skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't a new problem. Lindsay Perigo quit TVNZ in the early 90s, accusing it of being 'brain dead':

"I sometimes ask myself what would life be like if I had just stayed at TVNZ, and there is no doubt that materially life would be a lot richer. But I do not regret for a second the fact that I forsook that career. I was dying within at TVNZ. The dumbing down that was going on. Plus the fact that for twenty years I had made a career of listening to other people spouting mainly nonsense. I had also become aware of what scumbags they were."

http://www.freeradical.co.nz/content/36/36jesson.php
pg says in a later tweet reply [1] that it is 37 out of 511.
Which is 7.24%.

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/338809374459977729
https://twitter.com/heynavid/status/338813242799431681

@heynavid "@paulg which one was the biggest surprise to you?"

@paulg "@heynavid Since I suspect they won't mind me saying so, Rap Genius."

@RapGenius "@paulg @heynavid WOOP! I was surprised that PG is tight with NWA, personally.. http://rapgenius.com/Nwa-express-yourself-lyrics#note-318551 "
My company's space is pretty crowded with competitors, but we're beating them because our service returns results in 78ms, while our competitors doing devops and running in Azure, etc. return in 2500ms.

That's because we have a dedicated ops team who concentrate on performance and scaling, and leave the devs to write code instead of managing servers.
For those of you wondering about the (current) headline, "Pre-served prison sentence", it refers to time in custody on remand being subtracted from any prison terms.

People who are charged with a serious crime are usually placed in custody to prevent them skedaddling. Sometimes you can get bail to remain at large, sometimes you can't. When you can't, you remain "in remand" -- not in custody for punishment, merely to control the risk that you won't show for trial.

If a trial is held and you're found guilty, the judge first calculates a sentence for each crime and then combines them. Assuming that the judge sentences you to imprisonment, he or she will then subtract your time spent in remand from that sentence. You have, in effect, served the time in custody already -- the principle being that you shouldn't be punished more than once for a crime.

Depending on jurisdiction a judge may also elect to set a non-parole period or suspend the sentence.

This is why you sometimes hear things like, "John Citizen was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years. He will be released in 7", when the trial process took 3 years.

Of course: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I worked for below-market salary for a year and a half just so that I could get out of .NET development and start working on Python. Now after a year and half, armed with more Python experience, I have switched to another Python job at what I estimate to be at least market, if not above-market salary.

Bottomline, never say never. You may have to take a temporary hit so that you get to do what you want.
> the idea of actually spending time learning handwriting strikes me as very silly.

It works like this, in the mind of a (bad) educator:

1. I had to do this.

2. I don't do random shit, so it must be important.

3. Therefore, you have to do this.

This chain of logic breaks down at step 2, so that's where post-hoc rationalizations step in to save the day. That's why I'm going to say this explicitly: For everything you can come up with to justify handwriting classes, there's a better way to learn the same skill that also fosters things that are more important than having neat handwriting.

For example, fine motor control is better learned through PE classes that actually teach sports, which has the added benefit of promoting physical fitness. The aesthetics of handwriting is better learned through calligraphy as part of a good art class, which has the added benefit of transmitting a culture which is left out of handwriting classes.
Simple, it makes a great headline and linkbait. I've seen this story reposted and rewritten over the past week all over the internet.
Thanks for this, just tried it out and it works great
Ignorance is bliss.

This reminds me of the Jewish tradition, where men is punished when he eats from the Tree of Knowledge. The more you know, more easily you find anguish.

"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes deals with this subject in a splendid way (won the Nebula Award for best novel in 1966).

The tao says: therefore the sage, in exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills and strength their bones. Which is simple advice: don't think too much. Don't take everything so seriously.

It took me a life to learn that intelligence is not wisdom. The world is full of uneducated wises and intelligent fools.

Are you really smart? Pray for wisdom, not intelligence.
> The French approach to psychiatry is very different to that in the Anglophone world.

