skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Damn good, Patrick. This is probably the most powerful advice delivered in the most gentle way. It's inspiring even for people intimidated by the prospect of beginning a startup.
Some folks from New Relic gave a talk at RubyConf this year about upgrading their old-for-Rails project from 2 to 3, I found it pretty informative http://www.confreaks.com/videos/2425-railsconf2013-changing-...
Could you tell us anything about why these things are bad?

Regarding the last point (the one that you cannot change), I'm not sure I prefer the behavior of any other language. In Python, for instance, all of the number-like things I tried were falsy iff they were 0, and I found that almost any container is falsy iff it is empty, but Queues are always truthy. This is a weird exception, and I would rather not have to remember it. Collections and numeric types defined in external libraries can easily have the same problem.
I dislike this article because it asserts that the NSA has ever said "a lot of terrorists use X, Y and Z." In reality, the NSA has said "tracking this data w.r.t. terrorism doesn't always prevent terrorist crimes, but it has been successful in the past." It seems like nonsense to assert that none, zero, nil terrorists use these services... I agree with Arnor in his comment - this is a trivializing report.
Ohh, I'm so jealous! I had to cancel my pre-order.
I wish those questions would be moved to the relevant StackExchange site. Often times it's just a case of misplaced question, where it might fit better in superuser or it. It should be moved in those cases.
How would you define "rational," then? Philosophy, or "love of wisdom", of which law is a branch, is all about trying to apply aesthetic ideals to the real world.
Could this be used to do remote support? Where the app user initiates a support session (or via push message) or something) and then the admin can walk them through things?
I haven't seen slid.es before. This is awesome.
Ask HN: Blogs/Books with an impact on a small business' success?
I'm just starting my small business (SaaS) and being a software engineer by nature I yet have a lot to learn about the business side (e.g. marketing, PR, customer service, branding etc.).

What blogs and books with the potential to have a noticeable impact on a small business' success do you recommend ?

PS: This is not about creating a "complete" list - time is scarce: quality over quantity!
I'm not sure I'm hearing you right. Say you're President. How many lives would an act of pre-meditated terror have take to be worth your while?

10000? what if it were 100 a day for 100 days? Still less than car fatalities in a year.

9/11 happened.. ho hum.. call me when it's over
Don't laugh - they probably will.
Brainfuck syntax is even simpler and more consistent ;)
The content is distracting, which kind of defeats the point of Lorem Ipsum.
The "lisp is the most productive language on Earth" claim is mainly a selective bias. People who are good with their tools are very productive. Naturally they view their own tools as superior.

One of the biggest Lisp proponents (forgot his name) when joining Google found out that other good developers using other languages were just as productive.
There have been numerous of such stackoverflow posts submitted here, so one might argue: there's a void.

Would be wonderful to see a complementary service to stackexchange's (with the HN community that might be a possible venture? ;)), but in most of the cases I can recall, Quora is just that. Quora has the same "noise" problems as stackoverflow, what with "which ipod is best? lol", but for genuinely interesting questions, meta or opinionbased, Quora is the place I most often see that.
Yes, that's one of the major use cases.
We have a demo for remote help desk as well in the samples section http://showkit.com/samples
Hacker School: Where Students and Instructors Learn Together
So will StackOverflow reinstate my account which was banned after asking 1 question?

I love the fact that such a service exists but their moderation policies are (were?) not the least bit friendly
If anyone wants to jump the line for the beta, use the promo code 'HN-demo' and you will get bumped in the line.
I'll watch that video! Thanks!
Faster than LuaJIT? At what? Did you run benchmarks to back that up?

That's a very strong claim, and I've never heard anyone make it before. LuaJIT is unbelievably fast. I'd be extremely curious to see the proof.

(As a side note, on some level it's hard for me to accept that Clojure is fast because using it feels gratingly slow — since all the tools take several seconds to do anything thanks to the JVM's startup time. `lein repl`: 4 seconds wait. `luajit`, or `python` for that matter: utterly instant.)
Chinese Social Analytics on Star Trek 2
Curata Reader - A Google Reader replacement that I might actually use
History: Two NSA cryptographers defect (1960)
I don't see how that comic is relevant to Manta, and it seems to be a bit of an unfair comparison. The Manta web site emphasizes the ability to use common and existing tools to work with the data. In addition to standard Unix pipes, they have bindings for pretty much every language I could think I want to use.

I.e. Manta seems to emphasize the ability to use existing tools in a distributed fashion, rather than forcing you to learn a new language with unfamiliar syntax.
If it doesn't fit what the site is structured for, why should it stick around? Aren't there plenty of other sites that can host it? Or is Stack Overflow the only place to host code snips?

