skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was an impressively long justification for a perfectly legal business.

I'm curious, though - why start a business in an industry where you've had to spend time writing essays 'reasoning through your fears', instead of just doing something you're not conflicted about, and can get fully behind without any reservations, qualifiers, or arguments?
JSON Data Visualizations with Vega
`And how should I create a branch?. Use git checkout.` No. You create a branch with git branch. If you want to create a branch and immediately switch to it, use git branch (to create it) + git checkout (to switch to it). git checkout -b is just a shorthand for the two, it's there just for convenience. Unix has a lot of these occurrences. rm -rf as a shorthand for rm+rmdir, the open() syscall with O_CREAT shorthand for creat()+open() etc.
>As an outsider, it appears to me that the almost the entire US legal and political system is driven by, and for the benefit of, corporate and big business interests. The only other major factor at work seems to be fear - witness the ever increasing power of the TSA

Three factors driving law and politics in the US, IMNSHO:

money: big business, work the system for profit

fear: government works the system for more control

selfism: citizens (neoliberals, Bible Belt, etc) working the system to ensure nothing will be done for the public good
Fair enough, I'm just assuming that even given the capability to parallelise, they probably just don't have the necessary amount of hardware provisioned to cope with HN-magnitude traffic spikes.
> Yes. Otherwise command line scripts will start doing horrible things. It was never intended that you can alias builtins, the only reason you might think you can is because it is allowed in mercurial which I think is a horrible idea.

You should understand what you are responding to before typing your answer.

Say today I create an alias “boom = <whatever>” and next week git introduces a boom command.

Now my alias is ignored, my scripts are broken and I might destroy my working copy or kill my cat by using it without knowing it now means something else.

Git gives some very stupid hints “branhc is not a git command, did you mean branch?” it should also warn me when I defined an invalid alias.

Maybe that alias was valid two versions ago or I just don’t know that command exists, since there are eleventy thousand of them.
For physical cash, banks don't give a hoot, and their insurance doesn't either, because the sums stolen are so small.

Even the dollars a bank has uninvested, they are stored electronically, and it's very easy to undo electronic transactions. Plus, the limiting factor on stealing electronic money from banks is finding a stool pigeon who will do it with cash.[1]

With a system where transactions cannot be undone, you need life-or-death-level security on the entire holdings. No insurance company is going to underwrite a policy of "there is a completely unknown chance of 100% loss."

[1] A PDF of this was on HN recently but apparently I did not bookmark it. Help a brother out?
Side projects produce a ton of value for the individual working on them, even they don't "succeed". There are opportunities to explore technologies and solutions you may not get a chance to work on otherwise. There are opportunities to learn about what people like, and where there is room in the market and so much more. Even when side projects are not a monetary success they provide a rich and fulfilling experience.
Jeff Bezos' regret minimization framework: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ

We genuinely wanted to fix the UX problems associated with porn.
Actually, I think some of the laws DO ban distributing the videos:

Many of these bills are explicit about not just targeting the people
who do the investigation but the people who distributed it, who
republish it. For instance, there was an investigation a couple of
years ago that at the same time the group, Mercy for Animals, was
conducting the investigation ABC news was following along with it,
aired the same footage, after they verified it, and it drew national
attention to this and criminal charges. Under these bills, in North
Carolina, for example, both the investigator and the journalist would
be wrapped up together.

http://www.onthemedia.org/2013/mar/01/states-consider-so-cal...

I'm looking for more references now.
If the dataset fits in ram, doesn't need advanced querying and there is a certain level of guaranteed persistence, then why not?
It's not a scenario that most Americans feel any need to worry about, either. The home defense crazies are crazy, and in no way representative of Americans, or even of gun owners.
I'm disappointed that instead of trying to educate new entrepreneurs, the OP is discouraging them. The tone is incredibly condescending.

It's like he just heard of bootstrappers, and instead of saying, "Hey that's awesome, let me tell you what I've learned," he says "You'll never be one of us real entrepreneurs. Want a job?"
Depardieu got kicked for pissing all over the carpet in the plane.

Yeah, in France it takes a little bit to get kicked out.
You misconstrued. Reject as little as possible (<> reject little) was the motivation with respect to more naive random walks which suffer at dimensionality. I was not talking about leniency of proposal, where you are of course correct.
yes. This is the first thing I fix on most Rails projects I inherit. Hardly exclusive to PHP.
My current project, which may not be the most unique idea is only a couple of month old. The only thing that threatens it right now is my excitement to start new projects and I only have so much time for a side project while working full time. I get very low traffic but I understand why I have a chicken and the egg problem, at least in theory. But i am starting to get some chicken out of the blue and a few eggs are hatching, which is why I try to hang in there. A year from now I know things will look better.

