skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is an epidemic going around these days where people believe that if you charge for something, you're evil.

People are happy to pay for things that make their lives easier. Many are willing to pay a lot.
Linode: Lish SSH Gateway
Announcing SunSpider 1.0
ESRI Shapefile formats include a DBF file, which is a Foxpro database.
I get that. I agree with you the article is making a big deal out of the fact that it was a girl AND a teenager. In an ideal world, they wouldn't have any reason to do that because people would have their merits weighed without contextualizing to their demographic incidentals.

In this case, however, I think the motivation in pointing out that the winner was a GIRL and a TEENAGER, is to inspire other young women to study programming. On the other hand, I could totally see them reading this article and thinking "man, they are making a huge deal out of this.. guess I should stick to fashion"
"No, it's our responsibility as decent people"

Well, yes. But there is a reason that every profession that has tackled this problem has used a system of oaths and certification. Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers are the canonical examples.

You need something that is given and can be taken away for bad behaviour in order to change behaviour at this level. Damn human brains.
My sense of 'well-known' might be a bit skewed, but let's say docker and heka.
During her Benghazi testimony, Hillary Clinton was wearing some unusual glasses. One lens appeared to have defraction grating like a fresnel lens. It was speculated (and later confirmed I believe) that this was to treat double vision she was having as a result of a concussion.

It seems that such a pair of glasses could be made to help with this person's situation.

http://www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/hillary-fresnel-lens/
Intel, Samsung, And Telefonica Become Expect Labs’ Newest Strategic Investors
Wow, doctape.com looks pretty cool. Minus a bit of the "header and footer are too big" complaints the others had, that looks like a pretty good app. BTW, I think Apple is about to release something on the order of a personal robot. I'm just saying...
Zip archive containing an SVG file embedding multiple png/jpg/jpeg2000 images.
If you had told me 5-6 years ago that Twitter would be one of the top social media platforms and have 500 million registered users, I would have been completely flabbergasted.
Not all Android APIs make sense in a Web browser. How does one implement an AppWidget, or violate the browser sandbox with a remote API?

Different runtime environments and different OSs have real differences. For some apps those differences don't matter. For others, they can make the difference between useful functionality and a pleasurable UX and a dull trudge through interactions that don't benefit from native platform capabilities.

Maybe Web apps will find their highest expression in OSs that feature Web runtimes. Java was supposed to be "write once, run anywhere" but, for interactive apps, it only became popular once Google wrote an OS and class library specific to that Java OS.
Just one more data point from this hackathon:

Jen is as smart and motivated a 17-year-old I've ever met, and she solved a real pain point of mine with nothing but one day of a two-day hackathon and a greasemonkey script.

But.

If I were her, and the judges were commanding applause from the audience with specific references to my age and gender (this happened twice) instead of my app and skill - if I became this symbolic object of a story we all want to tell - I don't know how I'd feel about that. I wonder how she feels about it, especially in light of stmchn's comment on winning.

Personally, I wish we lived in a world where this headline could read "Smart kid wins with cool hack." I guess when stories like this are no longer news, we'll know we've achieved normalcy.
> the more advantages like this are offered, the more it dilutes my actual accomplishments

plight of all assisted minorities, gender-wise or racial
If only the author would elaborate on that point. Oh wait, they did.

TL;DR: A something can exist without being a solution. That's not a bad thing, it's just harder to build a business on.
REALLY? I'm a subscriber of a few lists for women in tech (Systers included), only one posted the link (followed by no comments). Systers tech talk posted nothing. Systers-dev and -foss, neither. Although, I'm probably subscribed to wrong groups... such as women working in tech (including learners), mostly programming. Not lists for people having problems with programming.
If you are a global corporation and earn money in an overseas subsidiary for spending in that country by the corporation, it is not tax evasion to take out a loan for things you want to spend in the USA.

As an individual US resident, however, you are taxed globally. The equivalent action to Apple here would be having your corporation take a loan out to pay your salary for work performed (products sold) in Germany (for example). The profits stay in Germany; the corp avoids taxes (hopefully more than the loan interest), but you still pay your individual rate.

(IANAL, just my experience as a consultant with a few foreign corps)
> paying taxes on profit is the deal we signed up for by operating businesses in the US.

What happens when you don't sold your product in the US? Why does the profit of Apple selling an iPad in UK have to result in them paying taxes in US instead on UK?