Which approach works better? Quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Google Glass: What’s With All The Hate?
40 million is an arbitrary number, but it's still interesting that 7% is also the average YC equity stake.
52k per year for an inmate to be incarcerated? That is just room and board?

What?

How can that work? Assuming you give the inmates decent food, you aren't paying off the compound, and you aren't making the guards rich, where in hell is that money going?

From the article, 539 inmates staying for at the minimum two years means there was 28mil sunk per year just for those.

The prison system is due for a serious reform.
> I realize you didn't have a holocaust of your own in the USA

A frightfully common misconception. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history#United_Sta...

We have also had a slavery based economy with unspeakable cruelty and concentration camps (though not death camps, to America's credit...) for Japanese Americans during WWII. In more modern times we have additional examples of atrocities, many of them ongoing. If you look outside of the boarders the picture becomes even worse.

Nevertheless, the myth of the benevolent American government persists. Somehow historical atrocities, (relatively) small scale modern domestic atrocities, and atrocities that do not take place within the borders do not count. Current American government being good seems to be axiomatic to a disturbing portion of American citizens. It is assumed that our government is good and from that assumption explanations for everything are developed.
The Product Group's Pre-Summer Product Person Party and More
Microsoft Hides Job Posting in Web Code
Do just one thing. By which I mean: if I have a task list, when I choose the next task to do, I do only that task. I don't check email, read HN, answer phones, or anything else until the task is done. After the task, I allow the email check, surf, etc. for a few minutes, before I begin on the next task, which, once again, I do to the exclusion of everything else. If you do this for a few days, you'll find it's a progressively easier habit to move in and out of the 'concentration zone.'
I use Workflowy as well, and Fargo didn't feel quite as convenient to me. One thing in particular I noticed was that moving an item to the same level as its parent is easier in Workflowy.

So I'm sticking with Workflowy for now. I just wish it allowed me to add multiline leaf items!
How would we enforce them?
It's really thin: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uPZ2b48viTk/TflhMaivRHI/AAAAAAAABC...
Wikileaks Documentary Attacks Assange, Excuses Manning
I couldn't find many either; just the one from a cursory search:

http://www.wow-huh.com/be-lazy-like-a-fox/
I'd like to see it if you don't mind.
Ever wonder if, in fact, those are not honest philosophical disagreements, but just rallying cries to divide the pool of supporters? See also: environmentalism, gun rights, etc.

Two teams play the exact same game on the exact same field. They wear different colors, but that's entirely superficial -- it has nothing at all to do with the game being played.

How can we demonstrate that this is different?
So let me get this straight. In evaluating where the boundaries should lie, we shouldn't consider how new technologies might allow criminals to coordinate in new ways, perhaps rendering existing privacy protections obsolete, but we should consider how new technologies that allow more effective policing might render existing exceptions to the privacy protections obsolete.

Privacy advocates do not have a principled approach to the problem of how to reconcile the legitimate needs of the police with privacy rights in the context of modern communications. Their approach boils down to "do whatever makes it the hardest for the police to do their work." Which goes wholly against what the founders intended when they wrote that limitations on the power of police to search must be "reasonable."
When One Social Network Is Enough
Yeah, they fixed the problem a while ago and you can install apps and watch faces directly to your Pebble from your iOS device.
Thanks for the kind words Eric! :-)
This is where I point out that the answer was wrong.

In HHGTG, a massive computer was built to answer the Question. The computer spent millions of years calculating, and arrived at the answer "42". The problem, it said, was that the Question had never been formulated. The computer then designed another computer to calculate the Question. After millions of years of calculation, this computer was inadvertently destroyed. The last remnants of the computer were only able to provide the question "What is six times nine?"

Also, knowing the answer without knowing the question is Jeopardy!
Sounds like a nice candidate for a web app, should they release how exactly it's done.
Reddit's Ad Sales Pitch Revealed (VIDEO)
losethos seems to have lost his patience or something (see bottom of page). I wonder if it's the lack of attention his work gets - his submissions all have 1 point with 0 comments.

