skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Daily Introspection – My System
The stories in the post all have repeatable bug conditions. If you read bugs submitted for something like Chrome or Firefox (or any big complex program) you see a lot of trying to figure out what state triggers a bug. There's a lot of, "I can't repeat it. Works fine for me." It's almost impossible to deduce what causes a bug because so many possible states can exists at any given moment.

The way a lot of bugs are eventually solved is not by asking what caused them, but when they started. It's often the regression testers who find the source. You keep going back through the nightly releases until you find one that doesn't exhibit the bug. At that point you go to the commit logs and there is your problem.
Apple's real enemy isn't Samsung
Css-only Alternative to the Select Element
exec()
Web Platform Tools .org
Unless it becomes illegal to own gold bullion again, as happened in the Great Depression.

http://www.the-privateer.com/1933-gold-confiscation.html
No, and the reason is very simple. The whole discussion shows, that you can have zero trust in national governments. It is therefore save to assume, that you can not count the slightest bit on any retirement plans that have some form of government involvement. Even if you only get some modest apartment in a European metro area as you personal retirement plan, you are way beyond the 100k. Do you really want to steal the money from people who saved money all life just to have some decent retirement? (The "bank account" argument doesn't really count, as the BCG report outlines how they are gunning for real estate owners next).
Whoa! I don't remember saying that there is anything wrong with OSS products and I'm fairly certain that clicking 'Later' instead of 'Buy Now!' on Sublime Text's nag screen does not constitute stealing... Am I wrong here?
L’evoluzione della specie in 2.0
When Good Design Isn’t Enoug
I have a hard time understanding why Dropbox would pay $100M. Compared to the Instagram acquisition, this seems like a blunder.

The talent - Maybe worth $10M at the high end, probably same for Instagram

Future profit - Difficult to see how this app would be profitable, but maybe it could make a few million a year if it swept the app store. Instagram had similar long term monetization potential to facebook.

Technology - Indexing gmail and keeping metadata on each message. A difficult task to scale, but not $10M difficult. Instagram was handling significantly more data, but Facebook certainly didn't need the technology.

Users and momentum - Don't see much value for Dropbox here with 700K users. Instagram was growing rapidly and had 20M+ users.

Time - Dropbox wants to be in the email and communications space... seems like the could have developed something in 6 months for a few million. Instagram would have been difficult for Facebook to catch up with, since head starts matter in social. Email apps don't have the network lock-in, so there is much less reason to worry about time.

Competition - There was no threat to dropbox. Instagram appeared to be dominating a demographic and use case for social, and could easily be seen as a threat to Facebook.

However, Dropbox did pay that much. We have to assume there was a reason other than a Techcrunch article.
> which are senior to depositors.

Not for any definition of "depositor insurance" that I'm familiar with. The whole point was that the investors of the bank would lose their money first, then a gov't agency would make good on the deposits.

Anything less is a return to the days of unstable swings banking and deflationary depressions. Or perhaps the wizards at the EU thought/didn't care that Cyprus would join Greece in their deflationary depression: But the signal to Spain and Italy is abundantly clear: Anyone who leaves their money in a bank in those countries is not paying attention.
Hmm? Never heard of loss leaders?
The Gesture Manifesto
13 year-old makes Game of Life run on a Raspberry Pi
Yeah; I covered this in a review of YC on Quora (open link, no login required): http://qr.ae/TAGtX

YC is basically 6-7% now, and bumps your valuation by (what appears to be) >100%, so it's a no-brainer for that reason.
Both stands are not mutually exclusive.

I really like Mailbox, it really helps me manage my email better, this was no trivial technical/design execution.

On the other hand, CrunchFund being an investor, and the fantastic duo being "contributors" to TC makes the cynic in me believe that the last four articles were more than "news".
The Cloud is Heavy and Design Isn’t Invisible
For $100 million, Dropbox just got a glimpse at every current and future Mailbox user's inbox.

