skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But really. Did these entrepreneurs really understand what they were building at the time?

Is it the case that these people articulated the best case for their products and businesses when Dustin saw introduced to these projects in their infancy?

Developing a product, and the right pitch is an evolutionary process, and it may just very well be the case that Dustin encountered them too early.

He may very well be at fault for thinking these ideas were stupid at the time, but then again he might very well not be.

Being introduced to a work in progress is always a negotiation. Asking the right questions is part of it, and on the flip side, having an interlocutor who has some sense of how to answer your questions.

Also, some ideas are just stupid.
>The interesting parts of Clojure (i.e., the sequence abstraction design) are replicatable in CL as a library.

The interesting part of Clojure for me is that the sequence abstraction design is part of the standard language distribution and NOT implemented as an optional library.

The major flaw with Lisps is exactly the proliferation of competing, (and frequently half-arsed), custom solutions for stuff that should be built-in and used by all.

I'll take a slightly inferior implementation of something that's standard in a language's libs, over 20 competing solutions or rolling my own, any day of the week.
A blogging platform centered around the idea of inviting tech elites to circlejerk over their pithy thoughts and lord over us with their limited membership.

What a stupid idea, I thought. The only interesting thing it does is let you upvote things by hovering your mouse in a circle.
It's a bit uncharitable to call "I thought Pinterest and Vine were dumb" arrogance.
Twitter has the odd phenomenon of being a private company that news media has to constantly publicly refer to. Even to the point of some articles printing what an unrelated no-name had to say about the event in question. It's bizarre, though it seems also to be in part a lazy way to get 'bystander comments'.
"Just curious, is there a way to sue/fine a company like this for false advertising, essentially?"

Yes. It's illegal to use someone else's likeness for advertising without their permission.
Not sure about your third point. It seems like he's genuinely echoing a point that's been made many times before: that good ideas can sound stupid at first. http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html

I don't think he's trying to show any superiority by telling us the details of how his conversations went about.
lazy, vapid, narcissism

Care to elaborate? My interpretation of Pinterest is really "visual social bookmarking."
> The consensus on HN was that there was nothing wrong with her code, but that she was being picked on solely for being a girl

False. They did not know she was a woman when they made fun of the code. And that was not the consensus. [1]

In fact, if they had known that she was a woman, they would have known better than to criticize. Us men in tech are well aware by now that you have to shelter women from the real world, lest they shatter into a million pieces.

Your delusions of persecution are staggering.

[1]
Here is what they saw, no indication of femaleness: https://github.com/harthur/replace

> I’m not entirely sure what drives someone to the conclusion that because “harthur”, which turns out to be be “Heather”, is a woman, that by default, I would intentionally discriminate against [Women]. Not every single thing on the internet is about gender equality, or about a minority. In fact, the only reason I’m writing this post is because this kind of continued behavior on the internet is one of the primary reasons this is such a problem.

See http://justcramer.com/2013/01/24/being-wrong-on-the-internet...

And here is the relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767
>But the thing is, Armed Bear Common Lisp (ABCL) already offers JVM interop.

Yes, a half-arsed, barely supported interop. And slow to top.

>If someone sat down and really massaged it, the currently clunky interop there could be just as shiny as Clojure.

I rest my case.
What do you think are the top deterrents for women NOT going into technology-related careers today? (More than one response allowed)

1. Choosing a career based on a desire for work/life and family balance that doesn't involve 60 hour weeks or waking up at 2:00 AM to answer a pager alert.

2. Choosing a career based on a desire for self-actualization and personal fulfillment instead of what best pays the bills.

3. Dropping out of difficult technical education courses in college in favor of less demanding classes, because there is not enough pressure to think about providing for oneself.

What do you think it will take for women to be successful in the technology field? (More than one response allowed)

Bleak reality. Technology jobs are useful and pay well. The more women are forced to care for themselves instead of relying on a husband, their parents, or the government, the more likely they will choose technology careers.

Of course, as more women that enter the technology market, salaries will drop (for everyone).

How optimistic are you about the future of women in technology?

Not optimistic at all. I don't think people are looking at the right problems.
And I still dream of spatialite becoming the one interchange format to rule them all.
Just to share another alternative: http://feedbin.me/ It has support for Silvio Rizzi's Reeder already, or rather Reeder has support for it. Looks promising, though I haven't tried it out.
"I want a filesystem in a single file. I'll pick the one I'm most comfortable with and pretend that it's much better than separate files".

Meanwhile, we'll ignore all the semantic issues around the data. What exactly _is_ a layer? Any given image file? What if some tools only handle e.g. alpha-layers? What if a layer is actually a filter kernel?

How are the layers composited? How are they ordered? Is it a linear order, or is there actually a tree of layers?

