skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not your PDF reader. It looks like this PDF has been generated with LaTex. It's quite common for the typesetting to overhang a word into the margin like that, I guess it's just to maintain the justification. If you can be bothered you can add hints into the LaTex markup to force breaks and hyphenation at certain points to alleviate it.
Goodbye from Stickam
I'm not sure where the executive order is published, if anywhere, but it's a direct response to the failed CISPA in Congress. EFF criticized CISPA as violating 4th amendment rights by giving government new powers to spy on the public. Also opposed: Tim Berners-Lee, ACLU, Demand Progress, Reporters Without Borders, Mozilla, ACM.
One of the many reasons I pay for Linode is the "good neighbor" aspect the price point brings.

I'm not saying that DigitalOcean suffers this problem but the cheaper a VPS provider is the greater chance of it being used by folks running bit torrent, warez downloads, etc and/or folks who think they need to smash the (shared) resources out of server to get their moneys worth.

Paying a few dollars extra for a Linode instance (and I have 100's of them, so it adds up) is worth the peace of mind of being unattractive to these kinds. IE 'bad neighbors" who will pee in the pool.

Support is also top notch (although I rarely need it).
If this is not an illustration of an executive power grab, what power authorizes the executive branch to round up a group of people?

Even so, legal or not, there is no valid reason to legitimize the internment of Japanese-American citizens.
IStockphoto Booting Top Photographer in Wake of Getty/Google Hoopla
The memory profile says otherwise, doesn't it? If you create a named function and call it like "setInterval(draw, 50)", the memory use stays constant.
Only seems worthwhile using and relying on online storage, if you use two or three completely separate services, all sync'ed. So if one goes down or disappears without notice, you have backups, and can add another completely independent service.

Though with bandwidth limits and limited online storage capacity (I've over 200GB of business files, plus 450,000 photos, over 1TB), still appears more cost effective and efficient to backup to a portable hard drive every few months anything new and store at a secondary secure location, with online storage only being used for short periods until that backup is made and a local drive copy of that backup used on a daily basis.
Latin is helping me a lot, in understanding ( bold that "understanding") words in French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian
How can one understand the difference between i.e. and e.g. without being schooled in Latin?:)
Yes, for me at least. (IAMA non-coder, Excel power user)

SQL is the same way- it suits my "power user" style by allowing me to type in a piece of script, hit the checkbox to find errors (or run it in a test environment), debug, rinse, repeat. Then I can stitch together all these pieces into one giant operation and let it run.

I would love to learn Python but as OP says I also have a job to get done. Every time I sit down with a Python tut, it seems (maybe just my perception) that there's so much fundamentals, coding, etc before I see the output what I'm actually doing. That there is a larger upfront investment than there is when learning Excel or SQL.
Great gesture to open source it. Thanks!

Downloaded the source and took a look at it. It is a PhoneGap powered Android app, that serves as a viewer to some hard rock artists' videos on YouTube.

Screenshot (as rendered on Chrome) - http://i.imgur.com/cAzRLpG.png
I would love to know the specifics behind this post, because it seems so very, very, wrong.

One of the comments nails it best: unless you are breaking the laws of physics, you can make software do pretty much anything... the real question is whether that is a net benefit.

"They want to use our software or customize things in ways that are technically impossible"

What the hell does that even mean? Perhaps the reason the tech can't communicate to the non-techy is that he can't communicate, period. Does it mean they're using the software for something it wasn't intended to be used for? Are they looking for a feature that isn't coded? Are they looking for support for something you aren't interested in supporting?

Not much is 'technically impossible' when it comes to businesses and software these days. What there are in abundance however are a lot of misguided applications.
Enforcing Congress's laws isn't the only power the President has under the Constitution. He is also commander in chief of the military. Telling the military to round up and detain people is an exercise of that power, and does not violate any separation of powers concerns.

