skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While going through a Math undergrad program in the mid-90s, I noticed that some number of my fellow students had a distaste for programming.

As someone who'd done reasonably well with both and had thought of them as heavily overlapping areas, I thought this was interesting, so I tried to poke at this a bit.

One of the concepts I got back from a talented classmate was basically a complaint about mutable variables -- that in an algebraic description of relationships for a given system what we call "variables" are less variable and more "unknowns" which represent fixed if unidentified quantities. Others similarly noted there was something absurd about writing out equations like "x = x + 2".
So the fact that 1.4 million people "left" doesn't really mean anything then.

Also, according to all statistics, Facebook has actually been GROWING. They have 1.11 billion users now compared to less than 1 billion last year. Something like a 26% growth if I recall.

Come on people, there are only a finite number of internet connected human beings on this planet. Growth HAS to slow down at some point. They're not gonna double their userbase YoY if they already have over 1bn people on their service....that'd literally be impossible.
> The 5 rss feed limit is part of our business model. Feeds consume resources and resources cost money.

Unique feeds consume resources. Two customers following the same feed should not double the resources needed to support that feed.

Create a test account that follows the top 10-20 of public feeds already followed by your existing users. That will not consume any more resources (apart from the overhead of an extra row in your users table). Let that be the demo account.

Actually, since you're presenting reading lists as a feature, a demo/guest account can probably just subscribe to that. Then there's the resource overhead of supporting reading list(s) per account.
Tumblr has a massive amount of hardcore porn gifs and jpgs. Flickr does not.
You've read the page for prospective clients. We give clients the option to have a developer with that level of responsiveness.

Client and developer arrangements are mutual, and not all clients require developers to respond within 3 hours on their day off. But, if your client does, you need to do it. Moreover, it is just important that you keep your word. If you tell your client you are going away Saturday and won't be able to answer emails, and you cleared this with them up front, there's not going to be any problem. But, if you told your client "Oh hey, don't worry: i'll keep the server running." and then you took off on a vacation without your smartphone and laptop, then that's a problem.

Many clients have had bad experiences with unresponsive developers. At TopTal, we strive to guarantee that they will receive the level of responsiveness desired.
For clojure, I'd actually recommend using light table. From my experience with the latest dev versions, the learning curve isn't hard at all and immediately having your code evaluated is pretty powerful and intuitive. [I started learning clojure recently as well]
Perhaps he means with only submitting articles?

Alternatively, there could be a time period before users can post comments or articles, though I don't really like having a time limit for posting comments, since that hinders insightful comments from throwaway accounts. It would also hurt users that only want to post because an article is extremely relevant to them and they know the subject well (or are involved in it). Really no winning scenario to this.

We could have some sort of user "turing test" to see if users are ready to post/submit on HN, but then one is left with answering "how does one know a user is ready and what are the qualifications?" On some of the Android forums where every user (hyperbole sorta) that roots their phone thinks they're a development expert, I always wanted to implement forcing users to look up various parts of the AOSP source (and/or answer questions about terminology) before they could comment in the development specific subforums. Though that is a bit more black and white than something similar applied to HN.
Tumblr is directly tracked by Quantcast.

They do 65x million uniques per month and 5.4x billion pageviews.

The most concerning thing for Tumblr, is the fact that they've had zero net growth in traffic and uniques over the last year. And their monthly pageviews are down 2 billion versus a year ago. Their traffic is likely done growing. If Tumblr doesn't sell now, they're in deep shit.
WebGL based web application for rendering 2D and 3D fractals in real-time
I'm sorry, I'm not at all sure how to respond to this comment. It aligns not at all with the world I experienced between 2000 and 2009. From my viewpoint, each non-ME desktop/workstation iteration of Windows during that period -- 2000, XP, and Vista and their service packs -- provided significant advancement in security and features, even if in Vista's case, the total package was arguably undesirable.

The comparison to what has happened with GNOME seems particularly off-base, since Microsoft was not actively seeking to destroy existing workflows and pitch anyone -- power user or not -- overboard. On the contrary, their fanatical devotion to backward compatibility largely remained and paid great dividends, as it has for ~30 years.

I say this not as someone who has any need to defend Microsoft, by the way. My livelihood has never substantially depended on anything Microsoft-related, and my own first choice of productivity OS was Linux by the late 90s, and OS X by 2006.

Your apparent worldview simply cannot be reconciled with my own experiences. It's as if you'd said what a lovely shade of puce the clear blue sky was.
Reaching traction
Both iOS and Android have app kill switches.

