skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. It'll be interesting to see what those women have to say.

It might be the case that this strikes me as a man's writing just because there are more men in tech, but I don't know that it's the incompetence per se. It's sentences like, "Often in this situation I’ll break out something like the Saxo board, with an FPGA and a thick USB 2.0 pipe," that I just have a very hard time imagining a woman writing. In the same way that a woman couldn't have written Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I think it's the implied, "I'm so cool because of all my techno whizbangs." But it's even in the non-tech writing: "In other words, I wanted to hack something I actually use: my vagina." is so horrid that I have to believe that even the bona fide female Xeni Jardin, lover of techno whizbangs, would have a hard time accepting it as... womanly... to talk about "using her vagina".

My girlfriend has screamed at me more than once over the futility of sharing my thoughts with "you people" who "will never understand [my] perspective", but at least a few here are kind, even if I'm not, and for that I'm grateful.
The article all but ignores the fact that there are political social networks that exist. Experienced political organizers already know this, which is why so much effort goes into courting the endorsements of unions like AFT, NEA, AFSCME and SEIU and churches and their leaders like Billy Graham.

These ARE social networks, and they're WIRED, and have a lot of structure at the local level where, as O'Neil instructs us, is where all politics is anyways. Any up-start "political social network" that ignores that existing infrastructure is like Facebook ignoring colleges.
His point - which I agree with - is that developers are a gateway to enterprise.
The genius of Linq is that it makes parallels between SQL and parts of functional programming. A lot of .NET devs have grown up using SQL and aren't looking to make changes. Instead of forcing devs to do functional programming, they made FP look familiar (like SQL). It's easy to explain a Linq statement to mediocre developers. For those of us who aren't mediocre, this makes a pleasant world where we can plunge further into FP without worrying about mediocre coworkers falling too far behind.
Sorry, I didn't mean to bother anyone either [by posting it to HN]. I thought it was an interesting post--responsive design has been getting a lot of attention lately, but often times creators forget to put as much effort into optimizing UX on bigger screens as they do on smaller ones.
No, I prefer objects with attributes called 'length'.
read up on the datawarehouse trend 10 yrs ago, you have to remain a viable company in order to take advantage of that stuff. turns out it's expensive and time-consuming to create value from generally-unstructured historical data even if you have an identity (or even just a demographic) attached to it.
Wouldn't finite, deterministic systems necessarily be able to be modeled by an algorithm? Either the human mind is infinite in some way, non-deterministic, or it must be able to be modeled by an algorithm.

NB I am a programmer and very weak in theory.
Interesting observation, I didn't even notice that.
RPG MO has a new tutorial
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22algorith...
Developers do hate paying for things, but that doesn't mean you cant make a business selling to them. You just need to make a much more compelling offering than they could reasonably create themselves.

For example, my company (https://circleci.com) makes Continuous-integration-as-a-service, marketed directly to developers. We have a lot of companies using us with incredible engineers (Stripe and Zencoder are 2 obvious examples who have agreed to be listed on our homepage, we have many more). Why - when they can build it themselves? Because we have built a compelling product that is much better than they could do themselves (and in many cases they tried)!

To give you one example, one customer has a test suite that takes 60 minutes on his laptop. He just pushes to Circle when he wants to test, and he gets a result in 13 minutes (blazing fast build servers, plus automatic parallelization)! That would overload a single build server, so they'd have to get a cluster set up. That sounds like fun , but only for the first hour.
There is an entire historical tranche of business oriented toward commodification, which I believe is what we're seeing applied to internet functionality as a whole. All kinds of services with nothing much behind them, to the point that business models are being based upon not much more than a Rails gem and force of personality.
HTTP Status Rappers
I don't REALLY think, but for a man that smart -- it seems a tiny bit silly. But he's also that crazy.
I wouldn't consider the use of KISS to be unnecessary. It's sufficiently well-known to effectively be considered a word (sort of the way en cia is used in Spanish), and I define it, albeit not explicitly. I also read way too many military documents to have an issue with acronyms, as their usage as an easily pronounceable vocalization for often complex wordings really helps language flow. Again, I don't have any issues with acronyms themselves, simply their usage when they aren't defined.

And I would argue you don't simplify my comment at all, although you do make it more concise. I consider simplicity to be the primary concern with writing, however being as quick to the punch as possible is also an extremely valuable trait. It must be noted though that they are not the same thing. Often times, especially with technical writing, they are at loggerheads.

