skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin works because it's actually a sneaky way of teaching the world Hayekian monetary theory without all those extremely long translated German sentences with multiple subordinate clauses. Ever read "The Denationalization of Money"(http://mises.org/document/3970)?
Its also missing some form of lock to prevent slow requests cascading (to the same host or IP) when the next instance of your crawler comes along. I did this once where I had a crawler spin up in a cron job. No problem, unless the previous crawler was still running.

Speaking from experience its far better to lock your crawler down from the beginning then to do it after you kill someones site. I did expose a few slow pages for some sites, but not before crashing the whole thing.
Actually, in the case of Gretzky and Lemieux, I believe they did average ~10x more points (and other contributions) per season than the average player. Also, don't forget that the NHL is just the best of the best; there are many hockey players that are "pros" but never make it to the NHL. When you factor them in, players like Gretzky may be several orders of magnitude better than average.

>> it blows my mind to think there's a large number of people out there who in just a few hours could knock out everything I spent all of last week on.

First of all, as I wrote in the post, 10x programmers are rare. There isn't a "large number" of them.

Second, it's not about producing more lines of code per minute or per week. It's about producing the maximum value (for lack of a better word) in a time period by making good decisions.

I'm not a 10x programmer and the results on my own work week are pretty obvious: when I look at it closely, I realize that I spend a lot of time dealing previous mistakes. I lose days because I made a solution that's too tightly coupled and it's hard to adapt the code to a new situation; I didn't add enough tests and waste lots of time fixing regressions; I didn't add enough documentation and can't remember why I made certain decisions; I've created designs that don't scale and need to be replaced entirely; and so on. Since it's harder to read code than to write it[1] and since the cost of fixing defects increases dramatically later in the software process[2], these bad decisions eat up an enormous amount of time.

However, as I learn more, I've noticed that I spend a much higher proportion of my time solving the "real" business problem instead of dealing with previous mistakes. In other words, I'm becoming dramatically more productive than I used to be, not because I'm typing faster, but because I'm avoiding/reducing entire branches of work that used to eat up my time.

These sorts of effects multiply: for the 10x programmer, the gain in productivity can be huge and they will be able to get an order of magnitude more done than the average coder.

* [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
* [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing#Economics
On Friday morning (EST) there was a post on HN about just this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455391

It has >1000 upvotes and >450 comments. It was on the front page about 11am and then by noon had disappeared (I stopped looking after about 10 pages).

Honestly, I'd still like an answer as to why. I know pages without links degrade quicker but this isn't what happened here. Nothing drops from top of the front page to page 11+ that quickly.

This company is a scam and it concerns me greatly that this may have been taken down, which raises the obvious question of why. User jdh (Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners), an investor in JustFab, tried defending the company but copped a (deserved) beating from the HN masses to the deceptive (arguably fraudulent) tactics of the modern-day "shoe of the month" club that is JustFab.

As another user mentioned, TechCrunch covered the class auction lawsuit (from 2011?) on the same day.
I've got to say I was hoping this would be about chip manufacturing...
Money isn't only incentive. It also measures the peoples needs. "Do my clients need XXX?" correlates with "Do my clients will pay $$$ for XXX?".
For organisation, replacing the need by the money allow to take explainable decision. Fame, power, influence or passion are far less easier to measure than money.
My takeaway: launch fast from the bleeding-edge.

That makes me wonder — what is the edge today? What would be the equivalent of the Altair and the BASIC interpreter? What would be today's intersection of new hardware and old software?

The Oculus Rift comes mind. There's been some interesting work to bring the Rift to the masses through the Web:

https://github.com/Instrument/oculus-bridge
We’ve let go of half a dozen employees and kept only as many

Wowzers. Firing every-other person you hire? Leaders should be ok to break big-problems down into simple ones, with the purpose of expanding the funnel of people who can be effective at solving the problems. This is the basis of leveraging resources. While it's legitimate to require a threshold tests of quality for building a team, a failure rate is this high with onboarding staff indicates something else is a problem. Imagine any sports team who mistakes talent at this percentage? While the players may get traded, the coach would be likely getting fired. There has to be more to the story?

