skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if "what you should be doing" is, or involves, business development, prospecting for leads, selling, soliciting feedback from potential customers, and/or raising funds?

Neglecting the importance of connections is silly... just as silly as neglecting the importance of building a solid product. And that's really my point here: this article seems to be hinting at a little bit of a false dichotomy through quoting the old saw "it's not what you know, it's who you know". Guess what, in the real world, it takes both.

I'm a software developer / hacker by trade, and my nature was such that I rejected this thinking for a long time. I though that my knowledge, skills and talent ought to be sufficient, without any need for "the old boys club". Now, at the ripe old age of 39, I've realized that while you may not need to be an "old boys club" insider to succeed, you almost certainly will need other people on your side at some point... and that involves connections and relationships.

Let me illustrate with an example... at Fogbeam Labs, we're building some stuff that I think is pretty damn cool - an Open Source "Facebook for the Enterprise" type package that you could think of as a competitor to Sharepoint or Jive Software among others. Now this is an enterprise, B2B play, and sales in this world is high-touch, and very human driven. So I drove down to Charlotte two weeks ago to an NCTA meeting, to mingle and network with CIOs, CTOs, VPs, and other decision maker types. There, I met a gentleman who runs a firm here in the Triangle region, who has paying customers already (we're still looking for our first "earlyvangelist" customer) who took an immediate interest in what we're doing. After 10 minutes of talking, he's already thinking of several of his customers that he can introduce us into. So we met again this week so I could demo the stuff for him, and after an hour or so, he's offering to introduce me to a number of potentially valuable connections, introduce us into some of his existing customers, and even chewing on some possible partnership scenarios between his company and ours.

I have to tell ya, if even one of these leads turns into something, it could be a game-changer for us and really help us turn the corner.

So, had we not spent the past 2 years or so building our product, this would all be moot. But if we build a product and never find anybody to buy it, the whole thing is moot. So the point is, connections are absolutely valuable and fostering those connections is a high-value task that you should commit some effort to. But it's not sufficient in and of itself. But neither is just building a product either.
Thanks for explaining this. Now I understand what the

index 1ef56e5..2c756d0

in a diff refers to. I'm now poking around in the object store with `git cat-file -p <hash>` and it's very enlightening.
> I bet you've not been exposed to many corporate email chains. Top-posting makes a lot of sense there.

Yes, but only because replies don't typically intersperse quotes from the original. Once a choice is made to reply point by point, the argument for top-posting falls apart. So I imagine detailed quoting and replying, as opposed to simply replying, is rare.

Example original post:

"Here are my concerns, please provide a detailed response:"

"1. What about issue A?"

"2. Have you addressed issue B?"

"3. Item C has bothered many people in the front office."

And so forth. Replying in detail simply isn't meaningful without interspersing your replies with the original queries. And that, in turn, isn't possible if one top-posts.

To me, top-posting signals that the reply isn't (indeed, cannot be) a detailed response to the points made in the original. And maybe that doesn't matter, if people are talking past each other.

> Both styles have sense in different environments.

I think the above says it -- top-posting means you don't plan to reply in detail, point my point, as I'm doing right now.

Bottom-posting clearly signals that you read and understood every word of the original message. It is to post layout what the expression "I hear you" is to interpersonal relations.
Agreed, but simulating that environment is hard. I guess that is where the magic trick lies because if you setup fake accountability you brain still knows that you are not really accountable to anyone and you begin slacking.
That is the exact reason why I opened the Hacker News page from my feed reader!
I'd have to say Q promises (https://github.com/kriskowal/q, adds promises to JS for much cleaner async code).

Even though it's not "cool" in the sense that it's very low level and doesn't do fancy UI stuff, my asynchronous code has become significantly cleaner and easier to maintain through using promises rather than having callback pyramids. The ability to wait for a number of promises to resolve before firing the next makes life so much easier too.
Setting ActiveRecord's connection pool size on Heroku with Puma and Sidekiq
Are you talking about pack animals and the like...? I think your parent was talking about recent-ish times wherein tools and things were made custom, serviced and maintained by the owners or the local smithy or carpenter.
The one that makes everyone's lives easier:

jQuery.

Its not sexy, but it gets the job done for pretty much everyone.
Personally, I agree with you, but the NIH does not. So far, "stupidity" is not a disease (nor is aging, for that matter).
Which obviously does not apply to Americans, or the rest of the world for that matter. The whole point of this thread is to have privacy and data protection for everybody -- regardless of nationality.
This change has been a long time coming. The first computer-aided diagnosis systems date back to the 1970s. They were evaluations, not real diagnostic tools, because no one was willing to risk relying on a computer for diagnoses. But that is all about to change -- among other projects, the "Watson" system, the clever system that won on Jeopardy, is now being programmed to come up with diagnoses and treatment plans.