Why don't you show us your side projects
I suspect they're not actually conflicted, but are reasoning through their prospective investors' fears by projecting it onto themselves.
"That throwing away all of your models and views by default when a different route matches is actually the opposite of the approach you normally want to take -- at least if you're hoping to achieve a smooth app-like look and feel..."

This is actually a really important point. This is exactly how Ember's router works, as far as I can see from the documentation - when you transition, you lose all prior state. It's essentially trying to emulate traditional routing, which defeats the point.
> I would respectfully submit that the common American assumption that the government cannot be trusted to do anything right is self-fulfilling.

This, pretty much. It has bottomed out civic participation such that the majority of civic participation comes from businesses whose engagement is about gaming the system.

I admittedly do not have stats to back that sentence up, but I suspect I could find them.
It makes sense to support IE 6 when you sell a product to an enterprise, the UI is task oriented and doesn't have to be pixel perfect to entice users.

The trick is to make supporting IE 6 cost effective. You can still use semantic markup and CSS layout, it would just be a simplified version of what you serve modern browsers. It's called graceful degradation, and with a well defined templating system, it's feasible without laborious adjustments and hacks.

Some enterprises really can't upgrade, and if you are willing to support that one troublesome browser, you can still sell the product behind it, which can be innovative and useful.
Grabbing Docs from Github API
Seconded.

My favorite was his talk on SelfGOL, and I don't even like obfuscated code! (See http://libarynth.org/selfgol for an explanation of what SelfGOL is.)
That business model for scheduled service is usually built around Federal government subsides to service infrequently visited airports. "Cape Air" is an example such airline that flies to places like Nantucket, MA and Lake Placid, NY. The airports often coincidentally happen to be where prominent congressmen live or have summer homes.

The other variant for that niche airline model is charter flights -- get a few hundred people from a city to go to Jamaica or something.

The delusion that some have that airlines represent "perfect competition" is amusing. It's an industry held up by direct subsidy, indirect subsidy via the Postal Service & military, and other bizarre compromises.
These really DO seem like criticisms. Particularly the hobgoblin. Given the context of the author[1] pointed out by the parent post, I think the thrust of these koans is obvious.

Personally It feels a bit dirty. I started out enjoying them, now they feel petty.

1. http://stevelosh.com/blog/ Scroll down. Mercurial everywhere.
There are only 3 million copies of SUPERMAN #75.
in part yes. at the same time, anyone using this argument for farms/ag is trying to conceal misdeeds, not trade secrets. Farms etc., house animals, which are protected by laws. The operation is not private such as your home is. Equally, a worker at a paper mill should be able to video and report illegal chemical dumping or worker safety issues.

The bottom line is that the prosecution processes aided by whistle-blower testimony is broken, requiring long investigations and, to play devil's advocate, wrongful accusations and financial harm to a business.
As someone who actually owns a few cows, many chickens, and a horse, my main complaint about the legal situation is how I am kept from selling a gallon of milk to a "close" customer: one that actually walks on to my land, hands me $16, sees the cow that I milked and comes again next week. Now that is transparency.

Although in many cases I can get away with selling the milk, if I were to butcher a cow an sell the meat (outside of a USDA approved slaughter house, etc) that would be pure unadulterated evil.

I would love to see a change in perspective that emphasized "local and small" = more self regulated, "farther and bigger" = more state oversight... oddly enough, in practice, it is the other way around.

Just let the small guys have more freedoms, and people will vote with their dollars.

This results in the rather brutal net result of "uncaring people will pay the least and demand the most abusive practices". But, honestly, I don't think we can get around this with legislation.
From Ruby to Haskell, Part 2: Similarity, Refactoring, and Patterns
Cliff Click: A Crash Course in Modern Hardware is high up for me
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/click-crash-course-modern...
If your solution to "get the current branch" is "cat out this magic data file that happens to exist in the data directory" then we have completely incompatible definitions of "user interface" and are never going to agree on this.
And obviously I declined "program" wrong, should be:
"Osobo używająca tego programu - wygrałaś".
Resolutions for grad students
I was struck by the observation taht revenue has been cut in half and production has fallen drastically within 4 years. as someone whoworks in the conventional film industry, this is pretty owrrying.

What's your business model for serving up HD video for free? I'm not really a porn consumer but I can see how it will be attractive, just not where your profit comes from.
I'm not a parent yet, but if you take the plane out of the situation, is telling your kid "no, that movie's too violent for you, you're 4 years old" now considered "oversheltering"?
Not everyone has the option to leave. Very few actually have the luxury of leaving their jobs because they "don't like it". From the way you're talking, it seems like you either have a pile of money behind you, or a family with a pile of money as a safety net in case everything else fails.

