skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, previous non-discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470917 :)
I agree. As an individual this is what everyone should do. Just write the software to get to the next publishable unit. I think however this leads to poor quality software for the field as a whole.
No, a glove is defined as a covering for the hand. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=glove

A mitten is defined as a "half glove" http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=mitten

So all mittens are also gloves.
Nobody will know whether spending all that dough on House of Cards will have been a good move or not for many months at the earliest.
True, but that assumes you are rational and do the math.
Most kickstarter stuff is in impulse purchase territory.
I can't really get into Kickstarter. It's one sided for people like me that don't live in the US or UK (I'm in Australia).

I'm not even sure if I would run a Kickstarter campaign (I have a few things that are would-be candidates). Still the fact that I'm not able to irks me to the point of not wanting to participate.

It's an economy where I can put money in, but it's not possible to take money out.
Man, people in the tech bubble really don't like being reminded that everything their industry does and the effect it has had on an established community isn't all perfect. This doesn't surprise me in my (anecdotal) experience in the industry I've run into a lot of "those are problems caused by other industries, not us", but the author raises some good points about the effects of booms (and particularly this one) on the people who were established prior but not part of it. Some can't be avoided but some can be mitigated - and some people have been less defensive here and offered some solutions to things like public transport and housing.
I'm thinking that it would be very interesting to make a search tool for this kind of things using color searching technology like in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5180830
Queer & nerdy: Why your startup should hire a gay developer
I read the article and did not come away with that impression. :-)
The large, bold heading "Diary" would imply this was an opinion piece. No ?
We need more startup marketing minds (a.k.a. Full-Stack Marketers) - GeekWire
For the record, plenty of people at Google read magazines like LRB or NYRB. Significantly more than the general population, probably even the population of people with undergraduate or graduate degrees.

Some people here being, charitably, more focused on the tech side of the brain than other parts doesn't change that, though it can give misleading impressions.
As someone who ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, I think it's amazing. For an inventor / creator it solves two key issues: raising necessary funding to make ideas come to live, and a "go to market" strategy to validate it. Especially for hardware ideas. I've also backed projects due to the pure excitement that someone is out there interested in making something that I want or need and don't have the time to do it myself.
This is one way to replicate the scroll magic from this annual report: http://prinzhorn.github.com/skrollr/. It's really user-friendly and uses keyframes for timed actions based on scroll position.
There's definitely been more than three jobs listed for Edinburgh in January 2012. I'm in Edinburgh and was looking for work most of last year, so I was paying attention at the time!
Very, very nice presentation.
Google is making buses work. Good for them.
Ruby 2.0.0-rc2 is released
NYC Tells Airbnb Hosts: Don’t Get Too Cozy
How I Wrote And Published My First Book
Warning VCs: The Internet is coming for you
Doubtful. In Sf, there are several companies running into problems scaling up to this type of model (ZipCar, Uber, Scoot). Often there aren't enough cars/scooters to meet demand, or the wait for one to arrive will be too long. People who value their time will always be willing to buy one of their own so they will be guaranteed a ride where and when they want it. Not to mention the cost of maintaining such a fleet.

It's also worth noting this type of service is only effective in dense urban centers. Enough people live in the country/rural/suburban areas where owning a car is necessary.

Americans spend a ridiculous amount of money on cars as status symbols. It'll be a long, long time before that ceases to be the case.

Maybe you meant the robo-car will end the private car in cities where its citizens focus on different status symbols? I can see that being the case in SF and maybe NY in the near future, but not anywhere else in the US.
"Sorry, we can't make things better for you, because we can't make them better for everyone."
Unfortunately, not displaying the customer's actual cost until the point of purchase is an annoying Americanism that applies to almost every financial transaction.
imho Yes , but not for "work-in-progress" products (in case of hardware stuff).If there is no working prototype then no.

If it is a software i would look at the person record and how many successfull product that guy has finished and delivered and there is no reason why the "kickstartee" cannot provide a working prototype either ( with limited functionalities , ... )
Really impressive layout and visuals. I know some folks have complained about the "long form scroll" as being less usable than linked pages broken up by section, but I'm a fan nonetheless. The more I use the web / tablet / phone, the more I find I prefer sites that put all of their content on a single scrolling page. It just feels easier to digest.

In this case, honestly, I probably wouldn't have clicked through each section if it were in a more traditional layout -- I would have looked, said "cool", and moved on.

But as it stands, I scrolled through the whole page from top to bottom and AirBNB delivered the full experience to me, as intended.
Most comments that don't add substantively to the discussion seem to generate downvotes. Which is too bad, as I like the funny.

