skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really enjoyed "There are riches in niches."

It doesn't take millions of dollars in revenue to have a wildly successful small business. An incremental $250,000 in annual revenue doesn't move the needle in a 50 person shop, much less a public company. But if you're a 2 person shop filling a niche, your year just became awesome.

There are a ton of profitable niches in software that people need filled. Markets that aren't big enough for a huge company to bother with. Markets that are huge opportunities for a few dudes to make something awesome to serve a dedicated base of customers.
The outcome of them trying to build a central place to look at listings turns into them becoming what they were trying to work around, and end up still not having a central place to look at listings.
1) The Burn Collector by All Burian
2) Getting Real by 37 Signals
No way "while bool.toString().getLength() > 4" can be a shit code! It works, what else do you need? Learn to understand first.
That should say "one whose passion", not "one who's passion".
Down's Syndrome IS a bad thing. It's a disability that inhibits their ability to function in society, and affects their physical health as well.

I can't imagine that anyone could possibly be worse off for having their case of Down's cured. That's not incompatible with accepting them for who they are with the disease.
The problem isn't the efficiency of the engine, but the efficiency of storing energy. Gasoline and diesel are very good at that, and are easily replenished. If your concern is the complexity of all the moving parts, rotary engines and 2-stroke engines are significantly simpler, but ultimately 4 stroke reciprocating engines make more sense.
> First, what does it mean to "slow down the pace" of accepting connections?

In C, if you don't call 'accept' new connections will:

- first: get queued in a kernel queue of SYN+ACKed connections

- second: when queue is full Linux stops sending SYN+ACK, thus forcing the client to re-send SYN.

Not calling 'accept' pushes pressure back to the clients, without sending RST, without introducing any state on the server.

> and then immediately drop new connections as they're made

That's not the same as pushing back the pressure. Dropping connections means: "go away, I'm broken". Not calling 'accept' means: "I'm busy right now, wait".

> And what does c.write being non-blocking have to do with crashing the server?

If 'write' is non-blocking _and_ always succeeds (as in Node) the node.js process may be asked to 'write' plenty of data. As it can't send it to the kernel, it'll get buffered in the node process, and eventually run out of memory. This is the case if you don't have any flow-control mechanisms: you'll accept all the requests and buffer in memory all the responses, possibly leading to a crash.

> but even if you're doing everything synchronously, you've still got to manage all that stuff.

Yes indeed! But at least it's obvious that you're spawning too many threads, or that all the threads are waiting on particular slow thing (disk for example). The state still need to be handled, but it's much easier to reason about it! (it's easier to count threads / coroutines than to count how many times a callback X was called and haven't yet called back the next callback on the path)

> Maybe someone can enlighten me?

I wanted to avoid the discussion about credit based flow control. It's possible to write flow-control aware code using callbacks, but it's generally harder. And requires a programmer to be aware of the problem.

Also, IMO flow control in callbacks style introduce spaghetti, as after the last thing ('write') succeeds you need to inform the first thing ('read') to proceed. But that's aesthetics and another discussion.
It's not the original comic that's at issue. It's Penny Arcade's response to the criticism they've received about it.

It's not a "noisy rape-is-bad awareness show", it's protesting against a company that, quite literally, profited from a rape joke. And then said that they regretted not profiting from a rape joke.

As far as advocating against rape, that's what this is. Poking fun at people who've been raped contributes to rape culture. Rape culture contributes to the conspiracy of silence around sexual assault (i.e. "They're gonna make fun of me too").

It's not that all taboo topics are off-limits for humor. It's that PAX bills itself as a safe space except for those times when the creator of the property wore a shirt making fun of rape victims' fear.
1. The amount of data would be quite large when it comes to the logs

2. System lock-in, I like to have the data and be able to query it as I see fit

3. If an event happens where the facility is cut off from the Internet you won't be able to tell what happened inside the facility (unless maybe there is a store and forward agent, but even then it is only useful after the event.

