skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why did Color fail? 
I sense that the $41 million in funding that it took prior to launch may have been a hindrance.

If Color had started out as a scrappy startup would things have been different?

Was it just too early to market?

Perhaps it was a solution with no problem.

But I feel like the idea of sharing real-time, geo-located photos and info still might have a future.

For those unfamiliar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs
What happens when they want to return the item? Pretty sure you have to offer a 30 day return policy, I could take the 'free' litecoin, then return the USB stick and ask for a refund.
Understanding mobile app stickiness in the iTunes App Store
It was a joke. Emacs vs. Vi, FP vs OOP, etc. All members of the set of useless debate topics.
dart rocks!
Ideally you'd be evaluated on the progress you made on both sets of goals with consideration given to the fact that you weren't working on either set of goals for the entire quarter.

I can't imagine a manager who helped you set quarterly goals with objective completion measurements and then penalized you if the goals changed partway through.

There would probably be some discussion as to why the goals needed to change. If they were not set appropriately to begin with that might be an issues between you and your manager or might be an issue between him and his manager (maybe priorities weren't communicated effectively from higher up the chain) or it might truly be a case of changed priorities in the company (changing markets, change financial outlook, whatever).
garrytan is one of the best people I have ever met.

There are many different functions for evaluating "good person". Some look to kindness, compassion and trust. Raw intelligence or creativity. Wealth and influence. You name it, garrytan has it. Of course no one is perfect. But some people are inherently good.

Garry is a true nerd, a social maven, a serial helper. He's the kind of person that you want beside you in a foxhole. It's worth making an effort to get to know him. There's a reason that he keeps showing up in these "N under N" things.

It's good to see a nice guy finish first for once. And I believe that his best work is yet to come.
I know all too well. But, as the Paypal compliance department has told me umpteen times, their policies are not the same and are under different laws. So, eBay will let you list any physical good you want that conforms to their policy (basically anything that's not guns or child porn and things like that). Paypal will not you accept payment for anything that they define which contains e-currency (bitcoins, litecoins, etc), including Casascius coins and the like.
This was discussed[0] at great length nearly 950 days ago. A great comment from PG[1] was:

Be brief and say what you want.

As I say, the discussion is long, although subsequent submissions of the same item[2][3] got no love at all.

A related item is "How to Get Busy People to Take Action When You Send an Email." That's also been submitted several times[4][5][6], but not got any discussion at all.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2532955

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2533379

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621604

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4589543

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6832732

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6451658

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274627
What’s It Like Opening Your Mail and Finding Dead Roaches?
Freemarker vs AngularJS
Dear all,

Does it make sense having a solution that uses both Freemarker and AngularJS?

I'm a junior programmer and as far as my understanding goes, I think they are designed to the same purpose.
You say thanks to Mark, but save him countless minutes of pressing Delete on the future CC's back and forth. Busy people get already too much e-mails and it is often a pain to get out from those discussions.
I don't think it's very impressive that 42% identified it as virtual currency - it does have "coin" in the name, and none of the other options had any relation to coins.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? We've never seen SteamOS so we can't say what it's been for any of it's history. This sounds like pure speculation to me, and if I had to speculate I think it's more likely that the reporter is correct, and it is unlikely Ubuntu.
Dart on track to becoming a standardized Ecma programming language
Ask HN: How hardware engineers see the web dev evolution and trends
In the past decade there were a lot of changes around web development (node.js, HTML5). Adopting methodologies and architectures from other related fields, making progress on having an efficient and "automated" development process.<p>I wonder how hardware engineers see these changes and if there are similarities or exchanges of knowledge or habits.<p>Hardware engineers in specific, because I imagine the physical aspect generates some constraints.
But with no clear user-facing way to activate it, meaning you have to use some unofficial app that accesses it in an undocumented manner, it has the smell of something that you could not rely upon as a "feature."

If it's there and it works, then great for you, but you can't expect a whole lot more. It sucks that they didn't actually make it a published feature with an actual means of accessing it, and take on the responsibility of maintaining it, because it seems like something I'd like to use.
I would imagine he's talking about NuGet. Unless I've missed something dramatic in the past half year in the .net ecosystem.
I upvoted this because you make an interesting point that goes against popular opinion. I think the ensuing discussion would be interesting, and I'd hate it if opinions were buried only because they were unpopular.
Uhg, I worry this will explode... really it's a college thesis and I'm sure it's not the worst one out there:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/2/28/spot-the-imposto...
I'm hopeful for 2014. SteamOS has the potential to bring a lot of new attention to desktop Linux from both consumers and hardware vendors.
2 lbs per cubic foot?
(1) Who pays the bills for the public registry (docker.io) and why?