Do you have any example 400+ upvoted questions you can point to that aren't of the type "everybody bring out all the snippets you've been saving, this time we're putting on a show"?
Ashton Kutcher stars as Steve Jobs in upcoming film [video] (trailer)
The reason I post is that the NSA, DOD and HUAC started a smear campaign. The duo defected because of their frustration at NSA activities not being reported to Congress. Might be some parallels to today.
There is also the option of running your own mail server, and encrypting mail as it is delivered:

https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...
People who break into computers are very different from people who build novel computer systems. The problem isn't the validity of the distinction.
To clarify: this isn't my app, I just stumbled onto it today. I've tried feedly, feedbin, newsblur, yoleo, and lector, and so far it's between feedbin and curata.
What kind of tool/service are you using to monitor those components and notify you when there is a problem?
Feel free to send us an email @ support@zipwhip.com with the number you are trying to register and we can get it sorted out. We are publishing better error handling for the bug you encountered this afternoon.
-james @ zipwhip
There are clearly differences, different risks, etc. in different kinds of businesses.

A new concept for a physical retail store is different from "another dry cleaner" vs. a franchise vs. taking over an existing successful business.

A consultancy where you have 20 years experience in the field as a consultant for someone else is totally different from a b2b startup a a field you solidly understand where you have initial clients lined up before you start, vs. a consumer "hits driven" business.

There isn't a universal line between startup and small business; it probably varies with time and with the founders themselves.
Will you be adding an IOS client soon ?
It's not about hosting code snips or even nice Markdown css styling. It's about have your question reach the most amount of knowledgable people. Stackoverflow is the best place for that, regardless of their [stupid] closing policies.
I'm not criticizing your world view, I'm explaining mine and my take on what I think is the most appropriate description of the nature of our society. Our system does try to avoid "tyranny of the majority" but to a point. It is not a system that puts "rights" first and relegates democracy to whatever is left after various broad and expansive rights instituted. Rather, "rights" are the exceptions to the general rule of democracy.

If there is an animating principle to the Constitution, I think it's the phrase "consent of the governed." When you tell a starving man he can't kill his neighbor and take his livestock, a freedom of action he was born with and retains in the state of nature, or else some government which has no stake in either his neighbor's property or his huger will punish him, I don't think it suffices to appeal to some supernatural "right to life" or "right to property." I think it is wrong to impose that system on people on any other basis than democratic consensus. And I think there is a reason the founders spent so much ink describing how the U.S. was based on "consent of the governed," a key distinction between the U.S. and Britain, while they were by and large happy to inherit the system of "rights" from common law English principles.
You can't expect the secret police to divulge their secrets.
While getting into specifics of collection shouldn't necessarily be public discussion, as it renders those collections effectively useless (think the old school mafia knowing what they can and can not say to be rendered into evidence in court), a framework is definitely a necessity. There is already a framework in place, but it doesn't address what the public concerns are. We should publicly answer questions like:

-Is it okay to collect intelligence on foreign governments?
-Is it okay to collect on allies?
-What are the boundary markers for the government abusing its power?
-Can we amend the constitution to reflect privacy concerns of the 21st century?
-How many civilian casualties are the threshold for being a tolerable amount in America?

Just questions to get you thinking about things. I feel like the majority of people's indignant outrage, if not translated into action in fixing a perceived problem, is passively accepting the status quo.
Why is the response to incompetence to increase funding? Incompetent businesses go out of business, they don't get more money. Others could do this job better - assuming we even want the job being done. The US became one of the most powerful nations in the world without any IRS for its first hundred plus years, gaining most of its revenue through tariffs rather than taxes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_histor...
There there, it isn't good to lie to yourself like that.
The trouble is, if you use the same key to encrypt the same plaintext, you'll get the same ciphertext. Then an eavesdropper can compare the ciphertext you sent her with the ciphertext you sent someone else and see if they are the same.
He figured out that P=NP and the CIA had him whacked.
I'm a moderator on Stack Overflow ( http://stackoverflow.com/users/16587 ). If you can post on Meta ( http://meta.stackoverflow.com ), we can take a look and let you know why you're question banned. However, I can tell you from experience that no one is post banned after one question (also, you can't see your deleted questions on your profile, which may lead you to believe you've only had one post).
1) It seems hard because you didn't learn this way in school. I agree that writing 1 + 2 * 5 is easier than (+ 1 (* 2 5)). It's true for very simple expressions. But as your expression grown you end up (if you haven't forgot) adding parentheses to ensure your operators executed in the right order. Multi-line expressions are just unreadable in traditional notation. But lisp notation with indentation is just fine.

2, 3) There is tons of material on Clojure. Read a book or two, google for christ's sake to get live examples on stackoverflow and hackers' blogs.
Also great features are (doc fname) and (source fname) to get source right away without even leaving your REPL.

4) It's very subjective what you wrote, so it can't be falsified.
Are you notified when your questions are closed?

