skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, how times change. The smart advice was to never use Javascript. (Years ago pg even wrote, "I would not even use Javascript, if I were you. Most of the Javascript I see on the Web isn't necessary, and much of it breaks." ) Javascript has gone from horribly flaky -> occasionally useful -> necessary -> mandatory.
Okay, since Opera seems to have gone the way of the dodo: Is there a browser for power users? I mean, good luck to Firefox and Chrome, but considering I rarely use flashy websites, I really would rather use something that only works with half the sites, but has the experimentation and hunger for ideas for the sake of ideas more than for the sake of market share these so sorely lack.
I want to start a company
VCs raise funds from LPs that typically range from the hundreds of millions to single digit billions. They need to return money on those huge funds, which means they care more about absolute returns than a large percentage return. In other words, given the choice to invest $10M and get back $50M or invest $100M and get back $200M, they'd definitely prefer the second deal (assuming equal risk).
Is it just me, or do most of the commenters here seem to believe that it's no longer possible to disable JavaScript, as opposed to it simply being removed from the UI?
Agreed. Put another way: less than 1% of the world runs on anything based on Node.js.
> Just making sure I won't be working with idiots.

I think the the interviewer (or company) would probably take this as an insult.

But I do agree with you in that these types of interview questions are pointless. Spitting back an answer verbatim demonstrates nothing.

A neat approach that I've seen people use is to take a you-should-know-this concept such as the merging part of merge sort and put a twist in it, so it isn't a simple spit-the-answer-back, but different enough to require some thought.
When you say better information, what do you mean? The actual basic fundamentals of each company are publicly available and required to be accurate. There's a lot in the interpretation, but at least on that front your actual information is on a reasonably level playing field.

I agree that getting into technical / behavior based trading is a much bigger hurdle due to all the specialized data and algorithms that go into it.
The people who operate the current tax system probably won't take kindly to an alternative system just being 'declared'. And they have lots of guns.
Why are things illegal? In the most purely naive idea, it is because government is supposed to prevent us from damaging ourselves. Tobacco and liquor are damaging things, they are literally poisons. Caffeine is also damaging.

I would be personally be much more inclined to believing the scientists whose entire career is the study of these illegal substances rather than the politicians who have to continue pushing the old ideals of "this is the line and we do not move the line because that would be an immoral attack on the fabric of society". Do you know why cannabis is known as marijuana? The reason is the old guard felt that cannabis was not foreign enough and changed it to something a wee bit more scary.

If you can put out a well reasoned argument against legalization then fine. If you will fall back to the standard catch all of 'its illegal!' then we have nothing discuss for you cannot present a reasonable argument.
Beware the $5/month Business
Why do you think Opera has gone the way of the dodo? It's an excellent browser, by far the best browser in my opinion. Furthermore, they're changing their renderer to webkit which will ensure no more Opera incompatibility. If anything, Opera just keeps getting better.
Sorry about this actually. I have an extension that automatically does the bit.ly redirects on CTRL+C. I will update the post with the expanded URLs.
So obvious to you that it would seem that you need no evidence at all, other than your preconceptions.
Poll: do you approve of removing the "Disable Javascript" option in Firefox?
Mozilla have removed the "Disable JavaScript" checkbox from Firefox 23 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968237).

I am curious to see the balance of opinions on this matter, so: do you approve?

(The choices here are intentionally coarse-grained. Polarise your opinion.)
Javascript, Flash, HTML 5, and virtually all the rest of the HTML "enhancements" are a cancer on the web.

Honestly, the only website that I can think of where using Javascript actually does something useful that I'd have a hard time doing better on a standalone app on my own machine is Google Maps, where it's nice to be able to scroll around by dragging the map with the mouse.

But even there, I'd gladly sacrifice that feature for a standalone mapping app on my own machine, so I don't have to worry about Google spying on me whenever I decide to go somewhere!

Geez. The web has become a gigantic spyware advertising network, and Javascript, Flash, and related garbage are some of the main enablers of it.

</rant>
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only reason the matrix being sparse is mentioned is because the author stuck a bunch of 0s in the matrices... this solution should work regardless of the sparsity.
Why New York’s rise as a startup haven is sustainable
Convenient clickable link to the discussion of the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968237
Open Reader API
Detroit, Embracing New Auto Technologies, Seeks App Builders
AFAIK, it's still in about:config. If you are smart enough to go into the options to turn off Javascript in the first place, then it won't be too much effort to go into about:config.
Give him some advice: speak up in a non-threatening way: "hey, can you help explain to me why X is actually worse of an idea than Y? From my experience and reading, it seems like Y has many issues with blah, while X is better at blagh."

