skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The challenge for founders is that one of the most common traits ascribed to successful founders is perseverance and determination. If you were to put those litmus' test questions to the AirBnB guys back in the day would they have folded?

When we changed from Rewardly to Streak, it wasn't an easy process even though we wanted to "fail fast". The key thing for us was we came up with some critical hypothesis that we knew had to be true for Rewardly to be a success. We then came up with various experiments and systematically tested the various hypothesis, and once we exhausted them, we could confidently say success was going to be very difficult.

I also think one of the most useful things to come out of YC was having an office hours with pg and him telling us to do something new. Not many people have the confidence and candor to say that so bluntly, but also the authority to be listened to.

This is also one of the reasons why I like Kevin O'Leary on Shark Tank/Dragon's Den. He often recognizes that people are wasting their life on broken ideas and isn't afraid to tell them that. The other sharks don't want to be "mean" or hurt people's feelings, but telling people the hard truth is a lot more noble in my mind.
Intrade Ceases Trading Activity
> If you already know F#, then Scala is a much simpler
Well, F# does seem to have a lot of "bolted-on" features, but Scala always gives the impression that things "come out of nowhere", e.g. a simple underscore turns the whole expression into a lambda! It looks neat, but I will need some practice to get used to things like this. But, as I said, this is just a superficial analysis, some thing we can only learn after some practicing.

> Not sure what you mean with that.
Braces, parenthesis, dots, semicolons, and IIRC you can use the arrow => without anything on its left side.

> The method is either defined on the type of the left, or added by an conversion from that type. That's it.

Unless it ends with a colon, right?

> Method calls with one argument can leave out dot and parentheses

That's somewhat simpler than I expected. I thought it was something Perl-like or Ruby-like (where obj.method + 1 is different from obj.method +1). There should be some way to get a reference to a method without calling it, that I still haven't learnt.

> If a method has a side effect, you define and call it with parentheses, otherwise you leave them out

Not sure I understand this. Is this the preferred coding style or something enforced by the compiler?

> I hope that helps a bit!
Yes, it helped! Thanks!
That seems irrelevant to making a working brain thingy. We don't want to predict how another given brain will evolve, we want to mimic intelligence. Your brain evolves differently than mine, yet we both are intelligent (I think). I don't need to predict your thoughts to have thoughts of my own.

Perhaps the randomness is even necessary because otherwise some situations could never be resolved (like the classic who should go first to go through a door - after you - no, after you...).
Cached copy until site is back up:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
I'm gonna chime in and say Marcaria is the worst.

1) The interface is complicated

2) They store the password in cleartext (I've told them how big of a deal that is 5 times now and I've been ignored every time).

3) My friend registered a domain there and didn't get a confirmation email. He was like why is it not working? I said I don't know let me try to register the domain. Next day, I get a confirmation email and he gets an email that the domain he requested is not available (even though he registered it a few hours before me).
Not directly related, but I wonder why no one is using similar to the Google Image Labeler service Google had online at one point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Image_Labeler) as a CAPTCHA?
Fairly good distillation of the research at http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/03/08/just-how-fast-...
My mistake; I only skimmed and judged too quickly.
This has to be considered less of a crime that physically vandalising a billboard, surely.
hey this hackerschool looks pretty cool. I see that their is a checkbox for "I am a woman" though. I am a high school-er that goes to vocational school for software engineering. I also happen to be a girl. I'm not so sure about putting a checkbox of "I'm a woman". It might turn that group away and I don't even like the idea of it too much. I'd rather have people see me more than just a gender.
I wish hosts would stop blaming their customers for these attacks.

Every time someone gets ddosed and complains on hosting forums, the #1 reaction is "who did you piss off?".
> I use Bootstrap on my web app because I care about design, but I don't care so much about learning fancy CSS

A paradox.
The Addictive Rush of Making Things (That Work)
It's blog spam. Flagged.
I'll second, lxml.html is in my experience very robust and fast. I've been writing a lot of scrapers along the years and the best combination I found so far is requests / lxml.html / gevent.

