skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The update also makes Chrome blurry (and other apps like Steam)

You have to right click the Chrome desktop icon -> properties -> compatibility -> disable display scaling

Then go to Chrome settings -> advanced settings -> increase font and/or zoom
I'm sure they tailored the demo to show the best aspects of the software.
5 months isn't a long time after launch for this sort of thing, it really took us most of 4 years to replace our consultancy (there are two of us, a husband and wife team).

The thing that works well for us is what people call "content marketing" these days. If you can write interesting articles and blog posts for your own blog and also for other sites, that appeal to your audience then it is likely that people will click through and have a look at your product. You don't need to write directly about your product - just to a developer audience.

The most surprising marketing success for us though has been sponsoring podcasts, specially where the hosts know and use our product and can talk personally about it. The return on investment on those has been really good.

Hope that helps in some way, I'm a member of a forum at http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm which is all people doing this kind of thing and talking about what they have tried so you might find that useful.
It's used as Commit, and that will continue to be useful
You aren't missing out, it's just screenshots of 10 tweets. No real information here.
> Python works pretty well with system packages.

Does it? From my limited exposure to python I remember that e.g. recent CentOs comes with python 2.6 only and installing any never version requires you to manually compile it while being extra extra careful not to touch the system python since otherwise yum dies.

Ruby works just well on that level - as long as the system ruby is fine for you, all is settled. For the rest of us that need a never/other ruby there's rvm/rbenv/chruby.
All of History Culminates in This Boyz II Men-Inspired Song About Silk Road
I think it's more what HN specifically pays attention to, than what gets attention in a global sense. My read is that the community here is focused on web-oriented, low-capital, low-time-to-MVP markets (Y Combinator's preferences sort of set the tone, but lots of bootstrappers have similar aims). That tends to make higher-capital, higher-time-to-market, high-R&D or high-sales-touch, slower-growth businesses a bit off the radar here.

I think partly it's that people are inspired by the category of businesses that seem like: given $30k and two years in a garage, I could do that! This requires a particular kind of company, and lots of success stories just don't seem like the kind of thing you could do in a garage, so they aren't part of this particular corner of the Valley mythos. For example, one of the top tech IPOs of 2013 is CDW, a Chicago-based B2B firm that's been slowly growing since 1984 by building partnerships and logistics infrastructure, and is now IPO'ing 29 years later. Totally different kind of company.

I think the location actually matters a bit less. People probably do pay more attention to SF-based companies just because that's where a lot of the startup-sector media is, but companies from elsewhere that fit the model I described also get press, like 37signals (Chicago) or SoundCloud (Berlin). A number of the more prominent HN posters with startups are also from outside the Valley, like tptacek (Chicago) and cperciva (Vancouver).
Maybe people just love feeling that "freakanomics" feeling of mental superiority that they're willing to swallow any alternative hypothesis that challenges the norm. Maybe people just don't trust medical science.

I hope it's the case.

It was fat, then it was cholesterol, then it was LDL, now it's pattern B LDL that shows a correlation. The ratio of HDL/LDL still factors in as well as triglyceride levels. The jury is still out there as to whether that specific type of LDL is what causes damage or is a sign of damage being caused.