That's actionable data that's otherwise difficult to get without starting your own webmail service. This comes at a time when Dropbox seeks to expand the services and integration-points to provide other services - this might pay-off in the long run as more than just a tool to complement email.
But where on the iPad is it stored?

And can I reverse it - taking photos off iPad into my server

Really backing up these devices is a closed book to me
You can't know until he open sources it!
I was teaching a coworker about activerecord, and he was trying to create some simple throw-away models to gain familiarity. He decided to name his model "Cow." Fine, so we create the db table cows and run migrate and try a little command line business -- and we can't successfully save, with pg errors about missing elements in some pg system table called "kine."

Cue fifteen minutes of frustrated googling and trying to figure out the problem.

Eventually, I write "cow".pluralize, and rails helpfully informs me that the plural of cow is kine. Aaaargh.
Ah. I did not know I was talking to a plant. My bad.
Demo here: http://leselys.herokuapp.com/

Username: demo

Password: demo
"Pump and Dump" claim might have some semblance of credibility if mailbox was a publicly traded stock that Arrington/siegler talked up on techcrunch, without noting they were investors, and then sold to the unwitting public who purchased said stock on the basis of a techcrunch article. Given that the sale to Dropbox was a private transaction, this is all moot.
Guys, this is an under-informed and reactionary post, which grossly simplifies the situation in a way that is insulting to Dropbox, TechCrunch/AOL, CrunchFund, and the Mailbox/Orchestra team. It's also kind of upsetting that this post is at the top of HN and getting a kind of froth-at-the-mouth reaction that it is.

It's well-known and indeed massively controversial[1] that there's a CrunchFund/TechCrunch conflict. Arrington left TechCrunch because of his desire to return to investing about a year ago[2], after the short stint at doing both journalism and investing in parallel. According to CrunchBase, this was coincidentally the same month that CrunchFund invested in Orchestra[3]. Both he and MG returned in October 2012[4], but both have hardly written any TC pieces since then. Why? Probably because they're quite busy with their day jobs running CrunchFund.

Additionally, on many posts with CrunchFund conflicts, they have been called out at the end of each article (see http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/andreessen-horowitz-adds-je...). They probably have been a bit lax about that as of late since the CrunchFund guys aren't really involved in TC (compared with the often torrential output of most other staff writers).

TechCrunch coverage did probably get Mailbox some users, and CrunchFund as a VC probably did add some value to their company, but the effects and importance of TechCrunch itself are wildly overstated. Probably more important is that the Mailbox/Orchestra team is top notch at making incredible mobile products (Orchestra won one of Apple's Top App award in 2011 http://blog.orchestra.com/orchestra-is-productivity-app-of-2...), had hundreds of thousands of active users within a very short amount of time (with only a tiny insignificant fraction of those coming from TC), and Dropbox can probably provide a better home for a lot of the Really Hard problems with email at that kind of scale.

Like I get why OP seems alarmed, but it's pretty naive to think that TechCrunch matters in any important way to the success or financial outcome of a company. Just read about the "TechCrunch pop"[5]; their users rarely not stay with or give lasting value to a product. If you want to belittle the astounding accomplishments of the Mailbox team, at least don't pick something like TechCrunch to do it over.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/technology/michael-arringt...

[2]: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/michael-arrington-leav...

[3]: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/orchestra

[4]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/getting-the-band-back-toget...

[5]: http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/11/19/the-depressing-day-aft...
Cohort.ly does a great job. They are in private beta so you can request access. It has been really beneficial to us.

http://cohort.ly/
This

function f(some_param, callback)
bla()
return 1

f(10) |u,t| ->
callback_code_here

or

f(10, success, failure)
succss: |data| ->
console.log("Success!", data)
failure: |error| ->
console.log("Error: ", error)

are not simpler than valid CoffeeScript, such as

f = (someParam, callback) ->
bla()
callback 1 # presumably your intent

f 10, (u, t) -> # callback code here

or

success = (data) -> console.log("Success!", data)
failure = (data) -> console.log("Error: ", error)
f 10, success, failure
This feels like a post that is more suited for Reddit
Thanks George. I replied on Twitter but worth saying here also…

I saw Pigeon Sim via Andy @ CASA the other day, it looks like awesome fun! We'd also like to play with Leap Motion and create something similar to the Google Liquid Galaxy stuff.

