skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like most places, their surrounding culture was a huge influence on their companies. To the point where I'd say these businesses weren't made in New York, they were made by New York.

Can’t live with the daily offerings from Banana Republic, Nordstrom and Fab.com, and yet can’t live without them?

So when one of his business school buddies left his $700 glasses on an airplane, the idea of selling inexpensive eyewear directly to consumers became crystal clear.

Students pay $1,499 per eight- to ten- week course, which include video conferences with career coaches and real world professionals.

Fashion, shopping, and luxury goods for wealthy individuals. There's nothing wrong with creating a business to serve your local market, and in fact that's precisely what you should do -- start with the market you know best. But when people like Bloomberg want to see more hard-core technology coming out of New York like other competing areas, it's a long hard road requiring a massive cultural shift. The engineering school will help, but it's going to take decades to break away from fashion, finance, and food.

But the best part by far:

...we would never speak badly about our city, but the rent is too damn high.

Yeah, well, growing the market for designer underwear sure isn't helping.
We're running a bit slow, servers aren't quite coping with the amount of traffic..
"Jobs created by pork are disturbingly similar to public sector jobs"

Which makes it all the funnier when "anti-gov't" politicians load up their bills with private-sector giveaways.
Mojang officially releases Minecraft for free on the Raspberry Pi
I don't know much about this guy's particular details (obviously), but he knew the rules. To break it down into something easy to understand, here are the the only two ways to continue getting money from the government after you quit:
1. Serve for at least 20 years so you get a (retirement)pension, OR
2. Become permanently injured/disabled so you get a (medical) pension and benefits.

Unfortunately for this guy, scar tissue doesn't count as a disability. But he knew all that when he joined the SEALs. When you join the special forces community, they tell you straight up that you are probably going to get injured and you will live a tough life. You know that you don't get any special treatment.

There are thousands of ex-SEALs and other special forces guys out there living with bad knees and lingering injuries like bullet wounds, broken bones, etc. Why should this guy get anything beyond whay they get? Complaining to the media makes him hand his entire community look bad.

Source: I'm in the military and am friends with a few Air Force Pararescue Jumpers. Not the same as the SEALs, but they work with them and know when a guy is being a whiny b*h.
The majority of what makes for a good forum community is the community management, not the community software.

Good forum software mainly just removes obstacles, but it doesn’t create a good community alone. And I think the thing I disagree with Atwood on the most is that you can somehow “fix” community management with scripted automations, algorithms, and whatnot. Especially if it creates an incentive to game the system, which works against the intended purpose. Atwood’s visit to Something Awful spawned a great discussion on this: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=347....

Hence, all the feature lists sound so inane, which is also why you need to watch your rhetoric when promoting it; your software isn’t God’s gift to discourse, and the competitors aren’t as unequivocally bad, as some make them out to be. Creating a good community is not really something contingent on the software (unless it’s HORRIBLE). The problem with current forum software is that is is a hassle to maintain, set up, and use.

But communities like Something Awful obviously do fine in spite of so-so software. If I could choose, I would stick with the Something Awful community’s management acumen over some fancy software such as my own. The latter alone isn’t enough to grow a great, vibrant community. The first one can still overcome clunky software. People > Software.

If anyone thinks forum software alone can create a great community, I would love to disabuse them of that notion immediately, and of the idea that using my project alone will magically fashion you a community on par with Something Awful.

I do plan on incorporating some more tools towards managing a community, but nothing that should give anyone the impression that it is going to do the actual work of managing an entire community for you.

Communities are people.
We should emphasize that he essentially got away with the hacking, too. Incomplete coverage in the enforcement of a law bears no relation to the quality of that law.
It sounds absolutely terrible. What prevents the organization from being filled with evil people just supporting one another? How come a organization filled with quiet hard-working people doesn't outmatch them?
It has been done several times with some degree of success:

- Java Applets

- Microsoft Silverlight

- Adobe Flash
Hi, creator of the headtrackr library here. As far as the headtrackr library goes, it does include a smoother (moving average) to avoid jittering of the tracking. It's set pretty low by default though, since heavy smoothing will lead to lag in tracking sudden movements. Any kind of moving average is a trade-off between responsiveness and smoothness, unfortunately...
IntelliJ IDEA is very good for Java, and good also for other JVM languages. But how good it is depends, both on the effort put in by the IDE developers and characteristics of the programming language in question (how well operations in the IDE are supported by the typing characteristics of the language etc)

When in Java, there is a mishmash of supporting file types, and it integrates them very well compared to its competitors - jump between .java, .jsp, various .xml for Spring, Hibernate, tag libs, etc etc. If you are "just" programming in a programming language (which is a lost utopia in for J*EE developers), much of this functionality is not of much benefit to you, but you might still find the IDE valuable.
It says "Anonymous and secure", but I don't see HTTPS in the URL. When I prefix https:// Firefox complains about untrusted certificate. Am I missing something?
I don't think there would be a simpler way of describing a type as complex as "a pointer to a slice of pointers to FooType".

