skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They've had incredibly strong growth since the release of Path 3.0 (in Path growth terms that is). They've been growing at 1 million users a week recently. They were also moving consistently into the top grossing apps in the app store.

I agree that spam can be used by companies sometimes in desperation, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence this was the case. Of course, we have no idea what really happened behind the scenes.
So like a startup that burns all the remaining money on a single super bowl ad?

Paint me skeptical on the wisdom of such investments.
Heh, not only that, but it implies that discovering the fundamental secrets of the universe isn't "sufficiently ambitious" compared to making things more efficiently or making easier-to-use gadgets.
No, they merely apply to go to Mars.

The dying part, they can do here just as well.
I think the statement "if you're building your platform on another platform; you're at the mercy of the underlying platform" is more accurate.

Facebook and Twitter have changed their Terms of Services/APIs multiple times which has resulted in bad times for Facebook applications like Vintage Camera and MessageMe[1] and Twitter services like Flattr[2].

However, Tapbots has been successful in adapting its Tweetbot client to comply with Twitter's API changes[3]. While the API changes cost Tapbots extra development time to bring Tweetbot up to snuff, their core business was not adversely affected. I don't think Tapbots has a bad time because they make Twitter clients that rely on third-party API access, but they are at the mercy of Twitter continuing to allow third-party API access.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732439280457836...

[2] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/16/flattr-twitter-paym...

[3] http://tapbots.com/blog/news/dont-panic
I suspect most of these people won't go when the chips are down. The training, mounting stress and creeping realization that this mission is most likely suicidal will separate the wheat from the chafes.

Having said that, I have half the mind to go, but that's also why I'm not. I'm not particularly sane or stoic, and this would make me crack for sure.
Just curious: which aspects of this elementary math education would you say could be taught by automated high-quality means, such as the combination of interactive games and questions that many people are working on right now? I assume that video lectures would not be effective at that age.
>E.g. speculatively even looking near call sites by method name

That is devious and fantastic.

> But to get the most performance out of this you're likely to need to be prepared to do some very basic JIT.

Yeah. But the attractive targets here are places where you can't have a JIT: embedded systems and iOS.
so in other words no M5, no alpina B7, no E63. probably no Caddilac V, no LS7 ZR1, no Audi RS either. in other words, you have no idea about other cars in the Sperf's class, just some bullshit cheapie base-model cars that are about $30k cheaper. but you are a tech dude with money who likes the idea of electric vehicles, so you like the Sperf, because it APPEALS TO YOU. and there's nothing wrong with that.

"instant" torque is cool and all, but no match for "more" torque. which also happens to be "instant" when you move beyond a cheapass 3-series M or base 911 with no balls (try a GT2, when you start wearing big boy pants) or V10 in that price range.
It seems the main difference here is that you're mainly talking to people in the USA, while i talk mainly to people in Europe.

As for contracting: Oftentimes bioinformatics people will realize that they're not good programmers at all and call in people to help make their code less of a rat's nest and learn from them at the same time. It happens quite often here in Europe.
This argument can just as easily be used to support a claim that generating C via string manipulation can very well be less error prone than relying on a huge, complex API like LLVM.

It is not a given that there are "more moving parts" in generating C output from a compiler than in using LLVM.
It all depends on what you're counting. Sort algorithm analysis typically counts key comparisons or record movement. In radixsort (and trie algorithms in general), you are relying on operations on digits of the key, not comparisons of entire keys. So linear isn't necessarily wrong, but you do have to say what you're counting.

Number theory? Not seeing the connection.
I agree that the USSR had not fell because of the communism per se. It's been destroyed by the apathy, caused by people getting their basic needs covered without the need to work.

When they started - they've got a boost in productivity, even higher than the article describes. They've built up quite a lot in the 1920s-1930s. However, as the workforce become filled with the generations that took this system for granted, its effect turned into the opposite direction and by 1970s, as the last pre-revolutionary generation retired, there had been very few people left who actually wanted to do anything productive. The country went along for a while selling oil and other natural resources but the oil prices dropped in 80s and that was the end of it. There was just not enough oil any more to feed the whole country of 250M people.
And only linux kernel 3.2? :/
They have an asset that has become an integral part of the culture, and I don't think that's an understatement. How much would something like that go for on the open market today?
I'm definitely curious to see how Path's growth works out now. It seems that since they are focused on close friends and family that phone contacts will work for this to some extent.

They definitely pose a threat to Facebook's stream quality if they do continue to grow. They could pull an Instagram and take away the Facebook share feature, or make it less useful. Something that could backlash on them, but doesn't seem to have affected Instagram's growth. If they grew too large and did something like this, it could effectively reduce the number of quality posts on Facebook, something you could argue it already suffers from depending on your current Facebook friends and likes.
For anyone else wondering, RHEL 6.4 has the 2.6.32-358 kernel.

