skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Talking about respect seems too little too late on Heroku's effort to save its reputation. I still fail to see how Heroku actually plans to compensate the users for the resources thrown in to 'fix' the issues they thought they were fixing. From RapGenius' version of the story, it seems Heroku was aware of the issue for sometime, it only started to respond and fix things up when RagGenius started to bitch about the issue on a massive scale. Frankly I don't see much 'respect' behind all these.
Show HN: Simple SSH VPN anywhere with NetworkManager
As a little side project for me I've decided to implement NetworkManager-SSH - full VPN capabilities over OpenSSH and with the familiar interface of NetworkManager. VPNing anywhere has never been easier.
InBloom Codeathon  SXSWedu (edtech API)
Honestly on a surface ship I can't think of very many 1-hit-kill components. Even in WWII tiny little Destroyer Escorts were able to withstand multiple shell hits from Japanese Heavy Cruisers and even the Yamato. (The Battle off Samar, if you want to wiki it).

With the move toward computerization and long-range missile-based combat there's probably a lot of risk with the Fire Control System, Radars (e.g. AEGIS), stuff like that. But even blind you can at least run away, and the CIWS has an independent fire-control radar for last-resort self-defense.

Submarines are more problematic. There's only the one pressure hull, only the one reactor, only the one main propulsion train, and watertight compartmentalization only exists for the reactor compartment.

This makes everything about subs more expensive since all work that affects these things has to be formally controlled and QA'ed, re-tested, etc. to avoid losing more subs like we lost Thresher and Scorpion.
> If your team’s hourly rate is $150/hr, that’s what they’re worth. Don’t skimp on them or on yourself. That $100 savings isn’t worth it if two team members each waste 30 minutes (you’ve effectively lost 50$).

That's a confounding of a couple of slightly misleading concepts.

If your billing rate is $150/hr, then that's what you should bill for. What you do in your non-billable hours is what makes your billable rates what they are. It doesn't mean that you're earing your billable rate during non-billable hours, or that you should evaluate them on that basis. Rather, you should evaluate non-billable time on the basis of: does doing this increase my billable hours, my billable rate, or otherwise improve business (reduced cost of sales, reduced churn)?

By way of a sports analogy, a team that can fill a 20,000 seat stadium at $50/seat for a 3 hour game, a net rate of $33,3333/hour, shouldn't evaluate its training and transport time on that basis. Rather, training and transport are what gets you to that $33 grand an hour.

Similarly, a $50 expense should be weighed on its marginal effect on productivity, in light of alternatives. If a $25 expense will return an $80 productivity gain, and a $50 expense nets $100, you're better off spending $25 (net gain of $55) than $50 (net gain of $50). Of course, in reality, costs and benefits are often much harder to measure, you're working off of partial and uncertain information.

But at least get the underlying logic right.
Guys, a bit misleading - On your site, I was expecting to see example/s of products with engaged users that you've built together.

Perhaps 'hire.me' would've been a more apt domain name as acquihire implies there's a company with a product to be acquired.
Not a bad idea. What if the government offered free tubal ligation and vasectomy. If you later want to have kids that cost is on you to reverse it.
"How do I delete a Discipline in EPF Composer 1.5?"
It seems like there might be a lopsided U-shaped curve to the expected benefit of "cut[ting] through the crap." On the left, at zero admission of guilt, is the baseline. It seems that in the middle there would be a diminished return expected when making a qualified or partial confession, but if you can get past a certain threshold (which may not be possible for all people in all situations), the expected benefit shoots back up.
MNIST is not a good dataset to show any artificial intelligence on. The dataset is so simple, a good programmer can probably write 100 lines of python to write a classifier for it, based on no machine learning.

Neural Network techniques which work so well in small, easy and trivial datasets like MNIST do not generalize to more serious datasets, and that's where the "and this is where the magic happens" component is needed.
"Magical information and assistance like this just doesn't seem to exist."

Agreed, but that's why the majority of the world ends up living life as a cog.

None of this shit is easy, and no one is going to handhold you through the process.

If that's your expectation, you're simply not cut out for this. But... you did mention a Steve Blank book, which makes me think all hope is not lost :)

I'd recommend:
1. Read "The startup owners manual" by Steve Blank, or at least skim the parts that seem interesting to you
2. Learn to follow the pomodoro technique religiously. This changed my "get shit done" ability dramatically -- sounds like that may be a hump you're having some trouble getting over.

In detail to 2, the thing I love most about the pomodoro technique is that it forces you to break down a task to <25 mins.

Let's take one of your points:
"3. Tell me whether I really need an LLC or just business insurance. Tell me the laws for doing business in my state, in my country, with other states, with other countries. Do I need a VAT id? What is the difference between a quote and contract of work that I'd need to do business with the U.S. government vs. a small company in Germany vs. a small company in Australia? All of these details, but in a really friendly language."

