skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working on a couple of books in this space, but not really those topic as I think they're pretty well covered elsewhere (see the writing of Brad Feld and Fred Wilson).

The first book I'm working on is on Startup Optimization which is a more practical guide to things you should be tweak to optimize for growth - hopefully I should have it done by the end of next month.

After that I'm planning to write another one about how to think about business models, user acquisition, metrics etc. focusing on more broader issue about how to analyze startup ideas.

Both are pretty experimental really, in that I've no idea if I can actually write about these topic in a way that will prove useful. But what's driving me to write them is that I've seen lots of startups mess up these areas and I want to try and improve that situation.
I was looking for a RubyGems proxy a couple of weeks ago but was unable to find anything suitable. What I would like to find is something similar to Artifactory for Maven. You include the proxy in your Gemfile and if it doesn't have the Gem it downloads it from RubyGems and caches it locally.

This type of proxy wouldn't help in this particular case but it would allow you to keep traffic to RubyGems.org down and also give you the ability to easily host private Gems.
.dbml files are a pain to merge because on any change, that element is moved to the bottom. To avoid other people smashing my changes I manually move it back to where it was before checking in, so the diff is only one or two lines. No one else on the team does this though, so they still run into problems.

I tried to find where the 'Startups for the Rest of Us' AuditShark guy (Mike?) talks about writing a tool so that his outsourced devs wouldn't have to deal with it, but it would take me too long to find. He doesn't seem like the type to believe in open sourcing anything but I wish he would consider it.
Do you plan making a linux version?
Not all side effects are equally negative. Some negative side effects are acceptable and ethical.

Let's take DMSO as an example. Treatments with DMSO leave a particular garlic-like taste in the mouth. This is a negative side-effect. But DMSO is not a poison during normal treatments any more than ethyl alcohol is a poison.

A good placebo for DMSO would have the same side-effects as otherwise a patient and perhaps even the doctor could tell the difference based on taste/smell compared to the anticipated taste/smell. I believe this still isn't possible, which makes testing DMSO difficult. One solution, for example, is to look for a dose-response curve, which is a more complicated signal to extract.
I can't obviously dispute your personal experience, but I think we can both agree that price is a signal.

I agree with you that you can mask your price increase and it isn't something that I'd considered when I originally posted.

However, I would argue that Bloomberg was priced high enough early on to not attract cheapskates. Again, pricing as a signal. If you're charging $15,000 and the person is making $1mm a month off of it the difference between $15,000 and $25,000 isn't very much. However, if you started out charging $150 a month and hope to get to $25,000 you're going to have a very hard time doing so even if your customers are making $1mm a month of the service because you've anchored your price so low. Again, there are probably creative ways to get from $150 to $25,000 like you mentioned, but I'm not sure I'm interested in spending my creative energy moving the needle that much when I could just start out charging a much higher rate.
Agreed. I've already witnessed Windows making a modem call the fire brigade emergency number (probably because it was confused about the country I was in). Woops.
"Thank goodness we switched to Heroku. Had we stayed on our previous environment, we would have been opened up to a security exploit without even knowing it."
Firefox 19.0 (a beta release) is too old to download a file? Can someone explain this to me? I wish they'd tell me exactly which API they're using..
It doesn't appear that anyone actually knows about the field here as this is really a non-issue for a simple reason (I chose you to reply to because you were at the bottom).

First of all, most immporant studies don't use a placebo because it would unethical when there are standard treatments out there already and you have to show that your new drug is just as good or better than those treatments (the proper terms are supperior vs. non-inferior trials).

But considering trials that do use a placebo - the whole point is to prove that their drug is superior to the placebo. If anything, when they design the placebo, it would have structurally similar molecules that would give the same side effects, and potentially the same results <-- which is key. A research DOES NOT WANT the placebo to do as well as their drug. The placebo can only hurt their results, not help them cheat.

