skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Ron Conway, probably the most successful angel investor in SV, has frequently said "you never argue with metrics."

I disagree. Metrics only indicate what people think they want, not what they need. Metrics are only accurate if you look for trends. Long-lasting businesses don't rely on trends.

> In a talk at Startup School 2012, he said that he "didn't get" Facebook.

Facebook, just like AirBnb, make a lot of sense. You don't need metrics to understand that.

The big problem with most investors today (not all of them) is their mindset and lack of vision. They're sheeps, just like everybody else. The only difference is that they had success and experience, which skew reality and reinforces old ways of thinking, which they try to apply to future investments. It doesn't work that way.

Do you want to live in a world where investors all throw their money at the next Instagram? Or do you want to live in a world where they invest in the next Xerox Parc?

People used to have dreams, people used to have big ideas. Now, it's all about quick money. Heck, the goal of many startups now is to get acquired by larger players. How sad is that?

Pinterest is not an awful idea, but unless they have a larger vision in mind, they're going nowhere.
Don't forget that in addition to code and art, you have data. Even if someone clones your codebase and invests time in recreating visual assets, they won't be able to draw on the player experiences you've been collecting. With data, you're able to identify trends and test new approaches smartly in order to maintain the edge; your would-be competitors wouldn't have much more to go on than their own intuition.

I won't claim to know what he thinks exactly -- maybe he's the alum you refer to? -- but I wonder if Samuel Clay (Newsblur, YC S12) would agree with that sentiment, given that he has published https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur for all to see. I haven't committed to my own startup idea yet, but my plan for it does involve open-sourcing the code while keeping a custom corpus and its associated NLP models private.
Ah, right! On our bug list; thanks. Will fix as soon as we can. Server is unhappy again right now with the load.
I think the explanation for this is relatively simple:

The obvious is that the low hanging fruit has been picked, so of course the rate of change is going to decrease as the problems get larger and harder to solve.

The less obvious is the massive influx of users for these languages/tools. There is an unavoidable regression to the mean related to ability/willingness to expend effort that comes from that influx.

In the previous era if you were involved in any way with programming you were, by definition, interested in pushing the boundaries. Now the majority are actively resistant to change like humans are with most things. This is their job, and changing how things work threatens their livelihood.

So why have the subset of people who are willing and able to do these things not doing them? I say some of them are doing it, but not enough to get a critical mass (at least a critical mass that would lead to the kinds of widespread improvements being discussed).

Obviously this is affected by the subculture I'm in but the most common reason I've encountered why these new ideas don't get traction is because it's considered a waste of time. Learning a new way of solving problems is time not spent spamming other social networks trying to increase signups to your social network. Growth Hacking is "getting shit done!", using some new technique that requires learning something new in order to be more productive is considered Ivory Tower bullshit.

Both Clojure and Haskell are communities I follow where there is real interesting futuristic work being done right now. But Node.js, with it's basis on callbacks is way more popular. Even though everyone in the 70's agreed that continuation passing style was a usability nightmare for programmers and put a strict limit on the complexity a human using it could handle.

Looking at it another way: Programming is futuristic, it's just that most people are too lazy to bother and just stick with the older stuff that works the way they are comfortable with, then human nature kicks in and labels everything they don't do as "stupid waste of time".
Part of me wonders if this is a temporary problem that got triggered by urban environments becoming extremely trendy in the last decade or so. Either way, we are not only losing a solid worker class, but also some of the skilled labor force because of it (especially here in SF).
Why log out? Since 2010 or so you've been able to be logged in as multiple accounts and switch via drop down.
I agree with you, maybe Jon Skeet (the top user on StackOverflow and a googler, IIRC) exagerated - he didn't even use Lisp :)
I am not following his language, partially the grammar and partially his lexicon-- specifically what he means by "natural number".

There is a smallest natural number. Exclusion of the lower bound --as in b) and d)-- forces for a subsequence starting at the smallest natural number the lower bound as mentioned into the realm of unnatural numbers.

Would someone be able to parse that out for me?
Here's hoping for .js sometime soon
SecureSend - Securely Send Confidential Information Online
Except of course when it's true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#Instances
> if it was simple for a user to augment their email app

You don't really think it's ever "simple" for a user to augment their email app?

Plugins are hard to implement on both ends, and they complicate otherwise simple apps. Open source is also hard, because every codebase is different in many and often unpredictable ways from others. Not even an experienced programmer would always be able to crack open the source to a mobile email client and make this sort of modification.
I believe in Mozilla independence and sincerity, its a good foundations and we need many more like it in the world..

