skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspected something like this :) I come from a technical background too, but I think that not thinking in branding terms is very often a big weakness of us technical founders - one of the reasons why inferior products often have the upper hand. I'm also trying to make a business out of this realization, but I'm not there yet and for now I'll just try to sow the seed of doubt here.

By the by, I also think that a lot of what you suggest for direct response marketing also has branding effects - just think about educating people by email for free - so the two things aren't necessarily in contrast. And I don't think that there would be much to debate about the value of your personal brand here (meaning no offence - if you don't like the word brand, just substitute "reputation" to it!).
How to get an email notification when an EC2 instance gets terminated
So far, I let comments automaticaly and delete spammy/offending one reactively. It does not happen often. If it becomes a problem, I'll have to switch to moderating comments, just like you moderate comments on a blog.
Rethinking the Urban Grid
Looks good but tldr.io exists. Feedly now has, what comes down to, a rating based on how many times an article was saved. It just needs a tldr.io layer over it.
It is data already on Facebook, so why are you so picky with sharing it further? (Or rather - criticizing people who do so.)

Especially, as one can get some nice plots back (also - personal).
Yes, in your Angular app's config you can use the $interpolateProvider to adjust this. For example, to use [[ ]], just do this:

var myApp = angular.module('myApp', [], function($interpolateProvider) {
$interpolateProvider.startSymbol("[[");
$interpolateProvider.endSymbol("]]");
});
Good timing - I just referred to this post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5603695
Impressive move by Spark, who have now put other VCs in the awkward position of explaining why they don't do the same.
The Explanation for Apple's New Product Drought
Eventually, Joss Whedon will do this, and he will break records.
>and would also be against my confidentiality agreement.

This whole thing isn't that important but why would it be against your confidentiality agreement to write a hypothetical example in one way versus another? I am assuming all of the numbers are fake in the first place.

My original point (again, not very important) is that I think it is more effective communication to say that a company is worth $1 million now and needs to grow to be $10 million for you to make back your lost salary via stocks, rather than talking about number of shares and strike prices (which you can't easily compare against other companies), since those values can easily be manipulated.
As someone who isn't a compiler developer. What effect is this going to going to have?
I guess I'll have to read the Vorkosigan Saga sometime, then :) (note: I'm not the articles' author)
How much of the friends with zero friends is simply because that information is blocked? If my friends "donated" their data, I would show as having 0 friends if I've blocked that information to apps.
> Super-hacker

> from the future

> the most tightly restricted consumer operating system in the world

> hacker savant

These things make it hard to take an article like this seriously. Never mind the complete lack of new information. I really dont understand the hyperbole used when talking about young people and technology. Not too long ago the Summly kid was a genius too. I'm hoping one day we can reserve this kind of language for the likes of John Nash and others like him.
Ask HN: Some advice for a startup from Pakistan?
http://opensource.com.pk we are a startup from Pakistan, trying to build a web agency powered by a collaborative community. Would really appreciate some feedback and advice.
He didn't. That's why he is refusing to talk through lawyers.
Was the boat not insured? (Or does his insurance not cover this kind of thing?) Would he not be reimbursed by the police department for destruction of property in pursuit of a suspect?
Pelican static site generator, powered by Python
Which Scheme? Each Scheme system appears to be slightly and definitely incompatible with the others after a point.

Unlike Common Lisp, which has a well-defined standard.

Unlike Clojure, which, while evolving, is at least compatible with itself.
God, I would love to see a weev/trolling/etc. documentary of the Lolercaust. You could probably cover Anonymous, Sabu, etc. at the same time.
Ask HN:RPi - easiest and cheapest project
What is the easiest and cheapest project to try on a raspberry Pi for a beginner?
Agree.

There is little to indicate that "presence" in the modern form of the word when applied to undergraduate education at most schools could be equated with anything approaching a one-on-one experience. There are courses in this country with between 300-2500 students in attendance. What you're sitting for is essentially a performance.

