skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you mean by plain english though? If I am talking to an accountant I use different words and levels of detail than if I am talking to the person in charge of network security, and very different still from if I am talking with a 10 year old.

The problem as I see it is that "plain English" doesn't really exist in any objective sense. We all speak different versions of the language depending on who we are talking to.

Indeed if you think about it, a lot of computing and programming terms are quite readily understandable to an imaginative layperson. Words like "stack" or "pipe" are pretty clear metaphors for existing every-day concepts and in fact when I introduce concepts like "heap" or "stack" I always use everyday example, like a stack of books....

> Nevertheless, I think Clarence Thomas sets an awesome example which really puts it in perspective for me. As people who are trying to deliver results to our stakeholders, we owe it them to explain what we're doing for them in as plain and simple language as we can muster.*

Thomas is one of those justices who, whatever you think of his preferred views on jurisprudence, is both an impressive writer and an impressive speaker and someone I am happy to see on the court even when I disagree with him.
Your candid photo is not connected to Google servers which can be doing… well, whatever they please.
Coupons have been around for years and will continue to exist as "deals" despite different distribution methods that involve others.

Give the market two to three years to consolidate and reach a sustainable level that doesn't overwhelm or burn the merchants and end consumers.
Not necessarily.

For me, when I'm living with someone, in several months I become a complete hermit. Probably because all my rudimentary needs for socialization are fulfilled.
Money is a tool.

The skills and knowledge you've gain can't be taken away like a tool can.

Time to get back up.

Rise.
WebGL strikes me as a much more likely and more open HTML5/Native hybridized future. I don't doubt there will be other hybrid technologies but I think WebGL is the first one that's here to stay.

To clarify: I mean open as in open web here; that is to say that the WebGL GLSL code that gets compiled to run on the GPU is human readable when embedded in a website. AFAIK this is not the the case with NaCL or PNaCL.

Moving back to adoption, NaCL has only currently been adoption by Chrome and Mozilla does not seem particularly interested in changing that.

Related:

* http://css.dzone.com/articles/mozilla-rejects-native-code

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630057
Did you actually read :h netrw before giving up?

P

opens the file in the most recent non netrw window.

v

opens the file in a vertical split and

:Vex

opens netw in a vertical split.
Here are a few tips for others startup employees:

1. Take the least amount of stock possible - your startup is statistically unlikely to succeed. It'd be better to bump your salary up $10-20K than to get the stock.

2. Unless it's liquid - it's worthless.

3. Valuations pre-cashflow - are useless. Anybody can value anything at insane levels using just one dollar. I value HN at $1 billion by offering to buy only 1 share of 1 billion in common stock for $1 right now. See the implicit valuation leverage. I took a dollar, then invented the billion.

4. If you work for a "nasty" startup - one which people can consider to be negative long term to one or more parties - expect eventual collapse or flat line growth (Zynga/Groupon).

5. Companies exist to make management, investors and founders rich - they hold the vast majority of the stock - and benefit greatly from path dependence and network effects. You on the other hand don't. Expect to be screwed at any time.

Think of it like this. Managers/founders of most companies are pretty dipshit - how is it that they can own so much more stock? Simple. Be there earlier! Akin to how old money works. Imagine if you were the first person to squat land near what has now become Manhattan. You'd easily be worth hundreds of millions. There is obviously some skill in researching, predicting, working and acquiring land that will soon appreciate in value. But it's not worth nearly that much. Path dependence, luck and network effects do that. See GFC boom and that dumbass cousin who made and almost certainly lost millions in housing to understand how this works out.

Startups really aren't that different to a speculative investment in a house during boom times. Once you understand this - a lot of things start to make a hell of a lot more sense.

6. PG says be relentlessly resourceful. That's useful. But even better is to be relentlessly cynical.

Free t-shirts? Just an easy way to drop your salary and indoctrinate you - scratch that - it's a god damn uniform - freedom be damned! Free food? You took a $30-$40K pay cut to take the damn job - the food isn't worth a tenth of that + you're now working during lunch hours! Free hardware? That's only $2-$4K.

Hackathons? That's just work during your free time - or if it's during work time, it's a startup product you should own, but don't. More days off? Aren't you already working 60+ hours a week today! Culture shit after work? That's just more indoctrination. Gym membership? Only $200-500 - peanuts! Flexible work hours? That just means work more, but do it at times that aren't 9-5. Parental leave? Big companies and Europe have had that for ages.

Oh, and that culture fit crap? That's just discrimination - rebranded! What? You don't like what other late 20s upper-class educated males like? Be gone heathen!

End advice.