To act as if we can say "cut out all cholesterol because it's bad for you" is wrongheaded. We know there is a correlation with these factors as we measure them in the blood. We can't say with a high degree of certainty that eating a certain way will cause a certain effect on people. But when people are taking in over 20% of their caloric intake as saturated fat and showing incredibly healthy cardiovascular health readings, you've got to wonder if the common wisdom is something we should be comfortable with.
Because it's all about trade-offs, and a one-button keyboard is a ridiculous trade-off.
Yes, but the effect is not pronounced. I seem to do well in relatively cool, dry environments. The humidity, I think, is what affects me the most. I live in LA, which isn't exactly cold, but the humidity is always low, which makes it comfortable. But when it gets hot, my brain does get sluggish. It's true that AC helps, a lot. :)
Ruby Whitespace Shenanigans, Hello World Edition
Talks start at 11 am, with Phil Libin from Evernote.
If it had worked fine, it would never have been added in the first place. We don't add sites arbitrarily to the list. It's based on actual compat testing. Also every site on the list can request to be removed so if Google had tested in IE11 and discovered all was great, it's very easy for them to contact us to remove them from the list.
It could also be that Steve Jobs had incomplete information. Holt told him he designed such and such (maybe he should have just said implemented), without giving him references for who did it before. Jobs did not bother to find out and the false idea that Holt invented it stuck to his mind. Maybe just an honest mistake, but then due to lack of rigor.
Bikes vs cars - we are many
It's "James A. Kirk" though, not "James Theodore Kirk."
Dick Cheney feared heart device hacks, disabled wireless features
I think it's a worthwhile goal to attempt to achieve this in other companies, but it's also important to truly understand why this works so well at GitHub.

GitHub is largely developers writing software for other developers. An interesting problem to a GitHubber is just as likely to be something that their customers are interested in.
GitHub is a classic example of dog-fooding. They use their own product and many of their employees used the product before they came to work there. A typical developer at Github is very likely to have the same vision (and passion!) for the product as the owners of GitHub.

If your product is software for a vertical that doesn't happen to be other developers then are going to be likely challenges. What is interesting to the developers very well might not be interesting to their customers.
I'll use XP until Chrome and Firefox drop support. At least until April 2015.
Manually selected, must-know news for web professional (weekly lists)
In Windows 7 and 8 there is a way to disable the blurry display scaling globally: In the display control panel's Custom DPI Setting dialog, select "Use Windows XP style DPI scaling". Then for the few apps that don't look good this way, you can go into their properties and enable display scaling there.

Unfortunately they took this feature out in 8.1. It defaults to blurry scaling globally with no way to override this, so you have to go into the properties for each and every app that looks blurry and disable scaling individually.

Of course all of this applies only if you do use a custom DPI setting. At the default 100% it doesn't do any scaling.
North Korea just built the creepiest water park you've ever seen
Ouch. Sorry to hear that. At least you can rent it.
Yes, of course I installed drivers.
Thanks for pointing out the patch - I'll review the discussion.

It's definitely an important use case - no argument here :-)
Time Warner asked me to give them the milliseconds of a working website traceroute, instead of the broken link to a non-working website! It's hilarious (and quite sad) how incompetent Time Warner is.
>before anyone at @twcable_nyc asks yes I’ve rebooted. laptops & modem. I wrote a book about it http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00D0TQVRE/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=... …

>.@TWC_NYNJ I called to report the outage to support at 9:15. Rep blamed my wireless router, instead of your widespread lack of service.

>I've pretty much gotten used to @timewarnercable shitting all over my dick

>And of course on weekend that I plan to do a ton of work, there's an outage in the entire area. Thanks @twcable_nyc 😡

>@Jessedegenerate @twcable_help thanks jesse. sad nobody at twc can respond to the issue.

>Is Time Warner Cable internet down for other people in NYC or just my sad apartment?

>Half the interweb domains are not working. Including the ones I need for work files. Major outage in NY. Thanks Time Warner Cable.

>Time warner cable is really dropping the ball right now

>.@TWC_NYNJ has been down all morning. Related: I fucking hate Time Warner.

There's a response from Time Warner at the end:

>Outages totally suck but we are investigating. Apologies to all our patient customers. We will post update ASAP as we get it. #sorry
You can frame it any way you want, especially with vague terms like "talented, ambitious and creative". Art Basel is a world renowned event that surely involves tons of talent, ambition and creativity. Strange that it's in Miami and not in San Francisco.