It doesn't get any simpler than this IMO http://pastebin.com/hacxmAjV
I noticed this too. It said "ely.com" is available, which was strange because most (all?) 3-character .com's are registered. And yeah, ely.com is registered.
"Texts you should read before you ever contact an journalist."

Grammar errors really stand out at font-size: 20px :)

EDIT: It's fixed now.
>> You haven’t hit 10% week-over-week growth on any meaningful metric (revenue, active users, etc)

Isn't this one a little extreme? I started a company in 2004. In 7 months we had sold $92,000. It was slow going, since it was a manufacturing company. In the 8th month we sold $40K, the next month was $60K, the next $72K.... the point is that I never achieved 10% growth on any metric for 7 months, and then it grew like crazy. Had I known how hard it was going to be, I wouldn't have started. Now that I have been through it I have no fear of doing it again. The company has now shipped its 100,000 product (lift kit for pickup truck).

It is a nice honest essay. I just think the one point was too extreme. It is extremely hard to tell when persistence turns into stupidity. I have been both persistent and stupid. I guess if she has spent three years pursuing the vision and it didn't work, then she knows what she is doing.
Go's declaration syntax (http://golang.org/doc/articles/gos_declaration_syntax.html) and package system are inspired by the Pascal family, according to the FAQ (http://golang.org/doc/faq#ancestors).
If you have a username, Code School doesn't display your user ID in the URL. But it's probably still accessible with an id.
But you can still make your Report Card private (and I'm pretty sure it doesn't display my email).

But more on topic, good on them! I've completed 10 courses (and watched a ton of Code TV casts) and I'm certain Code School is the website that consistently produces content with the highest quality out there. They truly deserve their success.
People who come into money should think the importance of things, but to be a bit cynical, let's not forget:

This is an article about the virtues of living in small homes written by a man who is in the business of selling small homes.

And I think it's interesting that this article completely avoids any mention of the rise of ownership-decreasing and utilization-enriching services like Uber, AirBnB, Lyft, etc (as my buddy David Weekly pointed out to me on FB).
So true, another example is the TB-303.
Thanks!

That beats my first naive attempt, which was an API call (/statuses/user_timeline/<id>.json?count=1) per user.

Hmm, I just noticed there was also (now deprecated) GET statuses/friends which did what I want. It is deprecated in favour of your suggestion.
Ditto this. I've written about this every time one of these "Oh no, not women-centric events!" threads comes up, but when I was at RailsGirls PDX (aged 21+), the question came up as to if they preferred the girls-only aspect or if they thought it was exclusionary.

Many had faced discrimination in classrooms or at events and felt like they didn't belong. They were much more excited and eager to participate in something where they knew they wouldn't be judged by something as petty as their gender, and many were encouraged by male peers to be there. I went because I knew it would be friendlier, both socially and in approach, than other events I'd been to. I don't know what the total was, but not everyone that applied was even able to attend. From what I've read, this is the case across all of their events, so if the interest is continually there, how can we possibly say it doesn't work or that it's wrong?

The blog title itself is unhelpful to the debate; each woman has their own individual experiences as a girl in this industry. Using one's singular experience to downplay a movement that could become much bigger than itself is irresponsible. Unfortunately, those who believe these types of events are active segregation/unfair encouragement are feeling even more validated by this post because it was written by a woman, despite the fact that she cannot speak on behalf of an entire gender and the personal experiences therein.
It's a lot easier to slink away and hide in a corner than to own up that you have failed. I did the former twice, so I have a lot of respect for Danielle.

I'm curious to see what you guys come out with next, but I have no doubts that you will eventually be massively successful!
Woman dying of ALS uses her thumb to write an 89,000 word book on her iPhone
That's really impressive. Was it your teacher, or the school that initiated this?