Quite keen to work with CASA, I'm sure there is a tonne that we can help each other with. I told Andy about the project a while back but that was before we had anything visual. I'll try pinging Andy again, unless you have another suggestion?
The only first-hand data I have is seeing the valuations YC companies raise on their notes, vs. what I consider to be fairly comparable teams (if not companies) from 500 Startups and no incubator. The YC companies are maybe 2x 500 Startups, and 3-4x people from outside the Bay Area. Given that a lot of YC teams weren't bay area insiders when they joined YC, it's a no-brainer. (and I'd consider 500 Startups worthwhile in general as well; I just think YC is better)

I think a top FB/Google tech lead who knows investors who leaves to go do a related startup probably doesn't see as much of a bump in valuation from YC as someone who just dropped out of U of Michigan and is living in Ann Arbor, but there are plenty of other reasons why giving up 2-10% to YC is more than worthwhile.
Show HN: Archive your Google reader read items
This is a quick week-end script: it will go and archive your google reader read items.

https://github.com/motdiem/GRARchiver

Why ? I'm hoping one of the new service that pops up to replace google reader will be able to import it.
Or maybe I just want to search through it for content that is not available anymore.
There may be other use cases.

I'm aware the code is dirty - but it does the job, and I thought I'd share it early. So far it writes a big .json file as a results. I had about 170k items, and it turned into a 640Mb file
I'm eager for ideas as to what to do with the file as well.
I couldn't agree with the OP more.
I had hoped to get across that I'm really not abusing the developers of this product.
Please correct me if I have misunderstood but not converting to a full fledged customer from a Shareware customer (yet-dictated by circumstances) and with every intention of doing so as soon as I am generating income with the software ...does not a pirate make. Have I missed a beat here?
One obstacle to a company developing a "hacker ethic" is invention assignment clauses in employee agreements. There seems to be a fundamental tension between carefree experimentation and "everything you build which is even remotely related to our business belongs to us". If you are passionate about your job -- and many companies want you to be passionate -- and if you are a hacker/builder then sooner or later you're probably going to create something that falls into the purview of an assignment agreement. For example, let's say you work for a game company and in your spare time, hack up a new way to do game physics. Even if you don't work on the game physics team, even if the company is already committed to using a third party physics engine, they may argue that your engine belongs to them. You have to entrust the fruits of your hacking to their stewardship; even if they allow the code to be open-sourced, it will go under their public Github account, not yours.

I don't offer a solution to this problem; it is understandable that a company will feel you owe them something if you hack up something cool using the tricks and knowledge you gained while working for them. The more they encourage tinkering and play, the more they trade in creativity and innovation, the more they might suffer if an employee goes to another company with his/her hacks. I suppose it comes down to how much you trust the management of the company. A company can still have bad management, even if they mostly stand for hacker values. You may hack up a cool solution to a problem but the company may be unable to use it in a project because they are already implementing an inferior solution and are committed to a certain release date. Your hack might end up in a corporate purgatory; your company may refuse to use it in a product due to politics, "not invented here" syndrome of the team that would incorporate the hack, or competing priorities. However, the company will not allow you to take the hack to your next employer because they may claim you used company know-how to build it. The fear of litigation can be just as potent as the actual legal case for it. Even companies like Redhat or Mozilla may have trade secret/invention disclosure clauses that prevent employees from fully embracing "hacker ethics" even if they are better than most.
@niggler, I guess it's kind of hard to provide such a number but let's see:

- Just entering YC will generate promo for your product, it will put you in-front of the eyes of thousand of tech focused people.

