skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately this kind of thing is the reason why Windows is in a death spiral that it probably won't get out of.

Microsoft has had many chances to introduce clean new APIs: for instance, .NET could have been built on top of a simpler platform, or Metro could have been an opportunity to take out some cruft.

In the end Metro breaks everything (if you think the median programmer could write non-trivial apps with asynchronous I/O, think again.) Amazingly, Metro almost feels like a tablet operating system when it is running on top of the line hardware, but the ultimate attack on latency is to remove things from the stack and not to add them.

Personally I think Windows today (even Win 8) beats the pants off Linux and MacOS as a GUI operating system, but I seriously have to ask questions such as "will Intel be making new x86-compatible processors 10 years from now?" when I see Microsoft and Intel consistently painting themselves in a corner.
Am I the only one that had a response of "OK" to this? While I think this limitation is so sad it's funny I haven't had problems with it in years.
I don't think he's pretending they aren't important. He's pointing out that people who claim that they are important don't actually act as though they are. I.e. The argument of 'egalitarianism' is used selectively, which makes it into a contradiction in terms.
Ask HN: Should I get mentored by this guy?
Why you can’t stop checking your phone
It'd probably be easier to design an ultra-long delay line ASIC that internally maintains a state for a certain count of clock cycles, and spits it out after a while. It might still be possible to do a cryogenic attack, but that wouldn't be very easy to do.

Or maybe some sort of superconductor/magnetic state device.
Agriculture is far from the only immigration job.

Everything from construction to tech.
very cool and similar to what I had in mind...
Right, but gentrification is nothing new. Look at London. All the creatives (how I hate that term, as if everyone else isn't, but I digress) clustered around Old Street because it was cheap. They were edged out by hipsters with trust funds, like vampires sucking out the cultural blood. Earlier Islington was where the creatives lived, but they weren't edged out, they gentrified the place themselves, getting jobs in "the meeja"! But London is still a vibrant city. Now all the low-budget art is happening in formerly rough area Dalston.
Only I think that all this 'leaving a name here' / 'leaving a stupid trail there' seems just way too stupid for someone maintaining such a business for so long? I think there is a decent chance that all of this was staged and Mr. Ulbricht is just another puppet. All of it just sounds so hilarious.
That's on par with public school tuition in my experience.
As a user, I feel offended when I zoom in on subject webpage in my iPad and the nav menu gets on top of the text I would very much like to read in a slightly bigger font.
Not much motivation to check how the page is displayed on the most popular tablet, right?
What if the person did plenty of work outside the classroom, but it never happened to involve object-oriented PHP? I just don't understand the bizarre notion that if one hasn't written object-oriented PHP before, then apparently, well, I'm not even sure what the conclusion is supposed to be, but it seems to be along the lines of "you are a crappy programmer."
New $100 Bill tomorrow with extra security features
The problem is that pimp has two meanings, the unintended meaning painting a weird picture in my head.
I will tentatively agree the shame factor is a mess. It cries out for analogies with shaming people into not drinking and driving, and shaming them into wearing their seatbelts. I'm not sure if those analogies prove my side or yours, but I'm pretty sure they are great analogies for the topic, one way or another.

If you're trying to define a new cultural norm, in this case for eating, you're probably going to roll out a group-think consensus type meme, so not shaming people for being rebels is going to be an issue. This strategy needs a (good) marketing guy. The Apple iDinner, now without love handles. Something like that.
Having lived in both NYC and Los Angeles for extended periods of time, NYC for the last 3 years and LA for the previous 7, I was surprised by how little of the underground creative DIY energy is left here. When I first moved to Brooklyn 2 years ago I was invited to some loft parties and underground art events, but compared to LA they felt "manufactured" - as if trying to nostalgically reproduce something that was lost - rather than the unabashed fuck all mentality of the downtown LA underground art scene. Which is bizarre, because everything I had known to date had told me it was supposed to be the other way around.

From my perspective NYC has already begun its final transformation into total yuppie assimilation - it takes a good half hour subway ride from Manhattan before you can run into any genuine 'starving artists' any more. Even places like Bed-Stuy are now loaded with wine bars and upscale restaurants. A loft space even deep into Queens is a coveted piece of real estate.

There's really not much compelling left for someone who spends their nights being creative while squeaking by day on a coffee shop barista salary. While there are ample opportunities there isn't much of a way to invest the time into making them work - anyone squeaking by can't afford to live here without spending their evenings and creative time working a second job, and the living space that they have to work in is in many cases literally a creativity-stifling closet with no windows. Thats why so many people in this situation are migrating to rural suburbs or cities like Portland or Philadelphia where the low cost of living allows you to have both affordable workspace and some free time for art.