I believe the root cause may be a bad culture fit.
Either:

A. His ideas really aren't as good as he thinks they are, and he is either not soliciting feedback or receiving it in a productive and understanding way.

or

B. The team does not have a problem solving process which clearly identifies the 'best' solution to a problem for the company.
Why is there no highly visible description of what "Dylan" is on this website?

Clicked through to "Home" and "About" and ended going to Wikipedia to answer the question "What is Dylan?".
You really do not want to be explaining Javascript to my mom and pop, or most others. (And yes, your parenthetical case at the end? It happened to me in just the last two weeks; coincidence, yes, but it did.)
The links are also very vaguely related to the topic. If there is a point which can be made using links, typically the text of the anchor tag should tell part of the story.
Maybe - but I'm reading it with the suspicion of someone who's just having been served a wake-up call on the exact nature of a friendship, and finding it's a lot less mutually respectful than expected.

I still see that "Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law." glaring out at me from the middle of that denial.

My suspicious mind now reads phrases like " … and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process" and "Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period", as saying "so long as 'correct process' includes a FISA rubber stamp, and that '(claims of) open-ended access to our users' can only be true if it includes all domestic US users" - then sure, we can say that while still handing over _all_ data on non-US users -it's still _technically_ true.

This is for me, kinda like when someone you thought was a close friend gets married and doesn't invite you to the wedding - nothing's actually changed, but you now view everything differently. Right now I've got that "Oh, _that's_ how it is huh? I guess that explains a few things, I wish I'd known earlier…" feeling - complete with that sense of foolishness for ever having thought things were different.

It might be paranoid - or it might just be pragmatic. Either way, things _are_ different now. I just didn't get invited to The US's wedding, while Apple, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Skype, TeamViewer, PayPal, eBay, Digital Ocean, Linode, Rackspace, Dropbox, Evernote, Trello, Freshbooks, and a bunch of others all did. Now I have to re-evaluate all those relationships too.

How paranoid is it to wonder if I can trust 1Password any more?
There's a lot of people stuff too. I have found that junior developers, perversely, are more defensive about bad decisions than senior folks. They tend to be quicker to leap to conclusions or become attached to a particular technical approach to a problem. Of course, senior people make these mistakes too, but, I find, at a lower rate.

It's not universal. I have no doubt that there are kids with six months of experience who perform better than me after my six years. But, I'd also be willing to bet that's an exception, not the rule.
That's exactly what it is. Thanks!
Millennial Trains Project: Freespaces in Many Places: A [ Freespace ] Initiative
YC deals with people at such an earlier stage that a lot of their advice and hand-holding is more generic - how to get a product out the door, how to improve user conversions, how to attract quality talent - these are examples of isuses that are universal, so having (some) competitors isn't too much of a conflict.

A later-stage VC, though, you might be having conversations with portfolio company A about how to entice sales people from portfolio company B, or portfolio company B might be getting ready to expand internationally and you're advising them on the best way to capture market share in Asia, where company A is stronger.

It's much more specific, targeted advice and consultation vs. "here's how we're going to help you get off the ground"
That's the point, you don't choose when to first come across something you haven't heard of before. You don't wake up one morning and say "I guess I'll go to the library and get a book about Javascript" because you dreamed about it.

There are a million ways to display and to drill down into options that would make the FF options less cluttered, more logical, while having even more options than it does. There are ways to inform users pretty much exhaustively via built-in tooltips and documentation -- all of this has been working great in the 90s and got better since then. Icon > Title/Tooltip > Short Description > Verbose Description, so you learn everything you "stumble over" once when you need it, and from then on just use it, with the option to refresh your knowledge anytime.

Just compare about:config in Opera and Firefox, and simply accept we're dealing with different levels of skill and taste here, not just different choices.
One aspect of this that I haven't heard people get into very much: the idea that a lot of people have, including (probably) most developers at Mozilla and many web developers such as myself, is for the web platform to be a ubiquitous way to deploy applications.

The idea is that JavaScript allows a relatively safe way to do that in a sandboxed environment (the browser) that is available on almost every computer.

