skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally agree with the latter part -- nobody's baby is as fascinating to other people as it is to its parents -- but the argument against "doing a startup" is actually a pretty easy one, and any founder should be able to counter this kind of waffling applicant with a large number of realistic and effective arguments:

* First off, doing a startup is not just about sitting in a dark room and writing code without a boss. It isn't even mostly about that. Your average engineer has no idea how much non-technical crap there is to do, and consequently has no idea that the things they like to do don't strongly overlap with the set of things they think they'll be doing as a startup founder. It isn't just pizza and coding sprints -- it's about talking to customers and coordinating with other people and marketing and finding photos and making spreadsheets and raising money and bookkeeping and filing idiotic paperwork with bureaucracies and diffusing personality conflicts and a million other things that good developers never think about and don't ever want to do. And if you succeed, your reward is more of that stuff and less coding.

* Second is that you'll work like crazy and have to bear a lot of stress. That's the way it goes. Most people aren't cut out for that lifestyle. Doe-eyed college graduates, especially, haven't ever done a project that lasts more than a semester or two. They have no idea what they're getting into.

* Third, if you don't have a co-founder, and you don't have any experience, you're doomed. Go work for someone else for a while. I know, I know...$FAMOUS_PERSON did it. They're the exception, not the rule. If you're in that situation, there's a litmus test: is your product currently built and exploding in popularity? Then you may be the next Zuckerberg. Otherwise, go work for someone else for a while.

* Fourth, these days, most people confuse "doing a startup" with "making a cool feature". They're not even close to the same thing. I can't tell you the number of resumes I've seen from developers who made a half-baked marketplace website that they called a "startup", then gave up when the users didn't come and they realized that 99.999% of the work was ahead of them. Building the product is the first step, not the last one.

* Fifth, just because it's cheap to rent server space and open-source means that you don't have to write CGI by hand doesn't mean the competitive landscape is easier. In fact, it's harder. For any idea you come up with, there are either 50 sophisticated, me-too competitors, or there will be within 10 minutes of you getting any publicity. The flip side of everything being cheap is that any bozo with a credit card can do it.

...I could go on and on with this. Point is, most developers have this hazy, romantic, idyllic notion of "doing a startup" that bears no resemblance to the actual thing. Communicate this honestly and clearly to someone when they're waffling between taking a job and going off on their own, and you've got chances. After all, anyone who's really ready to do a startup isn't going to be talking to you about a job. They're going to be doing a startup.
If aliens exist we should be able to notice consequences of their existence - either accidental or intended.

Even if we miss the window of contact, galaxy should be teeming with shadows of alien civilizations if only we know where to look.
Even if you were launching only microsats (without any other payload), I'm not sure the cost per satelite would be that high? Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_sy...) says the cheapest option right now is $2200/kg for LEO, so about $200 for a 100g phone. I guess going to the moon is about 10x more, but that's still not unreasonable...
Depression is a collection of symptoms—he could very well be depressed with a different underlying cause.
BODOL – inspired by Haskell, Clojure and Shen
What we are experiencing is a particular flavor of secular religion called "cultural Marxism". Marxists believe that social forces are best understood through a model of class conflict.

Economic Marxists explained the ills of society through the conflict between rich capitalists and the poor working proletariat. The rise of the middle class threw it a curve ball that it couldn't explain and it fell out of favor (outside of the Soviet union and American academia).

Cultural Marxism uses the same conflict between dominant class and under class to explain social pathologies in the under class. Thus, we all hear about statistics where under classes are not meeting the same performance as the upper class, with the implication that it is the upper class's fault. This is called "oppression".

So we know that women make less than men, but we don't hear much about how men are falling behind in college degrees and high-school education because this does not fit the Marxist narrative.

Furthermore, when there is an underrepresentation of an underclass in some desirable area, we take that to be de facto evidence of oppression (nobody cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners). We all except the collective guilt for the sins of our class and nobody questions whether or not the Marxist narrative might just be fundamentally flawed.

Modern academic feminism and racial theories are based on Marxist models, which causes them to make many errors of reasoning IMO. There is also a lot of data that they can not explain. For example, racial Marxists have no problem explaining why some minority races do worse in school than white children (oppression!). But I've yet to hear an explanation from a Marxist as to how other minority groups (Asians) do way better than white children.
No worries. In my experience, the majority of gnostic atheists are like some of the kids on /r/atheism. There exist educated gnostic atheists, but in my experience, they are more rare than educated agnostic atheists.
Eyeballing the chart, it looks like revenue from physical media dropped by about $15B since 1999, while digital revenue increased to about $3B in that time (and if the chart represents nominal, rather than inflation adjusted, dollar amounts, as is likely, the situation is even worse).

