skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i guess in 2013 iTunes overtook piracy in crushing the music industry because I see one of those articles every year, what exactly isn't crushing the music industry?
>I really find it hard to come up with a legitimate reason for this service

Do you really find it hard? Let me help you out then. First, there are people who don't live next to a locksmith. Second, there are people who drive home instead of walking, and an extra stop while driving certainly takes more time than checkin mail. Third, there are people who check their mail regularly anyway. Which is pretty much everyone.

That leaves us with all of the people who walk home, live next to a locksmith, and don't check their mail regularly, who can't make good use of this service.
Nuts pulled from shelves for having no nut-allergy warning
You are assuming the patient has complete information. If actually true, I would agree. What is "complete information"? Do the doctors offer the statistics that the treatment is not 25% effective, that by American medical treatment norms chemo is 75% worse than useless and of the remaining 25% many will still die?

The patients are scared. Doctors are playing on those fears, acting on the assumption that fast and aggressive treatment is the wisest course all the time. The patients are reacting out of fear, not getting second opinions, and are hurried into the operating table to be cut open.

That is the norm. I have seen it happen.

It is my personal opinion that, no, most doctors are not offering complete information. So your argument, while reasonable, simply does not apply.
Much respect to people fighting spam. It's one of the greatest challenges of the Internet age.
I'd like to point out that this curve seems to follow the economy almost perfectly with a climb until the late 90s, and then the economic slowdown of the 00s into the 'Great Recession'.

So, as we always say 'correlation doesn't mean causation'. iTunes probably isn't the cause, the severe decline in disposable income was the most likely factor.
The Rebirth and Future of Dashboard.io
"I have no use for bulging biceps."

For the past two years, I've relied on the fact that I walk a lot to take care of my exercise needs. But last year I started experiencing crippling neck and shoulder pain. A visit to the doctor and a referral to a physical therapist revealed that my upper body had atrophied to an alarming extent. Strength in the upper body affects your posture among other things. Muscle mass also affects your metabolism in a positive way. Now that I'm rebuilding I feel much better.

Plus I look better!
Look Out Google Fiber, $35-A-Month Gigabit Internet Comes to Vermont
I'd love to see arrows indicating dates when Napster, Kazaa, and Pirate Bay all began to achieve strong adoption rates. My music purchasing behavioral changes had nothing to do with iTunes..

I was a very happy Lala user until Apple killed it, and am now happy to pay $10/month to Spotify.
As a programmer who has seen all of the above (except for Dr. Who, never really could understand what was so special about it) while not being a fan of either of them in particular I also do feel that people who want to get into this industry should not look at these superficial things ("she/he wears a Star Wars t-shirt, she/he must be one of us")

I mean, reading "Ender's Game" as a 14-year old kid and being fascinated by it has nothing to do with the fact that 15+ years later I happen to program computers for a living. One of the major reasons that brought me into this industry (and one of the reasons I feel should be a big motivator for other people as well) it's that is so easy to build things that are actually useful.
I'm really surprised by the number of people trying to solve the author's problems. I don't think he posted this because he didn't have any good ideas on how to hire someone or wanted copy help on his hiring page.

I think he posted it because sometimes the most helpful thing is knowing that you're not the only one who wakes in the middle of night thinking about payroll and customer acquisition. I think he's wondering if other people have doubts and struggles. And anyone trying to start a company right now would know that as soon as they read it.

So, yes Jason, this is how it's suppose to feel and it's okay that it sucks. Just remember, you're more important than your work.
I used the word "gnostic", not "agnostic".
Quite unlikely. For paparazzi style imaging, satellites are very unsatisfactory.

1) Clouds. Major bummer.

2) Intermittent time on target - most the time when something interesting is happening, the satellite will be over some other place in the world. Geostationary satellites solve the "hover overhead" problem, but then see #1, #3, #4, #5.

3) Atmospheric distortion. Resolution is inherently limited unless you use adaptive optics.

4) The lens required to get decent resolution isn't going to fit on a microsat. See also #3.

5) Blurry pictures of the tops of celebrities' heads ain't gonna sell well.
This article assumes a lot:

* The aliens who possess the technological ability to reach Earth are the ones who built it and evolved alongside it. Who's to say they didn't take it by force?

* FTL is something that must be developed through technology. (i.e. discounting the possibility of naturally occurring wormholes)

* The aliens have no inherent desire for exploration

Yes, I've watched too much Sci-fi :)
>A bunch of C/C++/Java/Rust/Go folks are going to have a different value set

Not just from dynamically typed language people, but from each other. I don't know any C people or go people who like C++ or java for example.
Thanks for this. I was sick the day they taught this notation in my PL class and I need to learn it before my final exam next week!!! :)
I've seen studies where college students were shown a series of images. The sleep deprived students were more likely to recall the negative images. Focusing on the negative appears to be a hallmark of depression.

