skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is telling to me is that nobody, not PG or anybody else could have predicted which of the 400 ended up to be billion dollar companies. But for those two that made it to that magical marker being in YC made all the difference.

> And even though most YC companies have no problems raising additional capital, the program has only produced two big “winners.”

The word 'only' has no place in that sentence, it is a pretty good record for early stage investing, and it does not take into account stripe, heroku and others.
Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2013 edition
Few years ago, Joshua Schachter started this thread on HN for discussing hosted useful services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1769910

The contribution in thread introduced many interesting SaaS services which can immensely help in deploying services as well as development.

It's been three years since then. What do we have today?
I consider "legacy" code any code that has been committed and is dependent upon. I look at code that is 3 weeks old (has had a few additional commits), and start cringing. All code gets ugly fast. At the end of the day you have to pick your battles wisely.
Transcription: https://gist.github.com/pimterry/4971500
Go get some from a faucet, don't beg.
Broder's review was good journalism because it accurately portrayed the limitations of the Tesla S. Owners expecting to use it in ways similar to a hybrid or relying on Tesla's claims are likely to find themselves with a flatlined battery.

Journalism is not science.
The Open Invention Network
Show HN: Tweet to zsh
Was it a Han or Zang area? Sounds very interesting.
same logic as hello.com
I'm not so sure American authorities would respect that agreement if they decided they didn't want to for what ever jumped up anti-terror or copyright violation they can come up with. Is the EU really going to do anything anti US if some CIA bloke spys on my email? Would it even know? Would I know? Hell, in the UK international news organisation spy on the public, and that's pretty much fine. Of course the plebs get in trouble, but those at the top? Makes me laugh.

Besides, I have to ask. Why is any one who requires actual privacy on the internet or using tech at all? These days, if I wanted to communicate my evil intent to another party, I think I use lemon juice and a carrier pigeon, or something. I certainly would not be using the internet. Using the internet these days is like planning a heist in a loud voice in a busy pub. If you do it and get caught, well, you're an idiot and Darwin swings in to action. Same now with the internet.

The solution to privacy on the internet is simple to me: stop using it, there isn't any. The idea that the internet affords privacy is dead, if it were ever true in the first place. Lets stop pretending other wise and stop even wasting our time and energy trying to hold back the tide. Certainly trusting government to protect our privacy is, well, at best, amusing.

In fact, where did we ever get the idea that we had some right to privacy on the internet in the first place? We never ever did. We just assumed we did. All that's happening now is a long sad education process were we learn that our naive assumption was totally wrong.

Hm. Well that's depressing.
You are absolutely correct. I still have no idea what buy.com is because its generic.
In general rebranding is a bad idea because once someone has a perception of the brand its hard to change their mind. Using a brandable term in this case will at least let them start over...but with all the traffic from buy.com
Tuin: Zo kun je zelf een daktuin aanleggen
This might have to do with Rakuten bought buy.com in 2010[1] and is now bringing their property under the same name.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten.com
I think acquiring domain knowledge is one of the most overlooked elements in software design. Lots of people write programs for things they essentially do not understand.

This causes all kinds of misery.

I'd see this being C++ over Python and embedded as advantages rather than disadvantages! Each to his own I guess :)
I'm curious about why Rakuten would even want Buy.com... I've never heard of buy.com before, they seem like a spammy, domain-squatting type site. I'm guessing what happened is Rakuten picked them up for their existing backend infrastructure and staff, and they're going to make the front-end a more North American version of their existing Japanese site. Their current 'global' site is pretty disappointing, mostly just focused on Japanese-made exports, where the Japanese one sells damn near everything (including food).
Given their licenses, LibreOffice can incorporate any code written for OpenOffice into their project, but OpenOffice can't use any of LibreOffice's code.
This. I have never been to buy.com, but it kind of reminds me of that asking site with the red dot logo and ads plastered all over it. What's its name again?