A true artist never complains about his tools.
You have a molecule. Something that will "stay put" probably written on a "2d" surface like Graphene.

Graphene is composed of lots of little hexagons. Each side of the hexagon can be broken and have an atom attached to it in "3d".

You have 6 sides and the angle break can go "up" or "down".

You can only use 3 sides however so that each hexagon has data and you can tell unique data.

This gives you 3 positions in 3 states, Up, down, or Flat.
0.142 nanometers per bond...

That's 27 states per hex, and 190 hexes per nanometer... 36,100 hexes per square nanometer...

I'm sure I screwed up a calculation in there somewhere. But Based on current tech this is my answer to what is possible to write. Now Reading might be a bit harder at any speed... but hey this is all theory right?
If they didn't sound authorative, they wouldn't be able to play to peoples' insecurities and therefore get less pageviews.

And pageviews sell Ads!
It's neither pointless nor busywork. Being able to work the problem or know the material well enough to accurately assess the quality of students' homework submissions is a baseline requirement for effective teaching.
It implies familiarity to call someone by their first name. Combine that with certainty that I'm active in discussions I don't remember taking part in, and I start thinking of mistaken identity.
I can't speak for anyone else, but when I moved to DC, the regular supermarket options were all terrible (very small, don't carry lots of things I used to be able to get from suburban supermarket's, no parking, awful produce, etc.)

I found Trader Joe's to be a slightly less egregious Whole Foods, so I did most of my shopping there.

What finally wore me out was the fact that I couldn't do "all" of my grocery shopping there (I have no interest in buying hippy toilet paper or hippy soap), so I still had to shop at a "regular" grocery store.

Now, Amazon subscription takes care of most of our household stuff (like paper towels and dishwashing detergent and such), and we get produce delivered weekly by some local green grocer (which I let my girlfriend talk me in to, as left to my own devices I don't really eat produce).
And if performance is the issue, why even mention cultural fit during the firing? Items 1,2 and 4 are perfectly justifiable reasons for firing without invoking the "cultural fit" clause. Why not simply stick with the observations of (non-)performance rather than offering your judgements of the cause(s) of the non-performance? I can understand quitting because of reason #3, but not being fired because of it, unless it leads to poor performance. So again, fire me for poor performance, not because you believe - rightly or wrongly - that I'm not as motivated by your goals as I used to be. As long as my performance does not taper off one iota, it should not matter to you. And yes, for some people, loss of passion for company goals would lead to decreased performance. But other people might have additional motivating factors that allow them to maintain enthusiasm and continue to perform at a high level. Why should that be a problem?

Yes, I recognize that my refusal to accept that we must all have the identical motivating factors is a prime example of why I would be a poor cultural fit with many start-ups.
You are Dr. Who. You have a Tardis. It will convert your language in to any other language telepathically. Why not create a word that means the summation of everything you know, and say it to a person. They create a word that means the summation of everything they know and everything you know and say it to the next person...
Our biggest empire put Armstrong there. A digression, but just saying. The logistics of getting people to the moon in the late sixties are mind-boggling.
> Wait, so you fire half of your staff and they're happier afterwords?

I've known people who were laid off or fired, and of course they were pretty unhappy about it at the time. But I know some who took it as the kick-in-the-pants they needed to fix their lives for the better, and find a better job, start the business they'd been talking about, etc.

A year or two later, and they'll freely agree that being laid off was good for them.
I was going to say this too, I remember initially using web based proxies like proxify and hidemyass until they were all blocked then we figured out the blocking system didn't work on a wildcard so www.facebook.com would be blocked for example but bypass.facebook.com would not.

So a few of my tech savvy friends and I setup a web based proxy on a free host which just wildcarded the sub-domains, I can't remember exactly how we did it but we had that going for a long time.

