skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Would you bet on the survival of my company?
My company is like a row boat, a four man crew, trying to get to deeper waters. Except we are two miles from land and we can catch at most one or two fishes at a time. The crew is exhausted after fighting a rough sea and doesn't really know where they are or were to go.

We have Roger, a super sailor. He sails with us but actually he's on another boat, a faster boat. It's safest that way, well... it's complicated, but he's with us sometimes, so that's good.

Then there's François, a math genius. François took a spear to the knee while catching a whale. He never got over it. He's still a very capable sailor though, he just gets his kicks inland.

Jack is a quiet sailor. Jack can command every crew member by the sound of their feet on the deck, the job needs to be done, Jack ensures that it does, even if he has to do it himself. Together Jack and I are the muscle of our boat.

Roger, François and Jack used to work in bigger boats, it was easier back then, they didn't get to worry about where the fish was.

Leaving the analogy behind, we can't scale sales! The truth is, we never REALLY tried! There is almost no information about the company and there is no willingness to keep track of prospects and contact new ones. We are all developers and no one does sales with passion and belief, no one puts themselves out there.

Our team is soon to be split in half, doing work through a clients client, where we obviously won't get credit (or we could potentially steal the client) besides a slightly above average salary (not enough to run a company). These two members are required to be in the clients office for a period equivalent to the one of our own existence. During that period the boat is supposed to be managed by one person with the help of Roger. No growth prospects.

In an effort to burst our bubble I wrote this, what do you think is going to happen to my company?
I'm the maintainer of the archlinux AUR pkgbuild - a better build system would be much appreciated :) For now, I do 3-4 sed invocations over your various Makefiles.

If you want to have a look at what we need to hack our way around, take a look at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/re/rethinkdb/PKGBUILD
JS1K 2013: Spring, new competition started
It depends on your comparison point.

Compared to bottled/canned soda, you're right that there are high up-front costs and an eventual break-even point to using a SodaStream.

Compared to the more DIY version of buying a CO2 tank and the proper fittings to carbonate a 1- or 2-liter bottle (all easily found at a homebrewing store), the opposite is true: the initial buy-in of a SodaStream is about half the price of a CO2 tank and dual-gauge regulator, but refill prices for a 5lb tank are pennies on the dollar compared to SodaStream's refill cartridges. SodaStream's ultimately a razor and blades business model.
Here's another example showing why link submitters should not try to write their own headlines.
As my old economics professor used to say, quoting George E.P. Box:

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

This is very much true in any discipline.
Using "probably" is such a weasel word, which is part of the reason it bothers me so immensely on their "it's always greener on the other side" piece on the Nordic countries.

It's the same crap as "Danes" (or whoever) are the happiest people in the world. It's just a silly meme that people don't bother to scrutinize to understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
The passwords were, apparently.

“However, our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords – for approximately 250,000 users.”
I wish it had better support for live editing, but this is really a limitation of MathJax / TeX in general. Still, I wonder if it might be possible to improve the experience a bit by e.g. only updating when I close a $$ block, etc.
ITunes Store Countries in JSON
I love working remotely, and I want to believe the following, but I'm not sure that it is true:

"...most of our remote developers work longer hours than our in-office devs. It’s not required, and probably won’t always be the case, but when going to work is as simple as walking upstairs (pants optional, but recommended) people just tend to put in more hours and work more productively."

From personal experience, what happens is that the remote worker went downstairs to play with the kids and pets or watch something on T.V. that someone else was watching while they had a snack. Then they work 30 min more later to make up for it. It isn't working more- it is spreading out the work.

Also the post mentions that a self motivated, proactive worker is more likely to do well remotely. But, that depends. Micromanagement of remote workers is really bad, but so is just saying that they have to figure out what to do on their own if that is not their personality/work type. I personally work better when it is clear enough what needs to be done, and maybe if it is something I'm unfamiliar with, then a lot more information about the internals and business requirements and logic is provided, but I'm not told how to implement it. That is true whether I'm remote or not. But each person has their own way of doing things, and usually those aren't evident or may be misunderstood in an interview, so I don't think you can just say "they need to be proactive and self-motivated" and somehow some mystical force draws the right people to work on your team.
The likelihood of python/ruby/PHP/etc. programmer being able to interpret a native code stack trace is... what? Probably quite low. They might not even know what the function call names imply. And yet they'd fit perfectly in to this site's readership.
I love it how The Economist often runs articles trying to prove that excellent living conditions in nordic countries are all about "pro-business reforms" and have nothing to do with their well known welfare states. Ahh, The Economist...
It sounds like you're interested in the legal and bureaucratic mechanics of it all.

