skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Humans like flaws.

I don't think that's it. I think humans dislike change, and a lot of change (especially in technology) involves the removal of flaws. Almost every argument I've read that's critical of The Hobbit in HFR can be put in historical perspective by replacing "HFR" with "dialogue audio," "wide aspect ratio," or "color." You can find this sentiment anywhere you look.
You're looking for https://gocardless.com/ who I'm pretty sure are a YC company.
I'm sure a great admin is worth their weight in gold for an org with a headcount of 10,000. I'm not so sure for an org of 10.

I think, and I could well be wrong, that the trend for successful companies is towards the latter. None of this is to say the field is bad or will go away any time soon, just food for thought.
Rule number 1 of business: No matter what, regardless of who is right or wrong, never, ever antagonize or nurture a conflict with anyone. Especially not a potential customer.

If you can't get someone onboard as a customer, work on figuring out why and building a relationship so maybe you can get them onboard later.

Edit: Also wanted to add that if someone uses your beta product you should be thanking them for taking the time to try out your new product (and hopefully giving you feedback) rather than expecting them to thank you.
Wow... speechless. I was geared up for an unfair dismissal of a very–early–stage product, but this made me cringe. Saved with a hint of irony in my Social Media Ideas folder
You can get loan forgiveness in public sector jobs: teachers, peace corp, and government service. You can become a nurse after college, you don't have to write code, but it is not for everyone. The boomers will be retiring so there will be a huge need for medical and care givers. Also when they go, the jobs they left will open up (minus some losses for productivity). You can go the trade route as well, or accountancy etc...
Weekend Project: WieldyMarkup compiles to HTML
admins are going to be replaced by programs that software engineers write (consider devops, heroku, aws, etc).
The main fallacy of the whole rising-college-tuition thing is that students don't actually pay "sticker price". The actual cost is much less:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-27/misconceptions-101-...
FCC’s Genachowski: Gov’t will open up radio spectrum to improve Wi-Fi
The scariest thing in the article is the unemployment graph from Calculated Risk. Isn't it interested at how Wall Street has gotten better and better at inflating bubbles that take longer and longer to recover from.

I just wish the gov't was more focused on creating jobs instead of all the other BS they're fighting with each other over.
I may not be applying to the easiest jobs to get but I'm finding it incredibly difficult to even get an interview. After graduating from a top 25 undergraduate business program in 2 years and then going on to earn my MA in econ in another 2 all the while playing Division 1 football I thought it might be easier than normal to get a job. Ideally I'd like to be at an audacious startup and even rode my bike 215 miles to a midwest tech event (http://goo.gl/JX1ud). No such luck, unemployed as ever.

On a positive note, it's my opinion that energy prices are a better indicator of economic growth than interest rates and energy prices should continue to fall for the foreseeable future. The only problem is how quickly the economy will artificially inflate after years of QE.
Yes, that was cringeworthy. They seem to have dropped the ball on this one.
One admin for 10 programmers is a huge multiplier. That admin can take care of the non programming needs so that the devs have more time to focus on code than context switching to handle the crap.
Wow, 'ungrateful'? What do they expect exactly if I were to use their one free test today? A thank-you card, or just attribution somewhere if I were to release the product one day? Could they put that up front please, so I don't get surprised later on by a grudge held by their social media intern?
48fps was chosen because it was a direct multiple of 24. You can cut the framerate in half and project it in all the old 24fps projectors.
I think you haven't read CISPA. That's not what CISPA does.
Keep it simple. Charge for reviews, let people choose what makes sense for them.

One time transactional purchases:

$5 for 3 reviews
$10 for 8 reviews
$20 for 18 reviews

Subscription plans:

$5/mo for 5 reviews/mo
$10/mo for 15 reviews/mo
$20/mo for 30 reviews/mo

Work to earn:

1 review for 3 reviews written
1 bonus review for every 5 written

I think a ratio of 1:3 is perfectly fair, it may not be an even exchange, but it's fair. You have to have a profit margin built into the service to ensure its longevity. Reasonable people understand that.

