skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do any YC companies use Errbit or Fat Free CRM?
Hi there,

If you founded or work for a YC startup, I would love to know if your startup uses Errbit [1] or Fat Free CRM [2]. (Open-source Ruby on Rails applications.) If so, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a comment with the name of your startup, and the apps that you use. Thanks!

Full disclosure: I'm applying for an O-1 visa so that I can move to SF and work for a YC startup. I've contributed a lot of code to these apps, but need some statistics for a recommendation letter.

An H-1B visa would definitely be easier, but unfortunately, I don't have a degree or the required experience.

[1] https://github.com/errbit/errbit
[2] https://github.com/fatfreecrm/fat_free_crm
I don't understand why criminal copyright infringement exists. If there is no copyright holder to sue, then by all logic the works should be in the public domain, thus no copyright to begin with.
They weren't kidding when they said they were aiming for low-end devices.
> One exception: not enough pixels on screen to stress the graphics hardware

I'm more worried about DPI/PPI scalability. In theory web-based content should scale rather well, but reality is always more complicated than that.
Python Contract Developer rates – The Appeal
I may be wrong, but I always had the impression on Ballmer as a weird (in a bad sense weird) and inadequate guy. I also usually give credit to him for all ”WTF MS?” moments.
Is the audio streamed over cellular? It would be cool to preload clips over WiFi before hitting the road.
I learned to use hjkl(yubn) by playing Crawl on a macbook which doesn't have a numpad so it was impossible to move diagonally otherwise.

Nowadays I don't even need to think about using any of those keys for moving around. In fact, I use them in pretty much every application that supports them, including Firefox (with pentadactyl) and less.
What You Should Consider When Buying Your First Home In Britain
Yeah unfortunately there isn't a lot of control over HTML5 audio AFAIK. There is a preload option but it's specific to the individual <audio> element.

Maybe as a hack I could change it so each article has a hidden <audio> somewhere that preloads it in the background, then when you actually play back it should use cache.

I don't know if that's wise over a cell connection though, downloading all the MP3s.
I can respect and applaud the man for wanting to learn, When I picked up scala I had the same experience he did. When I went to solve a problem I immediately fell back to the imperative style of programming since that's how my brain has worked for a decade. It has taken real time and effort to _try_ and solve problems in a functional manner. Turns out that's a really good and elegant solution for some problems and a skill that's worth developing. If another language makes that training easier then by all means use it. One of the real benefits of scala is you can be useful in it ( just solving the problem ) while you have all the tooling necessary to make those elegant solutions when you have the requisite skill set to implement them. It would be handy if scalac has a setting like -Werror in C land where non-functional constructs would be flagged in the codebase.
Not all copy right holders have the financial means to sue for copyright infringement. It should be a criminal offence, what is wrong is the level of punishment associated with different levels of infringement.
IBNIZ, demoscene VM with cyclical stack also used as video/audio output buffer
Nicely exhibited by the down vote. Stay classy HN.
IPhones Top Seller In U.S., Japan; Android Winning Everywhere Else
Steve Ballmer does not have an MBA.
> Punishment seems hard to get right.

That's why some advocate focusing on rehabilitation instead of punishment. I'm not really sure if I agree, rehabilitation sounds bit too close to brainwashing and clockwork orange in my mind.
Comparing frameworks using the callgrind maps doesn't really say a thing in terms of performance. The relative weigh of parts inside the framework can be visualized, though you can not conclude by any means framework A is slower than B based in these figures.
I'm finding it hard to follow the TTS (but it's growing on me) but the core idea is superb and I'm catching interesting snippets. Changing the TTS voice between items is a genius idea I'd have never thought of myself but it really helps divide it up and keeps my attention.

A suggestion, perhaps, is to lean on tldr.io's system of providing well written short summaries of Hacker News items rather than the actual content. That way it'd sound a lot more like a regular news bulletin and skirt around problems of third party content. (I know one of the founders if you want an intro but I believe you can grab their stuff somehow anyway..)
It exists because it can be used to make money. Making it inexistent would mean someone would lose money, and as such this it's logical that this losing party opposes it strongly.