You could also argue that since it's not regulated, maybe the active component does actual harm to make the test drug look better! No. There are too many studies showing what the controlled group should look like (whether they are on a placebo or on nothing at all).
Two examples from the computer science review and publication process
Younity Selected as Finalist for Best Mobile Technology at SxSW Interactive
Collecting Energy: Are You a Collector, Generator, or User?
For a second, I thought you app is named "Secret Sex Change". Honest mistake until I went to the website which then made it clear as "Secrets exchange"
She loves the iPhone AND Google+ ..double trouble.
BlackBerry Announces The End Of BlackBerry
Did you actually clone the branch or did you manually set up the remote and branch?

I ask because a clone sets the upstream automatically, and inferring the remote from the branch's upstream is the correct behaviour. You can also use the -u flag in push/pull to set this.
I couldn't get through this whole article due to the dude in the corner staring at me... :-/
We do something very similar, but like you said there are the occasional sneaky devils trying to download their own dependencies. Nine times out of ten it seems like it's some version of distribute that they insist on fetching.

The non-existant proxy trick seems useful, I'll have to try that out.
Thanks Olly - great feedback!

I'm definitely developing it further - thanks for the kind words.

I'll be in touch, but a few things I wanted to touch on: The panel button bug is fixed - once I can deploy safely again (Heroku/RubyGems issue) I'll have that fixed.

I'll consider adding a start into the design editor, but the content screen is first for a reason, and it gives you something to start with.

Pixels are (mostly) not available, again, by design. You should be using EMs and Percents, they are more natural to web design. Borders and shadows are the exceptions - both are more useful as pixels.

Glad you like the output - I've worked a bunch to make that as clean as possible.

Everything else is good, and I'll definitely incorporate this into future updates.
You can easily configure your browser to "delete or distrust" the CNNIC's certificates. I just did.
How blogging can change your life
I'm open to the idea, but I feel like $70/system is about the sweet spot for this, if not on the high side already. I'd rather be at a $50 price point; I think that at that price point they'd find all sorts of new applications.

If I raise that to $80, I know that I personally start going from "that sounds reasonable" to "that's almost $100". And since I've been trying to get a product off the ground for five years, I feel like I have a reasonable sense of what "too expensive" looks like for what will largely be considered a toy.

I am curious as to thoughts of whether the 5% kickstarter tax is worth the possible additional exposure from going through the big crowdfunding site. I've seen Rock the Post, and now indiegogo, but since I had never heard of either before a few weeks ago I feel like they can't possibly be as popular.
I could be grossly underestimating BB loyalty, but I just really don't see BB staying in business that much longer. I think BB10 looks nice and it really has some compelling features. But, I just don't see anything novel enough to persuade existing smartphone users to switch or a majority of new users to consider it over the iPhone or Android. As a result, I think WP8 will outlast BB10, simply because Microsoft has deeper pockets.
Being cautious is important but keep in mind that the goal here is to be a replacement for having plaintext, sensitive info in your email history and chat logs.

We've all seen these: http://plaintextoffenders.com/
Neither of which ever happen during hackathons.
Bioinspired fibers change color when stretched
I really hope we get a Alpha Centauri II out of this.

I really enjoyed SMAC when it first came out.

There are some spiritual successors to it that have been out for a while. I'm currently giving Galactic Civilizations II [1] a try. So now you've got hyperdrive, and you are colonizing the galaxy. It was recently on sale for $5 USD on Steam.

[1] http://www.galciv2.com
Disappointed with Gittip
Damn I read that as Jan 6, 2013 in my head when I saw the post.
I'm pretty new to FRP, but I tend to visualize FRP like an Excel spreadsheet where one value change leads to a chain reaction of many values in the spreadsheet.

