skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I agree with no comments in methods and not much comments overall.

What if the comments specify why you're taking a certain approach over another or something that was decided by other people? Comments are good for documenting not what the code says, but the reasoning behind that code. This is especially helpful if you haven't looked at it for awhile.
The Downfall Of Agile Hitler [video]
Does someone know offhand why these HTML generators are macros and not just functions? If I need to RTFSC that's fine, but thought I'd ask in case it's a quick answer.
Me too. But why not work on side projects if you're bored? I'm building a web site in my downtime (compiling, honest! :p). Might as well plan for the future if you're not happy with the present
Building Go Test It: Fun with Scala and REST APIs
As mentioned in other replies, you should probably always assume that you alone have the responsibility for your password security.
Is it just me or does 1.45B seem just a bit excessive?
- Exorbitant loss of upside
Great entrepreneurs are known for their passion to pursue their dreams at virtually any cost, and sub-prime VCs smell their blood and desperation. Those companies become owned by VCs quickly and because of the investors' lack of relevant operating experience yields a further deflation of the valuation of the company. We've seen many companies with end-game founder stock way below 5%, which is unlikely to become life-changing. So, why would you take the scrutiny of the CEO job with that outcome in mind?

Always think about that, is it better to own 100% of a company worth 10 million bucks or 5% of a company worth 200 million? I would rather own completely the smaller business and have fewer people to answer to and focus on a more niche (often times more interesting) problem.
That's news.
Ignore the code
Offering video on the web opens up so many more options then the current methods, and many more revenue models.
As you mentioned, the ads can be updated to be the most current since the video is being streamed right then and there.

On top of that, the networks can easily have more targeted and relevant ads. They can track all of the shows people are watching, and know exactly how many people are watching them. There are additional hooks for people to discover new shows.

You can have different subscription models, with the free version allowing people to watch only the most current episodes, then being able to pay additional to see all of the previous episodes and seasons. People can pay to not have advertising if they want. Plus any other combination or other pricing models that you can think of can be used.

In exchange for giving up control, they would gain an incredible amount of flexibility on how the content is priced and used. They are crazy for not moving ahead with this with the amount of money they could make off of this.

*Edit:Grammar fixes
How is this different from pricing and special discounts?
Color-Shifting "Master of Disguise" Cuttlefish Inspires Hyper-Energy Efficient TV
It was weird for me at first, but I find it comfortable now. The eyes don't have to move as much while scanning code; small thing, I guess.

Of course, if I didn't have a proper text editor that took care of the tab stops for me, it'd probably make me crazy to have to hit the space bar twice for indents.

Still, it was never as off-putting as the significant whitespace in Python, which any pythonista can tell you becomes very easy to live with after an easy and brief acclimation period.
Dashboard: Track Your Leads From Anywhere
I'm in the US and it wants me to subscribe
I always marveled at how you could patent genes, which seemed to me to be "naturally occurring phenomena", which is supposedly not patentable. It is even more preposterous when you consider that plant patents specifically exclude tuber plants because the root that would be patented is also food, and the patent office was too worried about preventing people access to food.

If you zoom out, though, and consider why patents exist in the first place, the idea that a research institution deserves to profit from the fruits of their research money is not that absurd. I think the question is not whether patents should be issued for biotechnology research, but instead what the best method is to protect investment in biotechnology research while not retarding future work.

Also, on a side note, patents may be infringed upon for research purposes. This is not holding back research, it is only slowing commercialized tests (or maybe just increasing their cost). There is nothing to suggest that the licensing terms offered by the patentee are exorbitant... The patentee is merely trying to recoup some of their investment in the commercialized result of their research.
Unless you don't already have readers from HN.
"The amount of the fines is paid into the Community budget. The fines therefore help to finance the European Union and reduce the tax burden on individuals."

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/overview/faqs_en.htm...
While working for my last employer, a big software company, I had lots of free time ... milestones lasted a month, and the work we did in a milestone could have been made in 3 days of hard work by talented engineers with no endless meetings, and no internal systems to integrate to. And we used the worst tools ever.

Having free time was great, but in my contract was specified that everything I worked on in my free time belonged to the company.

Now I'm working at a small consultancy company that's run by an old friend of mine. It's not bad, but we offer consultancy services and that means ...
- at least 3 projects I have to work on simultaneously
- the projects have to be finished as soon as possible, such that we can collect the money :) This means we can't give too much love to those projects (although I'm learning a lot about meeting customer expectations and cutting features that aren't essential ... which is great)

When I joined I thought it would be great since I will have enough time to work on my own projects, and no contract to stop me from doing it. That's not the case :(

At home, when I feel like working on something, I end up working on tasks that are late at work.
Your Morning Commute is Unique
What Designers & Marketers Can Learn From the Slap Chop Website
Erlang FizzBuzz Showdown (Part 1) from a PHP/python/ruby developer's perspective
Building of a FizzBuzz program in Erlang from a PHP/python/ruby developer's perspective. The first steps into functional programming.
"$175K is not a salary that leaves much on the table, especially not when you live in the expensive area around Sandhill Road."

