skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to work for a company that got Tech Crunched every few weeks. We had lots of money in funding, but had practically zero traction. And our 'app' was pretty much smoke and mirrors. There were a handful of competitors that I felt had a much better product, yet we were the ones who always had articles on TC... Makes you wonder. I don't work for that company any more, but when I did, I suspected that our CEO was paying TC to promote us, or something of that nature.
Note that those are going towards the sun, not away from it, and so benefitting from the sun's gravity instead of having to fight it.

Accelerating to ludicrous speed on the way out of the solar system is much more difficult.

My understanding (though I'm no astrophysicist) is that gravity boost from a planet works because of the relative velocities between the planet and the sun, whereas trying to use the sun's gravity to boost your solar system escape velocity would fail since gravity would be fighting you on the way out just as much as it was helping you on the way in.
We play a lot of OpenRA at work, and we were unable to make RA work in dosbox on Macs. Plus playing in true full-screen mode is much better with OpenRA.
This is a common theme and seems to support the idea that tablets are growing new markets moreso than displacing old ones.
Mars Rover Detects Simple Organic Compounds
saul colt is amazing! he told us about how he used a cardboard banana stand (a la arrested development) as a conference booth and gave out free bananas to market one for one of his companies.
Amazon.com!
Pertinent:

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/hey-seattle-amazon-deliver-meal...
Treating employee-level equity as anything other than the chance for a nice bonus some day is a sucker's game. Especially for early employees who'll take a significant haircut on salary for the privilege of getting "points on the package" (to quote The Wire)

Edit: and that really sucks for your friends. I feel bad for them :(
Isn't the problem that many of those iPad users eventually go from PC to a Mac? I've been in the Apple system enough to actually be ok with using different OSes. I recently got an Android phone and more than one person asked me if it was difficult to use Android while having an OS X laptop.
you will probably be interested in this article that appeared ok Forbes awhile ago, entrepreneurs are the new labor:

www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepreneurs-are-the-new-labor-part-i/

its a long read, but worth it. it basically covers and expounded.upon the ideas you presented in your comment, that the incubators are exploiting the entrepreneurs
Get ready for the age of premium micropublishing
Which would also be the same class of user more likely to change their password after being notified of a mass password leak.
An awful lot of people have new iPads and ancient computers they don't need to replace because the iPad does 95% of what they need day-to-day.
Why on earth anybody would be dumb enough to sell an iPhone 5 on eBay is beyond me.
What types of things do they do on their tablets? Anything professional (i.e., more than just content consumption)?
Google's currently generation of Chromebooks are getting good reviews and appear to be quite viable as second computers.

I know that everything my wife does on her current laptop (running Ubuntu) she could do just as well on a Chromebook, so when her current laptop kicks the bucket, my first choice for a replacement would be a Chromebook, in which case it would be first laptop I've bought that does not have Windows pre-installed.
edit: actually I'm deleting my response to you.
8 Principles for Understanding the Fiscal Cliff
Should have went with the extended extended-battery.
The iPad isn't even remotely a threat.

Android will dominate tablets for the same reason it is dominating smart phones. Android tablets will outsell the iPad five to one within a few years. The volume that Android tablets will bring to market will, however, remove volume from the laptop market.
But, the students that do care about the course are dissuaded from plagiarizing their work. If my experience in uni is any telling, people who get caught copying/plagiarizing will do it again. If you cut the easy access of the more hard-working students, at the very least they'll have to do some research for those answers.

The nice thing about the zero to the stronger student without consequence to the weak student is that they didn't go down together, which tends to make the affected more likely to go confront the issue.

Sure, what I'm saying is not based on any hard data except my years at uni and the fact that a physics professor in my campus did the exact same thing.
Writer Sued for his Twitter Followers Settles Case
If you read the comments, the cloudflare guys mention that, like Amazon CloudFront, it is not yet possible to use your own certificate. That means their cost is essentially zero (some CPU time or an SSL accelerator card). They can serve every request from the same endpoint.

It also means their SSL service is useless for CDN because it will induce warnings in the browser. (You may be able to evade the warnings if you add their custom domain as a SAN on your primary certificate, but I've never tried it, so I cannot speak with certainty to the outcome)
Yes, that looks like a cardboard cutout. The lighting looks different on his arms.
Court Cases Challenge Border Searches of Laptops and Phones
When using a non database-based queue you'll have to find another mechanism to make sure your operation is still atomic.

In other words you can end up in a situation where a record is inserted but the job to work on it is not enqueued, or worse - that an insert fails but the job to work on it is enqueued.

