, that third option is actually the right one.

So, rather than saying, "Hey, you're the one making a positive claim," I should have just said, "Actually, here is what is right, and here's why."

Of course, the "why" would be limited in scope, because I'd rather direct you to external information that I agree with than write a philosophical treatise in the comments of HN.

Anyway, I guess at this point I'm talking about how to talk, which is starting to get "too meta." Forgive me. To move on to something more interesting:

In general, I am highly suspect of anyone who claims to know with certainty what morality is or isn't, or why it exists (or doesn't). People have been contemplating this for hundreds of years. It is very unlikely that you (or anyone) have discovered a new, empirically verifiable truth about morality. It is more likely that such claims are overconfident and unjustified.

I basically agree with your analysis, here. But, unlikely things actually do happen. In this case, I believe they have. I have some info on my profile that will direct you to more information if you are interested.
Hi Bill, if you hit the (i) info button on the top bar in the circa app it will show the attribution for each point in a given story.
The Missing Ad Unit
I used to treat comments like these just as some of the other replies do (old, stick in the mud, etc). But then I realized unnecessary noise for what it is: pollution.

Cutesy ideas like this lose any appeal when you understand that you are destroying someone else's environment for the lofty goal of calling attention to yourself.
>No, they simply are conventions making it easier to communicate and understand each others code.

A 1 page coding standard picking which common conventions people use perhaps is making it easier to communicate, maybe.

A 10 page coding standard with lots of positive manual actions a coder must do at ever step that don't necessarily add to the process (I'm looking at contracts in private functions and hungarian especially), or that are outdated and not state of the art, is positively soul-killing to many people.

Most places need code reviews, not coding standards.
[Inforgraphics]What is your Galaxy S III worth? Depends on the Carrier
Weev may not be the hero Gotham City needs, but he's the one Gotham City's stuck with. That's the thing about the judicial system; you go to court with the defendant you have.

The government may well have been counting on weev's reputation to work against him here. If your goal is to set a precedent that allows "unauthorized access" to be defined after the fact, you want a defendant people won't stand up for. It's much easier to turn bad law into bad case law when people don't fight back.
I hate to be overly negative, but this is just a bunch of extra complexity layered on top of an unworkable idea. The plungers aren't relevant. If you could run this with self-propelled plungers that push cars, you could run this with self-propelled cars.

The "flaps" are just trying to play with semantics. Either they work and this is just an overly-complex evacuated tube or they don't work and this is no different than Mattheij's idea. If you land in the middle where they "kind of" work, then you likely get the drawbacks of an evacuated tube (not enough oxygen to keep a human alive) with most of the drawbacks of Mattheij's idea (too much friction to be feasible). Air becomes too thin to support human life before air resistance becomes negligible.

This proposal also has the same right of way issues that any tunnel system would have, issues that Musk specifically said Hyperloop would avoid.
First time I've heard of Too Lazy. But makes sense. Always known it as Too Long
One of the central supports against patents is that engineers given a problem will all come up with roughly the same solution. So given that Elon has dropped a number of hints the question then becomes: can a bunch of engineers come up with his proposed solution before he reveals what it is.

That's a very interesting puzzle to me and I think this may be a way in which the patent office could do their reviews: ask a community of smart cookies to come up with what is in the (secret to that point) patent application, the one that gets it right gets a part of the filing fee and the patent is denied, if nobody can crack it in some set time (say 4 weeks) then the patent is granted.
There are not right of way issues if your tube is floating under water in the ocean. This also protects you from earthquake risks.

He has said that his system is like a “ground based Concorde”. His specs give you a speed of over 1200 km/h. If you're going 1200 km/h on the ground and aren't in a tube, you've got a problem.
I've given a lot of thought to the TL;DR approach to content digestion. It works extremely well, in a vacuum, or on the site it was made popular, reddit. Their, the original poster writes the TL;DR, which is why it works so well. If you write a large post, then immediately after summarize the post into 1-2 sentences, it becomes a very efficient message that still expresses exactly what you wanted to get across. TL;DR is the future, almost to a sad degree. A lot of time it digs deeper than just wanting to filter out the articles you have no interest in reading. But this becomes the only form of digesting news. You begin consuming a lot of news, stories, articles, but you're no longer actually informed on any of the topics, you just end up with a vague idea of what is going on around you. That's far beside the point though.