Pretty sure we used a script like http://www.phpmyproxy.com/
Why This Is Not Just 'Washington Breakdown,' in 3 Graphs (and 1 Story
I looked into this heavily over the past few days. The punchline is this needs support for NAT traversal and some type of out-of-band way for clients to find each other.

NAT traversal is an implementation thing, and I favor Jabber as the out-of-band these days since everyone can get at least a GTalk account.

Though we now have libjingle, which basically merges both of these things and would probably elegantly solve the problem. But p2p vpn's aren't much use if you have to control the NAT router you're attached to.
Here's the thing: Kickstarter is one of those SaaSS systems that RMS was arguing against.

Idealism gives you a target but not a roadmap. As others here have said without Propietary software much of what we have in software just wouldn't exist. Kickstarter wouldn't exist. If the whole world were full of enough people who shared RMS's Ideals then his Ideals would be workable. It's a bootstrapping problem. And RMS spends so much time complaining about the bootstrapping that it sounds like he'd rather not get there all if that's what it takes.

Maybe that's not what he actually thinks but that's how he comes across.

Me? I do want to get there and I'm willing to bootstrap to do so.
Or, they're in a comfort zone and trying to fly under the radar as long as the paychecks keep coming. Not everyone is self-aware... neither is everyone passionate about putting their employer first.
I've had that same experience. I bought a theme very niavely thinking that it would follow bootstrap conventions and would be easily modifiable. Instead, I've got a huge mess and I think I'm just going to throw it out. I've been looking for a site like yours, that actually respects LESS. I hope it takes off and will definitely be keeping an eye on it.
As an undergrad, we'd often do programming projects as groups and a part of the value of such an exercise was to gain experience in working within teams.

Although technically, CS degrees are for learning about computation rather than how to use a particular language or how to develop software.
It does in ASCII, and (consequently) in any ANSI-conforming terminal [emulator].
I agree with you, but keep in mind that Jennifer has mentioned that she spent 8-10 hours per day on this project.
2 is particularly relevant and more than solid grasp of CS is required depending on what you choose to do within the field. Malware Analysis for example can require understanding data structures, calling conventions, x86, compiler internals, etc.

Security is actually one of the few fields where I think you see a really interesting mix of theoretical and applied CS. Things like complexity theory, formal program analysis, etc pop up quite often.
Logacal: A Smarter Visualization Of Calendar Events
I found this sentence surprising:

> We’ve let go of half a dozen employees and kept only as many

Of all the departures I know of from software companies, much fewer than half are firings. That is to say, the vast majority are employee-initiated.
Cute baby elephant's first steps -and steps on his trunk
I don't understand the popularity of Candy Crush. It's just a less complex variant of Bejeweled style games. Mobile gaming is littered with them. I played for the better part of an hour before hitting the eject button, but plenty of people in the gaming press are enamoured with and addicted to it.

Hell, I even understood the popularity of Rovio's Artillary-like far more than this.

It just goes to show that you don't need a good idea to be successful. Just throw enough dumb ideas to the wind and, eventually, something will sail.
There are some interesting lessons with my pay-what-you-want approach, although I haven't quite nailed it down.

I run a DC-based service called Linktank [http://dc.linktank.com] that offers limited access to registered users and full access to PWYW subscribers: http://dc.linktank.com/subscribe

After launching my subscription service this past August, I have about a 6% conversion from freemium registrants, although that has been picking up steadily this month and will continue to rise in October.

Users have an option to pay $3, $5, $7, $9. Most users choose $3 but slightly less than that choose $7. On average, I am getting about $5.25 per user.

I'm generating about $1,400 from subscriptions alone but that number is increasing by a hundred or so every week.

I started this service as an email roundup. That list has now grown to about 23K subscribers and I'm now monetizing with subscriptions, advertising, and job postings.