Is he serious? I'll bet money gets really tight when you factor in the silver cutlery, butler, and other essentials.
I was in the US Army in the early 90s, and this would not be a particularly incredible story for where I was stationed.
Yes, but I believe he is talking about a 'they made me move to Sand Hill Rd to be near them when they invested' scenario, where $175K is worth less than half that for the rest of that nation, owing to exorbitant cost of living there.
Personally, I like clean, minimal designs. I'd have been happy with anything between 2-4. Stage 12 (or finished) is completely over-the-top for my taste. Tags are hard to read (red is too dark) and don't tell me anything about the depth or breadth of discussions that will be on these topics. Devdays font is coming off too strong in the final one. In Stage 4, StackOverflow was clearly visible and Devdays seemed pretty significant too. I was instantly able to make out that it was a 5-city dev conference by the folks from StackOverflow. In Stage 4, he could have highlighted some of the key words from the description to give more value to specific 'tags' and put simple links for buy-ticket, speakers etc. As it stands, it's very high on graphics, definitely very impactful, but not too clean or simple. However, that being said, it is still a very good design.
>> "Also, sometimes you follow people who you eventually find a bit boring, but your manners might dictate that you don't unfollow them if they're still following you."

Seems like that's a shame - I think it'd be great if each time someone tweeted something boring, their follow count dropped 10%. They might improve the quality of their tweets then.
We use it where I work for access control. We define groups in ActiveDirectory(LDAP) which are then specified for each subversion repository. It works fairly well for this except there is no fine control. You can only specify access or no access, not read only or something like that.
Why working at a startup? You have an image of an ideal that may be a fallacy. I work at a startup and it's not all fun and games. 1) It's a lot of work, 2) there is a lot of bureaucratic red tape (just like any real world business environment) 3) startups are more fluid and flexible, meaning they can succeed quickly, but fail just as fast. My point being that it's not fun to watch your friends get fired because the startup suddenly cannot pay them anymore.

Perhaps what you meant was "Working on my startup." To which I would agree. If I could be doing anything right now it would be working on my own projects and working towards being able to sustain myself through the application of my own skills. Perhaps that's not what you meant, but heed my warning, startups are not a panacea for programmers.
Except that if you own 5% of a company worth 200 million you should be able to quit and walk away with 10 million (for the standard definition of "own" and "worth").

If you own a company worth 10 million you can't really quit. If you sell it, chances are that the acquiring company will want you around for years so you'll be in the above situation but with golden handcuffs.
Gladwell is only using the basketball story as an example; whether or not "the press" works is irrelevant. He is saying: look at the game differently. Approach your competition from another angle. The Redwood City team was successful because they looked at basketball differently and took another approach. If they hadn't played 'untraditionally' they would have failed and that's all we need to take away from this article.
note he says "support family", it is easy to be a bachelor on a lot less but 175k if you want to do any kind of saving for retirement, saving for your kids education, and paying for healthcare is not much. So if you want to look your kids in the eyes and say "hey I'm gambling on something for my own personal fulfillment rather than giving you the opportunities that I could easily if I had kept my old job" then go right ahead but its difficult for others to do. Thats why I want to my whole risky-taking entrepreneurship thing BEFORE having kids so you don't run into that quandary.
In other words: Cultivate your own Reality Distortion field.
He's darn lucky this worked.
I'm reading '4 Steps to the Epiphany' http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch and one thing that is really nice about it is that it breaks markets down by type, such that one kind of product would be silly to take VC because it can get to profitability in only a year, whereas another would have to, because it will likely take 5 years to be profitable.

