skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, the fact that you were able to comment on the story means he didn't kill it.

Second, there have always, always, always been weak startups. Lots of them.

Third, anyone can cite one or three facts to construct an argument. But when you do that carelessly, all you end up with is a fallacious syllogism. In Lyon's case, A, B, and C seem to add up to "go back to engineering school".

The same thing happened with your comment here. You look at the evidence and suggest that the problem is a phenomenon that prevents weak startups from becoming good startups. But that's not the problem either; weak startups have never tended to become good startups organically, so it's hard to make a case for the availability of seed funding retarding progress.

Finally, it's not a genuinely heart-felt written article. It's a deeply cynical attempt to capture pageviews by someone with only a peripheral connection to startup entrepreneurship.
Thanks Daniel! The 12plus tee is still one of our favorites.
What I took from that quote was that this was the effective MS strategy before and it worked, but that it won't work this time. So I think your response is in agreement with the article, at least the way I read it. It's hard to know for sure, though, with so much sarcasm in the article.

EDIT: Changed OP to article.
McAfee Enterprise proxy server white-list thingy blocks this site as being a "medium risk" - So my comopany proxy server blocks it :(
Shell Gamification (how I learn to use my shell aliases)
The author answers the question only partially in my opinion. Sure, we should seek to minimise the impact of crappy tasks, but the best way to motivate people to "do things they don't want to do" is to turn the lousy things into things that they do want to do.

That starts with treating people like adults, and explaining the underlying reasons for the tasks. It also means listening to the people who will be doing the work, having genuine empathy with their situation and changing or reallocating the tasks accordingly. It also means giving autonomy and control to the people doing the tasks to allow them to perform the tasks under their own terms.

If it is not meaningful work, then perhaps it should not be done at all. Indeed your job as a manager is primarily to provide aircover to team members, as getting rid of overhead tasks will allow the team time and energy to focus on the main job.

For those tasks that are not removable, the manager needs to create sense out of it all, explaining why the pain has to occur and how they are helping to mitigate the pain. At one firm, for example, we removed an onerous task from a large number of senior managers by giving it to an external consultant (me), who was instructed to do an "OK" job, as other priorities were senior. Other approaches are to have an off-site meeting to do the work, to gamify the process (hackneyed I know), but most importantly to, as managers, keep challenging the need for any make-work.
I have no doubt that pg doesn't like the article Here's a quote
"...smart young people have been conned into thinking that starting a company is akin to buying a lottery ticket or rolling dice at Las Vegas -- the odds are long but you never know, you might get lucky and strike it rich. So make something up, throw it out there, and see what hapens."

That's describing 99% of bullshit yc stratups. The 1% (or less) which succeed would have done so with or without yc. And they mostly actually involve real business models of charging for a product/service.
How Bletchley Park was saved from the bulldozers
WhatsApp Messenger Redesign
Great looking WhatsApp Messenger Redesign. Just in time for Facebook acquisition rumors.
I think there's a confusion of terms here: Whatever is a "problem", therein lies the scarcity; you just need to identify it. If there were no scarcity, everyone could have what they wanted.

So what is it that the ISP cannot provide, specifically? I'm guessing it's the sum of all data passing to/from its customers per unit time. Hence why I called bandwidth the relevant scarcity, and suggested apportioning it based on how much users are using the network.

Can you operationalize the term "distribution problem" so that it's clear what specifically the problem is? "It's a distribution problem" is easy to fall back on, but hard to make precise. They say the same of food shortages, for example, but people have different ideas of what it means.
Lingo matters: raising money as visitor to SV
I plan on switching over as well. I love the speed when using static files, plus there's a couple of plugins that make this a full CMS like a CSS minifier and a thumbnail plugin.
Great job, but no cutscenes?
50% of what though? 50% of your take home pay or 50% of the value you receive from living in a functioning modern society?
That's mostly fair, but gigantic multiplayer experiences have in general tried to target more modest min. reqs., like Starcraft II on the competitive side, or all of those East asian MMOs on the casual side.
HgSharp: a completely managed implementation of Mercurial Core
This could be really powerful if users could put up actual $$$ for feature requests so the site actually performs more like kickstarter. This would also help the quality of requests.

Once the company completes the feature satisfactorily they get the cash. Or perhaps even a situation where they can grab the cash to start the feature- but this is obviously higher risk- like kickstarter- but the risk could be managed and even help the feature development process.

PS- With this in mind, importing feature requests from other sites could help growth. IE: People see a GREAT feature THEY want and are willing to put in $5... as compared to coming to the site to submit their ideas.
Another idea: Use ad revenue from site to 'seed' a user's initial ability to donate $$$. Perhaps require CC input in order to contribute this 'free money', thereby making it easier to give real money. I know the free money would have to be incredibly small, but sometimes little acts of giving something for free can really change a system.
Just some thoughts...
Looks interesting (thanks). Will certainly check it out.
> Does the HSTS list store the signature?

