skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ten years during which we enjoyed one of the most
prosperous and fiscally positive eras in modern US history.

Somewhat ironically, brought about in significant part due to the massive spending on R&D in communications and technology during the Cold War.
> I certainly don't think that cheating should be punished with physical abuse. However, I do think that the cheating on someone who you're engaged to and clearly expects monogamy is worse than hitting someone once. I just do.

Cheating on someone is a violation of that person's trust. Hitting your partner is violation of their physical integrity.

> Also, let's not forget that, whilst unacceptable, the kick was solicited by her admission of infidelity, whereas the infidelity is seemingly unsolicited.

What is the point of making this statement if not to excuse her getting hit or to make her getting hit seem like "she was asking for it"?
How to read patents: http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/09/how-to-read-a-patent-...
The two founders of http://flightcaster.com (tech startup) both have MBAs.

Matt Soldo, a serial entrepreneur who has worked in both technology and management and founded his own startups, has an MBA. He currently works at Heroku.
As soon as you have anything involved that's async to your process or thread, you're going to operate most efficiently with something along the lines of a callback. I don't see them as a Goto at all; they're much more like interrupt handlers or at least event handlers if you want jump ahead a generation from there.
Tried to find a API to access these images but can't seem to find any. Anyone know if there is any API?
This looks prettier than the MuseScore web interface.

Please tell me you will have some way to use this to display a score written in some open format. and/or interface with MuseScore or some other software.
Google 2004 IPO letter
This is awesome. Aside from the fact that my bill will be cut in half, I hate plans. Plans are just one more thing to monitor (make sure you don't go over your totally arbitrary limit!), and they generally lead to weird inequity.

For example, I've been adding ~75 people per day to my MailChimp list and the price stayed the same. Then one day it went from $75 to $150. Adding thousands of subscribers was completely free, and then adding one subscriber cost $75/month. That just doesn't make any sense to me.

Related anecdote: My company doesn't have plans (most in the industry do) and customers tell me all the time how much they prefer our approach. There may be selection bias going on, but I have tons of feedback supporting my decision to avoid plans.
I suppose one could argue that it could just as easily be used to prove innocence as guilt. Pretty much the ultimate alibi, assuming you didn't actually do it.
There are a few other signs that Google is freaking out about wasting money.

- search in Gmail is actually losing functionality.

- hemming and hawing about the NSA scandal (not wanting to risk irritating political leaders)

- ending free google apps tier

- ending google reader

- ending 20% time
Warren Buffett once wrote an article about the points you are making: http://www.tilsonfunds.com/superinvestors.pdf. Interesting read
Just upgraded to a paid database in Heroku, took about 3 minutes all in all ;) Hopefully it will handle the traffic better.

Kudos to Heroku!
Incredible. Truly. I would have never guessed somebody with an MBA might start a company or work in management. Somebody with an MBA who also is capable of technical things? Stunning. You have opened my eyes; clearly getting an MBA allows one to create incredible things. These are incredible.

Which one of us is wearing the SV blinders again? What have MBAs done, in the capacity of MBAs, that is incredible? Founding or working at some tech startup is not incredible.
Software Consulting, Opportunity Cost & the Economics of Juice
I think I have added myself to that list three times already. Thanks though :)
Open Letter to Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas of Silent Circle
I used NerdTree but for those on a Mac there is a pretty interesting Macvim fork (Alloy)[https://github.com/alloy/macvim] that implements a native sidebar.

(Here is a good post)[http://faculty.washington.edu/ivanoats/blog/2012/01/13/makin...] someone wrote about it.
The old pricing was fine with me. Now I worry you will go out of business or get swamped with support requests from people who haven't paid anything. But whatever works for you, I guess.
More meta: the article uses lowercase l to represent the digit 1.
That would definitely be an epilepsy trigger. Hell, I don't even have epilepsy and I had to cover the image with my hand just to be able to finish reading the article.
The hockey analog doesn't hold if you can replace any given player with a stochastic robot, which is what stock picker programs (and dart-throwing monkeys) have demonstrated.
What Happens When the N.S.A. Gets Sloppy
Not only has Congress almost completely stripped students of their right to disgorge their debts through bankruptcy (amazing, when one considers that even gamblers can declare bankruptcy!), it has also restricted the students' ability to refinance loans. Even Truth in Lending Act requirements – which normally require lenders to fully disclose future costs to would-be customers – don't cover certain student loans.

Not so surprising. With high tuition costs, and practices like the above ensuring the amount will almost always be back 100% or more ... and the recipient of these payments, the original entity billing the tuition in the first place? The government.