(2) Is there a future possibility similar to how so many Ruby projects fall down when GitHub goes down due to not 'pit-of-success-ing'[1] a copy of everything locally?

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2003/10/02/50420.aspx
I agree (a) inconsistency is bad and (b) latency is bad, but double-click-to-zoom is very useful (for operating the phone with your thumb when your other hand isn't free), and I think removing it would be bad overall.

Perhaps people will be more inclined to write mobile-optimized sites that don't need to be zoomed if they can get reduced latency as a bonus.
The "libraries over frameworks" notion is something I keep noticing in communities that seem to be more engineering-minded than rock-star-ninja-dev-minded. Where do you think this comes from? I think it's a mix of maturity on the part of the community members along with how often the language is used to do things that are harder than CRUD.
You can sell a pluggable device, no need to produce the whole phone
Groovy with Gradle is a pretty good answer that is there today. Gradle way way way easier to work with than with Maven for your build system, publishes packages with dependency info, so you still get your dependencies sorted OK. Groovy has automatic setters/getters, a ton of functional-style helpers (closures, etc), dynamic & static mixins, delegates, etc.
I had a taste of Prolog in college and always wanted to learn more, especially after reading this Dr. Dobb's article about using it for a vaccine scheduling app:

http://www.drdobbs.com/database/building-a-custom-rule-engin...

With all the interest these days in DSLs, I feel like knowing when/how to embed Prolog into larger applications could be a great tool in my toolbox.
"You can not feed a nation on "a premium product" that you have to "pay a premium for""

Yes you can. You just need fewer people to feed.
This should be fixed now. Thanks for the feedback.
Building a Custom Rule Engine with Prolog (2004)
Four ways to visualize US income inequality
What makes you think that? Valve has been focusing on Ubuntu up to now, and they have an APT repo. If they don't base SteamOS on Ubuntu, they will probably base directly of Debian testing. Debian makes up most of desktop linux anyway...
Yep. I have gotten one-star reviews on an app of mine because they think I want to invade users' privacy, when I really just want to pause media when a call comes in.

READ_PHONE_STATE means I have to decide whether I want a handful of one-star reviews for requesting that permission, or a truckload of one-star reviews for the app playing media over their calls.
The census publishes statistics that back this up:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/farm...

Most corporate farms are owned by families and a bunch of the remaining corporate farms are held by a small number of people (less than 10), which isn't the colloquial idea of a big business.
Well before it would hide the images, so there were a lot of people who read the emails, but the ping to the marketers server was blocked by default. Now the default is to show email images, which tells the marketer that you opened the email.

So, for the few people who clicked "show images in this email" before the change, the marketers lose the richer metrics they were getting. But in return they gain slightly less granular metrics for a lot more people.
Just as people say they want to reward creativity but subconsciously don't, you'll find that putting yourself out there as a master-of-all-trades will leave you with few callbacks.

It is the nature of business that if they want to hire somebody, it's for a narrowly-defined scope (solving any and all problems is something a CEO or more likely a founder does, not really anybody else). Imagine doing a carpentry job and finding inside your box of 2000 nails a "rare and special" piece of metal that isn't a nail, but can do the job of a nail, screw, brad, rivet, and/or wi-fi hotspot. You're not going to consider it a bonus, even though maybe you should.

Find something that you can do well, that's in demand, that pays well, and position yourself to focus on that on your resume. If not just one but a few of your passions meet these characteristics, put together a few monolithic resumes and send them to the appropriate places. They don't have to completely eliminate your ancillary experiences, but they should mention them in a downplayed manner. Remember, the resume is not the job; merely your way of getting it.
EFF Criticizes Google For Removing 'Vital Privacy Feature' With Android 4.4.2
I like your example :D
Machine Learning Could Allow Intelligent Chemical Reactions
I don't feel like you actually stopped to understand what the author was saying before disagreeing with it. To me, the piece reads more as sort of whimsical, preliminary musing about different ways of viewing interactions and how they can be enshrined in programming paradigms (e.g. OO, functional and logic programming all have different ways of expressing the relationships between program entities and have different ways of deciding what to do with those relationships).