People with real families and real responsibilities normally can't quit. Doesn't matter how much they want to.
Review: HTC One Android Phone
To be clear, Comcast wasn't injecting ads, but bandwidth overage messages. Still terrible though.
> I would respectfully submit that the common
> American assumption that the government cannot
> be trusted to do anything right is self-fulfilling

Yes. American here, and I feel the "self-fulfilling" aspect is key and is often overlooked.

With such a significant portion of the country deeply suspicious of government, we steer away from government in the name of "freedom" but actually just place more power in corporations' hands.

I feel as though our country is (perhaps stuck in) our awkward teenage years. You know how teenagers often resist anything teachers and parents tell them? We rail against government just because we can regardless of whether or not it's actually a good idea.

In our defense, the last two presidential elections have shown a willingness of the country (particularly among younger voters) to begin to move away from some of the mistrust in government.
"spending 40+ hours in a week on something other than you startup"

What does this mean, exactly? Yes I know in context it means your capital raising strategy primarily involves going to work on a regular basis, which possibly is a local maxima for at least some unusual situations, but it reads just as well for "sleep", "personal grooming", "recreation and relaxation", "social relationships", "raising children", "elder care", "athletic / exercise activities".

I'm just saying if you want to guilt trip people for raising capital by having a job, you need to do that very specifically, a extremely generic guilt trip about spending time being modern civilized humans in a generic sense with having a job being a tiny subset of the possibilities of being a modern civilized human, is likely to be relatively ineffective.
The libretto was a fine machine! I'd certainly be interested in a modern-hardware version of it with the same sturdy, rugged design. (Here's a size comparison from wikipedia: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/EEEPC901_... and here is one more: http://rubenerd.com/uploads/photo.libretto.jpg)
Ludicrous.

Are they also going to tax the chair you sit in? The computer you work on? The electricity to provide lighting and run the computers?
+1 for the System Shock reference :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock
This really ruffles my feathers as well:

Unless there are real consequences for failure—until you’ve personally guaranteed a line of credit and tried to sell your product to an actual human being,’ says Ruhe, you won’t have the motivation needed to build a business that matters -- Thom Ruhe, VP of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation

Now, I don't know who Thom Ruhe is, and I don't really care. But what I know is that this armchair quarterback with his fancy title, working for some foundation somewhere, knows bloody fucking bugger-all about my motivation, or lack thereof. You want to talk to me about motivation, dude? Quit your job at the Kauffman Foundation and come work with us. We offer no pay, no benefits (not even free coffee), long hours, sleepless nights, stress beyond belief, non-stop fear of failure, and an equity stake that could make you really wealthy if we succeed. Would you be motivated to take that swap, in order to gain the satisfaction of doing your own thing, the freedom of not having a "boss" and the sense of accomplishment that goes into building something? No? Well, guess what... we are. So unless you want to take me up on my offer, don't fucking talk to me about motivation.
The Top Mistakes of Entrepreneurs, Guy Kawasaki [video]
>You're not a business person are you?

I started my first startup while at university undergraduate. And am working on another at the money.

So, yes, I am a business person, just not the "bending backwards" for the customer business person.

>No manager or CEO is going to take that approach if they can make more money off having some IE users (and a more complex/harder to maintain web app) than no IE users

Then those managers:

1) not only do not have any pride in what they are doing (ie. they would put out shit if they could get some more money that way, instead of having a strong opinion on what they want to sell)

2) but also they might be loosing the company money, since they don't seem to understand the notion of opportunity cost.

Sure, they might make X money if the cater to legacy browser users than if they did not. At what overall cost to the company? Some messy workarounds that have your programmers working overtime? Not using nice new technologies that will give you a leg up on the competition? Spending 40% of the companies wages to fix bugs and work around issues for a 10% minority? Not iterating faster, so that in 2 years, when IE8 is < 5%, you have your food eaten by some new company building on stuff that only the latest IE support?
etc etc...
No, it doesn't.

-a, --all
Tell the command to automatically stage files
that have been modified and deleted, but new
files you have not told Git about are not affected.
At Last, a Firewall for Your Car's Black Box
Entrepreneurs, Look Before You Leap Into That MBA
Click this guys name.

30 minutes old and he has posted this same blurb word for word on every post regarding bitcoins.
I'm partial to Bryan Cantrill's Dtrace talk since it tackles a fundamental problem in software engineering and shows how to solve it using a new technology. The talk is more than 5 years old now, but sadly still as relevant as ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8
If there is an opt-out scheme, I cannot see this becoming that big a deal for the majority of customers and their service will likely continue working as it did before.

(I am not saying there aren't downsides to CGNAT for consumers, but these downsides aren't likely to be noticed by the average joe)
Seems to me institutions like Acorn that accept the public as part of their operation can't really prosecute a whistleblower as a trespasser. I'm not sure what a pseudo-private area is.