Zenwalk 7.2 has the 3.2.5 kernel.

What's the point of citing the kernel shipped with another distro here?
WriteNear
Strongly agree. Aside from the first-order benefits of encryption becoming ubiquitous (government can't read my) stuff, there are side effects that may be even more important.

If everyone is using Tor, for example, there is a lower probability that any given Tor user is engaging in activity the government does not approve of. And the more "legitimate" users there are, the harder it is to criminalize users.
With these amounts of bandwidth, does that still make sense? Sounds like this was a one-man job that worked.
Users know when they are being spammed.

Not always though. I know of a messaging app that has spammed the hell out of my friends. The trick is that it will ask for contact info and then automatically send SMS to all of them asking to install it. Message goes something like, "Hi, I am using <app name> to message for free. Get it from <website>."

Since it looks like it was sent from a friend, it has seem huge growth, at least in my friend circle.
re: JIT on iOS I've heard of people compiling their own JavaScriptCore (to use Ejecta), is this still an issue? Embedded systems is another story, I'd be far more concerned about Clojure's assumptions about GC.
Thanks for the down vote.

If you find any technical inconsistencies in what I said, please let me know.
> Too much perl code is essentially write once and forget.

Please stop repeating this misconception. People who put little effort into learning how to program write "write-once" code in any language. Perl had the "misfortune" of being the only dynamic language on the block for a long time, leading to many people reaching for it to get things done without bothering to actually learn the language, thus creating a vast corpus of low quality code.

(It does not help that the definitive resource of Perl for bioinformatics people, which i've seen in libraries like those of the Genome Campus in Cambridge, isn't worthy of being used as toilet paper, yet influenced a whole generation of scientists.)

> I've spent far too many hours trying to figure out what a perl script does

How often do you reach for perltidy when you do this?
7% for the first hire was too much?
It's a nice post, but if the first hire is as key as the text says, I don't think 5% is too much.
Not sure if this is FB punishing Path for bad behavior, or more that they see Path as a potentially credible competitor with Path growing as fast as FB is shrinking
It's an interesting fact I suppose. It's interesting to see why certain distros chose certain kernel versions.
There's a difference between making up for an existing disparity (the site you linked claims it is doing this and I applaud them for their efforts) and creating a new one (e.g. differential BI).

I don't think there is a single person here who would support giving BI preferentially to men, so when you proposed giving money to women we all assumed you meant giving it preferentially to women, because otherwise your statement would have simply been a restatement of what everyone else was saying. I object to the notion of giving BI preferentially to women, although I fully support the cause of ensuring they receive their share.

Please clarify what you meant.
Very much more complex, I think, stemming from diverse historical and cultural differences. I would put it that Boston is actually more truly liberal than even SF: Massachusetts, after all, put many policies into action that California even could not actually do (sure sure, it was the central valley, but still). Boston, being authentically liberal, and more generally authentic itself, is rather conservative about its liberalism. We still have some puritanical roots, and discussion still needs to be proper and polite, and politics is not brought to the table often for this reason. The general social protocol here is to be nice, pay attention to what you say, think carefully before you say it, don't offend, be agreeable.

SF is quite the opposite: discussion of anything is on the table, you say things first and think later or think by talking, everyone is expected to offend and to not be offended by anything, and if you cross any lines you're told so bluntly and argue back. It's a culture of debate, it's anti-puritan, anti-polite, and more free-as-in-speech free. But what you say becomes more important than what you believe, and your beliefs are allowed to be much more malleable and impermanent. Because of this, I say that it's less authentic, in that people are less solid in their ways and more apt to say what's popular or interesting at the time rather than what they solidly believe, and thus, they form fewer things solidly.

Disclaimer: I grew up in California, went to school in the Bay, and have lived in Boston for five years. I feel I survive well here because I actually fit in better with the slightly more intellectually conservative culture; or at least I feel like I understand it well enough. I think these cultural differences are fascinating because the cities share so many similarities otherwise.

I think the HubSpot article actually makes sense in this context—Boston folks do tend to be more loyal, have more of a sense of permanence both intellectually and socially, and know how to live through a good cold winter—a quality and gumption not to be overlooked!

Anyway, interesting and fascinating, and dripping with stereotypes and generalization, but in a good way. :)
As someone who doesn't use Clojure, but watches it fairly closely, I'd say the least appealing part of Clojure is its reliance on the JVM.

As such, I'd say efforts such as these are greatly welcomed.
Isn't this just a scam?
Republican Introduces Bill To Require Political Approval Of Scientific Papers
Who says they aren't offering programs to learn to read? Even if you went on a literacy campaign and made it a crime to be unable to read & write, you'd still have a transitional period, in which case services exactly like this one would be valuable.
Just make sure you're not on "testing" if you're doing this for a desktop (note that it is uncommon to run "testing" on a server). This release means that Sid ("unstable") just became "testing". Now, many folks are running Sid fine on their desktops, but historically the Sid -> testing push is volatile in the short term, and you probably would want to wait a couple weeks.

