skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The free market does not tend towards monopoly or oligopoly. If any one player is gaining market power and capturing a lot of consumer surplus, then competition will eventually find a route around that and supply an alternative with better value.

This is true under the usual simplifying first-week-of-Econ 101 assumptions (which exclude economies of scale, barriers to entry, irrationality -- including imperfect consumer information about the utilities realized in purchases, interaction between markets [note that the last two interact in an important way, in that enough money derived from one market and applied to the information market can drive imperfect consumer information in a particular direction], etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum), which are useful for pedagogical purposes at that stage but tend not to exist in the real world in the markets for a wide variety of goods.

This has been proven time and time again.
Palo Alto has always been a 'university town' with respect to Stanford's presence there. It benefitted from professors who were both teaching and entrepreneurs, or nurturing ideas that came out of their labs into full grown companies. Berkeley has a similar vibe for similar reasons.

Traditionally San Francisco has been an artistic and design hub but not an engineering focused environment. However, that is a great environment to create products which are distinguished primarily by their design.

It's surprising however how dysfunctional the whole San Francisco political scene remains. One would hope that the influx of young workers and the tax base they represent would encourage improvements in the management processes in order to capture long term economic growth. Its not clear that will happen though. It makes me wonder how durable a decision to base your company in SF will be.
Problem-solving skills (not business majors) top hiring wishlists
> South Bay is getting more expensive. Rentals at $2500 for 2 bedrooms in Mountain View and Palo Alto. East PA and Fremont continue to be cheap.

Meanwhile, those of us living in the East Bay are somewhat happy with the price they're paying and the short length of their commute :)
Who cares. Lone founders are apt to redesign logos too. The fluffy language was probably added because a simple, "here's our new logo cause it's better" is probably a little too brief, especially for companies who may have incorporated those marks into their own assets, and need a little justification for re-work.
It's not all peaches being an SMS-fist startup. Consider:

1. You pay through the nose for each "request/response" cycle. SMS aggregators will set you back a few pennies per message received and sent.

2. At some point you have to purchase a short code phone number, which typically start at $500 USD per month. Countries like Australia are worse, costing upwards of $1500 USD per month.

3. Phone numbers don't behave consistently globally. In an SMS world, you can bet on maintaining multiple phone numbers to access the same app. This can get confusing if you have a German mobile phone user in Canada trying to text an Australian phone number.

4. If you operate a US short code, there is rampant censorship and policing of how and where a short code is displayed. For example. If you operate the short code 88088 from your web app and a customer publishes this to their own personal website completely out of your control, expect to respond to a letter about taking this phone number down.

While the reach of SMS is high, I wish it would die a swift death and be replaced with mobile web technology because its really a horrible environment to build applications (much worse than any App Store environments)

If you decide to dive into SMS, check out this Sinatara-like DSL app framework we built for handling messages: https://github.com/polleverywhere/message_router
You're missing the point. Yes, the math is obvious. The correct coefficients to use are not, and those are what make all the difference.
No. I've used SCUMM, was the core systems engineer on Grim, and founded Telltale. I'm very familiar with both. The spirit of SCUMM is very much alive, but SCUMM is a system, not just a language. Lua runs circles around SCUMM as a language (SCUMM didn't support >8bit numeric types till Monkey3!), but as a game development system SCUMM was really cool. There's much that Unreal, Unity, etc could learn from it, but "running circles around Lua" is (ahem) hyperbole.
>My take is that imperative compilers are an admission that functional programs are easier to reason about.

If you're implying that "easier to reason about" for a compiler is equivalent to "easier to reason about" for humans, I think that's a fallacy.

Where functional programming fails is in performing tasks that are predominantly imperative; say, anything involving real-time behavior, like games or animation. And by "fails" I mean that an imperative language is easier for humans to follow when it maps more directly to the problem at hand.
As a C# developer, I had a hell of a time wrapping my head around Obj-C. I tried Titanium SDK hoping writing in JS would be more natural, but after several days I had a broken app that did nothing close to what I was trying to do.

When I saw & tried Xamarin, I had the exact thing I was trying to do in Titanium done within an hour, and that includes learning the SDK.

Highly, highly recommended. Also, when searching for help, be sure to search for MonoTouch as well as Xamarin. Finally, check out their IRC channel - some very helpful people there.
It is interesting to read and compare both, but I would avoid a simple LOC comparison as the Go versions have a lot of extra lines (newlines, unneeded selects, redundant case statements) that could easily be eliminated.
Ask HN: Bitcoin-backed fractional reserve currency
"Easier to buy and use than Bitcoin, guaranteed secure, and exchangeable at any time 1:1 to BTC or cash equivalent. Buy with your credit card."