Is there a specific reason or does nobody care about his work?
Workflowy is great.

In Fargo, if you want to move an item to the same level as its parent there are four ways to do it:

1. Shift-Tab.

2. Cmd-L.

3. Drag it to the left with the mouse.

4. Choose the Move Left command from the Outliner menu (useful on tablets and phones).
Yahoo's Design Chief Leaves Company
Once I get my White Pebble I might be able to join in with the watch app fun :(
$40M+ Exits with Public Prices:

Heroku - W08 - $212M > Salesforce [1]

OMGPOP - S06 - $180M > Znyga [2]

SocialCam - W12 - $60M > Autodesk [3]

Loopt - S05 - $43.4M > Green Dot [4]

$40M+ Exits with Rumored Prices:

Parse - S11 - $85M > Facebook [5]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/08/breaking-salesforce-buys-he...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/26/zynga-ceo-mark-pincus-omgpo...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/17/socialcam-autodesk-60-milli...

[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/03/09/green-dot-...

[5] http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse/
Yeah I'm waiting for the white too...
Look at the posting history on some of his other accounts and it'll make sense.
His other accounts?

I'm relatively new to HN so some context would be much appreciated.
Finishing is great and there's definitely a sense of accomplishment. Starting is usually fun ... it has a sense of adventure and a certain newness.

So if starting and finishing represent 5% each, that leaves 90% in the middle that's nothing more than discipline and an overwhelming sense of vision. Discipline is what I have to cultivate in myself - fortunately I recognize both what that is and what it means. And it's discipline in the middle that allows you to finish.

In any case, congrats to Jessica and the rest of this spring's graduating class.
Quebec Cracks Down on Airbnb
Ask HN: Where to start?
TLDR: My main question is, how do you start learning/working with 'modern' programming languages/practices/tools.

I am in my late 20's and a developer for a few years. The problem is I'm a Coldfusion developer. I have these ideas that I want to create, but I don't want to write them in Coldfusion. I would like to use something like Ruby, Python, Go, or even Scala. I've taken Coursera courses on Ruby and Scala. I do understand them enough to go through the courses, but it's hard to grok the environment.

I've been a Windows guy, and just recently bought a Macbook, hoping it would push me into learning the environment. But in reality it's been a bit of culture shock. I get confused using all of these tools. I tried setting up my machine with Boxen, until I couldn't figure out the error it was throwing and got frustrated and reinstalled. I think this is the third time I've reinstalled OSX.

Homebrew, ZSH (and oh-my-zsh), Puppet/Chef, Vagrant, Rails, Gems, Rake, rvm, rbenv, Node, npm, Angular/Ember/Backbone, virtualenv, pip, etc, etc. Even things like git, setting up ssh/certificates, and just generally command-line things are intimidating.

I get that a lot of people just intuitively know these now, because they 'grew up' with them, so to speak. But to someone just trying to get into it's incredibly overwhelming.

Things like TDD are foreign to me too. I understand it at a high-level, but actually writing tests is hard for me.

I know things well enough to know that I should use it, but not enough to know how to use it.

I want to write software, but I don't want to write bad software. I definitely suffer from analysis-paralysis. If I don't know that I'm doing it right, I find it hard to start. One of my ideas is something related to bitcoin, so I know that it will be attempted to be hacked. That brings a whole new aspect in hardening servers, writing secure code, auditing, etc.

I'm just at my wit's end. Maybe you all could point me in the right direction.
Woot! Pypy is a little slow sometimes but this is a great change for me as I'm getting more into python and doing "experiments" with virtualenv and pip.

Thanks for helping Pypy Fastly!
Nice! I'm going to try loading this once I get the BlackBerry 10 Pebble app done.
At the end of the day though, object recognition is also search, in a sense.

