skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's a great idea - much better than the old built-in formula dependency tracker. definitely loving your idea! I've been in the Excel business myself for years (having worked in finance) and always love when someone comes up with a fresh tool for the mighty Excel (yeah, I know most developer's views on Excel...). I've recently started www.spreadgit.com which is a GitHub-like service for spreadsheets. looking forward to playing around with your service!
> I learned as a kid that a house normally only get more value over time

I think this is one of the reasons we got into this mess. People bought more house than they could afford thinking they would be able to sell it if they needed to and at least break even. Nobody was prepared for underwater mortgages because we all assumed houses only appreciate.
Upvoted by this Stanford Alumnus.
The main article, though nice formally doesn't say anything new about subcultures and the alleged end of big C Culture - my main gripe with it being it generalizes from cultural microcosms. The Appendix (which takes the lion's share of the whole article), about Japan and Internet/FLOSS is where the interesting stuff lies.
How to Build an Online Retailer to $1M in 18 Months (“EZ-Guide”)
http://www.simplevpn.net/ ?
Yes. It's a designer and developer take at Medium, Svbtle which doesn't ignore Markdown syntax as a future standard.
There's a huge difference between being spied upon by your own government and being spied upon by some manifest-destiny-following foreigner.
"the same method of displaying a watermark is also done if you are not running a genuine copy of Windows"

Maybe that's because a prominent reason to disable secure boot is to use Windows Loader to pirate Windows. Of course, there may be an updated version soon that tricks Windows into thinking it booted securely.
Actually, I think this is good. The shutdowns of all these unsafe services are creating a need, and when there's a need a solution will appear.
The State of our Coal Generation
We've Upgraded One Month Rails for Rails 4
I likewise performed a detailed dissection of my previous failed website on my blog - very therapeutic. It still has one fairly regular user (me!) so I keep it going but I launched in much the same way: built it silently then managed to get about 10k+ visitors through HN. Only a few hundred gave it a go initially and within a fortnight or so, no tangible traffic at all.

Great learning experience though, and this post is a reminder to me to make sure I don't repeat the same mistake.
*2004
How?

The site has promised nothing new that I can see.. Launchpad already offers what is currently being promised.

In addition, the launchpad build infra is well designed and provides an assured build that is using the same architecutrure as builds for Ubuntu's primary archive (including gpg and network isolated build hosts)

Launchpad also has a receipe based build process, that (I haven't tried) could surely tie into Github?

On the face of it, this seems like a fun project for the developers, but nothing new.
Young people are trying something other than Windows. It goes by the name OSX.

For most people, there is also very little reason to make the effort of switching from Windows (or OSX - whichever they're on) to a Linux distro. Do you also think regular people would understand the concept of a VM well?

I think you're getting a little ahead of yourself.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense, but then I don't understand what you mean by "people obligating the people behind them to pay for the people behind them".

If your moral compass is based on what you believe internally, I don't see how you are being obliged to do something by someone else if that person has no knowledge of whether you did it or not.
Four years earlier and you would have seen them doing the Bellamy Salute which was dropped from the Flag Code in 1942 due to its similarity to the Italian Fascist and German Nazi Salutes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Students_pledging_allegia...
Disagree, perhaps. If you were talking to a New York Times reporter, with an intended lay audience, how would you describe scope issues like this?

And while it's a poor metric, lines of code is not completely useless.
Why I Hate Remote Working
I know the people who worked on this. This is not what happened. Just yet another propaganda piece by Forbes.
I've been running CM since the Nexus One. I don't think it supports per-app system privileges. Unless it is hidden somewhere deep within (though I could swear I've recursively been through their entire settings tree).

May I ask which ROMs you are referring to?
The Death of math
400kb for an useless image just on top of everything?

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/neverm...
Archive.is - webpage capture
My undergrad university has had a program[1] where students start/run actual companies for at least the last decade. The school helps secure grants or contracts with industry partners and the students work on actual problems.

If you want credit you still have to pay like a class. However, for a number of them at least the managers had salaries that met or exceeded their course cost, and some everyone was paid.

Michigan Tech feeds to the biotech and automotive industries particularly in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin given the location, and a lot of the enterprises have done some cool things with those fields, as well as some defense work.

1: http://www.mtu.edu/enterprise/
A bit off-topic, but if you've got a moment I would love to pick your brain a bit more about your Riak usage. Shoot me an email if you're up for it - mark@basho.com
Immersion helps, but it's pretty easy not to become immersed in Scandinavia, because everyone both speaks good English, and switches to it quite quickly when they realize you're a foreigner. It's possible to ask them to please speak Danish/Swedish/Norwegian because you're learning, and many people will then switch back, but the immediate switch to English is basically default (especially in Denmark).