That said, it seems like it would be hard to control for only occasional (and ideally funny) jokes in a community like this -- if jokes were generally rewarded, hn could become a jokefest like Reddit, dramatically reducing the signal-to-noise ration many of us appreciate it for.

TL;DR - use jokes sparingly, and make 'em good.

(edited for a typo)
Thank you. This is the point I tried to make when I wrote the original post. What's the point of spending extra time creating documentation and examples if, on average, no one is going to use or try your software. Perhaps it's just best to create a small publication for the software then push it out the door.
FWIW, they also put out a very nice print version of the annual report. Don't know if it's available on PDF but in paper-form, it's quite well designed.
I love checkoutmanager and dotfiles
Basecamp on the iTunes App Store
This is very nicely done, and the numbers show AirBNB has grown to be a powerful force in the travel industry.

Given this growth, I hope they are working on an official response or plan to address the problems they are having in New York City seen here:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/your-money/a-warning-for-a...

2. http://gothamist.com/2013/02/05/east_village_man_fights_30k_...
Equating piracy laws with state run human rights abuse is a bit of a stretch.
I don't know about the OP's point on the value of proof to programmers. I do optimization and machine learning, and I use all kinds of math on a regular basis. But I don't prove things, and rarely need to follow someone else's proof either. You can get a lot out of applied math without touching a proof. And if it isn't applied, then you really don't need it ;-).

I agree there is value in learning how to read math notation, so there is a valid point in there somewhere.
Beautiful presentation. Airbnb's product is something that can spark emotion more than most services. I love how they brought that to their annual report.
I did not say that The London Review of Books was a crappy blog. I said that the article belonged on a crappy blog. Implying that it was like a poor quality rant from a personal blog and not worthy of being published in The London Review of Books.
Do You Have One of the Top 5% Most Viewed LinkedIn Profiles for 2012?
As far as I know, nothing like this exists. It could be useful though. There are a few publications that do critical comparisons of scientific software. The assemblathon is one example of this.
> He might make more money in private practice.

He would, without a doubt, make much more money in private practice. That's one thing I think HN folks overlook. Senior DOJ people could lateral out to high six figure into seven figure salaries as partners in law firms. The folks that stay at DOJ as lifers are generally "true believers." That doesn't mean they don't have their internal motivations, but rather those motivations are shaped by an extremely deep belief in the rule of law. They view people who don't follow rules as at best anti-social, and more likely dangerous. Figuring out why they don't understand hackers doesn't require resorting to any elaborate theories about trying to make career-defining prosecutions. They're simply people who have a very different world view than the one hacker culture embraces.
Ever tried getting word docs into Indesign without converting to RTF as an interim step? This may not be a MS problem and may be Adobes fault, but whenever I get a .doc, importing into indesign directly makes my life miserable for too often. Even if it doesn't crash Indesign, it often causes strange behaviour and bizarre formatting issues.
Between that and the damn paper clip wizard man of old, my Office suite tolerance is about zero.
But LibreOffice, ouch. After this last week, one more 'java update required' popup and I might start crying. I DID IT 1 MINUTE AGO.
I'm less anti-patent than most people here, but I think that's a very good article. In particular, the treatment of pharmaceuticals is not the absurd "if we just got rid of patents, innovation would continue at the same rate" argument that some patent opponents advance, but a more nuanced take on what other changes could be made to the larger system to maintain appropriate incentives.
That's the etymology, not the definition. Just because a word once meant something doesn't mean it still does.

EDIT:

"a covering for the hand made with a separate sheath for each finger and for the thumb." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/glove

"a hand covering enclosing the four fingers together and the thumb separately." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mitten
This is a lot like the MailChimp one. http://mailchimp.com/2012/
A Review of MPEx, the Bitcoin Stock Exchange
I don't fully understand monads, but this is disingenuous. The article clearly compares unit to constructors, in a way that is far more like this:

class Monad:
def __init__(self, val):
self.val = val
unit = __init__
def bind(self, fun):
return fun(self.val)

Now, in the case of our ruby and python examples respectively, there is no sane way of enforcing typing, but if it works out, it looks to me like that at least implements the monad interface. Not so sure how all the laws work out...

But interestingly we could implement lift as a Monad method by:

def lift(self, fun=lambda x: x*2):
self.val = fun(self.val)
return self

unless I really don't get all this.
Wow. Nice working reinforcing the stereotype there of IT workers being callous, selfish assholes indifferent to everyone else.
"Sure. But if you give them all away, what do you sell?"