However, a depressed person can't seem to get enough sleep. Is it a snowball effect? Maybe the balance isn't about sleep deprivation, but finding the correct amount of sleep, waking to bright light, and keeping a consistent schedule.
But the "some form of contact" that's most likely is rudimentary communication with whatever small cross-section of people they kidnapped for study/captivity.

The rest of us would never know and just go on wondering "where is everybody".
Yep. Startups are like a shark, they have to keep moving forward or they die.
I personally would look to mount another office outside US. Make it in Spain, Argentina or elsewhere, put 10 good engineers to work in there with a good product manager and your engineer problems will be solved.
I think it's a great quote although a little sad about how true it is. I share your sentiment that many times the law is what keeps people in check. But as it is, we are humans and I think it is absolutely possible to at least ponder the thought of "social good".
Getting started with OpenTok's Mantis infrastructure
Despite all the hate surrounding Heroku lately, they're doing a pretty good job improving their product for users. This is good.
There's some evidence that the first attack was used in the wild, but the banks deleted the logs showing whether a PINless transaction took place so the customers were found liable for the charges.
This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones.

>there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers.

There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide range of values [1].

>Christopher Columbus first landing on North America (not a good event for native Americans)

The main reason Europeans were able to take over America was disease. The Aztec effort to kick out the Spanish was hampered by smallpox [2], and colonization of North America had to wait for over a century before the native population was sufficiently depleted by disease to stop offering resistance. [3] Needless to say, disease worked unintentionally and because both sides were the same species.

> So, screw it, all movie alien races invented artificial gravity.

Or, you know, maybe they built ships with rotating crew habitats that simulate gravity by centrifugal force. (I belive 2001 does a pretty good job of showing the concept.)

> If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", we're a 2 which is not comparatively far ahead of say, poodles - who are probably at a 1.

First off, poodles are at a zero. Second, if 10% of world GDP was dedicated to building an interstellar, multi-generation ark, we pretty much have the technology to do it right now. The technological problem is to reduce the cost to the point where the political will to do it can be summoned (probably around 0.01% of GDP).

>Maybe they want to trade with us. Well, yeah, right. If you've gotten this far it's obvious we have no tech that would interest them.

[4]

>How many years before we have a brain interface to Google? You'd know everything.

We already have Google in our pockets. But instantly finding any quote by Darwin doesn't mean I understand the theory of evolution.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_values

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuitl%C3%A1huac

[3] See timeline in http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
My boss knows Node
I don't know, working on a slow ass Rails stack might suck, but could be fun to rewrite it in something new and cool and hip and that scales way better like NodeJS.
the problem is also dependencies specified as:

gem 'activesupport', '>= 2.3.5' # too loosely
I'd also like to point out that it was placed there by local criminals, not the conference attendees. It was however discovered by the attendees and the hotel was notified and the offending ATM was turned over to police.
I know it was 4 hours ago but did you forget that we're talking about "price gouging" during disasters or some other event that disrupts normal supply lines?
How D3 Selections Work
Most of the comments here make an assumption that aliens would have similar motivations as ourselves.

Is there a chance that another intelligent lifeform would share ANY mental or emotional similarities with us? This assumes that they even have mental or emotional capabilities in the first place.

An alien intelligence could express itself collectively like an advanced ant colony or they could communicate in ways so different than us that we would each appear like brute beasts to each other.

If a giant amoeba colony that developed intelligence by acting as individual neurons in a collective brain we wouldn't even know unless its actions betrayed higher level planning and thinking. This would require that its motivations were at least marginally similar to our own.
30 day trials are prospect-hostile because they force customers onto the service provider's timeline, not the prospects. That said, I'm sure time-limited trials do force the decisioning process in a way freemium does not.

My opinion on SaaS plans is that the no/low-cost plan should be more or less fully functioning, without even some sort of limit such as number of leads (ex: Yammer, Zendesk, Eventbrite). When companies really start using your product, the features that make up a paid tier will become obvious and said companies will be more than willing to pay up.
The added information (depth, angles, shapes) don't contribute to the information being conveyed beyond a simple color change. Takes a lot more effort (however fast or cheap) to draw and perceive such effects than flat geometry. The audience may have spare mental cycles to throw at processing such info, but don't make them do so.
Only iTunes? Might be missing a few other changes in revenue.

What percentage of a CD sale went to the artist?