Simpler variables are declared as

var a int

or with type inference:

var a = 10
>Forcing the general public to fund bringing your ideas to fruition is a completely unsustainable economic model.
Governments all over the world are flat broke from this type of thinking.

Actually most of the cool stuff we have, we have it because of government funding research. Including the very internet.
I didn't ask about the wars. I asked about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.
Assuming 100,000 signatures represents even 5,000 votes it's is not an obvious choice.
Get your Start-Up fit for Summer
He wasn't forced to take on such a hard job, he chose it, over and over again by re-enlisting; it's a voluntary military. While I think we should do more for our vets to help them transition back to civilian life, we don't owe them a lifetime of babysitting because of their personal choices, no matter the job they performed. -- A vet myself
‘We need to pay even more money to the US military? $800 BILLION a year isn't enough?’

Here's an alternative takeaway: we should use those $800 billion better. Perhaps spend more of them on people who come home after war.

‘I wouldn't even consider that "greatest warrior of the month" material.’

Killing someone isn't super impressive, I guess. Doing so with minimum collateral damage in hostile environs is.

‘I don't know how many people outside the US are going to care too much about the plight of ex-mercenaries.’

Considering the general tendency of people to be interested in the US's interventionist policies, they may be interested in discussing a side that is rarely discussed. Also, please look up the definition of a mercenary. It seems reasonable that, like many, you meant to use it in a derogatory fashion; instead, you simply used it incorrectly. SEALs are US citizens fighting in their country's army, not a foreign one.
You're missing the point of Firefox OS. They don't want to make an OS, they want to make the web a good platform for apps.
I wonder if there is any chance of seeing this app on Android. I know it's a small project and that seems silly, but hell, maybe I want to talk to iPhone users.
Raytheon's "cyber stalker" tech demo
The trouble with startup valuations
Sorry about that! I think the "Secure" copy is a bit misleading. We'll take that down.

What we meant to communicate with "Anonymous and Secure" is, "Feel free to be completely honest because we won't show this information to anyone else, and we won't even ask for your name or identity!"

It was a weekend project finished on little sleep. Sorry abou the "secure" bit.
The success of Finnish game industry has a very little to do with Finnish Government programs. IMO, the number one factor is a demo scene culture that's been going on since 80s. Also Nokia's success in mobile phones breed several mobile gaming companies already in 90s (in addition to more traditional game studios), which is more important factor than government programs.
If you're are changing a...

...private to public:

The only references are in your package. They can be found trivially with ack or grep.

...private mutable variable to public:

You want to inspect all usages anyway to ensure that you're not violating the public invariant.

...private function to public:

You want to inspect all usages anyway in case you'd prefer to call an internal version of the function without the same preamble, such as argument defaulting or validation logic. If you change 'foo' to 'Foo', you can leave 'foo' around and just have 'Foo' call it.

...public to private:

You need to find all the external references anyway to eliminate them. Since the references are capitalized, it's easy to find them with a grep or ack. You won't get lots of false positives from locals that are named without a capital.

;

Personally, I prefer languages that let you bend the rules when you need to, but I also work with small and skilled teams on largely exploratory projects. If I were working on a larger and ever evolving corporate team, I'd be all over Go. They have made some excellent design trade offs for that audience; ie Google's internal usage.
When you hear someone talking about apps/an app do you think of Apache, JBoss, KDevelop, Chromium, ... or rather Angry Birds and WhatsApp?
Well it definitely provided some mental projections into how wonderful would it be to have more people around me that are interested in achieving the same things. Filling out those forms felt nice and regardless of the results, I feel strangely satisfied.
> The WW2 generation came home and, in many cases, achieved a great deal of success in the civilian sector. What is it about today's military that prevents the same from happening on a similar level?

Could it be the general economic climate?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econo...

WW2 ends, you come home the victors, and the economy is doing great and there's a ton of opportunity out there.

The War on Terror is ongoing, it's too early to declare anyone a victor and so the whole thing is tainted, and the economy is in the dumps.
It's a shame that the author doesn't try to clarify the difference between arithmetic and mathematics. An important distinction? Absolutely -- people who dislike arithmetic may well have substantial math potential, and there are calculators and computers to do the arithmetic.