Of course the government pulls out every trick they can to ensure their loans never go unpaid.
Great insight. You're absolutely right. For this reason, we take a lot of inspiration from Warby Parker. By building an awesome brand that people want to associate with, you can (hopefully) avoid playing the super expensive demand harvest game.

Thanks for your comment!
A word of warning to visitors: the site is broken. It pops up an ad after about a minute of letting you read the content.

I've seen this behavior previously (it's becoming more common) and I reward it the same way each time: closing the site and putting it on my proxy's blocklist.
I'm a manager at Google and I think 20% time is great. Engineers explore something that's exciting to them, and the projects usually pay dividends, either in great launches or else people get a chance to learn new skills or hone their current skills.
Are you implying that the tables have turned?
The solution? How about increasing the wage so that these guys dont have to work more than 20 hours a day? How about taking a loss of a billion dollars to reduce profit from 7 billion to 6 billion but in return provide for a better life for the thousands of less fortunate people? If some shareholder makes a few million dollars less, hes not going to die. But the people that are living on food stamps, might very well.

How does costco manage to do this without going into the red? Im not whining that theres no security, i'm stating that making the claim that there is security is WRONG. How about you read with your eyes open? thanks.

Edit: clarification.
Edit2: another proof that you can make a profit while actually caring for employees: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-trad...
Edit3: The supply and demand crap you spew is total garbage. Nothing is 'just supply and demand'. There is much more including profit creation as a result of fulfilling demand with supply. All I suggest is reduce the profit slightly so you pay your low level workers more. They already make less than a third of what people with education do. How about making it equal to or slightly more than a THIRD?
Thanks for the reply! I'm in Atlanta, GA. Looking forward to your growth.
Still seems to be down, but with a different error message.
What could make this scenario less suspicious for you? Strike the phrase "final say." The intent was only editorial: "Hacker, everything looks good overall, but how about dialing it up a notch here or dialing it down a notch there." Non-technical wants to ship, not wrestle back and forth on minutiae. The idea is to collaborate around a common idea and then recruit customers, partners and investors. Collaborative not antagonistic!

Also, to clarify, Non-technical has savings and and investments and is willing to cash out and spend to build a MVP. Non-technical wants to found a business based on their original idea and then recruit talent to build out a company.

Is your take that such a scenario isn't possible? And that Non-technical should wait out and accrue enough wealth to qualify as an accredited investor and then just invest in a team to develop his or a similar idea? Would this make Non-technical less "suspicious"?
Haiku's package management now enabled in latest nightly releases
Why does he describe the map as including "[...] Argentina and three Scandinavian countries"? Neither of those is on the map.
The Bitcoin Machine is now available for pre-order
I really like this idea. In a way, it is like a wiki, but tubular and tagged.
Having a list with ideas, how to identify the good ones?
Hello,

I have a list with 118 ideas. What are good ways to identify the good ones from the bad ones?

I appreciate your answer!
I thought the approach they took to permuting the address space was particularly clever, but was quickly schooled on Twitter by how bog-standard the approach apparently is (I very much concede the point!). In the interest of honesty about how easily impressed I am, and because I still think it's a neat little trick:

You want to generate a permutation of the entire IPv4 address space, but you don't simply want to shuffle every possible IP address because that would require you to keep an insane amount of state. So instead, work in the multiplicative group modulo p for prime p > 2^32, find an appropriate generator, and iterate by multiplying with the generator mod p. Remember the prime, the generator, the starting address, and your current address and you can detect a complete traversal of the space when the starting address recurs.

There are a number of simpler ways to do this (after sheepishly conceding that this is pretty fundamental stuff, I played with using PRFs and card shuffling to do it; DrHoney suggested Gray codes), but I liked how immediately obvious the multiplicative group solution was, and that I could code it from a simple description.
I believe that's the period Australia's program has. In addition it also caps repayment at a fraction of income. I was suggesting a system that's working. (I've had it explained to me, I'm not an Australian).
Ugh, no.

In part, how do you sort out the relevant bits? If it takes a lifetime to record, wouldn't it take a lifetime to watch?

My wife has kept a journal most of her life. I suspect it would be fascinating for me if I ever read it (which I will, if I outlive her). I'm sure it'll be fascinating for our children. But really, I don't want to look right now, even though I could.

So if I recorded my entire life, who'd want to watch?
PaaS: Present and Future
Great job on this. What I really like about this type of pricing is that it puts the complex cost calculation onto your side instead of the customer. I use a ton of products, Heroku services being an example where I have to try to guess at usage. Literally every day I have an internal conversation with myself that says, "Do you need to go into Heroku and turn down the Database tier you're on because the service isn't using the capacity that you're paying for? Wait, but you might get a traffic surge and the site will go down if you decrease the capacity."

This seems like for me, the ideal case. Automatically scaling down all the way to $0 so I never have to think about unsubscribing if I stop using it.

