skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please tell us you don't force people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/forcing-people-to-use...
Thanks! Oddly enough, we started building this to raise money for a personal project and only later did we decide to sell it. Turns out that was a smart move.

I can sympathize with your weekend pace. We worked on this for a year before it started getting any attention, and it's still not nearly as polished as we'd like it to be.
That is also what I think is going on. However:

>If you're gambling with other people's money, it's in your interest to keep complaining about how hard you're working, and how stressed out you are : It's a positive signal to the people funding you.

This assumes that the people who are funding you are primarily evaluating you on how hard you are working, and in this case, that they don't understand the correlation between performance and sleep.

Now, I think, in most cases, you are right.

>If it's all your own money you're gambling with, complaining about the stress might be taken as indicating you bit off more than you can chew : A negative signal for employees.

Hm. I think the "bit off more than you can chew" applies as much to investors as to employees.

Also, I've seen many, many middle managers pretend to work harder in an effort to 'lead from the front' and get underlings to work harder. It works; as they say, "it doesn't matter how early you show up, as long as you show up before the boss. It doesn't matter how late you leave, as long as you leave after the boss."

But this works on metrics that matter, too, not just on but-in-seat time. My experience has been that if you publish any performance metric, your employees will try to come close[1]. It's kindof irritating, sometimes; I mean, if I wanted to do it, I wouldn't have hired you to do it, right? I need you to pick up the slack precisely when I'm falling down. When I'm doing well? you can slack off a bit. But eh, that seems to be how people work.

But those things apply to the people that the workers see as their direct leaders, regardless of ownership structure.

I think the primary difference here is that when you work with someone else's money, the goal is to get big, fast, or to die fast. What do they say? Fail early?

If you are working with your own money, you usually have less to start with, and because of that you usually are playing a much longer game. (I think that most of the problems with having partners also come out in the 'long game' - to the point where I think a solo founder actually has a advantage in the long game, assuming that he or she has the personal earning power to keep the company in business.)

[1]" it was shameful for the chief to be surpassed in valor by his companions; shameful for the companions not to equal the valor of their chief. To survive his fall in battle, was indelible infamy. To protect his person, and to adorn his glory with the trophies of their own exploits, were the most sacred of their duties."

Man, I love Gibbon. I mean, on a conscious level, I'm embarrassed to use sweaty combat metaphors, but I do admit that it calls out to something buried deep within the obsolete portions of my hind brain.
I noticed that Exhibit 1 shows a Google search of "Moot", apparently as support to the claim that the term "Moot" is commonly associated with Poole. However, this search was done from a browser logged in by Chris Poole's attorney. Given Google's attempt to provide more personalized results, I wonder how much influence the attorney's relationship has on the search results from Exhibit 1.

It may be a moot point in this case, but considering the changing search landscape, attorney's need to be more careful about how they use Google search results (and others) as evidence.
moot - adjective
1. open to discussion or debate; debatable; doubtful: a moot point.
2. of little or no practical value or meaning; purely academic.
3. Chiefly Law . not actual; theoretical; hypothetical.

-Via Dictionary.com

Given the nature of the service (being commenting/discussion) I struggle to see how this would stand up in court, however I'm not a lawyer.
Sarcasm doesn't translate well on the internet, so I'd make that more obvious. And I do hope you're being sarcastic.
I don't believe for a second that for all the attention Parse has received, the idea of an elevator pitch has never come up.
My examples were germane to the comment I was replying to, which was about whether "sun" could be protected, which in turn was a reply to discussion of Paris Hilton. We're far removed from the specifics of moot's claim... why you thought that was the topic of my reply is beyond me.
Thanks again for your help.
I wonder what this means for Founder Collective?
Kaleidoscope 2.0 Beta - Diff and Merge Tool
So the Paleo Diet community (and Taubes/etc) would say that the greasy food is part of the solution (and that some perceptions of "fattening" food are wrong)
With some minor exceptions, you can sue anyone for anything in the US. You just won't get very far unless you have a reasonable basis.
> Without being an expert on the law, it didn’t seem right that an individual could try to strong arm me out of using a name that bears only a tangential relationship to his product and online persona.

I fail to see how "moot", the name of... well, moot's... online persona bears "only a tangential relationship" to said online persona.

> Although I wouldn’t necessarily call 4chan a “Goliath” of the internet, Poole has certainly taken the Goliath position on this.

...just because someone is large, doesn't mean they are de facto wrong or impervious to harm, and it certainly doesn't make it appropriate to try to win the audience with a silly David vs. Goliath analogy: you need a serious argument here, not cute soundbites.

