skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why not just block POSTs completely and return a 405 status? Even if your app is adequately RESTful, I would expect the front end to start displaying user actions as being successful when that is not the case (among other possible oddities).
Ask HN: How do we reduce the gender gap at our tech events
Hey HN, I've been running tech events (barcamps, conferences, hackdays) for about five years now and I've seen the gender gap at our events fluctuate, it's a lot higher than other events I've seen (as we really push to make sure the event is welcoming, family friendly and has a great atmosphere, but I'm always wanting to improve..

I'm hesitant to have specific female tickets as I think that's an unnecessary divide but one of the options considered is giving tickets to local groups (girl geek dinners, girls who code etc) to give out to members.

I know there are a lot of other event organisers on HN and obviously a lot of girl hackers, I'd love to get thoughts and suggestions from the crowd, try things out and I'll write up if they work..
I did ten years of work. I'm in a CIA prison. A job would be a CIA joke. Fuck them and die! God's gonaa FUCK YOU UP!

gOD SAYS...
C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT

fill to her
double.

18:7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so
much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a
queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

18:8 Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning,
and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is
the Lord God who judgeth her.

18:9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and
lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and l
At least for me doing meaningful hacking as part of my daytime consulting inspires me to work on my side projects in evening/during night instead of tiring me. On the other hand day spent doing nothing of direct value (paperwork, useless meetings and so on) leads to evening spend by essentially doing nothing.
129 days in prison: Developer speaks out about his detainment in Greece
I never realized the rack logo used the same font that Rackspace used to use. It was a little disconcerting to see that at first.

For those who remember, it's the one which had 8 little rectangular machines, with one of them pulled out a bit and glowing red. I used to say it was the one that was on fire, because, well, it happens!
Bit9 and Our Customers’ Security
This is quite a neat comparison. Certainly some geographic bias. Speaking of which - does your pricing software take into account such a bias? i.e. can you parse out what people from different geographic regions are willing to pay and, perhaps even more important, why?
Speaking German in Texas
No more no-idea applications?
There's KidsRuby and Hackety Hack on the Ruby side.
Looks interesting. fflick.com did this sometime back and were acquired by Google.

A feature suggestion - "Enter your email to get weekly notification for movies with more than 80 buzzscore" (where 80 is editable.) An extension to this could be email me movies that are popular for their comedy, acting or the story.
I agree that producing a piece of software many people use is great for your career. I think, on average, most software is never downloaded or used. So, given this prior, is it a good investment of my time to flesh-out documentation and examples rather than just enough to get it published?
I was impressed at how well it worked when I opened it on my Z10. Very well done implementation.
One way to spread love http://sidekicking.com/1912/lesson-exceptional-customer-expe... - Cookies and Hand written notes

Also - watch http://startupschool.org/2012/rusenko/ - it takes time. Focus on hand reaching out to a few people. Doing searches for related posts/projects - checking users profile and reaching out by hand :)

Good Luck :)
Socialised entertainment
That's assuming the article is right, but a look around the world shows the opposite - generally speaking the stronger the patent rights, the stronger the innovation. Weak IP African countries vs strong IP in American, European, Japan, Korea.
Yeah, you can be fined, audited, have your merchant account revoked - all sorts of badness.
A Mixin for Font-Size-Adjust
Ask HN: how do mobile developers find clients?
I started a small dev shop with a group of friends in NYC. We are 3 developers - we do APIs in Ruby or Scala and native iOS development. Our backgrounds are strong, and we have worked on some cool projects together and individually.

Since the summer we have had two bigger projects. Those clients are happy, but the work is winding down as we come to completion. They were both from previous connections that we had.

We are finding it hard to meet new clients for bigger projects. Is there a typical way to find clients? I go to meetups around NYC, but that doesn't seem to lead to anything.

Any advice would help.
You would think that for non-enterprise customers, they would charge more.

You mean charge less? In my limited experience enterprise customers are less price sensitive and more "how do I not get fired for choosing this vendor over the status quo" sensitive.
Soundwagon, the world's smallest vinyl record player
I think that theorems are just like libraries you can pull in for your purposes, and the proofs are the unit tests that you can dive into if needed ;) !
Cartoon about Nemo/Blizzard
You can take Victoria from my cold dead hands - Viral videos roundup
Currently been going through HacketyHack with her... she just made a star appear on the screen :-)
As a side note, I see that she has a Masters of Journalism. Why on earth would you need a masters degree in Journalism? Find a story, research it/fact check, write about it. Do you really need to go to a university for 6~ years for that?

https://xkcd.com/793/
I've definitely heard it before, though "body font" seems to be much more prevalent. It's probably a literal translation from a continental Germanic language, e.g. Dutch has "broodtekst" though the word refers to the actual body copy, not the font. German has "Bröttext".
Three things:

1. Some Rails apps shouldn't be affected, since Rails uses its own HMAC stuff to handle this. From the rack homepage: "Some Rails users may not be affected (if they only use Rails managed sessions)."

