skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Authy is a simple API to add two-factor authentication to your website or app"

Two-factor auth is a thing where when you log in to something, you also get a text message, or open an app on your smartphone, and type that into the app you're trying to log into. The purpose of this is that even if someone figures out your password, they can't get access to your account, because they don't have the 2nd form of auth (hence two-factor.)
I can't believe this guy has no sense of humor[1]! He's completely serious about providing a service and making tons of money from it.

In one question the interviewer asks: 'could you make a novel for instance?' to which he replies 'well, novels don't usually make money'. Wouldn't you think the correct answer would be 'well, it wouldn't be very good'?

Hauntology at its best[2].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8WuGKyBR90

[2] http://booktwo.org/notebook/hauntological-futures/
Precisely. I'm using "communism" in the American stereotype of communism sense.
I can relate to this from working as the CTO of a company that grew too fast, and then burnt out. I like building things, and I found myself less focussed due to management and business concerns. I'm now working on other projects, with fewer management concerns, and much happier (and being paid more).

However, I think the inverse of the post's title is also true. Your founder (at least one of them), if you are doing a tech startup, should be technically competent and understand the aspects of software development that are important... including not changing design specifications every week, and knowing how to interact with clients to prevent them from growing a project's scope beyond what your small team can achieve in a reasonable time.
I am currently writing a paper relating to this topic. (Nothing special, just part of a university course)

We are studying Seats2meet.com, a company providing co-working spaces in The Netherlands, or rather one of their co-working spaces, BounceSpace, where its free to work but you have to "pay" with your social capital.

What we have found so far is that it is mostly (early start-up phase) entrepreneurs and freelancers who attend the location we have studied. They say that they cannot focus well at home and having the possibility to interact with is great beneficial to them. The fact that the location is free is of course important, especially for start-ups on a tight budget.

The idea behind the concept is knowledge sharing but while there is certain amounts of knowledge sharing going on it appears that most are looking for human contact, and sometimes the human contact can help them out - good.

The academic literature suggest that teleworkers, and it appears entrepreneurs though the literature is quite weak on that subject, are often feeling isolated due to lack of face-to-face interactions such as informal meetings, lunches and "water-cooler conversations" with colleagues.

Our focus is mostly on knowledge sharing and social capital but I think many entrepreneurs could benefit from more interactions with others, rather than just hacking away at home.

P.S. Check out Seats2Meet/BounceSpace if you are in Amsterdam and looking for a co-working space, they got some collaboration with Appsterdam and such. Not to mention good coffee!
Nice. Lack of the ternary operator is the big sticking point I have with really compact Go solutions.

OTOH, in real world code I'm glad to see it gone.

Also just noticed the () on my import aren't needed, first one would have to be a space anyway but second one can be removed to get the character count down by one and a bit more jiggering of the if/else logic can shave another character:

package main
import o"fmt"
func main(){s:=o.Print
for i:=1;i<101;i++{if f,b:=i%3==0,i%5==0;(f||b){if f{s("Fizz")}
if b{s("Buzz")}}else{s(i)}
s("\n")}}
This.

When jasonkester says:

Generally it ranges between "reasonably good" and "better
than most people I know" [...] [b]ut there it stops.

I don't believe it's necessarily true. It has more to do with how they think they are perceived. Look at Kobe Bryant, one of the best basketball players to ever live. I've seen videos where someone will challenge him, "I'll get 2 before you get 10". Kobe takes that as disrespect. This person doesn't realize how good he is. He then goes on to dominate the 1-on-1, aggressively trash talking throughout. Try upsetting a doctor by calling him/her "mister"/"miss" repeatedly.
It's only difficult because computers are digital devices and all the "hard" things for computers/robots to do aren't done in hardware. Trying to have a single CPU do all of the things a robot needs to do is asinine.

Making a robot hand pick up an egg and a cup of coffee and turn a wrench isn't difficult provided that you build in similar feedback loops and low-level "firmware" that the brain does for us, unconsciously.