But because mozilla is so dependent of the Google money, they can use it to "blackmail", to push some decisions down the mozilla throat, or even worse, to cut the payment in a blink wherever they want and if fits their strategy.. so mozilla are in a pretty dangerous position, given that theres a conflict of interests, since Google have created Chrome..

i think maybe thats why they are trying to go with FirefoxOS? another source of revenue and financial independence?
Imagine the outrage that would ensue if Microsoft pulled a similar move with Excel and VB
The Importance of Lubricant
From what I have read from other hacker news threads, there is no evidence of that (and Lodsys apparently denies it).

Digging around, the only connection I could find was IV selling Lodsys some of its patents. Not much evidence for an actually connection, much less shell game.
Yes, Google has your email, but not your credentials. A breach of your email exposes all the email you have now. Bad, yes. A breach of your credentials exposes all the email you get until you change them, and if you don't know to change them...
That is actually a problem in trying to introduce someone to coding. First attempt frequently is experienced as boring and/or too complex. It would be absolutely wonderful to have several standard entry points to programming for various target audiences. There are some cropping up with popular MooC courses but nothing for adults that have a barrier to better understanding that programming is not that hard.
This person reminds me of a lot of people I went to medical school with. Very smart, and yet, not very realistic. He outlines a scenario that is endgame.. when in fact, we are seeing cyclical events. We saw the emergence of penicillin resistence in S. Aureas, then methicillin resistance. we moved to quinalones, and sulfa and we see resisance develop there.. OF COURSE it does. The antibiotics don't cause resistance.. Natural selection is the process going on here. There are random mutations that occur regardless of antibiotic exposure. We do see antibiotics cause resistance such as in inducible extended beta lactamase resistance.. (I have a patient currently with E coli resistant to everything but Colistin) but the overwhelming process..it's still good old fashion natural selection that Darwin made us all aware of. We really don't need to panic.. we just need to keep fighting the fight..because it won't ever end, unless we give up. Relax. When I hear people claim it was wanton use of antibiotics that caused all of this.. I wonder if they ever read a word about biologic evolution. Right now, there are organisms out there that are already resistant to antibiotics that haven't been developed yet. How can we blame humans for that?
"Jack of all trades, master of none."
Pretty much the question is: Who is the richest troll ever?
Don't get me wrong, I frequently use Pinterest.

But to say that Pinterest is a novel and future-resistant shopping interface is foolish. We can do much better than this. It reeks the web 2.0, where content has no meaning.

Links, captions and pictures? Come on, any 12 year old has the ability to produce a better system than that.
When I have a really computationally complex thing I need to write, I first write it in Clojure (or some other Lisp, but Clojure is closest at hand these days) so that I understand it fully. It's just simpler: I don't even have to think about syntax in that language. To me, this is the first requirement of what Bret Victor is talking about. Python and Ruby pale by comparison in expressiveness. Because there is no "syntax" that will beat pure data. Then I go and write it in whatever language I'm "supposed" to write it for work. It's kinda shameful to me that this is where I'm at.
Consider this sentence:

"That inability is mushrooming, driven by increasing rents across much of the country and wages that aren’t going anywhere."

One has to wonder: where is the money coming from that drives up these rents, if wages are stagnant? The issue is supply and demand.

Why has supply decreased? Part of the answer is the housing bust, which followed the housing boom (irrational exuberance was counter balanced by irrational pessimism):

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/09/ny-times-on-shorta...

As it says there:

"The latest land rush is in full swing, as developers realize that they have failed to feed the zoning, permitting and mapping pipeline, which can take months or years to turn raw fields into buildable lots."

The other side of the supply and demand issue is the increase of foreign demand. Some of the money comes in the form of foreign money that speculates in the American real estate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments-a...

As it says there:

"But some Manhattan neighborhoods are assuming that vacant feeling the year round, because the people who own or rent apartments there actually live somewhere else most of the time. "

A combination of housing bust and foreign speculation in USA real estate leads to a situation where rents go up even when wages are stagnant or falling.

-----------

A possible explanation of the international forces at work is offered here:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/trade-and-secula...

This was interesting to me:

"So the causation could run the other way, with deregulation and rising leverage pulling in foreign capital, keeping the dollar overvalued, and producing persistent deficits."
Can you provide me with examples that you've had experience with? If anything, I've noticed that any remotely pro-MS gets drowned out very quickly.
The obvious answer is: You can't profitably slaughter diseased animals (at least for human consumption, with various complex exemptions that massively reduce value)

So treating with broad-spec antibiotic prophylaxis increases your healthy-at-slaughter-date yield, especially under cost-optimised industrial feedlots.

More incrementally, (if perhaps still somewhat controversially), normal gut bacteria accounts for some fraction of the energy intake provided by animal feed. By killing them off, it frees up nutrients for the host. Other mechanisms including reduced immune load may also be involved.

