skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
During any gold rush, there are a small amount of people that get rich and many who don't. The only ones who are guaranteed a small fortune are the ones who sell the tools to the miners. Maybe not the best abstraction, but in this case the company I work at does not do anything except for build products that other people ask for (namely, iPhone/Android apps). We raised $0 in capital, started as a one-person company, and grew to 10 people (a bit under 20 with our contractors) in 2 years, several million in gross revenue this year. We have no debt, owe nobody equity, and make all our own decisions (at the cost of working for the occasionally difficult client). Everybody at the company usually works 40 hours a week at most, although I sometimes do up to 80 in light of my stupidly overkill work ethic. We don't have a product, and we don't have an exit, but we are making real money at least an can perhaps bootstrap our own products at some point. (I think 37 Signals did this? Not sure...)
> Adblock is you, unilaterally reneging on the deal you make when you visit a website.

I never made any such deal.

I understand that ads pay for such sites, and that if everyone used adblock such sites would not exist. I am OK with that.
TheOatmeal: State of the Web
I find it odd myself, but it might be because Android cameras are not as popular as any iPhone on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/cameras/
Your eyes jump around a lot more than you think they do, no matter what you're looking at. Your brain compensates for the effect somewhat, so it's impossible to notice the full extent of the movement on a conscious level.

Some quick reading on the phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
Facebook news feed is a pain nowadays with all the useless stuff my friends are sharing..
The LA Startup scene - An Aussie Doco
Any developed country != America
Consider that you can conceptualise reading code as a linear narrative even if your eyes tell a different story. Our perceptions of ourselves are often radically different from our actual behaviour. One fine example of this is in phonetics: the two /t/ sounds in “tomato” are quite different, yet we think of them as the same sound.
That is a serious frankenstand,

Once I settle into a more permanent location, I'm going to get two height adjustable stools, the air pressure cyclinder type, and put a desk on that with a bar between the pressure switch so they both go up and down at the same time.

That seems much less complicated than this one.
Seriously?

Business software isn't about "what they want", it's about coming up with a solution to meet a business need. If the customer can't define what their business need is (the why of specs), then they have no reason to be in business.

It's not the job of the spec writer to define the business need, it's to take an existing need (after clearly defining it through consultation with the customer) and then defining the parameters of the software - inputs, outputs, business rules.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with agile vs. waterfall development. A well-written spec is crucial to ANY business software project.

We do agile development at my company (a 25 year old enterprise software company) and will not begin work until we have a well-defined spec. I continually reject spec docs if they don't have enough info or if I have questions about an aspect of it. It's your job as a developer to help the spec writer see what problems may crop up and define a solution for them.

I think you need to read Code Complete. It's absolutely mind-blowing the respect for specs you get after reading that book, even just chapter 3.
Well other international forces could break in to those back doors. Or maybe facebook could gladly allow them in. As they say nobody is above the law!
Watch a tutorial. Pause. Open a programming quiz website. Open an editor. Solve a few questions. Get back to the tutorial. And so on.
Living like a Stoic
"For the real bounty -- messages, photos, videos, wall posts, and location information -- a search warrant is required."

Wondering why 'credit card information' is considered a basic record!
That's basically the same syntax but with keywords. How is it 'much better'? And if you're doing something complex like nested ternary (please don't) you can use () to mark sections just as well as your method uses {} to mark sections.
Someone explain to me how instagram is evil and facebook is okay?
It must have been one hell of a time during 60s/70s as a student at UC Berkeley's CS dept. You had opportunity to work with folks like Joy, Thompson etc. (who were also students) who became legends of the field by contributing things like UNIX, BSD, vi etc.
2012 End of the World: Is This Prediction Based on Correct Analysis?
People like to predict what will happen in future especially in 2012. Nostradamus brought about massive destruction and mayhem thought there was comet in 2012. Even Mayans stopped their calendar on December 21st, 2012. If it’s true, human only has less than a week to live. But do you really convinced by this dire prediction? Is this prediction based on correct analysis?
"Productivity."
Solar
Our company is a joint-venture company, located in Shenzhen city of china, which is very near to Hongkong, we dedicate to the research and manufacturing of the electronic products. such as : pure sine wave inverter,modified power inverter, grid tie inverter, wind charge controller ,solar controller, solar panel,solar cell, monocystalline solar panel and other green energy products
Assuming I know the ternary operator, I find the first version superior. Why? It only says "value = " once. I know immediately what the action of the code is when I start reading. Starting with an if makes me worry that the two code paths diverge, and also makes it take analysis to realize that 'value' is definitely assigned.
Ask HN: Dropbox and possibly stolen laptop
I got a notification from Dropbox about increased space and noticed videos getting added to the "Camera Uploads" folder. When I checked the revision history of the files on dropbox.com, these files seemed to have been added from my laptop at home. I'm out of town and don't have access to that laptop.