If there's will there's a way. If there's money to be made, there's will for it. After all, if we throw enough money at it there's enough will.

Some people rely their income on things like copyright. They have kids to raise, house to pay and so on. It would totally suck for them to be cut from the income.

The whole setting is just sad though.
At one big company where I worked, I was ordered to remove a single punch card from the 70's from the wall of my cubicle. Why? Some executive was coming and they wanted the place to look soulless...I mean consistent.
Nice! I've always been fascinated by tools and techniques that reduce the burden of solving complicated PDEs. After deriving, by hand, the finite difference matrix for a two-dimensional 2nd order PDE with varied boundary conditions I thought "there has to be a better way!"

In a similar manner to you I wrote an internal DSL in Python that lets you specify your system, for example that pesky 2D 2nd order PDE

pde = PDE('dx_dt', V)
pde.eqn = mu_e * E * d(V, E) - \
(1-tau)*sigma_E*E*(sigma_gamma*A*rho_gamma_E + sigma_D*D*rho_E_D) * d(V, A*E) + \
(1 - tau) * (E - gamma*A - r_f*D) * d(V, A) + \
0.5 * (1-tau)**2 * ((sigma_gamma * A)**2 + \
(sigma_D*D)**2 - \
2*sigma_gamma*A*sigma_D*D*rho_gamma_D) * d(V, A**2) + \
0.5 * sigma_E**2 * E**2 * d(V, E**2) - \
(r_f + lambda_gamma + lambda_E) * V

and appropriate boundary conditions in Python. My pdegen tool then works on the resultant AST to generate the primary finite difference matrix. Given some initial conditions this matrix can then be used with any linear algebra library to time-step the system.

You've given me motivation to clean up my code and release it :)
Intel has more than 100k employees.
I should have made the more generic point "MBA types" (high business, executives etc). Not specifically MBAs.
Would that make a difference? Probably not, the depressed person isn't dumb they know they are depressed. Much like if you had hallucinations that the sky was red it wouldn't matter how scientifically certain you are the sky is blue you see red. Perhaps that is a good way to describe it to someone who hasn't felt it, having emotional hallucinations in which every thing brings about fear and loathing even things that should result in joy.
> for a healthy person in their mid 20's

Oh come on, quoting the cheapest price isn't fair or realistic. How about showing us something more representative, or at least quoting the most expensive rate as well?
It roughly correlates to the expression, 'It takes a little bit of money to make a lot of money' -- implying the need to spend a little and also the contrast in relative quantities.
Yeah I came across tldr.io the other day and really like the concept. Would love an introduction.

PS: the codename of the backend that powers all this is actually "tldr" since I can't be stuffed reading :)
It's easier to say things like this when you rowing a boat across a river of gold.
On the styling of forms
3Dbuzz has revamped it's software development learning site
Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users' Life Satisfaction?
A Websockets, Ratchet, Silex and Redis pubsub implementation
A Roomful of Yearning and Regret
Any hint on the prices?

No doubt they will be priced cheaper than the Nexus 4.
Jan. 22 Webinar - Live Coding an IntelliJ IDEA Plugin from Scratch (Part 2)
Wow, amazing work. I too was skeptical about TTS but it really grows on you.

Are you guys using some kind of proprietary solution? Sounds really clear.
On the other hand it's a dev preview, not something designed to be used by high end customers.
Not everything worth doing makes money though...
It's down. Does anyone have a cached version or short TL;DR what i am missing out ?
> it's not about the money. It's an ego thing.

The two things are not always mutually exclusive. Society generally associates money with success. Thus money is the benchmark for ones ego.

Not just with CEOs as either. I often read online comments from warring zealots who proclaim "I get paid a i to do this stuff!", as if it somehow validates their claims.
Frankly I think he just sounds like the bitter old man he is. At least the TPB guys are idealistic in a cute way, but Cherwonik just seems self-entitled and grumpy.