This is a actually a very nice effort.

The issues I have with growth and actual value, is with how the summaries are generated. Automatic generation is fast and inaccurate, manually curated is slow and very accurate. In a world where people no longer have the time to read newspapers, their not only looking for quick news on the run, they want current news. Something that happened today, everything that happened today. But quick, not the full story, "i'll read that later." Meeting in the middle between fast and slow approaches does not work here. You're too slow, and the headlines in my RSS feed and twitter have already informed me of the news, too fast and your summary becomes a failed attempt to make twitter and RSS better quality. I have no idea how your TL;DR are currently generated. But I would think you'd have an aggregation and be doing some manual curation. To me for this to really work, you'd have to have a large group of people that read the article generating the TL;DR, constantly iterating, until you end up with an extremely efficient 2 sentence summary. Or there needs to be a project that integrates TL;DR on large scale, the publishers, news papers of the world, blogs..They submit these directly.

I think there's still a lot of value in what you're doing. I just don't think it will take off as it is now. Away from the name/marketing/novelty/social aspect not really being there. Twitter, RSS feeds, and sites like http://skimfeed.com/ end up providing me with far more day to day value. If you took this and spoon-fed me the TL;DR via my phone, i'd consider being a repeat visitor a little bit more. But you'd then be competing with a whole 'nother slice of the pie.
Since everything is fully funded you should give people the option of funding in advance.

Be open about it of course, and send them an email as soon as you know who the money is going to.

Also give people the option of getting an email when there is someone in need. (To avoid annoying people perhaps limit the email to the next 3 people, then stop sending them for a user specified time.)
>Coding standards is about basic discipline. If you followed the standard, I know that you are atleast smart enough (and more importantly friendly enough) for a real code review.

Some coding standards are basic discipline. Others are overwrought bullshit that are a drain on concentration, spin up time with new employees, and a constant sap on productivity in order to make stuff a slight bit prettier.
Yes, Learn Startup focuses heavily on testing so as not to waste resources on a product or feature no one wants. But that is not what an MVP is. The MVP is designed to test leaps of faith. You learn from the MVP, iterate, test again, continue the build-measure-learn loop.

"Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions. [...] Because those assumptions haven't been proved to be true (they are assumptions, after all) and in fact are often erroneous, the goal of a startup's early efforts should be to test them as quickly as possible." - The Lean Startup, page 81

"Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses." - The Lean Startup, page 93
Ask HN: Recommendations: accountant familiar with US ex-pat taxes in France?
I am a US citizen/programmer working for a US-based startup company. I bill for my work via my US-based LLC. I'm married to a French woman and live in France. Does anyone know a good accountant that can help with my taxes? Thanks!
Google brings indoor maps to browsers
I disagree. The coasts don't have a monopoly on software engineers for two primary reasons:

1) The midwest/mountain states have lots of great CS programs in their universities. UIUC, Boulder, UT, GA Tech, UW-Madison and plenty of others, as well as a lot of small universities that don't get the attention of Google and Amazon. My alma mater only produces a dozen CS grads a year but some of them have gone on to start insanely successful companies (Rackspace, for one).

2) Lots of great software engineers don't want to live in California, New York or Boston. I grew up in the Bay Area and I have 0 desire to move back. I hated it there and I know I'm not alone in that.
> breaking anyone who doesn’t have support for GZIP

What client doesn't have support for gzip?
Stallman’s got company: Researcher wants nanotech patent moratorium
I have little issue with complicated coding standards completely subsumed into the compiler.