Which is really interesting, because it tells you what kind of products to build if you want to own 100% of a $10 million company, don't want to take or can't find VC, etc.
Shifting Applications Into Gearman
Craigslist dropping 'erotic ads'
Ironically, according to Steve, the people who developed the above are responsible for Silicon Valley.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ
Startup 123: Another Reason Startups Kick Corporate Butt
If you can't support a family on $175k, you're doing it wrong.
Specify the parameters of your requirements ;)

aka touche.
I think this is a great set of articles - the undercurrent I saw was that in his early days, Cuban was disciplined as a matter of course. If I had been as disciplined at 24, I think I'd be pursuing my own ideas full time right now. The one big difference for me is I don't drive by big houses and want to be in one - I talk to my friends with trust funds and envy them the free time they have. I want to make a big win so that I can write my own software, full time. I think we are in the midst of a cultural sea change and that writing software is as valid a form of artistic expression as any. It's amazing the impact individuals and small groups can have today. My hope in making a big win early in life is to spend the next 50 years writing the software I want to write - and exploring the research topics I want to explore.
Being that specific about where you live is ridiculous. I can see them demanding that you live in the Bay Area, or in a particular city, but the only thing I can see VCs having any say on beyond that would be the office location.
My first thought was "Your mom!" but that only goes to show how juvenile my sense of humor is.. :)

Seriously, though, it's a powerful question and I've seen so many people redefine themselves and their lives by answering it. One alternative way to frame it that seems to have worked for others is by planning out your "ideal average day" in detail, hour by hour. Your perfect day might involve a date with Jessica Alba, skydiving, and winning the Monaco Grand Prix, but you couldn't do that every day so the word "average" is key.

Now, I've heard people complain that it's taken them hours to come up with a plan but that it's opened their eyes. Me? I'm currently on the weeks timescale.. indecisiveness, indecisiveness..!
Distributed Denial of Dollars(DDo$)
Does anyone know where Paul W Cooper, the author of Anywhere in 42 Minutes, is today?

fgraham@kent.edu
Hate goes viral on social network sites:
Craigslist dropping 'erotic services' ads
Data-ish Blogs
More traps! More black eyes! Nary a feather in your cap! Had you any friends I would urge them to see to you.

The ideal candidate for this job knows when -- as Kenny Rogers put it -- to "hold 'em" and when to "fold 'em." By not simply walking away from a fruitless discussion with a self-admitted troll, you've shown yourself to place pride above the minimax of effort in the pursuit of solution. This single-minded devotion to a stupid, stupid task is not a quality we look for in our engineers.

Instead of readjusting strategies and avoiding the sunken cost fallacy, you chose the classic 6th grade technique of pretending you knew all along and the decidedly modern approach of post-facto appointing yourself as head of Hacker News' Troll-Baiting Brigade (official motto: "We Get Made Fun Of So You Don't Have To," official song: "Nearer To Thee, PG"). When faced with a losing bet, you doubled up.

You can keep the dry erase marker you're holding, but I'm going to have to ask security to see you out.

Hard to find quality candidates these days...
The way he worked through the design really resonated with me, especially when he would break away from his original only to come back to it later on.
Matt Aimonetti and the Ceremony of Political Correctness
"Ubuntu is based on a snapshot of the "unstable" tree of Debian, which is merged into Ubuntu's current code release every six months.

Ubuntu is Debian unstable with some of the rough edges smoothed over"

I'd say that Ubuntu is more of a fork of debian/testing than debian/sid. The only serious Sid distro I know of is Sidux.
legal issues. The company owns the idea and the product if I thought of it/worked on it on their time/equipment.

I do play around with new languages/libs/tools/etc. though.
It looks very much like Pascal to me.
I wonder whether the fine will be taken out of "Intel Europe" profits (in which case member states can't collect as many taxes) or whether money will be moved from the US to Europe? In the latter case it's a small, but not insignificant, redistribution of wealth across the Atlantic..., sort of like the Marshall Plan, except without the smiles.
> To understand the privacy threats

As Bruce Schneier has written, there is no such thing as privacy.

Bruce Schneier, "Privacy in the age of persistence"

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/02/privacy_in_the...

"It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises."

-Theodore Kaczynski
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension is a U.S. law. Sweden was actually life+70 before the Sonny Bono act.

I'm not a big fan of life+70 myself, but I don't see what the Pirate Bay case has to do with copyright terms. The infringements claimed are on works like Walk the Line and Harry Potter, which are far from the end of their copyright terms, Bono act or not.

Rosa Parks was a great example of civil disobedience. To me this just looks like people who don't want to have to pay to watch Prison Break.
So does this guy design the covers for Wired magazine? Because that's what it looks like.
A Better Javascript Memoizer
Sure, but this is still an improvement over the previous situation, for me anyway.
Ask HN: The Essential Silicon Valley?
I'm a serial compulsive/degenerate (can't stop, help!) entrepreneur from Atlanta, and I'm coming to the bay area this summer for a few days, maybe a week, to find out what the 'Valley Advantage' really is first hand. I've got a list of places to see, a silicon valley guidebook, I've done mucho historical research and googlage and I've gotten some introductions, but I still need more activities/things to see & do.