But if you did that it would take tens of kilowatts to run a halfway decent robot. And that's clearly ridiculous! So nobody does it.
Will Dropbox Add a Music Player to its File Store?
The single best thing we did in this regard was to have a weekly communication meeting, like Google's Friday all hands. Our CFO came from Google and clued us in.

It's an open meeting where successes and challenges are openly described and anyone can ask any question. Someone from Google could probably give a much better description.
> (This I’ve heard from numerous sources, from both sides of the negotiations.)

Nope, doesn't work that way. You can't be both an opinion blog and a journalist. While DF probably does have insider sources most do not, he doesn't have journalistic integrity and can't ask his readers to take his word on something being true that confirms his own bias.
I'm curious about the licencing - he's scraping some stuff from Wikipedia, but it's not clear which bits.

I'm also confused about the super high price. Is this deliberate to avoid having to refund to very many unhappy customers?

And while these books are probably awful he's going to be known by the future people as one of the innovators of auto-generated content. At least he's not breaking spam filters with Markov chains.

It's gently odd that AI got stuck for a while; I very much hope that AI research and practice gets a bit more attention and funding.
Google Sync End of Life
RFC 6648: Deprecating the "X-" Prefix and Similar Constructs in Application Protocols

"""Historically, designers and implementers of application protocols have often distinguished between standardized and unstandardized parameters by prefixing the names of unstandardized parameters with the string "X-" or similar constructs. In practice, that convention causes more problems than it solves. Therefore, this document deprecates the convention for newly defined parameters with textual (as opposed to numerical) names in application protocols.

This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community."""
While your premise is true, hiring recent grads (often) avoids ingrained big-co tendencies. They should be 'adaptable' to your culture but the use of 'fit' might be a little too strong.
A lot of the things that you seem to think of as mandatory are not.

Domain: or get something longer for $9. E.g., authyapp.com or getauthy.com

Design: http://themeforest.net/ $15-$25, or DIY (depends on how much design matters for your niche--for Pinboard it clearly doesn't)

Video: You don't need no stinkin' video

Hosting: Maciej is recommending http://prgmr.com/xen/ for $32 (but can you actually run a modern app stack on just 128 MB of RAM?) Anyway, even if you need a gig, that's $100.
Visualizing the Geographic Connections Between U.S. Doctors
So you weren't talking about the index containing every word in the book? Or, if you were, isn't that be exactly what the most naive indexing algorithm would do?
Borges, not Sarte.
They seem to have taken an interesting approach - it's a Javascript source file that translates the source for a restricted version of Python into equivalent Javascript constructs and then interprets that. A JS-based interpreter for Python-like text, basically.

I don't think I would've implemented it this way, because:

1. It introduces the latency of having to download brython.js with every page load.

2. It supports only a subset of Python, whatever the implementor has gotten around to implementing. That's a pretty small subset so far - no list comprehensions, and I doubt he got the class & metaclass semantics right.

3. It'll run slowly because all the Python code is running through an interpreter, through a language that itself isn't blazingly fast.

I would've done this as an on-the-server compiler from Python to JS, using Python's built-in ast module to parse the source directly, translate to an intermediate representation, and output optimized Javascript. That seems to be the approach PyJS takes, which seems to be a much more mature and well-designed project.
> How comes it that in the US this kind of trust based systems with numbers are so popular compared to other parts of the world?

Like many other things in security, because systems evolve and these things aren't planned.

SS numbers were never meant to be these all-identifying secret numbers. It just happened that we wanted something like that and the SS program had already given everyone something that would kinda suffice, so we slowly started using it. Over time, it just came to be accepted. We just slowly evolved into a situation of using our SSNs everywhere as a personal ID.