AI won't "save health care" -- that's overhyped --but it will certainly create consistently high quality diagnoses and treatment plans.
talk something practial dude.
Who does FORM posting these days. Kidding us or what !
Screw the 0.001% of users who do not have JS enabled.
CMake is widely distributed now if only because of KDE, so the package maintainers and sysadmins have figured it out one way or the other already.
really? You're rebuttal is that I'm characterizing the test as a tragedy? sigh

ok. Continue about your day.
FYI, the Apple Store Geniuses are actual technicians and do most repairs in-store.
It's really unfortunate that this is written so badly, as I think it makes some valid points.
IMO it's pretty easy to keep most startups going in a low-burn mode. The hard part is scaling back from high-burn to low burn, but assuming you can do that, you can probably find a way to keep the domain registered, minimal service operating, etc. -- assuming whatever you're selling is at marginal profit instead of a loss.

Worst case, do consulting or get a day job.

It gets complicated when you've taken outside investment, but I suspect any rational investor will convert to equity rather than liquidate. The real cost is opportunity cost for the people who remain involved (usually founders, although sometimes employees switch from salary with small equity to a much larger equity stake).
It's unfortunate that you have to apply for access. Why force people to jump through hoops? Expose this data.
Another library that tries to make async code much cleaner is async.js (https://github.com/eligrey/async.js#readme). It uses yield and generators to abstract away the callback jungle.

For example, you can easily condense tens of lines of event code into a single `event = yield document.next("click")`
PouchDB rocks !!
The OP is missing the point here, the entire saying rests on the presumption that you have the necessary skill. As another saying goes, "luck favors the prepared mind". Skill and ability are considered prerequisites to creation--mixed with a little serendipity, and you'd be onto something.

[1] - the role of luck in scientific discoveries, applicable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_chance_in_scientific_di...
Actual data from Yahoo in 2010 suggests 2% in the US: http://stackoverflow.com/q/9478737/329700. Also, people break forms by incorrectly attaching them to the click event instead of the form submission.

http://stackoverflow.com/q/9478737/329700
lz is the fastest lazy functional library to work with lists.

https://github.com/goatslacker/lz

Why I think it's cool? Well it's really fast, and it's lazy which allows you to work with really big arrays. Plus it's a really tiny library providing you with a streamlined set of APIs for working with lists (similar to array.js/Enumerable)

If you're working with smaller lists it's probably best to go the lodash route, but if you want it to be lazy then I believe lz is the right tool for the job.

/shameless plug
I'm hard of hearing and I use bleeding edge hearing aids ( Change them every 2-4 years, got these little more than two years back - http://www.phonak.com/com/b2c/en/products/hearing_instrument...)

Hearing aids are limited in what they can do and will be limited in the near future. Hearing aids never restore full hearing let alone actually improve your hearing.

Hearing aids operate only on the outer ear and are basically just amplifiers with some smartness built in (trying to cut out background noise, amplify foreground etc). So they're really limited in what they can achieve.

The two greatest hopes for the hard of hearing are 1. Cochlear Implants 2. Flawless speech to text translation. You want to be working on either of those two.
This was a point that Brendan Eich made in "Why Mozilla Matters"[1]:

"Mozilla is not Opera. If we were a more conventional business, without enough desktop browser-market share, we would probably have to do what Opera has done. But we’re not just a business, and our desktop share seems to be holding or possibly rising — due in part to the short-term wins we have been able to build on Gecko."

I don't think people are blaming Opera; they are just frustrated at the loss of some diversity in the rendering engine space. At least we can expect some fresh injection of open standards support in the WebKit project from the Opera team, which should benefit all WebKit users.

[1] https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/
My vote is for TypeScript (http://www.typescriptlang.org/). It fixes some of the problems that I encountered while creating an enterprise class application and not being able to strongly type parameters, classes, etc (which meant that I had to open up every JS file to figure out what parameters a function truly required).
I was speaking on behalf of personal productivity. Not team productivity. But there are definitely failures in professional sports too. When one player doesn't feel like he's not being included enough then communication breakdowns ensue.
This is exactly what I imagined. The title is "How To Tell ..."
> Tell you what, if you think that isn't torture, then you go get caned

Yeah man. Why don't you say "Tell you what, if you think prison isn't inhumane, you go spend 25 years in prison"

Way to demand an unreasonable precondition to progress in an argument. Is there a name for this fallacy?

Anyway, that video is hard to watch, and I would be sympathetic to an appeal to reduce cane size and weight.
Checkout Flapjax as well:

http://www.flapjax-lang.org/

https://github.com/brownplt/flapjax/

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mgbcgb...