Personally, I feel like moot has a good argument here: what he has been working on for a while now, both with 4chan and Canv.as, is "the future of online discussions"; if I see a company with his name and that same mission, I bet I would have been confused.
>Well the allegation that Corey Dunphy, working for the US Department of Justice and a friend of Nguyen, was armed, and made threats against employees who crossed Nguyen to use his resources at the OIG to ruin their lives by destroying their credit and getting them declared as terrorists

This is my point, it's a non-sequitur. Being armed is irrelevant. Millions of American citizens carry firearms everyday. Everything you mentioned has nothing to do with the firearm. Mentioning it is just a way of scaring people with irrationality.

That aside, that Nguyen mentioned (from what I can tell) that Dunphy owned a weapon in a context where it seemed like he was making a threat is the real problem. Mentioning that a buddy/colleague owns a weapon as if they're going to go shoot somebody for you is...immature to the point of being psychotic...

That's the more relevant part here, I just found the placement, phrasing, and framing of it in the filing to be pretty poor.
Go has a way of programming. Go is totally optimized for that way of programming, in fact. Programming any way other than Go’s way, with Go, will be that recipe for frustration I bounced my skull against. Go’s way is not pretty to someone indoctrinated with the modern functional aesthetic, but it works, and works well. Really well.

A good summary of programming in Go.

However I would like you to give some examples of inconsistencies in Go. And I believe that leaving features out ("anything a modern programming language is supposed to include") makes Go cleaner, safer and more understandable than any other language I know of (IMO).
Rarely do I get to read articles that are that low on substance, facts or concrete examples. What is a "Go's particular way" and how does it differ from the author's way? What are these 'particular' structures and behaviour? What is this "particular way", and again "particular way", of solving design issues? Is it like Fight Club?
A fascinating read, for sure, but do take the accusations with a hefty grain of salt. As an employer who has dealt with his share of totally-irrational employees in the past, I've learned never to believe everything you read in an employee complaint/lawsuit -- especially when there is so much personal animosity/family stuff going on here.

That being said - I emphasize that I've learned never to believe _everything_ you read. Not anything :) I'd be willing to bet at least parts of this are based in truth.
Yes, it is possible. I have purchased my daughter's debt from a hospital stay. This was 20 years ago but I called the creditor and told them that she was an unemployed college student and they weren't likely to get anything from her, I on the other hand was willing to pay them .20 on the dollar for the debt. They accepted and I paid the debt. (this was not the original creditor but I believe the third, the debt having been sold twice, so they likely made a little money on it and took what I offered rather than take the chance of getting less through another sale or nothing)
It shows me why I will not support Anonymous: They are nothing but an online terrorist organization.
As others have said, this is probably easily solved by calling and just explaining the problem. It was mentioned multiple times in the article that this case was a fringe scenario (he had old software, first gen, etc). It doesn't even sound like Nintendo is trying to employ DRM to do anything dirty, it sounds like there were simply issues with early Wiis that weren't addressed.

If you decide to skip all that crazy talking-it-out nonsense and take Nintendo to small claims court, you pretty much deserve to lose your filing fee and time screwing around with the courts.
Striving.me launches - an app for sharing and achieving goals
>PHP is horribly inconsistent, breaks all the rules about programming language design, and is infuriating.

Some say that rules are made to be broken. In the context of Go, Rob Pike argues exactly that in this short talk on why they made Go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE
Woo Woo Woo...Am I missing something or isn't PHP also a back-end language?

About the article, I think you are just doing it wrong. I personally never used Go, like I never used many other languages, but I tried many. Everyone has it's own way, just because one does things differently and not your way doesn't mean it's wrong. It means is different. You know...taste...
If you are interested in Virtual Console games, instead check out different emulators:

NES: Nestopia, FCEUX
SNES: bSnes, Zsnes, Snes9x
Game Boy: VisualBoyAdvance
N64: 1964, NEMU64

Roms (file archives copied from cartridges) are easy to find. Some systems, you will need a bootrom, which is also easy to find.

Just post if you have questions how to set this up.
Hands-On Observations of the Microsoft Surface: Compelling
Help finding beta testers.
We are looking for a few developers to beta test a code generation tool designed for WCF applications. The tool is designed to help teams with projects requiring a user interface work more efficiently on both the Windows 8 Mobile and Desktop platforms. Does any know how to find these testers or have any personal interest in this tool?

Any help or guidance you can provide is greatly appreciated!
I am confident that HNers could make good contribution to this discussion; let's not ignore it simply because it is on another site that some view as competition.
I have heard accounts that, in the past, NetworkSolutions.com (owned by Web.com) would charge a ransom of $99 to anyone who tries to move a domain name away along with their business:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/web-com/web-hosting/jacksonville...

For balance, I recently moved my registration from networksolutions.com, based on the reasoning of the linked article, and nothing like that happened -- there was no problem and no extra charges. Nevertheless, it's good advice to avoid registering a domain with a provider.
I've been trying to work out what problems I have right now that I'd like to solve, and I really can't think of any that excite me, tech or otherwise.

