skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an ex-ceo of an at the time very popular startup I think that maybe I'm qualified to answer this, taking into account that this is just one viewpoint of a very complex and multi-faceted issue. At some point in time the company I founded held a spot in the top 300 websites.

To answer your question directly: It felt absolutely terrible. I had no idea on how to gain control of the wild horse that had left the stable unsaddled, with a jockey that was about as unprepared as could be. We did the best we could. We missed critical time-slots, dealt with all kinds of trouble as good as we could all the time knowing that we could - and should - do better.

Being CEO of such a company (at the peak > 20 employees on two continents) was more responsibility than I had bargained for. It took away time from those dearest to me, it stressed me out beyond belief and it gave me more experience in a few years than I'd built up in the decade before, both in a business sense and in a technology sense.

It made me weary of people, when you're having that level of success (newspaper cover photographs, TV appearances, the works) business wise you gain the attention of a lot of nice people, but also of a lot of not-so-nice people. They can be extremely hard to tell apart.

Suddenly you're responsible for two orders of magnitude more money than you've ever dealt with in your life. You worry more about your ability to pay your employees than you worry about your own health.

I could go on like that for a bit. Let's just leave it at if it wasn't planned that you were founder of a popular start-up it can wreck your life really well. Better make it something that you're aiming for consciously, then at least you will be somewhat prepared for the journey.

I would definitely not want to go through such a period of hyper growth without a means to control it again, I'm all for controlling the situation and maybe ending up a bit less successful than to end up investing too much of my most precious resource (time) into a company. Any company.

The price on other fronts is too high, which of course is a personal feeling but it is definitely where I stand today. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to be part of a success story, it means that I no longer want to be in an out-of-control situation and that I'll work really hard to maintain control, even if that's at the expense of some growth. I think in the longer term that that benefits everybody.
Merry Christmas boys
It's almost time where I am at the moment so Merry Christmas everyone!
What do you suggest to people who need a good lawyer bug have a low budget?
Lots of wisdom here, people.

Did your app fail in the market? It's your CSS framework. Write your CSS by hand and win over the hearts and respect of your users.

Reminds me of that time my app failed on the market because I left `// Generated by CoffeeScript` in my JS source files and became publicly scorned by my customers for taking shortcuts. I'd write a post-mortem but I'm too busy porting my Rails app to Rack to escape framework overhead like an adult.
DH2 critique in the Paul Graham pyramid:

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I see huge opportunities here. There are people all over the world solving the same local problems, shared across disparate areas. Furthermore, there are resources, ideas, talent, and real solutions being developed in certain areas (even the US and Europe) which I feel should be collaborating with groups like this to better understand their needs and great a more global technology community. Likewise, there are no doubt some incredible, innovative solutions coming out of lesser-known technology centers with which the right localization could make a huge impact here in the Western World.

I'd be very interested to see a group acting as a "liaison" between these communities to help solve problems more efficiently. Example: You're developing a sensor network to measure rain levels across cell phone towers? I have an algorithm that can measure this data effectively and correct for error so you don't have to. We already do this today with the overload of SaaS startups -- you're building some monitoring platform? Use Librato to capture the metrics. You need a disaster response application that can aggregate data and display the most severely affected areas? Use Parse for the backend and OpenStreetMaps for the geo -- no need to do it yourself. If you're solving a problem, there is a 70% chance that somebody either solved it already, is currently trying to, and/or has a good idea about how to solve it. Increase the collaboration to a more personal, local level, and you've got something big.
We need more pragmatists like you.
There are lot of advantages of creating native mobile apps like GUI, performance, reliability compared to mobile website or cross platform solutions. You can check some detailed explanation at http://theappentrepreneur.com/app-entrepreneurs-dilemma-to-g....
I'm curious about what makes Sass/Compass superior to LESS?
No, the emperor of an imaginary country continually advertising for citizens.
Collection of Intel 8080 microprocessors
As population increases and resources dwindle, we get closer to subsistence living or even a population crash. The decade-long cycle might be close to breaking, then.

