skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have also developed for the Leap Motion device [1] and agree with much of your critique.

The only arrangement I have had real success with is far away from the screen, i.e. mounted in a guitar.

My kids have been mildly amused by some of the things I've written and by the apps available in the beta, but e.g. with Cut the Rope, a lot of fun swiping on touchscreen iOS devices, they couldn't get it to work waving about in empty space with the Leap Motion. "Dad, this is too hard."

[1] https://github.com/heuermh/leap-motion-processing
Do Rob Pike or Russ Cox know any functional languages?

I am not in either's fan club, and I find it easy to believe that they indeed do not understand functional languages.
That is a fair point, I've known people who didn't really have any job responsibilities and yet insisted on 'helping.' Which resulted in lower productivity for everyone around them. One of the reasons Office Space was funny was that the stereotypes exist because these sort of people exist in real life.
We might as well debate religion.

JVM... you can keep it.
Sadly a patent examiner (in the UK at least) gets less than a day to do a prior-art search on the most complex applications in the most complex subject matter areas; half a day is probably the standard.

There are half-a-million patent applications per annum in the US alone (10 million since 1963). I'd estimate a global corpus of billions of patent applications. Prior art search extends though [in theory] to all publications.

You can see why prior art submissions are allowed from third parties. If you want to ensure only valid patents, or perhaps as few patents as possible, are granted then making such submissions is in your own interests.

Edit: Actually the gross figures are misleading, but remember these are complex 20+ page [in normal print size] documents on the whole. G06F11 - an IPC classification concerning error correction, detection and handling has ~9000 docs in the espacenet database for each of 2010/2011/2012.
Or, every day should be a FedEx day.
Instagram hasn't proven it's ability to make any money for anyone yet, and I doubt it ever will.

I don't doubt that sometimes there's a greater fool you can scam into buying your money pit, and even provide return to your investors. It's crazy exceptions like this that keep the good-money-after-bad merry go round turning.

But it is not now, nor has it ever been, a viable path to building a sustainable business.
> I don't think his comments translate into "you are stupid." They translate very clearly into "that is a terrible idea." With perhaps a shade of "don't 'pivot' because your feet are cold."

Consider this: If some random person after listening to you presenting your idea says a. "that is a terrible idea" or b. "you are fucking stupid." Does it matter? B may be more unpleasant to you, but both A and B express the exact same opinion about your idea.

Anyway, I think you missed my point. Nobody cares if feelings get hurt, but expressions like "like moths for bad ideas" aren't brutal honesty.

What would Spock have done when brandonb and his partner presented their (supposedly well-researched) idea bout changing the company? He would have said "My instinct tells me that your idea is detrimental to your business. But this meeting is to short for me to analyze all the facts and formulate a final opinion. Please get back to me next week and I will explain what I think the major weaknesses of your business plan is."

That would have been unfiltered and brutally honest. But it is also possible that it wouldn't have persuaded brandonb to change his mind.
This was incredibly engrossing and amusing. It was interest timing to see this, since today is actually my last day working as a contractor/consultant at a large financial company doing a job that repeatedly left me with days or weeks on end with no real work to do. What made it more painful was that this place blocked Gmail, Facebook, etc. so I was pretty much relegated to reading HN articles and screwing around on Twitter.

Somewhat amusingly, they blocked POST requests to Twitter, but not GET requests, so I could view tweets, but couldn't post any. Fortunately, I was able to use Buffer to get around this. :)

Happy ending - after 10 months in the corporate jungle, I am now going to work remotely for a startup! Very excited to be part of the startup scene instead of peering in from the outside.
I just find it sad that I could live with this restriction if I could remove the Google apps I do not plan on ever making use of.
Link should be: http://www.demarcken.org/carl/

But yes... I agree!
I thought he launched a Facebook competitor.
Why does Amazon let their warehouses get so hot? There are news stories about Amazon parking ambulances outside warehouses on hot days. Instead of reducing the time to take heat exhausted workers to the hospital, why not prevent the problem in the first place?

http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2017901782_a...
So how I read this is he stalks applicants on Facebook, won't hire people who drink socially during their own personal free time, and demands that applicants reveal the web sites they hang out on, or it's an instant no hire.