Basically, be wary of "testing" after a release.
Congratulations to everyone involved. I've been running wheezy on my home server for a while now (/var/www moved to /srv, apt diffs package lists...) and i look forward to upgrading the production servers over the coming months.

As an aside, it's really interesting that the word 'Linux' is mentioned only once on this page - and only after the kFreeBSD kernel.
This feels like one of the most "in your face" scams I've seen in awhile.

The first thing I wanted to find out when I visited the site is where they got their funding - of course that section is absent from the site.
The second thing I looked up is how they expected to get there and how they were solving the engineering challenges involved. On the technology page I found a dumbed down list of the different modules involved in the launch, and on the "is this really possible?" page I got a tidbit telling me they were using solar panels and nonpressurized rovers.

The icing on the cake is the $38 application fee and the note that "The entire plan revolves around the use of existing, validated technology".
Funny that the reason I love Boston so much as a tech scene is that it feels smaller and more accessible than SF, in the same way Myrtle Beach must feel even smaller and more accessible than Boston.

Sounds like there's a balance of many factors going on, with a sweet-spot depending on your needs and desires. Maybe someone can make a "startup location" tool that takes all the variables and spits out the perfect city for your startup!
By their settlement date, a falcon heavy or a variant of it, should be ready.
I wasn't being facetious, I just hadn't thought it through as thoroughly as you have. Good points.
Have you looked at mjolnir[0]? It was part of a presentation at Clojure West this year. I'm not sure if the video is out yet, but the slides are[1].

[0] https://github.com/halgari/mjolnir

[1] https://github.com/strangeloop/clojurewest2013/tree/master/s...
Welcome to Debian Stable. :)
I was under the impression that a newer kernel ment more hardware support. Am I wrong?
I'm not, because I find Debian's KVM support to be not what I expect, but if you don't like Ubuntu for whatever reason, it's not a bad time to do it. That said, Debian stable means you'd better be happy with what you have for a very long time unless you want to deal with the often-painful stable->testing or stable->unstable migration. (It can be done, I've done it many times, but expect it to break something.)

Personally, I just use Ubuntu. It's Debian unstable but shinier. :)
Shows how unbearably slow Debian's release cycle is. Wheezy ships with all the latest packages from 2 years ago.
Only if they get a LOT of mail.
Being pissed leads to me donating money to the ACLU, voting, and voicing my opinions.
Of course.

The tone of the top-level comment, I think, is "woah, Debian, you call this kernel updated?"

Rock-solid distros like RHEL/CentOS and Debian are deliberately conservative. Some folks don't like that.
Debian testing won't have "the latest features" a year from now, though. I guess it'll have "later features", but IME desktops really benefit from tracking unstable. Which, as one might expect, is sometimes...unstable. Enter Ubuntu.

There's a pretty good reason to use Debian on servers because of the long support cycles, but on a desktop I feel like most people are going to probably prefer an Ubuntu setup.
Think Manhattan except car ownership is an almost must-have.

This depends a lot on where you live. People outside the SF Bay Area tend to use "The Valley" rather indiscriminately, I've found. If you actually mean in Silicon Valley itself, then it's difficult to get around without a car (although not impossible, especially if you have a bike and both live and work within sane biking distance of a light rail station).

But our current dotcom boom is different from the 1999 boom in one significant respect--a much higher proportion of the action is happening in San Francisco. If you can manage to live in SF itself, Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, Daly City, or arguably even certain neighborhoods in cities on the peninsula, you may be able to get along very well without a car. I have several friends who don't have any issue without one. (I live in Santa Clara and could actually probably manage without a car given my specific neighborhood--even though I go into an office in San Francisco once or twice a week--but I wouldn't enjoy it.)

The costs certainly are insane, which is really the biggest problem I have here; I'm a middle-aged guy who still lives a lot like a college student: renting an apartment with a roommate. My roommate's job is moving farther east and our already-expensive apartment is likely to have another rent increase in the fall, which may leave me stuck between moving with him to a likely-cheaper abode with a much more inconvenient commute (a 30-minute drive to get to a train station which is farther away from SF than the one I go to now) or trying to find a one-bedroom place that I can afford on my own.

But, as much as I grumble about SOCIAL GAMIFICATION SOCIAL BADGE SOCIAL SOCIAL SOCIAL everywhere, I think the "groupthink" out here gets... hmm. I'm not sure whether it's overstated, or whether people tend to underestimate whatever groupthink exists in their locales, or maybe some of both. But it's actually not that difficult to find companies out here whose business plans are more inspiring than "give away shit for free, connect to every social network everywhere and hope Facebook or Twitter buys us."