When the people are American citizens on American soil, the action may very well run afoul of other Constitutional provisions, such as due process, but it's not an example of executive usurpation of a power that belongs to Congress.
I just switched http://jsonip.com from Rackspace/Slicehost to Linode about a month ago. I was a multi-year Slicehost customer and couldn't have been happier. It was only a matter of time after Rackspace aquired them that I was expecting problems. That occurred about a month + one week ago. (Sorry for the downtime to any users that might be reading this.)

I've since migrated the service to Linode and holy shit, it's such an improvement. The support is great, but even more their admin interface is excellent. Gives me so much more info than I ever had before. It's even a little cheaper than the plan I had with Slicehost.

Just to throw some numbers out there: jsonip.com is a node-based app that supports upwards of 6-10 million requests per day. Lets just say that I couldn't be happier with Linode.

Note to Linode: Do not ever sell out to Rackspace or else I will be forced to go live in the woods somewhere. Thanks.
I don't want information sharing that way either. We have (sadly, increasingly circumvented or weakened) laws banning that for a reason.
I never knew why they called it the wild west. It was very tame.
It does have size upload limits of 250MB.
You can't see the little dropbox icon in the folder? ;) I wish it were a different color as well; I wind up differentiating by the red 𐄂 and green ✓.
Yes. Firefox had terrible GC pauses until last year [1]. Chrome processes just a portion of the heap at a time to reduce pauses to a minimum [2].

You can minimize GC by being clever about re-using objects, avoiding waste. The top answer shows how GC happens less frequently when using a setTimeout loop instead of setInterval, I don't know the underlying reason but that was always recommended before requestAnimationFrame came along.

These days you should use requestAnimationFrame whenever available - it allows the browser to plan ahead for a smoother framerate, adjust rate to the device capabilities, and save resources when it's in the background.

[1] http://phoboslab.org/log/2011/08/are-we-fast-yet
[2] https://developers.google.com/v8/design#garb_coll
Why do I have to provide my phone number to sign up?
Reminds me of Stable Matching[1] but the groups aren't the same size. I guess if we can relax the "opposite sex" requirement then we reduce the problem to a Stable Roommates Problem[2] ;)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_matching
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_roommates_problem
Why don't you try http://megaspotted.com/. There you can share uploads on mega.co.nz and download files other people shared. Way better then similar 'Frensh' websites..
Hah, I'd never considered that.

Company idea: Dropbox but with a default folder that is green rather than blue or manilla.
Given the basic programming ability of the folks using Excel, I would expect something more along the lines of BizTalk's orchestration designer or ChipWits.

and, yes I have spent the odd moment programming such a thing
That's not the fatal flaw. The fatal flaw is that all the men in a social circle will click on every friend to see who signals interest. All the women will click on the same one or two individuals. In other words, the fatal flaw is that it will simply replicate the dynamics and frustrations of high school.
There's not that fine a line between skepticism and ignorant paranoia. Many people here on HN react in a paranoid manner to government initiatives without bothering to even read the proposals or educate themselves about the situation beyond what they hear from the echo chamber.
"We use Gmail for email and Google Groups for lists."

"What we have today works pretty well for our current size—around 45 people."

So if I can manage to get the Google authentication credentials for just one of Stripe's 45 employees, I can get access to the vast majority of Stripe's email? I hope they require two factor authentication.
It's just about impossible to start if you're intent on reading the articles in order, however. Every article seems to link to some collection of other unread articles. I manually scraped them all a while back and came up with a rough graph order, although there are some circular loops (cycles).
Interesting points, the chicken/egg issue is a real problem and something I think starting with a targeted community (college is the example in the post) would help alleviate.

You can't tell people that X people like them because it creates a perverse incentive to click on everyone to find out who.

Driving clicks shouldn't be the foundation of the idea, the partnering with local places to meet could help with the value side of things. This is how you also keep people using it (giving them a reason to check in to places) that I talked about toward the end of the post.