The anecdotal evidence Guy Kawasaki bases his advice for self-publishers on is that giving away books is always good. My publishers have signing events at conferences and give away case-loads of my current book at these events. Amazon sales always spike afterward.

In practical terms, that tipping point seems to be very far out there.
Really cool. Dunno how I missed this previously but it's awesome and fun library. Like a pop-up book for the web generation.
I just don't understand how reporting the phone as stolen would allow them to break the contract without having to pay the fee, or allow them to get a new phone without paying full price ( without going through the insurance).

I know little about IMEI resetting (which is a good thing I guess), but I thought it was a separate thing from phone unlocking?
I made a website that rates the latest movies by analyzing social media
Let me know what you think. I'd like to expand it to more data sources and also start analyzing other products such as tv shows, books, video games, phones, cars etc...
For what it's worth, it's the internet culture thing, not the youth thing. I'm 34 and feel the exact same way.

Well... that's not ancient or anything per se, but I don't think I can fairly call myself a youth anymore.
> For the northern hemisphere summer, they found that increasing the reflectivity of roof and pavement materials in cities with a population greater than 1 million would achieve a one-time offset of 57 gigatons of CO2 emissions (31 Gt from roofs and 26 Gt from pavements). That’s double the worldwide CO2 emissions in 2006 of 28 gigatons. Their results were published online in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2010/07/19/cool-roof...
It's not really that bad, as far as these types of articles go. The opinion column staff at the NYT churns out a worse article nearly every day.
"What incentive does any scientist have at all to publish their code?"

holy moly x 2

How about that it represents a fuller account of what you did and how you did it? (bugs or no bugs). Isn't scientific publishing supposed to be about reporting what you did as accurately as possible so that others can (1) understand and (2) replicate?

BTW the * in my f*ck from above stands for "ra", what did you think it stood for?
I've come up against this recently and I think a lot of imperative programmers will. For me, the basic pattern, starting from a career based on perl/php/java was this series of realizations:

- EECS circuit design is based on a conceit that gives chips a speed limit

- as a result, chips aren't getting much faster and that multi-cores are happening instead

- parallel programming will become more and more essential to make a buck as a programmer

- imperative languages aren't great for parallel programming due to mutable variables

- functional languages are better for parallel programming due to immutable variables

- functional languages are a lot closer to math concepts than imperative languages

- uh-oh

So for me it's been a fun few months of stumbling through self-directed study in stats, probability, and math. Bayesian probability from some articles by Yudkowsky. Fast, clumsy review of 0th-order, 1st-order, and zfc set theory. Anki decks out the wazoo. Now I'm plodding through Learn You A Haskell.

I would like to work more with actual mathematical proofs but I'm finding that tough to get into myself. It was fun paging through metamath for a few days, though.
Sorry, I don't have much info other than it didn't have the critical features they needed in order for it to be useful. The details of those features I never asked about. What I can tell you is that I mainly spoke with cafes, restaurants and other food service related merchants. Only spoke with a handful of retail merchants... Hope that helps!
It seems it all boils down to this: he didn't make as much money as he wanted.

I don't want to trivialize the issue: making money is not easy, but the guy over-plays the victim card.

He seems to be a successful artist. He quits and it's all a fault of other people, who don't pay him as much as he deserves.

Again, not to trivialize the issue, but an artist with a lot of fans should be able to find a way to make money.

Did he try to follow the steps of many cartoonists that make decent money doing daily cartoons on the web, like theotmealguy?

Did he try to create anything outside of work-for-hire arrangement that he entered (willingly, as a consenting adult) into with Disney?

No evidence of that.

According to him, it's just the system conspires against poor artist.

According to me, he's just a lousy businessman who lacks awareness of his own shortcomings and oblivious to many ways he could have made money with his art. Instead he chose a safe route of employment and as an adult he should understand that it also usually comes with limited upside.

If he wanted a bigger upside, he should have taken more risks.
Excellent. I will definitely use this.
A big concern for me has always been correctness. You're more likely to make mistakes and miss edge conditions in sloppy code. There's nothing worse than communicating some positive/inspiring results, only to find out later that you had an elusive computational bug in there that invalidates the results.

This reminds me: A man was seen cutting a tree down with a dull bladed axe. A bystander asked him "Why not sharpen your axe first?". The cutter responded "I don't have the time!".
Look at public meeting minutes for various towns and you'll see it.

Past that, most of the companies do it smart, and let the towns take the credit, and keep the rest quiet.