I do think that some students might need more handholding than you in this particular question, however... (hell, I might get lost in that) but there is room for creating experimental learning with the ability to get in flow for all skill levels. But that's what good teaching is about.
Steve Jobs vs Dennis Ritchie
The Revolution:

At the turn of the 1900s, the field of mathematics was changing. The old school relied of physical intuition as a means of proof. The new school found that an adherence to formal logic led to more reliable findings.

Most Relevent Sections:

In brief, traditionalists lost the battle in the professional community but won in education. The failure of “new math” in the 1960s and 70s is taken as further confirmation that modern mathematics is unsuitable for children. This was hardly a fair test of the methodology because it was very poorly conceived, and many traditionalists were determined that it would succeed only over their dead bodies. However, the experience reinforced preexisting antagonism, and opposition is now a deeply embedded article of faith.

Many scientists and engineers depend on mathematics, but its reliability makes it transparent rather than appreciated, and they often dismiss core mathematics as meaningless formalism and obsessive-compulsive about details. This is a cultural attitude that reflects feelings of power in their domains and world views that include little else, but it is encouraged by the opposition in elementary education and philosophy.

In fact, hostility to mathematics is endemic in our culture. Imagine a conversation:

A: What do you do?
B: I am a ———.
A: Oh, I hate that.

Ideally this response would be limited to such occupations as “serial killer”, “child pornographer”, and maybe “politician”, but “mathematician” seems to work. It is common enough that many of us are reluctant to identify ourselves as mathematicians. Paul Halmos is said to have told outsiders that he was in “roofing and siding”!

from page 33-34.

Core methods such as completely precise definitions (via axioms) and careful logical arguments are well known, but many educators, philosophers, physicists, engineers, and many applied mathematicians reject them as not really necessary.

from page 34

Why It Matters:

The sciences are at risk in the reckless implementation of maths.

Education methods are weakened by the philosophical divide.
A UI that were terrible and that the Samsung management spent ages comparing to the iPhone UI and pointing out how terrible it was.
There's an embarrassing amount of circumstantial evidence.
This is a clever hack, but I question the motives of both the father and Ars Technica. Must we erase—or invert—all aspects of yin and yang, simply to appease the gods of equality?

You may have heard the French phrase vive la différence, which translates as "long live the difference", but do you know what it refers to? It means "let's celebrate the differences between the sexes." Nowadays it seems we are only allowed to celebrate their sameness, or their inversion. This makes me sad.

Vive la différence!
Wanting to be treated equally is hardly asking for red carpet treatment.
True, and the documentary is great too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_1Ghk0CIc

Kind of depressing, but it's Chomsky; he has that effect.
For god's sake, just learn some CSS already.
Maybe your revenue wasnt't growing 10% week-over-week, but some metric probably was (maybe you weren't measuring the one that was - like value of leads in your pipeline). Or who knows, maybe the $28k commission we've made on $350k of merchandise sold (8% commission for those wondering) in the past 7 months is about is explode.

We're not shutting down, we're changing course and there's no reason we can't make more money doing what's next. I am betting we will grow revenue dramatically with our new direction.

More context:
http://refer.ly/please-read-referly-discontinuing-rewards-pa...
Overused? This is the first Nintendo game that ever used that trope. Mario wasn't even called Mario before this point, and there was no princess. It was just Jumpman (renamed to Mario starting with this very game, who got his name from one of Nintendo's landlords at the time), Pauline (who got her name from the wife of an employee, but just "Lady" in the J version), and Donkey Kong.
iPad loop trap
The title here is misleading. They are "ceasing trading activity" ... "as we do all we can to resume operations as promptly as possible." The statement alludes to "financial irregularities" which are being investigated.
Very astute observation. Different companies, different "models" with spotify and rdio and other radio, but the underlying dynamics for the artists really haven't changed
According to Wikipedia, the term 'blog' was invented in 1999. :)
Overused in the sense of storytelling more generally, not Nintendo in particular.
Hypothetical: if this balanced product was offered for $10 straight up, would you buy it?
Interesting. The author of that article sees Ender as very empathetic, and marvels that someone like Card could have written him. I disagree. 1) I don't think Ender was a particularly empathetic character, and 2) authors are not their characters. A little piece of me lives inside each of my main characters, but I don't necessarily see the world the same way my characters do. Card was an adult when he wrote about Ender Wiggin. He might have drawn from his childhood experiences, but he was not Ender.
EU set to vote on blanket porn ban; Internet freedoms at risk
Well, "financial irregularities which in accordance with Irish law oblige the directors ..." is legalese that, in essence, means something like "we've caught someone [stealing from the cookie jar / lying about losses] on a so large scale that the board is not sure if the company will be able to pay the money it owes to everyone".