With all that said, your re-write is actually quite a lot better. Thanks.
It's not about getting hits out of every investment but recouping something from most. If they can get 1x money or even .5x money back, sometimes that can help keep the portfolio above water.
Remember that through essays like this VCs are competing with each other as much or more than they are describing a competitive landscape as concerns the companies they pay attention to.
Best CyberMonday Deal on Apple - Perhaps Apple Itself? - Capitalogix
The big technology players don't want to enter this game because it is too dangerous. Everyone knows that a movie big flop can complicate the whole quarter for a movie company. Why would Google and others expose themselves to this risk? Also, they would become much less credible as technology providers for other content companies, which by itself would reduce a lot of the profit they generate. In other words, I wouldn't expect this happening anytime soon.
My open source cure for brain cancer
Distinguishing between attributes and methods in your interface violates encapsulation. The only thing an object's interface should be worried about is what messages it responds to, it shouldn't have to expose whether it responds to messages by fetching a variable or calling a procedure.

On the implementation side, if you just want to expose a variable then attributes are fine. Outside of your object, though, who cares whether or not "length" is an attribute? Maybe your object is encapsulating a lazily-evaluated database relation, at which point "length" would generate a SELECT COUNT query. It still fulfills the contract of "an object that has a length", and you don't want to get in the business of defining different interfaces for "an object that has a length cached in an instance variable" and "an object that has a length that is calculated dynamically".

The properties of an object are best expressed with noun phrases regardless of their implementation.
Macy's parade: 'Shredded police papers in confetti'
Telling a developer to use something sounds like a bad strategy, we hate being told what to use. My cofounder and I are developers, and we've talked to a handful of other developers, and we've found that SaaS is appropriate for a lot of things. Others you definitely want to build yourself. But a lot of it depends on what stage your company is currently at. There's a reason all the big companies like SaaS, it's less resources they have to devote to something that is not core to their business.

Looking at your profile, it seems like you're speaking from experience. Have you found that selling to marketing and sales folks was more effective for your own business?
Perhaps is it not so premature, since this proof relies mainly of this new inter-universal geometry,

Take the Fermat-Wiles proof. It's probably the most significant number theory result of the last century, yet it doesn't contain new profound number theory. Its genius is the use of elliptic curves, which is algebraic geometry.

I'm not saying Mochizuki's proof doesn't contain new profound number theory, but this is a very possible outcome, we just don't know yet.
I feel like I should point out that we have no guarantee when and where an expression will be evaluated is also true in languages like C, to an extent. The compiler is free to re-schedule operations that don't have a side effect, just as in Haskell - it's just that this happens less since so many actions could potentially have side effects in C.
Show HN: Walking Wizard guides you through what kind of walking you do
Australia has a strong competition / consumer protection watchdog - it may be that the advice of the ACCC was sought by the Department of Communications (that submitted the objections).
> https://twitter.com/Humblebrag

Yes, almost by definition, that is part of the lesson of the article.

It's almost impossible to say, yes I agree and here is my anecdote without doing so:)
Your post is inflammatory. Compare it to other posts in this thread, and you will see that you're detracting from the conversation, not adding to it.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/119969/javascript-chart-l...
There's a difference between taking risks and repeating preventable mistakes. That's what I'm talking about.
Show HN: D3-powered table of this year's Amazon weekly bestseller lists
...and how does it feel to your soul to be slave of your body? (instead of master...)
Harvard’s i-lab could buoy the entire region - Editorials
I didn't realize it was meant to be used for payments. I admittedly have used it for flight boarding passes, coupons and show tickets so far - I thought it was great for that (particular boarding passes as it updates the gate if it changes).

Perhaps it is their long term strategy to use it for payments, however it doesn't seem that way given their current branding? If it is targeted for that, I completely missed it!
The one that started them all http://dummyimage.com/
I always advise people to separate college into its components like you would everything else, than make a cost-benefit analysis.

The components of college are as follows:
1) Information you'd learn and the structured environment for learning it.
2) The degree you get at the end
3) The people you'd meet
4) The social events you'd attend (parties)

So the questions is - is this "college package" worth the time and money you'd invest? and "Is there another way to get these components for higher quality, less money, and less time investment?"

Since you say you can learn on your own, I think (1) The Information you'd learn, is not worth college. Especially in tech, you can learn all these things better online.

In web design and development, no one cares what school you went to - they only care about your portfolio and experience, so (2) is definitely NOT worthwhile.

You'll definitely meet cool and smart people in college, but you can meet even cooler and smarter peopler elsewhere I'd argue. Problem with college is that most people are just loafing around in a fantasy world with no consequences. In my personal experience, the people I've met in my post-college life have provided more value to me. And my college friends who are providing value now are only doing so because they are outside of that college bubble where you just drink beer and chase girls all day.

Finally for (4), if you really wanted to do the whole college social life - there's nothing stopping you from doing it for free. Just lookup the social events online and show up with a good story. Sounds weird to most people, but then again, most people go to college and live uninteresting lives. Entrepreneurs are NOT like most people, so who do you aspire to be?