- Free job postings on HN

- Incredible alumni network of actually successful founders

- Demo day will be covered by major news outlets and attended by lots of investors

- 150k of convertible credit [1]

- Only 10 percent don't raise any money after graduating [1]

- 90% raise an average of 700k USD [1]

- "The average valuation of Y Combinator-backed companies, according to co-founder Paul Graham, is $45.2 million." [2]

Looks way more valuable then 170k of dumb money to me.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/02/01/y-combinators...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator_(company)

EDIT:
I'm not saying HackFWD is dumb money, with regards to money smartness they are definitely better then most other European accelerators. My original (GP) statement is not about HackFWD but accelerators in general.
hey thanks for the endless video link...didn't know this tool existed.
> The most desperate needs are hunger and thirst, necessary to survive. Doesn't sound like an area were a lot profit can be made though.

That's just silly. How do you think Monsanto or McDonalds makes their billions?

And where are companies like those investing the most heavily and seeing the biggest growth in profits? Not here in the rich west.
I'm actually always afraid of this. Since I use Dvorak, should I ever need to log onto a computer with Qwerty, I had better know my actual password—but I'm not sure I do!
Inconsistency among visualizations of The Matrix code [1] is a really common problem, and I don't think all or even most of it is for copyright reasons. The solution is obvious: if it doesn't yet exist (I wasn't able to find one) somebody should write a specification for what a "correct" visualization is.

It might be a decade too late but better late than never.

[1] Wikipedia calls it the "Matrix digital rain", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_digital_rain.
I wrote something like this a while back in order to snag a Skype phone number ending in 1337. It was a little trickier since they require a session token generated from obfuscated JS on the search page. Rather than try to reverse engineer that code, I used Node.js to control a PhantomJS instance which did the scraping.
It's also a little insulting that OP thinks Dropbox is stupid. They paid $100m (or whatever the number was) for a lot of reasons and I'd suspect that TechCrunch really likes Mailbox isn't one of them. I'd suspect the number of people on a wait list isn't near the top of the list either.
"I think a top FB/Google tech lead who knows investors who leaves to go do a related startup "

I suspect there's a strong selection bias in YC and other incubators (take dropbox, for which Drew is an MIT grad), which probably makes my request for numbers somewhat foolhardy.
You can replace

function(data) { return doSomething(data); }

With

doSomething

Named functions are just as first-class as anyonymous ones...
That is cool, wish I could make it my background.
Good cookie (Memcache version)
Whatever I could mention, you could ask "where does that have it from", and the buck stops with the sun. Which is a finite mass of energy burning away, with no sane person dreaming to claim it as their own. The rest is what we do with that. But you're right to bring up plants, I guess we also need minerals, energy isn't everything. But still, I owe no man. I simply don't buy into it, I just accept it for the time being that most everybody else does, and that some get all stabby when you suggest enacting what is actually fact, namely we don't own shit but our time and work.
Note that this subsidizion can be a private, capitalist decision too. At least the package and mail carriers in my country do not charge by the mile, they charge by weight, so this is probably a non-issue.
Hey!
Thanks for your comment. I tried to keep it as simple as possible. I wanted to show that you don't need any coding or use of API keys to copy the whole functionality of Basecamp Breeze.
You're still assuming that HackFWD is dumb money. From what I can tell, they have expertise in European markets that probably surpasses YC and they give a much longer runway to develop without funding pressures (full year as opposed to a few months). There's no constant pressure to prepare for demo day.

I'm not saying there isn't a value-add to YC, but rather that its bad to assume other programs don't have value.
I think it looks quite nice. I was looking for more about what you'd actually learned, rather than a list of projects though.
> we shouldn't be leaving the super-pro-government conservatives out of this.

You are absolutely correct.

> the only things at which government seems to excel are areas where no one should want to excel. I'm thinking primarily of war, excessive policing, and weird, arbitrary laws.