Quoting from [1]:

> According to the National Office of Animal Health (NOAH, 2001), antibiotic growth promoters are used to "help growing animals digest their food more efficiently, get maximum benefit from it and allow them to develop into strong and healthy individuals". Although the mechanism underpinning their action is unclear, it is believed that the antibiotics suppress sensitive populations of bacteria in the intestines. It has been estimated that as much as 6 per cent of the net energy in the pig diet could be lost due to microbial fermentation in the intestine (Jensen, 1998). If the microbial population could be better controlled, it is possible that the lost energy could be diverted to growth.

[1] http://www.fao.org/docrep/article/agrippa/555_en.htm
I've just started using Octave (for the coursera machine learning course) and it also starts at 1. Takes a few exercises to reaclimatise. More annoying is that it doesn't auto broadcast matrix operations like numpy does (and the slicing doesn't feel as powerful either).
I'd wager (from various salary polls here, the nature of the tech industry, significant above-average intelligence and a hacker mindset) that the majority of HNers are in a position to save half of their income while living the good life.
Tesla: Google Chrome, Third-Party Apps Coming To Infotainment System Next Year
The natural numbers are defined as either the positive integers (1, 2, 3, ...) or the nonnegative integers (0, 1, 2, ...). In either case there is a smallest one (either 0 or 1). And so if you use a notation that excludes the lower bound then to include the smallest natural number (either 0 or 1) you have to define your sequence in terms of a number outside the set, which is awkward.

A more practical example is that you are using unsigned integers, so the smallest number is 0. If you use an exclusive lower bound, you can't actually represent any range containing 0, because -1 is not a valid number you can store.
To a lot of people greatness IS having a family and/or a fun life that is not defined by what you do to pay the bills.
I prefer Jack of all Trades, Master of many.
Pass or Fail on Personality Tests for Hiring?
There are some situations where an organism can evolve overnight to exposure to an antibiotic. See Inducible Extended Beta lactamase resistance in E Coli. HOWEVER. Bacteria evolve just as any organism does via random genetic mutations that may or may not lead to resistance. It's Darwinism on the cellular level. The vast majority of antibiotic resistance occurred regardless of exposure. There is a segment of society that wants to blame humans for every problem it seems.
> Meanwhile I learned how to use an OSS lamp stack and have been happily using it for the last 10 years. Very stable and reliable, I could not be happier.

I find that Java's biggest problem (stability/stagnation depending on who you ask) is also the JVM development ecosystem's benefit. There's not one body driving adoption of technologies by deciding what's supported and what's not, so technology choice is less dictated by economic imperatives.
Bloody marys, juggling, twerking and a bear costume: Kickstarting a book [video]
Tesla Model S will get Chrome and third-party apps by end of 2014
Induction might be an option, but on-boarding covers it well enough IMO.
Idiots Break 200 Million Year Old Rock Formation in Utah
Powershell is actually pretty cool if you embrace it for what it is and don't try to use it like a unix shell.

Of course, through Cygwin, MingW, et al you can also just run bash or whatever shell you want on Windows.

To be honest I don't spend a ton of time in terminal windows on Windows for some of the reasons others mentioned, though I do tend to constantly be using the shell on the Linux VMs I mentioned (often just sshed into a local VM).
First off, Congrats on starting your own Co-Working space. That's no easy task, and I commend you for building the startup ecosystem in your area. I see where you're coming from, you want to protect all the people that use your co-working space. Regarding the one year grace period, I should just state that Mr. Thomas (the IP lawyer) undoubtedly knows more about Patent Law than I do. But I think the question should be explored further, because I do not really agree with that insinuation. I should also consider that I was not there, and thus don't want to presume anything (I dont know what was said). I think the best way I can help is just to explain my own understanding of how the AIA (America Invents Act) impacted the grace period, and let you decide (or correlate with your own research). From what I understand; Previous to the AIA, the grace period applied to "all disclosures", meaning that the invention could be disclosed by someone (or some entity) other than the inventor, and still be considered a Publication for the inventor. After the AIA, the grace period only applies to the inventors own disclosures, which means the inventor must disclose the invention himself/herself for it to be considered a Publication. Hope this helps!
Coming from C# it seems odd that a string would index on byte and not char(rune) and that it is essentially a read only byte array. If you wanted a byte array why wouldn't you use a byte array, why have strings and byte arrays?

In C# you can encode/decode strings to byte arrays based on your desired encoding, but a string is composed of characters, it's in memory representation is abstracted.