I've lived in Denmark for 2 1/2 years and probably have had less real need to speak Danish here than in the 3 weeks I spent in Spain! More Spaniards are either unable or unwilling to speak English, so that trip was much more immersive language-wise, in that I actually had to interact in Spanish.
Black Holes May Have 'Hair'
The sound in this comic EPIC!
I think this is happening because of the.. haphazard way we're showing the file list inside the deb. In future this will be cached. If you refresh again it usually works fine. Cheers for the report.
Mythtv
I think you did a really great job in completing the project and launching. Disclaimer: I'm an MBA student so take my thoughts with a grain of salt :) I thought that your marketing was spot on in terms of trying to generate something but I'm just wondering if you tried targeting other types of customers or even zoning in on very specific types of programmers ( beginner level, expert level, etc)?
There are five points on page 3:

1. Linguistically legislated exact reproducibility is at best mere wishful thinking.

2. Of two traditional policies for mixed precision evaluation, Java chose the worse.

3. Infinities and NaNs unleashed without the protection of floating-point traps and flags
mandated by IEEE Standards 754/854 belie Java’s claim to robustness.

4. Every programmer’s prospects for success are diminished by Java’s refusal to grant access
to capabilities built into over 95% of today's floating-point hardware.

5. Java has rejected even mildly disciplined infix operator overloading, without which extensions
to arithmetic with everyday mathematical types like complex numbers, intervals, matrices,
geometrical objects and arbitrarily high precision become extremely inconvenient.
Minor nitpick: Using pattern matching instead of `if xs == []` is not just to make code prettier and cleaner.

First of all, you should be using the `null` function instead of `== xs` because the `==` operator only works if your list contents are Eq-able.

But the most important thing is that pattern matching is more type safe. If you use `head` and `tail` you, as a programmer, need to make sure that you only call them on a non-empty lists or else you get an error. On the other hand, if you use pattern matching the compiler helps you make sure that you always covered all the possible cases (empty vs non-empty) and you never need to worry about calling the unsafe head and tail functions.
Similar things became quite common in the upsurge of nationalism in the early 20th century. Most countries dropped them either after the fall of Naziism or the fall of communism, but the US one seems to have fallen through the cracks.
Obviously it depends on your exit strategy. Do you want to (a) get a loss making but huge user base or (b) bootstrap a business that has cashflows from day 1?

Sounds like that advice applies more to the latter route than the former.
Holy Hyperbole!
Effective today, all new Twitter user ID's will be 64-bit
Refactoring to AngularJS Directive
I was mostly referring to the much nicer user interface.
> they haven't surfaced a method for expert users to disable the warning

In the most user-hostile move ever, I wanted to disable the "automatic restart in 15 minutes" thing on Windows 8 (Home). It required adding a registry key(!) I hope there's an easier way that I just somehow missed...
Ask HN: Where to find big project RFP's in Web/Mobile Development
I've noticed in working as a subcontractor for larger contractors that they tend to have access to very interesting and high value RFP's from big companies/organizations. I've done all of the work associated with building the systems (so I likely have the credibility to score some contracts) but I am apparently clueless on where/how to get direct access so I can bid on my own.

I know that at this level, you aren't pitching websites or applications, rather solutions that solve business problems. I'm fine developing strategies and pitches for that as well.

Has anyone gone from being a small contractor to getting access to bigger projects via the RFP process?

Is it just really word of mouth and who you know?

Are there sites for this? Do you have a winning strategy to build a list of contacts who often have high value RFP's?

Any help/insight would be much appreciated!
get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.

This seems like sound advice, but I'd like to hear more on the execution of it. Do you actually get these people to sign contracts, or is it more of getting people to say "yeah, I'll pay you for that"? Do you let them know you haven't written any code, or just say it's "in development"? Etc., etc.
> Any sane person would be afraid of them.

It's a science machine to see inside your body without cutting you up. If a theme park offered MRI rides I'd be in there all day.
The more I think about it, the more I think it seems like a well-reasoned and wise approach.

We probably ought to decouple "the wallet" from "the identity" as much as possible, and users handing over wallet keys to their favorite Trusted Entity to Facilitate Payment is a step in the right direction. If you want to keep funds separate, you will need a separate wallet and to get comfortable making payments from one wallet into another. Accounts in the same wallet, derived from the same private keys, are not sufficient.

One of the problems I consider in building a service like this is: how do you safely scale your fee schedule to match the level of funds your users trusted you to keep securely and escrow?

