skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yes I use this at work. Another alternate is cake watch in CoffeeScript.
Don't mess with the narrative. If hard work isn't the only thing that contributes to success you're going to destroy a lot of people's entire world view.
But yes he was lucky. Just like the fact I'm a programmer right now has a lot to do with being lucky that my accountant father brought home an IBM PC from work in 1980. The choice to actually spend time learning how the computer worked, while an important choice, was secondary to the luck in being one of a fairly small number of people with a personal computer in 1980.
Developer CEO vs Sales Guy CEO
The War Against Too Much of Everything
Patrick - I went to hyperink.com, saw your book under "new", clicked thorough, saw the price of 9.99 with 100% refund (wondered what's up with that). Then saw I could see a sample chapter, was prompted for a "10 second survey" (did that out of curiosity and answered 1 question probably would have been better for them to simply say "answer 1 question"?) then got to what appeared to be the preface that wasn't anything exciting or unique or showed the "content". Saw at the bottom "people who read this article also read..." and clicked on "SEO for Software Companies" which simply said "this is a rough outline of my verbal remarks" and then followed with a brief biography and then prompted me to "complete 10 second survey" (again).

At this point I'm ready to abandon the shopping cart. Just
thought I'd pass this along I realize that this is hyperink's doing (and I like the graphics and look of the site) but this is ironic given the messages that you are trying to give and what you are writing about (I think..)
I wonder when they're launching. They've been invite only for a really long time now.
> The Contour has some traction,

I really like the look and design of contour's latest model (Contour +2), but having seen the user reviews on Amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, I feel that for me the software quality and functionality issues mean that I just won't buy it, unless this is greatly improved.
Why I Don't Monetize Social Fixer: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Donation
> to think about how your change is going to affect the whole system. That's a good thing.

I don't think you've made a coherent argument why that's a good thing. Putting in a printf for debugging is not spaghettification and does/should not affect the whole system.

> Writing code shouldn't be easy

Eh?
You can buy remote control aircraft that can carry up to 10kg weight. We make custom built octocopters for carrying a RED EPIC digital cinema camera, large lens, gyro and a hefty bunch of batteries (check http://londonhelicam.co.uk).

Right now, drones larger than Parrot AR Drone are fairly complex pieces of technology, which will hopefully help to keep them away from crazy people. But I admit it's scary to think what they could be used for once they become a commodity.
"and successfully convinced me on why I should try publishing through them rather than trying to e.g. go through a traditional publisher or even one of the smarter tech-specific presses"

I'm really interested in knowing what they did to sell you on that. What hot buttons they pushed.
Steve Job's boat impounded
The problem is the low social status of software engineers. We're well paid because of our rarity, but we've done an absolutely terrible job of getting respect for ourselves, so most of our work is treated as a commodity.

Consequently, business people don't trust us to do anything that resembles leadership. It's not just that they won't rely on us. They won't even let us take the time (which is why it's better to just do and ask for forgiveness, not permission) to do anything that involves future orientation or leadership.

The reality is that programming is a leadership role. When you write code and design systems, you will affect how other people work, unless your work is of such low quality that no one can use it.

The result of this is that we have a Greenspun's Tenth Law situation where the failure to address a capability results in it being met in an ad-hoc, ineffective way. Programmers aren't supposed to be multipliers, but such responsibilities emerge naturally and, when they do, the people picked to handle them (usually for political reasons, since business people are hopeless at evaluating software ability) are usually incapable of doing it.

Blog plug on this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/the-unbearabl...
DRM is a function of the viewer, not the format, and your ability to create effective DRM on iOS is limited by the lack of a way to diable screenshots (unless it's a corporate-owned device with systemwide policies).

It is also limited to some extent by the lack of remote attestation of non-jailbroken-ness using some sort of hardware crypto module.
It correlates with a massive decrease in crime. It's interesting, but I live in a fairly mixed-income and higher crime area and guns are very unpopular here. I think ultimately it's some sort of weird reaction to extreme safety. Our brains start creating fake risk when we don't have any in our lives.
Thanks, great comment.
Nicely done. Here's a similar site I made previously: http://www.domainjig.com

Beyond the shameless self-promotion I found that getting people to use it would take a lot of work, with lots of alternatives out there that have dedicated teams promoting them. On the positive side, I learned a lot from it; but I never made any significant money from it. If you're comfortable sharing your next steps, I'd be interested to know what you're aiming for with this project.