None of these things have anything to do with capability to do a job.

Sure, bad hires can be costly, but this article's advice is terrible and the author comes across as a crazed tyrant.
Is there anything specific you can point to that would explain what you mean here?

Or are you referring to thing such as the Mir, Unity, etc. controveries?
This is yet another step on the path of Bitcoin exposing that it is not the operational-semantics/capability/irreversibility based cryptocurrency many people wishfully thought that it was. The POW-based solution to the Byzantine agreement problem was quite novel. It's unfortunate that this novelty was wasted on the same old title-based accounting rather than something more appropriate for a fungible commodity.

A system based on accounts with default linkability invites all the tired old thinking that plagues our modern transactions - fraud, taxes, involuntary/post-facto regulation, etc. In this instance, the status-quo masses, having developed an interest in Bitcoin, will be reading this comment and thinking 'but of course the SEC should pursue fraud', because it fits their pattern of how the world works - it feels like someone has been wronged, so the big man with the big stick comes and sets things right. The underlying idea of irreversible transactions and "it is how it works" won't enter their world view. And these status-quo infusions of ambient authority will encourage additional ones until the novel autonomy-attempting properties of Bitcoin have been completely mitigated.

I just hope adequate electronic currencies don't end up stillborn due to the Bitcoin vaccine.
Citibike System Data
Never heard them called FedEx days before, I agree 100%

(When I clicked the link I was expecting a story about having one day a week when delivering stuff to the office is okay)
Slingatron - build a railroad to space
Sounds like a "Better off Ted" episode. Amazing. I can't believe anyone who hadn't actually been working has the gall to complain when they get kicked out.
Just curious: what was the idea of the mobile app for local events?
Especially somebody who lists her main hobby as triathlons.
So, I have been doing network engineering and sysadmin kind of stuff since the 90s. I remember when Cisco bought the PIX firewalls from Network Translation around 95/96.

Cisco has killed competition here by paying out the other company. Cisco absolutely will kill off a product line somewhere which conflicts with what they purchased, or vice versa.

While Cisco is pretty good about corporate integrations from a big-picture level, but I imagine the individuals with talent over at Sourcefire are getting ready to jump ship, because Cisco is really bad at promoting and compensating based on technical merit. They promote business executives and then hire cheap Indian tech talent (not trying to be racist here, it's just true).

Linksys was a weird acquisition and I don't think it's a fair comparison here at all. Instead, look to where Cisco got their big switches, their wireless networking, their IP telephony, their IDS, firewalls, and video conferencing tech. Cisco has integrated those products well, but they almost immediately stopped innovating new features and only responded to outside competition to deliver anything new. Cisco was LAST to have good 10Gb ethernet switches, LAST to have IDS products, LAST in a variety of IP telephoney features, and their PIX/ASAs still suck super hard, are buggy, and crash way too much.

Cisco sells stuff which gets the job done, but at an incredible markup, while spreading FUD about the competition. But mostly their stuff is somewhat mediocre, especially their software.

I really want Cisco to have more competition. I'm really sorry that Sourcefire sold out.

PS: Next time you are buying switches and routers, look at Juniper. Juniper mops the floor with Cisco technically, and is usually 25% cheaper.
I'd say Scheme and Haskell are functional languages, as they emphasize programming in a functional style: Composing functions to process values. "Value-oriented programming".