4. Latency monitoring (again maybe an agent can help) but if I see changes in response time I can't tell if that is the WAN or not.
Arial vs. Helvetica
The silly names almost always start from the fruit-fly community. They have some of the craziest names, but they are usually derived from the resulting phenotype. However, the fruit-fly version is just called hedgehog (hh), because it results in the fruit-fly embryos looking all pointy.

In this case, the funny name was added by vertebrate researchers who ran out of names when they found 3 homologs. The first two were named desert hedgehog (DHH) and Indian hedgehog (IHH). Naming the third Sonic was just too irresistible.
Sure, the high-end fingerprint scanners are reasonably good at this sort of liveness detection (eg. by detecting the pulse of blood flow or by inferring something about the 3D structure of the fingerprint so you can't just hold up a picture), but the cheap $20 scanners that many businesses use aren't going to be able to distinguish a real from a fake.
Author here. I wouldn't have made it through without my co-founder. A co-founder is great support during the bad times...and added responsibility all the time. If I don't give it 100% every day, his family feels it, and vice versa.

Some people can do it on their own, but our partnership/friendship works well for us.
I remember from a talk at IO13 that the point of the new Chrome Apps is that they truly behave and feel like what we think of as "native" apps. Therefore, no Chrome tabs or other browser-like stuff. I'd have to look at the talk again but if I remember right they limit how and when JS can be used in order to let you safely do things you can't do in a standard webpage.

This session explains it all:
https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/326973874
Why Vinod Khosla is Bullish About India
A growth-hacker is someone who extracts large amounts of money from hopeful customers awaiting magic growth, similar to how certain companies promise to enlarge certain body parts as if by magic.

If you think about it long enough you reach the conclusion that any growth-hacker that is not working on a no-cure-no-pay and if-I-break-it-I-am-liable base should simply not be engaged. It's the new SEO.
Anyone with a botnet this large effectively has a kill switch on Tor.

If this botnet actually relies upon Tor for its primary means of C&C, and the botherders are in fact motivated by ordinary financial crime, then it would seem to be the largest botnet that would be least likely to try to shut down Tor.

The most dangerous scenario for Tor is if this botnet continues to grow exponentially, its operators command it to go into an uncontrolled DDoS mode, or some other glitch in its software causes Tor to fall over. The C&C hidden service would become unreachable, the operators could lose control of their botnet, and it could end up essentially stuck in a perma-DoS mode upon itself and Tor.
If I could upvote this 100x I would. I know that stories like these should be covered because of it's importance, but the websites/news channels that publish or cover this story reap the rewards (just as much as Penny Arcade).

It's just perpetuating exploitation over and over again, and damn does that piss me off.
How do I get my app to be in "for your desktop" category? It's not on the developer page of my app. It's a media player app that matches most of the requirements of the new apps.
The paper itself is here: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/201/201ra120.full
Yes, another example of how growth hackers shouldn't be writing copy ;-)
I have to worry about how crowd-funding is going to continue to break records and change businesses when there's such a huge communication issue. If there is a risk of charge-backs for an undelivered product, which there clearly is based on Paypal's reaction, then people are clearly viewing them as pre-orders. That's obviously what it has become, but for crowd-funding to really be reasonable for companies like Paypal, failed projects have to leave backers out of pocket and nobody else.

If crowd-funding is synonymous with pre-ordering a not yet available produce, I can't say I blame Paypal for wanting to keep out.
There is specific reprisal against one particular gender of critics. Outspoken women who critiqued the comic and PA's response were sent rape and death threats.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Dickwolves
Introducing Background Jobs
There is no inherent isolation in homeschooling and there are standards if that's what you're looking for. On an academic level:

http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/

On a political level, the federal government has taken a hands off Jeffersonian approach (as far as I know) and let the individual states experiment. Some states are very involved while others are very hands off. You can explore the variety of approaches and see for yourself which work (if any) and which don't (if any).