It doesn't sound to me like Arielle's hypothesis is "Programming languages are sexist," but rather that it might be interesting to see what a programming language would look like that subscribes to certain philosophies derived from feminist thinking. I don't know enough about feminist philosophy to say what this means in specific terms, but it doesn't strike me as necessarily less reasonable than, say, Clojure's attempt to implement Rich Hickey's philosophies about complexity and identity.
A typical dryland farmer can produce a bushel of wheat (60 pounds) for less than $3/bushel, assuming typical weather. That's all that 99% of consumers care about. Everything else is niche.

Universities are working hard to bring these techniques to the mass-market farmers. GPS-enabled equipment has already let farmers massively reduce the amount of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers they use. Machine vision technology shows great promise in bringing the rest.
WordPress 3.8 “Parker” Released
I imported it. So I guess it's not a technical one-liner
I like the question itself - my friend went into journalism and now preaches STEM. I believe there is a disproportionate representation of those folks (rather than STEM folks preaching STEM themselves) because they are aware of the media distribution channels while the STEM crowd is more of a dark-room thing... And not-as-able to spread our ideas to the non-STEM crowd due to unfamiliar channels we by nature deal with less. Because of that we should continue to observe this paradigm - And I, one of the crowd, will meanwhile warn the potential traveller that the STEM road is harder, but the reward is inherent to the choice of going through it. I find the following applies much:

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

-R.Frost
I'd say the simplest way is...

1. Identify organizations that you think very clearly help people.

2. Apply for a technical role with them. (Id say the majority of companies in any industry have tech roles to fill)

In the above scenario, each line of code may not be saving a life but you'll be contributing to the organization in doing what they do better. Additionally, you'll have more opportunities within the organization to capitalize on doing things that align with your ethics.
So YCVC notes/SAFE are capped now? I thought they were uncapped? IIRC they were in the Start Fund days.
"Furthermore, the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest."

It actually does have an incentive to be internally honest, that is, to speak honestly within the corporate entity doing the research. If it isn't honest, it won't work, and what doesn't work can't be monetized (to a first approximation, anyhow; I can come up with crazy exceptions too, but they really are the exceptions). It does have an incentive to be externally dishonest and/or externally silent.

Public research, by contrast, appears to have no particular incentive to be honest either internally or externally. And lo, there's been a whole slew of problems lately about the problems that the largely public research community is facing with honesty, reproducability, and the skewed incentives around publication.

Personally, I think the only defensible position is that both approaches have shown to have serious problems with incentives, and the idea that public researchers are above corruption and have no negative incentives and are just generally "better" than private ones is a point of view that can't stand up to five minutes serious examination. And contrary to naive beliefs about the incorruptibility of politicians controlling the public research funds, both systems have a serious problem with needing to flatter the opinions of the one with the purse strings and make sure not to disprove them too hard. Very, very serious problems.
I would have preferred a button to "show all annotations" -- inserting spaces in the text itself if necessary to have everything line up correctly. I found myself moving through each annotation even on sections I don't care about right now, because there's that possibility that annotation I skipped was "Hey this clause will totally get you in trouble with the SEC, the IRS, and the Attorney General ..." Would have been much faster if I could just skim the annotations as I read.

Nice product, btw. I would love to see the same analysis done on the "Class F shares" company formation documents:

http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2009/04/23/what-is-class...
Google Might Build Their Own Custom Server Processors Based On ARM
Application based comparisons are usually flawed, because the writer will never and cannot release enough info to reveal the real problem. Just because your bad-performing application runs faster on one platform doesn't necessarily mean that platform is superior to the old one. It simply means whatever problems you have in your bad-performing application manifests less in the new platform. In the end, fix your application!
Well, here we go

I teach basic mathematics to adults in a couple of institutions in the UK.

Fact: Most of my students are women, but the male proportion increases significantly for evening classes compared to daytime classes

Fact: A lot of my students (both genders) begin to realise that basic mathematics is stable, has a logical 'rule' based structure, and that it is possible to reduce most of the technical parts to checklists on 5by3 cards

Opinion: I spend a lot of time encouraging students (both genders) to take the slightly harder and more challenging exam[1]

The upshot is that a disproportionate number of male students have a go at Higher compared to Foundation because of perceived valence of maths. They will make time for the extra study whereas the female students feel constrained not to take time away from other commitments (children, jobs, older relatives) and will suffice by working in the lesson times only, not between. I do what I can.