I had a question about about alternatives to Amazon's Product Advertising API that was there for a long time. I felt like it was fairly useful to people. It had 20+ upvotes and a dozen favorites. Then one day it disappeared without warning and leaving no trace it ever existed.
Here: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

Remove these all and then wait for 3 weeks. Your a/c should be deleted. This is how I successfully deleted mine(To be a little more safe I had deleted my photos, notes and videos manually, one by one).
PSA: Hit the 'eye' icon on the right, 'Run' on the top or CTRL/CMD-ENTER to toggle the preview pane in the demos.
The Open Bundle - Release of game assets to the public
Via huffingtonpost, here is a link to the IRS document which is the source of this report about "Open Source" firms being targeted.

What is released here is a "Be On the LOokout" (aka "BOLO") list - instructions to examiners. It talks not about specific companies but about criterea for evaluating applications for not-for-profit status. Regarding Open Source organizations, it notes that applicants may be the for-profit developers or for-profit support providers for the software. The advice given to examiners is to take it to their manager, since no more specific guidance is or was then yet available.

http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/sites/democrats.ways...
This also looks really useful for learning applications, for example where the learner needs to be guided remotely by a teacher, mentor or peer. Could even facilitate some fascinating collaborative learning exploration if it is extended a bit further.
Agreed.

I'm just wondering how long it will take to get people to convert to this way of thinking.
Steps for more, a better, sleep
I disagree that startups are about growth. The growth is the key for startups in certain web / social networking space - but definitely not in all areas.

I like Steve Blank definition of the startup: "A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model". So startups need to have _constant_ progress in their search for repeatable and scalable business model.

For example, if you run a bio-med startup, are you going to grow and sell your drugs out of the door? Nope. Or if your startup is some B2B boring stuff - sometimes you want to work hard to make a couple big customers super happy and work very hard on how to repeat and scale that business model.

Also some local restaurants do become startups - depending if they figured out how to scale their business model.
I found the Lean Startup by Eric Ries to be useful in helping me focus my efforts.

Also, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. This helped create more effective and compelling content. It's very high-level though.
This is a feature of the closing process on StackOverflow -- don't use the other SE sites as much.

You pick "off-topic" and is asks if it would be "on-topic" somewhere else and offers some suggestions.
Having recently worked with this project I can say that it's pretty reliable and way better than most jQuery plugins you'll find out there.

The iframe transport method for uploads is useful for browsers that don't support XHR file uploads (basically IE < 10). You can read more a bit about how it works in: https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-Upload/wiki/Frequentl... or directly in the source: https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-Upload/blob/master/js... (it's pretty small).
I may have quoted it wrong. Wikipedia says it became popular during the dotcom bubble.
No way.

I'd take dirty cash from Larry Ellison before I signed up to anything related to them these days. This is after 20 years of working with Microsoft on large enterprise products, some of which were built in partnership with them.

If you've ever been on the end of a partner agreement, which is what this probably amounts to with much more lock-in (as they're channeling cash to you as well), then you'll understand what I mean. It's overbearing and you're treated like a criminal after about 3 months if you don't spend, spend, spend.

Also, I worked for a startup which was spun up in conjunction with them (no funding but support, advice and endorsement). It was quite successful circa 2005. We switched out to Python/PostgreSQL as to be honest it was getting expensive throwing SQL boxes out and the time to market for ASP.Net was high.

The moment this happened, everything was off the table and we had the license police on our arses, even though we were in compliance and they knew it.

You know the film: The Firm? Not far off it from experience.
If I recall correctly, you could adjust the brightness on the VT 100 series through one of the setup modes. The VT200 had choices other than green. The TRS-80 Model 4 had white and I used a 4p as a terminal to remote mainframes and minis. The Xerox 820 was white. Most of the early Apple/IBM PC monochromes were green, but there were some really nice amber third party monitors.
Off-topic closes were definitely unfriendly before. It would show all five or six users who had voted to close, which felt excessive and like being ganged up on, and just had a generic message "Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming or software development within the scope defined in the FAQ." Where that FAQ link is to the whole FAQ, which had dozens of questions.

I hope the new approach helps, but strict arbitrary off-topic lines are still going to come across as hostile, IMHO. Especially when there is no StackExchange site that the question is on-topic for.
When I work in Clojure I'm not thinking in term of manipulating lines. I think in terms of expressions. I want to take this expression and parent it here or there, I do that. I want to factor out a piece of logic I can select the block and move it out, etc.

Lips has just a really tiny (if any) advantage over other languages in this. I can move code around quite easily in Java. And I don't have to care about formatting (I use autoformatter). In Lisps, formatting code manually is needed and it's a bit of a PITA especially when changing the code.