Not hard to see why the RIAA is less than jubilant about the situation. Of course $5B of that revenue disappeared before iTunes even got under way, so I don’t think PAID digital downloads are that much to blame for the decline.
>> When adjusted for inflation, revenue has been more than halved since Apple launched the iTunes Music Store.

Whose revenue? RIAA? What about the artists revenue? It'd be interesting to see that broken down.

Here's an interesting infographic showing how much artists make from various sources:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...
iTunes is actually less profitable than retail, but only if you're on a label that takes a lions share of what's left after Apple. It'd be interesting to see what independent artists' revenues on iTunes are like.
That's a good insight, and Star Wars is a good parallel. Not knowing a Hermes bag is probably akin to not knowing who George Lucas is. You're aware there are big name designer handbags out there, but never cared about the details. They're entry level bits of geekery, just in different fields.
For me, it's hanging on the create account splash screen (using Chrome). The HN effect, perhaps?
I can only speak for my company, but the advantages of equipment diversity outweigh the costs. We've already written "new developer" documentation for both Mac and Ubuntu, which we'd have to do anyway at a certain size. If the site looks bad on any type of monitor, we're able to spot the issue immediately. We can do native testing of IE without depending on VMs. And - last but certainly not least - we're all comfortable with our tools, regardless of previous experience.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle."

If you want more geek women, you need more geek girls. (Girls, if you wait long enough, turn into women, funnily enough.)
Is it strange that I found myself mostly ignoring the comments when I was trying to understand this?

The only thing I found the comments useful for understanding was pointing out the IE compatibility behavior.
Somewhat related, on a more micro level: some have suggested a trend in which news about Anne Hathaway drives up the price Berkeshire Hathaway’s stock.

Six examples from 2008-2010: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-mirvish/the-hathaway-effec...

A computer scientist who works with hedge funds: "We come across all sorts of strange things in our line of business, strange correlations"
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2011/03/does-ann...

As the intelligence of our technology grows, I find it amusing to consider these less-logical patterns in the algorithms (indirectly) responsible for so much of our economy.
One trick from some major media sites (such as CNN). They keep changing the title of the same article to make it look like it's a new one a few times a day.

You may learn what style of title may give the highest click rate, given the same article.
Some serious questions:

What percentage of people who you auto-favorite follow you back and/or register for your service? What threshold do you consider appropriate.

Do you have any visibility into the people who are annoyed by seeing your robot interaction in a place that they feel should be reserved for human interactions?

How would you feel if every single service provider interested in finding you were to favorite all of your tweets to get your attention?
> Opening line of the elevator pitch - 'It's like Google, but for goo'.

Uh, we just pivoted to a Facebook for homogeneous omniscient beings of pure energy.
Wannabe Glasshole
For business, marketing, and growth-related topics, I use http://quibb.com
I am very agreed with this. I had even been thinking in making a DSL (Scheme based probably) oriented to ML instead of a library. I would found that more useful in the exploring phase.
While I agree that the process is more similar to the "real world" - the fundamental problem is that the grading is not. When you work as a team towards some goal whoever is evaluating you is doing so based on your contribution to the team.

Here the fundamental scoring method is still the test, so an individual's motivation is to do better for himself; the teams success is secondary (and if the test is curved it may be non existent). Free riders aren't punished or penalized and all sorts of outside influences come in where people start trading on money/sex/favors/friendships/etc.

Arguably those outside influences exist in the real world, but why create a system that explicitly has no mechanisms to counteract them? (ie. the prof says you can do anything that is legal and doesn't try to catch "cheaters")
" do construction people start making their own construction companies instead of working for others?"

Yes, they do.
Google Glass developer digs into its guts, finds 2011’s phone chips
I was surprised to not find "unlimited Kool Aid" among the benefits.
When was the last time you saw a rocket with fins?
Absolutely this! I believe lacking the ability to communicate clearly and easily with "non-tech folk" is a significant barrier to many people trying to advance in their careers. Although this is more applicable to some paths than others, it's still an important skill.
Unblock Facebook
Should be fixed! Please let me know if theres any other bugs :)
It could happen if pushed by the companies that make the ATMs, rather than the banks.
"Lean Analytics"

I have never been able to finish a non-technical/non-fictional book after childhood to be honest! ;) I prefer a movie for that.
Yep. You have your app running on a Digital Ocean virtual instance and all resources there are yours.

The $8 plan, for example, offers 20 GB SSD storage, and this includes files and database.

You can sign up, so we can notify you when Rails support is ready.
I don't see how a company could meet a reasonable burden of proof in this regard. Not without altering the requirement to the point where they could go after anyone for anything they happened to say that the company didn't like. - There's enough trouble with legal threats in that regard already.

Still, I'm sorry that happened to you :(
Next time people ask, just explain that markdown always reflows consecutive lines.