The one area where I think we need to really fix online education (and in-person education as well) is to strengthen the connection between teaching fellows (or teaching assistants) and students. Graduate students are uniquely qualified for this role and if you supplanted an online education model with a combined cohort/mentor structure that pairs learners with course leaders, we could really have something that solves everyone's problems.

There is a glut of PhDs in this country in many disciplines. Making them a part of the online education model would make a difference in so many ways.
Good example, so let's say I started there 5 years ago and received a $100k salary, hit the pay cap last year and took a thousand shares in options. And then tomorrow somebody bought them for whatever their current valuation is, what would that be worth? After 7 rounds of funding, I gotta say, probably not much (especially after I divide it by my number of years).

But that should be an easy thing to compute for any employee there and for them to decide if that's worth it.

Perks: Free food and laundry service is cool, but I'd rather make more money that covers the food and laundry with some leftover.
That'd be great! My email is in my profile if you'd prefer that method.
But I can keep the moderating effort relatively low by adding a captcha (e.g. a choose-the-kitten picture quiz) - I do not see any point of inserting a "proof of work/humanity" here.
I hadn't realized, but you're right, he got them to give the number first.

Also, as many pointed out, the authors' industry is VERY special.
Does anyone know if there is something similar for Xmonad (or any other Window Manger)? When I occasionally have to reboot my computer (I blame Chrome), I hate having to set up all my windows again.
Wow, the article supposes _much_ more time is 'bought' than I do.

My rule of thumb is if I'm finished consuming my purchases (consumed at a 'reasonable' rate), I can stay as long as the coffee shop has at least one other free table.
Please read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, specifically "In Comments". Don't say you have! Clearly you have not.
This is going to be one of those wonderful games of iterated group prisoner's dilemma, in which one member of a formerly functioning cartel has just publicly announced an intention to always play Defect.
They touted themselves as a "Google Killer". They basically came out of the gate claiming to be the best search engine in the world, and then they went down in spectacular flames. Whoever developed their launch PR should have been put up against a wall and shot.

If they had rolled their technology with less fanfare they may have made a minor dent in the market, but even then its unlikely. But at least then they could have taken their IP and gone into the Enterprise Search space and perhaps have gotten bought out by someone evil.
Data wrangling. So I wrote my own "DataFrame" -- we have an official one coming to Mathematica 10, too.

Also, binning. There is a nice theory for multidimensional binning and aggregation [that I haven't seen anyone describe explicitly so far]. So I wrote primitives. They play nicely with plotting, statistics, etc. That'll also be in Mathematica 10.

Lots of Go for data egress. It's perfect for it.
Ask HN:What does your bash_profile look like?
I just accidentally deleted my bash_profile file which contained most of the custom colors, shortcuts etc. I would love to see what other people's bash_profile looks like so maybe I could try a new color scheme and some new shortcuts.
I guess that would be to just get it to boot the Wheezy for it - after that - upgrade, then make it start X automatically. Then get it to support a WiFi device. Somewhere in there you can make your own case from Legos. That would be easy & cheap. Then you can plug into your HDMI TV and watch YouTube via Chromium browser on RPi - like a bawss!
Clojure is a nice choice if you're looking to write production code, especially if you're already using other JVM languages (Java/Scala/JRuby/etc.)

However, Clojure strays from a number of standard common idioms in other Lisps, which, IMHO, makes Clojure a less-than-ideal candidate if you're looking to get the "full SICP" experience. It has a lot of other benefits as a language, but for a learning experience, you'll miss out on some of the idioms common to other Lisps.

But, give it a shot and see if it works for you. Once you've learned one, it's really to learn another dialect.