The not making money/driving growth part reminded me a little of a meeting Page and Brin had when they were originally trying to sell their algorithm before deciding to start google. They were showing off to a current search engine how page rank returned results that were magnitudes better than the contextual search (which the other site was using). The guy they were showing it to said something along the lines of "This is too good, too fast and the results returned are too relevant. We want people to stay on the engine page as long as possible to click on ads". Sometimes the value of something isn't immediately obvious.

It's more about just solving the problem first and the money would be a means to do that. I think if you can solve a common problem in a better way there is probably a way to create value out of that. For example it'd also probably work well for people meeting each other within a company, but I'd doubt any companies would go for that.
There might be better performing hosting providers, and there are definitely lower cost providers than Linode, but I don't love them like I love Linode.

It's not entirely rational, but if you ask around, I'd wager most people who use Linode love it.

Maybe it's because it used to be just caker doing everything, or the free disk / memory upgrades he kept handing out. I remember him asking about LASIK surgery in the (very helpful) forums; there's a family feeling to it. It's the anti-Rackspace. It's home.
Can you expand on this?

I'm assuming Box isn't a write-only file system as they'd have few customers if it was.
Here's what KK quoted:

Over the years, I have seen hundreds of examples of money machine people being severely done in by the patent system. Even murdered by it in several heart-attack-during-litigation cases. And not once did I see anyone approaching the patent system on a small scale basis and profiting from it. Ever. Once again: Unless you are well within a Fortune 500 context, any and all involvement in the patent system in any, shape, or form is absolutely certain to cause you the net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity. Besides ending up a totally useless and utterly unnecessary psychic energy sink.

Maybe the pdf has more information about building machines that either singularly or at least collectively are resilient to patent attacks.
I downloaded the iPhone app and tried it out. I'm actually quite impressed. The interactions are quite speedy and the app has a "native" feel to it. It also helps that the design of the app is quite nicely done.

I've been a big proponent of full native apps on mobile when possible. But this has got me thinking that the hybrid approach can be a smart move when done right.
a .net based language probably already has hooks into the office API's, that would be one reason to use iron python vs. regular cpython.
>It makes guessing the meanings of things whenever you're >visiting a country that uses a Romance language easier

Spanish, French, English, Portuguese. It's a big deal.
Err, IANAL, but you may have committed a crime by tampering with evidence even though it was a civil case.
You can already embed Python in Excel. There's a few different projects that do this; here's one:
http://www.bnikolic.co.uk/expy/expy.html

The article doesn't do any close human-factor analysis of why Excel is so much more accessible than programming languages; it's the lower abstraction bar. No need to name variables in functions when you can just click on the cell you want. No need to create loops when you can drag an already entered formula across a number of cells. Excel is a direct-manipulation programming environment, not a language, and a language can't compete here.

But I wish them luck; they diagnose the problem reasonably well, if not the solution.
Three Months In - Am I An Entrepreneur Yet?
Loved that tool. For those who didn't know, they EOLd it. Sigh. http://www.resolversystems.com/eol.php
In fact, he did do benchmarks with ab: http://jasonormand.com/2013/02/08/linode-vs-digitalocean-per...
You are wise beyond your years.
Replying to my own question like on Stackoverflow, it could be that what wevorce does (from a business perspective) is create a new market (a cheap divorce where there is only 1 lawyer instead of 2, and less paperwork), and providing this market with a software solution that it builds and maintains.

Wevorce doesn't employ lawyers directly, it just acts as a marketplace between them and people wanting to get divorced without killing one another, and it takes a cut in the form of software licence.

So from this point of view there's no reason it couldn't scale indefinitely.
A/B Testing With Limited Data
Which Amazon cloud storage product do you have? Is it an Amazon retail product or an Amazon AWS one (e.g. S3, Glacier, etc)?
At least in Minnesota, there is a trend towards attorneys who practice Collaborative Divorce and I'm told it's spreading across the country rapidly. How does Wevorce fit in with this?
Application Cache is a Douchebag
Repetitio is mater studiorum

"Is"? :-)
Pretty cool. I like the video-as-background. Good front end UI.