It's not really about a change in format but a change in a distribution model. Anything that reduces the amount of middle men is good for the consumer and the artist.
From what I can tell, thats basically what Betaworks are buying from Instapaper as well. Its not "technically challenging".
> The market is dynamic and responds to the signal.

W.r.t to price gouging, this is the thing that doesn't happen or doesn't happen quickly enough and means people who can't afford the new high price go without. For essentials like food, water, batteries in a no power situation, etc. that is a huge problem.
I'm pretty hard to fool.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gnostic (specifically definition 2)

http://actok.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Agnostic+v+Gnost...
Nate Gross disrupts the 17 years it takes to deploy medical discoveries
Since we haven't met aliens yet, and interstellar travel would take ridiculous amounts of time and energy, I don't think any of us alive will meet aliens. It's like saying none of us will experience an ice age. Even if they do happen regularly, it happens regularly on geologic time scales, so it isn't going to happen in your life span. There might be so many stars out there that aliens are bound to happen, but crossing stars takes so much time and energy it isn't going to happen often.
> However, a depressed person can't seem to get enough sleep.

This has not been my experience. If you mean that a depressed person continues to be tired after waking up from a full night's sleep, then sure, but that's not sleep deprivation.
Don't mind him rubyrescue, he's just trying to string you along. Oi.
2013 Top Wealthiest People in Britain and Ireland
It sounds like Creole is the same as Markdown, in the sense that it's "trying to find a balance between different languages." It seems that it's not a standard that everyone supports, it's a common denominator that eventually other people will add more features to.

Also, he says that StackOverflow supports an "alternative" link style such as <http://www.google.com>, but I'm pretty sure that's a standard. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#autolink
Potentially pointless anecdote: I've noticed sleep deprivation narrows my capacity for attention - to make an analogy with sight, it's like tunnel vision. As long as I have something to hold what's left of my attention span (e.g, work), I can't help but live in the moment, as I can't focus on (or even perceive, really) depressive thoughts at the same time.
You left out the misconception where FTL travel is even possible. That's probably most likely why we'll never meet aliens... the low likelihood of them being able to harness that level of energy reduced even further by the likelihood of a ship happening to stumble across this particular rock.... and then, further still by them even caring if they find us.

Heck, there might be cloud-squid in Jupiter we're not even aware of who make better conversationalists than us. The aliens might even show up after a thousand year trip and ignore the Earth entirely.
I'm not sure you understand what I said. Let me explicitly state what I tried to imply about your use of the word "gnostic": people who call themselves gnostic atheists are not generally being philosophically ignorant or dishonest.
Agreed. However, I think a lot of the PM hating arises due to PMs who think that just because work flows through them to the customer, it's ok for them to take credit for it. I've dealt with inefficient PMs, and I can live with such people, but PMs who use their job as an expression of their inner narcissism are a different story. I think the latter motivates people to take up torches and pitchforks more than the former.
Already clearly peaked and in decline 4 years before itunes launched, presumably due to piracy.
Right, my point is that neither service is ironclad secure. (By the way, loading and activating a prepaid Visa anonymously is more tricky than you'd think post Patriot Act - I'd venture criminals would more likely just grab a stolen CC).

Interesting about the redaction. Presumably that's to guard your home if the picture is ever compromised?
have the source posted anywhere?
On top of all that, we're forgetting that aliens might not just be very distant from us in space, but also in time. Implied in the Drake equation is also the percent of technologically advanced intelligent life-bearing planets in the universe, but technologically advanced intelligent life-bearing planets that happen to have hit some technological threshold within the right time frame to contact us. Once you start thinking of it that way, the probabilities get freakishly small. A couple small evolutionary events and a parallel Earth could have achieved sentient space-faring intelligence of some sort a billion years ago. If they came to check us out we wouldn't be here. Likewise, a couple mass extinction events on another parallel Earth could keep space-faring intelligence on the back burner for another 2 billion years.
You're absolutely right. Is there any way to solve this? I don't know that a small publisher could ever give them this recognition. Maybe find some that are interested in money versus fame?
You may be confusing depression for anxiety.
Good on you Jason, for an anti-fairy-tale post. It's good to hear we aren't the only ones! Keep prioritizing well and working with attention. Keep your cool and most of all: stick with it.
Please don't confuse what I'm saying. I don't know what type of developers that they are chasing but what happens after the startup phase and into the profitability/scaling phase is code cleanup. I've done enough of it to know that it's not that fun (or sexy, in my book) to see what shortcuts were made to get something working right now. Untangling that and getting it to work on a grand scheme doesn't sell all that well to the type-A 'let's hack this out!' startup mentality.