While you can also find all the content scattered around his blog archives, Brad Feld's 'Venture Deals' puts it all in organized book form.

Keep in mind that Feld's book focuses heavily on the venture-backed side of startupland and you're missing the other part of the picture. For that, buy a basic guide or two on setting up your business from someone like NOLO.

This stuff won't teach you how to run a business, it'll just teach you about the paperwork. It's still useful information to know, though.
The rise of fashionable technology
Let's say I have a url of a certain file, how would I go about to compare and highlight the changes (in an automated way)?
perhaps that Harvard isn't very good at getting students to take ethics seriously

The current financial crisis would support that hypothesis.
My Beloved Cuba
Poll: Spaces or tabs?
If it didn't matter syntactically with the programming language and there isn't a style guide governing it, do you prefer spaces or tab(s)? Why?

Edit: clarifying here, I'm referring to the characters saved into the file. Specifically multiple ' ' or '\t'. Doesn't matter what you type. If you configure your editor to insert 4 ' ' for each time you press tab. You vote for space.
Tab(s)
You can write fancy code in Haskell and then write long, narcissistic blog posts.)

Seriously, it is all about closures - you could capture (and delay) the computation, like creating a closure (a function with its parameters) and then actually execute the code when some other conditions were meet. Currying allows you to execute all steps but last one, for example, so you will have a returned function to call whenever you wish.
>>>The truth is, we never REALLY tried!

Do you know that you can hire commission-only salespeople? They don't make money until they've sold something?
Thanks. Yes, we have some very clear plans on how to grow. This was a big problem for us about a year ago, when our only method of growth was by posting to r/android and r/xoom. Currently, the project has solved the original chicken-and-egg problem in that we already have enough users that our existing userbase provides enough content to be interesting to new users.

We have a new method of very large growth coming up, though. There have been at least four different app developers that have contacted us recently, asking if they could include pressureNET inside their own apps. These are typically very popular apps with 1,000,000+ installs. Now, most of these users don't have barometers, but even 1% would be very large growth for this project. So there's that. This requires me to build a simple pressureNET SDK, which is a priority for this weekend.

Beyond this short-term, large growth, we have another plan which is to contact local Samsung and carrier offices and hopefully work towards a goal of having pressureNET included in next-generation phones. Contacting Google is a very clear long-term goal, but I want to grow with my current opportunities a bit more first.
Google settles French newspaper links dispute
> i have heard Friends and colleagues say that a college degree is a must and i might face some problem in future without it.

Maybe, but are you aware of how many billionaires are college dropouts, starting with Bill Gates? :

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

Does the above mean you will succeed without an education? No, it means you might succeed without a degree, an entirely different proposition.

Try to draw a distinction between education and schooling. As Mark Twain supposedly said, "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

> ... i request [sic: ask] HN users to input [sic: offer] their opinions [sic: views] so that it would help me correct [sic: change course] if i have done a mistake [sic: lost my way] min [sic] my life.

I can't begin to list the problems with the above sentence, so please put English composition on your list of educational objectives -- with or without time spent in schools.

The bottom line is that you're asking the wrong question, and education is by no means limited to schools. For many, the best education is life itself.
I've never understood what are real good reasons to use spaces if it isn't existing code or there's a style guide recommending it.

Nor why style guides recommend it.

Any one have a good reason?
Can someone describe what Avalon's hashrate: 66 Gh/s means in terms of bitcoin production (or better, in terms of money). How many days would Avalon need to work 24/7 to provide 100% ROI ? I don't know much about bitcoin, I would imagine such info should be the first thing a potential customer reads on Avalon's front page.
Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell on Steve Jobs at Atari and Finding the Next Jobs
The US won WW2 quite simply because of its massive production and population base. Most of the technology was already provided by the Brits. This is not to demean the efforts of the USA who really were the saviours of the Allies. Without USA, WW2 more than likely would have been lost or turned into something like the 100 years war.
Excellent question. I do realize that our sharing options are a bit vague, and I'm going to write up official descriptions and examples to eliminate all the confusion. We have not taken any action on the 'Public' option yet, so for now that option is equivalent to 'Us, Researchers and Forecasters'. There is currently no anonymization done as our only customer so far (Cliff Mass) requires the full dataset for calibration. For the Public data set, we will look into how to deal with this - it should probably not include unique identifiers, and so we'll likely remove those. This does, however, remove some of the utility of the dataset, so perhaps there is another option.

I'll make sure to be more open and clear about this as we make the decisions. Thanks for your comment.
Will bb get as many apps like iOS has?
>I disagree with this post

No, you actually AGREE with this post.

The posts says "for 95% of cases", that is, for most cases.