I eagerly await for a problem to come into my life to which the solution is only a few weekends of Ruby away.
Isn't it a moot point, since moot is a word?
No, but you might expect Paul Thurrott and Peter Bright to, if you were judging it on the basis of their general opinion of Microsoft.

I mention Thurrott as an exception. Peter Bright covers Microsoft, but certainly not someone who typically likes MS products. He tends to strongly dislike as often as he likes MS products (if not moreso).

People who like one Apple product tend to like most Apple products because there is a clear thread of simplicity and elegance that runs through them.

Really? Like the simplicity that is iTunes? The elegance that is AppleTV? The simplicity/elegance of OSX? Apple has been consistently elegant in hardware, but their software has been as jumbled a mess as anything from Microsoft or Google. It's just been coupled with much superior hardware -- and maybe that's enough, but it certainly not a thread that runs through all their products.

So in conclusion it's a big mess and old biases don't necessarily apply.

Yet old biases still seem to apply. Odd isn't it. And IMO the biases come out so clearly when you read what they write -- whether about the Surface or not, but especially about the Surface.

How is it possible that so many find it a joy to use, and so many can find no use for it at all. And it seems to fall completely along party lines?
From what I was able to gather, the authors gripes tend to be with the lack of meaningful whitespace and "tabs".

Both the goto arguments of someone who lacks enough understanding of language fundamentals to point out any actual flaws.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4806776
>Idiommatic Go is to have several lines of boilerplate after every single function invocation which can possibly fail.

This is an issue in every language. If you want to do something that might fail, you have to handle the possibility of failure. There are only two ways to handle this - return values and exceptions - and they differ in style more than in functionality.

So what is this guy suggesting? Does he want Go to have exceptions? Or does he want every function to magically succeed somehow? I don't enjoy writing error handling either but I see no way around it.
if you go the way of a decorator pattern, say, I write my `IntegerCamelDecorator` since your `Camelizable.new` does not support numbers, then what is the point of `Camelizable` to start with? You can just have a mirror hierarchy of `CamelAdapters`.

Of course, you can implement `Camelizable.new` so that it performs a dynamic dispatch itself, by looking up in a `CamelizableRegistry`. You can even have this built up magically with reflection.

You can, of course do everything, but a method call in ruby still only dispatches on self, and if that is fixed the method cannot be polymorphic, if you think otherwise we can agree to disagree.
I didn't even click on the link, I knew I was going to find hollow statements like that one.

After reading the fantastic article from patio11 that was reposted today, I can't read this kind of ----.
"For example, a social network for pet owners. It doesn't sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets."

I once worked on a social network for dog owners. Not pet owners, dog owners. And not actually dog owners, but their dogs. A place for people to have a social network of ... dogs.

But all the features made it an interesting enough project. The guy even came up with enough money to pay the web agency I was working at for the development - yes, outsourcing core product to an agency.

It took a year for the project to go from "I need devs" to "Build this". By then I had already given my notice at the agency with the dream of launching a cool startup.

I don't know that the dog social network ever launched.
I have plenty. I am eagerly awaiting market opportunities.
The `make` function is an example of an inconcistency. The language does not have generics, yet this built-in function is a generic one.

As far as Go being safer and cleaner because it lacks modern language features, generics would make the language safer (compare to casting all over the place, which is less safe, and has a runtime cost). Some modern languages also don't have null pointers, further increasing safety.
I have been using Surface RT at work for close to two weeks. It replaced my Macbook 2009. It really has proven to be quiet a little capable machine. We use Google Docs and Insightly everyday. So far its been fine. I have never taken an iPad to work so I can not compare. But, I do have some experience with Android tablets and Surface is better suited for my type of work, Business Development. You can view more of my thoughts of Surface here vpena.sqsp.com/blog
>The allegation is apparently that Nguyen invited someone into the office environment, with a visible weapon, and called attention to that.

This is the part I would have qualms with. The problem is that the presentation of context in the filing isn't great. I saw a one-liner that mention Nguyen telling somebody else about Dunphy having a Glock or something.

>I'm going to guess that you feel this is an infringement on "Dunphy's" right to carry that gun.

Please no. Not what I was getting at. I'm mostly concerned with the dissonance in what the filing is trying to convey versus how it might be perceived.

Mentioning that somebody carries a firearm in itself isn't a threat, it's heavily contextual. I have little trouble imagining that Nguyen was mentioning it in a threatening manner from what's provided in the filing though.
Anyone who calls their son's teacher every day to inquire about their co-founder's child's behavior despite needing to kick their own son in the stomach to punish him needs a reality check. Reading this thing is horrific.
Couldn't agree any more.