Since you're charging good money for the reviews they have to be very good quality. You'll need a moderation system and a way to very easily let people flag a review as bad and get a review credit refund.
Agreed. I went to a dirt cheap state university and worked part time throughout college. With help from my not very well off parents, I came out without any debt at all.

One of my gigs was Resident Assistant. While it may not have been the most lucrative job, it did cover room and board and included a stipend which easily covered textbooks and fees.
BetaPunch needs to revoke the access of whoever is responsible for writing tweets and have a PR focused person handle tweeting. They were too emotionally invested, and it just made them look petty. Definitely not the sort of discussion you want potential customers to read when researching about you.
Danielle Morille had a troubling encounter with them, as documented here: http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/01/why-i-wont-be-using-b...

As of 25 minutes ago, they were still publicly trashing her in Twitter.
Yeah but if I post a story about my flawless "Dick Algorithm" no one cares.

Who says women don't have an advantage in tech?
Actually, having now gone through some twitter history, @betapunch says "The public test was posted for less than 1 hour then deleted / apologized and sent 2 additional tests as a make-up and not a single thanks.."

So they actually wanted her to say thanks for trying to make up for the way they screwed up in the first place. I guess at least I'm clear if I were to just use their service and they don't screw up?
Motives aside, I'm glad to see more power coming from solar and wind.
Great title, terrible post. What a giant muddle of critiquing everything from one company to a whole industry to a variety of tangential companies in the space...without data. No one except for dollar shave club and their investors knows how many subs they have. They may have very few. They may have a lot. But trashing the for running a promotion in a month and for having a lot of money? Thanks but no thanks.

I love a good rant but this was not one.
So do I, but it doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
> One reason however that some CDs really did sound cold and clinical in the early days was because the transfers to CD were using EQ curves that toned down bass and heightened treble frequencies for pressing vinyls. It made the vinyl records more even, but it made the CDs sound weak and harsh.

You seem to refer to the RIAA equalization curve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

It is true that bass is reduced and treble is increased before recording a vinyl LP, but the opposite curve is then applied when the LP is played back. The overall frequency curve of the whole chain is flat (or as close to flat as technically possible).

The purpose of the whole thing was not to make "vinyl records more even". The actual reasons were:

1. Reduce noise (which is mostly located in the high frequency area, and is reduced at playback due to the complementary EQ curve)

2. Reduce the very high amplitude meandering motion of the needle that would be imposed by high-amplitude bass (thereby requiring a much wider space between neighboring grooves and reducing the total duration of the LP). Because bass is reduced while recording, the needle doesn't wander that much; at playback, bass is restored to the right level.

Moreover, the RIAA curve is extremely deep. It's + or - 20 dB at either end, and that's A Whole Lot. Any CD mastered with such a curve applied at recording (but without the opposite curve applied at playback) would sound downright awful. It's not a subtle effect, it's about the same like turning bass all the way down, and treble all the way up, on a classic EQ with two knobs. That's not "cold and clinical", that's broken.

Perhaps some clueless sound monkeys indeed made such an egregious error back then, on a few CDs, but the backlash was no doubt very strong. When LP fans talk about the "cold" sound of CDs, this is not what they refer to. They are talking about the lack of a certain kind of added harmonic distortions that give vinyl its specific sound, that some people apparently prefer over a clear signal, for some strange reason.

Source: I'm old enough to have actually built preamps for LP players (and cassette recorders). Often my stuff was as good as high-end professional electronics, at a fraction of the cost. But it often looked like something a robotic gorilla threw up after an indigestion.

> HFR may require similar "mastering" to suit the newer format better, changing filmmaking techniques that no longer apply like they did in the 24fps era.

I totally agree.