Anecdote: I was teaching probability today[2]. I managed to link a two coin tossing experiment where we tossed a couple of different coins 20 times per student (aggregating to 400 tosses) to genetics (Punnet squares where Heads represented dominant alleles, and tails recessive).

Historical note: Mendel's rivals refused to see aA as distinct from Aa (HT as different from TH using coins). Links to sickle cell anaemia and Hardy Weinberg equilibrium. Not a bad two hours...

[1]UK:GCSE Mathematics is offered at Foundation and Higher tier. There is a significant gap between the two. We used to have a middle path called Intermediate that really suited adult students, but some Tory idiot removed it on the grounds that we should do the same in mathematics as in other subjects. But we have subjects so that we can address the different traditions...

[2] see below for a sample of my methodology

http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/probability-sorting-statem...

http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/rolling-two-dice-experimen...
> Projects where performance is critical are coded in C/C++ , not in java ( browsers , AAA games , databases , servers , micro-controllers , oses... ).

This is not true. C++ beats Java performance in constrained environments. On servers the situation is not so clear-cut. You see some really fast Java databases.

And BTW, Java is better at inlining functions than C++, but C++ handily beats Java when it comes to controlling memory layout (though that, too, is changing).
What sort of official feature is hidden and can't be accessed via any user interface provided by the vendor?
Oh where do I even begin with this...

>>Why would folks who apparently preferred other subjects suggest that women and particular minority groups be encouraged to study tech subjects that they themselves did not like and ended up not needing?

What does this person think women & particular minorities like? Can I safely assume this person is still thinking in the stereotype world? "Girls like flowers and talking on the phone!" "Minorities like gangsta rap and basketball!"

"did not like and ended up not needing?"

So if women & particular minorities don't like or need them; I guess that implies only white males and non-particular minorities do. The amount of incorrect assumptions that one must have in the mind to make such a statement in 2013 is... I don't even.....This blog post is just off the charts filled with privileged/sexist/racist mindset. This has to be a troll/flame-bait/prank.

EDIT: WOW!!! Did this article get blown off the HN-frontpage in under 2 mins? This is an example of how tech-scene buries issues about sexism & racism. You have people in Harvard who think like this... I hope the mainstream media picks this up to let anyone else out there quietly holding these views know how wrong they are and to show sexism & racism still exists in places like Harvard and how it contributes to the lack of women & minorities in tech. Holding this kind of attitude will affect how you interact with women & minorities.

EDIT2: And don't think I haven't noticed the bury-team that always tanks my comments on these issues. Probably the same people I'm always talking about here:

Conspiracy theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6441795

Supporting examples:
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885123
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6365495
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448409
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6857739
5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6035263 - This is the most obvious one.
I first thoughts were "matresses are tuff and may feel like needles in them."
The background color makes it so I can only see this: http://i.imgur.com/P4i6X0N.jpg

Run any softw....
Brian Madden "It's one fo the m...."
North Korea embarks on Internet purge of executed official
While I agree with him on not chasing "languages with buzz" I also feel that you have to try some new technologies or you get left behind. Some new technology is adopted for good reason. The trick is trying to differentiate the good stuff from the hype.
Yet google loves analytics, so why would they "plug" this hole? Have they got something planned? Who knows!
Console games are just applications like any other PC game. They access hardware by communicating with OS services. The only difference is in consoles you exactly know your hardware and you can make better use of it and OS provides less than a full blown PC OS. But this is not related to Java vs C++ debate. Java is capable of accessing hardware directly. There is even some hardware that directly runs Java or some low-end embedded systems running Java.

As of XNU, it is mostly pure C. There are a few C++ files there but they are very far from what we call "modern C++". No templates, no use of standard library, no exceptions, const char* everywhere. Just C with classes.
If only laws could be removed by sql injection...
What a shocker... a Java guy says that you shouldn't abandon Java :-)

Lots of wild speculations... especially about the reasons PayPal picked node.js/JavaScript instead of a Ruby stack. He says that Ruby wasn't chosen because you can run it on JVM ignoring the fact that you can run JavaScript on JVM too using DynJS (he actually mentions DynJS earlier in his blog post).