I agree with the email every day idea.
Yes, we do require two factor auth, and we're very stringent about laptop security generally. We're pretty cognizant that, even at a less open company, compromising any employee can generally be used to obtain a surprising amount of sensitive company information.
What happens when they sell your ram to another customer, and then you decide you want it back?
VBA is a surprisingly flexible language (although it does have many quirks) and is visually much cleaner than python.

Read the MS-VBAL spec: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd361851.aspx
The President has broad powers to direct the military to take action. Telling the military what to do is a power uniquely within the President's purview. Telling the military to round up a group of people falls squarely within that power.

That's not a legitimization of the situation--you can argue that Japanese internment was illegal for other reasons, but we're not talking about the legality of Japanese internment in general. We're talking about the executive usurping powers reserved to Congress.
YC14.
how does putting a "real" language on the backend of spreadsheets help fix what happened in London? seems like it's just a bigger gun with which to shoot yourself in the foot.
Yes, file size limited to 250mb.

Account type: Personal
Storage (used/total): 0B / 50.0GB 0% used
Bandwidth used: 0B of 10.0GB
Max file size: 250 MB — Upload files up to 5GB
Which BLAS though? The reference BLAS implementation? That will have terrible performance. Would be interested to see if something better like ATLAS or OpenBLAS can be compiled for it. Recent versions of ATLAS do work on ARM Linux, so wondering if those can be easily ported to Android.
Asian Women Magazine Facebook
3
The only way there won't be an increased load on the powertrain is if the revs are matched. If the revs are mis-matched then the transmission will be at a different point in the powerband (likely out of the powerband) and will result in increased loads experienced.
It's a dangerous habit to call or think of anyone as "a non-technical person". Life is not binary; people do not come in discrete categories; these are merely labels we impose on ourselves and others, and once you stick a label on someone it's hard to see them otherwise. You're bound to the judgement you've made and will tend to block out any information that contradicts it – such as the fact that they can understand things, if clearly communicated.
Aliens Colonial Marines review: game over for Gearbox
The STEPS system provides a spreadsheet that is a simple extension of the system language: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
At least Dropbox has never complained about my ~4-5GB files.
Yes, I know, but it's not nice to mess with the lysdexics.
An Introduction to Backbone.js
The internet wasn't implemented by some basic government funded research. It was designed and built under a DARPA project and designed and implemented by key pieces of the military industrial complex (BBN, etc). It was run by the DOD and "flourished" long before it was commercialized.
They've been very reliable for us. Network is spiky (12-20MB/s at times), but otherwise, compared to roughly equivalent VMs (lscpu, /proc/cpuinfo, etc.) they are hands-down faster than AWS. In the limited testing we've done on AWS SSD AMIs (optimized for cluster compute), AWS wins on network and CPU, but at literally 10X the cost.

Also, see: http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean for interesting benchmarks over time (with all the standard caveats, yada yada).
How do you tell a non-technical person that they can’t understand?

You don't. You explain by analogy.

If you can't come up with a good analogy, it's probably for one of two reasons: Perhaps you don't really understand it all that well yourself, in which case you should find somebody who understands it better to do the explaining. Or perhaps you just have a hard time coming up with analogies in general, in which case you should find someone with better communication skills to do the explaining.
Well, every once in a while the government would come by and regulate a population out of existence for security reasons. But that was the old days, they're totally trustworthy and non-murdery now.
Why Students Think They Understand—When They Don't
Startup DNA
They're a publicly traded company. However you want to characterize their strategy – and I think everyone agrees with your summary of their strategy – as a shareholder I'm not interested in 100 year time horizons because I will be dead by then.