Would this paint the right picture?
Vine app videos now have their own film festival
Vine may only be a few days old, but a film festival has already been launched for videos created with the app.
RFC 3986: Web Encoding Hell
The old experts-exchange.com conundrum. They went so far as to not even have a redirect for expertsexchange.com
Vine may only be a few days old, but a film festival has already been launched for videos created with the app.
bundle package

puts all your app's dependencies in vendor/cache. That can then be put into a git submodule.

The problem then becomes the Gemfile and Gemfile.lock, which should really be in that submodule as well. You need to pass flags to bundler commands because it assumes the Gemfile is in the project root.
{ int x = 1 / 0; } is valid c++ that results in a runtime error.
Heh, several of my clients, most of whom have more sensitive data than a game company would have, mandate the use of Skype for IM. It really is a good IM platform, with the ability to edit/remove last message sent, easily build chats/conferences, the "send file" functionality actually works, and of course, it's simple to launch into a voice or video call right from the client. It's a shame that no other IM protocol even comes close to that.

On the other hand, Skype does keep logs of all your conversations on their servers, seemingly indefinitely. There's no easy crypto drop-in like OTR that I know of, and there's no easily evident way to delete those logs. I refuse to use it for non-mandated chats for these reasons.
It's sort of depressing that you offer "total privacy" and then go to a magic bullet solution.

Total privacy is not found by having a go-to technology. It's found by having a vast understanding of information tech in general, knowing the current state of defeating security protocols, and assuming that anyone interested in your data is one step beyond that.

Sometimes that means Tor is enough. But not always.
UEFI has _NOTHING_ to do with DRM.
Cook's a terrible guy to be the same type of CEO as Jobs was. But it doesn't follow from that that he's a terrible CEO, and I think it's exactly why he took the opportunity to elevate Ive to head of all design.
Presumably they never look at such indicies so they'd only be liable after someone notified them of infringement.
A large number need to at least understand the science. Doing machine learning and data analytics correctly requires mathematical and scientific understanding, for example. Same with, say, chemical engineering, or structural engineering.
Revenue Canada worker's video game draws criticism
Bad kerning at Dufferin station
It's certainly possible but there are solutions to mitigate that style usage. Spam is only profitable in bulk so they'd constantly be hitting our limiters which won't really make it worthwhile.

Also the content in the secrets in served as plain text so that diminishes the quality of the payload too (the recipient would have to copy & paste the URI).

Edit: by the way, Mandatum, not sure why from your few comments but you're hellbanned so they come up dead.
The case for earlier Out-of-Africa
I hope this proposal will get busted for good as unacceptable promotion of unethical practices for the Web.
Every smartphone looks like an iPhone. What did you think it was going to look like?
Skype's primary business is (video) telephony and IMs. In most cases, these are far more likely to contain sensitive data than the others you've listed. Google rivals it with Gmail of course, but Google also has very transparent privacy controls and makes it simple to know if you've cleared your chat logs, disabled things like Web History and Search History, removed certain emails, etc. Skype is completely opaque on such matters.

Honestly I'm uncomfortable using anything except a local Mumble server for VoIP telephony. Been using Google Hangouts recently for video calling, but would be interested in a Mumble equivalent for video.
I think this hack was related to the recent Rails vulnerability. Heroku is blaming this on a "YAML parsing vulnerability" which I think was the problem same issue with rails. I'm not sure if they are using rails or not but its surprising that if it's the same issue they didn't do anything about it before this happened.
Can Smartphone Apps Break Your Bad Habits?
Actually, having to draw that distinction is one motivation for van Wijngaarden grammars such as was used to specify Algol 68; that let the language definition be purely grammatical rather than having potentially ambiguous prose "semantics" implemented in ad hoc code.
Just curious what the whitelist is... Chrome's pinned certs? That's always a point of curiosity for me: no one knows what Chrome is sending to Google.
Muscle Memory: Sublime Text Keyboard Shortcuts for MacOS X
Agreed, there should be a clear warning - in fact, the load method should be renamed unsafe_load. The root cause of this is probably unclear documentation and misunderstandings between the users and authors of psych.
"You can't stop the signal" -- Mr. Universe
I'll vote for him
I only recently realized how easy it was to run your own PyPI - it just has to handle a few HTTP GET / POSTs.