They use 48 fps, but the shooting and lighting techniques are the same like in the 24 fps era. Of course there seems to be a disconnect.
Bay Area Datomic workshop - by author of Clojure in Action
Don't blame you for shining a light on them. A top post on Hacker News is a tough way, but if they are to have any future success, this is a lesson they need to learn.
Oh, the original statement was true, though apparently it was brief enough that no business was actually conducted... The capital bounced around quite a bit immediately post-statehood. The capitol building in Benicia still exists, and is pretty neat (though the park is slated for closure, if note closed already).
Wonder how this is relevant for Hacker News. Is this soap-opera tuesday?
I found it interesting when an unrelated twitter user posted that they shouldn't insult a "influencer" as it would just hurt their reputation. For some reason this struck a wrong chord with me, while the BetaPunch guys handled this entirely the wrong way, if they were in the right and a "influencer" didn't like what they had to say I wonder what would happen.
Ah, see now we're getting into what are "natural rights" which is much more tricky, yes.

The facts of the matter are that we find ourselves born into some particular land and some particular society. We have no choice about these things, we didn't ask to be born. But yet by being born at a particular time and place causes rights and responsibilities to be thrust upon us. Agreements for us have been made my ancestors, neighbors and invaders without our consent.

My assessment is that despite this scenario not being idea, it is in fact the world we live in and history has its claims upon us without our choice or consent. Life just isn't fair. The choices for us are then not the choice of what our ideal world would be like, what our ideal contracts and agreements would be, but a choice of how to deal with the world as it is. In that case, we find ourselves bound by agreements and in a system not of our own choosing. Again, we are faced with the same decisions I outlined previously: work within the system, leave the system, fight the system. The choice of staying within the system but not abiding by its rules is effectively the same as fighting it, i.e.- expect resistance (the metaphorical gun you mentioned).
2 BOLD predictions: Health innovation news, PRN (Pro Re Nata) - Medigram YC W12
This reminds me of the Dogme 95 movement from Danish directors[1]. It's a set of 10 filmmaking rules among which is:

> The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable (if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95
Updating Screenshots in iTunes Connect
I think PHP (5.x/6x) is still applicable to any developer, new or old, experienced or not. Many of us cut our teeth on PHP's simple scripting concepts, and that shouldn't change. And from what I've seen from past history, it won't.

There is a tremendous amount of backwards compatibility in current versions of PHP that allows one to follow the same approach to Web development that those did back 10-15 years ago with PHP 4. No, it is not "Enterprise", and yes there are security considerations to account for. But the process of adoption is key, and PHP continues to be adopted by a lot of startups/projects. Those that choose to adopt the PHP language as their advanced vernacular moving forward still continue to have a number of more advanced programming language concepts to utilize in PHP with each new release, with barely any breakage with other approaches to using PHP.
The Compelling Need for Game-Changing Influenza Vaccines (.PDF)
That was some serious WTF factor. However, I'm not so sure I agree that public shaming is the correct response.
Facebook hates PHP, but it would be too expensive to convert their 3 million lines of code. They just use HipHop to compile it to C++.
Does anyone see the irony here? The whole point of the BetaPunch service is to elicit critical feedback.

I kid you not, the quote below is taken directly from their site as instructions for site testers:

"Be as critical as possible when reviewing a website. It's ok to be positive but don't just talk about how great you think their site is. These websites sign up for BetaPunch because they know they have things that can be improved upon. They want you to be as honest as possible with them as to your feelings about their website. Figure out what makes sense to you and what doesn't. And be sure to VOICE your opinions as you navigate the site."
I've seen many poor Dogme95 films, but I can heartily recommend Thomas Vinterberg's Festen as both a prime example of the experiment (he was one of the co-institutors of Dogme) and a great film on its own merits.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a few why Go is better than Python or other high level languages for writing an emulator:

- Go makes it easy to write a process for your emulator, instead of a state machine.

- Go's slice types makes passing blocks of memory around a zero copy operation.

- Pass by value lets you reduce the number of objects GC must trace.