Good luck!
There are all kinds of opinions about this:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ru/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptabl...
Yes, it's wonderful that you have the band-aid — or maybe duct tape is a better analogy — certainly you miss them dearly when you're working in other languages. But you don't want to have to build your entire object system with duct tape.
Had Apple bought dropbox, they would've made support for other platforms secondary. Dropbox is still the only cloud storage service that works beautifully on both linux and mac (and windows).
Week 3 of my weekend project (Online SMS)
Check out the Bodhi Linux "desktop of the week" page, http://www.bodhilinux.com/about_dotw.php
That's interesting, because in WarCraft 3, by Blizzard, randomness is designed to be "fair". They use a special word for it but i can't remember it at the moment.

For example, there are certain items that can give you a chance to blow a "critical hit", a critical hit multiplies your damage with X.

Say an item gives you 30% chance to do 2X damage. However, the randomness has memory and is designed to distribute the critical hits evenly by gradually increasing the probability for every non critical hit and resetting it for every critical hit. So the first time you hit the chance isn't actually 30% but more like 10%. If you miss 3 times the chance of the fourth hit being a critical is more like 40-50%. The hit after that will be back on 10% probability. (Just picking numbers out of the blue to illustrate the concept, I'm sure there's some more thought through math behind it)

As the nr of hits goes towards infinity, 30% of them will still be critical but the chance of getting streaks of non-critical or streaks of critical hits is very low.

In practice it works very well from my experience. It is however not completely exploit-proof, you could for example go and increase your probability of initially blowing a critical hit by first making a few hits on NPCs and then go to battle against a harder enemy. But that's more of a hypothetical exploit as the time and risk of doing this simply isn't worth those few extra percent.
"...a feature, not a company," is high praise. That's how it should be, as long as that feature can be combined with other such features to create new things.

Very few users are well served by being locked into a single vendor's constellation of hastily slapped together aquihires.
No difference with wealth liquidity of US households.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#Wea...
It's "nebulous", not "nebolous", dear submitter :) BTW "nebulous" comes from Latin "nebula", i.e. "cloud". No pun intended, The Economist!
Yes, indeed. It would be very convenient to substitute an issue of double standard with of rhetoric.
This is why I don't worry about Kurzweil's singularity. The putative Godlike AI will be littered with catch (e) {;} and non reentrant signal handlers and shit. It's the nature if complex systems.
Pedant here: can you configure your blog so that the title tags contain the title of the post and not of your blog (I.e. your name). Would help in SEO, and more importantly for me a minute ago, bookmarking the post under a useful title
Anonymous edits on the Wikipedia article about Francisco Franco by the Vatican
I guess applying this concept on item drops available to every player on a whole MMO-server isn't as simple/fair as remembering the outcome of hits for a single player.
Wait, are you really comparing a personal NAS lying somewhere in your office (or even DC) with a proper cloud storage system? what about redundance, reliability, downtime, just to name a few? a personal NAS is obviously a very good solution for a limited subset of use cases compared to something like dropbox or Google drive, but not a definitive alternative solution, in my opinion.
Unless you make less money writing the book than you would consulting.

Yes, the content is already produced. But putting it all together in a book format still takes time. You need to go over old articles, choose the ones to go in, edit and rewrite where necessary, figure out what order to put things in, add new content, deal with the publisher, figure out typesetting things, etc.

If that process takes him two weeks and earns him $5k but his consulting rate is $5k per week then writing the book costs him $5k in potential income. In that case, writing the book is actually leaving money on the table.
I hope you don't take offense at what I'm about to say, but the code snippet you provided is not maintainable in the sense of not being readable. It sacrifices maintainability for cleverness. As someone above pointed out, sometimes it's better to write 5 lines instead of 2 lines.

We don't write code primarily for the compiler, if we would then we wouldn't be having this discussion because the compiler doesn't mind spaghetti. We write code for the next guy who will try to read, understand and modify the code. As an experienced programmer I can tell you, but you probably know anyway, that in all languages you can write very concise but completely incomprehensible snippets which even you won't understand in 2 weeks.
Same experience on android stock browser, the flickering is too slow for me to be able to see the picture.
I was Adam Lanza
Ever heard about suicide bombers?

They are even smart as real humans and don't care about their life.

The other point, terrorism is not abut effectiveness it's about publicity. Drones are not so much changing the game as it is right now.
If I were to start a company today, I wouldn't touch the space of "social" with a linked list of ten-foot poles.
More important: The code you write in the real world will also suck.
Yeah, there's a bunch of projects that haven't been added to the open source page. This one indeed is one of ours though.
Previously on Hacker News ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4953030 (tuaw.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4953097 (bangkokpost.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4953189 (sky.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4953290 (guardian.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4953811 (bbc.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4954683 (france24.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4955931 (cnn.com)
I think before that can happen we need really good open source software for it, and make it easy for anyone, and I mean anyone, to set one up, and set up all their data to be synced with it.
"But as Patrick keeps saying, if you're in a position to successfully pitch yourself as a subject matter expert for a book, you can make the same pitch for something more lucrative."