It is a priority for them, but unlike in the past, if you tell san francisco you want to spend 50 million providing public bus service, their answer isn't "sign us the hell up", it's "sorry, no".
I'm new to web design and I was very impressed with this presentation. Could anyone tell me what technologies were used to build it? Thank you.
The future of search is gravitational: Content will come to you
Kickstarter also charges 10%.
Why Humility is Essential for Every New Hire
I'm going to echo the other commenters here and ask why House of Cards was a hugely bad decision. It's funny because just today I reactivated my Netflix account so I could watch the show.

There is a problem here though. Because I'm sure I'll devour the season in less than a month, I'll be tempted to cancel my account (until Arrested Development is released). If they had spaced the release out like a normal TV show, they could get about 3 months of subscription fees from me.
I grew up reading Don's comics, and my D.U.C.K. book is so worn that it doesn't have a cover anymore. Hell, in my old room I still have his (wonderfully and finely detailed, as usual) Duck genealogical tree poster. Despite all this, I knew nothing about the man himself, which - judging from this heartfelt article - is as good and intelligent as his comics. It's sad to see he stopped writing, mostly because there's no one there to fill his gap -- and it's a huge gap, as huge as those left by Floyd Gottfredson and Carl Barks.
As I said elsewhere, most of this is known to employees of these companies, and privately mentioned, but not highly public.

This is done because otherwise, the towns get yelled at.
Heavily. There are lots of interest groups involved in this kind of thing.
We all aspire to change the world. Airbnb is showing us that they are actually doing it.

Congrats guys and keep up the amazing work.
You should compare your beginning to someone else's end. Otherwise when you get to your middle you'll find out you should have worked harder :)
Granted I have no numbers, but between the convenience of Steam, the seasonal sales, and the fact that it's trivial to use an Xbox 360 controller on a PC...I just don't see this. Why would they bother releasing on PC at all if it wasn't profitable? If anything, it seems like more console games than ever are getting cross platform releases on to PC. Personally, I'm seeing less and less reason to own a console at all. My xbox is really just a netflix player these days.
this is some javascript black magic right here
> Why should these cases linger for so long?

While I don't know that this was case with Aaron's case (I assume it was), most federal cases are incredibly complex and take a competent attorneys weeks just to get up to speed. Justice is not about arriving at a decision quickly, but arriving at the correct decision.

> Why can't we create have a hacker legal defense fund that would keep cases like this from bankrupting defendants?

Nobody says you can't, but I know I wouldn't put money into it. You don't get to do something like that and cherry pick who gets to use it. Criminals will use it to pay for a better attorney.

> Why should expert legal advice be only available to those who can afford it?

Because expert legal minds are not content to earn $50,000 a year, and with what it costs to attend the best law schools (and even mediocre undergraduate institutions) it's ridiculous to expect them to.

> What should we tell a friend who is planning to commit a crime on behalf of a cause?

That if they're not willing to pay the full price they probably shouldn't do it.

> Was Aaron's cause worth anyone's life? This should be a question for everyone, not just prosecutors.

This is where I start to get twitchy with the general consensus on HN. Aaron was not murdered. His death was not an accident. He chose to take his own life, so clearly to him this cause was worth that, or at the very least it was preferable to him going to prison.

> Is any middle ground possible in the conflict between rights holders and advocates of free information?

Not so long as rights holders are hell bent on perpetuating a business model from the 1920s, and not so long as free information activists are hell bent on not respecting the personal (intellectual) property rights of others, including corporations.
And what I'm trying to make clear is that offensive comments ("don't talk about it, just do it") sometimes engender offensive responses.

... as you helpfully demonstrated by calling chasing an asshole while chastising him for being offensive.
Hopefully a direct thought/muscle tension interpreter will become feasible and eliminate the need for this argument. It would also eliminate common cases of RSI.
GPS Events lets designers manage runway shows
The article talks about when to refactor: when you are making the code more closely resemble the product specification.

I'm disappointed that the key point of my entire article, which is the difference between accidental sameness and essential sameness, was apparently misconstrued as an attack on all refactoring.
Carbon for Twitter: The Best Twitter Client for Android
If you want a non-hipsterish way to say "non-mainstream", "long tail" might be better. Just don't tell the hipsters.
Alright, I'm going to play devil's advocate since you're obviously not getting the point.

> How about that it represents a fuller account of what you did and how you did it?

So what? Journals never require your code to be submitted. It's not going to increase your article's chance of acceptance. And nobody asks for your code anyway. Why should I publish it if it's not going to bring me any benefits?

> Isn't scientific publishing supposed to be about reporting what you did as accurately as possible so that others can (1) understand and (2) replicate?

In an idealized world, yes. But nobody else does it so why should I?