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of homeschooled kids do as well or much better than their public school counterparts when it comes to knowing the alphabet and much more (see link above). If your primary argument for outlawing/regulating it is that kids are being taught non-fact based information, let's go ahead and shut down all the churches, mosques, and synagogues while we're at it.
I've never read Penny Arcade or been to PAX either, but reading this story, it seems to me as if a bunch of outraged people want the benefit from attending this guy's conference, but also want him to stop making art that doesn't agree exactly with their sensibilities.

To me, this seems like unnecessary policing of the worst sort. Yes, his art seems to be in poor taste and he sounds like an asshole -- please stop attending his convention and urge other people to do so.

I don't see any direct link between this and "rampant sexism in the geek community", unless I guess you expand 'geek' to include 'anyone who has ever drawn a comic'. It is a case of a particular artist drawing something that some people think is horrible, but dunno if it calls for "unqualified outrage".
Oyster Launches Netflix For Books
Environmentalists oppose solar[1] and wind[2] installations too. It's impossible to generate significant power without significant infrastructure, and infrastructure is always opposed by someone.

In any case, Tesla does not call its cars solar and wind powered. What they say is:

> TESLA'S BATTERIES AND POWERTRAINS will help lessen global dependence on petroleum-based transportation and drive down the cost of electric vehicles.

That is accurate in that powering the car with a battery disassociates it from any particular energy source, unlike IC cars which are locked permanently to petroleum.

In some jurisdictions, homeowners can choose to purchase green power or renewable energy certificates for their home, or install solar panels themselves--again, options that are not available with IC cars.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/05/us-solar-wars-idUS...

[2] http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-august-7-2007/jason-jo...
The patching dashboard has scheduled jobs on the clients (PowerShell scripts on the Windows boxes and Ruby scripts on the Linux boxes).

We use Puppet to deploy the client to our Linux boxes and for Windows we deploy the task and scripts with Group Policy (soon to be replaced by Desired State Configuration).

This information isn't something we need to poll often for (and on Windows, there are difficulties interacting with the Windows Update apis remotely). We add and replace servers often, so the client adds themselves to the dashboard, as well as updating their status.

We have integrated some reporting into Orion, but that was a side effect of not having the dashboard before.
growthhackingguide.com
I really appreciate sharing this kind of data, there is a massive amount of mis-information about the current Android device landscape. Google's #s are actually quite underselling the average active users' device API level. DoubleEncore's numbers show roughly 15% Gingerbread, my own experience is around 5-10% Gingerbread. Anything before Gingerbread is not relevant. I am working with enterprise clients, so that might be a best case scenario. I have never seen a client with company bought Gingerbread phones, so those Gingerbread users are from "Bring Your Own Device" companies.

If you are making a general purpose app, you might have to deal with a higher % of Gingerbread users today. My gut feeling is that we are 6-12 months away from being able to make ICS the minimum for most apps.

The difference between 15% and 1-2% still means that I have to support Gingerbread today, but I spend a lot more time finding ways to take advantage of Jelly Bean than figuring out how to backport to Gingerbread. Skate where the puck is going.
Same with "Tourette Syndrome". It took a while to get used to, but it makes sense.
I read that the Sony SmartWatch also supports NFC. It would be interesting to see if a standalone smartwatch app could support NFC building entry (like a replacement for your company badge). It'd be a much nicer form factor and I'd be significantly less likely to forget it at home or at my desk.

Though it's worth noting, with August and Lockitron keyless entry systems being shipped this year, I wonder if the same can't also be accomplished with the existing BLE implementation by Pebble/others
Can anyone who is running this explain why and how he uses it? As far as I understand it, its not a media center solution but rater a self hosted social network focused on sharing media.

