skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually said out loud: “My name is Weston McBride, and I can do whatever I want to. I will approach this problem with enthusiasm unknown to mankind, and I feel sorry for anything that gets in my way.”

Were you looking in the mirror when you said it?

I'll admit that comment is kind of facetious, but I've long wondered whether these sort of self-motivational things ever have a meaningful effect on anything.

Anyway, the core truth that this post runs around is that running a startup isn't for everyone. If it was for you, you'd still be doing it. Running a charity might not be either, but it is healthy to re-examine your life at regular intervals and evaluate whether you really are doing the right thing.
====
She went on: “If you have conviction and the right solution, you can get in front of anyone [to raise money, strike a partnership, build a team, etc], so what are you waiting for? You’ve already shown you can build a team and a product, you have the technical background to solve this problem. How does a liquidity event really make a big difference? Why continue being miserable?”
====

You've also now demonstrated that you'll drop everything - that investor money, staff, customers, etc, because you don't like something. How will potable water investors react knowing this story? Part of being successful is sticking through with something.

"How does a liquidity event really make a big difference?" If he was really going to exit at $200MM, I'm assuming a decent portion would have gone to him. Having a bank of, say, $10MM should be more than enough to start his potable water business without having to go to investors to get things started the next time (assuming, that is, he believes enough in it to invest a chunk of his own money, not just someone else's).
Difference between matt cutts and everyone else is that he probably has thousands of sites (maybe hundreds of thousands, plus Google links) already pointing to the site.

Comparing a "big" site like that to a small business who might have $10-20 spent against them to negative SEO doesn't really compare.

It's like comparing McDonalds to a local burger joint.
Language, it's not like you had a choice in the matter. The invasion of England by the French-Norman in 11th century did a lot more to implant French language into English than whatever cultural influence France had after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England#Lan...
There is not any kind of recourse that would result in consequences for the government officials who committed this crime.

If the public cared, this kind of thing could potentially result in Obama's impeachment. Since the public doesn't care, it's a tempest in a teapot.

The nice thing for the officials is that while this kind of story riles some people up a bit, it quite effectively sends a chilling message at journalists and would-be informants. Surely a cost-benefit analysis was conducted and ironically the NY Times coverage is part of the desired outcome.

Consider for a moment what the coverage would be like if there were truly a hostile/adversarial relationship between the press and the government.

The public does not care about the rule of law, so we don't have it. There is no better way to join the establishment than to become a reporter.
Where are people getting these super cheap servers?
What would you posit the value/dynamics of Freicoin would be in such an event? Immune? Explain how the exchange rate would evolve, in your mind, between Freicoin and a non-rotting bitcoin.

The key concept that keeps getting avoided here is Freicoin's value in the face of alternatives. I think you're just as coupled.
1. Your subjective view of your own situation is very negative - "done myself in", "a life of doom" etc.

2. At the same time your situation is objectively good - you have a good profession and a good job, you're not complaining about health problems other than alcohol dependency, and you kicked the alcohol for two months now. Even if you went to jail you're out free now. The whole life is in front of you.

Given the obvious contradiction here, I suggest that you should not trust your own judgement, and instead defer to someone else until your judgement is repaired. This sort of discrepancy is indicative of anxiety-type disorder, the kind that impairs your ability to evaluate your situation and makes everything looks worse than it is. The best you can do is seek help from a professional psychotherapist, and do exactly as they instruct you. Do not deviate, do not "optimize", do not skip steps. Suspend all judgement and do exactly as you're told. Use your logical side to overrule your emotional side and just follow the program, because it's the right thing to do.
Play Atari Breakout Game in Google Images
Play Atari Breakout in Google Images
Farmers lose case against Monsanto- SCOTUS Decision [pdf]
Albums that originate on one machine are different from albums that originate on another machine. One must decide to manually sync albums, but the canonical copy of a photo lives on only one of the computers in question, not in the cloud.

This poses problems for creating albums from photos whose canonical copy lives on different machines. One must first sync, then duplicate items that did not originate on the local computer.
I'd been biking around 10 miles daily prior to it, but was still hit hard by my first hike. It was about 8 miles with a 2,000 foot climb, and I could barely walk for three days after. A few more hikes, however, and I was reasonably well conditioned. Well worth it, but could even be avoided somewhat with a more reasonable few starting hikes.
What makes you think that the end results of the exit will be obvious ahead of the exit? Do you honestly think the acquirer will put this on a contract?