- Go is explicit about integer size and sign, makes conversion errors more visible.

It's not better than C, but it's certainly easier to work with. I'm routinely surprised at how C-friendly Go's produced code is -- take a spin through profiling some of the image library primitives and compare them against your favorite C library.
On the helium 'shortage'
I don't see why YAML is a dangerous serialization format - the other type deserializations in the code seem sane and limited enough. (I wouldn't use YAML over e.g. JSON these days but I'm fixing up quite old projects)
No, I gave up gaming a few years ago and now all I can think about is how awesome it would be play a game with something like that.
I might have misunderstood either you or the article, but the main point of the article seemed to be that people don't really have much use for business/econ grads - they need people who will write the software. So you're clearly pretty smart, but are you hoping to be a programmer/teaching yourself to program, or what? How is your story a response to this article?
I've confirmed with my girlfriend: you can try on bras in stores.
I think it strikes the wrong chord because it shouldn't matter whether the person is an "influencer" or not — that's just not the way to talk to anybody when you're trying to build a brand, unless your brand is built on public spats
Also, one vote never makes a difference, so why bother?
IMHO it reflects poorly on both parties involved.
6 Easy Ways to Make Your Website Tablet-Friendly
A little colorful drama never hurts. You can only read so many articles about Lisp...
nope - it's Wednesday. Or possibly even Thursday, depending on your part of the world, but definitely not tuesday.
They're publicly berating a user for not being grateful, so I think it's perfectly reasonable to publicly point out how ridiculous their behavior is.
We can do better than create and maintain a system that intrinsically requires coercion of peaceful people, and in fact this underling violence has a plethora of unintended consequences. We can do better. We must strive toward the ideal.

The gun isn't metaphorical, it's very real.
NBC Saturday Night History & Trivia - Pop Culture/TV History
By the way: Two of the games shown are Red Eclipse and Supertuxkart, both open source and - of course - run on linux. While SuperTuxKart is not that exciting, Red Eclipse is quite fun.
I have mixed feelings on this. One the free video test revealed a gaping bug that I was only made aware of through the video. And I'm thankful for that. But I didn't know these tests were promoted to the public! Not cool Betapunch. And anyways, checkout http://criticue.com for their free service. I'm getting 3-5 helpful reviews a nite. They only reqiuire you to test other sites for a one to one return.
From the article kindly submitted here:

"'We have a more informed class of college consumers,' said Bonnie Snyder, founder of Kerrigan College Planning in Lancaster, Pa. 'Everyone today knows someone who went to college and ended up with a career that didn't justify the cost. They see college as a more risky investment.'"

Yep. More and more of us know more and more examples of college graduates who live in their parents' basements because they can't support themselves with their college diploma. It's time to be more discerning consumers of higher education.

Colleges try to confuse the issue of their value with imaginary list prices subject to discounts ("scholarships") that mislead about what a college is actually worth. Here's an interesting link about how colleges are advised to set their prices by consulting firms, a link I learned about from a Harvard-trained economist and policy analyst:

http://www.maguireassoc.com/services-challenges/optimize-net...
You can, but Go doesn't really have a good way to link in the product at runtime. Maybe something like a Go version of GNU Lightning would be a fun project -- http://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/

You can't wrap Lightning itself, otherwise any possible gains you could expect are lost at the CGO transition.
Can This Man Save Pinball?
That depends on our definition of property rights and sovereignty. You may "own" the land, but you are not sovereign on that land. The larger society, which claimed and defended the land prior to your ownership claims, has sovereignty over it and thus you while within those borders. If you do not wish to abide by the laws of the society, then you cannot claim land within that society's borders without emancipating the land. For better or worse, such rebellions are difficult to pull off.
As icing on the cake, it appears that their tweets discussing the results of Danielle's user test are still public: https://twitter.com/BetaPunch/status/256384610529857536
Wow. BetaPunch really doesn't know when to quit and apologize:
https://twitter.com/BetaPunch/status/289178660366348288
Exactly, treat every one of your customers with respect and if they choose a competing product, attempt to understand why instead of demanding, in a very passive aggressive way, that they become your customer or are grateful/thank you for some free service which you unilaterally provided.
It could also be that it is hosted on the JVM.
[Posting on HN since comments on the original post are closed.]