You're never going to figure that out on your own if that's the approach. That's a BIG, complicated question with a lot of factors to consider. Either you have the money to pay someone to figure it out for you, or break down something you can actually go do your research about.

Assume, test, analyze, grind, repeat.
As I recall he did portray it as risky. I remember him saying something along the lines of them having the Wired Magazine covers on a wall from all the previous huge startups that failed miserably, to remind them to be humble. I guess it wasn't that effective.
I think it's great. I've always had trouble saving any money always desperately waiting for my next paycheck, and after only two months, I've saved more than I ever have.

It can't really replace a full bank though unless all you do is use a debit card for all your transactions (like me).

Email me at Joseph@JosephRobertBrown.com if you want an invite.
"Bradley Manning pleads guilty, but denies 'aiding the enemy'"
Researchers develop way to read minds of mice
Is there something like wrapbootstrap.com for Foundation?
There would be no professional managers? How would that play out practically?
You're breaking apart a very minor detail. (most) People on hackernews can do this math, as can I.

Ironically enough, I had a much longer write-up for that section, and deleted an entire paragraph.

An audience / readers are fickle, if you want attention -- you need to take out what doesn't really matter.

But technically: you're right, you're right. Sorry to have offended you...
Indeed, the judge managed (on an ultra-compressed timescale) to provide this same-sex couple the same experience of surprise parenthood that alt-sex couples may have through an unplanned pregnancy.

This principle could be advanced more systematically. That is, perhaps adoption by same-sex couples should not just be permitted, but random and compulsory. If you're married and of child-rearing age, you might be assigned a baby!

The agency making the assignments can be called the State Taskforce Organizing Reproductive Co-equality, or STORC. So when these children ask where they came from, the happy parents can honestly say, "the STORC dropped you off".
Node.js v/s PHP load impact efficiency
So this essentially sounds like "You gotta work at it to get it done."
A lot of people use their phones far more for browsing, reading, playing games, etc. rather than actually making calls and a bigger screen makes these activities easier. However, I think that the popularity of full size tablets has caused phone manufacturers to go overboard with increased screen size.

I think 5" is on the verge of excessive and unwieldy but I'm sure many would disagree.
Well done.

"I let a lack of data override my intuition on what's best for our customers."
Isn't it intuition that becomes the problem when faced with a lack of data?
how long does new guy intend to be around?

How much effort is gonna put in? 40 hours/week or 100?

those would be my questions. No matter what, use a vesting schedule (so you're covered in case he isn't the right cto).

What if it was 5% vested every 6 months, up to a total of 49%?
> I expect the whole update process will be more hands-free and possibly a little more smooth.

I've been using my current Arch install as my main desktop since the great systemd switch late last year, and I just have it do an apper autoupdate on Sundays. I don't even do pacman -Syu, I just check the logs after an update before a restart to make sure it went smoothly.

It kind of won me over, that and yaourt at least. I have Ubuntu on my grandparents machine and sshing into it and using apt starts to feel last century after getting used to pacman.
This is where Common Lisp comes in: through macros you can expand the language to include the abstractions your application needs. PG talks about this extensively. The issue is that doing this requires a deep understanding of the language, and many programmers are not able to grasp what the CL toolbox gives them.
Already doing that, thanks. I agree.
The claim is often made that languages like Forth and Scheme are better for building applications than less elegant and orthogonal languages. But the evidence on the ground is overwhelmingly to the contrary. The vast majority of commercially significant apps are built in relatively baroque and ugly languages like Java and C++.

Personally I think that the ability to define your own language constructs is ultimately a lot less useful than things like rich libraries and robust tooling and I'm still waiting to see real-world proof of the advantages of programmable programming languages.
Agreed, to a point. What kind of abstractions are sufficient, or useful? What happens when they leak? What happens when you build the wrong abstraction, and have to go back and build something slightly different from the ground up? What about when your abstraction works, but is so far removed from the actual execution environment that it's so slow as to be unusable?

Yes, abstraction is a wonderful, useful thing that lets us think and do all sorts of wonderful, useful things - our high level programming languages and networking protocols are abstractions over lower level programming languages and networking protocols (repeat a few times) which are abstractions over the physical hardware they run on, and that's great. But abstractions are never perfect, and what you don't know about the lower levels of the stack will bite you, which is a good argument for using as few and as thin abstractions as you can to get your thing done (reasonably ... I'm not about to write this comment in binary ASCII, say).
It existed because testing wasn't stable enough and stable wasn't fast enough. The 2 year LTS releases are basically just the slow stable thing carried over, but having 2 layers of rolling release (like Arch) where you have a base repo and a testing repo lets them having the rolling release without all the continuous integration problems if it hits enough testing users first.
Except Jobs and Apple built revolutionary products that changed entire industries. Groupon is a way for people to buy the same old stuff for a little cheaper.
Is there a package for endless loop detection?
10 crazy things to do when you're dead
Because wealthy people don't experience passion. Down with the 1%! #occupy
For me a language is getting close to "powerful enough" when it does not get in the way of you as the programmer when you are developing abstractions of the form that seems most natural to you.