And, in the end, the only wrong answer to 'Which Lisp?' is the empty list[0]. :)

[0] This is an example of a super-nerdy Lisp joke which works in Common Lisp but not Clojure - in Common Lisp, 'nil', 'false', and the empty list are all the same value, (and all other values are considered "truthy"). In Clojure, they are three distinct entities, and there is a discrete "true" value.
There isn't really a great cost to learning the basics of a language. Lisp dialects are very easy to learn, at least to a beginner level. You can learn enough of any lisp dialect to start writing "useful" programs in a few days, just try them out in whatever order you prefer and see which one you like to get deeper into.
but then some people will look through the docs, find the exploits and become the top players. Wouldnt really be fair from a game play standpoint but I agree this was one of the most interesting things i have read in weeks.
That is the whole point of this fuss, though. Way too many systems, from nuclear plants to manufacturers to traffic controllers are exposed to the internet (often through backdoors in LANs) and are vulnerable to network exploits.

It is the faults of the designers they make them visible like that, but they do it, and it is an issue.
You are constructing a pretty big strawman here. The author is saying that MOOCs don't offer the level of sociability that brick-and-mortar classes do. Somehow you morphed that (correct) statement into someone telling you that you don't deserve credit for not asking questions. The author is merely arguing that traditional classrooms aren't going away any time soon, since that socialization and interaction is valuable to many people, even if it isn't valuable to you.
since they are disabling this, it would be nice if they provided a URL that you could hot-link to that just gets served from CDN and only updates every 5 minutes or so.
best of both worlds: they dont need to have it hit their full stack on every request, and I can make a jsperf using <script src="//cdn.github.com/documentcloud/underscore/master/underscore.js">
Its strange though to mention something like that at a "thinking about it" level. If paypal were to actually implement it, surely taking the world by surprise would be the better strategy.
Your goals and Zach’s just don’t align on this one—so don’t back it. His feelings will probably not be hurt and he will still be glad to sell you a DVD when the time comes.

This is a Kickstarter project, not an Amazon pre-order.
BeatDeck (YC W13) Looking for Hacker/Rails Dev
We're looking to hire a top-notch Rails Hacker.
You need to be well versed in programming (specifically Ruby on Rails) and have a hackers mindset.

We're a music analytics start-up building ways for artists to track the way people interact with their music and simultaneously aggregating big data around the web to predict the next big hit.

Feel free to message me at Avi@beatdeck.com or my partner josh@beatdeck.com with your resume/CV/ or short bio.

We love outside of the box thinkers!
Look forward to hearing from you guys,
The BeatDeck Crew

Avi@beatdeck.com
Josh@beatdeck.com
Founders@beatdeck.com
I'm in. I'd like to see a documentary about Aaron Swartz.
I think the key is at least from an enduser perspective instagram was a startup doing something "new". So there's first mover advantage, etc.

This is a different scenario, "we're just like amazon/walmart/wholefoods but greenwashed marketing and they have first mover advantage". Even greenwash marketing isn't a new idea. Its more like competing in the restaurant arena or maybe brick n mortar retail than real "startup".
I have high hopes from the project and I will most likely back it, but I found the last document by the director: "We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists" some what lacking.

I guess it was more about trying to bring the story to your average Joe rather than dive in super deep, I get that they have to cover the basics for larger audience.
Do Elite Colleges Discriminate Against Asians?
I'd be interested in seeing some examples. E-commerce is brutal and it's rare that anyone makes money out of the gate.
1. Networking

2. Connect with Apple employees and ask questions

3. Attend other side events like hackathons, meetups, etc...

4. Potential opportunities

5. There is a difference between attending in person vs watching stuff streaming off your monitor from afar similar to watching a sports event on TV or in-person.

Not all of the above are reasons for why I go to a conference but I'd imagine that some of those points apply for others (and probably stuff I'm not listing here at the moment).
In Bitcoin the supply and availability of currency are decoupled. By funging or splitting a unit of Bitcoin currency into pieces you increase the availability for use while preserving the value of everyones holdings. Based on the supply and demand the price will fluctuate independently of supply levels.