Your case, "firefighting", is a 5% outlier.
We most definitely have a plan to monetize pressureNET. We're working towards that goal right now by building a customer-facing API that will allow us to livestream our data to professional forecasters. We've already seen decent customer interest, and we haven't even reached out to anyone yet - just general media coverage is showing us that there's a definite market for our data.

A hashed unique device ID is currently shared with the researchers in order for them to do calibration work. We have not shared it with anyone else yet, and due to privacy concerns we would be very nervous about sharing it publicly. Removing it does remove some utility of the dataset though, so we're going to try to find another way.

I'll make sure to be more clear about the privacy settings as we move forward. :)
Because explaining a reason to teenagers (who despite having a lot of bluster, are usually fairly bright) is somehow asking too much.

You use terms like "because I said so" with a 2 year old who literally can't understand why you shouldn't play in the street.

Don't insult other people's intelligence, much less your kid's. There's no excuse for that.
Seriously, that's the same thing I thought too. It really makes the author look naive instead.
Sorry about my english there.. I don't usually type somethings like this, But when i do, i make lot of mistakes. i'm in the process of correcting my vocabulary.
And thanks for the input.
I have had a the lessons from my own life and also majority by looking at other's. Sure, it might make me successful. But the world would still say i'm an undergraduate, and this is what fears me.
"The new version defines unauthorized access as "the circumvention of technological access barriers," which leaves a much narrower scope for prosecution. It also specifies that changing one's MAC or IP address does not violate CFAA or the wire fraud statute. It's pretty clear Swartz, who was authorized to be on the MIT network, wouldn't be prosecutable under the new law."

Uh, what about the part where he snuck into a network closet and plugged directly into a piece of infrastructure so he could be on a subnet he knew he wasn't supposed to have direct access to? Wouldn't that still be considered unauthorized access? I'd like to think that if someone breaks into my home LAN, they won't beat the rap just because I also happen to run a free open hotspot in an attached VLAN sandbox.
right now, like ~8 days. It's really impossible to tell though when these things hit mainstream as they will affect the current difficulty so much.
College professors tend to be recruited based on their ability to do research and get grants, so measuring them on teaching performance is non-threatening. However, the situation is different in K12.

Bill Gates has been able to apply his measurement philosophy at Microsoft, and the results have been disastrous by most accounts.

Here's a paper by an HR grad student slamming the practice: http://stevegall.wetpaint.com/page/Human+Resource+Management

Money quote:
"Stack ranking provides questionable value as to insight into an individual’s actual job performance. Its use highly politicizes an organization. The rank number is most often based on unsubstantiated subjective judgment by an evaluator who may feel pressured to respond according to a narrow set of guidelines."

I love science. But measuring employee or teacher performance is not science. Managing an organization by pseudo-science should be called out for what it is: B.S.!
yeah but when will these things ship??
I don't think they could put how much money you'd be expected to make, as that fluctuates in relation to the dollar etc.

But I'd be interested to know what 66 Gh/s means in practical terms too!

Just found this site, that calculates your profit
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

Edit: This makes me wonder, why would you release this technology to the public.
The United States Government is involved with guaranteeing to the over-the-air CBS stations certain protections of their frequencies. It is reasonable to make certain demands on them as a result, and certain demands are indeed made. For instance, over-the-air TV is subject to some restrictions on content that cable is not. Similarly, when the phone companies were the beneficiaries of a great deal of funding to get the entire country wired up, and given government monopolies, it was and is reasonable to make certain demands in return.

Personally I don't think rises to the level of requiring the big stick o' government to come smashing down, but opinions can reasonably vary.
Fun fact: January 11 was three weeks ago.
Ah, the good olde days!!
Your comment brings to mind the quote by George Box, "All models are wrong, but some models are useful."

I am currently enrolled in Jeff Leek's Data Analysis class on Coursera. Jeff stresses that a good analyst always challenges their results, gaining credibility with the reader. I would have liked to have seen more of this in Bill Gate's essay in the NYT (that Cathy used in her blog).
that's what git config will do if you are not within a git repository.
I've disabled the spell checker a long time ago, but it still happens. So NSSpellCheckCheckString is still being invoked even though the spell check is not running.
Less keystrokes = optmal laziness.
For a sysadmin/network admin/help desk role (generally speaking) the answer is sort of. As someone who does a lot of tech interviews, I would take a person who writes open software and engages in discussions on mailing lists that I can find via google more than a person with a 4 year degree from $no_name_school. Having worked with plenty of people from Harvard who are poor employees and coworkers, I feel it just depends on the environment and role.

For a software developer role, you generally need a degree. Some of the harder algorithmic aspects can be super hard to learn on your own. However, any degree can be trumped by experience. I see github as the absolute best resume available.

