skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> is it because we forget that simplicity is better?

Oh yes, all the time. I am busy trying to automate everything in the office, because it is what I know. Whenever someone comes to me with a problem, I think about how it will integrated into our systems, adding tables to the database, adding a page so people can track how it is done. When someone else has already solved it using a simple trick.
Your templates are nice and have good use of color. But why would you have the stock photo promo pics as your product images instead of the mockups? I can't decide if it comes off as gimmicky, as in you're trying to be trendy with no justification beyond that, or deceitful, as in you're hiding the product/trying to make it look better than it is. Neither could be the case but that's how I interpret it. Either way, that's not good. You're clearly a good designer; own it!

Also, your Twitter link in the footer is broken.
I'm reminded of the statement from the Netflix culture slides circulating around the net (paraphrasing): a company's culture is evident in who gets promotions and praise, not what is in a values statement.

Your management is willing to ignore childish behavior because it helps their bottom line. The path is clear - decide if you want to work in an organization that exhibits those values. If not, move on.
Terrible General Lee Crash
2013′s Most Popular Developer Services
The one problem I had right away is that you're asking me to create an account. Why?

You're streaming music from 3rd party services. Search functionality is an API call. Settings and playlists can be completely stored locally on the device and backed up to iCloud. Sharing used 3rd party services. I don't see the need for an account.

The app looks neat from the screenshots, but offers no functionality until I sign up. Maybe there's some neat thing the app does that requires a login, but I have no idea what that is.

I like the logo. Love the premise. Design looks nice from the images.
Show HN: LetsPaste
tldr: I made a gaming screenshot sharing app: http://letspaste.com

A while ago, I noticed LetsPlays (making & sharing gameplay videos) were extremely popular, but I couldn't find any site dedicated specifically to screenshots.

Lots of game devs use Twitter (and there is a big movement there called #screenshotsaturday), but I find their handling of screenshots totally awful. I think devs could really benefit from a site like this.

I'd prefer not to post it on HN this early, but I've had a really hard time find someone to test it. Some of the design decisions are kind of bizarre. It might help to note that I made this with a (personal) bias towards indie games and pixel art.

This is an MVP!! It only works on CHROME currently. I've got plenty more ideas and polish to add (e.g. recommendations, filtering, more twitter integration), but I don't want to develop it further if there is no interest.

I'd appreciate ANY feedback you have, but especially:

1. how useful you think this is, how to make it more useful

2. usability, especially on uploading screenshots
I find the twitter comment you linked to very insightful, it's just a thinly veiled statement of "even if the facts don't support the claims I made about your actions, you're still to blame for your inaction". This kind of "You're either with us, or against us" mentality is rather alarming...
A VC's Open Kimono
sorry, this is only somewhat related. but i am really ignorant. this is a genuine question that i have for quite some time now.

when i download security relevant software, the website usually gives me a hash/signature of the download file, so i can verify afterwards whether the data i downloaded really is the file i want or whether it has been tampered with.

but in case an attacker switches the downloaded file for a malignant one, why should s/he be so stupid and not also switch the hash/signature on the website? i am positive i am missing something, as really smart people [0] are doing this, but i do not get it. thanks in advance.

[0] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
That's a very excellent point, thank you, I will heed that advice.
looks like it's blocked in russia :O
That has nothing to do with the conversation.
> This piece should have to be written.

I'm guessing you meant "shouldn't" there?
I suppose the corollary of this is that you have to make sure you put in place quality control checkpoints so you can make sure delegated work is done correctly. This sort of thing tends to be ignored when you do something yourself because you'll usually do simple double-checks to verify the work you've done as a matter of course.
It's "amateur social science" in the sense that it's an "off-hand comment". I could write a 5k word essay on this very small point and make it respectable, I didnt because HN comment boxes are not vehicles of long essays. If pg's observations were confined to small discussion threads on HN i wouldnt have much issue. But he presented the article I mentioned at Defcon. And his "Essays" section are presented as essays, not "off-hand comments".

> Why would you do that?

I'm responding to the questions raised in the most convenient way. I'm not going to give a serious critique of the many essays which require it to make a small point about his blase approach to serious academic topics. Far too much effort to spend on a crowd whose faith in pg's intellectual status is based on his money-making ability.
"If you don’t make time for your life, you won’t have one."
And currently, some form of ID is needed.