I was actually discussing with a friend that it seems like there could be a big opportunity in the cloud server space to have a zero scale server where you only pay for time that it is being used. I believe Heroku already does spin down instances that aren't needed behind the scenes, they just don't give you the cost savings. They keep it.
A look inside the MakeGamesWithUs summer internship
I played Nethack on a MacBook Pro (with no number-pad) to get used to the vim movement keys.
Oh, and, unfortunately, he has a known history for creating sockpuppet accounts, which unfortunately makes me unrecoverably skeptical of anyone who cites or endorses his ideas.
Cocaine is a terrible name. Not only is it difficult to search, it makes for awkward conversation.

"What platform do you use to run your infrastructure?"

"I use cocaine"

Ignoring the name, I'm excited for more personal PaaS options powered by Docker.
Doesn't this say more about the morals of America vs Russia than anything else?

Russians knew Americans would never do that to them, but Americans did not. (It doesn't matter if Russians would or would not, that's how they were viewed.)
For a long time it was true that college was always worth the money.

Colleges were not places of opulence: they were spartan collections of smart hard-thinking people. If you were smart enough you could go there with them. You would pay a small amount of money, but everything was done very simply, so it was cheap.

Even for the people doing things like art history, it was still a good value, because there were so few people doing art history that many could find jobs doing that. And even if you couldn't get an art history job, hey, you still had a college degree: not many people had that, and you didn't get it to make money, you got it because you liked the pursuit of knowledge. That was a valuable signal.

As soon as people expected it to always be worth the money, that's when the seeds for disaster were sown. There was no reason for a college to not charge more and more and more, because the students kept on coming. They even saw a higher price tag as an indication of excellence.

Likewise, going to college is no longer an indication of a strong pursuit of knowledge, or even basic smarts.

It's a giant credential chase, and the people a credential chase hurts the most are the poor.
Ability to complete coursework is not necessary and sufficient for being a good engineer in a company. Sorry. I've seen too many people flounder around, never completing things, making inane suggestions, and so on, all while talking great theory. Of course, I've seen the opposite, and Stanford is a very good school, I don't think anyone would deny that.

And that shouldn't be surprising. Look at brilliant physicists. Most end up in either the theoretical or experimental side, and are often quite bad at the other. Likewise, theorem heavy CS has its place, but getting through a program like that doesn't mean that you can write a for loop (I've interviewed Stanford grads that fumbled and failed though that), design readable, robust software, push through a sea of decisions and make effective, near optimal decisions (the whole SW life cycle is a n-dimensional optimization problem), get along with peers, and so on.

There is a huge cachet attached to degrees from certain institutions that really isn't deserved, in my opinion. In that sense the paper is "pretty". It's not a slam of the effort anyone at is undoubtedly making at the school, but the reverent regard with which it is regarded.
Great stuff. I know very little about music, but found it very helpful to visually decipher and decompose the sounds.

Would it be possible to isolate each instrument? Turn each one on/off?
How we raised a $1.1M seed round without customers, revenue or even a product.
What they are not taught is personal finance. Schools just don't teach it, with rare exceptions. I guess they figure it's up to parents to teach that, but when 7 out of 10 US households live paycheck to paycheck, parents don't know much about personal finance, either.

The good news is there are some solutions out there, and they're slowly gaining traction in a grass-roots style. One example is schools teaching the "Foundations in Personal Finance" curriculum [1].

But to make a big difference quickly, it needs to be more than just some schools here and there, but a national mandate to teach these sorts of things.

But ... I'm not going to hold my breath. To that end, I help volunteer leading these sorts of classes. Small moves.

----------------------------------------

http://www.daveramsey.com/school/foundations/
Court: Ability to police NSA spying program limited
My first experience with Linux came after downloading Slackware's "A" and "N" sets and writing the images to 5.25" floppy disks. Somehow, this complete "n00b" managed to get Linux installed and get the machine connected to the Internet via dial-up (which was quite a chore back then).

A few weeks later, a handful of people I chatted with on IRC encouraged me to get rid of Slackware and install Debian, so I did. It was a huge learning curve and certainly not the best choice of distribution for a new user but I'm glad I stuck with it. I was forced how to do everything from a command prompt and reading TFM wasn't an option at the time, it was a requirement.

In the 17 years since, I have never regretted my decision. There was a short period where the internal politics became overwhelming and I almost switched, but I told myself to hold off. I am glad I did.

I'm a big fan of OS X and I've flirted with other distributions over the years but I always come back to Debian for my personal machines. In a large environment I actually prefer another distribution but Debian will always be my true love.