There are a lot of gray areas here. There's a continuum between "disgraceful acquihire" and "honorable technology purchase". The acquirer may screw half your customers and please the other half. You may find that the exponential growth curve that you plotted based on your data from year 1-2 actually finds its way to a frustrating asymptote in years 5-6 and some of your investors want to see a return on their money - perhaps more than they want to ensure the happiness of each and every last customer of yours.

Perhaps your employees may start to feel the same way, especially after N years - fire-breathing startup guys may happily trade stickers with profanity on them (oh, my) for better salaries, ability to move around within a large organization stocked with some interesting people (remember that some of the BigCOs being discussed here are placed like Google and Facebook, it's not like they're going to some ginormous bank to code COBOL), etc - even if they have to do the odd PowerPoint from time to time.

Inability to predict this sort of thing is usually a good reason not to indulge in profanity-laced public rants about something that factors into outcomes for your investors and team. Unless you're actually specifically aiming to burn your ships behind you, in which case, I salute your bravery.
There are many known ways in which plants communicate (if you want to call that communication):

- ethylene is a gas, but also a plant hormone that causes (among others) ripening of fruits. So if you got a field of apple-trees, when the first tree's fruits starts to ripen and release ethylene there's a chain reaction where other trees detect the gas and causes the other trees to ripen their own fruits (and release more ethylene). This is used in the industry so you can transport unripe fruits and ripen them later with ethylene.

- Trees of Heaven produce hormones that they use to tell other plants to stop growing, so to speak [1]

- When lima beans are attacked by herbivores or parasites, they release gaseous substances that warn other plants, who then in turn upregulate their defences [2]

There are many, many, many more examples, it's awesome :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailanthus_altissima#Ecology

[2] http://www.mpg.de/942876/W001_Biology-Medicine_060_065.pdf
> There's also the fact that the array (I'm guessing) of bytes diverges from every other language to put them in front of the type which looks like crap.

It does look weird at first—I thought the same thing. But after writing some code with it, the design has a nice simplicity. When decoding C types, you have to sort of go back and forth "int * x[]" (an array of pointers to int) but in go it's always one direction: "int * []x". The type is always grouped together and that ends up being much easier for humans to parse.

Ditto for putting the return type after the function args. Seems backward if you're used to C/Java/etc but it makes things nicely composable, plus now every function starts with "func", and not a random return type.

I'm fine with the losing the parens around the ifs. Other languages do that and less syntax can look less messy. I do, however, HATE the required curlies. And the fact that stupid go-fmt always wants to format them out differently than I do:

if short_check { short_code() } // My preferred formatting for short error tests
if short_check { // go-fmt always wants to do this.
short_code()
} // Blech.

For that reason alone I refuse to use go-fmt on my code :-). But I'm stubborn that way...
How Apple is losing mobile
Suppose you have two computers, each with its own iPhoto library. Picasa does not unify all the photos into one repository and allow you to use them (for edits, or for composition into specialized collections of photos for sharing).

Also, it does not solve the problem of the iPhoto library filling up most of the hard drive and the user still wanting to seamlessly use the photos as described above.
How much fun the founders have is directly related to the chance of the startup's success, and a person's ability to learn is directly related to their personal success.

Sarcasm doesn't belong on HN.
See also, "Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/technology/chinese-hackers...

In each case, a government accessed a newspaper's network without authorization to determine the source of a leak.
Thanks, that makes sense (I cannot reply to you directly).

The US did not directly put Ríos Montt into power. However, the CIA did orchestrate a coup in Guatemala in the 50s, which triggered a bloody civil war and years of conflict that culminated with Ríos Montt coming to power in the 80s.
I thought the part about gay men in-the-closet was interesting:

> the closeted man must police every piece of information known about him, live in constant terror of exposure or blackmail, and impose sharp limits on intimacy, or at least friendship

This phrase "police every piece of information known about him" would seem to apply to everyone who wishes to retain even a baseline level of online privacy in spite of the mega-entities seeking to acquire aggregate every possible scrap of online information.

:-O
Information theory is a really cool, really practical form of math / computer science. I highly suggest reading up on it (I'm using this book to get through the basic ideas: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Theory-Symbol...).

Basically it has to do with measuring entropy / uncertainty in a message, and I'm finding it has applications almost everywhere, from file compression to image editing to highway design to just the way I talk and communicate information. Fun stuff!
something trivial that was previously protected by obscurity?