This is where you need the pragmatic developers who you probably wouldn't have hired at the start. They are (relatively) slow and tedious, but the job will be done right. This tends to be a natural flow of from start-up to mature company.
Why was "Don't be a douche" removed from the title?
Apple fans are apple fans because of the OS and the industrial design... not the hardware specs.
What are the best ways to think of ideas for a startup?
The film and even more so the book Solaris describes an alien intelligence that is far more interesting than the anthropomorphic forms that humans fantasize about.

The "alien" in Solaris is a sentient ocean that covers the surface of the planet. All kinds of structures form and dissolve on the surface. The being can communicate with visitors by accessing their minds and seems to alter reality itself to entertain their fantasies.

Whose to say that other lifeforms would be single units (like human egos), or would operate on time scales that we can even comprehend ? Or operate consciously only in 3 dimensions.

that said, there are probably more like us.
I'm really happy that there are APIs like OpenTok out there. If you've ever tried implementing WebRTC video streaming yourself, getting live video set up is quite complicated and even when you do, many users will not be able to use it because of P2P Symmetric NAT problems.
I've talked to these guys several times. They fail to address the exact problem I mentioned. They only have a few books, and they suck. They need to somehow find lots of teachers willing to write books.
I have never met a markup language with a intuitive way to make links. I wish they would all just support a href HTML and convert it internally to whatever their weird option is.
Thrust vectoring owns the sky! Now you've got me thinking of cellphones turning on a dime, Macross Zero style.
Social Signalling
Tesla addresses 'bricked battery' concerns with nigh-unconditional warranty
It's about thermal flux (or heat flux) [0] - the rate of heat flow (SI unit: joules per second aka watts) per surface area (SI unit: square meters).

If the Earth's inner core could be duplicated and moved to space so that its apparent size in the sky would equal the Sun's, it would indeed appear to shine just as brightly as our favorite star. However, it would cool and dim very quickly (relatively speaking), all its stored heat being able to freely radiate into the cold space, the ultimate heatsink.

This is because unlike the Sun, the Earth's core has no active energy source to speak of. A part of the heat is generated by the ongoing decay of long-lived radioactive isotopes, but most of it was created billions of years ago as a byproduct of Earth's formation.

So how do Earth's mantle and crust prevent the heat from escaping quickly? Remember the three mechanisms of heat transfer: radiation, conduction, and convection. The core cannot radiate because there's rock in the way. Rock is also a poor conductor of heat. Even though there are convective currents in the mantle, which is malleable and does flow over geological timescales (but is not liquid!) the convection is far too slow to efficiently transfer heat from the core to the surface.

If the core were to suddenly gain a more effective mechanism of generating more heat, it would cause the core temperature to rise. This would, in turn, raise the temperature of the mantle and the crust, until the thermal flux through the surface matched the extra energy created in the core. Similarly, in the core-in-space thought experiment above, the core would cool until the radiated heat was equal to that generated by the radioactive decay.

The attentive reader might have noted that the above implies a relationship between the surface temperature of a body and its radiative heat flux. This is indeed the case: given an idealized black body [1], the Stefan-Boltzmann law [2] states that the total irradiance (radiative heat flux through the whole surface of the body) is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature (in kelvins) and depends on no other variables. Planets, stars, and duplicated planetary cores are not idealized black bodies but can be approximated as such.

That our planet's core is so slow to cool has a few consequences. The convective currents of the liquid outer core generate the planetary magnetic field that protects us from the solar wind and other charged particles. The convection in the mantle, on the other hand, is responsible for volcanism and plate tectonics. Mars, our sister planet in many respects but only one tenth the mass of Earth, lost its youthful warmth much faster. If it ever did have plate tectonics or a global magnetic field, they shut down billions of years ago when the core and mantle cooled.

TLDR: The Sun continuously creates huge amounts of energy that has to go somewhere, the Earth's core a) doesn't and b) is well insulated.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_flux

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body_radiation

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
> When I chose my machine, it outspec'd the MBP in every way

...

> to build quality

What, praytell, did you buy?
That's probably the issue, it's a j-o-b not the adventure they're describing - big problems, software that matters, best work of your life... really it's the 7 billionth CRUD website and the people looking for that job will probably never include "heroes" in their search on monster.com.
Didn't these guys have one of those over-the-top programming challenges about a year ago?
Meet Mr. Money Mustache, the man who retired at 30
Industrial design _is_ a hardware spec.
AltWWDC - free wwdc alternative
Poll: How often do you read books?
I read multiple books daily
I read a book daily
I read multiple books a few times a week
I read a book a few times a week
I read multiple books throughout the year
I read a book throughout the year
I rarely read books
I rarely read books but wish I read more often
I rarely read books because I don't enough time