I extend thanks to anyone who has been involved in the project over the years and helped move it forward. I owe all of you a beer.
Oh, I totally agree; the Constitution derives its authority from human rights principles which transcend nationality. I would love to see amendments which strengthened those rights and extended some or all protections to non-citizens.

The meme of "Restore the Constitution" can either be seen as a first step towards that goal, and/or a realistic low bar for what can actually be achieved. (The Constitution has always been somewhat broken, given our history with slavery, suffrage, and wartime abuses, but it's a more comforting narrative for most conservatives.)

If we could somehow pass a new constitutional amendment, I think the most urgent matter is electoral reform: instant run-off, and publicly financed elections. Whether you believe in a big or small government, we deserve one that we genuinely believe reflects our values, rather than the blatant corruption and "lesser evils" we live with now. If you remove the left-right smokescreen, Americans agree on more issues than it would seem; restoring faith in the democratic process would catalyze new progress in other arenas from there.
This seems to be closer to how Mandrill works, and it's exactly what got me to sign up for them only a few days ago. I knew about Mailgun and Sendgrid before, and started looking into them first but their pricing tiers turned me off and got me to keep searching until I found Mandrill.

My app is very small, just bootstrapping without any funding so I'm trying to be very careful how I spend my money. At first I see that Mailgun's minimum was $19/month while Sendgrid's silver plan is $10/month. Easy, Sendgrid wins.

Oops, I want to support inbound email though. Sendgrid will give you that on the trial plan, but not on the $10 silver plan. Suddenly I'm up to $80/month to use Sendgrid. Mailgun wins here.

But before I even noticed that I had already signed up for Sendgrid (believing I'd be paying $10/month), but had to wait like 5 hours and then I received some email from them basically demanding that I tell them what my app is, why I need email, what is the purpose of me sending email. Maybe it's for market research, but it didn't come across that way. It came across as "we assume you're a dirty spammer". Of course if I was a spammer I'd just give them so BS answer, I wouldn't admit it. I can't say call a winner, only a lower: Sendgrid. Mandrill and SES both treat you like you expect; you sign up, they cap you at ~250 emails/day for a bit and then you're fine. Sendgrid fail.

Anyway, then my friend points me over to Mandrill and I sign up. The pricing model fit us well.. up to 12k emails free, then $0.20/thousand after that. In the state my app is right now I probably won't go over 12k for another few months, and once I do go over that limit I'm not going to find myself jumping suddenly to something like $80/month.

If I had been setting this all up just a week later (that is, now) I'd probably be on Mailgun due to this new pricing model.
Increase wages why? Corporations are not charities, and they have never purported that they are. How is a corporation responsible for someone else's lack of education or skillset?
And the numpy/scipy/ipython notebook/scikit-learn axis is driving a lot of python adoption these days. Look in any blog about beginning data mining/machine learning, odds are it'll say learn python or R.

Different kind of user, but... just sayin
That's fascinating. Can anyone explain what is going on here: http://roadrunnersinternationale.com/transporting_the_a-12_v...
Have you thought about adding Lilypond import? http://lilypond.org/

That way you could allow users to upload their own songs.
Thanks for your comment. You bring up good points.

Most of our users are sending flowers in creative ways outside of the obligatory flower send occasions. For this reason and others, we see the total addressable market to be quite large. In fact, we've reached substantial small biz levels of revenue in a matter of months.

Delivery in 90 minutes is what allows people to send flowers in creative ways. But hey, we're happy to concede 90 minute delivery isn't a game changer these days - it's a requirement.

Our users tell us the power flowers arriving moments after leaving a meeting or closing a deal is quite real.
Simple Glossary on Typography
You can say that about many things. Do Musk and Messi have "skill" or is their success just chance?
Employers are allowed to discriminate against people with "only" a high school education.

This is not so bad in a society where 10% of the people have a college degree. Because there are still a lot of smart -- to say nothing of hard-working -- people who don't go to college.

It is bad in a society with 70% of people have a college degree. What kind of idiot weirdo doesn't go to college?[1]

[1] NB: I really don't subscribe to that view, but employers do, for rational reasons.
Why is the docker hype machine cranked up to 11?
Yes, that should be "tries". I meant the experiment with turning off the GC some months back.
SWOT analysis would be a good start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
Try Readability - http://www.readability.com/

I press a hotkey and my browser loads a page with just the relevant text, no distractions.
Check out http://www.startupbook.net/

“This book is aimed at developers who want to launch their startup with no outside funding. It’s for companies started by real developers solving real pain points using desktop, web and mobile applications.”

You'll find various glowing reviews about this book so I won't add to them. The chapter about how to find and select an idea, measure traction etc before you start building anything may be of some interest.
Yeah, I was kidding about Docker in KVM in Docker. I know it would be a lot of overhead.