skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
raises hand me too. I'm way too honest to call what I'm doing "a startup." But I am spending my own money on it, and I am working on it exclusively.

The article makes the point but it should be re-emphasized: the tools a capable individual has at their disposal now to build software is, for lack of a better way to describe it, completely insane. I'm revisiting AWS's offerings as a solo person now after working for a larger company for a few years and it's mindblowing what's there. And then there's stuff like github, mixpanel, new relic, and so on, all of which offer starting tiers that are free or absurdly cheap. I can buy tools to do design work in the App Store today for tens of dollars which just a few short years ago would have required a sales call and a 4-figure purchase order.

Having done a "real startup" three years ago I look around now and realize a lot of the hard operational stuff I was wrangling with back then has basically been commoditized and can be paid for as a service that scales linearly up with profits. It's nuts.

My focus is this: take advantage of this massive leverage to get as many experiments going as fast as I can. Invest the time to build domain specific components (not devops crap that I can now pay for) so that I can quickly create a series of products/experiments around a similar theme quickly while I try to find something that clicks. Keep costs low and charge for the product, keeping a close eye on operating margins. (People paying for something is the strongest signal that you've found something interesting, after all.)
I believe you are wrong about that, but then I did ask someone who was a French native to respond ;)
Lots of real world apps don't compose nicely down to a bunch of REST bullshit.
“Hey everybody! I’m an adult healthy male named George, and I mean you no harm!”

That would be more like "Hey everyone, I'm George". Humans also 'encode' information in that sense - from that introduction you could probably tell age, general health and friendliness.

The day we can talk to any stranger dolphin and have a real conversation will be alike to contacting alien life.
You're not actually anonymous in crowds, because everyone can see your face. It's just that social conventions lead us to not bother one another. They work because we're not anonymous...if I bother you, you can immediately bother me to the same degree.

The ickiness with Google Glass is the asymmetry of information--one person basically stalking another, aided by a networked computer.

At least you'd know they were doing it by the ridiculous electronic glasses they're wearing.
"Rails isn't the easy framework it once was..."

I disagree. It's just as easy to set up a simple web app in Rails now as it was then. Rails may have grown in complexity, but it didn't add complexity to the easy thing.

"Sure, Rails itself is straightforward, but the frameworks you slap on top of it can quickly become burdensome abstractions"

I agree. However, I think it's so much easier to avoid these burdensome abstractions if you choose than it was in Spring when it first hit the scene. If you wanted to do something simple, I think it was far easier to write lower level servlet and jdbc code than to get spring mvc, hibernate, and some sort of build too (probably maven) all working together properly.

There were some good efforts. There seemed to be some enthusiasm about Roo, though I didn't find the code generated by Roo anywhere near as easy to work with as Rails code. I thought Play looked promising, though it wasn't enough to get me back to Java once I'd built some momentum with Rails.

A few people have commented that Spring 3 is excellent. It may very well be, and maybe I'll take a look some time, but to say I'm once bitten twice shy is to greatly undercount the number of times I was bitten.
After some rabbit hole googling related to my 'Seaquarium' digression below, I encountered this 2010 transcript[1] of an ex-Flipper trainer:

"Flipper was a wild animal that lived in Biscayne Bay before we captured her and dragged her, kicking and screaming, to the Miami Seaquarium and put her in a tank and gave her a stage name, Flipper. Her name was really Cathy. Well, not really. Her real name was [whistles]. Dolphins have a signature whistle that their mother gives them." - Ric O'Barry

So it seems like this research proves what dolphin trainers have known, ostensibly, for many years?

[1] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/16/filmmakers_activists_t...

======
OT:

> The researchers also intensely studied four captive adult male dolphins housed at The Seas Aquarium, also in Florida.

Made me giggle. Don't they mean, the [Miami] Seaquarium? If so, Flipper[1][2] is part of the study!

[1] http://miamiseaquarium.com/Shows/Flipper-Dolphin

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipper_(1964_TV_series)#Filmin...
"An admirable direction and quite the opposite of Java." What are you talking, specifics please? Is Java a framework with features comparable to Rails?

Why is the laundry list of technologies absurd, these are the technologies that I run a business on. I think what's absurd is the level of reaction in your comment. Rails people now have this defensive reaction, and I've noticed it in person as well.

It reminds me of the reaction of Java zealots in 2007. It really does. "Oh, really, you couldn't be serious, I mean it's absurd to think that Ruby...." It wasn't absurd to challenge, and neither is this challenge.
Today: Watch PlayStation Meeting 2013 Live at 6pm Eastern Time
Cheat Sheets for Web Development
"A successful product is the evolutionary result...."