There are just a few cases where the law obliges directors to do something; I'm not an expert in Irish legislation, but most likely they are clearly enumerated in a single law.
> There are regional shortages, but in the vast majority of cases that's a corruption and infrastructure problem.

This can also be said for most things which the globe has major problems with: Food, Education, Electricity etc...

Don't forget, that 1C of potable water also took quite a bit of electricity and infrastructure to make clean (assuming we are discussing most modern western water systems based on water treatment and not pure well water).

It is worthwhile, to examine how necessary aspects of our consumption are, in order to be more efficient and use fewer resources.
Thank you. This is why I come back to HN: for pretty much every technical question I have, there's someone with experience with many alternatives and can give their opinions :)
In our case we faced a lot of market confusion about what problem we were solving for the customer. There was also a seasonal effect I didn't understand until I went through it for several years.

I wish you luck with your new direction. I am sure you thought deeply about your choice, so it is probably the right one.
If you think that sourceforge and github are equivalent, you are very mistaken.
You are forgetting a lot of stuff inbetween, not in the least the fact that even successful bands have a hard time making ends meet, major label or not.

Grizzly Bear, a very successful indie band recently had an interview where they spilled out everything. The band that opens for Radiohead and Paul Simon, is featured in ads for Volkswagen and Peugeot and sells out Radio City Music Hall.

They can't afford health insurance. After a tour they just about break even, and they make most of their sales from touring. Here are a couple of quotes from Twitter: "Mog and Spotify do not help bands or labels or indie stores. Not shaming you, just stating the facts since someone asked" and "Buying an album helps a band ten fold over buying a t-shirt, no matter what format. Again, answering questions".

The vocalist, Edward Droste, says that he doesn't even make a middle class living.

Here's the money quote from the interview: "“There’s a ceiling that independent artists hit,” he recently told NPR, “and the only way past it is radio.” And radio “still feels very much controlled by major labels’ ability to use leverage—you still have to have the muscle. Very few indie acts actually have breakthrough radio hits.”"

http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/grizzly-bear-shields.html
It's a very abstract game that simply takes imagery from the classic King Kong movie.

At this point trying to read more into it is a tad paranoid IMO.
I would have a hard time recommending Chef and Puppet unless you wrap your deployed unit in a .deb or .rpm file with pre and post install scripts.

Puppet is not really great at executing a sequence of steps because it is declarative: you can always express sequence as dependencies (e.g., reload nginx when file X has changed), but for fine grained steps (e.g., create a softlink for the latest version of your code), it's less convenient.

It's also slower than a Fabric script. If I want to revert to a previous version, I just do "fab revert myapp". With puppet I would have to rerun the puppet agent/change a manifest/change the version in my rpm repository/...

We heavily use puppet to manage our servers, but we rely on Fabric for deployment tasks.
I read your reply, but what I mean is exactly contradicting your statements: I'm saying that right now MS-Word is NOT a product intended (by its makers) for that market and the "same established convention" simply does not hold true anymore for MS Office.

And the evidence for this position is this design choice made by Microsoft. I'm treating it not as a mistake, but as part of proof that they've consciously chosen screen-viewing instead of printing as their goal, and applied that convention for their apps.