Calling out Rakuten for "meaning nothing to most people" is kind of silly. What about Pepsi then?
Technically, play.com isn't actually a UK store - they're based in Jersey which isn't part of the UK and isn't subject to UK or EU consumer protection laws.
BoostCTR
Buy.com is not generally associated with quality merchandise. A rebranding makes sense if the enterprise is will be repositioned as something other than Big Lots on the internet.
Diesel-electric vehicles (running the diesel engine all the time to run generators, which in turn run electric motors) have been the standard set-up on railroad locomotives in many parts of the world since before we were born. They are rather big and bulky for automobiles, and that's why they haven't been used much for individual automobile designs.
It was that great. It got us away from the era when everybody would make up binary formats to store data, into the era where you can debug by eyeball instead of with a hex dump utility, and use off-the-shelf parsers as a bonus. That's plenty enough revolution for one generation of technology. Everything after that is gravy.
Can you find one brand using a generic and relevant to the category name dominate a category? Branding is not just a go with your gut instinct...it is a science that analyzes all the Kleenex, xerox, and googles of the world, the categories that are owned by brands and figures out what works...
Generic brands like apple and amazon are not relevant generic terms to their category so it can be associated in the mind with that category.
Ignoring them is my strategy as well, but it doesn't help that others are mentioning them so prominently as an open option. I felt it was necessary to say something to point out this is no longer the case.
Japan already has Rakuten.co.jp, which is a parent company of Rakuten.com.

I believe they're simply rebranding all of their international chain to match the parent name. AFAIK most of their international store already using the Rakuten brand except in few countries that is a result of a buyout. (Buy.com in US, Play.com in UK, PriceMinister in France and TARAD.com in Thailand)
This. It's the only UI tool that I know that is powerful enough for everyday work, yet simple enough to understand for noobs because it can't do everything that Git can. Sometimes, you'll have to use the shell, still, if you're a power user. Which is fine!

Colour me impressed.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

It is just someone else saying the same thing, or it's a real world example, or it's anecdotes-aren't-data.
If one company gave you a PHP job, and another a JS backend job,
and that'd be all you got,
would you flip a coin to pick one?

Or is this a way to say that you feel more satisfied with your work in Python than with your work in node?
The Story of Wanz, 51-Year-Old Breakout Singer on "Thrift Shop"
Sure, it is based in Jersey - but for as long as I can remember (10+ years?) the site has been aimed at UK shoppers.
Here is mine:

Twilio (www.twilio.com) - Communicate with your users over SMS and Voice

Stripe (www.stripe.com) - Payments processing simplified

BugHerd (www.bugherd.com) - WYSIWYG bug reporting

Discourse (www.discourse.org) - Upcoming discussion board
(4) is very plausible even if the study fails to find genetic variants associated with intelligence. Assuming intelligence is heritable at all, you don't need to understand the underlying genetic architecture to breed for it any more than neolithic farmers needed to understand the genetics of docile sheep to breed them.

This has been known for a long time, but there has been no large scale, serious attempt to implement a eugenics program breeding for intelligence. I don't see how this research would change anything, successful or not, other than by getting the subject some attention in the news.
> if the violinist slightly misplaces his finger, he plays slightly out of tune

This depends on whether the slightly misplaced finger ends up on the correct string, correct? I suppose to a violinist, however, a finger that was no longer on the correct string would not be slightly misplaced.
I never heard of rakuten until last week when I saw their CEO is keynoting at this years IRCE show. I even made a mental note to Google him later this week. now I dont need to.
I am sure the site has lots of traffic and I'm sure the domain has lots of market liquidity, so its a real income producing asset.
I should rest all this rip, but I can't help it: reference to multi-line lambdas in languages with Python-like syntax: http://cobra-language.com/trac/cobra/wiki/AnonMethod, http://boo.codehaus.org/Closures (yep, you're right, having multiple closures on a single line with offsite-rule syntax is "non-trivial" and no one solved this yet, but even one per line would be enough to make map and fold bearable, and ftr, I want to punch Guido or whoever else has a saying in language's design for not "stealing" this and adopting it into Python - I think there was a PEP along the lines that got killed and burried, can't find it now).
Facebook

(I'm getting downvoted because presumably people don't realize Facebook was a common generic term used for the book universities gave to students with photos, etc. of other student to encourage socialization at the start of the year)
When speed is zero, distance is zero and energy/distance is infinite. Hence the OP questioning how could the graph present a finite value at that point.

