skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
60% Off Social IQ - The Tool That Rewards Your Social Media Fans
Have you considered apologizing?
Yep this tactic doesn't work well for anyone that wants manual transmission cars in the USA. Most places get so few of them its hard to get deals on those specific types of cars.
Roberto Mangabeira: Using The Crisis To Remake The Market.
I was listening to this lecture on iTunes U and found the entire view very interesting. Thought it worth the share.
Why is Slut-Shaming Allowed on Facebook? Facebook:"No Comment"
The underpinning idea in US governance is the idea that if you don't like the society you live in you can build a new one a little further out west.

Until seasteading becomes feasible SF/the internet is as west as it gets. Amazingly, or unsurprisingly to libertarians, we can build our own society with out government telling us what to do.

What is wrong with people solving their own problems rather than lobbying government to provide a half-assed solution for them?

Frankly, it's rude to go to Washington and tell them how to live their lives, they can see how others live and decide for themselves whether they want to operate that way.
If I don't have the know-how, is it worth my time to learn? Does the true difference in selling direct vs. trading in closely resemble the Kelley Blue Book difference between trade-in and private seller amounts of money?
>Power hungry certainly, but if they were really greedy they could satisfy that far more easily in private industry for the same amount of talent and work.

Not really. The private industry takes far more effort.

A guy like George Bush Jr. (family aside) could never had made it anywhere except maybe in a used car dealership in Odessa, TX, or as a McDonalds manager at Boise, ID. The same applies for most good at nothing, silver spoon fed, sons and daughters of statesmen, politicians and the like.

And it's not like what they make is their salary at the government or GOP. It's the under the table and side deals that make up most of it. Corporate contributions rarely stop at the party level.
Having worked at NetApp for a few years at the turn of the century this is "old" news :-) But it is always important to internalize this stuff. M3 (or 3x mirrors) is still computationally the most efficient (no compute just I/O to three drives), R6 is the most space efficient at the expense of some CPU. Erasure codes are great for read only data sets (they can be relatively cheap and achieve good bandwidth) but they suffer a fairly high I/O burden during write (n data + m code blocks for one read-modify-write).

Bottom line is that reliably storing data is more complicated than just writing it on to a disk.
I started out with the Oreily Head First HTML and CSS as a starting point.

http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfhtml/

Work through the examples using WAMP or MAMP and a text editor, using Firefox to view your work, once you get the basics down learn how to use the Firebug fire extension for Firefox to inspect your own work and other websites.

Once you finish the examples in the book build your own website or pick out a project you want to build. You learn the most trying to build something new. Then improve on it. "I want my site to do this or have this element."
StackOverflow.com is a great place to search for solutions, techniques. I like Tizag.com as well for specific samples.

I also did a lot of tutorials on http://net.tutsplus.com/.

From there . . .

There is a Head First Javascript book you can work on after picking up some HTML CSS skills.

And Head first jQuery would be the next step. jQuery is used on a lot of websites and something you should learn.

(I didn't use those two books, I learned JS and jQuery from tutorials and stackoverflow.com.)

From there I moved on to Head First PHP/mySQL to learn some server side programming and database skills.

Along the way the key to learning is creating and editing websites for yourself or projects that you need/want.

I progressed from websites to web applications to mobile websites and mobile apps.

Wordpress is a skill you should pick up as well. There is a head first book for that too.

I would recommend learning HTML, CSS, check out HTML5 and CSS3 as well, Javascript, jQuery, jQuery Mobile (for mobile web sites), PHP, mySQL once you have the basics of those start learning Ruby on Rails.

Good luck in 2013.
I do. I prefer Thinkpads to any mac. I still see very technical engineers using Thinkpads (but definitely more in the "systems" guys than developers). The reliability is rock solid, you can get similar performance as a mbp at half the cost. A note: If you run linux as your main system - it can be slightly more difficult to get everything running the first boot, but that's it.
In the same area, OpenHatch[1] seems very nice. From their own landing page:

OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education.

[1] http://www.openhatch.org
I would buy a lot more movies if they were < $10 for the HD version. My wish list has dozens of movies that I'm just waiting to be on sale.

The other thing that bugs the shit out of me is they don't have an upgrade path from SD to HD or whatever's next.