What do you think of my approach? Where am I leaving money on the table? What are some missing opportunities?
So that means that no third-party services should be allowed?

When I send an email to a company that uses third-party customer support software to consume, parse, and host the email; I don't agree to the TOS of the customer support vendor.

When I send an email to a company that uses third-party software to parse and archive email for legal purposes; I don't agree to the TOS of that email parsing and archiving company.

It would be ridiculous and impossible to expect that I would agree to the TOS of each and all pieces of software used in the processing of my communications with a company.
Patent troll companies spend a lot of money for shell 'office' suites? I don't think that's actually true.
The Minute Physics Periodic Table ( of awesome )
If it's a console app... isn't the full-screen bit up to me?
Dark pattern's less of a mouthful.
The Bike Index: Let's Stop Bike Theft, Together
Although F# isn't OCaml it is fairly similar, and compatible if you skip certain features of each: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/179492/f-changes-to-ocaml
once again, how do the headers conjure up the int64_t type? it's not a keyword.
The most important reason we have to insist on the "rockstar programmer" being a myth is that it takes attention away from the CEO that wants to be the rockstar. Rockstars also have more leverage, which chaffs the suits who want you to be just another drone that they can shuffle around like an office chair.
The Silicon Valley Of Latin America: A Tale Of 3 Nations
Chaum's systems also failed because of a lack of demand. In the early-to-mid-90s it seemed sensible that nobody would spend money online without at least some of the security guarantees of digital cash. In retrospect, however, there are these issues:

1. Banks have centuries of experience in combating fraud. It is not clear that digital cash actually improves the situation for banks, given the higher infrastructure costs. If you cannot show banks that they will lose less to fraud with digital cash than the new infrastructure would cost, the banks will not care -- it is easier to analyze spending patterns and identify likely fraud.

2. Most users have a very poor understanding of the security implications of spending money online. On some of that, the fraud that users have to deal with is only partially defended against by digital cash; scams involving people taking money and not delivering the goods are even older than the banking system and are not addressed by digital cash. While the theft of credit card data causes headaches for users, banks are sufficiently good at stopping it that few people are clamoring for a better system.

3. It is unclear that merchants would have benefited from digital cash. While certain kinds of fraud affecting merchants might have been mitigated (e.g. no charge backs), the real issue is whether or not merchants would make more money with such systems. That is unclear, as the banks can and mostly certainly would still charge fees for the service and would likely charge at least as much as they charge for credit cards. Offline systems would mitigate the issue of service fees, but would also increase the risk of fraud and would leave merchants with the short end of the stick.

If anything, Bitcoin reinforces the point that security is not the deciding factor here. Bitcoin does not even have a clear security definition, yet for reasons that we could argue about for hours on end it has become more popular than systems with provable security.
Even better - attribute a meaning, in that language, to refusing to say anything to the next person (remaining silent). Then you can put the summation of everything they know and everything you know into the case where you don't say anything (in that language).

This is similar to making a version of gcc that outputs a Tetris program everytime it's asked to compile a 0-byte file, or maybe outputs all of Wikipedia. I mean, sure, you can hide Tetris, or the whole of human knowledge, in 0 bytes this way. But it's not a very useful exercise.
Hey, nice graphic, I have something similar here https://github.com/cixtor but it isn't a hack. Anyway, that's a very nice post, I also have a different explanation here, maybe you can compare some ideas, I use a different technique to achieve the same thing: http://www.cixtor.com/blog/57/github-contributions
> Exercise: think of inexpensive ways of mitigating this. Took me about 2 seconds to think of 3.

instead of "leaving it as an exercise to the reader", why don't you list your three cheap ways to mitigate gene pool decay? coz i can't see any cheap ways - anything coming from earth will cost an arm and a leg.
Star athletes may not be 10x better at their sport than other players in the same league, but they are probably (at least) 10x better at bringing in the fans and money for their sport and club than other players.

