skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TL;DR: Average anything is a terrible way to track anything. (And median or mode are bad, too). Any single-scalar value that compresses information that is best expressed as a graph (or multiple graphs!) is immensely lossy to the point where arguably it obfuscates more than it makes clear.

Back when we had to live with sort of printing-press methods of displaying information (ie, where anything that wasn't pure text was very difficult to display), mean/median/mode numbers were a necessary evil. But if you're looking at a computer screen, there's really no reason to subject yourself to an abstraction that throws out 90% of your data.
Trackerbird Software Analytics releases Python SDK
having already had the meeting with his parents one of the biggest problems that was identified was that they had no objective means to evaluate his abilities.

it's like he was a piano prodigy and they were deaf... both of them were stunned to hear my assessment of his abilities and accomplishments. it was like they could suddenly hear.

it was very much an emotional and pivotal moment in the meeting. my wife was crying... and to be honest it was all i could do to not cry.

his skill set is only incidentally related to minecraft; he could make a living at any of the three major disciplines that he has demonstrable competence in. they were so sad that all this time they were missing out on how happy they could have been for him.
Try getting used to Chrome, I assure you you won't look back after a while. The event timeline for instance is one thing completely absent in firebug and invaluable to debug client performance.
There's a lot more wrong with American health care than prices. I know a lot of people who simply can't get insurance in the US at any price because of how the market works - and some of them are in great health and have been forever. It's actually quite close to raganwald's 'flood plain' example, where the insurers will outright refuse or quote impossible rates.

And, as it happens, I can't buy insurance on the free market anymore either. I've never been hospitalized or needed surgery or been injured, so I used to get pretty affordable insurance and have no problem paying out of pocket. Then I saw a therapist and that was enough for every insurer I've contacted since to blanket refuse to insure me at any rate. According to the state agencies that regulate this stuff, that's how the system is supposed to work.

Now, you could say that this is how an insurance market should work - maybe the reason people like me can't buy insurance at any price on the free market is because it's not possible to turn a profit by insuring us, statistically, even if individually we are incredibly healthy and pay a ton. I can buy that explanation. But do you think it's morally right for people to be unable to access basic preventative care at reasonable cost, and be unable to afford emergency care, just because statistically 5-10% of the people in their group are expensive?

I think it's also worth considering the counter-example: group health in the US is comparatively quite sane. If your employer has a reasonable group health plan, you can count on having basic coverage, even if a pre-existing condition gets excluded for a bit when you first enter the plan. The employer's overall cost for the group might go up, but that's about it. A friend of mine found out that his company's rate for group health was nearly $2000/mo - apparently they had lots of high risk employees - but my past employer's group health rate, in comparison, was around $400/mo for good coverage.
Or whining about "too many computers in cars nowadays." Thanks but no thanks. I'll take the improved efficiency and reliability over your laziness to retrain.
The primary reason to have homeowners or auto insurance is not replacement, it is liability.

If a child plays in your yard and dies from a fall, or rusty nail, or if your neighbor slips during a party and breaks their hip, you could conceivably be sued for a whole lot more than just the replacement value of your house. Even if it is just a nuisance suit, it could take a lot of lawyer time (money) to make it go away.

I insure for liability; the replacement benefit is almost a bonus.
At Scale Even Little Wins Pay Off Big - Google and Facebook Examples
It may not be, but I guess it depends on what you have handy. But most of the info will still be useful no matter what hardware you use :)

I did this with an old Mac Mini that was acting mostly as a media server. My router wasn't compatible with TomatoUSB, so I went with what I had. The toolchain was a bit different since OSX uses the BSD networking toolchain rather than the Linux iptables & such.

Edit: s/GNU/Linux
New Design, New Team
FWIW, this makes me seriously question the sanity of the Go designers. I spent my college career writing code on VT100s, I'm never going back. I am much more productive with an IDE, and the patterns of colors and fonts are a big part of that.

I wonder if Rob Pike is colorblind.
The first is or could be Haskell. The length of a list is not part of its type. The second looks like Java, ditto there (although built-in arrays have a different syntax).

Haskell does not have mutability at all and thus no "pointers". In Java the insides of containers are mutable so you'd have to add an outer array or list. In either case though you don't need pointers to simply pass things around as you do in C (I don't know about Go).
Seamus Quinn: Mobilize your applications - or die
Yes, and that's why I added "often" to my last sentence. But while you can certainly avoid some illnesses by making good life choices, it's still out of your control. You can have never touched a cigarette and still get lung cancer.

In fact, that opens up another reason for public healthcare- many illnesses are caused by society as a whole. That second hand smoke from the man sat next to you at the bus stop is an individual thing, but the pollution coming out of the power station on the edge of town is a far broader issue.