Hello Sindhya-
I'm Michelle, CEO/Co-Founder of True&Co. I started the company to create a great personal shopping experience for women because for most women, bra shopping sucks - going to a store, spending hours in a fitting room, still not finding a bra that flatters you.

Women told us a great shopping experience is about delivering your personal bra shop to your house. We give women 5 bras to try at home, risk-free. Pay for what you keep, return the rest. All returns go through a 65-point inspection to make sure the bra hasn't been worn.

The algorithm determines which bras we suggest for you - the best bra for you may not be the best bra for me. So far, over 100,000 women have taken the True&Co quiz, We keep getting smarter on what works for each of our 2000 individual body types. Once you tell us which bra you’ve kept, we offer matching panties in your personal shop.

A great shopping experience is NOT about contractually obligating customers to buy every month so no, we are not a subscription service. Our customers return to us over and over again because they've discovered a better way to shop for all kinds of intimate apparel.

Sindya, I hope you try our service and give online bra fitting a chance! Please email me at hello@trueandco.com or visit https://trueandco.com/.
Yes. Some Dogme95 films. Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth. Amadeus. I'm sure I'm missing many others...
What's your revenue split between banner and interstitial? I've only been doing banner so far, but have been gearing up to try Revmob.

GameCenter's payload size got increased from 4K to 64K - you must move a lot of data! :-)

I do agree on chat, etc - I ended up making my own node.js chat server / presence server alongside GameCenter. Custom matching sounds quite cool. Nudging? Hm, could be done with APNS alone maybe, but yeah I see that then you'd be tracking match data on your server alongside GC and that's almost the same as building your own game server.

I agree that GC isn't great, but for us one-person shops the zero maintenance cost is a key factor. At least when it's working and not full of bugs :-)

Great article, still re-reading it a few times!
I'm one of the "us" you mention, and in fact I'm still working with PHP.

The comment added nothing to the discussion, and was still useless. I'm aware of the drawbacks of PHP. I look forward to a day when I'm no longer using it on a daily basis. But Tichy's comment added nothing to this discussion.
"I find nothing" is a fairly strong statement. There are plenty of general purpose scripts one can write in PHP. Also config files don't preclude 'general purpose'. For example, run anything in Java and you'll find out there are plenty of defaults running on the JVM that you can override. Yet no one would argue Java isn't a general purpose language. The fact that PHP keeps these defaults in a file is inconsequential.
It's relevant because it was voted to the top by the Hacker News community. That's why.
Your original comment revealed nothing. I think that's probably why it was downvoted.
> the only reason anyone is interested in this article is because he is framing it in terms of his personal life

That would hold more weight if "gay" was in the title. It wasn't. That he is gay was an easy analogy for him to make. There are many other people that aren't gay that could make the same analogy with aspects of their life.

Being gay isn't the point. That you are gay doesn't add weight to your point either. If anything, it suggests that your ideas like merit to stand on their own.
The frame rate was the least of The Hobbit's problem. If the movie had been good, I don't think anyone would be discussing this. When a movie's opening half hour is as utterly dull as the scene at Bilbo's house, what else can the audience do but take the time to closely examine every little detail of makeup and lighting.
> We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java --

Hey now. Let's not forget everyone's first love: Perl. :D

It's still quietly running quite a few big sites out there, and is currently enjoying something of a renaissance with frameworks like Mojolicious & Dancer, not to mention the releases of 5.10-5.16.
Room and board is double-counting. You'd ultimately have to pay for that anyways (college or not), so it's hard to attribute that entirely to the "cost of college" - it's not a net cost.