Do you charge a flat fee to list an advertisement on your forum, where your escrow services are included with the base price?

Do you take a percent fee on each transaction, and if so, how do you enforce it given that you're using three-party escrow such as this? If you're doing it right, they can literally complete the transaction without your help and perhaps should only feel compelled to pay you while you're actively involved in resolving disputes.

Maybe that's the right approach, it incentivizes users to police themselves and to do business with more trusted partners, to avoid paying fees, but you could wind up making very little compared to the volume of transactions that occurred between users of your advertising space. (Pro: the costs associated with fraud and managing escrow are very low.)

You could also charge a monthly membership fee and restrict access to the advertising space to only paid members with current accounts? They would get your escrow service for free (included in the price). That seems like the best option, but you have to deal with "critical mass" and network effects problems, there is little incentive to pay to advertise on a forum with no users.

It would also be easy to overshoot your target transaction fee percentage, or undervalue your time by charging too small of a fee when in reality attempts to perpetrate a fraud on even private internet forums are very common and very time consuming to investigate.

This may be slightly more naïve analysis than I thought, and reaching for a larger service than what you've actually provided, but it's more thought out than my first reply.
You know what else has hair? Uranus :)
I'm having thoughts on moving from Stockholm to the US (NJ or NY). It would be interesting to know how e.g. taxes are different between the US and Sweden.

Where do I find information like this? Taxes, costs of living - everything. How did you do before you moved to Sweden?
Broken link, and the correct link has already been submitted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583906
“Yahoo has regained its position as the #1 most visited Web site on earth.”

Is that true? Is it really visited more often than Facebook, Google, Twitter, or YouTube? Alexa doesn’t agree[1].

According to a recent article[2], Yahoo is the most popular website in 2 regions: Japan and Hong Kong.

[1] http://www.alexa.com/topsites

[2] http://www.fastcocreate.com/3019595/creativity-by-the-number...
I assume he means the key management window in the BIOS - UEFI BIOS interfaces are pretty wacky and complex these days.
As someone who graduated from Stanford pretty recently (2012), I can tell you that this is utterly ridiculous. Anecdotally, I would say there is a strong split between people who are insanely motivated to pursue a startup and people who think starting a company is a dumb trend motivated by naiveté.

Is Stanford a strong STEM school? Definitely. But if you take two seconds to actually look at the degrees that students end up earning (http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2011.html#degrees), you get a picture of a much more well-balanced environment.
Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware because 3rd party manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in the early 90s.

The Surface is absolutely gorgeous. If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made. I would love to see MS try to build its own 'Yoga' type laptop...provided I can still install Linux on it.

Dell, Lenovo, Sony, and HP should be ashamed of themselves. Apple makes the best hardware to run Windows on and they don't even like that you can.
Dogs: Volkswagen UK
How long will Google keep burning money on Motorola?
What a surprise: a media dinosaur dismissing new technologies before it was too late.

Also, how about appropriately titling the link instead of paraphrasing the opening line?
Articles like this pop up all the time. The problem is that they never address (1) the legitimate need for surveillance; (2) dangers of an internet (or other communications networks) which law enforcement or government cannot access at all; (3) the problems with arguing that government (or anyone for that matter) should be banned from collecting and reading data sent across the web.

I understand the concern. As someone who has advocated for stronger electronic privacy regulation, no one likes someone having the ability to look through their stuff. However, the answer is more likely a balance than a denunciation of all surveillance in any form. Surveillance with restriction is fine and probably a good thing. It helps prevent crime and can help catch criminals once crimes happen. Just as it's easy to argue that a government with information will misuse it, bad people with a closed communication network will use it to commit crime. Sure not everyone is going to plan a terrorist strike, or organize a gang online but some will. Is it worth enabling that kind of behavior?

Also what should and should not be private also has to do with where/when the information is collected. If the government were hacking into all of our computers and keeping back ups of our hard drives that's very different from collecting things that are sent on the internet. Legally there is currently a big debate about how to treat something that is taken from a stored medium - like a hard drive - vs one that is captured in transmission - like an email being sent. As it currently stands the government would have a hard time justifying accessing your computer remotely without a warrant but an easy time reading emails once they left your computer. Why? Because the sent email is akin to yelling something in a public place. Once it leaves your computer, it's not private while its being transmitted. If this sounds like a stupid distinction, that's because it is.
Open Access Mandate will Include Raw Data
Your last sentence gets at the heart of my point. If you wanted me to come on board with your idea that builds on hyperloop, I wouldn't be "agreeing that that's a pretty cool idea and should be on your list." I'd be agreeing to actually build it somehow.