How would a typical use case look like: Set up a mediagoblin instance to share vacation photos and videos with your friends?
Thanks! Yeah I think a traditional type system wouldn't make sense for Clojure, you need something that can describe data structures more succinctly, which is what we were shooting for
Firefox has made stubs for web apps that can be launched directly from the desktop since Firefox 16 (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Apps/WebRT). I guess the difference here is more (Chrome-specific) APIs and better support for running offline?
Companion Cube Computer
While I agree with you, men probably had threats of sexual and physical violence sent to them too.
To be fair to PAX attendees, at this point the only real relationship between PAX and Penny-Arcade is the name. PAX is very much a pan-gaming expo that happens to be organized by PA.
The mice are made specifically as an animal model of Down syndrome. See http://dmm.biologists.org/content/4/5/596.full
For me the exciting bit is being able to access devices from them.

E.g. I've been waiting for this for a while because you can write an app which communicates directly with an Arduino or any other serial device.

This means that a lot of special purpose desktop apps communicating with custom hardware can be written as Chrome apps and take advantage of the speed/ ease of UI development of web apps.

For one of the apps I maintain this will reduce the time it takes to make UI improvements from several days to several hours.
If Apple's hardware implementation is as good as my two year old Motorola Atrix, their customers will love the fingerprint reader. But I, for one, would never entrust all my passwords to Apple's closed source software, especially given their record in the area of software quality control.
What's "meaningful equity"? 1% of 0 is the same as 50% of 0.
iOS 7 also has a feature that will automatically start apps based on the times of day that you use them. So even if users are constantly dismissing apps from the multi-tasker (which I don't think will happen) the apps that are used the most will constantly be switched back on.
The issue of rape disproportionately affects women, therefore the normalization of rape jokes is sexist.
Other stuff is a rape apologist!
"As many know, there is a new "app switcher" in iOS7 that mimics the multitasking functionality of Android.”

Apparently the author never knew about webOS.
Keeping Your Cool - ServerFault DevOps on Outages and Incidents
What seems to me most outrageous is not the strip (which is obviously tasteless), but the response toward people who objected.

But you're absolutely right. We need a new word to describe open hostility toward victims of rape.
Growth hacking is nothing new. It's just marketing folks re-branding themselves. It's the exact same product marketed under a new name with a new brand image and targeted at the tech audience.

It seems to have worked. Every startup now wants to hire a "growth hacker" instead of a CMO. And developers now ascribe more value to marketing than before.
I don't know if the convergence will happen, but they certainly need to fix WebView in Android to at least allow migration. It's still using the old Android Browser and is severely outdated (no WebSockets, etc).

My guess is that Chrome Packaged apps will be the replacement for WebViews on Android.

Anyone who wants a stop gap though, should check this out: https://github.com/pwnall/chromeview
I would guess, much like another respondent, that such behavior was directed at /both/ genders of critics, and not specific to women.

Do you have any evidence that this response, in particular, was directly solely or mainly at women and not critics at large?
We use Puppet a lot and are generally quite happy. We have recently started leveraging Hiera which is addressing our main issue we had with Puppet: Reusability problems in the code since Modules (code) and our data were not easily separated.

A lot of these tools are about integrating / presenting but that isn't entirely the case. Status does its own polling of things like Redis and SQL. Realog parses the data, structures it in Redis etc, and the patching dashboard can kick of updates.
I'm kind of torn... I've lost a child to SIDS, but I would not tell people that they can't make dead baby jokes at risk of revictimizing me. So many people have a pain point of some sort in their lives that if we go down that route there will be nothing left but PC-compatible sayings perfectly fit for a poster in corporate America.

But at the same time the reaction to the controversy around the comic has been all types of screwed up by Gabe.

Right or wrong, people have made it clear that the dickwolves thing makes them feel physically uneasy (at best). Whether it's right for people to feel that way is basically immaterial by this point; the argument was lost long ago, and Gabe is chasing after a train that is long departed.