Another true statement is that San Francisco is a magnet for homeless drug addicts. It turns out there are a lot of people in both places and you can find really good and really bad parts of each.
RADs didn't target web browsers (and especially not to this extent)
Show HN: A simple site availability checker
There're lots of online services which help you ping your sites and get a report when one is down. AFAIK none of them are free. This is a super simple tool to help you check your websites and report back if there are some issues. If everything goes well, it will output the current time so you can store it in a log file or something.
Apple Unveils Scale Model of Cupertino Spaceship Campus
This is great for creating new products, for innovation.

But I've never understood, who then does the grunt work? Who slogs through producing the documentation, and keeping it up-to-date? Once a new product/feature is launched, who sticks around for the bugfixes, support, etc., since presumably everyone will be more excited to allocate themselves to the next new big thing?

In every company, there's a lot of totally boring, unattractive stuff that needs to get done nevertheless. With open allocation, who does that?
From the bottom of the page,

"During the 1950′s, a number of stimulant and sedative drugs were widely used and were promoted in the mainstream media. At the time, many amphetamines were available over the counter without a prescription, including Benzedrine."

I find this to be quite interesting, as this means that what are now illegal drugs had been legal for about 20 years before the Controlled Substances Act of 1970[1]. This means that there was a fairly established industry selling what are now controlled drugs, a fact that I hadn't really thought through before.

It makes me wonder whether if at the time if the Drug industry was simply not that important, or if the 1970 law was similar to the Farm Bills, where by accepting more regulation, the drug companies would receive less competition. If that's the case, there might be an interesting story to be told (probably mostly wrong) about how the Drug War brought about the current power of the Pharmaceutical Companies, unrelated to the patent laws involved. In any case, it looks like a part of history that I haven't paid too much attention to, that I should look at. Fun times!

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Substances_Act
Over 50 Cartoon
How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google
Why "Fork me on GitHub"?
Strange question.

Of course "most" programmers come from middle class or lower, as "most" people are probably in your definition of middle/lower class.

What's your definition of "rich"?

If you consider "rich" to be in excess of $100 million net worth, and private jets and stuff like that, then ya, maybe @nick2 is right.

If you consider "rich" to be in excess of $200k/year salary, and up to $10 million net worth... guessing there isn't a huge trend one way or the other. But the general bias is probably towards the middle/upper class vs people who are in the very lower class. Since having some resources (internet, computer, education) is needed.
I used to. The problem was I aimed at a component that was useful as a fixed standard (not always changing, upgrading etc). So, you can guess how this story ends...

I accomplished this. But it was by definition a stationary target, and competitors (in this case, open source) largely caught up. But worse, I lost interest, because I was no longer "the only/best in the world" at it.

Success: I not only made enough to live on, I made enough to invest in index funds giving a return that was itself enough to live on, and "retire" (for small values of retire, i.e. a student-level lifestyle - "ramen retirement"). Business began in 2000, able to retire in 2004 or so IIRC. Have lived off the business/investments since then.

lessons learned:

- Automating sales (credit card etc) is a pain to setup, but is helpful for both you and customers. But for my case, about 30% of buyers still needed some contact for the sale (I'm not counting technical help). Sometimes to negotiate on specific issues, sometimes they didn't fit the sales process, maybe sometimes they just wanted reassurance that someone was there.

- I tried to make it too much a business; if I'd stayed truer to my roots, it might have been OK. If you have an open-source version (or, at least, free), it starves off the competition, leaving them with no oxygen to get started, because no one needs it, they get no interest. And everyone's happy, which actually is very important for one's personal happiness too.

- I actually made a lot of money selling to the enterprise; but I hated it. Like, it really really got to me. In one particular sale, there was 5-6 months of negotiation, admin, international tax laws, etc. Ugh. And it all feels dishonest, pointless, and interacting with people who aren't competent because aren't interested and don't care. (the standard story of a developer dealing with business issues). So, you can do it this way, if you keep going up-market. The enterprise likes old stuff, that is trusted, field-tested, known etc.

- turns out I don't enjoy making a fixed standard. There's beauty in it as a business model; but for a technologist, the fun part is making it (and for me, supporting and debugging was also fun). But when it's all done, all working perfectly, it stops being fun. It's a funny old world.