Personally, I'd wager they followed the old scientific adage: "If you wish your function to be linear, sample two and only two points".
He carefully chose to use a really bad combination for pypy (or uncarefully, always assume stupidity over malice). Fast options for PyPy are cyclone.io or tornado (or eventlet or gevent on a branch I'm working on, although it's not done).
We need to sign Ruby gems! But how?
He probably just wanted to avoid paying customs duty.
Network hosted configurations are the scourge of most admin's existence due to the emphasis it places on network reliability and performance along with a SPOF for the network storage.

The other aspect is that many admins are ally do not like the bad habits associated with an image-level of abstraction, which leads to many hidden dependencies and configurations settings. Aa package-level manifest like Puppet, Chef, or Ansible enables much more of a complete explicit specification of the environment along with cross-machine dependencies. Such a description also allows easier reassembly of subsets of the system into different combinations.

The trend towards image-level abstractions does work for many as an alternative: Netflix for example avoids Puppet and just reassembles AMI images on each deploy, with auto discovery of cross machine dependencies at runtime via (eg) Zookeeper or other cluster facilities. But they have the discipline not to get into an image sprawl situation.
The race to create 'insect cyborgs'
D3.js: Data-Driven Delight
I'm very interested in more stories here. Do people on HN share the OP's experiences with Paymill? Anyone working at Paymill reading this?

I know Paymill is one of Rocket Internet's many "ripoffs" of successful US companies, but as a European I really don't care about that. They executed on Zalando real well, I've no reason at all to assume that they'd not execute well on Paymill. Or, well, I had no reason to assume so until this article.
While the catalogue is predominantly sourced from Inventables, there do seem to be several other sources (United Nuclear, Amazon.com, SparkFun).
I guess it's not quite as easy as whacking up something in HTML and CSS, which might justify the recent trend towards supporting that in as many things possible.

I also think that the attractiveness of one of these projects can vary quite heavily depending on whether you're a UI/UX designer or a programmer, and there's always the opportunity cost of giving up working on something new and fancy.
If it ain't broke don't fix it. If you've got a team of about 10 - 15 engineers that'd be over a million dollars you'd be burning in 1 year for a code rewrite. And most code rewrites that I've seen or been a part of take more than 1 year.
Russian here.
That's probably just what you or your family did because my parents didn't have any need to bribe people on your list.
"Netscape wasn't the first company to make this mistake. Borland made the same mistake when they bought Arago and tried to make it into dBase for Windows, a doomed project that took so long that Microsoft Access ate their lunch, then they made it again in rewriting Quattro Pro from scratch and astonishing people with how few features it had. Microsoft almost made the same mistake, trying to rewrite Word for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug"

"Things You Should Never Do" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
The funny thing is, books.com --> B&N, but we use Amazon, and for movies.com we all know IMDB.

Someone owns ask.com, and they say it's a search engine, but I can't overcome the feeling that they're just spammers, as the name is too generic.
Nexus 7 with Plasma Active (KDE's Tablet UI) + Mer Linux Video
Try borrowing me a bitcoin that you don't have so I can spend it as a bitcoin.

Then imagine doing that 'as a bank', either you have a bitcoin or you don't, you can't borrow one you don't have. Bitcoin is very subtle in this way and it seems as though lots of people underestimate the amount of thinking that went into it.
I'd love to see something on the JVM against this.
I find this argument smells of rationalisation to me: You admit yourself that building new stuff is much more fun. Say making an old codebase is "just as rewarding" but in order to actually understand all the legacy you need to put in 2x (or whatever the amount) of work that you'd need to build a new thing. Wouldn't you want to build 2 new things instead?