Why does Apple Operating Europe (Cork, Ireland, 100% owned by Apple Inc. but not operated in the US) has to pay them?

I really understand and adhere to the basic idea you are trying to defend but it's just not so simple with multinationals (Apple or any other), especially if the regulatory system leaves enough holes for them to make structures like this.
Awesome thanks! Any features that don't work?
That page says: "The use of XCF as a data interchange format is not recommended by the GIMP developers, since the format reflects the GIMP's internal data structures, and there may be minor format changes in future versions."
Despite complaints of spamming, Path stands by its app's invitation process
Many large law Liam's know international law. I'd guess that a company like theirs with a strong international presence would be interested in that.

Even if they don't have someone handy who knows Norwegian law, they could easily retain them.

My point is that proper legal advice can not be what's preventing them from helping. My question to OP was about the differences in laws which he/she was referring to.
This is probably one of the most amazing talks I've ever heard. At its core it lets you understand just how unexplored the computer is as a medium.
Only if the contract signed says so. There's usually a standard section in the contract for this sort of thing so it really depends on that.
Submitting this article since Nate Johnson (President of Marketing at Path) made some...interesting quotes to CNET.

"This is the No. 1 piece of feedback we get from users," he said. "That's why we have this in the new-user flow."

So that whole 100 friends thing didn't work out?
Snarky!
Whew. Lucky for me, my tax situation is simple. Otherwise, it could have been a few years in the slammer ;)
It's a mistake to relate the stupidity of an idea to its potential for success. And yet even with success they can remain stupid and you can remain right.
I guess I'm missing what you mean, could you elaborate? What I got was that "a 20-something guy" reached a target market that he was not a part of, and did very well at it too.
Glass How-to: Getting Started
In 2008/2009 I was browsing Brian Gossett's website http://since78.briangossett.com/ . Back then he had a digital mood board, which was simply a giant collection of JPG files on a white background with appropriate spacing. I saw these same mood boards on other websites - usually belong to designers. Some things hit me while browsing that website.

Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a service that let you...

- easily bookmark content from the web onto your personal "mood board",
probably using a booklet.
- organize that content into collections
- share it with a social network built around the original idea.

I shit you not, even my original design (which was mainly white on white) looked like Pinterest. I quit on it because I couldn't program at all.

I've had multiple experiences since where I thought of something and then something similar either already exists or it shows up soon after. The Pinterest example was the most extreme though, because I really had a copy of Pinterest (minus the identity ofc) in my mind and on paper. What this taught me is that I have a brain that is capable of thinking up stuff that is apparently wanted [1] and as such it has boosted my confidence. At the end of the day, the person who wins is the person who executes. Execution is key.

[1] Allow me to be very careful here. I may suffer from cognitive bias causing me to discount the amount of ideas that I've had that are probably absolutely shit, but in my own defence I'm the first person to shoot down my ideas. Also, knowing what the market wants requires you to test your assumptions. I'm well aware of this.
The site having no traction is not the reason they did not get accepted. In the YC application they "explicitly" ask if you have customers. Just a guess here but Im thinking PG and company read their app before they invited them for an interview .
It's definitely possible, at least with RRDtool and 30 lines of Python (only 20 lines for react to measured peak, not forecasting one).
I love the smell of roses, but people say I always complain when I smell them...
"I'm not sure if there's any lesson here other than a warning against arrogance, but I have two stories to share."

Of course there is. You mentioned it yourself!:

"The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present, and it's very easy to unconsciously dismiss the first versions of it as frivolous or useless. Or as stupid ideas."
Not quite. The messages aren't being sent from the device, they're being sent by Path from their own infrastructure once they've uploaded the address-book.
For stereoblindness caused by cross-eyedness, as the author's is: if someone's happy to wear that sort of headgear, surely reparallelising their vision using prisms would be a more elegant solution than a camera and screens?
Survivor bias? How many ideas has he thought were stupid, and then they went nowhere?
ChromeOS is a strange choice, because of the box, ChromeOS is not especially capable. That's why there's interest in tools like Crouton.

What distinguishes native apps is not whether they are rendered with HTML (many native apps use HTML rendering for parts), or whether they have access to privileged APIs, but instead whether they conform to the behaviors and conventions of the platform. Getting that conformance requires using the APIs the platform gives you - you cannot adequately copy it, as Java Swing has proven.