Yes the trick is to lower one's expectations. Ultimately we can be content with little more than a warm dry place to sleep and enough food.
Does PickFu allow inplace split testing like Google Analytics?

It seems to be more an independent polling service. My idea of split testing is to always be inplace so the user doesn't realize they're being tested.
In my opinion, yes, it is. grep is fast and versatile.

Shell tools in general are relatively simple or at least specialized, and they're built to be composed in novel/useful ways. The interface between all of these is text, aka data, aka what is arguably the simplest interface.
I think that Less has actually won the popularity race thanks to Bootstrap, a nicer website/docs, and front end devs not wanting to learn how to install Ruby. I think it's unfortunate because Sass is technically superior, imo.

http://cdn.css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Charts-...

(Could be skewed by the audience participating in the poll, of course.)
Yeah and pretty much every plan has unlimited bandwidth.
hmmm, I think it's fairly common practice amongst similar software (i.e. firefox, chrome, etc.) to use system time as a signal that you may be connecting to a server that has an outdated SSL certificate. while it's not perfect, it's a good first order security precaution to take (in addition to verifying the CA) to ensure you are talking to who you think you are.
Britain is much cooler during summer than anywhere in the lower 48. Most British houses resist hot weather very well, with thick brick walls and relatively small windows. You probably live in a modern apartment with a lot of glass and very little thermal mass.

One key advantage of heat pump systems is that they can often be run in reverse, serving as both heating and air conditioning. Currently a heat pump is no cheaper to run than gas central heating, but that is set to change within the next few years.
London VC Spared Jail After ‘Groin Thrusting’ Sexual Assault
YouTube says that this video is not available in the U.S.
What I would like to see is an integrated system where the a continuous monitoring device comes with the insulin pump and communicates with it automatically. I want open data as well and good software, but more importantly, I'd like to have a device that learns from my habits and recommends adjustments automatically. It would save me the hassle of having to pore through my glucose readings and think about everything every 1-2 weeks, which is what's required of me now to maintain my health (and which I'm negligent on).

And I'd like my insurance to cover it, but that's an entirely different story.
I'm not asking for my money back but I'm asking for the fee charged for the chargeback.
I read your posts. The constructive parts are minor compared to the derail, and you easily could have avoided the enormous argument. Also, do you really see no downside to the fact that you have basically reimplemented manual sync on top of dropbox? It throws out most of Dropbox's safety features just because they aren't perfect, and throws out half the ease of use.
Well, posting an angry rant is beneficial in at least one way: It's guaranteed to be read by all the kernel devs. Hell, we're reading it, and I doubt everyone on HN is a kernel dev or follows their mailing list. If Linus had been more polite, perhaps his comment would only have been noticed by those involved with the patch in question. Instead, he has simultaneously corrected Mauro's personal misconception and reinforced an important design constraint in the minds of all budding kernel devs.

I do agree that the second post was more effective in explaining Mauro's mistake, and would prefer myself to err on the side of politeness, but I suppose there can be benefits to acting like an asshole from time to time. Some changes are not ok to make, and perhaps it's justifiable to "make an example out of someone" from time to time to ensure that everyone understands why.
> Don't shoot the messenger if you don't like the message.

What if the message is liked but the messenger is behaving like a silly sausage?

Everyone knows that multiple backups are important. If I'd had multiple backups, and Dropbox had deleted items that I hadn't asked it to delete, I'd still be able to comment about that because data deletion is serious business.