If I'm flipping through my album of dog photos, or looking especially closely at dogs via google glass, maybe Google will show me an ad for dog food?
Because every country strives to be more like Syria.

"MPAA told Congress that they wanted SOPA and knew it would work because it was the same tactic used by governments in "China, Iran, the UAE, Armenia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Burma, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam."
Find somebody to work with. I sometimes have this issue, and having someone on the phone or skype with me allows me to talk things through with them. I can go fro stuck to super productive in minutes.
The lesson from Better Place’s bankruptcy: Be more like Tesla
yeah, god forbid google products actually work together -- and that seemingly abandoned products are revitalized.
Are they also going to push for laws that mandate that all anti-virus software must ignore their rootkits?

And with secure boot in Windows 8, it will be harder for rootkits to remain undetected by hiding in the boot loader. Will the entertainment industry push for laws that force operating system vendors to provide back-doors for the official malware?
Send an anonymous tip
> Most of all I really resent Ubuntu forcing me to learn how all these pieces are put together, so I could fix it. Using it as a desktop OS daily, I remain more convinced than ever that it is best put to work via an ssh session in a different OS. The command-line is the only UI on it that reliably works.

Why is it Canonicals fault Microsoft paid off (not exclusively, I know at Intel was also involved) and pushed for UEFI on all modern motherboards? Bios was working fine for a decade with Linux, UEFI has been terrible because there have been efforts in its adoption to only target Windows and obfuscate or just outright not support other OSes on some boards.
The circle jerk never stops, does it? Anyone want to post the visualization of various amounts of cash that front paged a couple months ago?

This kind of blind worship of money makes hackers look like wise-guy could-have-been doctors but instead were lazy and decided to make a business around popular markets for some dollars.
I'd rather know the sum of the valuations of all 511 companies (with the ones tha closed down valued at zero of course).

while I am making wishes, I'd also like to know what percentage of that total valuation is owned by cofounders rather than investors.
I don't understand how they justify the leap from visual size to "background information."
> when you are measuring performance metrics, they can be hell lot misleading

This is true regardless. For example, if your I/O benchmark is basically sequential, and your application's access pattern is basically random, then your benchmark is useless.

Ultimately, the only test that matters is whether a particular piece of hardware runs your particular application. So as a startup, you write your website, put it on a VPS, if it's slow then you get a bigger VPS or switch providers. The common case is that a VPS is good enough, and once you grow beyond it, that means you're getting enough revenue to afford an upgrade to a bigger VPS or dedicated server out of money coming in.

If you can't afford the upgrade when you need it, then it means either you're inadequately capitalized (you don't have enough investment to survive the bootstrapping regime where necessary server spending outstrips revenue), or your code is too inefficient for your business model to be viable (making $X in revenue costs more than $X worth of server resources, the "bootstrapping" regime has no end).

> 1-2 GB Ram

Upgrade this. RAM is cheap, and you get a lot of performance out of it.

> I haven't done the cost calculation

The available information at my fingertips says buying a full rack (40U), power included, costs $650 per month [1]. So that's $16.25 per 1U. That leaves $3.75 per month, or $180 total over a 4-year lifetime. Let's say you use a Raspberry Pi as the server, it costs $35. That leaves $145, or $3.02 per server per month, to pay for bandwidth, labor, billing/accounting, storage media, power cables, networking gear, and profit for the owner.

$20 is really aggressive pricing. $30 might be more reasonable.

If you have sunk costs, then you might be able to make it work. E.g. if you just signed a multiyear deal for a ton of rack space, but the project you were planning on using it for isn't going to fly due to your cofounder getting hit by a bus, you can regard the rent on server space as a sunk cost since you'll be paying for it anyway. Filling it with $20/month servers would almost certainly be better than letting it sit idle (though maybe not better than filling it with more expensive servers, subletting it to someone else, or having your company declare bankruptcy).
As with most things, you can blame The Oatmeal http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
There's evidence that a person's culture and upbringing can influence the range of sounds or shades of colors they can distinguish.