Same thing happened with e-mail. Developers needed a secure way to communicate with users to let them reset accounts and such. Slowly, e-mail accounts became the center crux of your online security. It was never designed or intended to be, but it just sort of became that way. It was convenient.

The same thing is happening with smartphones. Two-factor auth is on the rise, which is a very good thing, but what do you use for your second factor? Well, a lot of people are carrying smartphones, so why not use that? Hundreds of people come to the same conclusion and now phones are standard second auth factor. They were never designed to be, no committee ever sat down and said "we need to design phones to be a persons' personal identity managing token", but that's kind of what they're becoming. Our kids will ask us in a decade why a phone number confirmed via text is used to validate so much important stuff.

These things are chosen out of convenience, which is mainly being the right tool at the right place at the right time. Once they become popular there's a made scramble to adapt and actually make it secure, but those mad scrambles are not as effective as a good design from the beginning.

I almost ended with "ah well, live and learn", but... we don't learn.
I was waiting for that to come from the 3D printing crowd, but books on-demand work too.
Less Gun Control; More Wellness Care
I was at the grocery store right before the big Powerball drawing and almost got in line to buy a ticket. Then I realized I wouldn't want to win that much money and wouldn't have the slightest clue what to do with it. It would be more stress handling the money than working.

Now, I wouldn't mind starting a business, selling it, and walking away with a few million or 10, it can give me time to grow into my money. But to win a public lottery worth 19's or 100's of millions... I'll pass.
A long ago girlfriend said much the same thing about copy editing when I did that. She was anything but a fool.
Research Links Earthquake Activity to Waste Water from Fracking
How to Integrate Google Maps Into WordPress Shortcodes
This article will teach you how to integrate a Google Map in to WordPress Shortcodes in a few simple steps.
I agree that getting things done "properly" still costs money. But every single item on your list can be done for at least one order of magnitude less in the MVP stage.

* Domain: $9
* Design: $50 (Themeforest)
* Video: $5 (Fiverr)
* Hosting: $0 (Pick your choice)

I've been thinking semi-seriously about this & I came to the conclusion that with $37 you can actually get a LOT done.
The technical term is "transpiler". However, people tend to use "compiler" interchangeably without much confusion.
That approach might be fine for small projects/webapps, but I stuggle to see that approach working for anything more complex/hard. Sometimes the only way to make effective progress is a full day of uninterrupted progress where you can hold the relevent parts of the system in your head at the same time...

Sometimes you need several weeks of working on the problem in this way to make progress! (e.g. machine learning improvements, distributed system design).
Does this software just plagarize online content?
$137. pmarca seems legit too.
> "Mexican Train"

That's offensive to those of us that use that to describe a sexual position!

But seriously, I agree with you. Since I only played it about once a year, I usually forget to play it very conservatively and get a large score. You don't have to win a single round to win overall, but people seem to forget what the real metric is with the excitement of winning a round.
This doesn't seem very paradoxical to me, and at a layman's level I think one good parallel between a human's "operation" and a computer's operation with regard to this question is as follows . . .

Even as a non-programmer (I am a programmer) I might relate well to an ordinary desktop/laptop running my Excel spreadsheets. I can create a spreadsheet, enter data in cells, enter formulae, format the content beautifully, specify and view charts of the data I'm entering and information I'm computing. I might be able to respect and appreciate the beauty and complexity of how the spreadsheet program was implemented in an abstract sense. I might describe to another person my ideas about how the spreadsheet program was created, its major features and concerns, and its obvious complexity. What I'd be missing though, likely, is (a) the complex interface between what I see and what supports that experience behind the scenes; and (b) the 50+ years of computing technology under the hood that has evolved to support my narrow and visible relations with my Excel spreadsheets.