Given that modern sport is an industry this is the sort of thing that team owners would also take into consideration.
Interface design trends - text input
A PFQueryCollectionViewController is on my to do list.

If you are familiar with Parse.com's iOS framework it would be like a PFQueryTableViewController (https://parse.com/tutorials/parse-query-table) except the controller would show the cells in a UICollectionView instead of in a UITableView.

I would love to work on it together with someone. Here's my github https://github.com/davidolesch if you want to connect.
> land goes to who gets there, not who has force of arms to hold it

no, this will never be true, whether its mars or earth. Right now, the other planets isn't "claimed" because it's not economical, nor worthwhile (yet). I bet you when the sufficient incentive and technology exists to colonize another planet/moon, the various gov'ts will start claiming land, using the thread of force.
I've been there before too. In the end, I was happy to get fired because it was a crap place to work. Shortly afterwords, the guy who fired me and the rest of the founders got fired themselves. I can only assume they were happier afterwords as well.
"n!" communication problem, not just "n^2".
I agree with your point for what it's worth!! I also think it's easy to tell Maciej is kidding solely from his writing, but I figured I was biased since I follow him.
This seems like an interesting philosophical question -- after all, the sender never agreed to let Google read her emails, right? But I think the resolution is that the receiver did agree to let Google read both emails she sends and emails she receives. Once the receiver "receives" the email, Google has permission to read it regardless of how the sender feels about it (if the sender didn't want them read, she shouldn't have given them to a receiver who would agree to this).

But Google wasn't using that argument apparently; rather they were claiming that the sender gave "implicit" consent -- not sure if this seems obviously true to me....
Basic Income?
Why would you care about an invalid cert if you aren't handing over any credentials?
I should add that one drawback of keeping your TODO list checked in is that people will hijack it and try to use it for scheduling purposes.

The times that I've shared my TODO list with a project manager, I've regretted it. This /could/ simply be that the kind of PM who makes a schedule based on snapshot of an engineer's loosey-goosey list is a clueless git who is not to be trusted. Even when I've directly shared the list and TOLD the PM "Look, don't make a schedule off of this, it's just a basis for discussion" the next thing I know the list has been enshrined in a PowerPoint deck and has become Gospel all the way up. Whereupon the following conversation happens with my mangler [sic]:

"Figby the PM is a clueless git."

"Don't worry. The PM management chain is trying to fire him."

"Couldn't happen soon enough. But what do we do about his PowerPoint deck?"

"I think we're screwed."

"Next time I'm going to line up the items so the first letter of each line reads 'FIGBY IS A CLUELESS GIT'" and then point that out in the scheduling meeting."

"(sighs heavily)"

My mom thinks I'm in high tech.
That's exactly what we use. Unfortunately the scripts are full of various hardcoded internal info and I am not at liberty to post them. The CLI tools here make it very easy, though.
[Offer HN] Ticket for London Workshop - Tues 1st Oct
Tues 1st October - London - Nathan Barry & Brennan Dunn.

"Building a profitable audience" Workshop - all day event.

As much as I would love to attend this workshop, it's looking less & less likely that I'll be able to go.

The venue has a strict business dress code which has thrown a spanner in the works of an already packed itinerary for the week.

The workshop sold out quite quickly & looks like it will be a lot of fun & a great chance to meet people.

If anyone would like to attend I'm open to offers on the ticket. Thanks!
Show HN: Featureless text editor
http://notlikethesun.com/spaceconsole/

Convenient if you want to compose a special tweet, email, or note without the distraction of your inbox or other environment.

Scroll up or down to control the speed of the stars. The starfield Javascript is from Christophe Résigné - https://github.com/chiptune/js/blob/master/starfield.html
None of it... I think you missed the part about baseless claims I was getting at.
Clickable link: http://notlikethesun.com/spaceconsole/
> To paraphrase Hanns Johst...

You realize that you're paraphrasing a Nazi [1], right?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Johst#Role_in_Nazi_German...