What we call success is possibly persistence mixed with applied failure science, a method in which the practitioner modifies his techniques continually based on previous failures. She is an explorer who does not stop because she meets an ocean north, instead she tries to go west or if she gots balls, she builds a ship, but ultimately she is determined to find what she seeks.
Yes. I take it you've never worked at an enterprise company before ?

Every time a new developer comes on board they just love to add new technology X
and then in the years to come other developers add Y and so on. Of course there
are developers who have to manage this.
Explain to them what's bad about walled IM networks (it's like not being able to send e-mails between AOL and Compuserve back in the day) and explain what is the point in the federated XMPP networks. Then explain why Whatsapp security is totally broken. If people won't care after that - just leave them alone. :) Most people understand, but claim they are too tied in the existing walled networks. Some don't mind registering on some XMPP server in addition, so you can get a range of results.
Having to deal with the weirdness that is the simulated 'windows file system' every time you open when running a Wine app is much harder than just learning how to use gEdit with all the plugins you'll ever need. Or Kate.
Spring 3 is excellent BTW. I originally started to blog about a Spring 3 application I wrote, but then it turned into this Rails rants.

And, I don't hate Rails at all. Really. I don't.
Chrome's PDF viewer lacks the basic features one expects from a PDF viewer. It doesn't make sense to abandon the concept of pages or not support ToC. Those things are essential in PDFs. pdf.js handles all of those things. And there were browsers being able to display PDF before Chrome. KDE's Konqueror could simply load KPDF and Safari had Preview.app embedded.

I wish Google would abandon their viewer (which is closed source btw) and rather start using and contributing to pdf.js.
And ferrets.
Congratulations, everyone =)

Keeping a community like this together and preventing its degradation over a 6 year period is a remarkable achievement.

Let's also remember that this isn't just a site that lists current topics of interest; there's also the search feature. It's a great source of links to interesting views on various topics. For instance, whenever I encounter some tech-related topic where scepticism or additional information is hard to find, I search for HN threads on that topic and very often find more detail than I know what to do with.
You spell out the implied to reduce surprises about what parties think are implied.

You create lists to create concrete boundaries for sets of things, and to leverage accepted rules for how to interpret lists in legal documents. E.g. say you are covering an insurance client against "disasters." What does that mean? The English word "disaster" can encompass everything from Fukushima to cancer to your kid failing out of school. Instead, you might write: "we will cover floods, hurricanes, forest fires, and other disasters." This is technically redundant, because the enumerated items are subset of "disasters." However, under the accepted rules of legal interpretation, the enumerated items will cabin the more general concept of "disaster." You have a fighting chance in court of defending not covering someone's getting cancer by relying on the argument: "is cancer like a flood, hurricane, or forest fire?"

Additional wordiness is often the result of the need to be precise (or copy & pasting from precedent, or being in a hurry). Try describing the operation of some C code in English in very precise terms. You'll find that ordinary English leaves implicit a lot of "who, what, where, when" type details, and that making them explicit creates a lot of wordiness.
Cats always do the trick
SETI is about finding alien signals, not necessarily understanding them. However, it's likely that any extraterrestrial intelligence capable of sending out signals powerful enough to reach us, will have an understanding of science and mathematics, which is more than we have in common with dolphins.
Think about it from their perspective. Imagine you are an HR person, maybe if its a start up the CTO, and you receive the application you've been sending out. How would you react? Would the application be memorable? Would it impress you and make you think, this person seems like they are really enthusiastic about working at our company and they have impressive skills?

To this end, I'd say make sure you show them something you've built that's up and running and 100% completed. It only has to be just one thing, but make sure its impressive - something you're proud of and would consider your best piece of work. Send it as a link in your initial email.

Anything unique and cool that makes you stick out is good. Why not strap up your resume as an interactive app designed specifically for that startup you really want to intern for? Or whoever said you had to send a standard resume word doc? Why not mock up a sweetly designed resume - even if you're a programmer it shows motivation and ability to think outside the box. (See this link for inspiration: http://dzineblog.com/2011/09/35-brilliant-resume-designs.htm...)

Also, Looking over your resume I see a lot of stuff but nothing that looks like its completed (maybe it is but the resume doesn't show it). I'd also scratch anything from your resume that doesn't impress. The link to http://countervailinteractive.com goes to an expired domain, so I can't see what your skills are like, so I'd get that working or scratch it if you can't. Saying you built one website doesn't do much to get you in the door.

Anyways, I hope I didn't sound to harsh, I like seeing young people enthusiastic about programming and would like to see you get that internship. Good luck :)
The most bitter possible interpretations of these ideas, but still possible interpretations.