The reason PSD works so well is only partially that things are all in one file. It's also that the semantics of its contents are extremely well defined. (OK, if you're willing to consider PSD documentation "extremely well defined")

And Gus is almost completely punting on that part - define _that_ well enough, and it might make sense. Until then, it's just another VFS with a blob of assets that the receipient probably can't parse exactly as intended.
Not if you set "PRAGMA secure_delete=ON;" See http://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_secure_delete for additional information.
"Everything is obvious once its successful. Big wins come when you can spot something before its obvious to everyone else." -ev williams.
Teensy alien-looking skeleton from Chile poses a medical mystery
I just pressed it and it worked.
Remember you need to press the Fn key first (at least on mine).
I didn't like the author's choice of the word "defeat" to describe Jennie's accomplishment. I didn't know hackathons pitted the men against the women! I understand the connotation (the odds were "against" her in some regard) but I don't feel like it sends the right message.
why can't you all delete dkhenry's account information from your system?
It's true some artists can already work with interactive media through code, but I think his greater point might be that we're selling every other artist short if they've got to express themselves in code instead of geometrically.

So while there are some who are currently exceptional to that rule, we're still leaving out a ton of potential art by limiting interactive art to code.
There are currently 24 contiguous bytes of unused space in the SQLite header. If need be, and if SQLite catches on for use as a portable image format, I will be willing to allocate some or all of those 24 bytes to an identifier string for file(1).
SNMP -> shivers
I had a similar experience when I was 14 years old. At the time I was running a very popular trivia web site that had been featured on Yahoo and in a few magazines. A guy e-mailed me and said he liked my site. He asked if he could pay me a small fee to run a banner ad for his new business. I told him I appreciated the offer, but I didn't think it was allowed under the Geocities terms of service.

I was really into discovering new web sites at the time and had not heard of this company. I looked at the guy's site to see what it was about. I remember thinking it was ugly design and a stupid idea. Not much longer after that, the company began to take off. The guy that had e-mailed me was Pierre Omidyar and the site was EBay. I've tried to look at new businesses with an open mind since then.
Arguably, the root cause of Turing’s persecution was that his privacy got invaded, and subsequently the government did not think he had a right to his private conduct.

Actually, come to think of it, if viewed in that way, he's the perfect name for an ethics oath regarding privacy. I hadn't considered it that way.
Sure.

The main use of Pinterest is to show your friends and everyone else what good taste you have. "Look at this collection of bridal dresses I like!" "Check out all these vacation spots I want to go to!"

If you just wanted to collect photos of these things to give yourself ideas, you wouldn't need to share it with everyone. So you have an easy way to show everyone how cool all the stuff you like is, and by extension you are, with very little effort on your own part to actually create or realize (i.e. actually do work) those things into being. Sure there are elements of this across all social networks, but Pinterest has really distilled it down to the lowest common denominator point and click.

More of an indictment of society than of Pinterest itself I suppose. Pinterest or something like it was bound to show up sooner or later.
Here's how I see it:

Chief Technical Officer = Someone who looks at the market, trends, how their competition or potential competition are evolving their product(s) & trys to anticipate users demand within ~5 years. In other words a CTO is someone who uses their knowledge of tech to make money but they don't think about the exact details; they hire people to do that.

However, in order to help the CTO companies usually have a CIO (although that role is considered to be diminishing):

Chief Information Officer = Understands tech & uses it to reduce expenses & contain cost of growth
And people couldn't share photos online before?

I can see how it's popular. I just don't see why it's as popular as it seems to be.

And obviously i'm not arguing the problem is Instagram, since this is a thread about not being able to see why ideas take off. Clearly I just don't get it.
They're actually hiring a Director of Privacy and Legal right now:

"The Director of Privacy and Legal will be responsible for positioning Path as a leader in the protection of user privacy."
This is surely one of the greatest responses I've ever seen on the internet. What was the intention with the unused space originally? Did you foresee this moment coming?
AP classes are intended to let you pass a test that's equivalent to the introductory university class in that subject, not to be equivalent to a degree in that subject.

In other words, I'd expect the AP Computer Science class to be roughly equivalent to "CS 101" or "CS 1A", or whatever they happen to call the CS class where you learn what about conditionals, loops and basic variables is.
First GitHub pull request submitted by a baby?
This isn't the hypothetical where you're stealing a loaf of bread from the market to feed your starving family. I certainly respect that taking the moral high ground isn't always easy and that some people are going to be in situations where it is more difficult for them to do so than for others.

But the standard for acting like an asshole has to be greater than simple expediency. The necessity of breaking the social contract has to be roughly proportional to the community inconvenience; that's why firemen get to use the siren and everyone is supposed to yield when they are headed to, well, fight a fire, but I don't get to use one when I'm headed to the grocery store.