This thread isn't (at least, shouldn't) be about data being deleted; it's about unpredictable behaviour from software. When that unpredictable behaviour includes deleting data that that's a valid serious concern even if everyone has great backup strategy.
Craigslist-is-down
The stem cell scammers
Well it works but it's like running on 3 pistons. It's a serious pain to set up, when the Dropbox client is updated you need to update the 3rd party standalone client which breaks half of the time, and you need to manually switch to either one or the other (if you have one 'official' and one 'pendrive' version). Oh and it messes with your icon overlays on Windows. Massive pain, I regret going Dropbox for Teams but I'm sort of married to our setup now. The way it works is not clear at all - I had issues similar to the OP's which required support to resolve.
ack-grep is not ack's related cousin. Ack-grep is the name debian uses for the ack executable in order avoid a namespace collision.

dfc@ronin:~$ apt-file search bin/ack
ack: /usr/bin/ack
ack-grep: /usr/bin/ack-grep
...
dfc@ronin:~$ apt-cache search --names-only ^ack
ack - Kanji code converter
ack-grep - grep-like program specifically for large source trees
dfc@ronin:~$
I think if you write a code that the computer interprets and does something with that code, that is by any definition "coding". I know there's often a "code" vs. "design" distinction, but HTML/CSS are by their very definition codes.
Does anyone else use Sass besides the Rail devs?
Yes, I did get the point, but I don't believe that you get the Physics. It takes a lot of energy to raise the average temperature of the earth by 4 C - much more than we are getting from the Sun "within a few days". Stopping (most) of the Sun's light to reach the Earth would be an effective (if not crazy...) way of cooling down the Earth. Adding a huge quantity of greenhouse gases is not going to turn the atmosphere into a one-way trap for radiation. The physics involved in light being blocked by air-borne aerosol particles and that of the trapping of heat by greenhouse gases are different, and their effect, while going in opposite direction, are not the exact inverse one of another.
Good grief.

Look at bug fixing. There's a list of bug severity.

Crashes machine neeeding reboot

Crashes program but not machine (loses data, possibly saved data)

Mangles saved data

Feature not working

part of that feature not working properly

cosmetic stuff.

> There's nothing wrong with Dropbox.

There very much is something wrong with dropbox if it deletes user data without that user expecting it; ideally the user should give clear explicit permission for data to be deleted.
I am repeating a portion of one of my comments here because I think it could be very useful to many Dropbox users. If you implement this tonight you will, effectively, isolate your local data from Dropbox and any accidental loss at Dropbox will not result in total loss locally. Of course, you are responsible for local backups. If this gets up-voted to the top of the thread it might just help a lot of people avoid accidental loss of valuable data.

My approach for Dropbox on both Windows and OSX is to have the Dropbox folder on a dedicated drive partition. If that is not possible, you can use a drive that will never see development work or any data that will need to be shared via Dropbox (business data, kid's pictures, etc.).

This forces a FILE COPY operation rather than a FILE MOVE operation when you drag-and-drop files into any Dropbox folder. Which, in turn, means that everything in Dropbox could be trashed tomorrow and nothing whatsoever would be lost locally.

For years I have gotten in the habit of having at least two physical drives on every machine: System and Data. If I don't want to create a dedicated Dropbox partition I can usually place my Dropbox folder in the System drive and this will trigger copy-on-drag-and-drop whenever dragging files in from the Data drive.

If you don't have separate physical System and Data drives (highly recommended) you can split a single drive into System and Data partitions or simply split-off a Dropbox partition in order to achieve the same results.

DROPBOX FEATURE REQUEST:
It would be very nice if the Dropbox client software could have
an option to auto-magically COPY files in and out of Dropbox
rather than allowing any files to be moved.
Linus on user program breakage from kernel changes
I think what you're missing is that terminal output is nothing like the disjunct messages on twitter (and even there the inversion is terrible) but rather like the sentences of a novel.

We don't just "habituate to" reading backwards while everything else in the world still reads top-down.

And for that reason you don't break fundamental conventions like our natural reading direction that have evolved over centuries unless you have a tad bit less ridiculous justification than "looking at the world above the screen".
Do you use virtualized desktops for legacy/seldom used applications?
The Making of isitchristmas.com 2012
I bought an AC for my home in Seattle before last summer. Cost about $4,200 and was worth it in my opinion.
A simple example...