This also facilitates the powerful macro system where I can trivially write code that templates code for me or create DSLs to express the particular problem domain I'm working on. The whole aversion to prefix notation is incredibly superficial.

Usefulness of macros is overrated. In my experience, the s-exp syntax is too high price for macros. I like Julia's approach to macros much more.
China: Cisco poses a security threat and allows US to attack at will
If you have features you think will make the product better we're pretty open to considering them.
Hacker News at its finest.

OMG A DATABSAE THINGIE! IMMA POST THE COMIC WHAT SAYS THE CURSE WORD!
Skipper: Chrome extension to skip verbose directory structures
Barnes and Noble Suspends Development of Nook Tablet Line
Why you can't find a technical co-founder
Manning was a military officer and is at trial through the UCMJ, his rights are not the same as a private citizen. Additionally, the 'inhumane' treatment that is described in the UN report would mean that pretty much all the prisons in the US should be shut down (an outcome I wouldn't really oppose), but it seems about average for military justice. Keep in mind that the 'punitive' suicide watch kept him in solitary for about a week longer than he should have been there [1]. It's not like he was waterboarded.

“On two occasions … a medical officer determined that suicide risk
status was no longer warranted and the brig staff did not immediately
take PFC Manning off the suicide risk status,” Galaviz wrote in his
February 23 findings. In one instance, the suicide watch continued
for five days after doctors recommended it be canceled and in another
it went on for two to three days, the review found.

And I'm not sure what Guantanamo has to do with anything, there have never been any americans held there, and if it weren't for obstruction in congress, that hell hole would be shut down already.

[1] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/58991.html#ixzz2XF...
Start Small Stay Small is packed with great advice: http://www.startupbook.net/
What does a startup marketer do?
While cool,but really, Is there such a great clamoring for scaling programs over multiple cores

Absolutely. Queues, databases, caches, machine learning, graph algorithms, CRDTs, image, audio, and video processing, stream algorithms, analytics, geospatial work, even HTTP APIs: all demand compute performance. Since CPU flops have been essentially stagnant for ten years, the only way to improve performance on commodity hardware is with parallelism. Almost every program I've worked on in the last five years has demanded multicore programming, or at least in-process concurrency.

Clojure is not the fastest language out there, but it does make reasoning about concurrent code dramatically simpler than other languages. My Clojure programs tend to parallelize trivially over 16 or 32 cores, and only rarely contain race conditions, deadlocks, or other threading bugs. In contrast, I routinely struggle to write correct multithreaded code in Java, and when I do, I usually adopt a slower locking mechanism because I'm just not smart enough to reason about concurrent mutable state.

Why is Clojure better for writing concurrent programs? For one, it's multi-paradigm. You can serialize transformations over state using normal JVM locks, agents, atoms, refs, or promises. Immutable shared-structure objects make concurrency safety trivial--but Clojure's identity types make reasoning about state easy, instead of having to express everything through monadic composition. For mutable state, you've got java.util.concurrent and Cliff Click's high_scale_lib available, plus great libraries like Netty. It's a deeply pragmatic language where the defaults are safe, but controlled speed is available where you need it.

Or you could run 64 Unicorn/V8 workers per node, and push all the hard problems into the database. That's a totally valid strategy--but I think there's a little more to life than that. ;-)
Startups are not defined by their growth. However, VC-backed startups are customarily focused on growth. The difference between these two statements is subtle but important.

'Revenue first, growth second', a paraphrasing of Clayten Christiansen.

VC's essentially use founders like race horses. They pump in the steroids, exercise them to the point of optimal performance or death, and then put them out to pasture if they don't perform. Founders are part of a portfolio plain and simple. They are part of a stable. The VC's are benevolent trainers but they have one goal: ROI. Their benevolence is in direct correlation to their ROI, which is largely determined by growth. The irony is that Wall Street operates in exactly the same way. The difference is that the relationship between Bank and Borrower or Shareholder and Company is more clearly defined than the relationship between VC and Founder.

There isn't anything wrong with VC's. They play a vital role in the financial community. Yet, at the end of the day, a VC is going to look at a startup as a financial product. VC's are offering their partners a product just like a startup is seeking to offer the market a product. The fortunate part about the rest of the business world, cut-throat though it may be to some, is that no one expects anyone else to be benevolent. They expect people to conduct business.

The better the VC-Startup relationship is defined, the better it will be for the long-term health of founders. On the other hand, VC's have no incentive to change course because their is still a willing market of young people who want to strike it rich. In some sense, it would be far better for the market and founders if data was more readily available. In fact, it is a jilted environment. It is always in the VC's favor because they hold the money. However, it doesn't mean that they hold future value. If it did, they wouldn't need to go fund startups.

The current VC-Founder relationship is imbalanced compared to other portions of the marketplace. The VC's hold additional chips because of the allure of a successful exit, the siren of Silicon Valley.