There really isn't a way to undo this situation unless the cost of real estate in NYC drops precipitously, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Paul Graham and YC Alums featured in Vanity Fair's "The New Establishment 2013"
This has the same drawbacks as using a small random key, which the article discusses later on:

- They might find the key earlier or later in their search (it adds volatility to the amount of time required).

- Searching for the right value of m is highly parallelizable.
This is kind of what I had an mind https://gumroad.com/l/bADx - again I am just trying to validate the idea.

PS: I make more than $50 an hour in my day job but the hope is that it will be like a gym membership - you count on some people never to use your service.

PPS: I know this doesn't scale, at least not at first and if it is just me but I can see it eventually becoming a marketplace
>I don't believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That's bullshit.

First of all, it's not. Second of all, "crime, danger and poverty" are not the opposite of high rents. Low rents are. Low rents make for good art. High rents make for good stockbrokers and bankers.
M$ sucks... M$ tools suck... i get it.
You asked me how egalitarianism is relevant, and I'm telling you that it should be obvious that it's relevant because some folks think the current distribution of work is not fair to females.
I was made aware of this artificial limitation through a pretty vivid edge case while I a student some years ago. TortoiseSVN had somehow borked and began to recursively create .svn directories inside of each other, as fast as it could, until such time as I managed to kill the process.

Many can guess what happened next: I went to delete the erroneous top-level .svn folder and was given an error, the gist of which was: "Cannot remove. Path too long." There's more to the story, but it turns out the real answer was to boot into a Linux LiveCD and delete from within there.

I found it strange that one set of Win32 calls allowed TortoiseSVN to create paths of a certain depth, but the other set, used by Microsoft in their tools, would not allow me to delete them. These days I understand the reasons behind it, and so instead find it merely annoying.
Are you getting good performance? Mono is at the bottom of most of the framework comparison benchmarks: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
Always surprised when I see comments like this. I have the opposite view. The font size of both the OP site (and Medium) is perfect for me and I wish more sites would depart from the web's 'tiny text' mistakes of the past.

I find a website with 'old-fashioned' 12px or lower text is like me holding my iPhone at arm's length. Don't get it.

Curious as to your monitor size/res and whether you use the computer leaning forwards/backwards. I'm a 28yr old with good eyesight, I lean back in my chair.

Also wonder if a lot of hackers are biased towards small text because they're used to their IDEs/terminals which default to pretty tiny fonts.
I can understand some trepidation around actual checkout but seriously, how much linguistic fortitude do you need to implement a shopping cart?
It will add more confusion with the actual sharp tools: C# and F#.
Many thanks for the nice comments :) we are glad you enjoyed Noisli.

The loops are very long - we will try to figure out why it is stopping and fix it as soon as possible
A vague landing page and a nearly as vague blog post.
As far as I got a lot.
The main reason is that, with limited effort, you see your progress (tasks move).
Moreover the management is really enthusiastic of the approach, so they're often showing to guests (like I was) and promoting the activity as something unique of "their guys", so I guess this also makes people proud of what they're doing...
This might be the worst comment I've ever read on HN.
Instapaper delivered to your Kindle changes how you consume web content
There are also back-end specialists who cannot do what it takes to build an efficient back-end tool :)

The skills involved in web development and software engineering are so varied that I'd hesitate to define too few buckets to categorize people. Traditionally I think the reason designers get away with learning a bit of JS is because of the simple request, pageview and DOM semantic of the web makes it easy to hack on things until they work without the danger of really screwing things up too bad for 3 reasons: 1) you don't worry about persistence, 2) you don't worry about scalability, and 3) any problems you created only live as long as the pageview does.

Newer APIs like client-side storage and pushstate are allowing browser js to quickly evolve into the realm of serious software engineering with even a few twists of its own (like no easy production logs.) Of course a web designer can still come and do a tutorial and duct tape some things together, but this is equally true of PHP, rails or node. There is an inherent learning curve in learning how to operate at various levels of abstraction well enough to engineer a system that meets latency, scalability, correctness and maintainability requirements for a non-trivial app.
I think many workplaces have an idealized picture of what kind of person is a programmer, manager and so forth.

I worked at one place where boomer IT staff were happy. One guy told me, "It's great, I just plan to coast a few more years to retirement."

Gen X and younger people were miserable at this place. One guy who was 27 was fed up with not being taken seriously so he (1) started an MBA program (which the employer had to support at least partially) and (2) deliberately gained weight, and (3) went to a hair salon and had them do a fancy tint job on his hair with aluminum foil and stuff so he'd get grey highlights.
* It is often really difficult to get a "no" or any kind of bad news in time to compensate for it.