GitHub's change (for comment fields only) isn't list specific, they just never reflow. They document it here:

https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown#ne...
May I ask how do you become a C++ ML programmer? It is not an usual position but one I would definitely be interested in pursuing
This was a great summary of what I have observed with some groups trying to inspire women in tech. Lots of marginally technical to non-technical women in events supposedly focused on women in tech. Instead of fostering the geek culture the cocktail and sex in the city culture takes over. Gender stereotypes are re-enforced and they inadvertently took the cause back a notch.

What we need are more Rails Bridge, Black Girls Code and that sort of thing to re-enforce feminist geekdom. When the critical mass of any group is slanted towards non technical people it is tough to convey a message of tech being cool and make it attractive for kids to want to enter. I would also love to see a meetup that had a similar makeup and mission as the systers list. I am a guy, but would actively do whatever I could to support that kind of effort because the members of that list are great role models for women in tech.
Marooned in Realtime does use the word singularity.
I have never met him, but I love Michael Bostock
Just started using Parse for a clients app am developing. It is a social network type app!

I wanted to actually use Facebook as the backend but the client didn't as they thought it would force people to use Facebook.

Dave
I'm a PM at Heroku. The dyno redundancy check has nothing to do with protecting the platform. It is a best practice for production apps to have redundancy at the web server level. This protects your app from downtime should underlying servers fail, or if the web server process were to crash. N+1 redundancy for the win.

Also, it does not cost customers double because the first dyno is free with each app.
We post girl:guy ratios of bars & clubs in SF. Tweet us to help out
Have to agree. As soon as I read the first paragraph, I said, "capital-starved."
This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women who are not into geek culture would feel alienated by CS classmates and the tech industry.

There's been a lot of talk about getting more women into this industry, and it's often looked at as a failing of the industry itself. What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't interested in the field.
PGP word list
VMWare reported twice as much revenue as (is derived for) AWS for the recent quarter. AWS is cheaper, but even so, I'm trying to wrap my mind around how that's possible.
I just think about Robbie Williams. Every time he comes out with a new album -one- song plays on the radio for a few weeks and people buy the CD because of that song. Now though I guess people would just buy that one song and not bother with the rest. Not saying the other songs were bad, it's just that the one on the radio is the one our ears get spoon fed.
Indeed. And for that matter, pick guns. Nobody lives inside a safe, security is mostly a matter of societal convention.
HOWEVER, upper-stages to move satellites to GTO are ejected out of earth orbit (for safety reasons - you don't want it to add to the space junk problem). These ejected stages are taken through an Earth-Moon Lagrange point, before being navigated on a low-energy path to a heliocentric orbit. There's no reason a microsat can't hitch a ride on an upper stage, and then wait until the ejected stage reaches the L-point before deploying itself, at which point it's downhill to anywhere in cislunar space.

People are currently working on doing this: http://www.lunarcubes.com/
Some people define "freedom" with 10 pages of restrictions of which the exact interpretation is continuously debated years after release. Other people consider that the opposite of freedom.
This is like a beat poetry version of "Who moved my cheese?"
You don't need FTL to go to nearby stars. If you built something that traveled at 1% c to the star 5 years away, and then took 500 years to develop enough to launch colony ships of its own, the descendants would cover the entire galaxy from any starting point in 20 million years.
Well then that's even more than double, it's from free to paid.
Power of Vanilla JS
...also, if you're traveling FTL, then time travel isn't that much of a stretch. So, ya.
"It cannot be coached very easily."

(1) This is not a universal conclusion.

(2) Many forms of "coaching" are lumped together here. In fact some may only add 30 pts or less while others add over 100.

(3) Controlling for self-selection is self-defeating here since poor black/hispanic/native american kids don't have the same opportunity to self select into say private schools with test prep programs.

(4) Taking post PSAT gains ignores coaching received prior to this.

(5) This only measures indirect coaching. The effects of a superior school itself could be large.
So it actually costs an infinite percentage more to run that second dyno ;-)

But I agree your points on redundancy at the webserver level.
This thread isn't about HN, but you'll find this https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc linked when you try to edit your comments.
Too many assholes building apps
I guess someone took some VLC crash seriousley to the heart.... :D

Hang on guys!
Why you should write every day
Anything Is Possible
If life is so common that alien civs just have their total pick of who to study, then we should see some evidence of all these neighbors.

Remember, civilizations are composed of billions of beings. You only need one being to decide to come study this pond, or otherwise enforce a rule against anyone doing it.
Why Publishers Love Twitter and Not Facebook
I agree with that as well. My point was the more limited one that showing "when I poke at the hardware the observed behavior changes" isn't particularly surprising, or on its own evidence of a uniquely "hardware" etiology for the behavior, since any behavior can be modulated by poking at the hardware, if you figure out exactly how to poke. In other words, it does successfully show that the behavior is "hardware-mediated", but then all behavior is hardware-mediated.
I personally like the pandoc or the gitit version which also has a working title/authors/categories syntax.