That said, the merging of work and hobby is at a very advanced state in SV, which is a good and a bad thing. It's not so odd that they should overlap policy-wise.
I don't know why you're trying to buy Confucius' books -- they're online and free, in multiple formats:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/confucius/index.html

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?amod...

http://manybooks.net/titles/confuciuetext02cnfcs10.html

http://www.classicly.com/read-the-analects-of-confucius-onli...

and many more ...
If it's useful to you why would you care what it's called.
Nothing you wouldn't see at the appropriately named Yahoo News. Perhaps you can still read similar comments there.
If I remember correctly the PDF Spec says the files should be read backwards. The object table is at the end of the file.
Everything about this product -- Google marketing, user discussion forums, all news articles and promotional material -- keeps reiterating the hype about the "possibilities!" of Google Glass, and yet I have not seen a single realistic killer app/feature proposed. In fact, it looks like Google doesn't even have an idea what such a killer app would look like (but it's a video camera on your HEAD!!!), hence why they are soliciting other people's ideas.

Great products aren't crowd sourced -- they come from clear vision, which unfortunately seems lacking in this case.
Someone should define a canonical way to transform dolphins' whistles into syllables. Then we could at least sort of refer to them by their names.
Playstation 4 announcement live video feed
Can anyone annotate the big spikes?
> It's more about using previously tested blocks of language. Here's a good example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalaya_clause

Right; there's some cargo culting in legal writing. Until a particular form of words has been tested in court, no-one really knows whether it will stand up.

If there's an untested standard form, most people won't want to experiment with a variation because if their variation happens to be the one that fails, there's a possibility of a negligence suit for not using the standard form.

If there's a tested standard form, even fewer people will want to experiment, for the same reason.
In the past year, unique IPs seem to be increasing while the number of page views has only increased slightly.

Quick analysis would be that HN is continuing to attract new people to the site, but people aren't surfing within HN as much. It makes sense given the assumption that most people probably surf the HN front page as those are where the more relevant stories are showcased and then post articles from time to time.

From another perspective, people are decreasing their engagement with HN. They may not be wandering into the "Ask", "New", or "Jobs" columns.

Just thought I'd share some quick statistical analysis that went through my head when looking at the graph...nonetheless, Happy 6th Birthday HN! It's remarkable at how quickly its grown and moreover, how it has remained a resourceful tool to so many people!
Wow. That is really good. Thanks.
Ah, watch out for JSF, it's a dangerous place. JPA on the other hand is surprisingly good these days try Spring 3 Oliver Gierke has done good things.
I have the same birthday as HN ... only problem is I'm 20 years older and apparently its already accomplished more than me lol.

Happy Birthday HN and thanks pg for giving us a great place to hang out
Deep Inside: A study of 10,000 Porn Stars Infographic
There is already a Chromium plugin for pdf.js available. I hope Google starts using pdf.js so far it's better than the Chrome pdf viewer except for the startup time.
A Comprehensive Guide to WebP
How'd you spread the word at launch?
China Can Also Kill People with Drones
Modern culture is filled with prejudices towards non-human forms of life. Not only are animals taken for granted and exploited for the well-being of the human species, which is wrongfully considered a "superior" life form, but life itself is taken for granted. Realizing just "now" that non-human life forms are more complex than we thought is simply because our ability to even be open minded about that possibility was completely suffocated by the hubris of humanity.
maybe cause some things are more important than money?
Preview files in Google Drive
Unbelievable that humans still kill these amazing animals

http://www.seashepherd.org/cove-guardians/
Google touches more normal folks in far more profound ways than NASA's moon shot. So does Coca-Cola. I'm not sure this as compelling an argument as you think it is.
Hey K-2052 / lastbookworm, good job on coming out of the closet, that's a difficult step. You obviously want to turn things around, and I think you'll find that in general, at least a tiny part of the world will be there to support you if you genuinely want your life to change. It's gonna take some guts and determination, but it can be done.

Don't pay too much attention to all of the people in this thread criticizing you or offering advice that doesn't fit. The two worst things about the internet are that it's simply more difficult to empathize with other people, and that there are fewer / zero consequences for rudeness.

One thing caught my attention:

> I have never known my Dad. My mom left him when I was four. They were both drug users and to escape the drug usage my mom left him. I have only blurry memories of him. None of my memories of him are positive.

Having had similar experiences, from my perspective this is the root cause of your troubles. It's kind of unbelievable how deep the rabbit hole can go in terms of how this affects your life. I just want you to keep that in mind.

Take care and good luck. You'll figure it out.
Rails has monkeypatching. Access has COM.

Inbound developers will not be able to use either of these things because their skills and expectations have been set by that easy 80%.
It's not about an arbitrary debt ceiling
I completely agree with you. I would only add that even when living in a sea of talented individuals, most people will keep themselves on known waters. It takes a lot of effort to go outside of your comfort zone, but once you do, you gain a huge advantage over more talented people. Because now you feel able to do things they think are out of reach or simply don´t think of them at all. It is really being outside a bubble while the other people is inside.