So the standard for cofounding something is a million times higher than the standard for putting it into some list of ideas.
That's like saying it'd be hard to imagine being able to buy alcohol due to prohibition. But in any case, there little doubt that Turkey has reformed a lot over the last two decades in particular, but the original claim I addressed was the claim that "it was never illegal in Turkey".

I posted a link to a copy of the text of the law in question. Maybe it's an inaccurate copy. Maybe it was repealed before it came into force. Maybe the translation is even more broken than it appears. Yet if so, it ought to be easy for the people that are so insistent that it was never illegal to find documentation, such as the real text of the law, a better translation, or documentation of its repeal. Yet none of that appears to be forthcoming, just a stream of examples of recent usage of the letters from after Turkish society started reforming, 50-60 years or so after the law in question was passed.

It's great if the problem has been rectified. But that is far away from claiming it never existed in the first place.
Can you elaborate on what did happen?
Suppose Microsoft rewrites Windows to optimize for the Surface platform. How long would it take for Microsoft to stand accused of unfair business practices in the press? How much risk would they run of being hauled into court in the EU or US?

They just paid a billion dollars for failing to provide browser options in the EU last year.
Really suspicious looking site, bro.
The respect scale portion is interesting. It mentions class, race, and religion as reasons why people may not show respect to others. I think if we add political views to that, our country has bottomed out on the 'respect scale'.

EDIT: Also, it's kind of scary how topical this video is.
Just this weekend, I started coding up a tiny "saas product" that I thought about last week. Nobody knows about it, and that certainly has no launch page or audience. I got most of it done over the weekend, and really enjoyed putting it together in my favorite stack (sinatra, roots, marionette) and doing some design work, which I don't often get a chance to do.

I'll probably launch it late this week or next week. I have no audience, and don't expect massive profits either. I made it mostly because I want it. Since I plan on using it extensively, I honestly don't care if I have huge profits or a gigantic audience. I spent $5 on the domain name, am hosting it along with 10 other sites on a $5/month digital ocean box. I put in some great work this weekend, and am now going to end up with something that will fit nicely into my workflow.

It will ship with a decent free plan, and a $5/month pro plan with some expanded capabilities. If one person signs up for the pro plan, that covers the cost of hosting for this site and 9 other sites (bonus!) If 2 people sign up for the pro plan, it's profitable. If zero people sign up, I paid a very small cost for something that's going to be really useful to me.

Sometimes I wonder why so many developers gravitate towards huge ideas that they think other people might want rather than starting small, with things that you want. With this little thing I'm making, there's no risk. I've already won.
In my original comment, part of what I said was that I wanted a society that understood and cherished individual rights. If we had such a society (we don't) the majority would not choose to infringe upon the rights of minorities.

As regards the second paragraph, above, if a government is committed to protecting individual rights, implicit in that is not allowing majorities to infringe the rights of others.

A government that genuinely protects the rights of individuals also provides for the good of society as a whole, but this happens by side effect, if you will, rather than as the result of an explicit aim of the government. In other words, when you protect individual rights, you do what is best for all concerned.

Finally, I want to emphasize that I do not expect to see such a society anytime soon. Said differently, I think that what I advocate is possible, but unlikely.
Apple does use an extra microcontroller or small processor in MacBooks and other machines that controls fans and probably a large number of other power related things. They call it the SMC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Controller

So maybe not ACPI, but homebrew.
Great idea! Do you have to upload the spreadsheet? If yes then a big downer. Better if you could release and sell as Excel Plugin
I think single-value changes won't make a big difference (as you've proven yourself), but did you look into something like [1]?
But I have to admit, I hardly ever read your articles from top to bottom, but just skim through them, looking for paragraphs I find interesting. Your current design works well for that, most readability enhancing matters usually help reading the entire thing (like a story or an article in a magazine), but at the cost of the ability to quickly glance over it.

[1] http://www.readability.com/read?url=http://www.gwern.net/AB%...
One more reason for me not to switch:

- why in hell would I want to use a browser-based solution for something a free, native, off-line program is much better?
Sort of but not quite. Tegra 4 that goes in the new Surface 2 - The AnandTech review states the power draw for Tegra 4 is not that impressive for example. So Microsoft would have to be involved in the design and manufacture of the SoC to cure that problem as just one example of how hard it can be.
Hackintoshes have been benchmarked by the community and by and large they hold up quite poorly when it comes to battery life. It seems to be a larger issue with power management in general when the hardware is so generalized.

That being said, there is no reason Microsoft's own drivers shouldn't work as good if not better on the Surface. The power management on these devices should be the benchmark for other companies to attempt to live up to.