Not saying big companies or government jobs are any better. But at the very least you're already cynical about those things and demand to get paid well enough in risk-adjusted terms.
$110 million seems like a drop in the bucket if they really are bleeding money and have 4000+ employees, many of whom are probably very upset at the evaporation of their stock options.
When the load on a system increases by two to three orders of magnitude, sometimes it's difficult to preserve the original system's semantics.
The real reason is that the packaged apps have access to a privileged API. That let you make things that you can't do in webpages.

As a web dev, that's what you get.

As Google, you get a non-standard API that, if it picks up, will ensure you get 100% platform control (and marketshare too, but really, its about platform control)
If Zynga actually made games, I'd say that entertainment is one of the most valuable services that a company can provide. Too bad they don't.
So for a restaurant for example the coupon can be customized based on the age, gender, how many in the party and what they already ordered. The value of the coupons could be even computed in realtime, based on supply and demand + some safety rules built in. Everyone at a different times could get a different coupon for a different value.
>> I couldn't get syntastic's error marking column to stay on instead of shifting my text back and forth all the time

Try this:

augroup syn_gutter
au BufWinEnter * sign define mysign
au BufWinEnter * exe "sign place 1337 line=1 name=mysign buffer=" . bufnr('%')
augroup END

Bonus fancy character bling:
let g:syntastic_error_symbol='✗'
let g:syntastic_warning_symbol='⚠'
In addition to the red delicious, the strawberries, and the tomato, count in watermelon. It's gotten so you can only buy seedless in the store, and seedless isn't close to the flavor of seeded.

On all of these, flavor has been bred out in favor of looks and hardiness, and we now have a generation of people who don't know what the stuff really tasted like. Hell, I'm forgetting what some of it is like myself, until I eat a different or heritage variety. And don't get me started on poultry.
> Everyone can't start one

i'd like to challenge this idea that not everyone can start a company. May be not in the current form that a company takes - i.e., having a lot of "admin" stuff to take care off (such as taxes, registration, various laws etc).

I think specialization is the key here - may be there is room for a specialized company whose sole job is to take the "business admin" part out, and all the founder has to do is actually do the work. All of the other parts that a ancillary is done by this specialized company. What this could mean is that instead of working for someone, everyone works for themselves, and all the organizing happens via some automated fashion (akin to how the stock market operates).

Also what this means is that if the efficiency of the system is can be made high, then mediocrity will quickly die out (due to natural selection).
So true, also surprised they didn't have a super bowl commercial.

It's like the dot com hype all over again but with crazy short term revenue that's unsustainable
Good comparison. Thanks.
Wow, I joined almost 4 years ago... I went from slashdot (3 digit ID) through a totally non-productive fark/digg phase to here. I guess I missed the reddit bandwagon although the company is based in the same building I work in now. :) I prefer the tech focused sites and not the general "cool stuff" sites, and while sub-reddits meet that goal, I guess there's too much "other" stuff going on there which is a distraction.

Even after 18 years in the software building biz (as a developer) I still have so much to learn, and one of the things about this site is that I'm exposed to new technology and programming languages, great presenters and ideas. I still want to be doing this in another 20 years and I feel like the stuff I see on HN really helps keep me motivated (despite the distraction at times, which I mitigate by running through an HN rss feed filter that only shows posts with a certain number of points or more). For example, right now I'm reading about Kanren. :)
As an independent restaurant owner, I can't say I didn't expect to see this one day. The model simply doesn't work, at least in our industry. The restaurant loses money on every single "daily deal" that is redeemed. With LivingSocial or (insert any other daily deal site here) taking half of the deal, the restaurant is simply left with 25% of the revenue generated. This does not even cover our food costs, let alone labor.

The rise of daily deal businesses have brought up a couple of fundamental issues for us:
1)Customers are often daily deal hunters - We would be willing to take the one-time loss on a daily deal, if we had a chance of converting the customers into regular diners. However, we have found that most people who purchase these deals, simply move on to the next deal after they are done.

2) Cheapens the product - Once you have lowered the price for a product, in this case food, the guest automatically ties the value of that product back to the price they paid. This is a huge problem for restaurants in particular because the guest is not willing to pay full price for the product even if they liked it. Now your product is valued at half of your current price, and to get that customer back in the door, you have to offer a significant discount again (most likely another daily deal).

3) Cannibalizes our existing customer base - One of the worst unintended consequences of using daily deals is that some of your regular guests start waiting for these deals, and only come in when they are available. This hurts in two ways: 1) regular guests are now spending less than they were the last time they came in, 2) regular guests are now waiting for a LivingSocial/Groupon deal to become available before returning to the restaurant causing them to wait longer before returning to the restaurant.