You could say "fine the power company!", but that's short sighted- everyone benefits from the power they provide. As a society we have decided that x level of pollution is acceptable in order for us to have y level of comfort. The side variable is the number of illnesses caused by that pollution, and I think there's a strong argument that the costs of that should be borne by society.
I hope you're leaving this comment from a perfectly flat plain that never floods, is out of tornado country, has no mountains nearby to cause landslides, is far away from any earthquake faults, is out of hurricane territory, never has heatwaves, and never gets blizzards. Otherwise, I'm calling hypocrisy.
If you own 1000 or more mortgage-free rental houses perhaps you could consider self-insuring.

If that one mortgage-free house is the one you live in, chances are good that it's less painful to pay say 1/500th of the structure's value (don't include the land) per year to insure it and its contents against fire, theft, storm damage, liability, etc, than to take a hit from any of these and have to pay out of pocket. For perspective, property taxes are probably 4-10x more than insurance and you're stuck with those forever.
Except SEO isn't a typical use case. It like complaining that newer tires made for better grip in the wet aren't as good as cutting people off during rush hour.
Insurance is a really terrible way to pay for any commodity. If I paid a fixed price to go to the grocery store every month and get everything I needed off the shelves, the grocery store would go bankrupt. Obviously, insurance works for event that are unlikely, as a way to mitigate risk. But everyone dies eventually. Everyone will need healthcare.

Because of the nature of insurance, it drives up prices, it misaligns incentives, and our particular mode of insurance--subsidized employer-provided insurance--has the added injury of forcing people to stay in their jobs for the sake of their health and limiting mobility.

Yet, not only do we accept insurance as the best way to pay for healthcare today, we just doubled down on it with Obamacare, requiring people who previously weren't in the insurance market to participate.

My solution is to let healthcare be another commodity, like food, where there is widespread competition and choice, and thus lower prices and more transparency.

With your example, it's not like someone makes a choice in emergency care right now either. But at least you could establish a relationship with a hospital ahead of time. How about an app that lets you join a hospital network for emergencies? What about an annuity plan that lets you save up for a lung transplant ahead of time if/when you need it? I don't know what health entrepreneurs would come up with. But there are solutions out there that will never be tried as long as insurance companies have a stranglehold on the health industry.
I'm Jarrod, the guy behind Bootstrapping Design. Sorry I'm late to this thread, and thank you for sharing the book!

There are a couple of other design ebooks worth a look:

Sacha Greif's Step By Step UI Design:
http://sachagreif.com/ebook/

Nathan Barry's ebooks:
http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/
http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/

If I can answer any questions, leave a comment here or send me an email: hello <at> bootstrappingdesign {dot} /com/
Type 1 Diabetes Cured in Dogs, Study Suggests
This is a great list/discussion of resources. I am also helping someone get started learning software development but I have taken a slightly different approach. I am focusing on the computer science fundamentals first and afterwards focusing on web development. I have found that the Coursera courses as a great starting point. There is the Algorithms I and II with two introduction to programming courses using Python.

I also believe the Stanford courses (such as CS106A) is a great resource. I also would not discount the Oreilly Technology School.

The danger with starting with web development is that unless the person is very keen on learning, gaps in knowledge can develop and bad coding practices can be learned.
I don't think you can claim that it's not needed just because a 'large percentage' of the population is well-served. The United States' population is over 313 million people according to the last census. Would you be okay with 3 million people dying or living in perpetual poverty because they don't have access to preventative/emergency care? Politicians in the US regularly make a fuss about things that affect less than 3 million people.

Now, you can argue that any government-run single payer system would have 'marginal benefit', but you'd have to work pretty hard to do worse than what we have now for those people.
Can you elaborate on what makes Visual Studio so great? I used it professionally for a year, but it would just grind on my productivity. I wonder if I'm missing something. Specifically, VS 2010 had a lot of strange bugs - mt.exe fails during the build (solution: build again), project dependencies don't always work (solution: pre-build subprojects manually), little refactoring support (whole tomato is slight improvement). The debugger is quite good though, minus the part where it points to the next instruction in the stack frame (which reflects the IP, but still).

Maybe this is just their C++ support? Is C# better?
Lessons From Disney
Very well deserved!

My primary Java IDE had been NetBeans for years, mostly because the rough edges in Eclipse outweighed the extra functionality.

Recently I've been doing some Android programming, and found the native lib support in nbandroid to be suboptimal at best.

Idea works swimmingly in the same situation, and Eclipse well enough, so my options were to muddle along with manual build system changes in NB, add necessary functionality to NBAndroid, or switch.

Since I spend a huge chunk of my time coding C (NB's C support is actually quite nice), I've been giving Eclipse a go. It's come along rather well, I must say.