If I bang on a stranger's door at 6am because their house is on fire and I'm trying to warn them, then that's great, because the "don't harass strangers at six in the freaking morning" social norm is less important than the "OMG THE FLAMES THEY BURN!" social norm. In contrast, if I bang on someone's door at 6am trying to sell Amway products, then I'm an asshole. Finally, If I bang on someone's door at 6am, insist that their buddy, whose name I found by going through the trash, has photos to share with them, and only later reveal that there never were any photos, then I'm an unbelievable jackass.
How did getting out of high school early go for you? I'm finding that high school is seriously lacking. To supplement, I've been working on my computer science major at a local community college. Unfortunately, doing both college and high school is extremely time consuming and I've been looking for alternatives to high school.
It's a popsci article. I wouldn't go criticizing the scientists based on this.
Just finished the game... pretty intense!
But I'm not sure about the merit of the position that expressing a strong opinion early on is a form of arrogance. If 90% of the time stupid ideas (as well as good ideas) simply don't pan out, then perhaps one can say that an opinion that something is "stupid" is not only unarrogant, but accurate. Then again, my point is that calling something stupid or smart really is largely irrelevant because the odds of success / failure are the same for ideas that are equally stupid and great. I'd like to see a post on the arrogance of calling something Great when it truly is not. That sort of hubris exists in equal quantities in the VC world.

I agree that one should give all ideas the possibility of success. But it's just human nature to judge things as stupid or smart. And as the animals that we are, our opinions largely don't matter in the grand scheme of the universe. Arrogant or not.
.. A bit hard to read this wall of text, but I've only ever had a great experience with them.
I've had two different experiences like this. The first is a co-worker that did a different tactic. When someone would ask him if he wanted to get lunch and no idea of where to go, he would ask "rice or noodle?" This somehow always lead us going to a place that had neither of those things.

From what I've seen, the inverse of this seems to also imply where a group will end up going for lunch. I've had co-workers say Costco or Taco Bell "isn't lunch". Because of those negative statements, that is exactly where the group ends up going.
Amusingly, I've had the opposite problem: I see some things, think they are the best ideas ever and then watch them fizzle away.

Perhaps the largest example of this would be Wave. When I first heard about Google Wave, I was incredibly impressed and immediately signed up for the beta. I really did think it would replace email and IM--it was an elegant solution that did both, at the same time. I then played around with it, rather liked it and even got some friends to use it. I was still trying to use it well after almost everyone gave up on it.

I was rather disappointed in its ignominious decline and eventual death.

I also really liked webOS. All your apps would just be web apps! It would be great. It wasn't.

I really loved the Zune HD. It had one of the best interfaces I had ever seen and was incredibly capable for its price. I still have mine, and I still like it, mostly. I've had people on the subway ask me about it simply because they didn't know what it was :P.

I thought Gnome 3 was awesome and a gigantic step forward from Gnome 2. You could customize your entire environment, all in JavaScript. And yet almost nobody I know uses it. Unity may have gotten panned by internet critics, but at least plenty of people I know use it. Gnome 3? Maybe one person.

A disproportionate number of the things that I get really excited about--rather than just interested in--seem to fizzle out. Maybe it's just selection bias, of course. I imagine the contrast between my expectations and reality make things stand out more. But it does seem that the more enthusiastic I am about something the more likely it is to flop.

Right now, the technology that I'm really excited about in a very similar way is Rust. I hope it breaks this rather annoying trend! It's basically the only new programming language that I genuinely like and don't view as a waste of time and space. I honestly think it will take off, but that's what I thought about all the other examples too.

I guess this doesn't have much to do with the actual article. It's just a lament about my own misplaced enthusiasm. But it does feel better to have written about it :P.
Hey!

I went to the first CodeDay in LA a few weeks ago and it was quite fun! I'm looking forward to future CodeDays!
> A satellite in orbit is always accelerating as well, and will remain in constant motion if the orbit is far enough out (i.e. well beyond atmospheric drag).

If general relativity is correct, that system will generate gravity waves which will take away energy and the orbit will decay. This is a small effect, however, so we generally don't have to worry about it. E.g., Earth's orbit is decaying by about the width of a hydrogen atom every few hundred years.
"I'm sure you know perfecly well that you are talking nonsense, as does anybody else who's reading this thread"

How do you expect me to answer something like that?

You don't know the language and are intent on having an argument with me about this?

When Forth is used correctly productivity gains become exponential (the limit being application dependent). So, yes, when used correctly you can go 10, 100 and even 1,000 times faster than assembler.

A good comparison would be to look at the productivity gains had when writing raw Python vs using a library such as SciPy. The productivity gains are orders of magnitude greater than the raw language. And, even raw python is orders of magnitude faster than writing assembler.