For example, Light Table fits your criteria: it's a double clickable .app file with access to privileged APIs, with HTML and CSS rendering the UI. But it's obviously not a native app, and will never feel like one.

Note that I didn't say "real". Light Table is certainly a _real_ app. But the distinction is inescapable: it's impossible to miss the fact that Light Table is non-native.
The difference being that there's also a newborn in this case.
Ask HN: What are some popularly held cs misconceptions?
Talking about mistakes/misconceptions can sometimes be as elucidating as talking about facts.

Here is one that got me:

In Java this sometimes occurs:

Integer a = 10;
Integer b = 10;
a == b; // returns true

Integer a = 1000;
Integer b = 1000;
a == b; // returns false
I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great!

If you cant though, then there is some kinda balancing act that the OP has to optimize, how many matlab sessions can simultaneously be hosted on one of the OPs VMs in the cloud at what cost? Since most of the cloud infrastructure providers seem to charge an arm and a leg for CPU, and I am assuming (maybe incorrectly) that this service will be CPU heavy, as an investor I would have to be convinced that this team has some technique for bringing down these costs...

either they would have to have better algorithms, or perhaps some interesting grid architecture that drastically reduces CPU time and hence costs, or something.

I am making assumptions here, but I think these are standard assumptions, these are the kind of assumptions you have to convince a investor you have a solution for. It may be as simple as saying, we can service 10,000 simultaneous users on 10 VMs, I have no clue what the numbers work out to, but they would have to at least show how this can scale profitably.
Engineers have this system already and have had it forever. In Canada (the one I'm familiar with) it is the P.Eng (Professional Engineer) license.

I think the system should be licensing and involve losing that license if you commit an ethics violation.

There would be unlicensed developers of course, but connecting the incentive to not do unethical things with the incentive to be part of the elite class in your profession has worked pretty damn well for Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers.
It actually really sucked for US citizens overseas, who may have moved when they were children, or when they dodged a draft in the 60s, and never filed their 1040s or FBAR.

The worry recently (as the IRS has been cracking down as of late) is any re-entry to the US with a US passport would lead to a massive tax bill for all foreign income over the past 40 years. Or for Canadians living in Florida who never declared their Canadian retirement funds. Fortunately the IRS offered amnesty in 2008-2010 to most to "come clean and get no penalties".
Brian Harvey was also teaching his own version of the old CS61A last I heard, but he may be retiring after this year. (I've been hearing about him retiring pretty much since I started at Berkeley 5 years ago, for what it's worth).
Nice Work! I love the artwork and character animations. Im leaving you a review.

Can you rate my HTML5 submission for LD 26?
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview...
I thought Twitter was stupid when it came out. "Why would any one choose to limit themselves to 140 characters? Also the name is dumb and childish. 'tweet'? Who wants to 'tweet'? I'm a grown man, I don't want to 'tweet...' etc."

I still don't know why Instagram is a thing.
Of course, the flipside is maybe more dangerous. "Hey, this sounds like a really stupid idea... then again, I thought pinterest sounded stupid too, and look how that turned out. Ok dubious business opportunity, here's my time/money!"

I'm being facetious of course, but the best deals are often the ones you don't make. The real question is how much of an impact an anomalous success story should have on the way you evaluate business opportunities.
The only way I can tell that I had a bad time in college is because, when I left, I said to myself "in a few years you're going to remember all the great times, but the majority wasn't that great".

Lo and behold, five years later, I only remember the good times.
Maybe '[...] will not judge you for being a girl' would express the sad reality most.
I'm still looking for a good replacement Windows app. I currently use FeedDemon, which uses Google. I haven't heard/seen anything about similar applications that use any of these new services out there.
It still seems like a better basis to fork for a format than something new and untested.
I'm reminded of my comment on this thread [1] (Ask HN: Why would a government have created bitcoin?).

"I like bitcoin as a robust, validated communication network with the currency function incentivizing its operation and creating noise to mask the murmur of its true purpose."

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
For what it's worth, I need your product and know other people that do too. I would pay for it, providing I didn't have to pay much.

Increasingly, we have big data sets, and want to work with them collaboratively. Because they are so big, the problem of how to proccess the data is added to the old problem of what to do with it. I think that centralizing the 'how' would be a great selling point too.