- the underlying factor is that progress marches on. It's good for the world, and it's fun to participate. But not so good for a self-sustaining business with a competitive moat (Warren Buffett likes candy, chewing gum, soft-drink, bricks, furniture etc - stuff that doesn't change fast). You have to keep investing in it - developing new features, new products, new users (analogous to the capital investment required by the cotton mills of Berkshire Hathaway, making them a terrible investment). But this is all OK, if it's fun for you. And it can be.
Recently read a breakdown of the three main stages of team formation and the subsequent management styles needed

- Survival (Crazy deadlines, lack domain knowledge.under resourced). Style : command and control, with aim to clear enough time to get to

- Growth ( Adequate time, domain knowledge) Suitable for learning and experimenting with new methods and tech. Style:
Coaching: needs structure and encouragement to reach new skills and potential

- Self-directed: individual team skills top notch, good domain knowledge and sufficient time to experiment. Style: facilitation - check in from time to time, discuss whys of strategy etc

It seems pretty clear GitHub is in the third category - but they did not get there by having a crazy management structure - they got there by being a skilled team, that then was able to attract and hire equally skilled people. They never found them selves with dumb coders who needed to learn something other than Java and don't know why source control is useful. So because of that they did not grow layers of management as a form of duct tape holding it together, and because of that they found no need to add in those layers once management stuff needed to happen.

The problem is of course that most in house software departments are thus massively over staffed if the coders are good enough to be self directing, and if not the coders are bad enough that you need to stop and skill up, but which managers are going to say "these guys and this environment is pants, hire some good coders and you won't need me, please can I print out a CV?"
This approach seems almost magical. There are a couple areas that I'd like to hear more about.

- How detailed is the strategy coming down from the top? "... [W]hat you work on is up to you, within the bounds of what’s important to the company." What is the process of oversight to determine if each project is "important to the company"? Are there often conflicts in this area?

- How does employee evaluation work? Does each member of a project submit evaluations for the others?
Iron Fist (countermeasure)
Https Google Search Redirecting to http in Iran
How can a monkey in the middle stop you from going to encrypted Google search? How can they redirect you instead to plain old http://www.google.com?

So I'm doing a normal Google search like I do a hundred times everyday, and suddenly I get this message from Google:

"SSL search is off

This network has turned off SSL search,
so you cannot see personalized results.

The security features of SSL search are
not available. Content filtering may be
in place."

I look up at my URL bar, and yes, it says http not https. I get curious. I search Google's support pages for some way the government can mess with my Google search (I live in Iran) and I find this: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en

To quote the relevant part: "To utilize the no SSL option for your network, configure the DNS entry for www.google.com to be a CNAME for nosslsearch.google.com."

I dug around a little and learned that all DNS queries are replied by a nearby spoofing server (nearby, because it responds so fast compared with what I have to endure in here!). I could do something like "nslookup www.google.com 1.2.3.4" (anything works instead of 1.2.3.4, whether a real DNS server or not) and get "216.239.32.20" which is the IP address for nosslsearch.google.com.

I tested this with four different servers around the country I have ssh access to. Everywhere it's the same.

DNS spoofing is a known government technique used for content blocking in Iran, but I haven't seen it be used for this purpose before. The government has long been lamenting Google's decision to go SSL. They have been looking for some way to get to see what people are searching again, and they seem to have found it.