I believe that a company that provides customer acquisition via deals could be extremely valuable, but they must do it properly, and most importantly it must benefit their customer (in this case the restaurant). Until a company learns how to ensure that a business is obtaining a profit from providing this massive discount, without cheapening the product, and cannibalizing existing sales, the daily deals industry will continue to fall by the wayside.
Yep. I was about to suggest the same.
Did another company offering options take its place?
You're right: reliable fault-tolerance between two nodes in datacenters with dedicated physical hardware and isolated network links is easier than distributing state over a hundred geographically disparate nodes in in virtualized, multitenant environments backed by unreliable hardware abstractions.
> nobody in their right mind would give that 18 year old a business loan

that's only if the giver of the funds is an irrational actor. if the business proposition has meat, they ought to be able to get funds.

The next gen of fund raising would very much be like kickstarter (except this time, you actually get equity, not just a preordering system). I suspect you could even keep the identity/private information of the founder a secret, and make the proposal and get judged by that alone.
I feel like Heroku might get some benefit from looking into Lagrange System's load balancing technology ... not suggesting they buy it persay, but they have a pretty compelling way of doing things without the need for node-to-node coordination.
> Having a slack attitude towards money (our own money or others) doesn't build a business or an understanding of value that ultimately ends in a revenue stream.

Of course you need to value other people's money, but when they gave you they money they know that there were higher chances to fails than to succeed. If you did 100% of what you could have done, you have done your job. If it was easy everyone would do it.
While I didn't state thate it is CAP isn't applicable one interesting point is that CAP concerns itself with distributed computer systems.

While I guess almost all systems built on top of heroku almost by definition needs to be distributed in some way heroku itself doesn't need to be. (Not saying it isn't.)
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances?
Maybe I am being too insensitive, but ...

I think that if the valuation for companies, which have been overvalued corrects itself, that is ultimately a good thing for the industry and society at large. It means that resources are being freed up to work on more valuable things. It is also another case study from which this young industry can learn.

As for the employee and investors, they have taken a deliberate bet on the company and lost their stakes. This is what you sign up for when you decide to work for / invest in a start up.
The simple fact is that over the long (enough) run, there is no such thing as sustainable competitive advantage – markets change, grow, shrink, die – if you're not actively exploring what will replace your offering or share the market with it, you can rest assured that someone else is and eventually, they will enter your space.

So, IMHO, the smart money finds the best alternatives and bets on them too, at some point... (or they exit, if the market is simply going to die, but that's another angle).
Computational Journalism Publishers Workbench 2.0.2 Released
Smart completion is fine to me, but the refactoring is a potential problems. It seems there isn't an open source refactoring tools as good as PyCharm for python.
I'm sure everyone knows very well that this "I was hacked by China" is just a convenient excuse, and nothing else.

Think of it: Even in the rare case that your logs actually show that the attack came from a Chinese IP address, that machine was almost certainly cracked, too. Or, does anyone really think that a serious attacker would run attacks directly from their own system?

So the story goes like this: Someone failed to secure their systems and were cracked by a more or less complicated attack. Since they don't want to admit that it was some cheap security, they point to the evil genious Chinese attacker, against whom no super-secure system whatsoever would have had a chance.

It is quite similar to the argument of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment". This is not about the quality of IBM, it's about being able to say "I have done everything as good as possible".
Thanks for investigating the steps to reproduce the bug. I filed a bug report: https://bugzil.la/843473

It sounds like PDF.js has made some incorrect assumptions about default text colors. :\
Mac OS X menubar Weather monitoring app
Not enough cash to pay local merchants? If I were a merchant on LivingSocial I would be cancelling any further deals and notifying my customers that they should be filing chargebacks. I doubt the credit card companies would let LivingSocial off as easily as their employees had to.
Oh, duh.
I thought that the ending actually ruined the essay. It felt like an anomaly, a self-contradiction. His entire life story is one of how it has always been impossible to reprogram who he is, and here he is, at the end, declaring how he's going to "fight the urge to fade," and change himself, trying to change himself into something that is very clearly antithetical to who he is at every level of his personality.
I think that the control/signal separation may have come from radio originally, where these would be broadcast on distinct frequencies.

Similarly, in phone systems the control and signal circuits are often physically distinct to prevent blueboxing.

(Source: vaguely remembered snippets of conversation with my radio-and-phones-and-microwave-and-satellites-and-fibre-and-coax specialist father)
Disclaimer: I work at a company that makes hard drives. Don't forget about their sensitivity to rotational vibration, most often induced by coupling from other drives. Maybe it's not important in this particular application, but it can be a performance killer. To avoid it, 'vibration absorption' is not always the name of the game :) This link has some good background info, and a reminder that there are actual hardware/firmware reasons why enterprise & near-line drives are more expensive than consumer drives: http://enterprise.media.seagate.com/2010/05/inside-it-storag...
35 Google Glass Project Concept Ideas
But they did have a Super Bowl commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33jb2Ns7yaQ
Neil's reviews on the various categories of CPAN modules have been extremely helpful. Highly recommended!
Sequencing the Startup DNA
heroku itself doesn't need to be [distributed].