2. You don't need an upgrade of Rails, just `bundle update rack`.

3. 3-2-stable has already had the rack dependency bumped, so the next release of 3.2 will include a minium of this latest release.
Courier Prime: Continuing to solve the wrong problem with screenplay typography
I cannot go into technical details because that is a solution I worked out for Nuuton. Though it is possible by using a helper bot. The crawler does not do the job itself, but gets the data passed to it by another bot.

I don't want to sound dickish, but I can't really give you much technical details. Sorry.
"he tried to change everything around him - everything but himself."

Read his last big piece of writing: the series Raw Nerve, which he called "a series of pieces about getting better at life." He was trying to change himself. And he was making headway. And then not.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve
> the sector that has the knowledge and employee base to be geographically independent are also the ones that pay the most for their location

I agree that more tech companies should be okay with remote workers. But its not the trivial thing you make it out to be - it takes work, especially in larger teams. And unless you're going to put that work in and make it a part of your team's identity, you have to be where the talent is. I don't think this concentration of tech companies is nearly as surprising as you make it out to be.
As a YC alum, I strongly recommend YC to anyone considering it -- even if you don't get in, it's a great way to think about your startup.

(Wow, it doesn't even seem like the Winter 2013 were 6 months ago yet. I wonder how much the reduction in class size (previously discussed on HN) will affect YC S13.)
Well most cities have subsidised public transit, so it is pretty hard to compete, even if it were legal (in cities like my own it is 100% illegal).

Variable fuel prices doesn't really change any of the other private mass transit systems, like air, ship, and train (or even taxi?).

Environmental requirements are essentially irrelevant, especially compared the the fuel that will be saved.

High capital investment? I could start with a single van and one frequently travelled road. Or provide the service exclusively to one employer (ala Google style).

Demand challenges meet multi linear optimization. Our fire stations, electrical grids, gasoline stations, highways, office buildings, and eateries all have demand challenges.

Why would the profit be especially lower? If it were too low, entities would leave the market, if it were too high entities would enter the market.
I too am very interested in this. Netflix and Amazon both seem to be amazing companies to work for - if you're in the right class/caste/level of employment. If you're a developer or similar working for corporate, it sounds great. If you're working in the factory-like fulfillment warehouses, it sounds less great. There are few stories I've heard of the companies applying equal policies to both. I've heard of even fewer stories of people moving between the two classes of employees- or of the companies creating opportunities for them to do so.

But moreso, instead of demonizing the companies for any practices on their hourly employees- I'm curious to know if its possible to apply these forward-thinking policies to 'unskilled labor' or hourly workers from an organizational perspective. Or are these types of policies only workable for certain types of jobs? Have there been any large (and recent) experiments done with applying this type of management to hourly employees?
from the article:

"In countries without patent laws, inventors depend entirely on secrecy, lead time, and other alternatives to patents in protecting their intellectual property."

This has been shown time and again, remove patents and you remove the incentive to disclose.
PG, would it be possible to see a screenshot or a basic tour of what the application reviewers see? I'm curious to see the logistics on that side of the equation.
They updated this in 2011, by the way:

http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
<3

There are some small issues with Hackety, including one bug in a tutorial. We're working hard on fixing our big upstream dependency before being able to do another release, but please let me know what you think.
Hooked Model: the psychology of how products engage us
Cold call. Advertise. Network. Linkedin. Golf clubs. Recommendations.

Just pound the pavement every single day. There's no easier way.
They've said already that they plan on putting out at least 5 new Netflix original series a year.
Whoops. You're right, my bad.
Curious here as well. While it's wonderful that these POS entrants are coming out in droves for small business - I'm surprised to see so few focus on integrating the Brick & Mortar with web-stores. VendHQ has their Shopify integration but aside from that, who else (form any YC class) is offering a complete setup?
We've been selling a ton of product via Groupon and need a POS system to handle the redemptions of those Groupons.

One little quirk is that Groupon does NOT collect sales tax, so we're required to collect tax at the time of redemption.

We need our POS system to handle a payment of type "Groupon" for $X and then a second payment for $Y.

So - for example - if a product is $100 and tax is 5% (total due: $105), we need the total due to show as $105 (naturally), then apply the Groupon payment of $100 and show a balance due of $5, to be paid by credit card or cash.