That and for some reason the apple tv uses an independent wish list for some crazy reason. They make it easier to buy movies, then they make it stupid to find the movies you want.
VC ’12 Year-Ender: We Suck Less!
Which is exactly why Apple never made Apple TV more than a hobby product, they have never been able to win the battle with the studios (who see the record labels as getting "screwed" by iTunes) budge on the price point. The sad fact that I think we'll have to come to terms with is that, while the music industry was able to be more or less coerced into charging fairer prices for digital content, the studios aren't going to ever go for it and so we won't see an evolution there until the existing players are replaced. Netflix starting to produce their own content is a good first step, let's hope it continues.
>The scum of the earth are often the same people as those who deeply emotionally feel they are good guys,

Sure, but more often than not they are just scum. Thinking of most of Bush's cabinet.
Well, we can at least try to do something. If we could get millions of Americans to do this (though that seems a little far fetched . . .), it could make a difference. We have to fight back.
Mine: Changing a formula (that is working somewhat well) too much at once, without a way to get back to exactly the old way, can really bite you in the behind.

Earlier this year, I took on a bit too much work, hired help, took on a new marketing channel to support the new capacity, decreased prices (relatively dramatically) in hopes to increase volume and changed the service I offered so I could produce it profitably at the new price point.

Any one of those changes could have been a great boost for my revenue + sanity but doing them all in the same month spelt disaster for about 3 months.

Here's what happened: I had too much work and when I brought on new person, even though they were smart and competent, they still needed training. Because I was spending time training them, I didn't spend as much time on sales. (Lesson: You can't just hire someone expect them to know everything you know.)

We had leads but I didn't get enough time to call them. At the same time, a really interesting opportunity presented itself where I could buy leads from a competitor and be able to double the number of leads I had each month. The price was expensive per lead but one sale would pay for a month's worth of leads so I pulled the trigger. (Lesson: Don't spend time and money on marketing unless you have the time and money to dedicate to sales.)

At the same time, I had a nice chunk of change in the bank so I decided to do some experimenting with what we were offering. I lowered prices of websites we designed dramatically to focus on monthly reoccurring revenue ($300 + $30/month instead of the more $2500 + $10/month hosting) we normally charge on average. I also changed the service so it wasn't completely custom, which allowed me to deliver in a much smaller amount of time. Weirdly, sales crashed with this new price point. I can't explain it with reason but I have some theories. That's for another day. (Lesson: Don't mess with a sales formula by changing too much at once because you won't know what broke it or improved it.)

So now I had 2 heavy expenses and a product offering that wasn't selling as easily and when it did sell, it made a lot less money. Wow, what a dingbat thing to do, right? Well the decisions had sound logic behind them at the time :D.

Luckily I was able to restore my business model to the way it was previously after a lot of tweaking and ended up with something that worked better than before... but those 3 months were just plain bad.
Think of programming like juggling. Some genius programmers can juggle 6 balls at once, which is a rare and impressive feat and has a few purposes. This is the Linus-type programmer who can punch out an OS in a week. That's probably not the programmer most companies need.

People want a programmer who can only juggle 3 items, but does it so well they are juggling chainsaws. That's easier to identify - it's their production (portfolio = chainsaws) and the quality of their production (referrals = not missing any arms). If you can verify that people coded what they claim they coded, it should be fairly easy to tell who the good programmers are.

If you're having trouble telling who the good ones are, you haven't found any yet.
Yeah, it does take some getting used to. In the past it was nice to have a thought, write it in Mou, and paste it into Tumblr. Now it takes opening the Terminal, running Make and ensuring my CloudFront distribution invalidated correctly to update my blog, but I do like tinkering with things ;)
The Best VPNs To Use With Torrents
Not outright; you implied it. By saying:

> "how to make more money doing X" and then 6 months later writing a blog post saying "how I made $Y selling a book/course on how to make more money doing X".

Which is not what Brennan is doing or has done, as the previous commenter so clearly explained out.
Haha yes I did. Not sure how I managed that. :P
I can never read the well because I can never tell where anything's beginning or ending. Can someone explain the format? Are the two authors writing asynchronously adding to the bottom over some period of time?
I don't know why they don't make nice bags for $200.

It's because of the demand side of the equation. There's a large enough market of aspirational consumers who really just want the brand name but can't afford to pay the mid-market price ($20 vs $200 vs $2000). The perceived quality, whether it's actually there or not, comes from their ability to wear and show the brand name. Globally, that's a large enough market to make it continually worthwhile for producers and resellers to continue the counterfeiting, especially at the very low end.
One of the most perceptive posts on Silicon Valley I have read in a long time. Very spot on.
Agreed. I stick to the foreign movies section of netflix these days. Hollywood movies have gotten to be utter garbage. I think maybe I go to the movies once a year.
You can push off and take your economic growth with you
The Financial Elite's War Against the US Economy
I overwhelmingly agree and think an additional problem is that a large portion of "technology companies" are not really technology companies. Most are actually consuming and applying technology - not developing new technology in any major sense. For example, is your run of the mill VC backed company churning out an app with a sprinkle of social integration and location awareness a technology company? - I would argue that calling what they do "technology development" is quite generous.