From the user's view, the Excel spreadsheets, Windows Explorer, the Start button, etc., are the aspects of the computer analogous to a human's thought processes. They're visible and explainable. The user might have some vague notion that files are stored on disk, that there's something called a CPU, that does the computer thing, etc. The user has no clue, though, that the Excel spreadsheet program itself contains but a very small portion of the effort to make its visible manifestations happen. There's an enter support system from file system, CPU, memory, buses all over the place, GPU, video display, chips, specialized interfaces to I/O and other subsystems, ASIC's, semiconductor physics, electricity, magnetism, etc. The hardware, firmware, and software for the latter have had 50 years to evolve and mature. To a normal user these aspects aren't understandable. They understand Excel.

And so for us, we can understand and describe human thought and cognition in an abstract way. But most thought is below the level we're conscious of, and supporting that thought is an entire interface with the physical elements of the body, its nervous system and autonomous function, and the interface of these with the brain.
The uncommitted
Therapeutic Refactoring [video]
Not really, no -- it's been pleasantly surprising how quickly I've picked it up using the above method though. I highly recommend giving it a shot.
MS Windows Chief on Windows 8: You're Doing It Wrong
Man Utd vs Sunderland Live Stream 15/12/2012
partly because this is a bit easier to implement, so the barrier to entry is lower.

Also, no network access is required for OATH TOTP tokens to work (they are derived from a shared secret and number of 30s segments of time since Unix epoch) if you are somewhere with no mobile coverage, or are abroad and don't want to pay roaming charges. You can also get hardware tokens for this reason.

Finally, there is no guarantee the network between your mobile device and the web app are secure, and as we've seen with some nation states abusing wildcard SSL certificates, even SSL isn't necessarily a defense.
How dare they let just anyone write a book. Printing presses should be reserved for the elite and people whose opinions I personally agree with.
... and; What was Punchd? For those of us not familiar with their work.
Are serial killers sane? Their crimes are not crimes of passion. Lots of serial killers kill complete strangers to them.

Do they get to plead insanity in court? Should they be sent to mental hospitals or prisons?

I'm not being facetious, I'm asking seriously, what definition of sanity are we running on here?
I enjoy the hardware, the administration not so much. Their control panel seems to log you out if you don't do anything for longer than a minute, and the graphs have failed to show up on multiple occasions. The whole thing is steeped in early 2000s web UI. First time I encountered their monthly data volume billing I was baffled (hint: over-use costs as much as pre-paying for extra, there's no need to do it as far as I know). Customer support's been friendly though.
70 now, still same idea.

for x in range(1,101):print['','Fizz'][x%3==0]+['','Buzz'][x%5==0]or x
This isn't shocking; Mac OS X will also happily show you your passwords. It stores them encrypted, then decrypts them for you after your keychain is unlocked.
Oh, neat. Thanks for the pointer!
Anatomy of an IT breakdown
Well there is an engineering cost to defining and implementing the interfaces that would make setting "default apps" work. Still probably cheaper and definitely better for users in the long run.
You can generate PDF (without the hyperlinks) with standard psutils (e.g.: ps2pdf). A good PDF reader will offer text search, which is a bit of a help.

Otherwise, I'd have to investigate groff and text conversion utilities to see if the metadata are readily accessible. Interesting question, though I suspect it might take a slight rewrite.
It's seems impossible to interact normally with others if the entire world knows you've become wealthy. The interesting thing about SV is that you can cash out of a successful start up and still be completely unknown outside of a smallish circle. You don't necessarily even need to tell your family the scale of your success. You can just get a bit more generous at Xmas and donate more substantially to your favorite charities. People with simply appreciate the extra efforts rather than expecting/demanding access to your new fortune.
Thanks for sharing the list of all the games, and especially thanks for putting us on the 16th, we have received a lot of feedback since the contest launch and would love to hear yours, we are implementing several changes in the game play, it'll become faster and will have more levels in a few weeks.

Also we are preparing the lunch for the android version :)
Stripe will happily waive the first $37 in fees.
I wonder if he'll ever collide with this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906456
It hit home for me because it brought to light something I hadn't thought about before.