Last I checked Square register doesn't support this, Shopkeep doesn't support this, and a few others I checked don't either. It's not rocket science - just the ability to accept 2 or more payments for each sale (Groupon + cash or Groupon + credit card) and have the balances get calculated correctly.
Just because you don't explicitly write it down doesn't mean you didn't prove something. For optimization, you have to prove to yourself that the new code behaves equivalently to the old code. Anytime you use algebra you're doing a small proof to show that two expressions should be treated equivalently. Writing a proof down is the very last step, the hard part is thinking it through.
> No one is in even a remotely comparable position in 2013 to suppress ideas.

Of course not. That would be weird, as those events lie hundred of years in the past.
It is a total different world today.
Thinking that those events map one-to-one is far beyond ridiculous.
You need to refer to the principle.

The hard truth is, that much of the publicly funded research is kept away from 99,9 % of the people, just so a few can make profits.

Fine, it might make it easier for you to say to yourself, that

> democratically-developed laws

back up your opinion.

But the actual truth is that many laws are written by lobbyists.

Also the laws are and always have been up to interpretation.
The prerogative of interpretation is under a constant challenge.

If you think that the current system will be seen as just in 100 years from now you are probably wrong.
If we want to accelerate human development we must make sure, that everyone has access to current research, just as we make sure that everyone has access to the modern software due to open source.

Sadly, for every Aaron there are thousands of people with your mindset that chose the way of least resistance.
And when I hear those people pitying the ones who are trying to make the world a better place, it makes me angry and sad.
Excellent idea. I'm already telling people about it.
Bitcoin is created by rules of mathematics and mined by problem solving. Gold is creating by mining and refining and governed by the rules of physics.. What does any of this have to do with the definition of fiat? It's already defined, lookup the latin - 'it shall be'
Thanks for the reply. I was wondering, because of a rather bizarre comment I saw (and replied to) earlier today. I thought the most charitable interpretation of the comment was that it was an attempt at a joke.
Would anyone use a command line blog platform?
I want to develop a blog platform for personal use that can manage your blog from the command line and I am curious if other devs would use it.
We see almost exactly the same thing people filling out the form see, except with a comment box at the top and a bunch of submit buttons representing different grades.
Cool. I wrote something like this to alert me when its time to pick up my daughter from school. Though in my implementation it starts playing a very annoying alarm (I always have headphones on). Congrats on shipping!
Unfortunately yes. I used chocolaty to install speccy and got Google Chrome and Google Toolbar installed -- silently.
Good question. I wonder if reddit links are handicapped. I can imagine they may be for good reason.
Knowing when to refactor is obviously an art, not a science. And with an example as trivial as this, it's not really a very "real-world" example.

A lot of the time, you don't even know if two swaths of code are "coincidentally" identical (don't refactor) or identical in a "deep" way (refactor), even when the program is yours -- you just don't know how the program will evolve.

In the absence of additional information, I usually refactor only when I see three similar code paths, since by that point a project rarely goes back. Over the years, it's turned out to be a surprisingly good rule of thumb.
Your app is targeted at a very specific audience. I have no clue what it does. I'm not even familiar with Heroku at all. Figure out exactly where those people look and deliver it to them.
Great job. Any plans to open it up as a web API?
Winter 2013 applications weren't 6 months ago. One of the things we realized after starting YC is that January and June are 5 months apart, not 6. So we have 2 more months between batches in the fall. That's why Startup School is in the fall.
"Yes, these actions are against current laws"

Actually for most of the sites life it wasn't known if it was illegal or not, since no such case had been tried in Sweden.
Show me a fiat currency the appreciates over time and maybe I'll look at it differently. Have you ever thought of that the root of our over-consumption society might be caused by the need to keep our money always moving to prevent it from depreciating?
I don't really understand how that could possibly work. If you install tools on private machines then they never talk to each other.
No, but it highlights the hypocrisy of the largest anti-sharing organization. Movie studios and record labels are also generally lousy to the talent they make their money off of. Treating creators like shit while outwardly pretending to care about them to advance your business interests makes your whole side look bad.
Golf clubs... that's an interesting idea.
We haven't decided yet. For now that's commented out.
You can't lump all clinical testing into the approval process. Drug companies have to do a certain amount of clinical testing just to see if the drug does anything. To make a computer comparison: just because you don't get your OS POSIX certified doesn't mean you don't need to run any tests.

This graphic suggests that pre-FDA clinical trials still account for about 30% of the cost of developing new drugs: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/aroy/files/2012/04/fda_05t2.j.... Even if you assume that all of the costs after that are allocable to the regulatory process (which is a liberal assumption--it's unlikely that drug companies would need to do zero human trials in the absence of regulation), developing a new drug is still a billion dollar endeavor.