Having your ticket punched opens doors plain and simple. In general being published by a major house will open doors just like a Harvard degree will. Doesn't mean there aren't ways around that. Doesn't mean for anyone. But I don't agree that you can make the same pitch for something more lucrative.

Also with that statement you have to make a distinction between the traditional world and the online world. Being a top ranked commenter online means something online but it probably won't get you on 60 Minutes or (as easily) quoted in the WSJ or NY Times etc. I mean if I was in PR I could certainly pitch it that way and perhaps I would succeed. But my job would be much easier if you had been blessed by a major publisher.

"For the amount of effort that goes into writing a book, the deal major publishers"

I've been meaning to ask you this for quite some time. By your karma ranking you obviously put much time into HN. There is no doubt that this has paid off for you. Did you ever wonder or tally up that time and have any idea of how that effort would have paid off if you had followed another route?
1tb is already $100/month on EC2. (Of course, you'd need a running instance to do anything with it.) The real gain with Dropbox is with their incredibly seamless client. DMCA and FISA do not matter to most users.
The Apple app store rankings are public though... so couldn't anyone have seen that the app was doing well, and cloned it?

Beyond raw resources, Facebook's big advantages seem to be its well-known brand and its ability to incubate new properties. That brand won't always help though - in some cases, a focused brand will have an advantage. And a viral property could negate Facebook's distribution advantages - although perhaps that's less likely given how they've cut back on news feed distribution.
Three steps to get lots of followers on Pinterest
original source : http://blog.parts-people.com/2012/12/20/mobile-raspberry-pi-...
I'm not sure this is correct. I believe courts have ruled that you can make copies for personal/backup reasons, but someone with more knowledge would have to back me up here.
Eh, you'd design your deck around low-mana-cost cards, figuring that most of it had to work with 2-3 lands and the higher-casting-cost cards had to be used sparingly.

One of my favorite decks was an all-common blue/red control deck with 28 land, made so that I could bring it into school and not worry about it getting stolen. It was maddening to play against - I'd be like "Okay, I'll flood 3 of your creatures, block your knight with my clay statue, and counterspell your disenchant." Typically games would run 40 turns with nobody doing any damage, and then all of a sudden I'd be like "...and I'll Lava Burst you for 20. Game over." Or the Storm Shaman would come out around turn 10, by that time it's 5/4 and I've got enough mana to counterspell any attempts to remove it, and the game is over in 4 turns. Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
I love Bitbucket. I love the fact that they provide unlimited private repo hosting for free. Only thing I would like to see from Bitbucket is the comprehensive stats aspect that Github provide.
Making something people want means you can have higher margins , means you can easily overcome customer loyalty to existing products or services overlapping with your offering and it means that people don't have to need your product to buy it. How many people need an extreme sports camera? How many want it?

The lesson here is that even seemingly established markets still contain a large value for people who get it right.
I feel like the article is mostly empty scaremongering. Drones are inevitable, you can't stop technology marching forward. They may not be a bad thing, however. More drone warfare means fewer soldiers involved in conflict and fewer deaths. I think a lot of the handwringing over drones is just because it's OMG ROBOTS, rather than considering that these deaths would have happened anyway but would have also caused casualties and psychological damage to the troops that would have been in their place.
This is true. It's actually in my interest they didn't in a way as I'm on a bunch of platforms - iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac.
I'm glad that you have had more positive experience on HN with faith/religious comments than I have. Others have made similar observations to mine.

Some conversations have gone well, but there are more that have not. Most likely my own fault for calling people on their intolerance rather than just shrugging and finding another story to comment on. :-)
Ask HN: Hacking for social good (Education)
Hi All,

I have been trying to get the attention of a few good hackers HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4952891
I really like this! I recently started making simple cocktails, and I am certainly going to use this.

Things I'd like to see:
* I prefer milliliters over oz (I didn't even know what it was before I googled it, since I live in Europe), please make this an option
* Some form of autocomplete, preferably with a dropdown list (but make sure it doesn't obstruct the next textbox). There's a jquery plugin that does dropdown autocomplete well.
* Pressing enter should make the next textbox active (seems more intuitive than tab in this case)
* It would be nice if the ingredients in the ingredient list below a cocktail were clickable. Clicking them should add them in the list of selected ingredients and update the cocktails visible.
ACC doesn't need your money.
So here's something that just happened 5 minutes ago.

A girl I've been snapchatting with texted me and asked why the Poke app is just like snapchat. I asked her if it was better, and she said 'I haven't used it much, but it looks much better', and now we're using it instead of snapchat.