I could never imagine someone on their own accord, going by themselves into a 30-year-old codebase and refactoring it, just to make it "look nice". On the other hand people constantly build new stuff (too much of it really). I think it would be fine to admit that working on new code is more desirable than working on old code. Sometimes the latter needs to be done, but I think most programmers are happy to avoid maintenance work when they can.
getsentry.com - error logging

clicky.com - real time analytics

irccloud.com - IRC in the browser

sendgrid.com - API for sending e-mail
"This rebrand is so crazy that I have to assume that somebody inside the company has gone insane."

It gets weirder. The CEO of the company (a man I respect alot) is Japanese but switched the company's "official language" to English and insisted that all his Japanese employees learn English.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7olItNyBfo

Apparently the policy doesn't extend to domain names.
Another dumbest rebrand that comes to mind is Moneybookers rebranding to Skrill.
Does it bother anyone else that Inc got the story wrong? I thought they were supposed to be somewhat journalistic .It took me < 30 sec on the site to find out that Buy.com had been bought by the Rakuten group. The post author is suggesting that Buy.com simply decided to change their name -- instead their owners want to slap their own name on it. Maybe silly, but not crazy.
It's either fixed or there's a problem on your end.
There Are Giant Camera Resolution Test Charts Scattered Across the US
Though I don't know of any international ones, there should be regional examples. E.g. mail.ru. Though now it lost its first place to yandex.ru.

It seems like those who own generic names are getting too old to be competitive.
ابراج اليوم - ابراج يوم الاحد 2013/2/17 - حظك ليوم الاحد 2013/2/17
I imagine that most of Buy.com's traffic is driven by the parent company's affiliate network, Rakuten LinkShare. Buy.com is prominently advertised throughout the backend interface and it's clear that you should be pushing Buy.com as an affiliate.

This finally explains to me why I've been seeing all the graphics for the Buy.com campaigns change to 'Rakuten Buy.com'. I didn't know that Buy.com is a Rakuten brand. Honestly, I didn't know it was a company outside of Rakuten LinkShare. TIL.
It seems there's an assumption here that building your product again means throwing out all of your experience. What I thought would have been self evident is that by starting again, you bring to the table all your experience and you harness that to build a better product.

Because that's exactly what someone else is going to do. The company that makes the product that competes with yours is unlikely to have picked your product at random and simply decided to compete against it on a whim. There's a good chance they've been using your product and have become so frustrated with it's shortcomings that they've had a crack a building there own version. They've been on your support forums that detail every bug and bad descision, they've read the blog post detailing exactly what is wrong with your features and how they could be done better. They've stared at their screen in a full on rage wondering why the hell your product doesn't do things in a way that makes sense. They have their own experience and they are not afraid to use it.

There could be one, tens or hundreds of people who decide to do this. Many will fail, but if one succeeds then you have a serious problem. The continued success of your product can no longer rely on it's features unless you're prepared to make some fundamental changes. Only now you have a deadline, whereas before you could have worked at your own pace.

You're right when you say your legacy code is your greatest asset. It's proof of what is a good idea and what is a bad idea. But that doesn't mean you should keep it around any longer than you have to.
Netscape was put out of business for doing just that: rebuilding Mozilla/Geeko from scratch and missing lots of time while MS grabbed market share.

Sure, we know have Firefox, but that's little consolation for the corporate entity that was Netscape.
did you see they compiled QT against emscripten recently. That's pretty insane if you ask me. Now they just need to compile KHTML too, so it's webkit all the way down.

[1] http://badassjs.com/post/43158184752/qt-gui-toolkit-ported-t...
Transcript - the keys to Andreessen Horowitz's success
Building something new is more fun in the beginning. Refactoring an old codebase and making it fly is rewarding when you're done. This is not about cosmetics.