Point 2 is still necessary despite idempotency imo: lets say some value is updated to "a" and then to "b", enqueuing two jobs. If the request to update "b" runs before "a" then your receiver will end up with the wrong value. Same if the initial request to update "a" fails.
They have "Indie Game: The Movie": http://store.steampowered.com/app/207080

So they may add more stuff in the future.
Neat! I'll try that using the g() function. I would replace your $* with "$@" (in double quotes), though, so it doesn't try to re-split your arguments by the IFS. (Yes, $@ is a gigantic hack, but a necessary one.) See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3008695/what-the-differen...
Not really a blog at all: just a collection of snarkily titled animated GIFs...
Most likely whoever posted it just didn't know about it.
Apple rejects drone tracking app
It Just Got a Lot Harder to Get Into Y Combinator
Are We Becoming Cyborgs?
NO consumer would want to replace a PC with an iPad because there is a LOT of utility attached with a PC that it would be a blunder to replace it with a tablet like an iPad.

This is an innovator's dilemma situation, where the incumbent technology (PCs) are delivering far more value than some users need. As such, "worse" technology (tablets, phones) are acceptable replacements for PCs for some of those users.

To you, that extra value is important, but many people just want Facebook, Email, Internet, etc. Those people are often totally happy with a device like an iPad that doesn't have as much overhead or complexity.
There's no office suite included with any iPad.

Perhaps you tried the iWork applications from Apple that they sell for $10/each?
so..demand higher taxes and don't cut spending. Sounds great....
I'm a HTML5 game dev so not really positioned to comment on the main story, but I did try out the Big Picture browser:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; Valve Steam Tenfoot/2095; ) AppleWebKit/535.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.989.0 Safari/535.11

So, Chrome 18. What is it with Chrome 18 given Chrome for Android is also stuck on that version? Maybe coincidence and slow release cycles... (Also, Tenfoot? Hmm)

I also tried playing a HTML5 game with it, which could be awesome with gamepad support. It seemed to freeze the browser and kept playing sounds in a loop, even after I had exited Steam... had to reboot to get rid of it. Guess it needs some work.
Try again next semester. Taking compilers is mandatory for comp. sci students, so they will have to bite the bullet and take it eventually, even if scared of Roberto (somewhat with reason; the course is easier than Coursera's Compilers course, but still a hard course for the undergrads).
Just a note, "Bushisms" are properly "malapropisms". Not that I'm not a foaming at the mouth socialist (Canada, wooo!), but I find it takes away from someone's real point when they accidentally drag a partisan phrase like that into an apolitical setting.
I always thought the right solution to this problem was to wait for both parties to submit feedback before revealing the feedback.
No, not by our definition. But for many people email, web browsing, and writing the occasional text document is their professional life. The iPad is well equipped to do those things (most of those handful bought a keyboard as well).
I remember reading about this on HN a couple months ago when the Field Trip app came out. Some android developer found the new API embedded in that app.

I'll try and find the link.

Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4646039
> On second glance, this whole article is borderline troll bait.

If you look closely, the article was written by Business Insider[0], which is not what I would call a trustworthy source.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Insider
Having recently sold an iPhone on eBay and been concerned about problems like this, I wish eBay would allow non-professional sellers restrict bids to professional buyers.
You're welcome andymoe. I found it interesting to see all these takes, many of them crucial to the movies, put together in this way. Even being a fan I did not noticed these techniques were being used to great effect. I suppose that's perhaps why they work!?
>"There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough."

This is a particularly superb point! I really like this argument.
I hear what you're saying but in my family (Irish so sample size is huge) Dad, my father in-law, my kids (<5), two teenage nieces (admittedly the have access to a Mac, but its probably a 20% use case) are iPad only.
Regarding McAfee's explanation...how do we know that it was his phone used to take the photo and not VICE's? If you were a fugitive...why would you hand your phone over to anyone to take a photo...when it's just as easy for them to take the photo using their own camera? And who is likely to be too dumb to turn off mobile phone GPS? A fugitive or a writer?

Also, as the OP points out, it's not usually the case that the escapee puts together a ruse and then exposes the ruse before it fools anyone. You usually do that after the authorities swoop down on the wrong location, if movies have taught me anything.
Show HN: Reminders re-imagined
Ironically, Medium: http://medium.com.

Otherwise, Tumblr or a gist powered by http://gist.io.
Pretty sure that's a losing battle for you. If you can get the money back somehow later, then all the better, but I'd settle with PayPal for now. Ask for a money order next time, cashing it before sending the item.
Techniques for Making Cities More Walkable
>> rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower

Wow, it's amazing how different our views of the world are. IMHO the rate of advancement is now far, far, far surpassing any other time in the known history. The PC (1975), Web(1991), FB(2004), iPhone(2007) have created such an enormous change so fast. Have a look at
"How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought" by
Ray Kurzweil to see how crucial sciences nowadays are advancing by the month.
Also, it's too early to call the Surface. The RT has flopped, but the Pro is very interesting. I can imagine it being very handy for students.
Wait... 10 year old kids would prefer to play on a tablet rather than do WORK(!!) on a PC?! AND they are unswayed that they can do work on a PC?!