If you make me manually do paperwork every day, I will quit your thing
Apportable
How to Master the Craft of Writing | Copyblogger
What we're missing is a fiscal disincentive, a cost of acquiring bad patents and suing others for violating them. Currently the equation is unbalanced, it's too cheap to harass others with patent litigation. The harmful effect of bad patents isn't factored in into the complete patenting scheme, thus the bad outcome. It's like spam.

Not that I support (software and any other) patents at all. I deliberately don't want my name on any patent. I might work on something that my employer wants to patent for they do pay for my time and creativity but I don't want my own name involved outside of that. This isn't just a principle; it has happened in reality. I wish Stallman was heard and patents were banished completely.
Any monetization or signals that monetization is possible?
The Firefox layout issue is because Firefox's HTML "quirks mode" is less quirky than WebKit's. With a proper DOCTYPE to disable quirks mode, Chrome will render the page like Firefox.
The volume of news can be daunting. 30 mins to an hour depending on a person's speed might not be that much. Tech news alone can blow past this time frame easily, especially if you want to be relevant, comprehensive, and interesting enough to capture a decent chunk of posts.

That said, I know first hand most people are incapable of writing well much less condense into exact words. This was on my list of to do as well and I've interviewed some writers and those of relevant majors and I assure you, the stuff that comes back is not as good as you think it would be. In the long run, you'd need an army of decent writers that can condense content well.
I don't think it's fair to cry "rotten wood" here, unless the Rails ecosystem is flush with amazing systems wizards who can work around crippling flaws in the OS to run their software.

Agreed; however, if they were having problems with Ubuntu (or indeed Linux in general), why didn't they try something else? That's the quick and easy way to see if it's really the platform or your application that's the problem (quick tip from my own userland developer experience: it's almost always not the platform; the times I've had Linux crash on me I could always trace to one of three things: 1) flaky hardware, 2) binary drivers, or 3) I was mucking about in kernel space ;)
First paragraph is optional.
My daughter sees technology as just another way to be creative
I would propose that colloquial English is too imprecise to draw such a precise conclusion, so the better alternative is to express possible interpretations as propositions and see what works.
New York City turns old pay phones into modern touch terminals
I think if specifed at the language level (pep8/python, gofmt/go, objectiveC/apple docs), that's one thing. Additionally, if you have complete tool support for your format, you can demand much much more from the programmer.

The issue is making a guy constantly REMEMBER, Keep in mind, and implement something NOT enforced by a compiler is a huge sap on a certain type of person.
Standards suffocate me, as any restrictive device should. Even knowing their importance, especially in mission critical roles such as aerospace and medical, it is hard to reason that all the time and creative energy spent on most standards is worth it. Especially since standards evolve by being broken or ignored, creating flux that makes the standard meaningless.

I think the need to form standards are a symptom of poor tools and methodologies for software development.

Robust software needs to be built using first principles. Instead of forming standards in such situations to enforce coding style, we should be improving our tooling, and not be writing code at all. The tools are the standard.

Code is a creative free form medium, and ignoring its raison d'être means killing what it is. If you need precise coloring within the lines, build and use the right tool - a printer. Don't enforce arbitrary rules on using crayons.
"Politicians who are easily defined by others..."

Oh, come on man. Romney couldn't even define himself for more than a few months at a time, if that. That was part of the problem. He had been on both sides of some of the key "litmus test" issues. Rightly or wrongly, the current narrative likes it when politicians don't change their minds about hot-button issues (like medical care, abortion, etc.)
Do you know of one that works for Objective-C?
Thanks. It only targets a specific version of 2.6, which is comforting.
Check out Torque, tiny torrent client in the browser written in Javascript:

https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/btapp
How does one actually sell Wordpress plugins? I've heard this a few times before as "Pro" or "Premium" plugins, but never seen where the market is
Agree. I used politician to mean a person with views and driving force around political issues, and not specifically a career negotiator. Ultimatist is a good technical term for the role he commonly occupies.