College and "place-based education" as Bill Gates would call it is archaic. Information is extremely cheap and mostly free, and connecting with mentors and people you want to learn from is also much easier.

As someone who attended an elite university education for a bankrupting sum of money, I have a bitter view and am obviously biased, but I'm sure most entrepreurs agree that with this last point that learning and connecting is available for free to anyone who works hard to get it
I'm not following your point. By your own admission, installed software in the enterprise is not as affected by piracy, so it seems to back up my point that there must be some other factor that prevents a commercial, installed application ecosystem to flourish in the developer tools sector.

I still think the service-oriented nature of github has a large effect. It's one thing for a open source clone of github to exist, it's another thing if it's something that IT needs to install and manage in your organization. On the other hand, your text editor, debugger, etc, are all things that IT doesn't care about beyond if it is installed and runs. So, the value of B2D is beyond the functionality of the tools per se but it's also the additional benefit of not having to run the service yourself to get its benefits. If that additional benefit were missing, the github-clones would thrive because they would be very close to equivalent in terms of time/cost/reward tradeoff for all members of an organization.
> Why people spend more time on Facebook than on a political social network

I would guess: Because time spent on Facebook is relaxing, whereas most internet discussions feel like a drunk fist-fight without winners. (Of course, that may be the nature of democracy itself.)
A fun weekend hack. The patterns of the blue/green SAT guide are quite funny. Also, there are a few books which don't play nice with amazons image API. And one deleted book! (can you guess which one? Use your imagination :) )
Some really good advice here, zedshaw, thank you!

One thing I might add is, develop a pipeline for writing (1) don't judge your first draft, (2) schedule time to review each draft and edit ruthlessly, (3) edit once more before publishing.

The most important way I have improved my writing is to give myself permission to just write when working on the first draft. Write without any judgement and trust that the subsequent steps in my workflow will catch any issues and produce polished writing.

Edit: A book recommendation "Weinberg on Writing, the fieldstone method" by Gerald Weinberg. Excellent advice from his experience writing several books as a consultant and technology writer.
Richard Branson Video - Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
it is as open as ever

What I see when I press the Windows key on my keyboard tells me you're wrong. That's still my desktop, whether you want to call it the desktop or not.
Facebook has money and time. Plus a few hundred of the very best engineers in the valley, that joined pre-IPO.
South Korea Arrests Man For Re-Tweeting Oppressive North Korean Government
afterburner clearly understands this. His point is that in the US drug war, it is the government of the United States that is the main antagonist. This is not the case in with the ongoing violence in Mexico.
"I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read"
Mathematics - at least some kinds of it - is largely a game of symbols. You define something and then see if you can prove anything about it. Most of the time, it turns out to reduce to group theory (e.g. Galois theory basically consists of reducing the study of fields to the study of groups). Sometimes you come up with a novel structure about which you can say something. Occasionally, this gives you a result that feeds back into another branch of mathematics, or even into number theory - as with Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. But most of the time, this is just some funny structure and you say "well, that's nice" and move on.

So Mochizuki has almost certainly defined some new objects and proven some things about them. But mathematicians do that all the time (admittedly on a smaller scale). If you just want to look at something, there's plenty of "new territory" around - stuff that doesn't require learning a new notation, and hasn't had Mochizuki looking at it for ten years already. The only reason some arbitrary new structure is interesting enough to spend your time learning about is if you can tie it back to number theory.
Thanks for sharing Ruby Koans! I like the guidance that RubyMonk provides, but Ruby Koans just goes deeper and asks more of the reader. I wish RubyMonk was more like it in that sense, but I like how RubyMonk doesn't require a page refresh for each code test.
The Cloud is Robin Hood: it is bridging the gap between rich and poor
For the NYTimes, I write about tech history and history of science. I see 3 common problems with "startup" writing, i.e., the language of young college males:

1. Do not condescend. I immediately broke this rule above—it gets attention, but it doesn't convince. E.g., tweet-length commentary about complex subjects is condescending.

2. Delete rhetoric.

3. Graphics are a good hook, but they rarely explain anything.
Storing in environment variables is a good practice.

Take a look at this: http://www.12factor.net/config
We test on 47 different handsets, comprising four different Android versions. Do you want a list?