It appears this is very much the case- Bloomberg insiders have known for years that you can access anyone's information- and have publicly stated as such. I suppose people didn't realise the dangers contained within that before now? Seems odd, but still.
I wrote it for a project and probably won't publish it soon. It's not all that interesting... at least, it's not interesting once you've written a simple emulator, which I highly recommend doing; it's an extremely rewarding personal project, and not nearly as difficult as it sounds. Pick something GCC can compile to.
> it saves some typing

Your macropy is very interesting, but please do not use this argument. "Saving some typing" is the least interesting side-effect of some macros.

To clarify my point: in most of the industry, we all fight hard to garden big codebases with intricate dependency problems. I am convinced that code complexity management is very far from a solved problem, and I hope advanced tools like macros can help there.

But "saving a few keystrokes" is very often at the heart of the stupides issues we have with code complexity.

Two examples:

+ "from x import " <-- this saves a few typing, but it become extremely annoying as soon as your code get more than 10 modules.

+ template.render(tpl_file, locals()) <-- this feeds the template space with shit and makes it much harder to trace data between templates and models. I daily revile the guy who typed the "*locals()" in the Mako doc.
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org
I've never regretted making a change to my life when I discovered I was unhappy. Kudos on the tough decision!
Attitude and bad language aside, I understand the sentiment. But I haven't seen one rant on this topic that looks at the bigger picture: how much these shutdowns hurts other startups. When there are lots of shutdowns, especially high profile ones like Google reader, potential customers are going to be more weary and other startups won't get the same traction. It's one thing when you loose the convenience of buying your widgets online, its a lot more painful when you've uploaded content, created a network, etc. Maybe it's so blindingly obvious it doesn't need to be said.
> Go, lacking the same thing, relies on people just entering github URLS which seems insane to me but could work I guess

There's no need to guess. It works. Almost the entire Go ecosystem uses it.

> Then you could do something like person/project@v1.2.3

This has been suggested. But it's just a mechanism for versioned dependencies; it doesn't address the transitive dependency problem that I cited.

As of right now, if you need to pin a dependency to a particular version, then you fork it yourself. I welcome this infrequent pain with open arms to the benefit of keeping the `go` tool simple.

It's not like people haven't tried to setup a central repository with versioned packages [1], but it just hasn't caught on.

[1] - http://www.gonuts.io/
I had to learn all fifty states' postal abbreviations and capital cities in elementary school, back in the 20th century. Seriously, kids these days! Now get off my lawn.

(And if you're reading this and you're not an American? You should learn this stuff anyway, because the world revolves around US.)
I've written a small production web project and several medium-sized personal projects in Go, and have not yet found a need for a web framework outside of net/http. I've used several libraries that work as nested/stacked handlers under net/http; Go's structure embedding is a natural fit for that.
Thousands died, but if you compare the numbers against the numbers that died under communism in Cuba, Russia, China, East Germany and various countries in Africa it can be used as a convincing example of ends-justify-the-means foreign interventionism.
In the USA the moment you're convicted of a federal crime your rights go right out the window, some of them permanently. In some states you lose the right to vote. You lose all 2nd amendment rights (the right to bare arms) for life unless pardoned by the president no matter what the crime was.
There's almost certainly near no magical evil council

Uh... nice strawman?

the misguided actions and interactions of generally well-meaning people

Have you read "War Is A Racket"? And what big corporation are you the CEO of, or what public office did you hold for how long, so that you would even know what the priorities at top levels are? Are you, for example, telling me the Bush administration was genuinely worried about Hussein having WMD? Could you say that with a straight face?

And are you denying that quite a bunch of those individuals aren't generally doing individual actions for their own benefit? Eichmann was "just scared of loosing his job", too, so where exactly do we draw the line, how is that not just an euphemism you could apply to anything, how does this not apply to China or North Korea? It's just the son of a dictator afraid of loosing his job, his privilege, so he plays it the best way he knows how. And if you were born in China, you would make damn sure to do the right thing, too, which would be to join the communist party and do whatever you need to put food on your family. Who is anyone to judge a culture that is older than dirt, right?