If you want to run your own PyPI internally, here's a very simple PyPI server (~150 lines of Python) that I wrote:
https://github.com/steiza/simplepypi
We also get a brand new man(7) section :)
Working immigrants - yes. But if we allow free immigration with full access to welfare state benefits, it would create great incentive for people that can not or do not want to work to move into the US. Let's say you like to live in Elbonia, but you got sick and Elbonian healthcare sucks. So you move to America and sign up for health insurance (remember, we now prohibit insurance companies from charging high premiums an discriminating on the basis of existing conditions?) or get a free Medicare benefits. Or maybe, Elbonian government, being smart, even buys you a ticket - so you would not burden Elbonian welfare system but would burden American one. For how long such model would be sustainable for America?

>>>> but these indict stupid entitlement programs more than lax immigration.

That's my whole point - entitlement programs and free immigration can not coexist. We will have to choose one or the other. Most welfare states choose the former.

>>>> I do object to this topic as a specious support for the "War on Immigration".

There's no such thing. Thousands of people legally immigrate to US each year, and there's no serious politician that opposes immigration as such.
Wow. I'd never even considered something like this, but the analysis was fun to read. Interesting post.
Price Is A Feature
truth haha
Chains of trust can't defend you from this. Only certificate pinning. IMO this shows why self signed is the way to go: There are no authorities you can trust.
Were being hunted like game !!!
Honestly, I never expected RIM to have such a powerful launch, BB10 really delivered where they needed to. I've been growing sick of iOS's limitations and Nexus's hardware design direction - Non user-replaceable batteries and absence of external memory cards.

Blackberry sounds interesting and for once since Symbian, I feel relieved.
I like https://www.thismessagewillselfdestruct.com

Also available at https://tmwsd.ws
I wish blackberry all the luck in the world. They acknowledged the problem and did everything they could to develop it.
Updates for viewing photos and videos on Twitter
I can speak from my own experience there are times where depending on funding, portions of a project must be developed by U.S. citizens... but the bigger project can have parts developed over seas. Depending on funding and the project.
Given the capitalization on the Github repository, it looks like that is intentional.
Agreed. Sun bought StoageTek somewhere in there. Which was fun for me as both companies were resellers for my former employer. Sun was still selling a decent amount of server gear, they just sort of fell out of the consumer space.
Textillate.js - A jQuery Plugin For CSS3 Text Animations
QNX is a subsidiary of BlackBerry, but they still do all their own hiring and a fair bit of marketing. You'd be applying to work at QNX, not at BlackBerry. Not to say there isn't a ton of crossover.
Self signed is indistinguishable from "China is MITM'ing you".

We agree about pinning.

As pinning becomes more widespread, browsers that support it will become a sort of surveillance network for forged certificates. That's effectively what caused the Turktrust discovery.
What role does a creative director have on a big consumer product like this? Would her role be more about branding and messaging, or does this suggest that Keys is actually getting her hands dirty with product design, and possibly signal a greater trend of Hollywood figures attempting to take the reigns of the tech scene?

Alicia Keys doesn't exactly seem like a Johnny Ive, but then again I would've said that Ashton Kutcher would be a funny pick for a VC.
That is not always and engineering problem. It can be a manufacturing problem. One case[1] of this is the F-86. It was engineered fine, but a worker on the floor didn't follow instructions and installed a bolt incorrectly. This caused the plane's aileron to lock during certain maneuvers killing some pilots. This was a manufacturing problem not an engineering problem.