This is one of the larger problems I have encountered. It's a cultural issue. They (Indians) view "no" or "we have to lengthen the schedule" as verboten. So, you will always get a "yes"... and, often times, crappy software.
It's interesting that some of the NYT visualizations are static graphics that normally, back in the print-only days, been done in Illustrator. Here's a map of Chicago killings done by Mike Bostock et al:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/02/us/chicago-kil...

I wonder if making static charts via D3js has some time-savings/production advantages when the dataset is large enough? Before you say "maybe they just wanted vector graphics that worked for high-res"...that's obviously a benefit, but not enough on its own to give the web devs a graphic that could've been done via the traditional means (many of the Times stories include static graphics as PNGs in the sidebar)
Same here, but with Windows' own backup tool.
Matlab and several related programming languages are designed for carrying out mathematical calculations. Ruby is designed to be a multi-purpose language that has found a niche in Web-development. My advice is to use the right tool for the job, and not to try and force a round cylinder into a square hole.
Clickable - https://www.learnedbyme.com/
Yep.

Productivity frameworks can be helpful in a context with people who are smart enough to process the central insights and genuinely interested in playing a longer game than an immediate problem or narrow personal/career agenda.

But in some hands, the important insights either don't get absorbed, or they're wielded selectively to poor effect. Bad decisions can actually be justified with situational appeal to some guiding principle -- but when it cuts the other direction, the principle gets played down and the other side of any tension present gets played up.
I have a better idea! Let's just use strings for everything!
Hosting and scaling on Windows Azure is a pretty cost effective option to avoid "licensing".

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/
>" you'll still pay licenses for Windows on the dev boxes and for Visual Studio"

Would you? Wouldn't Visual Studio Express be enough for a lot of cases?
> I heard Hotmail (now Outlook.com?) runs on Linux servers?

No, Hotmail runs on Windows.

Before it was ported to Windows in 2000-2001, it ran on FreeBSD. Not Linux.
I would say Kanban is the opposite of keeping your head down - you have to come up for air every time you finish something and priorities can change each time. Waterfall is the classic head-down approach, work on something for months/years and then release it and see if there is still a market for it. I think there are strong tendencies towards waterfall in many tech personalities - "I'm just going to disappear and come back with something brilliant at some unspecified point in the future." People don't want to feel that they're building widgets when they could be making a cathedral but that's often what is needed. Agile and Kanban fight this tendency and are therefore not always popular.
I'm not sure if this is really true if you use Qt 5 and Qt Quick, which allows you incredible control over the look of your application.
Thanks man, the course is awesome!
The New Establishment 2013
For a second I thought these were killings done by Mike Bostock...
Bitcoin Week: Silk Road Seized, Coinvoice, Tradehill Auctions, More
First: No. See PG's essay about the Python Paradox.

Second: My understanding is that the licensing models of Microsoft become hideously expensive as you scale up. Why waste money?

Third: Ethics about proprietary software; I think it's considerably more ethical to use and advocate libre software.

edit: Fourth: Windows is harder to get @#$^ done in, IME. I've generally lived in the F/OSS ecosystem as much as I could for the last 5+ years; whenever I want to do something that I'd do in F/OSS in Windows, it seems like "everything is hard". The complexity required to do anything programmatic is significant compared to using Linux/OSX, even if you just measure in keystrokes/clicks. This is, I'm sure, partially due to my inexperience, but I'm reasonably sure that it's a combination of Big Enterprise Design Pattern thinking along with Cater To Non-Hacker thinking.
From personal experience, the higher-level features and frameworks that MS puts out for .NET are what tend to get in the way of successfully scaling .NET systems. I can't comment on ASP.NET MVC but I don't trust EF at all, and even the higher level XML interfaces can be problematic. Basically it comes down to profiling and optimizing, just like in any other system. Just don't design your systems to be tightly coupled to any particular API.

If I were building a new system in .NET I'd base it off of open source tools that weren't available when the systems I currently work on were built. The most appealing of these seem to be built by stackexchange folks at the moment (ie servicestack, dapper). These tools were designed to be Mono-friendly and deploy to Linux so less licensing/vendor lockin worries.

In general I don't trust MS but I do like .NET and often turn to F# for personal projects.
Beyond the toolbox, though, I would need to investigate the platform costs of scaling MS technology.

For Microsoft, there would be a licensing cost not only for each instance of the OS but also the supporting systems ( SQL Server, VM Manager etc ).

I don't have much insight into those costs but at $WORK it is one of the drivers for moving as much portable code to Linux VMs as possible, even at the technical and organisational cost of a split development environment. The Big Apps remain .Net on MS, since that's how they were written, but everyone else is pushed to OSS.
I've been looking for Georgia Tech grads/dropouts who have been to YC. Any chance you could send me a quick email at chintanparikh@gatech.edu? I run Startup Exchange at Georgia Tech
very cool, christophe, thanks for taking the time to compile this list.