Amazingly, work on Flapjax dates all the way back to 2006! Let that sink in ... the point is that it was way ahead of its time, and with all due respect to bacon.js, I think Flapjax is still in in a league of its own with respect to how it's implemented.

I studied the internals for months back in 2010, and that learning experience was a huge catalyst in pushing me toward functional programming, Clojure and ClojureScript.

The reason Flapjax never quite caught on was in part, I think, that it was so ahead of its time. And also that its internals, while well engineered, are much harder to understand than those of jQuery and other popular libraries. It's harder to use something truly effectively if you can't quite wrap your head around how it works, and understanding Flapjax certainly takes dedication.
Materials - HackerThings
'eh, maybe. Though who knows what future technologies will bring? Maybe in a 100 years will have a 20 billion people but most of them will be uploaded to the singularity. Maybe nuclear & solar will save us all. Maybe we learn to mitigate the effects of global warming by some sort of large scale teraforming projects.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

There's a big part of me that thinks that the "we're all doomed because of how we're ruining the environment" comes from the same place as "Americans used to have principles, but now we're just a bunch of self centered assholes" which comes from the same place as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_a....

Everyone has their own way of thinking that things used to be perfect but then we turned to sinners and fucked it all up.
http://browserify.org/ because it will fundamentally change how you approach writing and organizing front end code. The moment you stop writing boilerplate code to glue your disparate files together and start using a simple module system you will never look back. This is more than a library, it is a way of re-thinking how you can maintain js libraries going forward.
when.js is also pretty cool. I wrote a wrapper object for node that's been extremely useful https://github.com/icodeforlove/node-promise-object
Are you saying that whole FAQ is 'outrageous claims' about the 2012 CISPA, or can you highlight the most 'outrageous' claim? Has anyone written up an explanation why?
Well the money is coming from somewhere. There is certainly some benefit to finance as opposed to advertising which is annoying and manipulative (though to be fair it has funded Google, television, and most websites, but again, the money is coming from somewhere.)
Because the single server that runs it is being turned off and another one is being turned on? Its probably not worth the time to write something to sync processor state from one to the other or clone some sort of vmotion type thing.
Step 4 does not matter when every EULA starts with 'This Agreement may be modified at any time'. What's the point of having contracts with terms like that?
> Communicating well takes an extraordinary amount of time and the speed with which most internet communications take place precludes quite a bit of the work that should go into it.

Good point, well taken, but only applies to casual conversation environments such as here.

Do we need to establish a "best practise" for environments where accurate communication is imperative, eg diplomatic offices, and how would we go about doing so?
> Way to demand an unreasonable precondition to progress in an argument. Is there a name for this fallacy?

I don't know if it has an official name. I call it the "Jury Fallacy." The Jury Fallacy says that, to have the right to express an opinion or form a judgment about some behavior, you must have personally experienced, or taken part in, that behavior. Which would mean that, to serve on a jury in a murder trial, you must be a murderer. But it's neither true nor sensible -- to qualify for a jury, to be able to draw a conclusion, all you need is to be competent to evaluate evidence.

So ... the "Jury Fallacy."
It didn't make me laugh.
I'm not sure what breaking the internet means.

Failing to do data validation on the server side is application suicide.

Depending where you are in your development lifecycle, it is probably better to focus on the 99% of users who have JS enabled and are not using screen readers. Then, when you need to be fully accessible go back and fix it.
I'm really in love with Component, which is a sort of package manager for front end development

http://component.jit.su/

It breaks down large frameworks like jQuery, Underscore, Backbone, Twitter Bootstrap, etc into small, reusable, and composable micro libraries. There are UI elements like tool tips and modals, wonderful and tiny DOM manipulation tools, well documented AJAX libraries, and more low-level functional and control-flow related tools. It's really amazing.

It's by TJ Holowaychuk too, who is huge in the node community (Express, Jade, Mocha, Stylus, Connect, and many others).
Definitely try hipster.js. It works with node, mongodb, and it runs on plan9. Meteor integration is in the works.
I discovered underscore.js recently, I really like it as well. After learning a little functional programming, it is cool to see things like map, contains, select, etc. brought into JavaScript in an easy-to-use way.
HN doesn't use XMLHttpRequest. View source to see that.
I'm not really interested in getting into the conspiracy minutiae, but let me just play devils advocate on #4:

What, exactly, would be the harm to humanity of a coming generation of hyper-intelligent Chinese nationals?
Biotech Company Run by High Schoolers Developing a "Flying Syringe"
This is more like solving my grandparents' problems, but one idea I had is to help the elderly stay in touch with their grandkids by selling them tablets or netbooks that are customized to make it easy to check Facebook etc. You could sell them through retirement homes along with training sessions. Help people see photos of their grandkids!