Both are fun, assuming you stay in long enough the first will at some point turn into the second, no matter how well your intentions were at the beginning ('this one will be different, this time I'll get it right').
Top Internet Companies on the Inc. 5000
Maybe they do not want to happen to the public image of brain research what happened to the public image of AOL after AOL released to the public a few tens or hundreds or megs of search queries for research purposes.
I agree with the point that there is a lack of respect for designers in the area, and IMO more significantly, they would not be allowed full control of design; hard work could easily be ruined by differing opinions.

But FFS why did you have to bring apple in to this. Absolutely nothing to do with this, quit it.
I can think of at least two retired guys from the UK who like living here in Russia.
>Not only LibreOffice, this is somewhat a general sentiment I have about most Open Source Software. If I were a designer I'd love to be part of such an important project like this.
I don't get why designers are always doing stuff like redesigning website X for free, without being asked to, but miss great opportunities to be in the spotlight by participating in projects like GNome, KDE or the likes.

Because redesigning famous X website does bring them attention in their circles AND its something that they can do by themselves in little time.

Whereas participating in projects like Gnome/KDE is a messy, long term, no pay, proposition where they'll also have to put up with the opinions of non-designer contributors and be at their coding mercy.

Plus, they like to work on the platforms they use, and almost every professional designer uses either OS X or Windows.
- 1-800-FLOWERS
- 1-800-CONTACTS
- hotels.com
What's the deal with this? "I exited the freeway, hoping that the lower-speed rural road driving would allow more regenerative braking and would extend the range. I got a little "credit" by coasting and hovering on the brake pedal"

Is there now a pervasive urban myth amongst electric car owners that you can get free energy from the brakes? Or that you can extend the range in stop and go driving? The NYT journalist did the same thing. That's just crazy.
"three sands" sounds like something Clarkson would say ... I think, his image immediately flashed in my mind when reading that.
You could do the refactoring to enable yourself to add shiny new functionality to the big old product. In the end you will have a revived mature product with shiny new brass bells and whistles. While that other guy will have nothing more than just another half-usable prototype.
Dont you think there would be an initial sort of violent (I could use a better word there) revaluation which would quickly settle down in to something stable? I suppose a bit like initial trading of a new businesses on the stock exchange, perhaps?

My, granted ignorant, assumption is that BTC would keep revaluating each time a big organisation adopted it, but that "reaction" would smooth out as more and more organisations adopted it and its value settled.

So, yes, initial pain, but surely all interested would know and accept that in advance. As usual, early adopters accept the pain as it were. But early adopters in general are up for that for the thrill, if you like, of being there at the beginning. A bit like people who buy Tesla cars. They know its not perfect and that there will be some pain, but they love it anyway.
Or in Chinese, bai could mean white or hundred.

Rakuten sounds like Rasputin, a good Russian brand?
I second this, when you are ambitious to build a global brand this makes totally sense. A generic domain can be a liability, because it's almost impossible to make advertising for "buy". Isn't there Best Buy?

Brand strategy is very interesting and complicated, Quickster was a bold attempt to boost the streaming platform.
Harvest ( http://getharvest.com ) - Time tracking and invoicing for freelance work

SendGrid ( http://sendgrid.com ) - API for sending and tracking email

Lighthouse ( http://lighthouseapp.com ) - Issue tracking for teams

Trello ( http://trello.com ) - Task tracking, lists

Stripe ( http://stripe.com ) - Fast, easy payment processing

BundleScout ( http://bundlescout.com ) - Third-party library update tracking (shameless plug, but I use BundleScout at BundleScout)
Self-Host Everything
Interestingly photographers have known about the effects of cold on li-ion batteries for a long time. It's common to keep your batteries close to your body to keep them warm when shooting on cold days.
I never run an ssh server on my laptops, no reason to really. Secondly, with ssh, it requires you know ip or hostname, both which I don't want to worry about.