Pretty fascinating. She downloaded the app because they're advertising it on their mobile app.
Flickr offers three months of free Pro access to new and existing users
So, let me get this straight. A typical YouTube channel can have its video suspended if it violates the "viewcount policy." However, when a not so typical YouTube channel owned by Universal or Sony, who are responsible for sending out DMCA takedowns, violates the same policy all they get is a drop in views? Oh how the corporations run everything. This is really really great, Google.
I use git-annex for pretty much that. It's rapidly gaining features that make it a Dropbox replacement.
Here's where I first read about it.

http://archive.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/contract/ar...

EDIT: there's a reference link but I can't open it on my phone.
Shelved my project for doing that because I couldn't fill all the gaps. This rocks!
I don't think it's that simple. For starters, there's probably a very short list of people who own tacocopters, let alone people who own grenades.

If it becomes a problem, I can think of countermeasures -- register the things, ban them in public spaces/require flight plans, detect and triangulate the control signal. Heck, you could just look around; with a low tech system like that, whoever's flying the thing needs line of sight to it in order to identify the target. It's noisy and slow and I'd expect not nearly as effective as stealing a car and doing a drive-by shooting.

But more than that, I'd be very surprised if that sort of thing becomes a problem. Normal people aren't murderers. Think about all the poisons, explosives, and highly kinetic pieces of equipment normal people have access to right now.
Thanks. Still, I noticed the Kickstarter campaign has started, so this is likely worth a heads up…
A New Yorker piece argued that K pop was much less sexualized than its Japanese and American counterparts, to the point that the music stars themselves have to live a pretty straight edge life while in the spotlight
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_...
Something like a game never really sounded like the problem, it actually is a good idea before all standards get dragged into something usable, flash being used to power content and annoying ads was the reason the platform got to this point, I think.

This is exactly what flash was for, power things not possible in the browser until the standards catch up (animation, video), then moving to the next missing thing (i.e.: gaming, 3d worlds)
What an interesting story. Project goes awry and recovers by using the refund story to build interest for new venture. Apple sees hand and raises. Users throw down 4 aces and collect giant pot of cash. Sounds like wins for everyone.
One of my hobbies is FPV flying with RC planes and quads, so I can comment on "consumer grade" drones.

The ARDrone is completely a toy. It has a range of about 20m before the video cuts out and the quad flies away by itself, crashing into a building or just falling out of the sky.

That said, you can make a long distance plane complete with video, gps and autopilot for $1000 - $2000. Depending on setup, flight time is between 15 minutes and an hour, with effective ranges up to 20km.

HOWEVER, very few people are capable of pulling off long distance FPV. Hell, most people fail at short distance FPV. The gear is hard, radio interference is a huge bitch (especially if you are near any urban area) and frankly, it's hard to fly a little plane made out of foam. They get knocked around by wind gusts really easily.

Any rotor platform (tris, quads, etc) are limited in range to 1-2km max, simply because you can't strap enough batteries onto the thing for longer range. Flight times are 15-30 minutes with current technology

Obviously, technology is going to continue to advance. And if the project is bankrolled by a government, all bets are off. But lone terrorists are going to have a hard time pulling off a drone attack. You can simply triangulate their signal (both the radio control and the video feed, which also usually includes a GPS downlink) and know exactly where they are transmitting from. Interfering with a drone is as simple as jamming the radio spectrum they are using...most drones (planes or quads) have about 10seconds before they crash into the ground when uncontrolled.

Lastly, carrying gear is really hard for any rotor platform. Max payload right now is a couple of kilos, usually a DSLR on a gimbal. These have to be lifted by octocopter setups (8 rotors) which absolutely kills battery efficiency. You get 15 minutes flighttime max, and the thing sounds like a swarm of killer bees.
Box != Dropbox. See: http://box.net
This is true of any API from a for-profit company, just look at the problems with Google Maps and Twitter. If I were making a startup today, I would not piggy back off any of these social APIs for this reason.
>That is what threatens Dropbox and friends the most. Once storage becomes cheap enough to price personal NAS clouds below $100 (and upstream bandwidth gets faster than molasses), why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?

Because it's not the price, it's the convenience.

Plus that very very few people understand what "DMCA/FISA-encumbered" and even fewer care about it (for example, I understand what it means, but still don't care).
Startup School 2012 in Pictures
I live in WA. Email's in profile. Ping me for coffee if you're in Vancouver.

One thing that has occurred to me after I formed an LLC, is that being a sole proprietor with a DBA, while considered somehow, amateurish, has one advantage. You need to be a lawyer to represent somebody else in court, even if that "somebody else" is your single member LLC. However, if somebody sues you as a sole proprietorship, you just show up in court with no money out of your pocket. Since, you need to guarantee your line of credit, etc, with personal property anyway, the whole LLC "corporate veil" attempt, which often/usually fails anyway, seems of little value to me, for most single member LLC's.

This is all just my opinion, and I am not following my own advice, but I might follow it in the future.