Okay, so let's not judge people for what they do, nobody is without sin, so no stone throwing. Point taken. But can we still call out that they do things that, spoken about plainly without euphemisms, are generally agreed on to be bad and yes, even evil; and that others fall for them? Instead of hand waving the instant it is even brought up?
Indian Govt Brings In Central Monitoring System: Surveillance Of All Telecoms
It's mostly C++ for indexing and lookup, but "Search" is a big topic, and there are Go, Java, and Python parts in the many systems that make Google's web search work. Go is growing in popularity within Google.
Same here, mine was "golden retriever".
Hey, I wrote this! Thanks for linking.
This is a cool comment. Thanks for writing it. I wouldn't have looked as carefully at those photos if you hadn't written it.
Because as a group neocons are the ones that are most ideologically behind global interventionism.
Many Americans have not real knowledge of what their nation looks like from the exterior. Yet it is rapidly becoming apparent to many that we are being manipulated and controlled and that those we "voted for" are not abiding by their oaths and have no intention of supporting the constitution and will do whatever they can to stay in power.
> You wouldn't think it would be possible for compiler speed to be so much better than C that it would make a difference, but Go's compiler manages it.

I did some ocaml work a few years ago and had a similar revelation. Its compiler is just as fast—my short little programs were more or less instantaneously compiled. Fast compiling is really, really nice, even though it seems like a silly thing to tout.
Reminds me of the time back in the '80s, I had a day to kill so I made a breakout game in Z80 assembly. That was fun.
Checks? Seriously? They must have some badass OCR.
You mean to tell me that people struggling to live hand to mouth are also making mistakes? Ridiculous.
> Writing a language feature is different than writing an application

True enough. But libraries can easily tend toward either of those extremes. And any obstacles to library development will eventually become obstacles to application development.
Google Glass Picks Up Early Signal: Keep Out
>certainly not politics

Right, Liberalism and Republicanism never really caught on following the French revolution.
There is a HN for ideas at http://firespotting.com
Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on the New Digital Age
XML is a "must know" kind of thing for any serious developer anyway, so I don't really see your point. XML and JSON have enough different use cases, even though they have common ones as well. For starters, XML can be automatically validated when needed using schemas, while JSON can't (even though there is a draft for JSON schema in the works). So XML has advantages over JSON is various scenarios. The price is more complexity naturally, but one should expect that.

But besides the point, XMPP already uses XML. So there is no need to reinvent the wheel here.
The "protection" is token, at best.

Google "MEMS enhancement utility", read headline on first hit... Ah, yes, of course.
Atari Breakout
Cer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CER_Computer
OfflineIMAP crashes a lot. I have been using it for many years and with each upgrade, I'm optimistic that stability and/or performance will improve, but it still sucks a huge amount of CPU and hangs several times per day.
Realistically our army isn't sporting the greatest record against "pea-shooters" the world over. They do good for quick and dirty but they have not held out for a prolong period of time. Add to that they will be fighting where their family and home will be in the line of fire.
Well, no other country did a "revolution" and had their rulers decapitated (women included) following the French Revolution. Strange huh ? And the French Revolution was an utter failure within a couple of years, in case you had not noticed.
Getting Real
Rework
The Dream by Gurbaksh Chahal (motivational, not instructional)
Business Model Generation
The Lean Startup
Delivering Happiness

Good luck!
That reminds me of the famous Sun Microsystems discovery that shouting at hard drives increases their latency (for real): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
Well said. I hope more of our country men feel this way and vote accordingly.
Wow, that's hilarious. You really got people telling you to "fucking die?" Some people become so stupid when they're anonymous.
I thought about COBOL, but then I realized I did not work at a bank.
Did you seriously just post "As someone who doesn't know how to read this language, this language seems really unreadable!" ??

As any Go programmer will tell you, Go is a very readable language. It's one of the design goals. It is _not_ a design goal to impress people making superficial judgements.

Also, LOL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5327478
These are the things that stopped bothering me at some point along the way. I still prefer SQL to Sequel, and in general prefer acronyms to be spelled out, but at the end of the day it really doesn't matter.

In all techno-religious matters you're better off just embracing the variety.
I sincerely hope we do, yet I fear we won't as the media is basically a bunch of whimpering liberals with no desire to ask the hard questions.
Curiosity Rover Reveals White Veins On Mars
While, mostly working in client development, I'm a professional developer of 12 years, and while I've had my random encounter with XML, I've managed to avoid it, and do not "know" XML in any significant capacity.

It's easy to forget that there is a large set of different developers. And some don't know what you may consider common knowledge.

IMO, something being JSON over XML would be a significant plus in my mind.
It’s Time To Kill Mobile Photography
Well, I was having fun with Python and Lisp. But it was a bit painful between all of the different parts. Plus on the front end, I was writing mostly Django. Which has its own set of conventions. I like to keep things simple. And that made me move to Go. Its simple.
People have had that realization in the past

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deba...

There are good reasons why they have not caught on, performance being the most salient one.