The developers who really want the web to just be a bunch of static HTML are actually inhibiting that vision of a web platform. Because if disabling JavaScript were to become popular, that takes away that capability of web browsers to run applications. The conversation would go from something like "we can use JavaScript and this application will run for anyone who has a new version of Firefox, Chrome, or IE10/11, or Safari" to "we can deploy our application to the latest browsers, but we will have to first present a screen asking users to enable JavaScript on our site" or something along those lines. It goes from being a ubiquitous cross-platform solution to one that will only run for people who like JavaScript.

JavaScript in the browser is by far the best option we have now and in the foreseeable future for easily deploying applications across different types of operating systems and even devices.

Its amazing to me how many people don't appreciate that goal or really take it into account.
I don't believe that corporations are libertarian, largely because "limited liability" completely divorces them from the responsibility of the individual, which forms the basis of everything in the libertarian system.

I don't see any problem with partnerships and sole proprietorships, though.

As with any system, these people need to be ethical. But corporations have a sort of legally forced amorality.
Anything would be better than sitting.
Very true, I think the defensive part comes from feeling comfortable with a limited toolkit. It's only natural to try push what you feel comfortable with, my experience is a lot of the more junior staff I work with are more pushy and emotional with their tech interests, however often relax and become more approachable if you provide guidance and help them learn something new in a comfortable environment.
I can confirm the "Advanced" button is gone.

At least for the moment, the dom.disable_window_move_resize and dom.event.contextmenu.enabled preferences still exist in about:config, though.
"We can't learn to see until we admit we are blind." -- Alan Kay
I imagine it would be similar to what i've been looking for.

Central app that manages the storage, sending (server to server) and receiving (server to server) of email exposed over a rest api
Must we continue to carry water for U.S. political factions by discussing this manufactured pseudo-news? How about we get back to the real story of the IRS election rigging that the administration desperately wants to be forgotten. Or the insane war in Syria where they are backing Al Qaeda and their nasty friends.

No, we have to keep chewing over these planted stories about how we are shocked, shocked to find spying going on at the NSA. This week we are to believe that France, Germany, and Britain are poor helpless waifs who are going to pick up their alms bowls and go back to their orphanage because mean ole Unca Sam was sneaky.

Echelon bait: nuclear, cosmic ray backscatter, intrusion countermeasure.
Who other than Google could set such a thing up?
I'm glad the author is changing the URLs. In the meantime, there is a Chrome extension to automatically expand shortener URLs to the real link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/knowurl-expand-tin...
Academics are liberal elites. Conservatives are from industry.

My parents lived through the depression. They have money habits. I'm pretty fiscally conservative, too. I don't drive, so I have money for soda. I have no respect for people who place themselves in a pinch with high mortgages and stuff.

Anyway, my little brother once threw change from a restaurant in the street and said, "That's for the homeless". I paid my way though school with scholarships and work.

Liberals like to fuck-with conservatives by extravagance.

A liberal programmer loves it when he comes-up with some wasteful algorithm, so he can fuck with conservatives.

Linus uses C, not even C++.

Academics like LISP, completely worthless, but boy do they like their little 50 line programs that are embarrassingly parallel, so to speak.

----

I have 640x480. The people at OSDev mock me -- retards. What good is it if you support 2 GPUs out of 30? Or run with no acceleration and can only do terminal?

They like to imitate best practices from Linux. They think someone is going to write drivers for them, so they are doing documentation and planning on their driver interface and talking about monolithic and microkernels. They are desiging for portability.

Basically, they make grand plans being monkeys doing best practices. They feel superior to me because they think I'm too stupid to do grand plans like they do, and oh how smart they are for doing best practices.

In the end, they have something unfinished that is grandiose and useless... but they mock me.
You must know that humans are very fickle creatures. People buy clothes and food from poorly-regulated industries all the time, not because none of them can be made to care about the conditions under which these goods are manufactured, but because not all of them can be made to care constantly.

If only a small group of people are ever interested enough to personally fund regulation, how can such free-market "regulation" effectively ensure good working conditions and food safety? Government solves this problem by low-pass-filtering the fickleness, thus ensuring continued funding.
Sure, but that benefit will become increasingly large as the problem size is increased. Benchmarking should be done, of course, but only as a way to determine where Strassen's algorithm begins to dominate. Note also that that quote supports what I said, at least in the limit: Strassen's algorithm does improve performance more dramatically for large problem sizes (though how much more dramatically is certainly debatable).