Dropbox also shows recent activity from the laptop with an AT&T U-Verse IP address. I don't have AT&T U-Verse at my home. Strangely, the videos are of women undressing taken secretly through window blinds. Could this be a bug in Dropbox or could someone have stolen my laptop?
I would expect similar results. Factor and other stack-based languages are not particularly linear, thanks to, well, factoring. Sure, data flow generally runs from left to right and top to bottom, but word and tuple definitions are just as scattered about as in any procedural language.
I think this is incredibly interesting. The most out-of-the-box idea I've heard yet. There are lots of impracticalities, but it deserves to be part of the discussion.

Is it getting traction anywhere?
It's not false if you're paying for it. you've bought the right.
And hello to good old friend, Flickr!
Instagram's loss is flickr's gain. Time for some Real photography, beyond filters!
We use flickr at our lab as a photo dump for an eyefi, and absolutely adore it in every single way. I seriously cannot say how valuable that is to us.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hslphotosync/
Now for a lot of developers half of any project is spent working around various browser quirks -- how far we've come!
> RDS is still just a dream for us

In my experience, with large data sets (I'd say > 100 GB), you want to run your own database instances, if only so you have control over the small fiddly bits you need control over.

RDS: 1) Uses drbd for master failover (this introduces network overhead on disk writes), 2) Only gives you access to super commands through stored procedures, and 3) doesn't let you tune InnoDB to your dataset or performance requirements.
So - that pretty much answers my question. If you actually start to use that 100TB, they drop you as a customer. TANSSAAFL, so, if it looks to good to be true ($0.33/mbit/second on Softlayer network) - then it probably is.

I'd be very interested though, in what people have been able to sustain per server at 100TB without getting dropped.

My guess is that it's somewhere around 32 Terabytes/month per server before 100TB gets a little angsty (100 mbits/second sustained), particularly if you have more than a dozen or so servers with them (filling out a GigE sustained)
=) You're welcome. Have fun and I'll get back to work as well. I agree that stocks and mortgages don't capture happiness, wars, and so on.

For anyone who cares to pick up the thread, steveklabnik has left you with:

Marxism is really about a methodology than a strict set of answers: you use the tools of dialectics and historical materialism to produce a scientific analysis
Apologies. I used the paycheckcity.com calculator, which gave take-home pay after all withholdings. It did not take into account over-paying (and thus the refund at the end of the year).

Wikipedia says federal tax for those making between $83,600 and $174,400 is a fixed $17,025 + 28% of the amount over $83,600.

ftb.ca.gov says that California state tax for those making between $48,942 and $250k is a fixed $2,154.83 + 9.3% of the amount over $48,942.

This gives

California: $6,903. Federal: $21,617.

Then there's about $6600 in SS+Medicare+SDI and approximately $5500 standard federal deduction for a grand total of about $30k in taxes.
I'm getting ripped, healthy, and happy in 13 minutes a week
America is not a pure capitalist society.

Of course. That's why I used the word "implementation". But I thought you had some kind of Marxist critique in mind that relates to some of the capitalistic aspects of the USA. (Since that is what this article is about.)

19th century Marxist theory doesn't have the answer, but it frames these issues in an important way.

Can you describe how you think it frames the present topic?
Actually, it is much worse. Extra symbols certainly contribute to clutter and reduce readability.

More to that, in my opinion, "code flow" in functional languages is completely broken.
The communication is improving and Matz is onboard. I was really happy to see the IRC logs from December 10th. At least people are talking.

As mruby gains traction, people will want to know the differences between mruby and MRI. I think it's a perfect reason for Matz to be involved in RubySpec, and for an accessible language reference.
Instacart: analysis of a startup investment
Welcome to the Instagram Social and Mobile graph baby
Sounds fun. How do I start making games (tutorials, useful libs)? Can anyone please help. I know JS and CoffeeScript but have no idea about Sprites, Collisions, Physics etc.

[Edit] Sorry just saw this - https://gameon.mozilla.org/en-US/resources/
Technical hacker available for consulting
If you are looking for an architect level guy who takes ownership and a doer (hands on), look no further and contact me on 4082039960 or sid4it@gmail.com.
I am very passionate about my work.

Experiences quite broad and depth Open source contributor (have github account and projects) Latest client web frameworks - backbone, bootstrap, kickstrap, knockout.js, ext.js etc., NoSQL - Mongodb Mysql, Oracle and list is endless Web crawlers in perl, python or Java or scrapy Python web framework Php (Lithium, code igniter flavors (pyrocms, fuelcms, etc.,) Java or .NET Beanstalk Queue/Tubes, RabbitMQ, MSMQ ....endless

Referential clients and quite visible profile on Linkedin.