// Less
.rounded-corners (@radius: 5px) {
-webkit-border-radius: @radius;
-moz-border-radius: @radius;
-ms-border-radius: @radius;
-o-border-radius: @radius;
border-radius: @radius;
}

// Sass + Compass
.rounded-corners {
// All vendor prefixes are generated for you
@include border-radius(5px);
}

I'm sure there are plugins for Less that can accomplish the same. I just grabbed this code from the Less homepage.

Another thing... Sass has much nicer control flow (if/else, while, for) that can create very powerful mixins.
You probably can- the price of the plane ticket would be marginal compared to the investment.
Jacques - thanks for sharing this.

Although I'm not successful yet, I can relate strongly with something you wrote (as a CEO):

> You worry more about your ability to pay your employees than you worry about your own health.

When you are the CEO of a business - any business, you have ton of worries. I can only think that when you become 'popular' or 'successful', these worries just increase and you somehow dont have the time to savor the moment.
Things the service needs to explain before I'd consider buying it:

Similar technology already exists in the form of Sage [1]. How is this different or better?

From a business standpoint, it's great to host the running code server-side: You can measure usage and charge heavy users, and you have a decent excuse to do so (market expectation that servers resources cost money). But what advantages does this offer that client-side Python in the browser, Skulpt [2], does not?

Also, "a notebook...allows you to explore the system that a job sees...You can...Peek around the filesystem...Run non-Python programs..." I really hope each user runs in their own VM for security's sake.

[1] http://sagemath.org

[2] http://www.skulpt.org
Our company has a corporate account but none of the employees want to use it for this reason. If we could make "corporate" folders and share them using the same account, but not lose the storage credit, that would rock.
This post prompted me to commission a script that calculates itemized page weight: https://bountify.co/ruby-script-to-display-itemized-page-wei....
I believe he was referring to the claim that switching on an old computer that hadn't been synced in awhile deleted tens of thousands of files. Not the original post.
Gonna stand out on a limb for my 4 sisters and fix that for you:

Merry Christmas girls and boys.

;)
Ask HN: What are some good startups that a CS grad student should intern at?
My thinking on what could make a particular startup a good place to intern would be -
1. It has a strong engineering team, so the internship provides good learning and an opportunity to build good network.
2. The product is exciting and requires strong CS skills (as opposed to one that requires stronger marketing)
3. The startup is doing good, so there's a possibility of future full-time job.
He's replying to edanm, who had another problem, and not the blog author. His comment is more relevant to edanm's problem and I think it's fine.
Presumably, Instagram's terms of service, like most others, say that they can change the terms of service at any time simply by notifying you of the new ones. If that's the case, I don't see how there could be a breach of contract.
... It's private photos so you can personally limit its exposure. When that trust breaks, Facebook won't last long after.
> but the messenger is behaving like a silly sausage?

I think that's mostly a format issue, the underlying message is solid.

> Everyone knows that multiple backups are important.

My experience and your experience are apparently not the same in this respect. And I look at a lot of companies every year. The number of times the question 'do you do trial restores of your back-ups' is answered with either 'what backups' or 'no' is way larger than what you'd expect.

And those are companies, not individuals where I'd expect the situation to be much worse.

> If I'd had multiple backups, and Dropbox had deleted items that I hadn't asked it to delete, I'd still be able to comment about that because data deletion is serious business.

Yes, absolutely it definitely is. Dropbox dropped the ball here. The problem is that you can pretty much expect them to drop the ball on occasion, no large service has every been 100% without data loss. Amazon, google, dropbox, microsoft, they've all lost some customer data at some point.

It's the rule, not the exception. When you're dealing with data data loss is the thing you're working hard to prevent but it'll never be 100% perfect. It can't be. There will always be edge cases and the simpler you try to make it on the outside the more complex the actual software becomes. Complexity leads to bugs, bugs (can) lead to data loss.