What is the world coming to? Next you'll be telling me kids no longer find their chores fun.
'The Daily' doomed by dull content and isolation
Thank you too. It's very interesting to see what folks in HPC are doing. If your new layer3 protocol is open source, send me a link-- I worked on an alternative layer3 protocol at one point, so I'd be interested where you went with it.
Many times the idea behind distributed systems is to avoid single point of failure. by using Database for communication, you are essentially creating another single point of failure in the form of database (unless database is running on some highly reliable elaborate master-master setup). However you can use systems like zookeeper to get similar functionality and to facilitate communication.
I've been in the same position as this James guy and as a founder doing the hiring. No founder is going to find an over-achieving experienced engineer that will work for pennies on the dollar, make a statistically stupid bet with your equity, and work on something she is not ridiculously passionate about. One, or all of those, have to be flexible if you want the top talent.

On the surface it seems financially ridiculous to have not given the tiny bit extra James wanted. I have to assume the culture clash was the main driver. If he were truly exceptional, he would have been potentially worth more than 10 other guys you will hire that are not negotiating with you. He would have attracted more great talent. He would have pulled off many heroic acts. This short sighted thinking, more than anything, is what frustrates me about the job market.

There comes a time when you reach that point in your individual contributor career where some lightbulb turns on and you realize how valuable you are. You realize you don't get what you don't ask for and start negotiating. But if you're in the job market you have to be able to back up your lofty compensation requirements. This is obviously not a newly realized situation and it has been discussed endlessly in the past. There's a reason great talent in Hollywood makes 100x more than the rest of the cast and crew, and great sales people can do the same, even though they are just employees. The top performers are obvious. The talent in software doesn't have this luxury without going out of the way to self promote. Unfortunately, putting enough proof out there is only possible when you work largely on your own and promote that fact for people to see. Otherwise there are too many varying factors and nobody can know if you were the core reason for the project success.

So, James, go do something on your own, publicly. Make it not suck. Then watch the above-market salary and equity offers come rolling in. Or, start your own startup.

And for all you founders out there. Either loosen those purse strings and be ready to terminate employees that don't work out, or work on truly interesting problems. Otherwise you're just going to end up with a whole bunch of average or inexperienced engineers. Not that there is anything wrong with that talent strategy, just know that it will happen, and realize the implications of that situation.

Who else thinks we need Software Engineering talent agencies?
Seeking Linux SysAdmin(/Ops/Sec/Dev?)/Hacker [remote]
When using a message queue you're forced/expected to flush messages quickly, this is often not the case.
I know several people who have bought at least one tablet in the last 5 years, but not a PC or Mac.
cmd + k (too)
How Organizations Transition to Agile and Scrum
Ha, true. From what I can find, each of Voyager 1's RTGs is about 5% of the total mass of Voyager 1, so about 15% of it's mass total. Seems surprisingly low to me, considering they are basically trashcans full of plutonium. I'm not sure how many more you would have to add to keep Voyager 1 operating longer, but the more you add the slower it would ultimately be going (well, the harder it is to get it going the speed the mission required). My guess is that additional/larger RTGs couldn't be justified or technically pulled off at the time.
This was just the state of the web a little less than ten years ago as well. One of my first businesses as a 12-year-old was running a couple of shared servers and teaching others how to do it as well. The little-big-leagues was actually getting dedicated servers of your own, rented or colo. It taught me a hell of a lot about how to manage a brand at a small scale, as well as how to treat customers (some of whom were clients as well, but with slightly different needs). You're definitely right about some kids not knowing how to deal with the effort and responsibility of running a service business (no matter how small), but there were definitely a few who took it the other way– I would bend over backwards to keep people happy in fear of damaging my credibility.