What evidence is there that the current MS Word is aimed at printing primarily, and because of that its "body text ought to be Serif" ? It has been aimed at printing a dozen years ago, sure, but why you're reasoning that it still is now?
I didnt just pick the successful ones, I went for the ones who changed the world in some way.
The problem, or the balance that must be struck, is that it's hard to innovate without being surrounded by other innovative people. You need a city with a critical mass of innovative, talented people and a low cost-of-living.

I agree. Come to Austin, TX!
I think that's actually a pretty good nomination. He knew what he was doing; he knew that he was risking serious jailtime, but he did it anyways because he thought it was the right thing to do.
I could spread celebrity gossip by telegram; that doesn't mean twitter didnt create something innovative.
Slightly OT: what's the current status of online gambling? There were talks of nevada and new jersey loosening restrictions, but most of those were reported by financial analysts and not by the technical community.
I'm not sure what you're taking exception to: I said it was one of the first examples (wasn't sure if it was the first, so thanks for clarifying that).

While in the video Sarkeesian goes through its overuse in general as mturmon mentioned, Nintendo did go on to overuse it themselves, with Donkey Kong being the first of many times Nintendo went to that well. The linked video goes through several examples.
Reposting and responding to a dead comment by lexarchy:

--

>This is a clever hack, but I question the motives of both the father and Ars Technica. Must we erase—or invert—all aspects of yin and yang, simply to appease the gods of equality?

You may have heard the French phrase vive la différence, which translates as "long live the difference", but do you know what it refers to? It means "let's celebrate the differences between the sexes." Nowadays it seems we are only allowed to celebrate their sameness, or their inversion. This makes me sad.

Vive la différence!

--

This kind of put into words an odd feeling I was having about the whole "war of the sexes" vibe that this seems to generate. I'm not sure the motives of the father or the site need questioned at all - it's a thoughtful gift to his daughter, and a very clever hack at that. Certainly worth covering in any case.

What I don't understand is how one of the most common storytelling tropes in history (we're talking Shakespeare and then some) has suddenly become uncool to use, or why we're making a harmless part of videogame history a political and social justice issue.
That's a nice link. (A little bit of "gotcha" media critique in that series, but generally well-deserved gotcha's -- her Lego two-parter is also worth a watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrmRxGLn0Bk)

Before watching that, I had not known that Nintendo tried to get the rights to the Popeye characters for video game purposes (see around 6:30 in the linked video). Besides the obvious King Kong character parallel, there is also a loose parallel to Popeye (Maiden = Olive Oyl, Mario = Popeye, Ape = Bluto).
> huh? Who are you? have you made me a project? ooh! that's so cute!

Two (now three) replies are quite a low bar to call something "a project". But I get it, you're totally casual about it.

> Well I could just wave off your weird outburst here but I guess out of fairness I'll address you point for point.

That wasn't necessary and I don't care for reading it. You might want to have this discussion with the original user replying to your statement, I was merely reiterating his complaint.

> Why do you care so much?

Because I read a quite interesting discussion on an interesting subject and you wasted my time with a weird and somewhat self-indulgent tangent. I felt that you deserved to have a little of your time wasted in return. I think we're done here.
Main discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5354142
Berlusconi was nominated at some point. Just saying.
Seasonal effect is the worst sometimes, we had similar issues that encouraged us even in the face of other evidence. Thanks for your insights, I'm glad it ultimately worked out for you.
EmberJS and Confusion, Part 2
hah :) so software is like interactive literature.
I thinks the growth value really depends on when your compagny will become beneficial. Were you losing money on the 10th month (the one at $72K)?
Mycestro, The Next Generation 3D Mouse
Sometimes one gets tired of the same old stories, lazily retold by deep-pocketed corporations as an easy gimmick to make money.

The deep-pocketed corporations always win in the end, but in the cracks, something different can flourish.