I never understood why anyone classified Lisp (typically CL) as a functional language, as it isn't any more functional than Python, Ruby or Perl.
That's very impressive. Great job building that, I totally want one now. I'm curious as to how you identify the different Satellites? is there an API available that gives the orbits/names?
What exactly is Go missing for you?
The creator of USB hasn’t stopped inventing: conversation with with Ajay Bhatt
Now that is an interesting speculation.
Wait, what? How is ARC more powerful than Python's system? ARC is reference counting. Python is reference counting (with a mark-and-sweep collector that sometimes runs to collect cycles). Python also supports weak references (http://docs.python.org/2/library/weakref.html). What's the difference?
"QSF" works for the SF area on Hipmunk.
Wallstreet ;)
I would suppose not only PG's emotions but also his personality, track record and the OP's general admiration for him, which all add up to his influenciality.

If someone puts all of this in the balance, you listen, and it won't leave you unmoved.
Choose wisely whom you grant such power.
Atlas Beta - The new learning environment from O’Reilly
القرضاوي يحرض علي قتل السيسي وقادة الجيش | التيار
Refurb MacBook Pro? Just wait for one to come up with the specs you want.

http://refurb-tracker.com/
Edward Snowden's fear of flying is justified
C.S. on the cheap
I'm glad this article implies that employees need not stay up all night, as Facebook Hackathons seem to promote. Such events are heavily biased toward the participation of the young and childless who have few mandatory scheduled responsibilities outside the workplace such as childcare. Of course, participation ostensibly is voluntary, but it's clear that there are career benefits such as making oneself known to upper management by presenting one's hack. Companies who schedule these sorts of events likely send a message unknowingly -- If you can't pull and all-nighter, you ought to consider working somewhere else.
We're doing 2-day sprints at work, and it largely has the same effect in terms of productivity.

Very clear, concise, sharp goals that are actionable and measurable.

Programmers can decently estimate what they can do in a day. I know I struggle to estimate for longer projects.
American companies such as Facebook and Google are under EU laws when operating in the EU. Handing over all this private information about EU citizens is illegal according to EU laws. So PRISM will cause problems for American companies because they will not be able to operate outside the US without getting fined.

That is the economic side of things. Then there is the other aspect that it is going to ruin relationship with allied countries. We have had to put up with a lot of shit from the US, and this feels like the final straw.
Their platform is ok. It jittered a lot, and I'm really not a big fan of the social graph, but some stuff is good, some stuff is bad, it's on the balance ok.

The problem is that they're selling advertising access to their people. That's all they're selling, via direct ads or graph access and 'sharing'. Impressions. Period. So there's a very natural friction between people who are investing a bunch of dev time and expecting their impressions for free and facebook, who doesn't want you to piss off their users with a bunch of spammy ads without at least paying them for it. So facebook is locking it down, little by little, and all the devs who were used to getting something for nothing are seeing their marketing vector dwindle little by little (unless you pay).

The whole 'review process' I found extra annoying, though. I will tolerate that shit from Apple, but not from facebook.
Agreed. In case you're not across their various.. decisions, this podcast has a good summary of their most recent one, Mir: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/39982/mir-problems-las-s2... (you really don't need the video)

Basically they're building their own X replacement even though there is one in the works (Wayland) that they admit fits their needs (or could if they worked on Wayland), simply so they can have control over it. They also admit that they aren't going to bother to make it work for anyone but them, nor are they going to worry about a stable API for it (because in their minds it's only used internally, they don't care about external people who are trying to build compliance with it).
It's really worth looking into the recent project that transpiled the Lua VM into JavaScript, and which allows Lua to be used in the browser -- even to interact with the DOM. The size of the Lua VM in JS is under 200 kB, not much bigger than a large JavaScript library.
And how I read it is that somebody who shows up drunk to a job interview does not use good decision making skills and is likely unreliable.