My understanding is that regardless of how inflationary or deflationary Bitcoin is, there will be no effect on the availability for anyone to buy and sell.
For people like john Nash we have adjectives like god/supernatural :)
how would you effectively compete with distributed computing frameworks such as Pregel, MapReduce, and Dremel, when Mathematica is primarily used as a desktop application for in-RAM datasets? I know that Mathematica supports various parallelism options (such as multicore and grid), but frankly to gather real information requires much deeper probing, which far higher numbers of people, graph clustering/centrality on billions of nodes, edges etc. Mathematica's core routines seem to provide multicore implementations, but distributed algorithms require you to implement your own code on top of mathematica, meaning you'll never see the full performance/behavior of the finely tuned Mathematica im,plementation.
Finding the same thing with node.js, I got started OK with passport thanks to the examples for passport-local: https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-local/tree/master/ex..., especially express3-mongoose-multiple-files.

Beyond that though, I've had to hack a fair bit to get "remember me" working (following the practices suggested http://stackoverflow.com/questions/549/the-definitive-guide-... and http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_coo...) so not exactly straight-forward. (Aside: the remember me example for passport local might not be production ready, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16136712/is-an-authtoken-...).

Also would love to hear what others are using!
I think this also varies based on how busy/crowded the coffee shop is. I don't feel too guilty camping when half the tables are empty, but there are many downtown coffee places that are near capacity most of the time.

At any rate, I'm enough of a coffee fiend that I get a new beverage every hour or two anyway. :)
Scheme does have a feature that would be handy in Common Lisp: continuations with indefinite extent. PG has an interesting way to simulate this with macros in On Lisp, but that hardly suffices. It is not something that I frequently need, but I have had one or two cases when such a continuation would have come in handy.
Dealing with a real life externality
Very early on, someone experienced told me they always start with the Cash Flow statement. Of the statements, that's the least-bullshit one of the three. Look at Cash Flow, and look at the "Current" subtotals of the Balance Sheet. Look at these longer and more carefully than the P&L.

Technically you should understand how all three fit together; each alone could be misleading in its own way. But for many businesses the cash perspective is the closest to reality. If you only have time to understand one, deeply, that's the one.

I suspect most people look mostly at the P&L a.k.a. Income Statement. But that uses a lot of constructs (like "accruing" things over time) in a well-intentioned effort to tell a more-accurate story about the business. The problem is if you treat it as "hard numbers". Actually it's just one story about the business, a useful fiction with some truthiness value.
> One of the consequences of ubiquitous communications is that it makes crazies more visible. On the one hand there is the very real ability for this to give a stronger voice to people with reprehensible or counter-factual beliefs. However, it also exposes these things to the light of day, and it empowers people who wish to put forward counter-arguments just as much.

I hadn't thought of that. You have a point.
Or... stop writing yet another vague motivational blog post on "excellence" and actually build something.
Nobody was killed, but that doesn't mean nobody was harmed.

Sunil Tripathi's name will forever be linked to the Boston Marathon bombing for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, causing irreparable damage to his memory and untold grief to those who knew him on top of the already crushing grief of his being missing (and perhaps, it now seems, dead).
I'd rather imagine him fuming in one corner: "stupid Nobel committee… they should have kept their crappy stamp collecting prize…"
For me also I take into consideration how much the server has to do for me. For instance if they give free refills and have to come around to my table for it, or even just stand behind the bar and refill when I come up, I will leave an additional tip for them
What Would Your Life Be Like If You Were Born In North Korea?
To make the choice of L1 vs L2 a little more flexible there's also Elastic net regularization [0] which lets you combine both L1 and L2

Also agree with LDA, I've recently been using it for some unsupervised text classification and the topics it generates are impressively sane.

0.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_net_regularization
Depends on your environment. If you get Clojure set up with Light Table, it's pretty easy to mess with. I think Clojure is not as intuitive as Common Lisp or my brief explorations of Scheme.