It doesn't matter. The ONLY thing HSTS does is tell the browser to make future requests over HTTPS. If an HSTS site switches to a self-signed cert between my visits, the browser will still get warn me, because the new cert is suspicious.
It's silly to provide a "read an excerpt" link that is just the generic intro-to-this-book copy that's approximately reproduced on the page that contains said link. "Hackers like to optimize things." Gee, thanks for that.

Excerpts should be meaty: show me what's going on in the third section of chapter 6. I may not understand all the prerequisites, but I can at least judge whether anything is actually happening in this book, before I give you money.
Show HN: Music I composed specifically for coding
in the context of work yes. But in the context of learning or bettering your skills and yourself... this type of motivation is best from people that want to do it because they want to make themselves better.
I would be surprised to see this call service take off. Isn't the whole notion of using social network like LinkedIn (asynchronously) phone call (synchronous and disrupting) alternative in the first place?
> then Apple's use of the moniker is misplaced

It's called marketing. Also, don't believe everything you read.
Former Zynga finance guru surfaces as video chat company president
in the context of work yes. But in the context of learning or bettering your skills and yourself... this type of motivation is best from people that want to do it because they want to make themselves better. So if everytime I expect him to learn something new that will help him in his career path, I have to give him a bonus or a raise it doesn't scale.
And I, in turn, have never understood the argument you mention. Regulations have effects, both malevolent and benign. When regulations are enforced, someone wins, someone else loses. If we "clean up the air and breathe easier" as you put, it but millions of people end up in poverty (or worse), is that a net win?

We would unquestionably have cleaner air if we shut down all coal-fired generating plants and banned the internal combustion engine tomorrow. There are excellent reasons to do just that, environmentally speaking. But does it sound like a good idea to you? If so, then you may need to think things through a little farther, I believe.
I support the notion of enabling HTTPS by default, but calling this "privacy" is a bit optimistic given the way things are these days.

Supposing the NSA wanted to spy on your traffic to tbray.org. Would it not be as simple as them asking Verisign (or whoever signed the server's SSL cert) to hand them the server's private key?

I think true privacy would require a bit more hassle than most users are willing to deal with right now, and that's a shame.
Yes, he's the original founder of Maples Investments, which became Floodgate. Appreciate the information!
Remove the text-rendering: optimizelegibility; line from your CSS and that text will render properly again.

We ran into this on Windows Chrome too. It was a pain to track down.
Isn't this what Clarify.fm is trying to get resolved in some capacity?
Exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Thanks!
UN Internet regulation treaty talks begin in Dubai
"I'm sick of whining entrepreneurs"
thank you for posting this!! looks like i ran into in just the knick of time. i just recently purchased a new macbook pro with a retina display for my brother how lives out of the country. will make sure i have a samsung display so he doesn't have ghosting issues or apple care issues in the future!
Cannon.js + Three.js first person shooter test
> Fuck everything about this. I had two screen replaced, luckily before Apple came up with this idiotic test.

The cost of those two replacements is probably why they came out with this test.

> But that they still have not solved that problem that is plain as day fucking sucks!

Considering that they have billed the Retina MBP as something to be used by designers and content creators, they shouldn't limit things to an arbitrary test. If the problem is perceived as a problem and can be consistently detected, double blind, then it should be replaced, period.
You're missing the point. Just because there's one problem with the iPhone, no matter how many people it affects, doesn't mean it's automatically a bad choice if every other feature is what you're looking for in a smartphone. If the antenna makes a phone 90/100 but every other phone is still at best 80/100, does switching platforms make sense? It's still a valid issue to complain about, but not enough to make the decision to abandon the platform for some people.

The point is, the iPhone is what these customers were looking for. They still like it enough to keep it, and they like it enough to complain when there are quality issues rather than switch.
That's fine, but it's a different use-case than when a user is presented with tiles that they did not size themselves.
Who upgrades a CPU without upgrading their motherboard too?

The benefits are neglible, as next-gen RAM, next-gen peripheral bus, etc, all require a next-gen motherboard.

More of a concern is custom-built shopping, where it is harder for a small vendor to stock a batch of mobos and a variety of chips, and some chips go obsolete before sale (and so their mobos would be lost too...)

But hardware is really, really good these days (as the article notes). Runs cooler, less stress, less failure, far overpowered for most use-cases, less need to upgrade.