The argument goes, no other company gets such a free pass from their shareholders. Amazon could be amazingly profitable right now; in real terms, shareholders are subsidizing their current strategy in ways that Apple or Microsoft or Walmart could never get away with.
I think an important aspect of what makes Excel formulas (relatively) useable to people who don't think they're programmers is their functional nature. You don't have to simulate the program's state in your mind because there is no state. You hit return and it shows you what the result is, and if your formula gets too long you can break it up into multiple cells. Giving users a procedural programming language is only going to help a small number of Excels users - the ones who like thinking in a procedural way.

For me, the real pain point in Excel's formula language is in how the path of least resistance leads you towards unmaintainable code. "SUM(A3:K754)" is not very meaningful. If only named ranges were more discoverable and useable, we might end up with more examples like "SUM(ProductSales2012)".

Shameless plug: I'm working on a visual, functional programming tool for querying data that's aimed at people who currently only use Excel: http://querytreeapp.com. I think the advance in browser technology is going to bring a number of tools like this to market to challenge Excel's dominance and hopefully improve to quality of "shadow IT" in business.
Because "communicating with messages" is one of the important features of objects, but objects are the focus.

The confusion, I think, mostly came about because in the late 1980s early 1990s, an explosion of "Object-oriented" programming happend by gluing classes into existing popular structured programming languages -- producing ObjectPascal and C++ which became the popular "OO" languages which became what "OO" meant to lots of people (Objective-C was a contemporary, and despite being C-based like C++ was more like Kay's idea of OO than C++, but didn't become popular until later.)

So what became popularly conflated with "object oriented" programming was statically-typed, class-oriented programming typified by C++ and similar languages (e.g., Java.)

There are certainly ways (often not the same ways between languages) in which newer languages -- Erlang, Python/Ruby, etc. -- are more "object oriented" than Java/C++-style languages.
Both OSX and Ubuntu easily fill your requirement.
I'm not suggesting a 180 degree about-face. And if we were talking about a company that didn't sell philosophy in the form of books and blogs, my point would have much less relevance.

> as any good web developer will know.

Am I missing something here? Pretty sure I haven't written 2 books, decrying overhead and the ills of appeasement. 37signals have 2 books (which I've read) that clearly illustrate why you should avoid scope/feature-creep – especially for the cost of satisfying a few people. The avoidance of a native app followed this lineage.

I've watched the slow, articulated steps from "bootstrapping", Jeff Bezos, "this is different because X", etc. It's all very well and good, but you've charged people $. Like any customer, expectations are there.

So I am to ignore hundreds of pages of text because we all don't have the books in front of us right now for reference?

My overarching point is, if you're going to sell me an ideology - stay with it.
IOS mobile app & mentorship for $6k flat fee (for startups)
This is an interesting tactic. I think it can work well for companies up to a certain size, at which point new hires start getting auto added to certain lists and you start to have enterprise email issues (I think Stripe will manage to avoid this fate though) ;)

This is a timely article for me though. We actually did a Show HN earlier today for a product (lightermail.com) whose ideal use is exactly this scenario. It allows people to control the flow of email from specific senders or domains. We see it being ideal for companies who have these sort of mailing lists, because it allows employees to subscribe to all the relevant lists without getting distracted by all the associated email throughout the day.

Good luck with your experiment! It will be interesting to see how it goes.
I have read the book (paper copy) and recommend it. It is a relatively quick read, you can knock it out over three cups of coffee at a coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon or on a medium length plane flight, and I think most people would benefit from it and feel inspired.
I'm just curious : which linode plan do you have for your server ? Is it the $20 monthly plan ?
Run DBaaS Metering & Chargebacks w/Data Director, then add Hyperic
"That's disgusting."

I agree. This was years ago - I wouldn't do it now as I have financial freedom and (probably) a higher standard of morals. But back then, keeping my employers satisfied so my sole source of income was safe, was a large motivator.