I, like a lot people, have had daydreams about winning the lottery and what I would do with the money. I'd consider myself relatively fiscally intelligent, I'd make a few gratuitous purchases but most of the money would get invested. However, my daydreams also include giving a lot of money to the people I love. Seems like a harmless, selfless gesture, but Jack Whittaker's generosity towards his granddaughter contributed to events that eventually led to her death.

Sure, I have no idea what his granddaughter was like before the money, and maybe she was already on that collision course, but it made me think about how giving someone a ton of money could seriously negatively impact their life.
Support SF Food Bank - ZeroCater Food-For-All Party
It's more that for Apple, users are customers (they buy the gadget), while for Google, users are the product being sold (ads).
And http://www.skulpt.org/
A consultation with a mental health professional could be ethically made mandatory in the same way that background checks or eye examinations are made mandatory in an ethical manner. Requiring everyone to get their eyes checked would be unethical and probably illegal, but requiring people to get their eyes checked before being licensed to pilot a giant piece of metal down city streets is a-okay.
The output is considered to be a derivative work of the input, so the same copyright as the input applies. In the case of Pixar, the original models are definitely an original creative work, so the output is as well.

If you are simply using public domain databases as the input, and passing them through an automated process with no creative input, then you probably won't be able to get (or more to the point, enforce) a copyright on it.

Now, whether the databases he's using are copyrighted or not is an interesting question; as well as whether database copyrights even apply. Not all jurisdictions have the notion of database copyrights. Individual facts cannot be copyrighted; but collections of them can, at least in some jurisdictions. However, I don't know if the databases he is using are copyrighted or not.
Well what I mean by "hard" is that I can train a neural network to do a reasonably good job of recognizing say handwritten characters given some amount of training data.

My attempts to train similar networks to learn the rules of chess (just the rules, I'm not even talking about trying to win) have not led to good or steadily improving performance, despite the fact that there's effectively no limit to the amount of training data that can be generated for chess.

There are a number of possible reasons for this of which I think 2 likely ones are that:

1) The networks I'm using have insufficient computational/storage capacity to learn the rules of chess.

or

2) Even if (1) is not the case gradient descent is unlikely to find a sufficiently good near optimum because the response surface is too complex.
Certainly true, but perception and mobility as basic as they are, are a lot complex in nature than intelligence.
What a greedy misappropriation of an otherwise incredible tool.

I assume what pushed him into the market was the software's economic analysis of the latent market for spam books on Amazon 2010-2014

As a medical student, I particularly love books like this[0] with their description: "If your time is valuable, this book is for you. First, you will not waste time searching the Internet while missing a lot of relevant information. Second, the book also saves you time indexing and defining entries. Finally, you will not waste time and money printing hundreds of web pages."

How is this not fraud?

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Stevens-Johnson-Syndrome-Dictionary-Bi...
If it was $4.95 I might have ordered it as a Christmas gift. But $495 is slightly too much...
This is correct for a mid-level developer.

Jr: $50-$80/hr
Sr: $90-$150/hr
Is there evidence that anyone's actually bought one?
Yeah, it works quiet well actually. You just make the window size bigger and the video scales to fit it. I never have any buffering issues and it's always clear enough to read the other dev's code without them having to increase their font size. The best part, as I said above, is being able to easily switch between presenters.
Yes, that's what I was told when I made similar comments about IE only websites years ago as well.

How short of a memory does this community have if they don't understand what comes after "embrace" and "extend"?
Baltimore MD issued speed camera ticket to motionless car
i always type the code too for similar reasons, people often asked me why i do that "cause its slow", but i like it. i remember and understand better that way.
Bill Gates on Warren Buffett (1996)
Masterless Puppet
Basically, yeah. Goes well with platform-as-a-service for software-as-a-service, full-text-indexing-as-a-service for software-as-a-service, payment-as-a-service for software-as-a-service, etc.

Easier to snap these components together than roll your own.