Our Android app lags in features and reliability to our iPhone app because our devs have to spend so much time dealing with the problems of the fragmented marketplace, so there is less time to innovate. This isn't flaming, it's fact.
Dribbble and how YOU are ruining it
My point is that drug prohibition remains the root cause. Even in America, most of the actual harm is done by gangsters rather than the government. And yes, I'm aware that organized crime still exists in the United States, but not to nearly the same extent as during alcohol prohibition.
On My Radio Durning the Divorce - Radiohead Cover
I actually think some TLDs like .book, .app, .movie, could be useful. Often for movies you see they've used domains like reavingzombiesmovie.com, which would be better as reavingzombies.movie, and would let someone else buy reavingzombies.app or .book, for an entirely different product that happens to share a name

All of these TLDs should only be sold to companies who plan to let people buy domains from them

The idea of Amazon owning .book or Apple owning .app just seems bad for the internet as a whole
100, 200, 300, 301, 410, 420, and 504 are pretty good.
yes, it seems there are two kinds of thesis:

(1) a forward - must be falsifiable to filter

(2) a afterward - need-not-be-falsifiable cya (a/k/a rationalization)

Fred seems to be communicating a variant of (1) fairly credibly; although many VCs sgravitate toward variations of type (2).
If a programmer locked himself away for 14 years and then emerged and announced he'd written a completely bug free OS, there would be skepticism. Code needs to be battle tested by other people to find the bugs.

Mathematics is the same, to an extent; one guy working alone for 14 years is likely to have missed ideas and perspectives that could illuminate flaws in his reasoning. Maths bugs. If he's produced hundreds of pages of complex reasoning, on his own, however smart he is I'd say there's a high chance he's missed something.

Humans need to collaborate in areas of high complexity. With a single brain, there's too high a chance of bias hiding the problems.
Hacking Meat: 6 Meat + Data Icons
What does Washington and Colorado mean for the above now?
I was trying to come up with a example where a theorem prover would have to be extended or rewritten in order to handle new types of mathematics. My imaginary scenario is a theorem validator built by mathematicians from pre-Cantor days, where I conjecture that it would be hard to encode transfinite proofs. As I know nothing about how theorem provers work, this is purely conjectural.

In more concrete terms .. and I am so far outside my knowledge that I barely know what I am saying ... I read in the Coq FAQ that "The axiom of unique choice together with classical logic (e.g. excluded-middle) are inconsistent in the variant of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions where Set is impredicative. As a consequence, the functional form of the axiom of choice and excluded-middle, or any form of the axiom of choice together with predicate extensionality are inconsistent in the Set-impredicative version of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions."

In other words, proofs involving "axiom of unique choice together with classical logic" cannot be expressed in at least Coq. While it might be possible to use a machine to check tools which assume the axiom of unique choice, it would no doubt take a lot of work if one needs to build such a system from scratch.

And that is the scenario - where it's much more difficult to develop a mechanical tool than to come up with a proof that enough for humans - that I am contemplating.
Our broken ads increased remarketing conversions
brilliant. Thank you so much!
Cross cut shredders people! NSA specifies:

“Maximum Particle Dimensions: 75% of the shredded particles shall have no edge dimension exceeding 5 millimeters in length. The remaining particles may exhibit edge dimensions between 5 and 12.5 millimeters in length.”

Better yet, shred then take it to a recycling center where it is pulped immediately. Or shred it then burn it if you are cold/don't care about carbon emissions!
Honestly, you sound more like a "non-science" person there. Did you think many branches of science have an epistemology founded on automatic computation? Think again!
Eliding the braces does make it a bit less idiomatic I suppose; but in ten years of programming I don't think I've ever been bitten by a bug caused by that style... not even in JavaScript.

On the other hand, I think the risk of making the code slightly more brittle is worth it if it makes it much more pleasant to read. Whenever I see a for/foreach followed by a single statement then I know that the code is doing a simple projection (i.e. Select in Linq or SQL parlance). If it’s a for/foreach followed by an if statement followed by some other statement (as in the above code) then I know it’s a simple filter and projection (i.e. Where and Select).

But I wanted to illustrate your larger point, which is that C# programmers shouldn’t be so quick to use functional idioms since imperative code can not only look just a pretty, but it’s almost always slightly more performant since it doesn’t imply as many allocations and indirections.
Unfortunately, I feel that I'm missing something. Where does ROM come into the equation, and why is low memory usage bad?
Williams' book is all that 'Skunk and White' should have been. Consistent, actionable, readable.
FB has many employees that are not engineers! These are the people the posters are targeting.
Reset Windows Password (zipped ISO image)
>> It will force you to type faster than you are able

The text is appearing really slowly for me. Is there something that I'm missing? I have to keep waiting for it to catch up to me.

EDIT: I was using Firefox. In Chrome, it's completely different.
I think there could be more outlines and diagrams in place of text. Paragraphs of text are often necessary, but the question is to what extent could alternatives be tried.
Also, Dan Shapiro did some of the math on his "VC Insanity, explained"[1].

On a side note, Fred Wilson has responded to this thread below[2,3,4,5].

[1] http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/08/vc-insanity-economics...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828933

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828936

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828943

[5] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4829128