Could something like this work? People would probably be content with the increased convenience, and it could substantially increase the amount of people that use Bitcoins, theoretically even higher than the amount of Bitcoins that actually exist. It could make money through exchange fees like an exchange does now, and it could be faster and function with a fractional BTC reserve.
Django 1.5 cheat sheet, "Model fields" area: FileField is listed twice.
Exactly. Zero-day were only if the attackers gained access before these N days. Did they?
This is kind of a novelty. Your i7 has way, way more power for jobs which only use a few cores. Most normal jobs are like that, so unless you have specific requirements, the i7 is going to give you much better performance.
I recommend not bothering. Liability for fraudulent CC activity (in the US) is very low (max $500), and banks never enforce the liability for two reasons: 1) it's easier for them to chargeback the transaction to the vendor, thus they're not out of pocket, and 2) it causes customers to leave for a provider that doesn't hold them liable.

How much of your time spent chasing down and changing a CC number is worth a maximal risk of $500 with a vero low probability of occurring?

EDIT: Thanks to nenolod for the correction!
Yeah, Storyboards are still in their awkward phase. That's totally fair. And I don't yet trust them for running view navigation.

But you know what they're awesome for? Static table views.

If you want to build a grouped table view as login view, settings panel or the like, Storyboards are perfect.

I'm also a big fan of Storyboards for prototyping. You can get to a pretty good fidelity demo of your app's information architecture, and often you can re-use what you built when it's time to code the app for real.

(Though I often cut the Storyboard content out and paste it into a nib.)
Very good to hear! I really didn't intend to come on as overly critic, and look forward on read your follow up on the issue.
You're nitpicking. I already gave a few examples of where Parallella would be a good fit. To remind you, let's revisit the OpenCV for robotics application. The Parallella is shaping up to be a great device for OpenCV applications, do you at least admit that?
Point taken on the Facebook login - will look to provide other means of logging in! Very cool video on gimmebar.com.
There may be an average for your particular niche, however I believe it varies drastically on the whole. Largely depending on the work you do, experience, and your contacts. Also, I believe the rate you charge gets you completely different clients. Charging $50 an hour? You will get people who don't pay, don't know what they are doing, and are hard to work with. Don't change anything except your rate (e.g. $150 an hour) and you will see completely different clients.

I personally work only off retainer at a rate of ~2k per day. I think for my line of work this is on the lower end. Retainer must be paid upfront. I have fewer, but longer lasting clients and projects. I am VERY good to them. I believe I approach the freelancing game different than most and it nets a lot of referrals. I often turn down work and I am a stickler on who/what I work on.

NOTE: 90% of the time I work for myself solo and 10% of the time I freelance, mostly out of the desire to get new perspectives and work with others.
As much as I'd like to agree with the estimable Mr. Schneier, there's a part of me who remembers watching "Brazil" and the scene where the restaurant blows up and everyone just goes about their business. Later, if you remember, the protagonist goes through the wringer for failing to have a proper form 27/6 on a minor matter.

So why should we keep calm, not in the face of a terrorist attack, but knowing that our government has priorities that differ from the people's?

Consider how much time and energy our government spends to stop file-sharing and pot smoking, which despite what Nancy Reagan might have said, has not contributed much of anything to the terrorist financial networks.

I'm not so sure the measures taken so far to prevent terrorism were even designed for that purpose. Given the rotten state of government finances and the US's overall economic decline, the massive surveillance apparatus under construction seems better suited to preventing capital flight than plot detection.

It's sort of like the massive fence that used to separate Czechoslovakia from West Germany. The Czechs supposedly built it to keep NATO out, but the nuts and bolts faced towards West Germany.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. And I wouldn't mind it one bit.
Anyone know the reason for the drip of water that the Octocat is holding?
Uh, what? Github is still run by its founding team. They're big because they sell something that is extremely awesome compared to the market substitutes. The good guys don't always win, but they did this time. Spare us the anti-corp agita.
Cleantech kinda collapsed on many large VCs, so to boost the returns to somewhere within the range expected by LPs, the capital is deployed into clearer monetization paths.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22385874/kleiner-perk...
When the iPhone SDK came out, this was what you got. And this was how the first Apple tutorials were. Back then, there was no Interface Builder for iOS. All the views had to be laid out by hand. That's how I wrote my first iOS app. Man, that was tedious. I'm happy there's interface builder now. Though a word of advice: the ugly XML/plist format of interface builder files makes tracking changes or merging very, very difficult.
Yes, there is Interface Builder in Xcode.
Visualizing People Movement: 350 Million US Addresses At Once [video]
Windows key + X is your friend.
I see, I am less confused now. You commented elsewhere on this page, and assume that we all have read those comments, though they are not in this chain right here.
Thus the challenge of modern syntactic theory - to most it is clear there is some structure occurring, but attempts to quantify it are still beaten by rather naive statistical approaches.
It is much harder to peer review for errors than code.
I never actually used VB so maybe I'm talking out of my ass but...