Enjoy our modern bounty and pay a bit extra for a new mobo every few years.
Yahoo's Hadoop Tutorial
I think I agree, but there's still a tone in your and OP's words that makes it sound like you're appealing to some objective measure of a "high quality product." Obviously, there is no such thing, and different problems will frustrate different people. It's quite possible that 99% of MBP buyers would never even notice that ghosting problem. Does that still make the MBP a "low quality product," and are Apple's policies still unreasonable, or does it just mean that the product simply isn't compatible with OP's needs?

The same thing applies to my dead pixel analogy. Personally, I am extremely distracted by dead pixels (even a single one in a non-retina display drives me crazy). I have always purchased displays with very strict dead pixel tolerances. But it would be ridiculous for me to buy a low-end display then complain that the manufacturer makes crappy products and doesn't care about its customers because they refuse to replace my display that only has a single dead pixel.
I was thinking of signing up for this for my nephew, maybe as an Xmas gift but the pricing scheme I find kind of confusing, especially as I'd be turning this over eventually to my brother (his dad) who isn't really familiar with web hosts and might be offput by the fact its rated in terms of minutes of playtime

Seeing as this is kind of geared towards kids wouldn't a much more simplified pricing scheme make more sense?
I'm on my third campaign with Teespring (http://teespring.com/rubyguy). They've been great to work with.

I ran a store last year selling shirts (http://rubythreads.com/) and I managed inventory and shipped out of my garage. Any profit made on the shirts was spent on logistics. Its a rough business and I'm trying to appeal to a very specific audience. I was planning on building a new storefront and moving to a kickstarter-model for future designs, but Teespring has been totally turnkey for me so far.
I would have bought the book if I could see what was in it. Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about the entire book, even the chapter headlines would work. The exercept is not enough to make me want it. Pity, it sounded interesting...
Most ARM chips are BGA.
This also works in personal relationships. If your SO feels hurt by something and you say "oh, grow up!", that doesn't help, even if you think some 'tough love' was needed/adequate. You have to deal with her as someone who is feeling hurt and until she perceives that you understand her, you'll just be sweeping the issue under the rug. I suppose this can be classified as listening but not really hearing.
Nexus 4 available in Canada at 12 noon PST
I'm not sure if the potential lag involved in European hosting would make this pointless, but there are some mega cheap-yet-reliable-enough deals out there. 32gb plus a couple of terabytes storage is available from Hetzner for 50 or 60 EUR/month, and I've been quite happy with it too ;-)
I have to agree with this. I believe threaded reply systems (in combination with upvote systems) work reasonably well to produce digestible and shallow conversations (in terms of the number of participants, not necessarily quality) for news articles, but are absolutely terrible for conversations that happen in real time, grow to a certain length, or are expected to be read in full by participants.

The reasoning for real-time conversations has already been stated, but as for the other two aspects, I offer the following anecdotes:

I have serious trouble reading the comments for Hacker News articles that receive somewhere upwards of 50 replies, and not just because of the quality of the comments that those articles tend to attract.

I am incapable of browsing anything but the tiniest of subreddits for the same reason. The lack of visual cues for reply depth other than minor indentation and the sheer quantity of comments on the average article there are enough to make it literally stressful for me to read.

I have absolutely no problem following IRC all day, going to sleep, and catching up on IRC logs in the morning.

I regularly read, in full, and even participate in threads on 4chan and other forums that exceed several hundreds of posts in length, and not just ones full of throwaway one-liners and amusing pictures.
> Supply chain management at Apple's scale is unbelievably hard. It's certainly not excusable for the issues you're encountering, but from what I've seen / heard, Apple has a top notch supply chain management team pretty much unrivaled by any other company.

Who was it at Apple who said, after you reach a certain level, there are no more excuses?
Google should comply. If the rightsholders want to give their titles the internet death penalty who are we to argue?
Experience tells me this is not a huge problem and my personal opinion is that it won't become one - don't have any references though just IMO. What I mean to say is that basically if you're making a production level app, you just build it to work cross-browser that's the way it is, you rarely do things based on UA if you know what you're doing and opt for feature testing instead. Maybe some provide neat little extras if a browser has a specific feature like webgl, but you're going to make sure all functionality is provided for every browser so you hit the widest audience.

I find it hard to believe you get clients that think everyone uses Chrome, that's never happened to me. I've also rarely had a client ask for something to only work in a specific browser, the few exceptions have been making things work for IE6 or older browsers that were used internally by larger corps.

These are just my thoughts, discussion is welcomed :)
How To Write 4x More Words Than You Ever Have Before
If I self-host, for example, then I can hold on to my stuff until either I get a subpoena or the cops show up with a warrant. In the meantime, I can decide if I want to risk charges for destroying any evidence, I can call for lawyers, all these various actions I can take before my data gets handed over. Beats the hell out of getting an email to your backup account: "Your domain has been taken down at the request of law enforcement. Please have a nice day. Do not reply to this message."
I'm a big fan of The Verge. They are a step ahead of a great deal of the competition. That said, a lot of the criticism is dead on. They, represent, though, major trends in tech writing all around. The Verge just set itself up to rise above them and its failure to really do so is its greatest disappointment.