Can y'all help me with some suggestions for events, sites, bars/restaurants/whatever that would be good to visit to get a sense of the 'valley advantage?'

Trip date is week of June 8th.
Worked - thanks.
Ask HN: Please review our web app - TellMyPolitician.com
I think many people don't "find" their passion, because they are afraid of what happends when they commit to follow through. So they find many things interesting, but deep down they are just dishonest to them selves out of fear. I want to argue that a good way to not only find your passion but to living it, is to tackle one's fears and eliminate them. Kill your inner daemons and the dream will appear.
As soon as I saw the title of the post, I was pretty sure what you'd be writing about. I thought the similar things when reading the discussion. One thought that went through my mind was: this kind of negativity doesn't really reflect well on the community.
I liked the second last design more. Christmas at StackOverflow!
I think it's time for a follow-up article on social news site crapspam.
I work with mileszs on TellMyPolitician. We are trying to get feedback on how to better present this to publishers to entice them to place our button on their site. We eventually want to have our tool added to the likes of addthis and sharethis as well.

We would also love to here your opinion on the tool and how to make it better for users who are trying to contact their politician. Please let us know what you think. We are grateful for any feedback you have.

We originally submitted this to the apps for america contest with sunlight labs. We didn't do as well as we hoped, partly we feel, because we didn't do a very good job showing where our real value lies, which is as a button on news sites. We hoped our new design will better emphasis that goal.
What I don't get is why web frameworks put routing into the code at all. Most of them don't do anything interesting with it (Rails is the most prominent exception), and if you're just gonna map a few things with regexes, well... what's so difficult about mod_rewrite?
Wolfram Alpha to Launch Live on Justin.TV
when?

What you're looking for isn't exactly a tourist attraction.
Finding your calling is an iterative processes.

Just because it's worth repeating.
I can see how this will result in politicians being flooded with a lot of emotionally-driven comments and rants and therefore be less productive than some coordinated effort which has a backbone of reasoning.

So you may want to consider a way to create something like I just watched this video, I would like to hear more about the issues than this one video presented to me and then contact their rep.
can you elaborate the finer control aspect?
I actually was thinking the same thing when I scanned over the comments for this article. One reader wrote something similar to, "it seems like you fell for every trap the interviewer put out".

What trap? Thinking before speaking? Someone who answers general, ambiguous questions with a general, ambiguous answer cannot be much of a programmer. Aren't we trained to do just the opposite after all?
Axum - Introduction and Ping Pong Example
Myriad's patents give it exclusive right to perform diagnostic tests on the genes -- forcing other researchers to request permission from the company before they can take a look at BRCA1 and BRCA2, the ACLU said. The patents also give the company the rights to future mutations on the BRCA2 gene and the power to exclude others from providing genetic testing.

How does that not hold back research, or merely "slow down" testing?
In the past I would build stuff and rapidly open source it. One of those cases where it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, I figure. If you're not looking to profit from it most companies don't care to come after you.
There is probably a huge opportunity in this for someone willing to trudge through that wasteland.
Announcing PHP SDK for Windows Azure
Mootools plugin and tutorial
Guaranteeing profit is not why patents exist in the first place. They exist "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

It is not about profit, but rather about overall progress and benefits for society at large. I think there's a good argument to be made that the current system now falls short of this goal and new rules are required.
One thought that came to mind is this: why not answer with, "I have a straightforward, textbook answer, but also some thoughts/questions about your assumptions in the question. Which is it that you're looking for?"

(Note: this question would be asked in a friendly, collaboration-seeking tone of voice/body language.)
Before asking about sending it overseas, perhaps you should say what quantity you want to build and how much you have budgeted for assembly. Hint: anything under less than 1,000pcs/month is probably not worth offshoring.

Plastic molding: same thing. What quantity are you looking at? The costs and options change depending on how many you want to build.
That makes little sense. Schneier was talking about the far future. It's certainly not an assumption that people make as they go about their daily lives. "Eventually," we'll be a spacefaring civilization, so why bother with anything on Earth?

Also, if you're going to claim something absurd like technology and freedom being incompatible, you're going to have to do better than quoting the Unabomber.
jQuery and JavaScript Resources
The search functionality needs to be on the homepage, so I can immediately see the benefits of your product.

Also, I think you should be marketing the search functionality and not the button. Make it easy to find a politician's information and then make it easy to contact them and you will find more people will use your button.
You seem pretty sure of yourself, and some differing data points would be nice to hear. Are you raising a family in the Bay Area?
You'd be one step away from the business end of organized crime. Not worth the risk IMO. Craigslist is probably somewhat protected by their sheer size and high profile. You'd be one guy taking money from and dealing with career criminals.