I love a beer in my time, and I would be happy to enjoy a beer with my coworkers in our time, but I find it hard to believe that somebody who shows up drunk to an interview (even a phone interview) is a "good hire".
Ubuntu forums breached
As a Graphic Designer, I usually reference CSS/HTML galleries that give "web awards" to great websites.

http://bestwebgallery.com/
http://www.thebestdesigns.com/
http://www.awwwards.com/

These gallery websites should get you well on your way.
This is a HUGE turning point. PLEASE call your member of Congress using this easy calling tool: http://defundthensa.com/.
Not the author.

Yes, it's essentially Backbone & d3 (with topojson for data). And it's a better intro to "real life Backbone" than todos, so if you're interested, take a look.
Canonical’s Hail Mary
I promise not to argue, then, but I'm seriously interested to know why would anyone not like the JVM? (this isn't the first time I've heard this view, but I never asked before) I've been writing software for some 20 years now, and have never seen a more impressive environment (in terms of performance, pluggability, monitoring). Is it the startup time? The classpath? The monolithic JRE? (the last two annoy me, too, but they should be resolved in Java 9. I hope)
The Edge is designed to be used as a desktop as well.

It also has a true Linux terminal and runs Ubuntu.

Quite different than other phones.
Facebook could have branched off into a few profitable models with their vast network. As you mentioned, dating would have been one avenue. Match.com may not have flashy revenue numbers but their profit margin is impressive.

They could have also been LinkedIn before LinkedIn really took off. People tried to use FB in that manner but the real value of LN is in the features they offer to businesses (recruiting, sales, etc). Again, they had this enourmous network but didn't think to add value to it.

They could have gone after Craigslist, especially in the realm of real estate where CL wants to make sure any searching is as painful as possible.

I also feel like they dropped the ball in regards to business marketing. Plenty of small businesses can't afford a real website, FB could have been a powerful platform for finding the kinds of small businesses that are buried by other sources. They know where you live, they could know what your network likes, and they could have offered cheap, professional looking pages that get the businesses close to you on board.

Their network has so much hidden potential but they've done nothing to dig it up. Use among my network is declining but not long ago it was the hub of the internet for many of my friends. They had the eyes and mindshare to get a billion people to at least try a new service. Add the power of all those connections and they could have deprecated half of the underpopulated, poorly designed, or poorly managed sites like Yelp.
Yeah fair enough, was more about playing around with angular then anything :)
Maybe you'll convince the rest of us! If you do write another blog post, try to include the recent indie nightmare that was purportedly caused by Go[1]. I think it's relevant here (since we're discussing large projects, after all).

[1]http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/27755.aspx -- it was also on HN but I'm too lazy to dig out the thread.
Mailchimp is also known to be extremely strict with this in regards to competitors.
Data-storage concept from Russian Schoolkids
more info http://www.siliconrus.com/2013/07/digital-sandwich/
An old Texas saying:

"Don't wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."
Very informative - here is a license comparison tool I've found useful:

http://www.tldrlegal.com/compare
I believe he fetches a satellite catalogue from Celestrak: http://celestrak.com/
The Very First Amazon Order
The plenty of Haskellers I know have all expressed disinterest in Go as a poorly designed language.

The linked post seems to be a very superficial take of Go. I wonder if he'd keep his opinion of Go after learning about lack of generics, error product types, nulls, mutability of concurrent messages, and all the other show stopper design mistakes...
Apple posts $6.9 billion profit on $35.3 billion in revenue for Q3 2013
Yes, if we had this kind of data for several campaigns, then you could compute a (normalized) <% of goal> vs. <time>, and from that estimate the final <% of goal> for this campaign.

The problem with your original calculation, is you're assuming the rate is constant, which it may be, roughly, for day 3 through day 27, however in these campaigns there's always an uptick right before the deadline. Really, it's that uptick that you want to estimate, based on previous campaigns.

I don't think kickstarter or indigogo release this kind of data though, unfortunately.
One license I think gets overlooked is the Mozilla Public License (MPL). I think it's particularly good for libraries and I've published some of my simple javascript code under it.