I am not going to deny that hardware matters, but it is important to know where it matters. Hardware matters in terms of constant factors. For sufficiently large problem sizes, hardware might give you a 10x improvement if you use it correctly -- but that is 10x no matter how large the problem size becomes. An algorithmic improvement will become increasingly beneficial as the problem size increases; that is why we speak of things like "crossing points," where an asymptotically faster algorithm begins to dominate. Even very poor use of hardware features (terrible locality of reference, etc.) will eventually be irrelevant for an asymptotically better algorithm; a large number of really good uses of the hardware is still slower than a small number of really bad uses.
What is your take on w3m vs elinks?
Ok then, here's one.

One time after dropping some acid, I was lying on the couch and above my head was a rather large asparagus fern hanging over my head. While staring at this plant and pondering the deeper meaning of life, it suddenly began to twitch. The branches were bouncing up and down an inch or two.

From that point on, and for many years later, whenever I looked at that plant from anywhere in the room, the branches would begin dancing around.

I would make visitors look at the plant while I stood across the room looking out the window, and while they watched, I would turn and look at the fern. It did it everytime without failing once. I have at least 100 witnesses.

Now that's one of the nicer stories. But what I would say to anyone considering experimentation, you'll be sorry if you do. Philip K. Dick speaks of spending a 1000 years at the Mountain of Shame. I can so relate.
I had a similar experience recently. I read a lot of HN and other programming tech sites. It's easy to think you know a lot. I sat down for an informal interview with a founder, much older me and much more experienced than me and we bounced ideas back and forth. I got torn a new one. Destroyed my ideas and really offered a new outlook on things. That's the moment I knew I didn't know shit.

I am a Junior Developer.
Agreed. More smaller cap funds and accelerate deal closing. Shouldn't take three months to raise. Right team, right product/pitch and they should be on their way iterating as fast as possible.

This could also potentially shorten length of runway needed. If you knew you could raise in 30 days... you wouldn't need 12 months of runway. Much more efficient for the entire ecosystem.
I've updated the URLs. Sorry about that.
replying to myself:
one more way apple simply makes better software: safari offers a simple reset option that seems to reset all browser settings. Now, this doesn't help in the case of a user not understanding what went wrong, but I can tell someone over the phone "click on safari -> reset safari" far more easily than walking someone through deleting a firefox profile while saving bookmarks or reinstalling firefox and creating a new profile. I don't like safari as a browser, but it's to apple's credit that they offer this simple option so I tell my mother / mother-in-law to just click reset if the internet is weird.
Show HN: A minimal feed reader that uses ML to streamline your reading list
You said that Wikileaks was all about stroking Assange's ego. I called you on that. I'm sorry if I came off badly, but I keep seeing this idea and I never see it substantiated with anything. He's an attention whore because he tirelessly works his causes? Is Chomsky? I'm not so much angry at you as exasperated at what I see as some kind of reflexive nitpicking of a guy who's doing a huge amount of good.
Thanks for sharing this. [:)].
Why wouldn't users be able to click links? He is simply providing URLs for popular social sites that can be used in link hrefs to share the page being viewed. Ie,

http://facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://url-of-the-post

You use this to make regular links that users can click, instead of buttons loaded inside iframes, etc.
Great device! I can't wait to try one out.
Junior developers know how to do stuff. Senior developers know how not to.
Ask PG: How will crowd-funding affect YC and the VC industry?
In your latest post, you talked about trends in venture capital, but didn't bring up recent trends in crowdfunding. How do you think crowdfunding will change the game for both YC and the venture capital industry?
This is a twist on the basic web-based feed reader concept that a friend and I have been working on in our spare time for the past couple of months or so.

Users can mark items as liked/disliked, and the app will not show the user new items it thinks they won't want to read. It's done on a per-user basis, i.e. my preferences won't affect your reading list and vice versa. It's built on Rails.

It would be great to get some feedback about layout and marketing copy if anyone has any.

We'd be happy to go into more detail if you have any questions about any aspect of the project.
Not only is this overly-pessimistic, but your assertions are largely unfounded.

VCs are not out to "stick-it" to anyone. They want to be a part of a great deal just as much as the next person.

Key bottleneck is that the process is too slow. Not designed for today's 15-minute world.
Hey Engineers — Stop Pissing Off Your Product Manager
Try disabling cookies. This exactly describes the effect, except that it's not mysterious once you're used to it. If something doesn't work, I open it in Chrome (where I have cookies enabled), and it works.

In many cases, I suppose the developer doesn't know about the cookie dependency (because of a framework or some other dependency). In other cases, I guess they don't care. Rarely does the page actually tell you that cookies are required.