skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The people who shape our society will know what they need to know. I'm not sure a great understanding of a desktop PC is going to change this.

If you define "what they need to know" as "what's necessary for vaguely close to optimal job performance", then no, they won't. They will know the minimum they can get away with. They will know as little as we let them know. It has always been this way. The USA was founded by some of the brightest men of its day because the prevailing view demanded that this be so. Today, we do not demand that our leaders be our best and brightest. We have no idea how we would go about measuring such a thing. Instead, we've been taught to support the candidate that fits our preset ideological subset. This leads to parrot leaders who do not think strategically about the management of a country as much as they think strategically about the appeasement of their sources of votes and campaign contributions.

It comes back to understanding the basics of asking good questions and thinking about one's surroundings. This process is what humans did well to succeed: we should be encouraging it as much as possible. I do not ask that the average person, or even our decision-makers, already know how to re-install an operating system. I ask that they know how to find out, and think about the problem well enough to gather information and come to a conclusion about what's wrong. I ask that they look at the world rationally and scientifically. This is the failure of our educational system. Because we have not taught basic thinking and reasoning skills, because we have not taught that this is fundamentally necessary as a basic part of being a human, our leaders will say things like "The internet is a system of tubes". Because we do not expect or teach our citizens to think rationally, because we do not expect and verify that our leaders are informed about the mechanics and consequences of the decisions they make, bad laws are passed with great frequency.

This is our cultural, educational, and societal failure. No, I don't expect everyone to know how to re-install Windows. I expect them to look around them and see if they have any resources to get closer to a solution before expecting a free fix. And if they decide it's not worth their time to do it on the regular, I expect them to conceptually understand it on a basic enough level to provide information when asked probing questions by the person they're paying to fix it. Think, then act. It's not hard, we just gave up on teaching it.
i want to +100 your comment
OpenSSH comes with the ssh-copy-id script to make things easier too.
I have no idea what you are selling. How does it work?
Thats how I see it. Also if the goverment crebily commits to a 'we will shut you down policy'.

Of course in the contract you have to agree that its ok with you that if the plane does get hijacked its ok with you to shut it down.
It's mind boggling how bad the arabic translation is at:
http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetvie...

It's like they ran the text in google translate and never bothered to check the results.
Flynn - Open source Platform as a Service powered by Docker
More that you have to memorise what the word is and what letters they're removing from it.

("Is it Lg, or Lrg? Err, hold on, I'll check...")
I expect lots of us use it. There is nothing in my email that the NSA would find remotely interesting. Therefore, there is no practical reason not to use it.
You're aware that gmail.com was registered to an entity that wasn't Google between its original registration on 1995-08-13 and Google's acquisition of it on 2004-03-31, right?

While looking for that second date, I dug up a piece of spamming + domain hoarding history:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.protocols.tcp-ip....

(Note the date of that post and what domain shows up in his list...)
How to Improve Speech Delivery
I'm really interested in an open standard too. If anyone's up for getting involved, my email is in my profile.
It's idealistic, sure, but exercising these rights doesn't change the evidence.
Growing better tomatoes with genetic selection and other farming hacks
Nobody is denying anyone's legal right to privacy. Eric Schmidt was setting expectations about it, when he made that statement. You would have known if gawker didn't (1) Made their own value judgement. (private => filth) and equate privacy to security (2) Quoted the entire statement, instead of the part that fits the story that they want to tell.

In case you have't read it a hundred times before, he continues to say "But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."
And anyone can pay for the EC2 instances to test all 3.8B pages!
Plenty of people are extremely productive using any number of tools. I like to think I am a rather productive programmer myself, despite my general dislike of vim.

However, in the general case, I don't think it is much of an advantage in and of itself, which is why I disagreed with the poster above matter-of-fact stating:

> Productivity is far greater with vim

as if that was an indisputable fact. It is not. That was the thrust of my argument.

And regardless of typing prowess, knowledge of sound, elegant design is the essence of good programming. How fast you can edit text is almost irrelevant in the long term. I know excellent programmers who basically type with two fingers, and shitty copy and paste hack programmers who do their damage at an amazing rate with vim. The two-finger typists make more than the vim wizards, and for good reason. Don't confuse the tools with the craft itself.
I take issue with a lot of these, but a bunch of other commenters have covered most of them.

This:

>"Assume the market is efficient and valuable ideas will be discovered by multiple teams nearly instantaneously."

That's just irresponsible and unrealistic advice.

Splitting stock evenly and governing yourself as a "final say" CEO seems a bit self-contradictory, to say nothing of whether or not you should be a "final say" CEO in a startup (debatable).

This is also deplorable:

>"If it doesn’t augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way, it’s not worth doing."