Yes, it does.
Hahaha. Everyone is afraid to leave a comment here.
I had Chrome OS running pretty smoothly on a Sylvania G Meso (a cheap netbook). I got a bootable disk image here: http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/
Sony announces Playstation 4
Anyone else put off by the poor font rastering? ( http://i.imgur.com/4Jcc56U.png - notice the 'e', 'o', and 'a').

What should be done here? Use google web fonts? Just use different fonts that don't have this issue? I'd love to hear more thoughts on this issue from font experts.
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these..." (No, seriously.)

This puts peta-scale APU computing into the sub-$500k range. That's affordable by a (funded) startup, and there are certainly interesting things one could do with that kind of supercomputing firepower.
It's entirely possible that he was silentbanned and has been trying to post the entire time but HN is silently rejecting his posts. This happened to my primary account at around the same time edw519 stopped posting. I took a similar position about the Scwhartz situation in my comments on that account. I can log in with that account, but attempting to post comments will either mysteriously time out or no comments will be posted (even with showdead) after a minute or two of pageloading. (This is not a connection issue; posting from this account never has such lag.)

If he was silentbanned, he'll be able to post again the next time management lifts the silentbans.
I'm not sure that all of them fail out. When I got my masters, the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that you had a better chance of being accepted if you applied for a Ph.D. and then quit with a Masters, which is what I did. Also, many of the other posters here decided that the job prospects were terrible and quit.
https://plus.google.com/+projectglass

"Project Glass [Verified Name]" ...riiiiight.
I tried to say just the same thing on previous posts. The Hacker News community does not tolerate differing opinions.
I am honestly surprised they've lasted this long. The whole current premise of daily deals does not work whatsoever. Every business owner I've ever known that has done one of these daily deals has never done them twice, why? Because every deal offerer (restaurant, beauty spa, dentist, tooth whitening formula company, discounted holiday) loses out and it has been proven a daily deal coupon doesn't mean you'll get a return customer because lets face it, most of the people buying these daily deal vouchers like bargains and your standard price offering is probably way out of their affordability league.

I once considered a daily deals type site where the premise was there is a strictly limited number of deals driving up the demand and at the same time, not bankrupting the family owned hardware store because 800 people bought their $500 worth of tools for $120 voucher because they thought more vouchers would mean more return business. Sucks about the stock though, I'm sure every single employee of LivingSocial deserves that money, they had a good thing going. I feel sorry for the families of the employees who are about to lose their jobs. They say the economy is on the mend, the increasing number of failing business stories I read every week says otherwise...
Nielsen TV ratings reportedly expanding to include streaming services
What is really exciting about this site is its code. It is just about a couple of megabytes of Arc, together with the language compiler.

It remarkable, that this very site is a proof of the ideas and concepts described in "On Lisp". It is not just works, it creates that much value.

Information and old code - http://arclanguage.org/

When you see it, you, perhaps, would look at all that piles of meaningless OO crap differently. Just about a megabyte of code and "good-enough" design decisions.
It depends on your criteria. Many people on here like to discuss sustainable businesses. Being acquired prior to reaching profitability is obviously a huge hit for the entrepreneurs, but it's irrelevant to the other conversation.
The best book I found on writing succinctly is Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace". I highly recommend it!

http://amzn.com/0226899152/
Delhi Mobile Hack Day: March 9th, 2013
Sony’s Yoshida: PlayStation 4 won’t block used games
These tweets he made last month seem somewhat relevant:

https://twitter.com/edw519/status/290809378213359616

https://twitter.com/edw519/status/290461720290418688

https://twitter.com/edw519/status/290840931404492800

I tweeted this thread to him, but he hasn't been on Twitter in nearly a week so I doubt he'll reply anytime soon.
I got pretty freaked out about playing with other people's money when we first took on investment. On discussing it with one of the lead investors, his response was "If all of this goes wrong, my children will still have shoes on their feet."

Your investors would not be investors if the failure of any one of their investments would create an insufferable financial burden upon them. If that statement is not true about a particular investor, that's their fault and not yours.
Nowadays x86 directly means 64-bit since it's the most common architecture. Also the 8GB of RAM directly suggests 64-bit support. I'm curious how much cheaper and faster it will be to develop for x86 compared to the PS3's Cell processor.
Not sure where you live, but the national paper in New Zealand doesn't have journalists write its articles. Badly written advert/infotainment.
Whenever someone offers you equity or shares....

Try to remember how many times it ends up being worth something, and staying something.

otoh, getting valuable mentorship like YC is probably worth paying for.
https://twitter.com/edw519/status/290461720290418688

"The past 24 hours confirms Hacker News is both a kind caring supportive community and a bunch of people who talk when they should listen."
Using Gajim Instead of Pidgin for More Secure OTR Chat
Looks like it can!

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-21-sony-tells-euro...