I might add that the continuous allegations of bribery and corruptness does not really help his case.
I did browse the beanstalkd, but I didn’t try it. Since we were moving our infrastructure to aws, it was feasible for us to use aws simple queue service. And I’m using long polling (which will wait 20 seconds to reconnect again) and bulk sending to reduce the no of calls to SQS.
Seems to be up for me still.

Basically it reads text to speech of each article on the front page of HN. Kinda like Hacker News Radio almost.
Glad you're pleasantly surprised. You'll probably come across a few oddities sooner or later.

My startup has licensed some premium text-to-speech engines for a pretty penny so you get what you pay for!
I'd add one more thing to this article: don't throw these projects away, even if they seem failed/doomed/incomplete. Store them somewhere. Back them up. Whatever. You might need them.

Back when I was a teenager, I wanted to write an art package for an obscure computer (Acorn Archimedes). I wrote the first version in BASIC, then decided to re-do it in assembler. The assembler I first used couldn't cope with the size of the project in the end, so I wrote my own assembler; at that point I discovered C, so wrote it in that. Unfortunately the C compiler I used was so full of bugs I decided to port LCC to produce ARM assembler, but then I needed a linker, so I wrote that as well. Got it all working lovely to the point where it could compile itself.

At university I figured Intel PCs were more useful than my obscure computer so... I forgot about it. Lost it.

And to this day, I can't help but wish I still had it... I had written, and lost, a complete C development system, faster than any of the other compilers/linkers I tried, small footprint (it had to fit in a machine with 4Mb RAM), and ARM chips are now everywhere. Damnit!

So please... save your work.
Temperature Rising: How High Could the Tide Go?
SIM provisioning over-the-air (OTA)
Yeah. Came across Hacker News Radio before but the domain has since expired. Anyone know who was behind it?
I think it should be illegal to commercially exploit personally identifying information if it is obviously not published intentionally or with permission. If my personal details were accidentally leaked, I'd prefer every law abiding company didn't suddenly use this information to focus me in their spam cannon sights.

Whether this should be a felony should relate to how conspiratorial the intent and whether there's a reasonable expectation that the persons whose information is involved will be affected. It does sound like weev was doing something that would screw the AT&T customers involved -- a pretty nasty move.
Since childhood I have wanted to build on scale humanoid robot. Though I have not done anything towards that goal except some thinking of what kind of materials it has to have as the body. How to power it and what kind of brain it needs. Though currently the only thing stopping me from starting to build skeleton for it is money. :P
Is there anybody left?!?
I don't necessarily think that it needs to be a Forever Project, as long as it lasts for at least 6 months or so.

I've heard many smart people recommend having a bunch of small problems to always think of. I think Richard Feynman recommended it.

Some examples of these kind of mental problems that I've been dealing with over the years:

* How long does it take from the time that the planets are aligned to the time that they are aligned once again. This was a problem I thought of in ninth grade and was the reason why I learn programming at that age on my spare time.

* How does one construct a P2P filesharing application that does not have a central single-point of failure. I thought about this for a year or so in high school. Obviously, I also wanted anonyminity for the users if possible.

* Dreaming about the perfect configuration management.

* Mining common log line patterns and automatically extracting useful information for debugging, surveillance etcetera. How I would scale such an application, what it could be used for etcetera. This actually resulted in https://github.com/JensRantil/disco-slct

* Last year or so; How to develop a web application that uses CQRS, event sourcing and a distributed model. This also involves thinking about how this would enable smooth upgrading of subsystems, scaling of such system and security.
The Keon:
CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 1Ghz.
UMTS 2100/1900/900 (3G HSPA).
GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (2G EDGE).
Screen 3.5" HVGA Multitouch.
Camera 3 MP.
4 GB (ROM) and 512 (RAM).
MicroSD, Wifi N, Light & Prox. Sensor, G-Sensor, GPS, MicroUSB.
Battery 1580 mAh.

The Peak:
CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.2Ghz x2.
UMTS 2100/1900/900 (3G HSPA).
GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (2G EDGE).
Screen 4.3" qHD IPS Multitouch.
Camera 8 MP (back) + 2 MP (front).
4 GB (ROM) and 512 (RAM).
MicroSD, Wifi N, Light & Prox. Sensor, G-Sensor, GPS, MicroUSB, Flash (camera).
Battery 1800 mAh.
Edit should end “so don't be put off by it.”?
I've watched those tutorial videos as well. They blew my mind.