Yeah, it's wonderful to "augment the human condition...", but don't be a condescending prick about it. Things are perfectly worth doing even if they don't impact a large number of people.

The trouble with this is, Slava inherently claims superiority to his audience when he declares (not suggest, declares) that things are not worth doing just because they aren't up to his self-defined standard of ambition.

Such a statement is not for him to make; it wouldn't sound right coming straight out of one of Paul Graham's essays, so on what authority does he get to make this statement?
Can the International Space Station Really Last Beyond 2020?
Yup. This surely is unrelated.
"Before you type even a word, determine what you want to say."

I disagree. Writing is part of the process of determining what you want to say. It's an imaginary conversation with your reader and with your conscience.

We all have vast quantities of ideas bouncing around in our heads, like those animated gifs of Brownian motion. Writing is a way of coralling them.

It's useful to cultivate an inner voice that asks "is that true?". Every time you write a word, get your voice to ask if that word is true. Which actually sounds very like insanity, but seems to work.
The Cure for the $1000 Toothbrush
Never mind the actual window-washers and builders who made these buildings are de-facto slaves to the Monarch of Dubai Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Then in the next demo over they try to get all multicultural with the first nations language "ᓱᑯᑦᑎᐊᓃᒃᑲᓗᐊᕐᖓᑦ ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ? "

http://www.vice.com/vice-news/the-slaves-of-dubai
Wasn't saying that others are not, all I was doing was correcting his spelling.
What exactly is the intended use case? On my home computer, it's faster for me to right click, save and my Dropbox opens up.

On other computers, I have to remember to go to your website (and thus remember your URL) and sign into Dropbox. I might as well download it to a Downloads folder and then upload it to dropbox.com.
Agreed, it's not very clear. How does it support YouTube? If I give it a YouTube page does it resolve and download the video to my Dropbox? How do you get access to create the "My Downloads" folder? How can I trust you guys not to ruin my Dropbox? What's the difference to saving to my local Dropbox folder?

It'd be nice to have more of your story on the "About" page - what's your pain point that made you create this app to fix? What are the bio's of you guys?

Otherwise the site looks nice & clean. It's simple which pairs well with the Dropbox look & feel, but lacks a bit in a persuading sales proposition.
Sharknado is also ridiculous enough to get free advertising on Reddit, so they have that as well. I'd be interested if the "Snakes on a Plane" effect makes an appreciable difference in revenue.
I liked the "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" bit. I saw it yesterday, after seeing a lot of recommendations on HN for it. Excellent movie for all of HN. Go watch it.
Oh give me a break. Larry (Oracle) Ellison is just trolling now. Oracle bought Sun, including their rights and obligations to a little known language called "Java". Sun was having no problem with Google using it for android. Hence Oracle inherited that. Oracle lost their essential claim that the API was copyrightable.

Larry Ellison is just pissed he could find no way to force Google to a more favorable royalties negotiation position and he's seeing all the $$$ he's not gonna extort now.
> Where do I apply

http://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/streetview/trekker...
OT but what's the benefit of using bower? Just seems to complicate things.
A good gem I found recently was to use the big version of the command line flags. So instead of seeing -s -q 1, you should use arguments like --max-depth. Increases the readability of scripts by a huge margin.
One advantage of "parallel --dry-run" over "xargs echo" is that the former quotes its output:

$ touch 'Ham
Jam
Spam'
$ touch 'J.R. "Bob" Dobbs'
$ find . -type f -print0 | parallel -n1 -0 --dry-run echo
echo ./Ham'
'Jam'
'Spam
echo ./J.R.\ \"Bob\"\ Dobbs
$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -n1 -0 echo echo
echo ./Ham
Jam
Spam
echo ./J.R. "Bob" Dobbs

For my own "dry runs", though, I've always preferred passing the command line to

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
char** argp;
int i;
printf("argc = %d\n", argc);
for (i = 0, argp = argv; *argp != 0; ++argp, ++i) {
printf("argv[%d] = %s\n", i, *argp);
}
return 0;
}

to remove all reasonable doubt.
Learn to draw a cassette pixel graphic
Infrastructure projects like this a usually not financed by companies. The I-5 wasn't either.
Wow, I must have reinvented this particular wheel at least five times.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Best Practices (whitepaper)
Its actually meant for users to save their files, really huge files to their Dropbox.

Its meant to solve the pain of downloading the files to your Downloads folder and then uploading it.