This can cause problems in some cases; when the language is stepping that far back to allow you the freedom then it is up to your to enforce your own constraints to avoid your abstractions becoming...too abstract (maybe).

Also in my opinion there is not one abstraction form that will appeal to every type of programmer. For me I like the freedom to manipulate and define symbolic forms with Common Lisp for others it might be the expressive type system of the Haskell. I don't think you can truly say one way is better than the other.

I think those languages and a few others are giving the tools of abstraction that will not get in the way of you as the programmer.
Here in the UK at least basically everyone has access to free contraception, you can usually walk into a health clinic and ask for a bag of condoms and they will give them to you.

I think there may also be mechanisms for women to get the contraceptive pill gratis if they are on government support.

The issue is though that this requires some degree of responsibility and planning, which is almost by definition missing in people who breed irresponsibly.
So you have a lot of people who want a lot of children or are at least indifferent to having them, however they have no financial means to support that many children.
I guess if you have not been successful career-wise then having a large family might give one a sense of accomplishment.

The upshot of that is that it's not fair to let these kids starve so the government has to offer welfare to these families. For example it is much easier to get government subsidised housing if you have children. So you end up with a situation like we have in the UK where people sometimes have children because they will get a free house (and if you have more kids you get a bigger house) where otherwise they might be homeless or forced to live with parents etc.

So quite the vicious cycle.
I would prefer our technology to be tools we can put away at any moment.

A wire popping out of my head makes that a bit hard.
Fake data? Give me a break. Groupon pioneered a new business model. With a new business model you need to account for things in ways they have never been accounted for before. While I'm not arguing their numbers didn't look shady at times, but it's because no one knew how to account for how the cash moved through Groupon's books because no one had ever done it before.

Do you count the full price of the deal as revenue? Or do you count only Groupon's cut of the deal as revenue? How often should they pay out the merchants? How do you account for refunds? Where do you keep the reserve pools Groupon needed to pay out all those refunds? Are the reserve pools considered an asset? Or a liability? How long do you need to hold the reserves before you can be sure there won't be any more refunds?

Management had to answer all of these questions in a matter of weeks because Groupon was growing so fast. It's not surprising they kept changing the way they accounted for things so often. The fact that you think Groupon knowingly misled investors like it's some sort of conspiracy is absurd.
Yes, this. You have to learn all the abstractions in a language, and the advantage of "batteries included" languages are that the abstractions are (largely) the same in everyone's code, aiding maintainability and re-use. On the other hand, if you build everything yourself, it might be better optimized to your use case, but you'll be the only person who's easily able to use the abstractions.
Am I the only one being put off by the CSS? I had to crank the display brightness to the max in order to read it without strain.

Edit: I agree a lot with the content though - For many complex problems, especially the kind where you can't just throw some standard software solution at it, it would be helpful to first develop a suitable DSL. From personal experience I'd say spend one third of your time budget into developing your domain specific toolset - even if your managers get nervous. If it works you will finish sooner than you expected and you have developed reusable tools and skills, if it doesn't you can still throw in a crunch and get it done. For me it has always worked though.
I was under the impression you could get a 4G brick from Sprint and use that as an access point. Unlimited data and all that. Still kind of insanely expensive, though, but hey, companies can own radio frequency.
Assuming comma separated emails, here is the "product" in Python:

import random, string
email_list = "a@b.com, c@d.com".split(', ')
random.shuffle(email_list)
print string.join(email_list, ', ')
If the entire recipient list isn't disclosed to the recipients, then there would be no need to randomize it. So, bcc meets his goal of not disclosing the particular order in which he entered the email addresses.

Granted, in rare cases, it is desirable to disclose all recipients' email addresses to each other, but I'd personally prefer it if that were the exception, rather than common practice.
I think Psyco was a separate code base, and not an actual progenitor of PyPy.
I could help you with that. Been doing it for myself for years.
So poor quality work should be treated the same as high quality work, in the eyes of the USPTO, then?
This would never have happened in Kenya where the Children's Act expressly forbids homosexuals from adopting. Sad.
Wendell Phillips
I like your response and tone. And the article.

But:

> Agreed, but that's why the majority of the world ends up living life as a cog.

This to me, amounts to: You are a failure (cog) if you don't do your own thing and "follow your dreams".

I don't agree with anything in that statement. I would ask readers to really think about why "following dreams" is important. Is it related to happiness? What if skills and dreams are completely out of reach from each other? Is it really just going to set someone up for failure/depression etc.