Just speaking about Houdini makes me want to pick it up again.

I found that the complexity lied in knowing all the different nodes, the jargon, and of course when to use what (which comes with experience).

After a month or so I bailed out because of time constraints, my daily job, and other side projects.
"According to our findings,
passive following triggers invidious emotions, with users mainly envying happiness
of others, the way others spend their vacations; and socialize."

"Finally, our results offer an explanation to the ever increasing wave of selfpresentation and narcissism behavior witnessed on social networks – a phenomenon we refer to
as the self-promotion - envy spiral."
Anders Hejlsberg, hacker who did not graduate (2006)
To be exact, he dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA program to join Microsoft.
Versioning AST's has been on my mind for some time as well, I got interested it as a way to store source-code in a coding-style-neutral way (check it in & out with whatever coding style you're used to), and to be able to categorize check-ins based on the type of changes to the code (only comments, moved code, variable renames, etc).

Probably you already know about it, but have a look at papers aboht the tree edit/tree distance problem:

http://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=tree+edit+problem&hl=...

It's exactly what you would need to store versioned trees such as AST's.
Pretty cool in itself. Good demo of SoundGecko too.

I've been doing something similar on my iPhone for awhile:

1. Send articles to Pocket

2. Highlight article

3. Two-finger tap to bring up context menu then tap Speak

With TTS voice speed set to 1.6x and British Female and it's a good way to wake up in the morning and absorb in wikipedia entries or news.
Would be interesting to see statistics of average sentence per crime. Something that would rank all crimes from highest average sentence to lowest, and where visitors can vote for sentences to go up or down. Crowdsourcing justice? Or is it better to leave justice in the hands of the few?
Are You Running Your Business Like a Greedy Search Algorithm?
Tell HN: The Notifo profile field is gone
Background: http://blog.notifo.com/notifo

Anyone notice any other changes pushed to the site?
Automatic File Replication Across Two Storage Servers (GlusterFS + Ubuntu 12.10)
95% of the Time, Liars Tell The Truth
What do technical managers do, anyway?
This study makes a lot of sense and I totally agree on its findings.

But: the more I think about it I come to the conclusion that Facebook -- still something depressing if you use too often -- became a key driver for all my accomplishments the last years.

The envy the study describes is nothing new, we had these kind of feelings always towards our peer group and FB just increased and accelerated those feelings to the max. But nonetheless those feelings of inferiority pushes one to new limits, drives people to be more active (in the long-run) because they want to be on par to their peer group's top achievers.
Clickable: http://blog.notifo.com/notifo
Every Obama conspiracy theory
Google made €50 million copyright offer, French publishers want €100 million
Did you build SoundGecko or you built a Hacker News channel on SoundGecko?

It's a cool service. Right now, I send articles to Pocket so it can be read to me.
Australian attorney is granted a patent for the wheel (2001)
Figure 1 is a particular howler.
I'd be awesome if this was on github so people could improve the parsing. For one, it reads stuff that is obviously not meant to be read "live", but are just informational tables.

I'd also be awesome if this was a Shoutcast stream that also had live people doing shows as well.

Edit: Also, switch voices between entries, and continue reading entires one after the next.
They use single string commercial components but have tested them in a particle acceleration for radiation tolerance. Also the software must take into account that upsets or breakage can happen.

NASA and other space organizations and companies do much more expensive and comprehensive radiation testing, something like 100,000 dollars per integrated circuit, while MOST probably did all the components in total for that kind of sum.

And MOST is in a 800 km orbit, worse radiation than ISS.