Probably not the best links but ...

http://www.macworld.com/article/1134930/iphone_killswitch.ht...

http://www.tracyandmatt.co.uk/blogs/index.php/android-has-ap...
See beautiful examples here: http://plginrt-project.com/adb/?p=13917
Javascript is pretty hot right now with the advent of NodeJS. Scala and Clojure are the up and comers. Python is a solid choice. Java, C/C++ are classic and have some new features on the horizon. Haskell, Erlang, and other lisp varieties are enjoying a resurgence.

Those languages cover many genres of programs: Scientific, parallel/concurrent, server-side, client-side, desktop, mobile, embedded, scripting, business, gaming, and so on.

The question is what are you most interested in? Are you trying to find a job or are you learning because you find it interesting? Do you have projects in mind? What would be the right tool for the job?
The word, "Founder" - isn't really black and white.

Simply drawing a salary doesn't mean you aren't a founder - the vast number of founders of companies I know of in the valley draw a salary. Not investing money, also, doesn't mean you aren't a founder.

My definition of a founder? Someone who's idea's shaped what the company would be, who started work on the project prior to there being an actual company, brought a lot to the table (whether that is engineering, marketing, money, leadership) that made the company successful, and had an equity stake in the company.

In Marco's case, all four are true. He was there before tumblr existed, helped shape what tumblr would do, did much of the engineering that made tumblr what it is today, and he had an equity stake. He could reasonably be called a founder.

With that said, being known as a "Founder" is also subject to negotiation, and sometimes an employee can come on up to a year after the company is started, invest no money, but still be called a "Founder." It's really quite nebulous.
I'll be interested to see Marissa Mayer's stance on this - I wonder if she'll be as progressive as the media makes her out to be.
The Pricing that Danielle has quoted - $10-15 RPM is extremely high.

First - Tumblr is not a "Premium" Property. NBCNews.com and Business week is.

Second - Porn which is plentiful on Tumblr is the opposite of premium. It tends to be cheap and not easily monetizable.

Third - A better metric to use would be CPM. Un-targeted ads deliver <$1 CPM Typically. These are the Run off Network kind of campaigns.

Targeted ads such as search / display targeting, retargeting typically deliver between $2.5 - $5.00 which represents the best case.

Fourth - The ad platforms tend to take a revenue cut + platform fee which easily amounts to 30-40% of that.

Fifth - I am assuming that Tumblrs ads are direct buys in which case it is highly unlikely that they can quote CPMs given in my earlier statements. This is because they probably don't have enough technology to deliver those kind of media buys yet.

Net net..your numbers are off. The $3b title is a nice bait but the valuation numbers are off.
> but you cannot obviously reinstall it

From the App Store, no, but from your iTunes backups you can. All you need is the .ipa backup file associated with a purchase under your Apple ID.

I've got this for several apps (iMAME and Gridlee, to name two) that Apple's done similar to.
I encountered an insurance company that used floating point as their standard data type for monetary values. On the bright side, that was in the late nineties; hopefully they've switched to a proper decimal type since then.
It is and will be scaled. Half the world still does not have 3g access through smartphones.
This is another one of those SV deals that simply DO NOT make sense whatsoever.

So Yahoo! wants the young audience (check), but what are they going to do? Throw ads at young teens (who browse porn and nail art on Tumblr)? Have a "bigger" presence in mobile? Integrate Flickr with Tumblr? Don't get this.

And how does Yahoo! still have cash? Jesus

The acquisition just makes zero sense, Tumblr price (valuation) makes even less sense:

- $15M in revenue (down $85M from the projected 2013 of $100M)
- 175 employees (for what? 150 of them are probably useless with regard to the company)
- Running out of cash (so hey, let's sell for $1B since we'll be worth $100M in 6-months anyway)

Why is SV rushing in to buy this company as, like another user said, the wheels are falling off? Where is the value, yet alone $1B value?

Just stupid SV math.
Bang with friends seems crass... Not to mention randomly fucking your friends is usually a stupid idea. It makes social relationships awkward and complicated.
Actually, some would say that laziness is supreme virtue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi

Work, work, work, work, work, more work, work more, must achieve success, must attain the "goal"

...ark, ack, nyug, gasp, Die.

We all meet the same end whether we attain something (achievement oriented successful person) or not (good for nothing enlightened lazy person).
Is the form under the social signup buttons not a 'local' signup?
Tumblr and Twitter both used to, and I've met a bunch of developers at meetups who rather than think S3 is a CDN, do not understand what a CDN is.
Sony A4-sized digital paper notepad [video]
I think that the possibilities of growth and diversification element of your question is less dependent on the language per-say and more dependent on the languages eco-system. Objective C gives lots of options because of this, as does java, javascript and C++. Python is definitely up and coming here because US academia seems to have picked it up, although I think it's slow and I can't work the configuration management elements (I constantly get this egg needs this egg type issues) - still I have just dabbled (for much the same reasons as you!) so I know little. I do know though that there are many interesting projects using python now and that as a language it's very well thought through and powerful semantically.
Not yet... LXC is not even production ready yet in terms of security. Will take a year or two but it's getting there.
If you want to do web browser then javascript

For apple (IOS/OSX) then objective C or maybe Ruby or lua

Embedded programming then C

Microsoft you have a large choice C# or VB.Net perhaps

Android is Java

Enterprise programming then Java or C#

Pose value haskell or scala :-)

It depends on your background and what you want to do. I think every developer should know C or C++ but not as a starter unless you like serious hacking. Javascript is the language of the web browser so you'd need to know that for any browser programming. Enterprises run on C# or Java.