So there might be many people with the potential for tetrachromancy, who just haven't had it trained-into-them by challenges as they learned vision and color perception.

The researchers might want to take whatever performance tests they use to verify tetrchromancy, and make them into a progressively-harder game for children... to see if with early-enough practice the capability is more widespread.
Yeah, it would be great if you could download the photos with the recognized keyword tags embedded into the EXIF information. I really hope they do this.
37 Y Combinator Companies Have Valuations Of Or Sold For At Least $40M
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...
It used to be called LoseThos, then SparrowOS, and now TempleOS.

He has another account https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS and see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992749
It wouldn't be very surprising to learn that every single person has some kind of genetic defect -- perhaps dozens -- but usually the compensatory mechanisms are strong enough to mask them, at least while you're young and strong overall. It makes a lot of sense that health should be a spectrum or a kind of dynamic equilibrium, rather than a binary on-off condition.
After meeting the Rap Genius guys, I'm not at all surprised they were over $40mm valuation.
No.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/26/paul-graham-37-y-combinator...
CloudKick (to Rackspace) was probably over $40mm, or close to it.
We shouldn't craft laws with the prime concern of making one set of public servants' job easier for them. See: Blackstone's formulation.
So downloading copyrighted content makes you a "hacker" now?
I boycotted SONY because of this and have been free of their products for 6 years.

Now it seems that more companies want to learn a lesson the hard way.
How Microsoft stole Steve Jobs' dream
I think it's safe to assume the sum of current valuations is nearly 2x the valuation of dropbox+airbnb, or essentially the 30*40 + known big exits (~$600mm in total) + airbnb + dropbox, as a first approximation.

There's enough uncertainty in how accurate the individual valuation numbers are for airbnb, dropbox, and the 30x40 club to dominate the error.
Why You Should Consider Crowdsourced Conversion Rate Optimization
Is it bad that the first thing that stood out to me was the mismatched quotation marks?
Point of Order: "colour blindness" is a misnomer for what is more accurately called "colour deficiency" since being truly colour blind would mean you saw only in some kind of grayscale.

Source: my father is an OD and my brother has almost no red cones at all.
That's hardly the point, which is that they can get Congress to bend over backwards for them. Since this piece of legislation is obviously absurd, they'll attempt for something pared down but clearly authoritarian with minimal (non-existent?) oversight.

At this point they're just flexing their muscle to see how much wiggle room they've got. A small part of me wishes votes on legislation were anonymous so our congress-critters would avoid the constraints of having to vote along party lines (and notably their campaign donors' wrath).
I tried to be rational and then I got to the second paragraph of their own brief:

"The second and even more pernicious effect is that illegal theft of intellectual property is undermining both the means and the incentive for entrepreneurs to innovate, which will slow the development of new inventions and industries that can further expand the world economy and continue to raise the prosperity and quality of life for everyone. Unless current trends are reversed, there is a risk of stifling innovation, with adverse consequences for both developed and still developing countries."

Source: http://ipcommission.org/report/IP_Commission_Report_052213.p...
If it allows me to run arbitrary Javascript on my blog, this would already be a huge improvement over Wordpress. This is not to mention having to pay to control the CSS just to fix the theme designers' bugs and horrendous CSS practices.
Surely the devs focus on performance and scaling as well, if not at the level of managing servers? Having a dedicated ops team is a necessity, but it's important to keep developers in the loop on operations as well.
The total valuation of those 511 is currently about $11.5 billion.

We ourselves don't know the percentage owned by founders. But considering that investors continually complain that YC companies are overpriced, it may be higher than the industry average.
9 key things to mention when pitching your software startup
Ah. I am an id10t. Helps if I type the command correctly. Carry on.
You got what I said exactly backwards. I meant it exactly as you put it. It's about getting the job in the first place and not being eliminated outright in favor of someone else with a degree ("lose it to someone with a degree").

Job security has nothing to do with it. It's about landing a job.