I use that to write nearly everything which I can easily convert to latex/html/whatever which is especially nice with different templates.
You don't buy payload space by the kilogram. You buy it by the rocket, with the smallest launches costing millions of USD each. That per-kilogram figure is just the number that comes out when you divide the launch cost by the maximum theoretical payload capacity.
AWS is of course huge, but many forget that Rackspace is in the same order of magnitude at $1.3b yearly revenue last year and growing about 24%.

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=rax
> Point is, most developers have this hazy, romantic, idyllic notion of "doing a startup" that bears no resemblance to the actual thing.

I think that notion is actually, more often than not, "doing a lifestyle business." People tend to get confused--I think because they're both talked about so often on HN--and connect the excitement of the startup scene, with the four-hour work-weeks of "hands-off" B2SMB businesses like Patrick McKenzie espouses.

I think, if people took a hard, rational look at their own desires, they might realize they are okay with less excitement and more four-hour work-weeks. You can do hackathons and contribute to OSS in your spare time if you still feel an urge to be speep-deprived ;)
As an AWS user, it's nice to see them continually lower the prices of their offerings (presumably due to efficiencies of scale). Still, that's not something I'm really used to, from anyone. Is it truly cheaper to service me, or is there something else at play?
God says...

30:14 And I will make Pathros desolate, and will set fire in Zoan, and
will execute judgments in No.

30:15 And I will pour my fury upon Sin, the strength of Egypt; and I
will cut off the multitude of No.

30:16 And I will set fire in Egypt: Sin shall have great pain, and No
shall be rent asunder, and Noph shall have distresses daily.

30:17 The young men of Aven and of Pibeseth shall fall by the sword:
and these cities shall go into captivity.

30:18 At Tehaphnehes also the day shall be darkened, when I shall
break there the yokes of Egypt: and the pomp of her strength shall
cease in her: as for her, a cloud shall cover her, and her daughters
shall go into captivity.

30:19 Thus will I execute judgments in Egypt: and they shall know that
I am the LORD.
This article is pretty funny when you look at all the subtle statements and think about what they actually mean.

"The smaller, cheaper "45" record dominated music in the 1950s and '60s, but the music industry wised up in the '70s."

This means, 45's were very popular and then the record industry purposely killed them to sell consumers more expensive full albums just to get a copy of the same song.

So the music industry were ripping people off, and the advent of piracy/digital downloads means they can do longer do that.

Interesting biased article. Needs a proper translation though from RIAA-speak to real English.
South by Southwest: Spring Break for Nerds
A first-generation HP Envy 14. This was about 3 years ago, long before Retina:

* Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB RAM, 160GB SSD

* 1600x900 14" IPS "Radiance" panel

* Switchable graphics (Intel integrated / Radeon discrete)

* Backlit island-style keyboard with oversized multitouch touchpad

* Amazing build quality (aluminum-magnesium alloy case, no plastic, slot-loading disc drive, edge-to-edge glass)

It was, essentially, an MBP clone, with an objectively better display panel, lower price tag at the same configurations, and Windows 7 instead of OS X. 3 years later it's still in perfect condition it was built so solidly. Unfortunately HP ruined the brand name by applying it to cheaper, inferior laptops in the years since, so you can't compare it to an "Envy" today.

@bluedino: It was just as sleek, with the same pixel density as the best screen you could custom order for an MBP, but better brightness & contrast. Here's what it looked like next to an MBP of that time: http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2011/11/d929dd...
Making money isn't difficult for Amazon. They earned $1.1 billion on $34b in sales for 2010, without much apparent effort toward profitability. They've demonstrated at various times that they can generate profit at will.

Clearly Bezos believes it's far more valuable here and now to invest into winning market segments like AWS or digital content (eg streaming vs Netflix) or competing in tablets.

With $61b in sales for fiscal 2012, I don't think it would be surprising if they could generate $3 or $4 billion in profit on that basis, with a strict focus on that. They're obviously never going to be a profit machine however, not without Walmart-like scale.

The numbers don't look good for future returns off of the $116 billion market cap. If you assume they have a great decade and reach $150 billion in sales, with 5% margins, that's $7.5 billion in profit - they'd be fairly valued today on a profit projection seven years out. Shareholders can expect exceptionally low returns on average over the coming years.
Unless there is one galactic hegemon, there's going to be someone who says "fuck it" and decides to come visit.

Unless there's no one.
Incorrect. Facebook can't legally aid its direct competitors, and Facebook can currently be sued by its stock holders if it discloses that it was breached and as a result of that disclosure the stock drops.