Another idea is to help the elderly tell their stories. It's a shame so many are passing away in silence. What about some way of helping retirement communities get their populations to write, perhaps by blogging? The customer here might be the retirement home, which would pay you to set up a community of blogs. It would be a way for members to write, and also give the retirement home something to show off.
Three.js is a wonderful way to experiment with 3D programming.

Github repo: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/

Examples: http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/
Right, I knew they were separate things. I meant only that widespread adoption of Bitcoin would obsolesce both; should have phrased that more clearly.

it is simply a metric that private parties have chosen to
reference when setting. Libor is influenced by central
banks' rates, but so would a Bitcoin economy's reference
rate be a function of international money rates.

Yes. My point was that not all private parties would "choose to reference" things like LIBOR, nor be forced to participate in the Fed's quantitative easing schemes by virtue of holding US dollars. That is, with a distributed currency like Bitcoin (or perhaps a descendant of Bitcoin with even greater anonymity), we pull back a lot of control from what is currently a hypercentralized, opaque system.
Neuquén: Comunidad Mapuce sitiada por la empresa Apache
DRM is not meant to stop the flow of content to thepiratebay, and never has been. Its purpose is to stop casual sharing, enforce region restrictions, and encourage repurchases. That's all.
Let's say the government does the exact same thing to make
money that they do now : legislate that more money is
printed.

Which government? The US government? Or the Russian and Chinese governments? The USG is in decline and everyone knows it. Its ability to enforce laws around the world is not absolute. And by coming out and showing that it really wants X (e.g. the death of Bitcoin), it becomes obvious to many other governments that an interesting way to stick a finger in the eye of USG is to allow not X (e.g. free use of Bitcoin).

Russia recently made it almost impossible to extradite Russian citizens to the US:

http://rt.com/politics/russia-us-moscow-medvedev-clinton-071...

And I don't think the USG is going to be renditioning Chinese citizens from the mainland anytime soon, given how broke the Americans are and how much they owe to China (not to mention that they are a nuclear power).

A lot of people wanted a multipolar world. We're going to get it, and among other things it means the USG will not be able to print money (and thereby dilute your stake, and seize your work product) for much longer.
How does open-source counter the issue of monoculture? If there is a monoculture and it's open source it still has the same problems. You can fork but there's a monoculture so your fork is irrelevant. You can submit a patch but there's a monoculture so your patch doesn't get accepted.
Open source isn't a magic bullet, try forking Chrome and see how far you get without prominent adverts on the most popular page on the internet and investing millions into packaging your browser as part of Flash/Java/etc. updates.
Much of this debate centres around whether you define 'being productive' as 'enjoying your work' or 'providing value'. I've certainly done work which was enjoyable and progressed quickly in it due to that fact, but in the overall scheme of things had negligible value for the company - that's not productive work, in the sense that most people would use.
Full disclosure: I have almost zero experience in this area.

I'm under the impression that CAD users learn the scripting language that goes with the software to automate a lot of the tedium. They're also the people who buy those crazy mice with the eight macro buttons and extension ports.
Your intended use is a computer that doesn't have SSH running?
These days more and more Japanese are using applications like Line to exchange short messages with each other. This is increasing in part because smartphone numbers are increasing rapidly and the "gala-kei" phones are dying out.

In my experience the provider-based email addresses seem to be used mostly as a way to confirm other service's accounts, and that sort of thing.

(An article with numbers supporting this: http://www.startup-dating.com/2013/02/smartphone-penetration...)
The network rack stuff sounds interesting. Have an example? I am sure the ledger google groups would be interested.
I don't know what I might refer you to. Beta reduction requires recognizing subtrees of the form (#T S) (where T and S are any subtrees), eta reduction just requires recognizing subtrees of the form #(T 1) (where T is any subtree).

No idea about animation. It's really not something I'd thought about, I have to say...
I'm a fan of how well the Ace code editor handles text editing, vim, emacs, etc.

Non direct link (to plug my own site with lots of other similar stuff)
http://pineapple.io/resources/ace-high-performance-embeddabl...

direct link
http://ace.ajax.org/
The phrase isn't meant to be taken as a literal declaration, but that connections keep the wheels of progress well-greased.
I don't think that submitting the same article from Scientific American will make it any more popular.
>> It feels as if western state-assisted assassinations of civilians are becoming a more frequently documented reality

And when were they documented the first time? It's much more plausible to believe that you are paid by the Chinese government to spread that rumor than to believe what you've written.
News Corp, AllThingsD contemplate split