It's space technology, all kinds of myths are spread around. If there would be more openness, diversity and launch opportunities, progress would really take off as new solutions could be simply tested.
Someone should make a platform independent message search tool
I’m as excited about the potential of Facebook’s Graph Search as I’m sure most people are, so I’ve signed up and await my turn in the queue. And like most people, even with its blatant bias, I hoped Google’s Search plus your World would result in better overall search results. With focus being on developing and improving these platform dependent search tools, I find one of my most immediate search needs remains unmet; that to just search stuff that’s been shared with me, privately or not, across the all these fragmented internet and mobile networks.
Yes it should have - now fixed - thank you. I appreciate that, not least because it's nice to know someone read it! My recent submission about the script to download saved stories has had fewer upvotes than expected, and I've been wondering if that's because people don't want it, or people haven't read it. I guess now I know, so I can stop bothering about it.

BTW - I see you're near London. I'm giving a talk in London on Feb 28th - care to meet? I'll buy you a coffee (or appropriate alternative)
> Shouldn't this be a civil issue, to be settled between the two parties

I kinda understand at least one reason why it's not that simple. In high profile cases like this, you could have hundreds of copyright holders wanting action. Coordinating all those people could be impossible, and thus legitimate cases would fall flat on their faces just for lack of cooperation.
If you really want to have a good (but easy) introduction to quantum mechanics (and quantum information) I recommend http://www.amazon.com/Six-Quantum-Pieces-Course-Physics/dp/9... - it requires nothing more than some linear algebra.

(As a side note, I'm trying to make a computer game of quantum mechanics, to make people learn by playing.)
> Is Microsoft the last big company? They had to grow to that size to handle the marketing and distribution globally - their most obvious successor is Google who operate at a similar reach but something like 1/10 of people

Er... Google has about half MSFT's employees, Apple and Amazon have about 75%, Intel has slightly more employees than MSFT. And they're not huge companies in terms of employees headcount: retail groups are in the multiple hundred thousands (Walmart 2m, Tesco and Carrefour 500k), Automotive groups are also up there (VW 500k, Toyota 300k, GM and Daimler >250k), etc...
For Startups, First Impressions Are Everything
Inspired by a basketball free throw, considering dribbble already has that theme going for it.
Probably worth looking at the Fortune Global 500 to see lists of really large companies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500

e.g. Walmart has 2.2 million employees
I think this is hillarious, Ballmers best moments. http://youtu.be/e8M6S8EKbnU
> instead of using the one thing that I believe could have competed in the market - Maemo and then Meego

I owned an N900 and I liked it, because it had a full terminal and could run a Debian desktop on it if I really wanted to, but normal people don't care about any of that.

If Nokia had stuck with Maemo and Meego they would be in the same position as they are now, except their "ecosystem" would have less apps, less Microsoft-marketing dollars behind it, and Nokia wouldn't be getting $250 million cheques from Microsoft every quarter.
It varies too much, that's why the service doesn't link to the psds directly when available. Usually the creator will specify some loose terms.
GitHub blocked in China
Img.ly - it's like Instagram but for the browser.
Relevant to the discussion at hand: http://thisisindexed.com/2012/12/somebody-teach-this-kid-to-...

I think the age matters to give appropriate advice and direction. With the case of the 14 year old, they don't have the life experiences to be able to get certain analogies, and they have a different set of opportunities available to them. At 14, you can prep differently, you can go to college for computer science. For the 40 year old weekend hobbiest, going back to college is generally not an option, so the path they have to take to get proficient is definitely different than the options the 14 year old has.
I'm a co-founder of the startup that built SoundGecko. But more specifically I had a bigger part in building this "feature" for Hacker News since it's something I actually wanted to use personally.
For anyone interested in the various guesses at what the number could actually be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe...

That said, it does seem even if we gain a mind-boggling level of energy manipulation, 10^20..10^40 years is a rough expectation for regular matter, as we know it, to continue to exist.
His punishment is work for the public good for X hours in a way he chooses.
He chooses to digitalize and publish works of creativity that deserves to be seen by the masses.
As he already done that already; he gets as change, the thank you from the public and a medal for his work even going against the laws.
Just tried Clearly and it worked brilliantly.

Thank you so much for the recommendation. I have a feeling it's going to be used heavily.
yellow text on a white background, what a delightful way to make reading an article horrendous.