The resulting problem is that most of these companies do not really care about pushing technology forward or contributing relevance to the technological sphere - just figuring out the right arrangement of features to make the things not completely fall apart. Just as an anecdote during my career Ive worked with 4 Phds (Stanford, MITx2, Brown)... in each one of those cases they were essentially very educated software implementers - management would dole out tasks to myself and them that were just typical... we need an ad unit here, an app for this, analytics system for this, landing page for this. I don't criticize the Phds I worked with in that Im sure they were trying to pay their bills like everyone else but it was disheartening that our current system/environment had allowed such great minds to be puppets of management who were the least qualified in the room to be working with technology.
Or because the CEO of a defense contractor plays golf with a few congressmen.
I had this problem.

I told him it wasn't working out and found another co-founder. I was lucky because the entire ideas was mine and I was a developer. I brought him on board because I thought he could offer some expertise and help getting the company off the ground. I was wrong.

I also never partner with "idea" guys. Why? They have no idea how long something will take and in my experience, can easily just leave you when they get bored with the project. I had 2 ex-co-founders do this.

After a few months in, they decided that the project wasn't happening fast enough and move onto something else. The issue is that if you do become successful, they will most likely lay claim to your work. Even if it doesn't hold up in court, it's time taken out of your life.
Because if there is an exploit that allows an attacker to recover your password for instance from a session replay then you're instantly open.
You can mirror the repos, sure, but you can't mirror credentials or issues. At least there's no way that a quick google search reveals
I love divvy, but a file input field is still easier. Both options require you to go through a file browser to find your file, but a file input doesn't make you resize any windows then resize them back.
That nasty code is as equally present in a 5 man development group as a 5,000 man group. Absolutely fantastic folks, but the codebase... <shudder>
Remove censorship, certification process so anyone can upload their app if there is potential audience for that as long as it conforms to certain technical criteria.

If something is legal Apple has no right of preventing users using it and developers making apps for it.

Recent case - where an application delivering realtime information for US drone strikes was rejected.

Apple should be technical gatekeeper and not moral.
Having a fake open 22 is actually a great way to build up a blocklist.
Why do some PHP Developers love static APIs?
Love this:

Their goal is to make themselves as appealing—or threatening—to a big player as possible so they can get bought out for a few hundred million dollars and then devote the rest of their lives to a) building Burning Man installations, b) investing in other people’s widgets, or c) both. They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it.
Mine was probably that I will never be more "satisfied" with my day-to-day life even if my startup is a huge success. I need to find balance and tend to the moment and the people that matter in it.

Second was probably that you can make huge impacts on the health of your business by tending to your pricing and pricing model. Don't just copy from other products that might have way different usage patterns.
Thinking critically about Big Data and health care
Getting require.js to play nicely with rails 3 asset pipeline on heroku. It would all work fine locally but compiling js always had some dependency issue. Finally got it working some week or two later.
I dealt with this exact problem for a number of years. Background scrubbing takes away I/O resources and can be a disaster on your workload if you rely on sequential reads/writes. For that reason, most controllers are configured by default to only scrub when the disk is totally idle which is never. Even if the controller had a better definition of idle, scrubbing an entire disk to find those rotten bits would take a long long time, a disk would almost certainly fail before that.
Discussion (if any happens) on /r/PoliticalDiscussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/15qfi7/...
I did so to be more fair. It is common practice for media companies to profit from user data (through "marketing" partnerships), but after reading my post "arguably" was too explicit. You should have the opportunity to define the terms of the discussion, seeing that it's about you.
By not focusing on sales a lot earlier (and focusing on the product only), we left a lot of money on the table.
The StackExchange idea is excellent. I'll get a sense of how the command should be used in real environments.

I'll definitely check out 'apropos'. :)
Nook Media Takes $89.5M From Pearson
Kenyans now have $50 smart phones that exceed all but the latest phones in capability. We have $50 android tablets. We have reached a sort of technological plateau where stuff we consider awesome advanced technology is more available than clean drinking water. The great stagnation cometh, the center holds, things stick together more strongly than ever.
The dots are not placed to exact addresses, but roughly evenly distributed within census blocks. The number inside the block should be correct, not the exact placement.
No harm, no foul. Happy new year! :)
It was a combination of reasons. Firstly I wrote it better the second time. I think almost any time you rewrite something even in the same language you can do it in less lines. Secondly even with boost and the STL its really hard to do some things in c++ in a few lines of code. My case was incorporating ASIO the framework to get it up and running and get its event loop working as well as the cod to parse the data that was being received. In Scala with Akka it was an actor with the IOManager and then simple text manipulation and I had replicated the functionality.
De Beers probably like this usage of diamonds.
You make a good point. For those just getting their feet wet with Open Source projects it makes sense to start first with a smaller yet active project.
13 People I Want to Meet in 2013
Dear Skype, please fix the following issues (chat messages out of order)
I hope somebody from the Skype team will read this message.

https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-4001

My messages I am receiving often have the wrong time stamp, which then puts the message way up the chat history and i cannot see the message. Or sometimes I just do not receive the message at all.