That said, if Idea were to add official C & C++ support, I'd be on it like white on rice. I very much prefer to use one primary tool, minimizing switching back and forth, so using Idea for some languages & platforms and NB or Eclipse for others just isn't palatable. Idea is almost good enough to make me consider a two IDE world, though (this from a "vim unless I'm doing Java" guy, up until a few months ago).

Sadly, I've run into an aspect of CDT that might be enough to push me back to NetBeans, even if it means doing some additional work. It seems that CDT language aware search (such as "find references") takes pre-processor directives into account.

So, when searching for, say, a function name (or worse, doing a "rename" refactoring), I'll only find a subset of occurrences, depending upon what symbols I have defined for a given build configuration. For personal code, that may not be an issue, as I tend to eschew ifdefs in favor of using different implementation files resolved by platform specific make targets.

However, the main code bases I work with daily are littered with #ifdef WIN32 and #ifdef TRACE_ON and such.
Keep up the good work Google. I hope this serves as encouragement for them to continue to screw over those who want to turn searching for relevant information into a war for who can cheat the system the best.
I agree, but eventually everyone does bear the cost as individuals.
Am i the only one who thinks that SEO is more a plague then it is a real profession? Google making it hard for SEO is exactly the right thing to do. Making it impossible for SEO should be the ultimate _goal_ of a good search engine.
Not entirely - after all, to his clients an SEO consultant isn't just a black hole they throw money into. They do expect to see results in the form of higher search ranking, and Google's algorithm changes make it harder to deliver on that.

I think I'd mirror others' analogies. It's more that the complaint is futile - and kind of sad. One comes away with the impression that the author is naive enough about the nature of his profession to genuinely believe that, on this subject, he and Google should be buddies and not adversaries.
Why Companies Are Outsourcing to Kickstarter
Just like the price of cars and computers and telephones never went down?
I think that one of the big advantages to building it into chrome is that you get better window management capabilities. OS X is utterly horrible at managing windows without using the mouse, having everything built into the same app often gives more control.

Web driver approaches would work much better if there were sane ways to control where the new window pops up. Even on Linux with X Monad or stumpwm, the communication/protocol for the location of new windows popping up is difficult to impossible.
17/ SAMSUNG : "for elevating imitation to an art form". Really ??
I stopped reading at the exact same place and I'm still considering going back to the article to read the rest of it. I don't know, maybe later - which means that I probably won't read it.

Calling people who disagree with a specific coding convention idiots was irritating, but it at least had a bit of merit - namely that 'readability counts' and that the code is more readable if it's written in consistent style.

The remark about linked lists in Lisps is both irritating and untrue. If even Schemes (I know. I just wrote a cute, little, hobby project in Racket and I used a list twice (by accident)) routinely deal with vectors and hashes then I can only imagine how many different builtin datastructures have CL (or Clojure) programmers at their disposal.

It probably was meant as a joke. Ok - it just isn't the sense of humor I share, that's all.
Now that all of the tech companies have invested billions in them and would logically want to protect their investment and competitive advantage, I don't ever see it ending (since of course corps control government). If we're lucky someone will get an iPhone banned in the US and then all hell will break loose.
Love.It! You guys are geniuses of simplicity!
URGENT STOP FLYING, BIRD FLU
> Therefore the correct approach is to only buy insurance for things whose loss would wipe you out financially.

I agree, and I added this clarification to the original post.
I wonder how this post got to the top even though the sentiment in the comments is that this posts sucks.
As I originally posted this to HN, I must say that the claims in the article don't hold on closer inspection. I shared it too quickly without checking facts and thinking it through, shame on me on spreading misinformation.

Good commentary about the claims:
http://bgr.com/2013/02/11/rovio-revenue-debunk-324583/
considering Bootstrap threatens the livelihood of many mediocre designers, this type of advise is understandable.
Richard Koo: How the West is Repeating Japan's Mistakes
Everyone thinks that the market value of something will be more than they can afford. So they implement policies that are guaranteed to make the price higher.

Every commodity costs something. The best way to distribute a limited number of goods to a maximum number of people is a free market with a free price system. There will always be the poor who require charity to be taken care of. There will always be the rich who can afford the million-dollar life-saving procedure (but of course in time that procedure will get cheaper).
Show HN: Song Dedications, Connect Through Music
Big Data: Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst Looks 20 Years Into The Future
Why Facebook and Twitter are not among the most innovative companies of 2013
This is creepy and how do they do it?
I think you'll find only a very tiny fraction of HNers bother to comment, so it's not a representative view of people's opinions on a given article.
I think the fact it was downvoted speaks volumes to the main point of the story.
> How is what Aaron did legally different from what Google does with Google Books and Scholar?

One's an easy target to be made an example of, one isn't.
>But it sounds like you don't like Go.