What I said was that [Forth] "It's just above assembler yet many orders of magnitude faster to develop with." and you seem to think this is nonsense. Well, you are wrong. What else do you want me to say. Go learn the language and we can have a conversation. Using it casually doesn't produce the same level of understanding you get from dedicated non-trivial usage. This is true of any language or technology.

I am not insulting or diminishing you. Perhaps you are taking it that way. Relax. It's OK to not know everything, I certainly don't and I've been designing electronics and writing software for a long time.

Here's a place to start:

http://www.ultratechnology.com/forth.htm

Here's a good Q&A:

http://www.inventio.co.uk/forthvsc.htm

If I have the time later tonight I might post a follow-up with an example of what development flow might be for, say, developing code for a multi-axis CNC machine.
Federal	Court Dismisses	Craigslist Claims to Exclusive Rights and Copyright
I’m typing this on a desktop with a full-size Apple keyboard, so I don’t need to press the Function key to use F-commands.

In Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, the keyboard shortcut to reload a page is Command-R. What browser are you using?
Indeed, I am sure that it was (is?) a mainstream opinion. Perhaps less so in the majority, but not in the extreme.
The interview from their perspective is probably an opportunity to learn more about it and see if you can ease any concerns they have. Another possibility is that they may have liked the team and wanted to see if you would consider working on something else.
Just because an opinion is popular, that doesn't necessarily make it a fact.
Usually, this is what happens when someone get's so caught up with 'Growth Hacking' they forget about UX.
One thing I picked up regarding the article itself and not the story:

"If you remember one thing from this article, it should be that the father of this prize-winning girl hacker (Paul Lamere, director of developer community for The Echo Nest, which publishes Evolver.fm) did not, as one might suspect, force, cajole, or otherwise convince his daughter to take up hacking."

Jennie's father is a part of the website which published an article about Jennie. It doesn't detract from my understanding of the story much, but I felt this fact diminished Jennie's accomplishment in some small way. Not in any meaningful way of course, but I wonder if this story would have been published if Jennie's father was not part of Evolver.fm's parent company.
There are so many things that seemed like a stupid idea to me:

- Seinfeld: Who is this guy, really?

- Frasier: Come on, a spinoff? (So, I didn't realize spinoffs were a thing)

- Twitter: Haiku and vanity plates for the Internet.

- Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream: Salty Caramel, you've got to be kidding me. I don't want salty ice cream.

- Arrested Development: Wait, Jason Bateman. He was so bland on The Hogan Family.

- There's Something About Mary: Their promo seemed ripped off the Zelda commercials, or that's how I felt.

- Blogging (Well, Live Journal): Do I really care what other people are doing?

- Scrubs: I don't know, I just didn't like the idea.

- Freaks and Geeks: How dare they try to explain what it was like to be adolescent me?

- McGriddles: Sausage, syrup and pancakes?

- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Slow animals doing karate makes no sense.

The only common thread I can find in these things is me. I have no idea why I had negative, visceral reactions to these things. It's gotten to the point where I try to pay special attention when an idea causes me to have this reaction.
Some messages in there for me as a parent. Make time for chatting with my kids informally and away from distractions like tv and Internet. I have been for a few short hikes with my youngest and I probably should be doing more activities like that instead of us both sitting in front of a screen. Also if I treat girls like real human beings and talk to them about life, art, science, tech or anything else and value their opinions they turn out to be just as competent as boys which shouldn't really be surprising.
A well-written humblebrag.
Don't listen to the dummies who love to hate.

This is a slick idea, something I personally felt I would need - I watch WWE RAW with a delay, and sometimes they post news to their facebook feed, which unfortunately spoils part of the fun.

However, I haven't implemented it. I didn't know of anything like it. You did it, great hack. It's something that I would personally use.

Let the naysayers saying you got an award just because of some characteristic that does not define a "hacker" prove you wrong by creating stuff instead of posting stuff that only prove they are the dummies.

Creating stuff is what really defines a hacker.
Unfortunately, your analogy is excessively dramatic and misses the reality of the situation. It's easy to create surreal situations in which absolute visions of your own morals apply. Sorry, but you just don't get it.
Samsung-HTC-Motorola-Blackberry-LG
HN's semantic markup isn't always great, but in this case it simply uses <pre> styled with overflow: auto.

> The behavior of the 'auto' value is user agent-dependent, but should cause a scrolling mechanism to be provided for overflowing boxes. — http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visufx.html#overflow

Apple's rendering is overly pretty to the point of being useless. They dropped support for a perfectly reasonable semantic requirement (make all the content available) which was in the spec literally before their browser existed.
The user experience for person to person transfers varies and is usually poor.

Electronic transfers (ACH) only take a couple of days though, and for things like payroll, once the accounts are set up it all works fine. They also work pretty well for making payments to businesses and what not.