The interesting part about it is that it says modifications must be published, but that they are file based and not project or linker based. This omits many of the "onerous" (from the library user's perspective) restrictions of the LGPL, while still keeping the spirit of "this is free software, please give your enhancements to others to make the world better" which is sort of the whole point of GNU.
Thanks for sharing! I'll try to hook up with some relatives in Toronto and see what they have to say!
Facebook wins right to police “face-” trademark prefix
Honest In-App Purchases
Do they provide 100% funds?
You need to use a "truck" on this site since your "car" isn't yet capable of doing the same work, obviously.

This is a data visualization company's proof of concept, using voronoi tesselation rendered via SVG.

My iPad 5 doesn't do justice to this, since it can't render fast enough. It's very choppy.

Could they make a stripped-down version that works on iPads? No doubt. But that defeats the purpose of their exercise.
This was a great post. Honesty/Transparency/Bluntness is just critical. Related to this, it requires a culture where people don't have an emotional attachment to their ideas or work (at least during the development stage).
Well, this is shitty. I did check my "other folder" a few months ago and found nothing but spam. Decided to scroll down through it.

Turns out that back when I was in high school, five years ago, a girl I had a crush on messaged me her number, address, and asked me if I'm coming to her party.

Well, thanks a lot Facebook. -.-
JekyllThemes: a directory of the best-looking themes for Jekyll blogs
do you have the updates tab turned on? my inbox is pretty good about filing digests and updates under the 'updates' tab and actual marketing under the promotions tab.

it works really great for my usage, where the primary tab is the only one that makes my phone beep. i want to read brownie recipes from grandma and digests of bad updates, but not immediately. Gmail does a great job of sorting out things you need to be notified of into the primary tab, and putting other things in the other tabs.
There's a demo site at http://jekyllthemes.org/ too.
This is yet another reason why you need to look past e-mail for personalized communication with your customers. Personalized messaging inside your web site or app is much more effective for certain use cases.

Are you e-mailing your users to tell them about a new feature? Why not show them an in-app message instead, when they are logged on and engaged? Are you e-mailing a custom offer to a certain segment of your user base? Show them the offer when they're on your site.

Obviously, if you are contacting users that are not visiting your site at all, then e-mail is still king.

Personally, I am glad to see Gmail implement this kind of separation so well.

Full disclosure/plug: I work for Evergage (http://evergage.com) and we provide this behavioral-driven in-app messaging.
With DW that was the only way to actualise certain designs though.
Thanks for sharing! I suppose citizenship + TN visa isn't a bad combination. Where exactly South? California, I suppose :-) (for the weather)
I would say that's pretty normal and even reasonable. It depends on what the people do, but managing 6 people can easily be a full time job. I've actually been a manager of 6 people and found myself with no time to do anything else, but manage them.

As a manager of a software team, my goal is to make sure that everyone on the team is completely unblocked to do their job, so even though I only had 6 one on one employee meetings a week, I have meetings with managers, meetings for updates on projects, budgeting meetings, meetings to report to the company executives, getting all the signatures required for large purchases, meetings to discuss planning for future projects, meetings to plan our new process integration, meetings with higher ups to try to correct issues for my team. At one point I had 6 hours of meetings a day, so I think it adds up quickly. I'm not saying my company was efficient, but that's the reality of even a midsize company.
Fair enough. I didn't realize the new MBA was so far ahead on battery life. While most of the build has been solid for the 9 months I've owned it, the durability of the power plug (an element that can hose the computer) worries me.

Coming from a 12" ThinkPad with 1024x768 screen, the 1080p sold me on the ASUS. I'm sure the MBA will get "Retina" display screens soon though.
My try of a licence wizard: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/licences/
Yes, I'd appreciate automatic transitions from year to year as well.

I don't know if they could be SMOOTH, because of the use of tesselations, but at least it could do it for me. :)
hahaha

You can't be serious. NSA simply won't lose.