Yeah sorry for the url thing, I m coming up with a Browser extension soon.
What else would you recommend if you own your own domain?
I must have webmail, IMAP, calendar, contact list, task list and seamless sync with mobiles. And be free. And be outside of the US.
they really don't. I realize this is one of those conversations entreprenuers think VC's have a lot, but most VC's have ownership and $ thresholds they are aiming for in an investment - just splitting the baby in half with another VC firm doesn't get you there, and you'd be surprised at how many firms like working with firm a / b / c but hate d / e / f. The better argument for not revealing this is that its leverage - ie, the investor might think your other option is AH/Sequoia/Accel/Benchmark/Khosla/some other top-tier firm, while in reality it might be some relatively podunk firm - you get some potential benefit from that (and also potentially some downside if its the other way around).

The compromise position here is being honest but guarded - ie, especially if you are talking to one of those above - As a founder / CEO's, come back to the investor here and say we're talking to a couple of top-tier firms, which gives the signal effect to the investor that they need to sell / convince quickly while maintaining your leverage as an entrepreneur.
There are some great images here. I like how Google has been striving to document more beautiful places. The sheer amount of brainpower and processing that Google is putting into Streetview is truly staggering and unprecedented. Nobody else out there is doing it in this way.

On a more hand-made note, my company, http://360cities.net, has been publishing user-generated 360º imagery since 2006. I have built a tour of my own city, Prague, starting in 2004, which was before Google Maps or Streetview. We now have hundreds of thousands of images, (all high-resolution, completely spherical 360º photos) from every country of the world, including some very remarkable places in Antarctica, skydiving from an airplane, underwater, "remote" places such as Havana, Iran, Tibet, Burma, Easter Island, and so on.

Our "editors' picks" are something I'm really proud of.
https://www.360cities.net/search/@tags-editorspicks

here is our world map. zoomed out, you should see only "great" stuff: http://www.360cities.net/map

Other services that are similar to 360cities include http://viewat.org, http://roundus.com, http://arounder.com, http://photosynth.net.

Then there are the services for iphone/android 360º app, but these images are far lower in quality overall: http://occipital.com/360/verse and http://dermandar.com/worldmap

edit: made all links clickable
I think the big move here is that they didn't publish it to their own http://code.google.com site.
Traction doesn't apply to a hardware startup. Quite simply, it's impossible to get any sort of "traction" when you don't have the cash required to commercialize hardware and release it to customers. Not to mention the manufacturing fiasco.

And not all startups are app-driven. Most are, since hardware is hard and a lot of startups like to ride the app-wave but this post only takes those into account.

Sure, social startups and other "apps" playing the users + page views + engagement numbers game can easily make an app, grow an audience and have their "traction" but this blog post applies only to those types of companies.

MANY factors are taken into consideration when raising money - not just traction. Where you went school matters, who you are, your team, your product, your business model, your ability to start and run a business, your past experiences with running a business, and etc.

It's not just traction.

VC's aren't stupid.
The final tip being "use the tool I'm selling" makes the preceding 10 seem a lot less compelling. I'll stick to testing my code in prod, thanks.
TechHub London Startups Who Are Hiring
Facebook doesn't ask for your permission... Didn't you see the article on their "shadow profiles" a couple days ago?

They also aren't honest with how they use that data either, and they definitely don't "ensure us that no human other than the ones you authorized will ever see said data", there have been several huge incidents about that, including one involving Zuckerberg's sister. They continually break our trust, it's not paranoia, look this stuff up, or pay attention to terminology news..,
No, again it isn't. If you are looking to raise $1M on a $3M pre and you're talking to two firms seriously with the idea of picking one investor (who would end up with 25% in that scenario), you might negotiate some of that point, but its pretty unlikely you will end up taking 1 on 1 ( with the investors each putting in $500K, which would get them to that same 25% ownership threshold as in the original scenario).
Please help @chrisblizzard or @dweekly or anyone in charge or at least tell me what happened:

I can't access FB Developers site (can't browse any app, read-only bugs section - can't subscribe or comment). Can't give you app IDs, but can you look at userId: 100000522453817? I'm getting response:

"App creation failed Our automated systems have temporarily blocked you from creating new applications. If you think this is an error, send us your feedback."

I didn't get any mail with information or something, just blocked dev account and nothing else. I'm a developer and such problem directly affects my workflow.
SpaceX Grasshopper completes highest leap to date
Shell scripts have their use but at the point when your script needs output coloring or printing debug information, it is time to switch to Python.

Edit: Place a general disclaimer to weaken the absolute tone of the above statement. Rule of thumb, exceptions apply, yadda, yadda. In other words, I somewhat agree with most responses that disagreed with the statement above :-)
We create the `My downloads` folder when you authorize our app. And please we will only download the files to your Dropbox, which you asked for.

We are solving the problem of users downloading their files to their local machine and then uploading it to their Dropbox (huge files).