That said, I still read it every day at work and I have faith that we'll see steady improvements in quality as time goes on.
Approaching this from a different direction: It's hard to search for information when you have almost nothing to go on.

See these Reddit posts for example:
(http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/14521p/inherited...)

(http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/13ih3j/what_is_t...)

(http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/comments/13df8g/any_idea_...)

With these you're basically crowd-sourcing, and hoping someone somewhere has seen it before. (Although 'jecniencikn' does quite well with the badass lion.)
For what it's worth, GNU Parallel seems to be fairly new; at work I have an ubuntu distro from this year and it's not in the package repo yet. xargs is POSIX so you can expect it everywhere, though no parallel option is specified (merely encouraged).
Teespring may be facing legal issues soon
I do IT consulting, with a background in sysadmin, probably more customer-facing stuff than the average developer.

For this sort of relatively labour-intensive sectors, places like France, Germany and Nordic countries are way too expensive. Eastern Europe is a hit & miss, safest being Czechia, but they're also a few more hours away from the US (in terms of flight and timezone), and they're not as dirt-poor as in 1989 anymore, so prices have gone up. Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal) would be great, except their English is lousy, tax arrangements are byzantine, their salespeople will screw you at every turn, and their approach to customer-service can be borderline disgraceful (and I can say that, being one of them! lol).

I don't think Irish wages are too high -- they certainly went up in the last 20 years, as the country improved dramatically and sort-of aligned with other EU members, so the economy has to rebalance a bit, but that was to be expected. Overall, the Irish system still provides very good value for money, I'd say.
The problem is that when you pick a motherboard, you also pick the CPU you want. Now, motherboard makers are unlikely to carry such a wide array of upgrade choices. For example, when they introduce a new cheap motherboard, they will offer a low performance CPU for it. A high end motherboard will offer a high end CPU, and so on. You might have one or two CPU choices for the motherboard you want to buy, as opposed to every possible choice like now.
All true - the explanation should be littered with "here be dragons ..." - but for the sake of grasping the concepts without drowning in detail, I thought it was worth leaving out such tricky (but important!) Issues.

But you're right, there is interesting and deep material here.
Thanks for the link, will check it out.
That powerpoint deck is awful. So video is an increasing percentage of internet bandwidth - so what? Price/performance of bandwidth is improving exponentially. It's unsurprising that non-video bandwidth isn't increasing as fast as video, since video is automatically big (and easy to make bigger: just move up to higher resolution) whereas "normal" traffic only gets bigger when users create more stuff. This increasing percentage doesn't say anything about increasing backbone costs, even though the graphs are meant to imply that it does.
Thanks! Checking it out now.
I wish Google would use a strategy that a former colleague used in an upper year Physics course. While encouraging students to discuss problems, he informed them that plagiarizing assignments was not allowed. When he got the first assignment, he noticed that the solution handed in by one of the top students in the department was identical to the one handed in by a much weaker student. So, he gave zero to the top student and full marks to the weaker student. (It should be noted that the contribution of each assignment towards the final grade was likely less than 2%). As he expected, the student who got zero went to see him. My colleague told him that he had no foolproof way to show that it was the other student that plagiarized the assignment and that the best method to prevent another zero being given was to not allow other students to plagiarize his assignment - if indeed this is what had happened. This solved the problem for that year ... and for many years after as word got around.

So... I wish Google would selectively remove links that are clearly submitted erroneously (claiming that, since the studios own these sites, no third party is claiming fair use) whereas preventing links where fair use appear clearly reasonable (such as wikipedia and reviews from news outlets) from being removed.
I don't think it's the Sum total of all data.

I think the problem is that the last mile access is prohibitively expensive. Glass connections in a datacenter are $.10 per megabit, but AT&T DSL over copper to your house is $30 for 1.5 megabits. That copper could become glass, but no one will pay for that upgrade.

The distribution problem is that in order to compete with at&t at the residential level, you have to build a parallel connection and the cost of doing so is prohibitively large. Therefore, everyone is forced to rent access from AT&T, BUT since common carriage doesn't apply to residential access lines, AT&T doesn't have to share.

If sonic.net could build glass to your house, they would, and they wouldn't ever complain of congestion, but because of artificial barriers to entry no new competitors can enter the market.

Does that make sense? I'm not trying to be evasive, it's just a complicated problem. Carriers don't have a problem dealing with aggregate capacity, they have a problem dealing with edge access capacity. Core carrier routers like the CRS-3 from Cisco can move 322tbps+, and they do, but you can't put a CRS-3 in every DSLAM.