Anyway, I think it's great that Minecraft can become an outlet for those kids today. Some customers will get a lesson on dealing with people they don't know or trust, and a few young providers will get more than a few valuable lessons on providing a service and keeping people happy.
Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites
SEO does not equal directories. Directory listings don't work anymore and in fact can hurt rankings because they're basically link farms. I wish some people would do the basic amount of research before posting something like "say no to X". seomoz.org is a good place to learn about Search Engine Optimization.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. What I meant was that if you enqueue the job directly and the job is idempotent, using approach 2 will introduce dependencies like the ones you pointed out.
For those who would like to use HN's built-in threshold feature:

http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=150
He writes

(head -5; tail -5) <data

but that's a bit misleading. These don't work.

seq 20 | (head -5; tail -5)
(head -5; tail -5) < <(seq 20)

Both giving just the first five lines.
IANAL (I've said that a lot in this thread), but I believe so. Actually, I think it may be mail fraud in any regard, if he's using the US Mail to take delivery of his booty and you can show that he had prior intent to commit this scam (which is why he didn't have the packages shipped to his home address). So, maybe the right place to start is with the Postal Inspector, especially since this guy seems like a repeat offender with the same MO.
Did I miss the link to the example showing it in action? Or is that left as an exercise for the student?
The majority of the doom-and-gloom seems to be predicated upon their unrealistic expectations from last year.

"Windows Phone will become a viable 3rd choice behind iPhone and Android"

Really? Did anyone actually expect a product that came to market so late, with no OEM buy-in, to be successful?

"Windows 8 will re-establish PC dominance"

MS has an established track record for releasing a hit version of Windows, then a flop, then a hit, etc. Windows 7 was a hit. It's hardly scientific, but most of the people I spoke with expected Win8 to flop simply based on that pattern.

MS is only in dire trouble in relation to the overly-optimistic predictions Y!F made last year. In reality, they're continuing to lose ground as they have been for years. Yes, Ballmer's leadership is still questionable, but it's hardly like they've had a terrible year. They're just continuing to slip and lose dominance.
There are lots of message queues that overcome this. A good example is Apache Kafka (http://incubator.apache.org/kafka/)
Multi-functional survival uses for a condom
I think you have to acknowledge that vice magazine is written with a certain amount of irony intended.
Facebook has the infrastructure and population coverage to facilitate provide this service.

They could charge for "Verified by Facebook" services. Hell, they could replace eBay and PayPal while they're at it, not to mention AirBnB, CraigsList, etc.

They're stumbling around looking for a business model as it is, I don't know why they don't get into this. Sure, easier said than done maybe, but if anyone can do it, it is Facebook. Becoming the one site that has the single largest repository of known internet identities within it is the hard part.
The Story Behind the MailChimp Billboards
because the bubble hasn't popped yet. you fund start ups for the same reason people bought houses a few years ago: the market is still willing to pay ridiculous prices for things with little to no actual value. and the fact that you.have reduced your funding to 80k per start up and also reduced the number of companies you are funding to, what, about 64 or something?, only confirms this theory. you are reducing your risk as well as your market exposure. the problem.is.that you can't get completely out.of the game because.if you did then investors would see that the market is collapsing.and.there would be no liquidity for the.startups you've already funded. you are too high profile to just stop.funding.new companies. its a catch 22. you aren't getting the quality of startups you want, but you have to fund something (that's what YC does), so you just find the best you can find.. you are essentially polishing.turdps and passing them off as gold.

edit: I just realized, there is no way that pg can respond to this. he cant confirm my ideas, because that would admit that there is a bubble and would be very much against his personal long term interests. he also can't deny my arguments because by responding to some random troll on the internet ( me), he lends credibility to what I'm saying, which would only confirm that I am at least partially right, which would, again, be against his long term personal interests. his only winning play is to not respond at all. but crazily, now that I've said this, I've essentially tipped his hand. the non response response is now considered a response because I called him out on it. by not responding he is saying that my arguments hit too close to home to respond to. they are not easily dismissed by a flipant comment.

I suppose he could always hide behind saying that he didn't see my response to his response.

... fuck it, pg, don't respond. I hereby declare that you not responding means that my arguments are wrong. I concede.

I also hereby declare that I am just a random troll on the internet and my ideas should not be taken seriously. this is especially true on hacker news because they break the standard circle jerking that goes on. you guys just keep living in your fantasy world, and ill keep on living in mine.
To play devil's advocate, how could similar businesses make better decisions? For example, buyer/scammer "A" sends money via credit card payment to seller "B"s paypal/dwolla/freelancer/etc--"C"s account, who then withdraws the money to his bank. Buyer "A" then files and successfully gets a chargeback from the credit card company, who debits company "C".

Now C is wrongfully in the red, and they need to make it back somehow. Their only options? Either get it back from B's account or take the hit--which can really hurt smaller companies and startups.

What would you do in company C's position? It seems that the real bad guy here is the credit card company, TBH.
Show HN: 2u.fm is a social music discovery site, my side project for over a year
Economically, the world has seen down years within one decade, depending on what we're measuring. The somewhat-loose-yet-quantified world gross product, for example, is certainly an economic indicator and decreased in 2009.
How a 15 year-old brought an Oxford technology back from the dead.