Similar issues:

https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3999
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3992

This is not a major bug, it is a critical bug! The chat feature is useless. This bug is reproduced on all mac and windows devices.
Jython. It's an unfinished research project/toy/proof of concept that never should have been used in a production environment under any sort of load. Unfortunately my predecessors made the wrong choice and I inherited that technical debt.
For those interested in functional programming, but with a desire for something a bit more pragmatic (and highly compatabile with CoffeeScript), you can check out LiveScript http://livescript.net

Functional Programming in JavaScript using LiveScript and prelude.ls:
http://livescript.net/blog/functional-programming-in-javascr...
Just yesterday, I was looking for this. Thanks!
Thanks for the advice. I've already gone through K&R, but I just got the C Answer Book in the mail a couple months back and wanted to go through all the exercises again. I'll just have to really pace myself and not take in more information than I can handle in a single day.
Which libraries did you end up using?
On 3ware(LSI) controllers you can schedule a 'verify' task to run on a schedule. I do believe it is on by default, but I could be wrong. It is good to tell admins about this being that an uninformed one may turn the settings off without realizing what can occur if it is disabled.
well for me "hair on fire" means "what were you really inspired about/by" to the point you stay up late working on it. For me:

ML for the working programmer - started down this road as I wanted to make sure I really "get" what is being expounded upon by haskell/shen etc.

shen/klambda - every time I dive into this bottomless pool I come back up with a new insight to how programming could/will someday look.

amber smalltalk - close to my ideal collaborative programming environment - the new helios ide and compiler progress bring it even closer!

edn - seriously I don't think enough hype has been made about what edn can bring to the table, specifically w/ "tagged" data. Stayed up one night and wrote jsedn so I could start to use edn in projects.

datomic - There are no silver bullets in database programming, but datomic is damn close. Trying to wrap my head around the specifics culminated in prototyping datomicism, my smalltalk esque environment for working w/ datomic.

minecraft - which has led to working on a full blown 2d/3d schematic system (stay tuned for http://schematic.io) and a rediscovery of "primitive" computer geometry (namely "geometric principles and procedures for computer graphic applications" by Sylvan H. Chasen). This will hopefully serve as a nice open source example of how to meld coffeescript/backbone/datomic and a edn based DSL for helping kids "code by osmosis" as it follows the bret victor principle of showing the code change as the objects are manipulated (and vice versa).
Useful article, thanks.
Trying to find the formula to help companies with no MySQL experience (yet running mission critical MySQL instances) get stable, redundant, & backed up fast.

There's nothing like being paged 10 times an hour at 11pm to get you motivated to get things fixed.
Once you've found potential customer's what is the best way form the message (whether by phone or email) for the initial direct contact? I've found it can be difficult to sound genuine and not spammy.
DDoSing D.C.'s mail system might get some attention. What we (read "I") want is for a lot of people to do this.
Agreed. I've had the same demoralizing experience with books and manuals in the past. What I really hope to do after reading each manual page is use it throughout the day wherever I can. Someone else also suggested reading some StackExchange questions on each command. I think that will be beyond valuable, and provide some real world uses that I can add to my toolbelt.
I worked in direct marketing for three years. Our two most common sources of customer data were credit card companies and subscription media.

I don't mean to levy an accusation here. It's just worth pointing out that using subscriber/visitor data as a profit center isn't uncommon. If you didn't engage in that practice, then I'll take you at your word. I'm sorry that my original language was accusatory. I didn't intend it that way.
What is unpragmatic about Fay?
Not knowing how to research 'hair on fire' problems other people have, so that I could create a solution, add value, make money, one-man-startup style. I know it's kinda meta.

Reading Kalzumeus and other entrepreneurs opened the door a little. Lean startup pushed me along the way as well.
To further improve reliability, consider using a secondary-as-a-service (as well as your self-hosted secondary name service). This will only work if tinydns supports zone transfers (AXFR/IXFR), which as far as I can tell, it doesn't.

I don't use a self-hosted secondary. I use a secondary-as-a-service as my secondary /and primary/, which has the advantage of my VPS going down (for less than 4 weeks) wouldn't impact my DNS's uptime.

I blogged about it this month: https://tom-fitzhenry.me.uk/blog/2012/12/host-your-own-dns-w...
Great talk, thanks for posting!
Ask HN: Who is Not using breakpoints?
Ruby, PHP, node.js, Python etc. developers, who is not using breakpoint feature in debugger? Who is not using debuggers at all?

and why? :)