Ideas should stem from problems. The "problem" with only solving problems for yourself, however, is that you may not be hitting a real market. The tech niche isn't exactly the norm (it's the .1%).

Lean methodologies behind testing problems and market needs are definitely making it better, but it's still extremely time -consuming, can get costly, and can lead to nothing (which is still better than building a product that doesn't go anywhere).

Landing pages, blog posts, setting controls & changes, analyzing the results and transferring those to actual needs and potential customers.

It's a mess.

If only there was something to solve this "problem" of figuring out which problem-solvers are market viable and which aren't quickly and affordably (without the massive learning curve).

My team and I just may have to give tackling this one a try :)
Join Us In The Fight Against Patent Trolls
If Samsung did not see these Google services/apps as critical to their success they would cut Google off over night.
All he says is "probably". Misleading title.
Although my thoughts are rooted in the immediacy of this article, it's a trend I've noticed over the last couple of years. As another has pointed out, it's not quite as meritocratic as I thought it was.
I really don't have time to waste trying to get around someone deciding to completely change the interface on one of the tools I use to make a living.

No offense but that is a really lame excuse. You wouldn't have time to learn to use a nail gun instead of a framing hammer if you were a carpenter? You risk being out of work soon with an attitude like that.
That's what I'm thinking will happen, in all honesty. 4chan have attacked en masse websites much larger than a startup in the past - and by using the name "Moot" and flat out denying that it has a relation to 4chan, they're putting a lot at stake.

I wonder if they've got any VC backing, because I don't see many investors trying that one on for size.
What is it about Japanese companies and their inability to create good online services. 3ds, ps3, psp, wiiU, etc.. so much potential.. xbox live is already a good example of how it's done. A simple copy of that would be 1000x better than what's there now.
Fiduciary duty is not a myth. Other than that, i have no concerns.
second result in DuckDuckGo
They have respectfully suggested a name change because they know they do not have a strong case. I find the letter a surprising move from someone so aligned with internet counter-culture.

I think it's fair to say that a large majority of internet users would have no idea of the founder of 4chan. Plus the term is being used in a descriptive allusive sense from what I can tell. A firm rebuttal is in order.
On iOS I'm using it to log errors and usage info (how often different features are used). I'm only sending/storing simple JSON which I can pull out later as required with simple scripts.

I'm not using it for anything that I couldn't write a server for but it would have been a couple of days for me to set it up securely and it comes with libraries with useful fuctions like sendEventually which will save the update to send later if it can't connect straight away (again saving me time).

Parse has more advanced features like user registration that I'm not using (I don't need them at the moment but I'm also nervous to get myself locked in too deeply). It also offers a mechanism that takes some of the work out do implementing push messages. I might investigate the push mechanisms yet.

I think it makes sense to speed up implementation where you want features not supported by iCloud such as cross platform support or to share content between users.
another suggestion for sourcing ideas is to identify weaknesses in popular products then build something where that weakness becomes a strength (e.g., browsing in smartphones => iphone, search in portals => google).

re the unsexy filter, success can create sexiness. nike sells shoes. amazon sells books. salesforce sells enterprise software. yet these are all considered cool, sexy companies for the most part. if you build something people love, you can make it sexy. worry less about if something is sexy today, and worry more about building something people will love tomorrow. sexiness will follow.
I'm pretty sure if he does have another go at a startup, it will be using his own money without any meaningful board or oversight.

Megalomaniacs don't deal well with situations where someone else can pull the rug out from under them.
"How is it possible that so many find it a joy to use, and so many can find no use for it at all. And it seems to fall completely along party lines?"

I think it's just because not that many people actually have the Surface yet.

So as another commenter pointed out, it's probably either going to be early adopters who want it to be good anyway or the tech review sites which everyone seems to accuse both of having an Apple bias anyway.

Not saying either camp is correct, but it's not like we're talking about a big sample size here, in either case it's probably the vocal minority contributing to the initial impressions.
That is all fine and dandy, but you're not taking into account recent news of data leaking in iOS 6 (which has been fixed, for now, I know). 150 bucks to theoretically optimize my sleep schedule, without a wifi signal into my brain for 8 hours.

That being said, I was a sleep cycle user. I lost faith when I let the app run overnight on a table across the room and it graphed my sleep.. I checked USGS for earthquakes, but no dice.
After 20 years of entrepreneurship, of struggles and successes, of spending man years of that time thinking about startup ideas, and having learned so many lessons the hard way, I can say the following:

pg's essays are so true and correct that I could practically cry.

If enough people read these essays (especially this and the recent "growth" essay), it could materially boost the economy.
Moody's downgrades France to Aa1 from Aaa, maintains negative outlook
See Scala futures and promises.