I can offer 30-40 hours of my time per week. I am productive. Timings are flexible and rates are negotiable. Willing to consider pilot projects to check creds.

Thanks
“One of the things that stood out to me in watching the video was how much my mind seems to work like a computer.”

One of the things that stood out to me in watching the video was how much his mind seemed emphatically not to work like a computer at all. His process gave the appearance of a network self-training for a little while, then simultaneously training and producing output. The more times an area of the program was visited, the better the training, and consequently the longer it could be retained. Notice how the results of calculations are “picked up” from the source and “dropped” almost immediately into the output, as though they’re heavy and difficult to hold on to!
Twitter are fairly transparent in their policies. You should read this if you want to get a sense for how a large social network can operate with "best practices" -- at a level that's practical anyway -- with respect to protecting user information: https://support.twitter.com/articles/41949-guidelines-for-la....

Of particular interest is their link to http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2705, the part of the Stored Communications Act that allows a gov't entity to prevent the network from telling the end user about investigations under certain rules.

You should also take a look at the EFF's best practices stuff, such as https://www.eff.org/wp/osp (dated).
Stop whatever it is you are doing and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Android may be the more popular platform in general, but there sure are an awful lot of iPhones being used to take pictures for Flickr, and apparently not a whole lot of Android phones.

The most popular camera on Flickr: the iPhone 4S. Not just the most popular cameraphone—the most popular camera. The second most popular at the moment? The iPhone 4.

Cameras brands, in order of popularity on Flickr: Canon, Nikon, Apple, …, Samsung, HTC, …, Nokia, Kodak, Motorola …

Cameraphone popularity, in order: iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPhone 3GS, Samsung Galaxy S II.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

Perhaps they're causing some bias in these numbers today by not pushing the Android app, and some more bias by not reporting Android phones as a group, but given the data they have, I'm not surprised they push the iOS app over the Android version. It looks like their user base is very heavily biased towards the iPhone.
In the blog post announcing the changes (http://blog.instagram.com/post/38143346554/privacy-and-terms...), they called out a "few key updates." The changes to the TOS were described as, "Our updated terms of service help protect you, and prevent spam and abuse as we grow."

Our "friends" over there sure didn't go out of their way to call out an important change in the TOS. If it wasn't an attempt to sneak this by, it's indistinguishable from one.
Just like being in the group "college educated" is not a free ticket to a successful career, being in the group "engineer" is not a free ticket to a successful career.

Is a college educated person in a better position to have a successful career? Of course. Is an engineer in a better position to have a successful career? Of course.

The only difference between an engineer in the wrong discipline and a college graduate with the wrong degree is magnitude.
> the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic from Netscape.

What is this referring to?
It was quite a shock the first time I saw a homeless person who was younger then me. Until then I had been able to rationalize them away as the responsibility of the previous generation, but no longer.
Eye tracker hardware is tricky and therefore usually expensive, but on the software side there are good tools. I've used VisionEgg[0] with an Eyelink II system and found it quite easy to deal with.

[0] http://www.visionegg.org/
It needs to be said that one of the original value propositions to flickr was their API and famous "you show me yours, i'll show you mine" policy -- basically letting users take all their photos and data, including porting them to any service that also allowed full export.

This includes full resolution, EXIF data, etc. (though it did/does not AFAIK include comments inside the community, which are subject to user TOS with other users, thus this makes sense in several ways)
I still don't get why instagram is evil and facebook is fine.

Is it because instagram is more disposable/replaceable to people?
Anonymous Hacks Westboro Church. Bad Idea.
Carmack: Next-gen games will still target 30 fps
I'm happy to answer questions
Google was the map provider for NORAD's Santa Tracker (http://www.noradsanta.org/en/track.html) for the past five years.

This year, NORAD went with Bing. (http://searchengineland.com/this-year-norad-tracks-santa-wit...)