Is this a performance or zero copy thing? Not having to encode/decode to get to the bytes?
Ask HN: What is your qualitative perception of hashtags?
Cracking Authy's Encrypted Cloud Backup
Capitalism isn't designed to handle non-ownership. That is why it is an easy target. Either privatize or regulate, but don't blame it on a system that is DESIGNED to maximize profit.
Heh, careful with that "we" - don't leave out those of us who are in the target demographic of both Hacker News and Pinterest. :)

I have less purchasing intent while browsing Pinterest than I do while looking at Yelp or Amazon (or Etsy), but I spend more time on Pinterest than on shopping sites. I've bought several things I had originally pinned just because they were interesting and then later realized would make a good gift for somebody.
[serious] Can we replace the icann?
I like how you are thinking outside the box a bit.

Having said that, there are a couple of issues:
1) This is really not a hard problem for a computer to solve. Detecting different image types is pretty trivial. You made it a lot easier by making the letters sit in the boxes in a regular manner.
2) A high percentage of captchas are now broken by humans, instead of robots. This is not a problem you will likely encounter in a small site, though.

(1) Is an easier problem to solve. You could do "input the letters near the cat", or "input the letters near the map of florida".

(2) Is harder, but most of the people who break captchas live in 3rd world countries, so you could possibly arbitrage cultural knowledge (see florida example above). They will catch on pretty damn quick, though.
That's because Perl does not have arrays. You've been using hashes.

In practice, Perl is not expected to be fast, so I don't think there's any difference.
It's not negative commentary. It is a legitimate user interface issue that several people experienced. It is also super easy for them to fix. Sometimes(always) when you launch a new product or design, you want feedback on the silly little things you wouldn't have thought of that could potentially turn people away. The attention span of cold clicks is measured in seconds. Any silly issue can push someone to click off. I have used a computer extensively for many years and thought it was a live demo for a few seconds. As they say in web usability, don't make people think.
They've evolved into a better way of expressing certain emotions and such.

For example I've seen things like "I'm sorry you're leaving! #dumb" which helps convey that the person is laughingly sad that the other coworker is leaving.

Stuff like that.
I think games are a good way to teach the first principles in coding.

Last year as a pet project I ported Terrarium.Net to javascript (this is definitely not noob-friendly at the moment but it is open source :) )

http://terrariumjs.wiselabs.net/

The idea is to code the behaviour of a critter that can move / attack / eat and reproduce.

So a species that survives well can grow and invade a terrarium.

But the cool factor is the blue ball. It is actually a teleporter that sends critters randomly to someone else's terrarium, so your critter can invade other terrariums too :)
"If a boss is feeling insecure about how their company is performing, then leaning on their employees for more hours is one of the few ways that they can feel like they’re turning the cogs towards success."

A very important point and very well stated. If I knew of any internet slang signifying a virtual standing ovation I would put it here.

It frequently also comes with pushing an atmosphere of artificial urgency and high interest technical debt (save an hour today and cost the company weeks in a few months) because all are based on panicked short term thinking.
The first example is not indicative of the actual difficulty because the letters are pink (this is noted, but still).

Beyond that, the examples use extremely hard to see letters... that completely defeats the purpose. There's no need if the challenging part for the computer is detecting satellite imagery.

There are multiple letters on some of the images, sometimes hovering between two images. Again, why? The computer is going to have no problem divvying up the images, but the ambiguity is confusing for humans.

Make the letters as easy to read as possible please. If that breaks your captcha, find a new captcha method.
Hold on... you live and work in silicon valley and you claim you can get by on 30k a year expenses?

Horseshit. The cheapest rent I've seen around here is 1500 a month, and that's almost 20 grand a year right there. Add standard utilities, food, insurance, and commuting costs and you're already pushing 30k. That's assuming you don't have student loans to worry about.

I totally agree that the power is in our hands, but it is far less simple to make that work then you are letting on. There is a reason salaries in the valley are so high... it's damn expensive to live here. If you're in a position where you may get fired for not putting in 60 hour weeks, more often than not your options are work 60 hour weeks or hope you get another gig before you're forced to move out of the valley.
It fails when the metrics obscure fundamental problems with the business model which will lead to the metrics cratering later.

The most obvious example in recent memory is Groupon. They had insane metrics, huge revenue growth, and lots of adoption. The problem is that their value proposition was based on companies selling at a loss, treating it as a marketing expense, and then making it up in repeat business later. Many companies bought into that proposition at first, tried it, but then the repeat business failed to materialize, and they vowed never to go near Groupon again. When Groupon exhausted their initial market, sales collapsed. Groupon may survive based on the smaller market of companies where their value proposition holds, but they aren't going to meet initial investors' expectations.

An older example would be online retailers like Webvan and Kosmo.com that sold below cost, hoping to make it up in volumes. Here the problem is that the investors were looking at the wrong metric; the stocks climbed to astronomical heights based on userbase and revenue, but the key metric for a retailer is operating margin, and this was negative for these companies.