Well, I like large parts of it though. From major stuff, like the implicit interfaces, the syntax for having methods on structs etc, the simple C like syntax, to minor stuff like the capital letter for exports and gofmt for one and only one formatting. And the promise (which is not yet a reality) of a fast, memory efficient, statically compiled language.
No, Rovio did not rack up $2.4 billion in revenue last year
Revoking your API key is the equivalent of taking your application offline. And there's no fix; as soon as you reissue your application (after waiting a week for Apple's approval) then the spammer has your API key again and can start sending pushes through StackMob/Urban Airship.

I send a lot of push notifications through my own servers. I made sure that spammers would have a hard time abusing it by constraining (server-side) who can send what messages to whom. Unless I'm missing something, StackMob has no defense against spam whatsoever.

If spammers aren't already abusing this, they will be soon.
My opinion of google improved reading this article. I equate the quality of Google's search as the inverse of the happiness of "seo gurus".
There may actually be a good reason why you're feeling guilty. And it may in fact be a better plan to do something else.

You can try the following thought experiment: suppose you follow through on this new business, spend 6 months working on it, and a month after it gets going, someone ELSE copies the idea, does it a little better than you, and your sales go to zero. How will you feel?

You might think, "Well, all's fair in love, war, and startups. I made a good attempt, learned a whole lot, and I got beat fair and square. It doesn't really bother me, that is how the game is played. Now I'll try something else."

Or, you might think, "Wow. I just wasted 6 months. I didn't gain any new skills. I don't feel good about what I did. I wish I had spent that time doing something to improve myself."

Or, you might feel, "I WAS ROBBED. I spent all this time working on a real improvement on web site X, but web site Y just ripped me off and benefited from my 6 months of hard work."

Never mind what you think is the "right" answer - you might be happier in the long run trying to think of something new, or at least spending your efforts on learning something new.
I think SEO is practically dead, and for good. The Social Web is supposedly lot more democratic and apparently a better choice.
Wouldn't that require a lot more than dalvik? I am thinking, at least, of the IPC and permissions system.
Simple, Free Crash Reporting
We can't downvote posts.
That robots.txt is so big that even with comments maybe google will drop it after trying to parse it for a while....
I'm okay with this, with the proviso that it may not have been a flood risk when you built there.

I mean, there are plenty of houses that have been around 50-70 years, and with water levels rising, are now in flood plains that they weren't.

This of course, could be taken care of by subsidizing it based on when you bought the place vs when it became part of a flood plain (FEMA issues flood maps, so you don't have to deal with local politics at least)
I always thought SEO was supposed to be a cat/mouse game. The search engine tries to balance the search results fairly. The SEO consultant tries to game the system and get certain links to appear ranked higher, whether fair or not. Isn't that just how this works?
The first and oldest .com on the Internet
I think this is a common view, and I share it: I really don't like SEO. The thing is, SEO does provide real value, but it provides value because the system is broken: your website should reach the top of search results based on merit, not based on some arcane black magic.

I think it's somewhat akin to lobbyists: I don't blame them for making money off and taking advantage off the political system, and they certainly provide something of value to their customers, but I dislike the fact that they can exist at all. But that's not the lobbyist's fault, it's the system. In this respect, I applaud Google for keeping people on their toes and making SEO less relevant. That's their job after all.
Medicare doesn't pay if the patient doesn't show improvement. If the person is dying, medicare will not pay for their care, leaving dying people and their families to choose between pain and debt.

We will all die. Why, in this world of medical advancements, can't we all help each other die as painlessly as possible?
Hmm ... when you explicitly and specifically pay for a license, is there sales tax? Like, seats for enterprise software?
Founder/Market Fit: The most important predictor of Startup Success
While Founder-Market Fit isn’t the only factor in these companies’ success, it gave them a real leg up on their competition. As you consider investing significant time or money in a start-up it’s worth remembering the price of weak Founder-Market Fit. In my experience, investing in creating the right Founder-Market Fit like Brian, Dag and Jason Freeman is the best investment an aspiring entrepreneur can make.
Another Titan library for Clojure is Hermes: https://github.com/gameclosure/hermes
Next time, on a hottest day in the year, put your hand on the roof of your car, after 5 minutes your hand will be cooked like an overdone steak. Combine this with the fact that the driver may be racing to work on the hottest day, while running the AC on full. And 150F is something that happens to the battery every day for a month in many parts of America. And the battery has to handle spike temperatures up to 200F. Racing the car up a hill in the Southern texas sun? The Internal combustion engine can take it no problem because it's made of metal and plastics that can survive 200F. The battery maybe not.
If the iOS application decides who to send messages to and what the content of the message should be, then anyone who downloads the app now has the ability to spam to any other user just by extracting the API key out of the binary and using the StackMob API directly.
me too. in that case it would have been cool.