I´ve been feeling this way for this last year since I begun my project. Probably I will fail, but even then I have am far ahead from I thought I would be able to be.
The main problem I see with that is security. PDF is a huge attack surface, reducing that to the already existing and well tested javascript surface is a huge win. Ideally (in my mind) every browser will come to use Mozilla's pdf implementation.
If you want to experiment with StarCraft's pathfinding, you can, with BWAPI http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/ . Particularly, there is some reverse-engineering information on pathfinding here http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/issues/detail?id=190&cols...
It's crazy that hard drive prices are still higher than they were two years ago because of the flooding...
It will no doubt be shocking news to Mr. Weissmann to find out that factors such as a desire to learn more or to make new contributions to human knowledge can motivate aspiring PhD candidates. It's also rather ironic to see such analyses promoted by someone who chose a career in the notoriously unprofitable field of journalism.
Perhaps they had made an offer. We never would know.

We don't even know the details of the Mozilla-Google deal. For all the openness that Google and Mozilla appear to proffer, the agreement between them is a secret.
Hmmm... all of them from Canada or England, and some are based on US. Well, I guess we will have to be the first latin team there! ;)
As others have said, this looks really useful for proof of concept/prototyping work. The first use case that came to mind was hackathons, actually.

It'd be really nice if there was a fast, automated way to "unwrap" the microframework version of your webapp into the full-blown django project so that you can start hardening things for production in a single command.
Downvote me all you want. This luddite "all smartphone owners suck at communicating" is a tired annoying meme in and of itself.
As minimaxir says, this is the weekends. Amazon.com gets big traffic spikes during the typical work week, I suspect HN's traffic spikes are the same effect =).
http://www.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html

The site was originally called Startup News. We changed the name and focus about 6 months later:

http://www.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
Here are some of the list resources:

20 Perl libraries for fetching web content - http://neilb.org/reviews/http-requesters.html

An SO wiki page for html scraping - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2861/options-for-html-scr...
I don't look at it that way. It seems YC is interested in pushing early seed stage companies to raise a big next round and become a "large, venture-backed company" (from our interview rejection earlier this spring).

This "2013 startup" is something different: focus on customers and revenue instead of just raw users, and go from there. At least that's my interpretation of the concept.
I love a good storage story. Its interesting that they still put them behind a couple of gigabit network ports. Using the native network (2 x 1GbE) it would take more than a week with those interfaces on full dump to get a full load off or on to a pod.

I had an ultimately unrewarding conversation with Sean Quinlan (of Google GFS fame) about the futility of putting a lot of storage behind such a small channel (in Google's case the numbers were epicly Google of course but the argument was the same). You waste all of the spindles because the operation rate (requests coming into the channel) vs the amount of data ops needed to satisfy the request, basically leave your disks waiting around the next request to come in from the network. (btw that allows you to make a nearly perfect emission rate scheduler for disk arms but that is another story).

What this means is that petabyte pods are going to be nearly useless, although with an external index they can be dense.
Actually I think Authy is in Colombia.
I went to the San Francisco Glass Foundry--- it was awesome. I felt loss after I had to hand the device back-- as if I was missing one of my senses. :)

Unfortunately as you undoubtably well know, I cannot talk any details due to NDA.
Looks great. I was looking into creating something similar in terms of processing, some years ago, but never took it very far. Your work sounds very interesting and I can think of some interesting uses - I have access to some fascinating data sets.
There's no reason we can't pursue multiple lines of research in parallel. It's probably more efficient too.
I will wager money that their names translate to things like:

Big nose
Funny tail
Horny boy
Big mamma
Deep swimmer

Not just amusing, but also useful. By correlating individual behaviors and physical features with names, we might be able to unlock dolphin language! Which would be incredible!
Not as pretty as the OP offering, but this bootstrap template is a great starting point for an quick, legit marketing page.

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/examples/carousel.html
Apparently, dolphin trainers have the ability to whistle their names:

"Her name was really Cathy. Well, not really. Her real name was [whistles]."[1]

[1] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/16/filmmakers_activists_t...
And yet, there he goes, using it, happy as a clam.
Also, GTalk does not use libjingle but its own slightly-different pre-standard implementation, that's why it is impossible to talk to GTalk users with a XMPP client that supports Jingle via libjingle.

This is quite a mess.
This guy qualifies for gargoyle in my book. http://eyetap.blogspot.com/2012/07/physical-assault-by-mcdon...
SETI is not misguided. We've known for a long time that Earth was hospitable to intelligent life (us). That there are other species with similar levels of intelligent just makes Earth more awesome.

But it would be a complete mindfuck if we found other intelligent life in space, where before there were mainly only stars, rocks, and interesting formations of liquid and gas somewhere in between. It would change everything.