Austin would probably be a very good choice for a startup. If I were leery of the SF Bay Area, though, I don't think I'd be any less leery of NYC unless I had a really specific reason to pick it. It's the only metro area running essentially neck and neck with us for living costs.
> I've said it before and I'll say it again: anonymity online and encrypted communications are one of the most important problems we're going to going to face in the coming decades. Hackers should be working on those, not clever ways to serve ads or geolocating your latest locally-sourced coffee.

Are you currently putting code behind that yourself? We could always use contributions and help with new and ongoing OSS projects at Open Whisper Systems.
So it doesn't exist, and is therefore unvalidated...
If you're running Ubuntu Desktop and want to run modern game systems like Steam then I think you'd want to stay on Ubuntu.
So then run ArchLinux on your servers, and godspeed? Debian is not aimed at having the latest and greatest, but its packages do tend to be more up-to-date than RHEL/CentOS, which is its main competition in the "stable server distro that doesn't get you fired" category.
Surely these utterly fall apart (perhaps that is what you meant to begin with) when considering actual usage rather than arbitrary geographical boundaries.

Oakland is very much not the geographical equivalent of Brooklyn (you might be able to make some sort of argument for the Bronx or Staten Island). San Francisco is not more densely populated than Manhattan, neither is, by a long stretch LA.
I can see from an clean request to google.com that they set two cookies on your browser that are set to expires 6 months from the last request to google.com.

So assuming you use google more than once every 6 months they can keep a running log of your searches, and as soon as you log in to any google service with that cookie they will associate it with your account (I'm guessing).

If you clear your cookies reguarly or use incogneto it's not an issue.
A modest processing fee isn't unreasonable. It ensures only those who are truly serious apply, and the money would help cover the many costs of this campaign.

Common, don't be so cynical.
Traveling to US first time
Hi HNs,
How you doing.

I am an entrepreneur in Startup Chile and working on a startup for elder people.
I am traveling to US (first time) next week and will be there till late June. I am going to SF, Vegas, DC, Boston, NY to attend some events and meet some people.

Could you suggest any events, people I could visit (including you)
I am looking to raise money and form partnerships for launching my startup in US.

Ajay
www.2nl.co
and with upstart &co
The World’s Biggest Public Companies
This is something I find tremendously useful in programming, but at the same time find a lot of other developers amazed when it's used.

I don't care if the dataset in memory is 553MB or 632MB - what I really need to know is whether it's "a few tens of MB", "a few hundreds of MB", or a "a few thousand MB".

I don't care if the API server can service 7321 simultaneous requests or 6578 - I just need to know if its "a few hundred", "a few thousand", or "a few tens of thousands".

You can solve an enormous number of engineering and architecture problems with a reliable order-of-magnitude estimate - at the very least you can quickly exclude solutions that are vastly under (or over) provisioned for the problem you're trying to solve.

A good order-of-magnitude estimate is also a great error check for a more detailed calculation, if my quick estimate said "5000-ish plus or minus 50%", and your calculation says "24,152", one of us has got something wrong.
bah just as I was finishing my register allocator...

My Firefox history indicates that I have read the Mjolnir page before, but I don't recall why I didn't use it at the time. Taking another look :-P. Thanks for the link!
There's more about the discovery of the RDS data here: http://windytan.blogspot.fi/2013/04/how-i-discovered-rds.htm...

(there's also a couple links at the end of this article discussing how she modified her radio to provide a digital interface for the data)
They were also moving consistently into the top grossing apps in the app store.

This is interesting. How is revenue calculated for free apps?
Hello Poe's Law†.

†: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law
I, as a self-taught programmer, would learn design if I knew how. I just couldn't find any good material on this. I'm wondering if it is because designers are bad teachers or what. I subscribed to one of those courses that popped up here in hacker news. It was terrible. All it did was send me weekly emails with videos about how cool apple products are, or tasks that were way too far away from the actual work. I'm sorry don't remember its name.

Does anyone know of a good book/tutorial/course to learn the very basics? How the hell do I choose a good colour combination? I've read about the colour theory. Now what?
Once you're in a cold war, it makes sense to play to your strengths. Capitalism, as an economic system, is better at producing weapons because it's better at producing anything, and producing a lot of weapons is a good way to get the other side to try and keep up. It's like developing a massive tolerance to alcohol so you can drink people under the table.
I'll keep you posted on whether or not the Design for Hackers book is any good.
Another article [1] says over 20,000 people applied, which is over three quarters of a million dollars.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/more-than-20000-peopl...
FB hit 1.1 billion the other day as reported in their quarterly earnings -- a growth of 100 million is not exactly "shrinking"