What raynier is saying (I think) is that if it is illegal to trespass, then it is illegal to trespass for purposes of whistleblowing because that is still trespassing - imagine if they had trespassed, filmed, and found nothing illegal. If one of the farm workers were to film the video, there would have been no trespassing - it would constitute whistleblowing.
> As an outsider, it appears to me that the almost the entire US legal and political system is driven by, and for the benefit of, corporate and big business interests.

This is the case in every country. Those at the top will take an inordinate amount of time to make rules that benefit themselves and their friends.

The primary difference between the US and other countries is that the US constitution provides a means for the citizens to fight back against the most outrageous of offenses. Now, that doesn't mean it always works. In fact, it rarely does. But it does, in fact, work occasionally, which is better than nothing.
You just listed two reasons that arguably apply to most hackers. 90% of my career I have been happy at work, but I have always had multiple side projects going on as well.
Oh wow, never knew about that. That's very helpful thanks.
The whole thing of this is to remain anonymous. Again, no one questions and no one knows how posesses the first coins.

So, this is a free Out of jail card.
Why not close the channel instead of sending 0? You can detect a closed channel with the "x, ok := <-y" form.
But you need to unlock the car in order to get to it, surely that keeps out anyone nefarious?

I don't see what problem this solves.
Biology Inspires New Hearing Aid iPhone App
I think what he's saying is that the tools could be sold with a model similar to GitHub's -- the tools would be free to use for open source projects, but you'd have to pay to use them for your closed source projects. The idea is that open source software could benefit from having better tools to work with, while the software company still turns a profit off of commercial users.
Recently I was offered a free flight for a weekend trip. I declined, citing the myriad displeasures of flying.

Now, should we initiate a behavior recall? Take the number of McDonalds-level staff in the air (A), multiply by the probable rate of power tripping (B), multiply by the average loss of tickets sold (C). A times B times C = X. If X is less than the cost of some basic decency training, we won't do any. Which airline do you work for? A major one.
TL;DR -- Anyone who promotes an ethics that humans should be more than hedonistic, endorphin-driven consumption automatons is a religious zealot and/or hypocrite.
Try buying something with your APPL stock before converting it back to USD at the current market rate and tell me where your value went, especially when your probably don't even hold the paper the stock was printed on, if it ever was.

Maybe you put your money into a Stock Market system (buying stock), increasing its value, meaning that taking money out (selling your stock) would reduce the overall value of the system.

Maybe the Stock Market is just as misguided?
Wow, reading through that bug makes me glad I never have to deal with Mozilla for anything time sensitive.
Here's some highlights from the article for those seeing the wsj paywall:

"Doctors have long assumed that saturated fat and cholesterol in red meat are what raise the risk of heart disease. But a study in the journal Nature Medicine fingers another culprit: carnitine, a compound abundant in red meat that also is sold as a dietary supplement and found in some energy drinks.

Health reporter Melinda Beck points out a compound found in red meat, energy drinks and several other foods has been found to raise the risk of heart disease. Photo: Getty Images.

Carnitine typically helps the body transport fatty acids into cells to be used as energy. But researchers at the Cleveland Clinic found that in both humans and mice, certain bacteria in the digestive tract convert carnitine to another metabolite, called TMAO, that promotes atherosclerosis, or a thickening of the arteries.

The researchers, led by Stanley Hazen, chief of cellular and molecular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute, tested the carnitine and TMAO levels of omnivores, vegans and vegetarians, and examined records of 2,595 patients undergoing cardiac evaluations. In patients with high TMAO levels, the more carnitine in their blood, the more likely they were to develop cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, stroke and death."
What pisses me off is people are falling into this Ponzi Scheme.
Agreed. R&D is notoriously hard to estimate and high-risk projects require tight risk management to allow proper progress monitoring. And yes it also depend on the organization as most organizations don't even keep records of initial vs actual estimates, making estimation based on historical data hard to impossible.

As for projects going over initial budgets, that's a different problem from progress monitoring, though they often go hand in hand.
As a recent convert to Python, I have to say that decorators is one of the most useful features I have come across thusfar, both syntacticly and logically.
No because the ISS would burn up way before it hit the ground.
While abuse of food affects your body, porn affects your mental abilities and along with it the ability to interact with others. Porn, like termites will eat away the very fabric of society. I challenge everyone who reads this comment to do research on their own.

Porn might not be as addictive as psychoactive drugs, but it is dangerous left unchecked. It is violence against your mind itself.
A data-driven study of the patterns of life for 180,000 people
The money lost to someone buying some gas is minimal.

Transactions are completely reversible until someone involves physical goods, including cash. The system can deal with tiny levels of fraud. With Bitcoin, someone can do a complete transfer of my life savings in an instant, and then what?
Duplicate hashes are an issue because of the birthday problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

The chance of two hashes being equal is small but the number of two hash pairs grows exponential to the number of hashes.