As I say, I like the sentiment, but feel there is little analysis to the thought.
Perhaps it is because I am in a dark room reading in bed with a MacBook Air set at 50% brightness, but I actually really liked the experience of reading that. Though I can absolutely understand where someone might not.
10 false facts most people think are true
As a counterpoint to this article, I'd point to Yossi Kreinin's excellent "My History with Forth & Stack Machines" [1] which has been posted on HN before [2] and which discusses more extensively the particulars of Forth as a powerful toolbox of primitive operations, as well as the use of Forth in actual applications.

[1]: http://www.yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machi...

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1680149
Were you waiting in the same state/program/whatever?
Maybe your state has less supply and you should enlist in NY.
The book is a bit dated (1971), and from what I understand, it is promoting vegetarianism. I'l still take a look at it : )
It was effective; in getting more press because of the cute little anecdote. Which is the reason they did it anyhow. I would imagine that what a company has on its walls has never materially affected its future.
Thanks, givewell seems like a neat website!
I did this. It was scary because I was leaving a very well-paying job, but I was so excited for all the possibilities. In a year, I produced tons of awesome code, that did what it was written to do. But the product itself floundered, and never took a shape that I could believe in. I even tried hiring others to give it a fresh take, but that didn't work.

In the meantime, it sped the end of a relationship. She seemed as obsessed with her own goals of starting a family as I was with my goals of starting a company. There was little middle ground. My bank account ran dry sooner than expected. I didn't find quite enough freelance work to stay afloat.

Finally, faced with a rapidly shrinking runway, the prospect of 1.5 years intense coding work amounting to nothing but uninspiring demos, and nobody else but me invested, I imploded. Meltdown. I was grasping at every straw, but it was all just that. Straw. The SO was gone. The money was gone. I'd taken the initiative to start interviewing, but nothing was connecting up.

This led to one of the darkest depressions of my life. Things are only just starting to look up now, as I've finally had a job offer with a company that I'm truly excited to work at. And the work that I did while independent played a big part in landing the job. I can't say whether it was 'worth it' - only that this is how it happened, and I'm very grateful that it did. I feel it did not have to be so miserably hard.

So, I suggest having even more cushion than you think you need. Keeping your relationships with colleagues warm. Pursuing other plans, contracts, or job prospects while you work on your idea. If you do not already have very supportive family and friends around who believe in what you're doing, ask yourself if you have the personality to really believe in yourself that much. Anything so it does not have to be like "I must succeed at this or life is over."
Private companies / IPO research firm PrivCo actually foresaw all this in 2011 pre Groupon IPO. Boy were they right. Just looked up some of the research I read then that made me a believer to avoid Groupon stock and its IPO. A taste, pretty good crystal ball, good solid analysis of the numbers:

http://www.privco.com/research/october-21-2011-groupons-3rd-....

The problem now though: Eric Lefkofsky's Super-Voting Stock (many times public shareholders) means he's still the same guy in control, though now has the CEO title too. So nothing will improve at Groupon. Andrew Mason was only a puppet CEO. Lefkosfky called all the major decisions. IPO investors: boycott ALL IPOs with supervoting stock! This is exactly why! Shareholders should be booting Mason AND Lefkofsky. (Zynga has the same problem: Mark Pincus gave himself 70x-to-1 supervoting stock before the Zynga IPO...stock's down 70% from IPO in barely over a year, yet you can't get rid of him). Don't buy these IPOs. (Also some thing PrivCo and others have advised clients, and I'm one of them.) No matter how tempting the IPO sounds, don't do it. Go on to the next IPO...I'm an active IPO investor, and there are always great new ones on the horizon....just wait for the good ones.
In point of fact, quite many babies are conceived against the intent or desire of at least one parent.

And this adoption wasn't completed until Danny signed on. Someone had to start the ball rolling.
Colemak keyboard layout
Thanks for the advice!

> If that's your expectation, you're simply not cut out for this.

I'm identifying a need. I know plenty of people like myself. The problem is not motivation. The problem is that by the time that most of us are old enough to recognize that we could do it on our own, we're also smart enough to realize that even if we knew all of the rules, the chances are 100% that our family has to sacrifice and chances are even with all of the knowledge, failure is frequent. I want to minimize failure. I would pay someone to have this info. Something focused on selling support for previously free open-source products with established international customer base, and converting from 6 figure salary with great benefits to working from home at same salary within a year at most. I'm the only wage earner and we have bills to pay. I'm not being a wuss. It is just something I want to do, but have no idea how to pull off. Many would say either "don't do it" or "start slow and see how it goes". I'm trying the latter right now, but I still have no fucking clue how to handle the practical stuff. I need to know the applicable laws, have the connections, and I'm not attractive to VC's or angels at all in my own estimate.
Hacking the Kinect with Processing