If you want to know more about common lisp, I have a site for that: http://articulate-lisp.com
Since I can't reply to the comment below me--Now that we understand ecommerce we're profitable from day one with our new brand launches. It usually takes about 2-3 months before we're doing 20k/mo revenue online with 100% margins.
Well, that's exactly where I stand now. I'm curios to know where I can go from here with minimal investment. Something involving Python that would make the RPi better equipped for future projects.
Has anyone noticed that if you edit trace("Floating point literals are typed as double: " + 1.1 / 2) on lljs.org's demo to become trace("Floating point...are typed as double: " + 1.0 / 2.0) you get an answer of 0 instead of 0.5?
LLJS may not be ready for prime time, so compiling crap is probably just going to produce more crap.
Yes, you can change the start and end symbols to be whatever you want: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8302928/angularjs-with-dj...
Systematic Business Innovation for Startups
The guy had an internship at Apple, which ended 7 months a go. Now he has landed another internship at Google and is going to start there shortly. Good for him, but this is not exactly the kind of story Pulitzers are won with. I expect to read this on his Twitter feed, not for Forbes to regurgitate it.
This news is a year old. It's also blogspam. Here's the original, from 2012 https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120426/14505718671/insan...
But the Veronica Mars project just that,sooooo
1) There will always be high performance outliers in venture capital, it's the nature of the business, and as such the VC asset class will never actually sink. It'll continue to perpetually boom and bust. It's a 70 year old industry that serves a valuable function, it's not going anywhere.

2) Whether the VC market is crawling along or zooming is dependent on both the economy and the Fed's monetary policy. When money is cheap and easy to come by, it chases higher risk investments. If you can't earn 1% on your dollars, you're more likely to push that capital into riskier investments seeking yield.
Bacteria churn out first ever petrol-like biofuel
I think the "avoiding canonization" ship has long since sailed.
> Within two months, Allegra was given an internship at Apple. But just over a year later, Allegra says he was suddenly let go for failing to respond to an email that would have extended his employment.

To me, this doesn't read like he was "let go" at all from Apple. It seems like they extended him an offer to come back for another internship, which he failed to respond to in a timely fashion. Deadlines like this are given because departments need to determine their itern headcount for a summer so they can extend offers and allocate funds accordingly.
Man and Van N11, N22. Hire Man and Van Bounds Green, Haringey
Scientific paper that announced high levels of lead in rice retracted
GitHub intermittently down
Doesn't paying the legal bills for the other party create some conflicts of interest or other weirdnesses for the lawyers?

And why do VCs expect people to pay the legal bills? Who buys the coffee when they go for drinks?

---

Also, I'm using Chrome on Win Vista. Here's a screen shot. (http://imgur.com/5DP7C0e)

If that's how they wanted it to look, well, fair enough. But I don't think it is. I wonder how much time and effort is spent building style sheets that end up rendering as nasty as the results I got?
Because 1001 different Schemes exist and the code between them is not portable because the Scheme standard is so tiny.

Scheme code is so hopelessly unportable,that you can not even talk about "writing Scheme". You are either writing Gauche, or Chicken, or Racket, and once you write it, your code stays in that tiny little ecosystem with not more than 10 different users each.
FCC International Traffic Data Reports posted to Github
The net effect is that they're being more honest about how much they're actually willing to invest, correct? They don't magically have more money and the lawyers have to be paid anyhow. At least it puts the onus on them to keep their negotiations to a minimum.
And Amazon is one of the very few success stories of its era. Remember that there were dozens of very well capitalized venture funded retailers working one part of the market or another. Remember pets.com?

This is a big part of the reason why the current startup environment "feels" the same as the dot com crash. Valuations and funding have gotten completely divorced from the business fundamentals. YC startups are being handed blank checks, and no one even remembers "ramen profitable".

At this point, IMHO, it's undeniably unsustainable. Whether it constitutes a "bubble" or not is something we won't know until it pops.
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