It is possible, but very difficult to get any job in upper management without a degree.

Disclaimer: I've worked professionally in tech for 10+ years, lack a college education, and am very successful. However, I did a technical job for 4 years in the US Army.
Whenever I meet someone with the right connections/profile I propose this, had no luck thus far. Hell depending the amount of work he could get us, I wouldn't even oppose to pay him a safe net!
The change of title seems a bit tasteless on the 70th anniversary of Stalingrad - could the submitter change it back please?

[Of course the US was vital to winning WW2, but so were the efforts of many other countries].
So how many years did it take for you to recover from finding out Santa wasn't real?
Really rad implementation of a diff system. I've recently been working on a service for diff/versioning. If you're interested in checking it out, it's http://imnosy.com
Yeah, I suppose I do like one of my kids. Hmm, good point.

;)
What is it with the recent Economist's crush on Nordic countries? Am I missing something?

At least two others in the past day!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5152160
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5149821
After nearly 40 years' experience in programming, I offer that (as to computer source code) tabs should be outlawed. They are visually indistinguishable from spaces, they are handled differently in each editing environment, and they often result in difficult-to-detect bugs.

A space is a space, one character width (when fixed-pitch fonts are used). A tab, on the other hand, is whatever the editor thinks it is, and a given editor can be made to change how it represents a tab (by default eight character spaces).

The above problems become much more severe in languages and environments that honor whitespace -- examples Python and YAML.

There is no excuse for tabs in modern times. They were originally meant to regularize columns on a mechanical typewriter, then they were meant to save memory when memory was precious. Neither of these justifications (no pun intended) exists any longer.

It's no contest -- eliminate tabs.
> Less keystrokes ...

(groan)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less
Genome can reveal surname
Or just as likely, the Soviet Union would have just steamrolled over all of Germany and probably kept going until they got to the English Channel.
>Its very unlikely that you'd see any issues on your own sites if another customer's app was compromised.

>Hmm, very unlikely but still possible.

I think this is a fair statement as far as I can tell: If it were possible for a compromised customer's app to affect your app, then you're not safe anyway without this exploit: a malicious customer could affect you too just as easily.
It's a common theme at the Economist to pick out a section of the world and focus on it for an issue.

This week it happens to be the Nordics but in the past it has done China, the USA, France, Singapore, etc.
Unclutter App for Mac – The Best Way to Clean Your Desktop
Are you the author of the original article?

I think I screwed up my post. It actually refers to the guy who tried to fly and land the Cessna using his flight sim experience. That was dumb.

As for your article, good attempt but what do you think are the chances that someone will remember all of that without conducting drills once or twice a week? In other words, what you do in flight school.

I have enough trouble having people remember to manage energy and fly --as opposed to "drive"-- a model airplane around. That's why I start everyone with a pure glider (no motor). With such an approach they have no choice but to learn what flying is really about and manage energy at all stages. Flying is a beautiful and complex art.
I went ahead and updated the blog post to explain, but I'll include what I wrote here too. Sorry if I didn't explain that clearly. I still see what people are discussing on SEO blogs and on the Google webmaster forum. I know the most recent trends in how blackhats try to spam Google--that's my primary job, after all. I look through the questions and comments that people send me on Twitter. When I put out a call for webmaster video questions, I use Google Moderator so people can vote up questions that interest them. I keep an eye on what flavors of spam snake oil are being marketing to newbies on various forums ("I know Google pulled apart my last link network, but now try my Social Rank Tout Suite product! It will automate 100% of all of your link building!"). And lots of people at Google keep an eye open themselves and alert me if they see issues.

So I feel like I have a pretty good feel for the pulse of what people are talking about; it's just that I lack the time to have one-on-one conversations with every person that emails me.
Currently – slick home screen replacement for chrome
That article mentioned plenty of welfare policies.

"Universal free education allows students of all backgrounds to achieve their potential. Separate taxation of spouses puts wives on an equal footing with their husbands. Universal day care for children makes it possible for both parents to work full-time."

In fact the conclusion of the article was this:

"Economists frequently express puzzlement about the Nordic countries’ recent economic success, given that their governments are so big... Goran Persson, a former Swedish prime minister, once compared Sweden’s economy with a bumblebee—“with its overly heavy body and little wings, supposedly it should not be able to fly—but it does.” Today it is fighting fit and flying better than it has done for decades."
Once they become prevalent, they'll make money at the same rate GPUs make now, or CPUs made before, or etc. etc.
I use lastpass, it's a great product.
This isn't a valid argument for anyone using a proper text editor -- vi has auto indent, and emacs can autoindent using the tab key.