Then of course there are all the scripting languages python is perhaps the most popular for general scripting, or powershell for windows
Quick rebuttal: Flickr barely makes any money.
This has definitely been useful as a way of determining interest – based on reaction so far it seems like the book premise is good.

I decided to remove the percentage for now since it was an arbitrary number. I'm not even sure what will make the book 100% if I plan to go back and add/revise chapters as js libraries are updated/released. Using semantic version numbers and a roadmap would be better.

I'll add a list of completed/started/planned chapters to the book description soon, which will be much more useful than a percentage.
Download Games Free
Here you can download unlimited games for free, without spending a dime
http://idownloadgames.net
Nikola Tesla Pitching Silicon Valley VCs [video]
Seems like it may solve one set of issues, but will create an entirely new class of potential problems that I'm not sure are any better. A lot of the teething issues seem to be getting some focus though and maybe this will get better over time.

What dependency issues with Django apps have you been having a hard time solving? You should be able to solve everything with a decent configuration management system like puppet/chef/saltstack/ansible.
anything opensource?
> "and simple, specialised libraries which can be mixed in as and where required"

Well if you're using the AMD syntax, that's what you're doing, albeit initially limited to the (extensive) dojo library.

I personally find the dojo core relatively simple to use. Each individual module is small enough to grok in a few minutes.
I found "compromising" pictures of a friend of a friend on flickr once. That having been said, it was shocking to find it on flickr, I can't think of any other time I saw content anywhere near that "vulgar". Certainly in my experience, flick is like .5% as "porny" as tumblr.
GitMinutes
> Or are you implying that your government is by nature unreasonable, and will systematically abuse its power to print?

No, and indeed the governments use printing press as a last resort. However when it becomes necessary to inflate in a last ditch attempt of saving economy, we're not speaking of 5-15%.

Greece without external bailout, were it not in Eurozone, would've taken perhaps 500-1000% annual, with most loss concentrated within few initial months. People's savings would've been wiped and confidence in the currency lost for at least a decade. Likewise for Iceland, Cyprus and other borrowing bubble zones.
In my opinion you need dojo-scaffold (now outdated) or dojo-boilerplate(still recommended by dojo developers) only if you do not understand dojo well. I am quite sure after reading the article I wrote you will not need any of those clutches, and do things the way you please.

Dojo's learning curve is a big problem, and I am trying to do my bit to address that.

The changes are confusing, yes, but what can you do? You can not live with old just to not make things confusing.

I believe the great programmer bit is only another way of saying the documentations are lacking, and not that dojo itself is more "complex" than jquery (of course it does much more, so compare it with jquery+requirejs+backbone+<there is no widget library in jquery i believe>).

Debugging is a pain in the ass, yes. I am not sure what is the answer to that.

I am planning to do a few more articles, covering MVC etc in a little bit more detail.

To me the first question is technology, dojo represents a solid, well thought out technology, secondary is documentation/learning. I would be willing to spend an extra week to learn something with sparse/confusing documentation, if it provides me with an edge when it comes to future work. And in my opinion dojo does.
What show-stopping problems have you been encountering?
Also, which VPS providers have you had luck with so far?
i agree there is value in developers sharing the same architecture and conventions, but that's a general truth.. don't need Dojo for that.
If all you need is DOM manipulation then it probably doesn't matter what you use. Heck, with jQuery dropping IE support, if you only need DOM manipulation then why are you even using jQuery?

Dojo has been great for managing our very complex UI - I certainly wouldn't want to do it in jQuery, but that said, I wouldn't necessarily choose dojo for some brochureware website job.

In other words: the right tool for the job.
Just put Cloudflare in front of it, it's free :)
Appreciate Dojo for it's history - but do not use it for your next large-scale JavaScript project.
I'm aware of the large libertarian chunk of HN and have nothing against libertarians.

But api made no references or comments about the efficiency of government services; he merely stated that companies use government services.

Not to be rude, but it seems like you are looking to start a political debate where there isn't one (and a conversation that has been had over and over again in HN threads).
NetBSD 6.1 is Relased
Ask HN: Why did Paul Graham stop posting essays on his site?
I notice the most recent was from November, not the others are about a month apart.