The obvious way to get around this for me would be to add an entry in my /etc/hosts file or visit encrypted.google.com for searching. I suggest the same thing to other people living in Iran.
ot: i really love all these tech sites that just don't stop loading crap while you're already reading the article. then it just scrolls to the top, bothers you with popups and shit.

extremely off-putting. many times i just quit.
really great for retaining readers.
Because pcs used to be expensive?
Wireless microcontroller for web-enabled DIY projects.
Just merged in support for reading any stream in Node:

https://github.com/jimhigson/oboe.js#reading-from-any-stream...

oboe( fs.createReadStream( '/home/me/secretPlans.json' ) )
.node('!.schemes.*', function(scheme){
console.log('Aha! ' + scheme);
});
.node('!.plottings.*', function(deviousPlot){
console.log('Hmmm! ' + deviousPlot);
})
.done(function(){
console.log("*twiddles mustache*");
});
PHP PSR-0 implementation using SPL functions
https://github.com/dysinger/node-schadenfreude
Bill Gates was from a well-off family.
Graphics Chips Help Process Big Data Sets in Milliseconds
Ship Tracking Hack Makes Tankers Vanish from View
For us central Europeans: 20h.
Proton Collisions Vs. Quark/Gluon/Antiquark Mini-Collisions
Not coming to Windows? :(

As you mentioned it's coming to app store soon?
FYI, on Ubuntu 12.04 using Google Chrome, the Vimeo player kept going black after starting the video, I had to keep making small movements with the mouse to keep the video showing.

It's almost like a div is made black and floated over the top of it if that's possible.
Potentially something more useful.
http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com
Nope. But that seemed like a few more than normal to me. I might be wrong about that, though.
Narrator on video: "We're going to move through this pretty quickly".. Video length: 20 minutes.

The code produced by the app does look quite clean for a WYSIWYG however.
As of 1pm EDT, I can now reach Rackspace, Facebook, Hotmail, Github, Digital Ocean, etc.
Import/Export Google Apps Script with Neutron Drive
This looks really neat. It also helps me understand why so many websites look bad on non-Mac platforms (aka 90% of desktops): designers who do stuff like "that looks a bit heavy, let's bump down the font weight a bit" without realizing that these settings look unreadable on Windows or Linux.
I haven't found a schedule online for who's speaking at what time. Is that available?
Right, spare time working 16 hours a day...

Also, you can't just reject your brain. It's not a tool, it is the boat in which YOU sail. If you treat it like the enemy, like a piece of shit you hate, you will be on the losing side, you will drown. The only way is to learn how it works and take control of it, slowly and methodically...
I think that is where "cultural fit" comes in, where everyone has a sense of ownership of everything for which they possess the required skill-set.

If that is so then the real magic happens at the hiring stage.
HBase Apps And The 20 Millisecond Factor
Just wanted to link to a desktop version of Amazon.com link

http://www.amazon.com/Reboot-Your-cking-Computer-v2-0-ebook/...
See 'The future' of technology at the Orange Expo 2013
I get your point and fully agree with it.

But it makes me wonder when exactly we start to call something over-engineered. The same function will be implemented differently depending what you are going to feed into it i.e. if the numbers are sufficiently large then you need to worry about integer overflow etc. Probably a function definition should be considered incomplete without pre/post conditions.
Looks like the front-end still needs some polishing. A cursory glance shows a type (My Settings -> Add Alert Contact -> Mobile (SMS) "...that suppor it..." , multiple clicks on the main logo pull up multiple "Loading" messages.

Also, I find it odd that the interface is > 1280px wide(at least it is for me presently). I'm not used to a horizontal scroll on a 13" MBP.

Overall, if it turns up less false positives than Pingdom, I'll be happy.
Sure thing. I've just pinged you.
I will drop you a line. My antipathy towards the subject is that I have analytics people telling me what to design and some of them think they are the "center of infinity."

In regards to topic or plot extraction I would start with "The Seven Basic Plots - Why We Tell Stories" by Christopher Booker:

The Guardian review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/21/fiction.feature... )

and then break down which plots in both literature and film are "fashionable" or why they work.. We are off topic now, I will take this of line
Intel's Silvermont Microarchitecture
Well, then don't take too many vitamins - problem solved.

And as Patrickg_zill said, fat soluble vitamins are the dangerous ones, as they accumulate instead of being flushed. Pretty much all of the other vitamins and minerals are well controlled by the body...