So while I don't doubt that Gabe (and Tycho) do not literally support people being raped, they have been told in no uncertain terms that is how many people perceive support for "Dickwolves". Any further push for 'free speech' there must come as a package with instilling a culture of rape... again, even if that's not how they mean for it to be perceived, that doesn't change the reality of how it is being perceived.

I empathize with Gabe's greater point, but the fact is that he needs to start choosing different battles if he wants to win this 'war'. This particular battle was lost long ago.
Parse Analytics: Same Great Taste, Now Just the Way You Like It
"Chrome-specific code that means they won’t be able to run on other web browsers"
This sounds vaguely familiar...
Facebook refuses again to pay exploit bounty
Anyone in advertising or marketing could probably call themselves a "growth hacker". Apparently the term "hacker" is the hot thing, so it gets thrown around as if it means something anymore.

Ten years ago: "Software Engineer". Today: "Java / Full-stack hacker".
Ten years ago: "Accountant". Today: "Financial hacker".
It's redundant. An upvote says the same thing. Feedback needs substance, and without substance, it's just noise. People come here specifically because there isn't much noise. It all comes down to respect. Respect my time by providing insight, value, knowledge, or a unique perspective, and I'll do the same.
I'm sorry for such an awful (but accurate) pun, but this seems like a bit of a pushy sales tactic. I personally run away from businesses that use tactics such as these.

Please, don't do what this article suggests.
"rather than bringing negativity"

That seems like a false dichotomy. Someone who's a pollyanna even about horrendous abominations is a problem in one way, someone who's indiscriminately contemptuous of reasonably useful code is a problem in another way. Software projects (or teams, or companies) can bog down or die in more than one way. Driving off people who are doing reasonably good work is one way, tolerating unreasonably low standards is another.

And also, correct criticism is not particularly "bringing" negativity. If there is something unacceptably technically bad, and you want to point to the person or people who brought the negativity, you'd do better to point to the original creators and/or the chain of people who have signed off on it since then, rather than pointing to the person who criticizes the problem. The irreverent child did not bring the negativity to the Emperor's famous tailoring fiasco.

Someone who reasonably reliably distinguishes between good and bad is useful. Making the distinction correctly is generally much more important than the style of expression. It's easy to hire pollyannas (or, indeed, to err in the opposite direction by hiring hard-driving abrasive jerks) who don't have the tech skills to make the distinction correctly and just fall back to emoting in their preferred style. It works better to hire the smaller fraction of people who can do a good job, and who can recognize a good job. When you do that, it doesn't solve all style-related abrasiveness problems, but it does help mitigate them. By the time you've worked with someone for a while you learn to translate A's "this is unacceptable" as synonymous with B's "this is flaming rancid goat barf". (And axiomatic though it seems to be to you, in my experience saying "flaming rancid goat barf" is not useful evidence of unwillingness to learn and teach.) Both A and B are useful as long as they're reasonably reliably correct. Much bigger problems are C who says "this is a good effort" about everything, and D who flips between praise and condemnation based on issues other than technical quality (randomness, politics, mood swings, whatever).
To what degree exactly were they 'threats'? I have been hearing this phrase 'X received death and rape threats' a lot recently, but I have almost never heard of these being reported to the police, or arrests being made because of them (which you'd expect to be the case).

For example, randomcommenter123 saying something asinine like "you deserve to be trampled by a rampaging rhinoceros" does not constitute a death threat. On the other hand, someone who knows your address, or personal details about you is clearly dangerous and should be reported to law enforcement immediately. I would like the see the actual text of some of these threats before we assign them any actual importance.
It relates a bit to some of the discontinuities that have occurred between deaf communities and researchers working to correct the issues. Cochlear implants were not seen as a positive development by some (many?) deaf people.

The same attitude will have to be dealt with, to some extent, with anything that significantly alters a persons sensory or cognitive ability when a culture has developed around those limitations.