That is probably true as well. It's sad to think that we will all live to see more wars.
The word "unacceptable" sounds strange in this sentence. It reminds me of PG's essay "Mind the gap"[0], where he discusses the use of the word "(un)fair" in the context of wealth creation and (income and otherwise) equality.

I don't think "acceptable" applies in this particular context, as these are not journalists that have to obey a fixed set of rules and regulations, rather, they are people that will decide, out of their own set of standards and moral, completely subjective to the person.

Ultimately, we have to vote with our eyeballs and clicks and, if you believe that a site/blogger does not match your values, simply don't read them. That said, its hard to get the masses off of bacon and fries, regardless of how bad they are for you.

[0]: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
How to express my thoughts at 'technical' presentations
Hi developers,

I have been requested for a technical presentation to startup team. I love this startup and am very very excited and eager to join this startup. I have done technical presentations at school but they are very verbose. Is that okay for presenting for at startup ? Can anyone please guide me
A lot of sites are on hardware that's older than two years old (AES-NI didn't show up till Westmere), or an OS that's more than two years old (Ubuntu Lucid, for example, ships with OpenSSL 0.9.8).

Upgrading takes time.
If you're in the "startup" business, where the real product is the business itself, this sort of operation is standard practice. It starts with having a PR company - a truly productive one. Add on some great media contacts made over the years and you're playing an A game.

To an extent all business runs like this. It actually is much more difficult to enforce the now, but imagine a world in which only those who can afford advertising have any public voice at all. As an added bonus, those who buy advertising are at least at the front of the line to get positive articles written about them. Those 2% of your customers you inevitably piss off can't drag your name through the mud because they have no truly public forum for their opinion. That's pretty close to how things were before the web.
> If receiving mail is a basic skill, then so is having a mailing address. Thus, Alaskans should subsidiz my rent.

No, that does not follow.

> As for your arguments about subjective feelIngs, if the minor grudge people feel when they are forced to pay for video games is smaller than the enjoyment gamers gain, should the government force non-gamers to subsidize gamers? If not, why not?

Because you're trolling. I have no interest discussing this with somebody who obviously has no interest in what I have to say about it and instead just wants to have an excuse to talk about themselves.
OpenSMTPD 5.3 has just been released.
That's interesting from a cultural perspective. Our feelings about fonts are deeply rooted in culture.

The poster they show is NOT the one I've seen. The poster I've seen has a handwriting typeface, and a diagram of a(n American) football play on it. I doubt that diagram would mean much in non-football-playing countries.

http://www.dvdsreleasedates.com/posters/800/S/Silver-Linings...

But the font they replaced it with (slab serif / ITC Lubalin) has "athletic" connotations in the US - it's a classic "varsity letter" font. Does that connotation carry over outside the US though?
Yeah, what a bunch of bitter assholes. The nerve of those people, being such a nuissance for EU and Turkey just because a small 36% of their land has been illegally occupied for almost 40 years now. Just suck it up and move on already.
Absolutely! Give me a few hours and I'll have it up. Thanks for the offer. Also it ended up being 6000 objects because a box is 6 planes. I wanted to reduce that to only visible planes but because boxes could be partially translucent depending on some property and be selectable when clicked, it would look weird if inside sides were missing.
Yes, I've learned a lot seeing how different people are approaching the static web page publishing job. I'm at the other extreme, a couple of bash scripts to push markdown files through markdown and add header/footer then push the changed ones out to the Web.
I believe the YC application process is an effective filter, but I don't think it particularly needs to be -- I'd be willing to bet that the marginal admit and marginal reject are close enough in quality that YC and its benefits are a major difference in outcome. (It might be a harder problem than elite college admissions, since while you can pretty readily identify top credentials and signs of failure, successful startups are more frequently hidden behind cosmetic flaws (or personal biases) than successful students are hidden in with C/D students with a bad GPA.)

YC has gotten pretty big now relative to a certain part of the startup ecosystem, but look back in 2005-2008 for when YC was smaller, and the success rate of YC companies vs. non-YC companies of that time. It seems pretty good, which warrants the valuations.