> This thread isn't (at least, shouldn't) be about data being deleted; it's about unpredictable behaviour from software.

All software that I'm aware of contains bugs. The discipline and experience required to write bug-free software is universally claimed to be present in one industry only: aerospace/aviation. And even there they have bugs, just fewer of them at massive expense. Bugs are the norm, not the exception.

> When that unpredictable behaviour includes deleting data that that's a valid serious concern even if everyone has great backup strategy.

Yes, it is a valid concern. And the way to mitigate that concern is by looking it in the eye and saying 'I don't trust software'. Any software. Including dropbox.
/away on IRC or IM status are pretty much Twitter too.
I have been saying this for so long. Now we just have to wait for the Ruby community to understand why people do Dependency Injection and we'll be getting somewhere.
AT&T Labs Builds an Asthma-Trigger Detection Device
Co-Founder/CTO at Authentise (SingularityU Startup) - We're hiring
Authentise, is creating the backbone to digital manufacturing: An iTunes for 3D printing that enables secure streaming to printers and remote production monitoring. Some great traction, so the product should ready for general consumption Q1, 2013.

Authentise is looking for a tech overlord/founding CTO to oversee the development process. Have a look at the profile: http://bit.ly/XJWBkR and contact me (melissa.mccoy@singularityu.org) or Andre Wegner (andre.wegner@singularityu.org).
The History of the Teddy Bear
I agree - we need more oportunistas to invest in businesses in developing countries.

I invested in this African company: http://unreasonableinstitute.org/profile/mwilkerson/

It was a little easier as the founder was from the US and I met him here, and then he returned to Africa to continue running the operation. Wish more African founders had the opportunity to raise money here.
Hailo Raising $30M at $140M Valuation
And how much will this "solution" (extraordinary evidence required) --cost-- ?? (On the face, apart from economic & natural costs.) Compared to (over-simplified outline) 1. TERMINATE beginning a relentless closing down of the biggest CO2 emitters? And 2. CONSERVE retrofitting human dwellings for far great energy efficiency? And 3. REPLACE building the offshore wind resources to offset terminated emitters?

Who will pay for the cost of such a program? Who will control it (and thus shoulder the responsibility)? What measures will additionally be needed to protect against the failure of the "solution"?
What you're talking about looks like (is...) dependency injection. Rails is a response to the Java FactorySingletonWidgetFactoryClass culture, so the question is does DI benefit Rails, or simply allows us to pontificate about our code? Which is what DHH is arguing against.

In my experience DI has been a great pattern for writing testable code, so do you have any resources relevant to DI in Rails, and why it (DI) is more beneficial than the OPs argument of a Service based architecture? (other than a simple google search like I did?)
Haven't seen it mentioned here; but I am in the process of switching to Cubby from DropBox. It's new. Seeing as how DropBox's most requested features are mostly ignored on their "VoteBox" part of their site, I noticed disgruntled users on said site suggesting Cubby.

Sync any folder, security keys, don't have to use the cloud, better data retention, more space, better desktop app, more features in general.

https://www.cubby.com/

Yeah, almost seems too good to be true. If anyone uses it perhaps they can share some downsides.
They maintained the mandatory arbitration clause. That's a lot worse than selling pictures. I'm glad someone is standing up to FB (it is FB now period).
Oh dear someone doesn't have a sense of humor do they
You also need an Ord or at least an Eq constraint on the b's.
Amazon AWS experiencing issues in US East
Facebook messages 'seen' feature disable extension
To paraphrase someone wiser than me: "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product."

Period.
Correct, LESS is all I use right now because of Bootstrap. I don't get it though, LESS is open source. If it's so inferior, why aren't there more pull requests to make it better?
RESTful API with Express and Mongoose on CoffeeScript
Nothing about his punctuation makes his comment difficult to understand.
What does M-Farm do?