Maybe I explained that badly - in Amazon AWS are a bunch of datasets.If I want to play with them, I have to create an AWS instance, with the right tools, go find the data, and spend time figuring out how to read it. If your online Matlab also helped me handle data, then for opensource data someone would only need to solve that problem once (ingest), and for closed source data, at least I'd have a common platform with my team.

Anyway, my imagination of what your product could be, and all the problems it could solve, has me excited. I encourage you not to give up or lose faith in the concept.

This is entirely putting aside that yes, Matlab is expensive, and for occasional / home users, it would be nice to have something subscription based rather than couching up for a perpetual license.
> The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present

And the past is hard to see without the lens of hindsight warping things. A decision might look silly in the face of information from the future, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong decision at the time. It wasn't. You made the rational play and you happened to lose. Your information was just incomplete. And unlike the founders who ended up winning, you had no incentive to assume the gaps would be filled in with magic traction and a bag of money.
Exactly.

I always picture myself in the following situation: A guy comes into my office in 2005, and says: "Uhm, excuse me, we're looking for investors in our new great product. It's for sending messages!" - "You mean, like email?" - "Yes. Except, you only have 140 characters." - "Err?" - "Oh, and you can't determine who will receive the message." - "Excuse me?" - "Yes, that's right. Would you like to invest?"

I would have laughed that guy out of my office back then...

...and now he'd be laughing at me.

Thus I'm very glad, no-one ever comes to my office in real life.

The End.
> I recently won a competition, which is great and all, but I always wonder in the back of my mind if I won it because I was the only woman in the competition.

And you suffer this now, in your generation, so maybe the next generation will have so many women succeeding that this idea will no longer make sense. Having examples to strive towards is always cited as an important part of deciding who you become in life.

You didn't ask to do this. Your post makes that much clear. Very rarely to we really ask for the roles society casts us into. It is simply how it happens.

Reminds me of an old quote, from the film Zulu about the defense of Rorke's Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879:

Private Cole: [After Mr. Witt's carriage rides off, Mr. Witt screaming the British soldiers are all doomed] He's right. Why does it have to be us? Why us?

Colour Sgt. Bourne: Because we're here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zulu_(film)
The 3DS has 3d camera, and the author knows they can see the 3d on the 3DS.

So I guess the author could just carry the 3DS around forever and photograph everything with it.
When You Lose All of Your Startup Money
Even if you could have coded Pinterest, that's just the beginning.
In 1978 I thought Bill Gates trying to sell BASIC interpreters for what was 90% of the cost of the computer to run them was a pretty stupid idea :-)

That said, one of my VC friends defines an Entrepreneur as someone who can take a stupid idea and make it successful. Sort of an homage to the whole idea that they can see something you cannot.

These days when I'm confronted by this sort of proposal I ask the person making the proposal to describe the world where their idea has succeeded. What is different about that world from today, and what is the same. What do people do in that world that they do differently now or can't do at all. And perhaps more importantly what do they do today which they no longer have to do.

If you can paint that picture in enough detail you can figure out who is going to be working against this person and who is going to be cheering this person on, you might get a sense of how much work is between here and there and the kinds of people needed to do that work. And if you know this person well you might be able to guess whether or not they are up for that, or perhaps more importantly, committed enough.
Exactly. I wish instead of articles like "[minority | disadvantaged | young | old] person wins hackathon" there were articles like "[Intelligent] Person makes cool thing, wins hackathon."
trying to improve matlab by building something on top of octave is putting lipstick on a pig. matlab/octave is a great language for writing quick algorithms but it's biggest flaw is it is not designed for productization of those algorithms.

in other words, focus on the real problem with matlab, it's poor interoperability, deployability, and overall ignorance of good programming language design patterns, not it's lack of being in the cloud or having good tutorials. If you really need matlab, you will suffer through whatever god awful things you need to in order to get it to work because it's the only tool that will accomplish your goal. .m files have the tendency to be both the worst and best code you've ever written: algorithmically brilliant, stylistically abhorrent. The fact that I feel dirty after writing one is a sign there is something missing, and it's not tutorials.
Twenty-somethings coming of age today will be forever shaped by the recession
Thanks you for the link. It looks like the picture here is almost the same as what is shown in that video (from 1.5 years ago).
With "Please, oh please use git pull --rebase" I didn't mean to preach but to convince some of the people I code with to maintain at least basics of a clean git history, thus the 'please' in title. I wrote it some time ago and only yesterday I was surprised at the sudden popularity of that post :)