The reason drugs are such a great example of the applicability of patents is because they're the worst case scenario for the economic issue (free riding) that patents address: high capital costs for a product that is trivially reproduced. That dynamic exists independent of the regulatory process, and exists in other capital-intensive areas too (Tesla has a raft of patents on its technology, and Google has patents on self-driving cars, etc).

The reason patents often seem ridiculous in the software context is that by and large they are not a bad scenario for free-riding. The capital requirements for software inventions tend to be very small.

Looking at capital requirements also exposes a weakness in the article, which uses historical data. Capital requirements for new inventions was much lower in the past than they are today. The era of "lone inventors" is largely dead outside the software realm. We live in the era of "big science" where it costs $1 billion to get anything done. Patents are a lot more relevant in the face of high capital costs than in the face of low capital costs.
Ask HN: purchases not eligible for paypal seller protection?
I work at a small startup, 7Sage. We sell an LSAT course, a wholly virtual good.

A customer recently won a chargeback case against us, despite blatant fraud on their part. They claimed their identity had been stolen, despite ample usage of our product and a few other proofs.

Paypal ruled against us, saying that the transaction was not eligible for seller protection. From what I've read, that's true of all virtual purchases.

1. Is this correct, or is there a way to get seller protection?
2. Is there a good solution we're ignoring? Our site is built on Wordpress, and uses S2member for membership. Right now they don't handle any alternative processors such as Stripe.
Try reddit it r/shamelessplug, try other communities.

HN isn't the be-all and end-all of views. In fact, it's usually good for a server-crushing influx (if you manage to hit the magic sweet spot of "interest" and "timing"), but most of that traffic disappears after a day or so. If it's really cool, it will start getting shared around on twitter from HN, but that won't new you a huge amount of traffic.

Reddit will usually provide a smaller amount of traffic in one hit, but it'll keep coming for a week or so - the way stories move on there are just generally different. If your tool is relevant to a particular subreddit, then that's your best bet for getting consistent traffic.

Finally, put a link to your tool in the comments here - it's worth another shot.
I have an odd question that has stopped me from applying from most incubators to date (although it may also be too early as well)...

If my idea is very specific to an industry because that's what I'm interested in pursuing but would require developing applications that would benefit almost all general industries conceivably, is that considered good or bad?

For example, my company is only looking to be a player in the legal information industry but the base application I've designed would work just as well for any industry where text analysis is useful.
>Or, it could be the case that the university exposed him to a ton of readily digestible theoretical knowledge that he wouldn't necessarily have stumbled upon on his own.

I never attended college. I'm entirely self-taught. I've had a successful career.

For the first two-thirds of my career I was awfully satisfied with my own ability to assimilate and apply books, docs and discussion to my work - seemingly much faster than anyone I worked with.

Eventually, I found myself working on big, unique, urgent problems with a guy who was both college educated and had exceptional ability.

For the longest time I'd had ideas without the words to describe them. I could run something past this guy and almost always get a response like "What you're describing here is a..."

We ended up having hours of discussions that amounted to a crash course in computer science, all sorts of higher math, history and philosophy. Our talks didn't just teach me directly, they gave me conceptual footholds to make the next logical leaps - completely expanded my horizon.

I suddenly realized just how much I didn't know and how hard it is to even know where to look in order to learn.

I didn't need a structured education to be effective, but I can certainly see how it would enable an exceptional person to be that much better.
What’s Cloud Computing, Really?
Surely there is an advantage in being the company that says $100. No additional taxes, no add ons, no surprises. Plenty of companies here and in other countries keep retail costs flat across a market despite the cost of a sale fluctuating. Maybe I ask too much.
It's not a tool for ordinary customers. It's for developers. There are fewer of those around, so it's harder to reach out to them.

Another way is to have a huge number of followers on GitHub. Sadly, I don't have that either.
Intro to Ember.js and ember-rails Pt 1
Corporations withholding royalties from salaried employees with whom no agreement was made regarding royalties is not "obviously bad".
I'm going against my better judgement in trying to critically engage you, but what's your background? Are you a security researcher? Have you audited Django? Have you read the Python source code? Why do you think a given language community is going to be more secure than another? Is security one of the tenets of Python?
Final Day to Apply for YC Hardware Hackathon
It's terrible whatever it is. And it hates network drives. And iPhoto and iTunes hate remote libraries. And then they create local ones without asking and mess everything up. And if 2 computers share the library terrible things happen to the library and it gets corrupted (presumably the library stops matching the locally held file and its very easy to accident use the wrong remote library as after a disconnection a pop up asks which library you want to use. Pay careful attention at this point as a database rebuilt is the minimum pain one will experience with a miss click.). And the OS hates telling you what is taking up space so good luck freeing it up. Never again - although the 64 was accidentally ordered rather than the 128 and I assumed everything would be ok. It wasn't.