The one thing that always astounds me about people who generate dataviz with d3 is that they almost never do anything interactive with it (filter, zoom, etc) and if they do, they won't use any of d3's insanely cool/easy transitions to make the visualization smoothly morph from one state to the next.

Really, if you're going to start messing around with d3, read about Mike Bostock's thoughts on change blindness and object constancy.

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/constancy/

amazing example 1:
http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/1256572

cool example 2:
http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3808234
The potential with Node is that you could have the best of both worlds, using the same code to render on client and server depending on which would provide the best experience given the current hardware and connection capacity. (Edit: it looks like Rendr and Derbyjs are starting to realize this potential)
I'm not sure if this is exactly what the parent meant, but there are two things at play here:

- Deliberate invalidation: "sweeping" is the process of transferring all funds from a wallet into another one. If the owner ever gets access to some private computer time and one of his wallet backups, he can empty everything into a new address - one where the private key is stored in an undisclosed location, even his brain. Anyone with access to the wallet file in question in this article would do well to sweep it into a new address now.

- The reference client creates 100 addresses at a time and stores their keys in a file. New addresses are used by default for "change." Change is another subject entirely, but the end result is that yes, you do need to keep updating your backups every 100 transactions or so. This has the nice effect of helping anonymity and passively invalidating that file you forgot about, and the not-so-nice effect of being annoying. Some other clients have different behavior.
I've worked on a number of MS based systems, some at the prototype phase, others at significant scale. It is absolutely possible to be productive and cost efficient long-term while using MS products, just don't expect it happen by accident. Of course, the exact same thing could be said for almost any other engineering choice you could make at the earliest stages of building a complex system.
They're using rolling admission -- so if they come across 100 qualifying applications before they encounter yours, it doesn't matter how good you are (they bump you to a future semester).
Boston Tech/Innovation Calendar is Jam-Packed
that one probably doesn't need mentioning, as question posed in the article was "does anybody other than stackexchange use MS"
Paid. Since I'd put a generous amount of effort into it. Since this is advanced level that would mean video demo with voice overlaid + slides and code practice. I'm thinking about premium version where you can submit your solutions and get some guidelines.
You touch on another interesting area. How to rank the importance of features. I am careful to highlight our own work, but do a search for Aha! Scorecards and Aha! Scores. We introduced a way for teams to enter into their account their own key business metrics and then rank features against them. It's hard to game the system when you are asked to rank the importance of features against real business goals (sales, support, internationalization, mobile, etc.) and then forced to defend your rankings if there is disagreement.
I guess that makes me and our company unique. Started over 3 years ago on the .Net platform and have no reasons to consider switching. The BizSpark program and Azure services are great for startups.
The hard statistical challenge is your voting theory is pretty much a proxy for urban/rural. So you'd need some sneaky statistics to find the rare areas where you can separate the two closely matched data sources. Rephrased, I bet if you ran correlation coeff for urban/rural ratio vs both voting and death rates I bet they'd match up about the same and the coeff between urban/rural and death would be higher. Or I could be totally wrong and you're right. But what I am pretty sure I'm correct about, is this experiment would be the logical second step after your theory.
It's not illegal if Uncle Sam does it!
related: http://blog.ycombinator.com/paul-graham-and-yc-alums-feature...

discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510663
Coffee Flavour Wheel (D3.js)
Thought this was cool and decided to share.
Breeze.js: Rich Data for Javascript Apps
That's a special case though, emulators are not real devices that would likely generate bad data for their purposes.
The iOS Developer’s Guide to Apple App Store Categories
These are interesting scenarios. Each of them could probably use some additional context but overall I think the problem is one of practicality vs idealism. I have been in both parties over the years and have more often than not been in the camp of over-architecting a solution. I think that on the surface, he does sound like a very practical programmer who is cognizant of the bottom line. If you are not going to be paid extra to implement something, then sometimes it doesn't make business sense to implement it. It is sad but true and you will sometimes feel the same if freelancing. To me, I would not turn my back on this guy - it does seem like there is stuff to be learnt from him. Nobody has all the answers though, so it is good for you to question him. If it is possible, maybe open dialogue with him about these would be beneficial to you both.
Hard to answer without knowing what else you've done. Assuming you're fresh into the computer science world, you could try taking the HTML beginners course on Code Academy. After that, choose a language or platform and run with it. Treehouse has a good (I assume) beginners course on iOS development.
Show HN: my first game - Basketball w/ Friends for iOS7