This is not to say that arithmetic ability isn't useful for everyday transactions, but there are many people who, because they dislike, or have no aptitude for, arithmetic, end up missing out on mathematics, which is a different pursuit with its own requirements and rewards. Now that's a shame.
That sounds like a clone of Rack, that doesn't support the latest version of Python.
Acts of God
For what it's worth, the DMCA was definitely intended to include circumvention protections well beyond what was needed for copyright protection. It was commonly understood to extend into device locking, commsec and nontraditional drm - this is why you have exceptions to the anti-circumvention elements for security researchers for example. This doesn't make it right at all - but in no way was motorola "misusing" the DMCA as far as the drafters (lobbyists) were concerned.
Are you going to update the domain name to keep up with Internet growth? That might be expensive...
That was developed by SamKnows and is used by the FCC to rate ISPs in the US. http://www.samknows.com/broadband/index.php http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america
I like the idea. Some feedback: I started filling out the form but once I realised there was ~10 input fields and not ~2 I just quit. Also, something tells me that you're more likely to actually deliver good matches if you make everything simpler. Not only will you be able to handle the data in a good way but you'll probably have more people join.
I'm sure this is just a weekend hack for folks here, but the presentation really looks chilling.

As a side note: is there anyway to participate in Google+ or Facebook without enabling the location features ?
Didn't look at the website yet, but just from the link: Try Google+. I don't know most people that I circled there. Not that I have Facebook, but when I look at Facebook with others it's more like talking to people you already know. With Google+' trending topics (I don't think Facebook has that, nor is Facebook as content-oriented as Google+) it's easy to see others posting about a popular subject, see their profile and posts, and circle them. And of course exploring topics you like with the Google+ search.

Edit: Submitted. Let's see where this goes :)
Contracts can require you to agree to things that are otherwise illegal for them to do. IANAL, but to give an extreme example, Motorola can't ask you to rob a bank in exchange for the ability to purchase a device. There are things such as the First Sale Doctrine (not necessarily applicable here, but still) that dictate limitations that a seller of a copy written entity (copyrights on a physical object, sigh). Such things could maybe render parts of a EULA moot depending on local laws. Again, IANAL.
>Should all of the startups on HN owe the creators of PHP, rails, python, and every other framework a Ferrari too?

If they are successful and the rely on those programs, sure, why not?

That's how you get more support for Open Source software, and more funds for projects that benefit everyone. OSS was moving faster at the late nineties-early 2000s, when huge companies employed tons of people to work on the Linux kernel, libs, frameworks, the desktop, etc, that it does now.
I think this is overly optimistic. It assumes that politicians don't understand that what they're doing will likely become public knowledge.

That seems excessively generous, and suggests that these people are actually ignorant of the scrutiny under which their actions can and likely will be placed. I don't think that's likely, at least in most cases, if not all.

It seems much more likely to me that these people simply don't care what their constituents think. Perhaps that's not something people in the EU are accustomed to, but Americans have been enjoying this phenomenon for generations. Perhaps our lobbyists are just spreading this problem like a political plague; if you think of it that way, they're our own ship full of infected rats.

Sorry, guys. We don't want them here either, but we didn't intentionally send them over there (or, at least, we didn't vote for it).
Good luck using that as a defense...
There are speakers available at public institutions and low cost events. While I agree that privilege absolutely helps, the point the author is making is that it is more about HUSTLE and less about who you know.

Fixating on the privilege in this case is just like making an excuse about not knowing anyone in the first place.
Is Yandex really a search engine? My website never gets referrals from Yandex, but Yandex constantly indexes and re-indexes my site.

When I search for stuff on yandex.com that my website is really high in Google, I don't see my site, I get spammy/scammy links sort of to my site.
This is what I often refer to as "the curse of the competent." Future me will always have more complete information than current me with regards to what current me is doing at this time, and that will always cause me to evaluate past performance in a more critical light.
Also, as you continue gaining knowledge in a particular field you become aware of how much more there is to learn. It's constantly resetting your opinion of "how much you know" which can lead to statements that from an external observer appear to be unrealistic.
Ask HN: Masters or Side Projects?
Hi, long time lurker first time poster.

I'm struggling with the decision to pursue a masters in Information Technology Decision Science or dedicate time to working on projects and putting together a portfolio of work if you will.

I currently work at a very large company and find the culture there less than desirable. I'm looking for advice from a group I generally respect.

Thanks
I'm sorry you feel that you didn't have a good experience.

As one of the original Chef contributors before Opscode, and then becoming one of the lead people working with the open source community for Opscode, the vitality of the open source Chef project is very important to me. However, Opscode's support for all of our open source projects also hinges on the company being successful enough to continue to do so. Thus, a balance must be struck.