And yeah, if you give it a Youtube URL, it will upload the video as it is, to your Dropbox.
It looks like an old world rule applied to the new world. In the old world it was expensive to publish, so it was accepted that publication takes place in non-free (as in free beer) media.

In the new world publication is almost free, and perhaps one would just need to register a URI to point at all relevant information.
Well in fact it wasn't that unrelated. I can barely watch the special Google maps sites like this one: http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetvie...
Architecture of a Database System
> 2. Split the stock between the founding team evenly.

I can tell that you have all honest intent for writing this, but from experienced accounts I have read (a lot from PG and this forum). Many startup veterans strongly advise against this.

> 33. Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi, then do marketing that way. Pick a small set of tasks, do them consistently, and get better every day.

I've seen this and I love it. I love how you tied it in to startups too. That man is an inspirational model of a life long determination to be the best at what you can be.
Thats a lot of work for what you get out of the box with clang. There is a whole community of tooling around llvm for these types of use case, so why use gcc?
All Machine Learning Platforms are Terrible (but some less so)
The blackbox support seems like a killer feature. No more debugging minified JQuery! I also can't believe that CSS auto-complete wasn't there before.

I've been using Aurora for the last few months and have loved the experience. It's stable and I get to early access to great new tools. I highly recommend it for any developer looking to use the latest and greatest.
Hence, like I said: they should not have been near an API that had the letters R-S-A in it. They should've been near a very nice API with no configurable knobs to get wrong. The entire thing was part of an authenticated encryption scheme: they could've just use NaCl's `box` API and the entire thing would be two lines of code, give or take. Oh, and not utterly pointless ;-)
Sharks and underwater cables (report from 1987)
A Simple Device to Detect Concussions
Yes, you are correct. But some people crazy to write everything in shell scripts.
Thought I'd share this comprehensive 36 chapter SDL game programming tutorial series, though it is for SDL 1. http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/
10-year-old girl arrested for allegedly raping 4-year-old boy
It's a long story, and it's also not complete yet (I'm actually doing very UI heavy work right now as a tech lead). It's also not really correct to say it started with UI - I was big into programming language theory in college, even implementing a bunch of toy interpreters/compilers, one of which even got some measure of fame on the Internet.

The 5 second overview is really that it's the same as getting good at any new skill. You find an area that you don't know how to do, and then keep working at it until you do know how to do it. Then repeat with finer-grained details. There were a bunch of skills involved in this project - C, HTML5, UTF-8 decoding, debugging, testing, autotools, CTypes, API design, documentation - that I wasn't all that good at when I started that I had to pick up along the way.
Econ is great, but you may want to take a minor in the humanities. I'd recommend music, but art, literature, etc. are all good.

Think of your ideal "interesting person" and supplement your CS with something else you'll enjoy. If nothing else, you'll be a better writer and conversationalist.
> it should at least come bundled with an optional style (the old Bootstrap2 style would be fine)

It will. :)
Shouldn't it be:

which curl >/dev/null 2>&1

?

(what I learned from man bash)
I'm sorry to hear that. Do you have the same issue on other sites that use WebGL or just mine?
I don't like the `require_curl` example.

Here's what is done there:

OK=0
FAIL=1

function require_curl() {
which curl 2>&1 > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
return $OK
fi

return $FAIL
}

(`2>&1 > /dev/null` drops stdout and writes stderr to stdout—not what was meant. `which` doesn't write to stderr, so I drop that part.)

That can be shortened significantly by using the return code directly in the if branch:

function require_curl() {
if which curl > /dev/null
then
return $OK
fi

return $FAIL
}

Or by just using the return code directly:

function require_curl() {
which curl > /dev/null
return $?
}

And as it will return the return code of the last statement executed:

function require_curl() {
which curl > /dev/null
}
Not sure why you're being downvoted. As you said: the list contains great, tough advice, but some of it is wrong as it's personal preference or pompous.

"augmenting the human condition" sounds like it'd be better achieved by writing a novel. I'm trying to imagine the person who could say their startup was "augmenting the human condition" with a straight face.
Traction applies to everything. Look at the hardware startups that used Kickstarter to gain traction before shipping! Lockitron and pebble for example.

But you can get traction in lots of ways. Got 200 customers on your waiting list? 10000 people follow your blog? 20 enterprise customers with verbal commitments to buy? Those are all traction.
What if your command has a pipe in it? Then putting echo in front won't work, because the command after the pipe is still executed. The dry run option always works, and doesn't require editing the command itself.
Can you give me some citation on that? I can believe it would be the case, but such an arrangement sounds moronically greedy.
The author preparation feature (#4) could indeed be useful, sometimes it takes quite a bit of time, especially if one is not very familiar with the system, to see how they fit in.