Does anyone know what's up?
Digital Magazines That Work On Every Device - Beacon
Utter nonsense. Technologies compliment each other. You cannot space launching vehicles without being able to stand on the shoulder of giants. Maps, email, translations are all required for humans to lead good day to day lives. Unrelated but I care two hoots about spaceX and would prefer humanity to end on earth. Heck, they should invest in improving the lives of people living on earth right fucking now like Gates is.
How is this proposal different from Gas Cooled Reactors that UK use for decades now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox

UPD: Switz tried to make underground reactors and got what is now the most contaminated cave in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor
I am here saying you must consider it for next, especially large scale javascript project. Start with dojo-1.9, assume anything before this never happened. Read my tutorial. I dont want to be contradictory, but dojo truly shines in large scale javascript project, where jquery has no help, unless you use something else.
Please guys, ignore the dojo history. There is massive difference between dojo 1.6 and 1.7, and 1.9 is much more improved version of 1.7 too. Dojo is changing fast, do not dismiss dojo1.9 because you burnt your fingers with dojo1.3 or due to migrations.

For a new project, give dojo 1.9 a try.
One thing which really bothers me is that you are always using a space in front of your exclamation marks. It's happening on Pikareader and your other site PikaCode.

http://english.stackexchange.com/a/4646
True, Buddhism is no different from Hinduism, Christism, Muhammadism or any other ism in that it cannot escape the additions to the core teachings. Errors in narration, translation and interpretation all contribute to giving one a good reason to take what is passed down with healthy skepticism.

IMHO, the Buddhist recommendation to exercise this type of necessary skepticism is to try it out, to experience it. If your experience confirms what the received wisdom is said to be, you are probably on the right track. Of course, there are lots of other basics, including the most basic of all - get a good teacher. Needless to say, the meaning of "good" in this respect always requires a modicum of circumspection. :)

Yup, there's lots of stuff like those you mentioned to divert your attention. The idea is to give you a reason to get started. In this case I'd say something like Nike's Just Do It as mentioned in some of the other threads is a tad overconfident. The Buddhist way would more likely be Life is Short. Just Get Started.
Their method would have been a lot more difficult had they not caught Sabu and flipped him. Even with Sabu flipped, absent a confession they only have a lot of circumstantial evidence on Jeremy.

Sabu was blatantly poor at covering up his identity. He was doxed by other hackers online long before the FBI found him (apparently it was one of the anti-anonymous 'patriot' hackers who passed on Sabu's real ID to the FBI).

Without Sabu, they wouldn't know where to park the van, or which VPN providers and ISP's they need to subpoena.

Sabu made two mistakes. First he pasted a link to a file in IRC that was hosted on prvt.org. Somebody looked up the historic whois records for that domain and found the name Hector Monsegur.

His second mistake was that his Tor setup didn't "fail close", and when his local SOCKS server died his IRC client accidentally logged him in using his real IP address.

The feds can't match Tor activity if they don't know where to park the van. They also relied on Jeremy having a weak Wifi setup where they could watch his network connections. All of these other leads, including the personal details to match against, relied on first flipping Sabu.

The idea Tor setup is having an intermediary isolating proxy, and preferably one that is hosted offshore in another jurisdiction. For extra security, run a VPN connection over that, so it would look like:

laptop => OpenVPN or SSH tunnel => offshore server => privoxy (header munging) => VPN connection => tor => tor exit node => VPN server => internet

To prevent matching against a shared circuit, setup multiple tor circuits and random load balance across them, and do the same with the VPN.

Tor is just like a lot of other things, it can be setup and used in such a way where it leaks a lot of data and information, but it can also be used as part of a chain that makes the job of unmasking the user a lot more difficult.
Absolutely, the "band-aid"/short term help IS needed and the people behind it should get support.

As to why we still haven't eliminated the tragedy/ies at the root:

-> A few rich people control the media

-> control our vision of our nation's priorities (financially profitable wars VS taking care of our own brothers and sisters)

-> control of our votes

-> control of our nation's policies

-> REPEAT CYCLE
Show HN: Starting Point for Developing Android Currency Converter using YQL
Okay - why porn is even problem? The people in 18-45 group have grown with porn, they have voluntarily and involuntarily seen and read porn they like, porn they don't like, kinky porn they like, kinky porn they don't like, they have been goatse-d, japanese whale-d, two girls one cup-ed and either don't mind porn or have become completely desensitized towards it.

And lets be honest a lot of top advertisements have not threaded carefully into innuendoland.
Wtf, I never noticed that either, duh?
I hate the small delays of a VM environment though.

Rails already has some minor loading issues, adding a VM to that can be very frustrating - I imagine.
Root Galaxy Note GT-N7000 on Android 4.1.2 XXLT5 Jelly Bean