Storyboards sound like an attempt to do what you're describing. You can throw together a bunch of views without writing any code at all, then string them together so that a tap on a given button or cell pushes one view to the next.

This is also pretty useful for prototyping.
Outline of the Senate Immigration Reform Bill
It's great you're openly talking about this! We need more people with stories on failure, because we learn more from that than success stories.

There is a lot of stuff in the post and the comments about Lean Startup, but I want to jump in on this the wish expressed 'The Jason Fried Fantasy'. Specifically this:

We would combine simple, opinionated software with crisp software copywriting and a low-touch online sales model.

This limits your options. I think the product was too niche to be a 37signals 'sell to the fortune 5 million' product. I'm passionate about 37signals, but it might be difficult to apply to niche markets that require aggresive sales / long deal flows.

Now you also point out:

For every customer or prospect we talked with, the risks of innovation (failure and losing their job) far outweigh the hypothetical benefits we proclaimed. Customers just want reasonably priced software that does its job, not helping you launch your Lean Startup adventure.

Now assume you've already validated the problem. Probably you were getting the wrong people in your sales funnel. Basically if people fear to lose the job, you need to move up in the companies hierarchy. Look for the manager above him and keep going. Or start at the top and work down if possible. But keep talking until someone keeps calling you back to have their problem solved. Steve Blanks Customer Development talks about this as well.

About the quality of the MVP. It's better to ship a half product than a full featured half working product. From what I read in your post a lot of people weren't feeling safe to introduce this in the organization because it was an immature product. You solve this by narrowing down the featureset or display 'upcoming features' and involve people in developing further. But this is different per market, B2B (as mentioned in another comment) is different than consumers.

Edit: fixed markup.
علي بنا 2013 ، الفنان التركماني علي بنا
I find that as long as you save files and make sure dropbox is "synced" before starting work on another machine, this setup works fantastically. I occasionally have Dropbox "conflict" files, but have never had an issue figuring out which versions to keep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode
XCode has a drag and drop interface builder built in for iOS.
Your statements have way more to do with your personal views then any facts.

As a person that lives in the Bible Belt, I can tell you that a significant number of folks that do not think America is the best. Many do believe it was at one time, but some of the strongest critics are in the Bible Belt now. The Tea Party movment, while arguably misguided, is a great example of that.
Agree. They should have a guideline about using the cat at small sizes, or provide customized low-rez versions. I looked at it and thought it might have worked better if they ditched the suckers and just used multiple waving tentacles.
Nothing that you're saying justifies why producing worse code, less efficiently, is better than producing good code, more efficiently. Your position assumes a false dichotomy where the choice is between shipping or not shipping.

Well, you say it's a false dichotomy, but if TDD really does reliably produce better code and more efficiently than a non-TDD approach, how come hardly any of the most successful software projects seem to be built using TDD? It's been around a long time now, with no shortage of vocal advocates. If it's as good as they claim, why aren't there large numbers of successful TDD projects to cite as examples every time this discussion comes up?
That's interface builder ... It's not quite as "RAD" as VB was because you have to wire up all the data sources for things like tables manually, and rather than double clicking to add a click event, you have to this whole weird outlet/action thing. But, generally speaking, same concept :P

edit: I meant "weird" as in, weird to someone coming from VB-land. Once you're used to it there's nothing wrong or inherently bad with it
It’s probably a tweaked version of Secca Extra Bold or Botanika Bold.

Compare and contrast: http://imgur.com/hdcz2Sd

(Top: Botanika, middle: GitHub, bottom: Secca)
Is it just me, or is the logotype very similar to Atlassian's? I like it a lot.
FWIW:

1- No investor will sign an NDA on your pitch.

2- Its not just about Idea. You are a developer with an idea, go build it! and share it to the world.
I guess I don't really disagree with you on that, especially if you're specifically targeting nontechnical users. However, the thought of someone reading this and choosing something like an all numeric password does freak me out because....

>Not really sure what you mean by this or what issue you think I have dismissed by mentioning brute force.

Let me explain through analogy. I've often heard the story that a company will request a penetration tests and then restrict what can be done: "you can attack using method X, but not Y. A hacker wouldn't use Y."

That's a silly perspective, right? A black hat hacker is going to use any means available. When you say brute force, you seem to be specifying the method by which attackers will come at your password (and it's certainly not just you, many other people are repeating the meme). I think that's the wrong way to look at it.

Perhaps the confusion arises because you're making the assumption that someone will use some off the shelf, automated cracking software. That's reasonable. But automated != brute force. Again, if I were to write a cracker, it would first grab low hanging fruit. I've already given examples. Having a long password doesn't save you in that situation. That's why we think in terms of entropy.