Opscode doesn't respond to every ticket on that open source tracker, just like we don't write all of the code in the open source project. I personally try to at least see every issue, but with over 1.8 million installs of the Chef gem alone, there are a lot of users out there. If you want a guaranteed response, we do have various paid support plans which will provide you with that, but it doesn't come for free because we have to pay the people who research and write those responses.

There are multiple ways to install the Chef 10 Server and many ways to start the processes. We have tried to support the most popular, and I think most people have found success. We're proud that we can do things like release our rewrite of the Chef Server in erlang back to open source. We want it to be easy for people to use Chef. We initially wrote it to make our lives easier, and we want your lives to be easier too. That's why the Chef 11 Server ships in our Omnibus packaging, which provides a running Chef Server in three commands or less.
$29 will soon be history - we are updating the app with the new approach: you'll be able to negotiate a price once your task will be submitted. Stay tuned!
Are you planning multilingual support?
Well his personal taste likely informed the design decision to use capitalization to confer some semantics for a variable.
My personal grudge with Go is its sorting interface. You have to typedef various kinds of slices and define methods for them. I mean, all Len() and Swap() calls look exactly the same (at least in the sort package), it's such a horrible duplication of code.

Also, the Less() method should not be defined for the slice types. They should be defined for the types in the slices. Every sane language lets you define comparing methods for types themselves, rather than bind them to the container types, to honor some software principles.

Also, "err" is a surprisingly common name for variables even in the same function. When it's previously defined, and the variable after it is not, the ":=" operator doesn't work (I seem to remember). Appending numbers to "err" is ugly IMO. I don't mind no exceptions if not for this. Speaking of it, making "err" a keyword or special global variable may be a good idea, like the "errno" in C.
This was before Google bought them.
You are confusing the governance on the European (edit: EU -- see below) level with the governments on the national level.
Premature, propietary, propietary.
Anybody funding ventures will mostly fund ones that end up failing. The question is how much value or employment the few that succeed generate.
Ask these questions before developing a marketing strategy
The problem generally is that there's more to Libertarianism than fiscal conservatism, and Tea Party interests tend to be just as selectively fiscally conservative as the battered-brand mainstream Republicans once they're placed in power. It' s a gimmick for Republicans who don't want to be called Republicans but be elected by socially conservative Republicans that call themselves Libertarian :p
That's not at all what I'm saying, and to whatever extent you think it's what the OP is saying, I guess we are interpreting him very differently.
Twitter Bootstrap for WordPress
You can get free https certificates at https://startssl.com

On a first glance they don't look too high-tech and trustworthy, but for example https://lucb1e.com seems to be valid in all browsers.
Not open source, but I provide a free web service endpoint for my NLP system: http://kbsportal.com/ Use the form demo page to use it interactively.
One of the best ways to deal with this is to create a minimum lag for changes in direction which is dependent on the magnitude of change.

AKA, assuming you just bumped v from 10 - 11 based on a change from 100.9cm to 101cm then going back to 100.9cm will not change things for say 1second, going to 99cm changes things in 100ms second, 98cm changes in 100ms.
It's a measure of a cipher's quality that one cannot distinguish an encrypted message from a contentless one. Modern encryption methods don't give a decrypter any exploitable patterns. A method that did reveal patterns should be discarded in favor of one that doesn't -- there are many.
Roadmap to Learning Software Development: A Beginners Guide
Geospoofing with the Raspberry Pi
I couldn't agree more with that assessment.
Them being proprietary had nothing to do with their success.
I'm not sure I see how capital letters make a language harder to syntax highlight.
At the end of the day , the only user will care about is the app store and performances. If the apps are great and run fast then people will not care how they are made. That's the only thing we should care about.If FFos doesnt deliver on these levels then it wont work. There is already an os for cheap celphones , android. Cheaper hardware means crappy software.
Is it right to say that today's laws are far more scarier than 30-40 years ago? I mean, 5 years in prison for unlocking a phone, that a person paid money for and bought it? Making it a crime itself is absurd, and a full five years in prison for this?
It may be a cause or effect of this, but the open source culture has fractured in the 2000s to many smaller projects or libraries instead of these huge mega-projects (say Linux, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice) that mostly come from the 90s.
Great to hear someone is looking into this even though it's only a side project!

But I am not sure the GUI engine would really take THAT long. How long did the Android guys need for their GUI solution?. It would be interesting to know that.

And no, I actually don't know people working on projects like this :)
AFAIK, it became common on new systems soon after Vista SP1 was released (around mid-2008 I think).
The Importance Of Architecture In Video Games And Virtual Worlds
Maybe because it is more efficient than reserving space on the card for something most people do not need?

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/pa_g_1986/__4.html
We have an apropos saying in journalism: "to be a journalist is to be great at nothing, but good at everything."
> Premature, propietary, propietary.

pro - what?

s/propietary/proprietary/