1) http://characterqualitystories.com/cqs/node/394
They explain a little more in their blog: https://mega.co.nz/#blog_1
Google’s No. 1 Asset Is Its Ability To Empathize With Its Users Through Design
Ironically this site gives me an SSL warning about an unknown certificate issuer.
I find "Git Source Control Provider" to be a very decent plugin to work with. What's so wrong about it ?
But most people using the express versions probably aren't building these types of applications.. Also, the download size is important here. You can download the developer libraries GP refers to separately IIRC... Windows SDK etc.
It looks nothing like an iPhone. There's a line above and below the screen, the call speaker is a completely different shape and size, the camera is in a radically different location, and it says, in big bold letters, Blackberry across the bottom. There's also no button on the front like the iPhone has.

Other than that, it has the general shape and design of an LCD panel. But don't pretend it looks like an iPhone when it doesn't.
You can deploy X.509 in the same configurations as you can OpenPGP; X.509 is just a certificate encoding format, and the semantics are up to the application .

Ruby has better support for X.509 PKI than it does for OpenPGP, so using OpenPGP seems kind of silly in this case.
>Easy examples of requirements that violate context-freedom are the requirement that variables be declared before use, or the inability to divide an integer literal by 0. (The latter is a compiler error in Go[0] - I'm not sure about C++, but I know the former is a requirement in both languages).

It's usually just a warning, and runtime error. It's actually used in a few cases to attempt to kill a process.

Apple's abort(), for example, uses it:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-262/stdlib/...
Stop Loading Stylesheets And Javascript In WordPress
It was intended to mean that they had cutting-edge technology, and rather than keeping it stultified in a lab they were brining it to everyone, pushing it out to the world and making it a part of the busy lives of their customers.
If your encryption key generation security depends on people not knowing how you generate keys, then it's totally busted.
I saw the solution immediately, to be honest. Of course, my mother has worked for a railroad since before I was born, so maybe I had an unfair advantage...
It's not as bad as it sounds, and you don't have to do it for all scripts.

1) Most scripts will work, you just have to tweak how loops are written and the way you declare functions.
2) If the script uses basic commands like ls, mkdir, etc their are powershell aliases built in already that point to the equivalent PS command.
> I think you are conflating the grammar checking of a language with all the checks done in other compilation phases.

The main ppoint is that for some languages those two kinds of checks can not be easily separated. The top answer to the linked question demonstrates that for C++. It occurs that in C++ typen<1>() can be either parsed as a template istantiation or not-parsed (i.e. producing a syntax error) as (typen < 1)>().

The syntactical correctness of this expression depends on the result of evaluation of a fine piece of template metaprogramming - there must be more than one grammar checking phase, each one dependent on the evaluation of the previous one. This gives a good hint on why C++ compile times are sometimes so huge.
They dont even need to remain a paid subscription service if they created an html5/JS/webGL based appstore that would integrate closely to their service. Imagine a fb where you could install custom widgets into the interface that more reflected your personal tastes.
I did some work in a similar space. It's amazing how many publications and organizations out there need a good solution for doing something as simple as a photo contest or a simple storage for documents. This company did a good job tackling a specific audience of "publishers, universities and art organizations." While the work I did was on a product that was able to be flexible enough (more generalized consumer feedback) to facilitate this kind of thing, I think they made a great decision to build something specifically for this type of problem.

I wish them the best of luck in their business, it was an interesting ride for us.
It's not like $20k is a lot to Microsoft.
Of course, fb makes money off apps and advertises. They nickle and dime.
According to Certificate Patrol, I'm getting the same cert I first received on 2012-12-11:

not valid before: 2012-03-03
serial: 00:E6:99:C4:B4:04:ED:07:D2:E5:BC:42:29:09:B8:17:D0
sha1 fingerprint: BD:2E:60:69:49:99:53:29:BD:E9:24:12:95:E1:5E:65:E0:64:79:2A
Don't forget it's 5%, not 50%. That means $50 will become $52.5. Not a big deal.

Indiegogo is also hugely popular. They charge 4%.