>Nevertheless, if an attacker has to assume that you will be using all character sets, the effort to crack your password grows exponentially with the length of your password.

Agreed, but my point is they don't have to make that assumption. We don't get to decide what assumptions they start with.
Unfortunately, it's hearsay to me; it came up in conversation (about computability and complexity) with a professor, and I took his word for it at the time; I've been meaning to ask him for a reference ever since, but never got around to it.

But at least one thing I can see is that in PR, you need to fix the upper bounds of the loops (/recursion depth) ahead of time, not "on the fly". If you're doing some kind of iterative approximation, you probably don't know what those bounds "should" be, because you're going to terminate on some other condition, like, the change in the value has become negligible. Your upper bound will be a worst-case estimate -- which you have to do extra work to compute -- and I don't see how it differs much, in practice, from a timeout, which has the advantage (again from a systems perspective) of being measured in clock time rather than cycles.

Not sure about parallelization. PR doesn't suggest any advantages to me for that offhand, but then, I haven't thought about it.
> I'm not so annoyed with the "no-advertising" rule as much as I am the lack of a paid-app ecosystem.

I don't think that's that much of a problem either; instead you'll have free Glass apps that consume paid (or freemium) web services. There's still plenty of ways for developers to use Glass to make money, even if the glass app itself isn't a paid app.
Infographic: The Many Faces of a Marketing Team | The Brightpod blog
>> "Is there an equivalent Visual Basic-style editor for making iOS apps? You just place the button, double click on it, add functionality, drop in elements and you're off the races?"

That's pretty much how it works on iOS with Interface Builder (for laying out UI's) and Xcode. It's only slightly more complicated. Instead of double clicking the button and having the method auto-created for you, you create the method yourself and then in Interface Builder you link your button to the method (Ctrl click and drag from the button to your First Responder/Class object).

Edit:

VB is slightly easier to create a click method from an object but having used it to develop a Windows 8 style app I feel like Interface Builder is simpler overall. VB required me to write a LOT of XAML even when I was dragging objects on to the UI and double clicking. With Interface Builder all standard UI layout can be done without writing any code.
Your parallel is off. Ireland itself was the "war" zone,
which would be analogous to the US black sites in
Afghanistan. You don't want the comparison.

And civil liberties in the mainland were nowhere
near as bad as this stupid war on terror.

The UK had internment without trial in the 1970s.
The hunger strike episode was in the 1980s, and was
started by people who had been tried and convicted.
Not people being "rendered" illegally from other
countries and certainly not random people handed in
for bounty who never received trial.

Finally, the internment episode, which shows the
UK in the worst light, is documented in this link
in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Demetrius

The timeline is from 1971-1977. "Gitmo" has been going for twice that long already.
Anyone have more information on this? I don't see a paper title or any links but it sounds interesting . . .
The Purpose & Application Of Roofing Underlayments | LGC Roofing Blog
The Real Story Behind Facebook Moderation and Your Petty Reports
Hey! Just signed up for an GimmeBar account.

There's a few things you can learn from QuoteRed that makes me want to use them to save text snippets:

1. Their UI is very simple. Upon landing on their site I saw examples right away of how people are using it and started thinking about how I would use this. I got it immediately.

2. Sign up was very easy. One click, done. No need to register for email/pw combo. This can be a negative for some but for me it's a plus.

3. Their getting started flow is brilliant. With clearly defined steps and arrows pointing out exactly what I should do, setting up was very easy. Open up bookmarks bar, dragging and dropping the bookmarklet, etc. I didn't have to worry, I was in good hands.

4. This third point is probably most important. They started me off with an example. Getting to use the product was part of the getting started flow, and when I closed the site I already have a quote in my account. There are no more barriers to entry, I already know how to use their product.

Building a great product is one thing, but that product is not useful there is a huge learning curve. Spend some time crafting your getting started flow, it is very, very important.
I know, but honestly I can still get some value from that kind of article. IMO it's the political activism which is more out-of-place.
Not really. You start from the solution cells and work backwards. It might be easier than reviewing a functional programming language that does the same work.

Think about all the accounting and financial decisions that is reviewed in excel. They are vitally important to get correct.
Don't really care about the startuppy angle, but I like the idea of SMS as fruitful constraint. The idea of building an app that delivers its full experience to SMS, browser, or something wearable like Glass is pretty sexy.
Yes, that is also how I interpreted the two phrases.
Is cracking passwords even worth anyone's time anymore?

Most password salting is extremely unique from one website to the next. And as long as the salting increases the length of the string that will be encrypted passed 16 characters, it will be uncrackable.

It would be much quicker to social engineer your way into a system and just plant a script that honeypots unencrypted passwords.