The official word? "This year, NTS and Google mutually agreed to go in new directions, and we are excited to welcome a number of new contributors, to include Microsoft, Windows Azure, Bing, and iLink-systems, among others, to help us in our mission of tracking Santa. The ability to work with a diverse team of contributors is fundamental to the NTS mission, and we appreciate all of the continued support of all contributors."
Am I the only one who will keep all photos on Instagram? I seriously don't understand what the fuzz is about. Not one single time have I've seen anything bad happen after privacy "scandals" like this and I'm pretty sure nothing will happen this time either.
I think that decade is now. Brains work nothing like computers. Well, as much as they do like plumbing systems ;)
Apparently, someone has actually FIXED it and put it online. Although hard to know if the linked EXE isn't just a trojan. Anyone have a clean room they can test it in?

http://mspinball.weebly.com/index.html

See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378...
I said none of those things and I won't explain what's already written in front of you (talk about understanding context). Just keep in mind that excess of labor force in a sector leads to decrease in wages and increasing demand in neglected markets. Between 'we demand jobs for philosophers' and 'everybody should just study IT' there are more balanced scenarios. Trends don't change in one year cycles - when you notice that something went wrong it's already too late and it takes long years to fill the gap, and only assuming a too agressive correction doesn't happen.
Startups : Demystifying user acquisition
WOOD WORKING
Also hard to imagine paying $400 (source: http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html) for a text editor. Even if it's Emacs.
I went through the entire Santa Call portion of the application and at the very end it wouldn't place the call because it's too late. OK--I get that. However, it offered me no way to schedule the call for later or to save my progress! Be warned!
Precisely, the term big data is about selling stuff to CIOs

Nobody at yahoo went "we need hadoop to deal with our Big Data problem", it was simply a very large amount of data with relatively limited budget problem, and plenty of very large companies are happy using teradata or netezza to manage PB of information.

The new set of tools are often brilliant, but the problems that they solve are almost all not new.
I'm pretty sure that $10/minute isn't hurting anyone working at a VC firm enough to matter. Maybe $10k/minute?

A fine that was high enough to cause financial harm would surely have other unanticipated effects.
Usually "dont feed the Trolls" is the correct advice. But Ogres eat Trolls.
it's better because 1) it falls out of the regular semantics of the language. it's just a regular if expression. it's a consequence of a more elegant and unified design, in other words. that ternary syntax by comparison is ad-hoc. to begin with, it's the only ternary operator in those kinds of languages. (thus people call it "the" ternary operator). it shows poor design restraint, imo

2) it's not punctuation. a ternary expression is a 3-input mapping to begin with. punctuation only makes it noisier.
Nice work Googlers - Now for the Nexus 7 I so deserve for being a good boy this year, can I please have it in black and in its original box so it doesn't get damaged when Santa comes down my chimney. Thx.
If you're happy with a $30k return on a $3m portfolio...

-- You should never be happy with this. IMHO.
Whenever a fellow programmer or myself starts even considering that the OS, .NET-Framework, JVM etc. might be responsible for a bug, I have to smile.

In that moment, 2 things are almost certainly true:

1. The bug is in your code.
2. You are too tired/stressed/overfocused to see it.

So when I find myself in this state, I instantly stop working and go for a walk (or go home when its late enough).

Then, when rested, I tackle the problem again. I will find my bug, or, for the very rare case, find a way to prove that it really is the environment my code runs in.

But most importantly, I will have a sharp tool for the job.
If you wanted to make money as a mobile app developer, would you put your effort into Android?
I was just joking :)

It's interesting to me how often people cite "Unicode in code" as some sort of amazing thing. I once posted on S.O. about the idea that maybe we should have a programming language where the vast array of options in Unicode were exploited to make things like Regular Expressions more readable (avoiding the backslash plague alone would be worth it).

I got smacked down by people complaining that they didn't know how to type anything but ASCII.

Sigh.
Yes, that was my first comment. My second comment was this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928822
Some of the tools in the article are enabling businesses to capture new types of data by making data collection & analysis cheaper and easier. For example, user interactions in an app. User interactions can happen hundreds of times per session, across thousands of devices.

Most businesses don't have to deal with those data sets, because they haven't had the opportunity to record that level of detail yet.

I think one of the most exciting things about "Big Data" (ugh, so buzzy) is that there are so many new opportunities for data gathering and analysis. Now that data storage is so much cheaper, we can record more stuff.

Full disclosure, I work at one of the companies in the list (Keen IO). We didn't know the article was coming out; not sure how they came up with the list or where they got the content (the description of what we do is a bit outdated).
See: http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own-disp?CIK=0001548760&actio...

Apparently that's 18 million out of ~500 million. But the denominator is irrelevant. Nicely done sir.
Ask HN: Any HN readers who play music wanna help try out my app in early beta?
hey guys
I've played the guitar for a few years now and I found it incredibly boring to practice scales, exercises etc. with a metronome.
So I made this app for myself to help me practice better and more often. At some point in time I decided to add a bunch of features and make it available for other people.
I am ready to release it but I'm looking to do a private beta for early feedback to smooth out any rough edges and hit the servers with some realistic load. If any of you guys are interested in helping me out, just drop me an email at infoATgitoriDOTcom and i'll send you a link to the private beta.