That's just not true. I vote without showing any ID at all.
Nothing he said is out of line with what a lot of classical liberals were saying throughout the 19th century and they were refining ideas that basically go back to Aristotle. If echoing their thoughts qualifies one to be a pseudo-intellectual then I'm going to guess in horror at what you consider to be genuine intellectual thought.
Tax-wise, the US is among the worst places to be self-employed. Per this little calculation of mine, an IT entrepreneur earning $100k would keep >99% in Singapore, but <57% in SF. (Massive caveats apply and are enumerated in detail in the article.)

http://gyrovague.com/2013/10/30/half-the-donut-why-an-entrep...
>My 50 year old plumber knows jack about Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism despite - as in a Louis CK bit - his seeing a dead body "one time".

Well, most of the stuff guys "under 40" think they know about "Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism" are a half-understood mismash too (I'm not talking about someone with a PhD in Physics here).

And, as some they will find out later in life, not only knowledge of those "serious academic topics" doesn't matter as much as they thought, but also most of them are inherently bullshit too.
I know that this is a general complaint about breaking a common feature but in case someone really doesn't know: right-click the back button in your browser and choose how far back you want to go from the list. Works at least in Chrome and Firefox.
Based on the comments here, I can see that this tamper evidence method is not foolproof. Is there anything that is better (harder to detect, harder to replace even if known about)?
Are you saying that during the entire time from registering to vote to the point of voting, you never had to identify yourself? I find that odd. How do they even know who you are?
http://nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/taxday/

Took 5 seconds to find.

A tax return is used to provide your income information to the government. If you want information about how government monies are being spent, you can look it up. This information is freely available online. The tax return is not the proper place for this information, as not all government monies arise from income taxes.
My main work tool is a Thinkpad keyboard with the trackpoint buttons below the spacebar mapped just like the Leap keys on the Cannon Cat. All of my work is inside two text files, one with what I'm actually working on ATM and the other with everything else I'll ever need to keep on a computer. I've been through a few text editors over the years, and the one I'm using now is Archy, which was made by Raskin's son actually. It's pretty much a copy of the Canon Cat, rewritten in python. To the commenter below: I will switch to emacs one day, but haven't yet, since any good text editor with incremental search will do. Oh, and I also remap every navigation shortcut to some home row shortcut, for when I don't want to use 'leap' to navigate.

What do you use as your main work tool?
yeah, i forgot about the US system for a moment. i knew the 90+% plea bargain number, but it is so utterly inconceivable that i always and again forget it. simply does not compute.
Some thoughts on the scala REPL
I don't think photo ID's are an effective certificate for proving identity.

So why are we even talking about them? Photo IDs are the solution being discussed here, not some theoretical has-yet-to-be-invented technology that is indistinguishable from magic. You wrote why do we keep excusing people from having a basic mechanism to prove who they say they are? in the context of a mechanism that doesn't do that...so what exactly is the point of introducing a very costly "solution" to a non-existent problem that doesn't actually solve anything?
And was quite prominent in the Lisp community, back in the day too.
Yeah, the banks sure were pushing back on all that pressure!
Thanks for that explanation. So the fraud is unrelated to Bitcoin, I take it.
I cannot tell if you are being serious or sarcastic, but in either case, and with all due respect^, fuck off with this bullshit.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about a literal witch hunt, as an allegory for McCarthyism. Do you think that he thought that blacklisting actors was literally as bad as crushing somebody to death with stones over several days?

Of course he didn't. It was fucking allegorical. Do you really not understand the basic premise of a metaphor? I think you do. I think you are trolling.

^ little is due.
> Its like dancing, the more effortless it looks, the harder it is to do.

This is actually not true. It is fairly effortless for the dancers doing it - what was hard was all the training and hard work getting to the point of it being effortless.
Freddie's jokes
I think you should do some research on voting in the US. You can start by looking at web pages like this: http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/eleifv/howreg.htm
Hey thanks! Subscription - so instead of paying a fee on a payment, you pay a small subscription based on how many payments you take a month. We're designing to take care of lots of edge cases (to allow more micro-transactions than CC's can realistically permit) and ensure it's always an 85-99% reduction on what fees would have cost you.
I plugged his numbers into a Numbers spreadsheet I use for estimating my taxes including self-employment tax. This should be the maximum that he would owe for 2013, though there is surely more that he can deduct.

It accounts for his wife and child, but does not take into account any personal deductions like mortgage interest, donations, or anything else. The state rate is approximately correct for Idaho where he lives though the state uses brackets below $10,000.

Just from the amount of deductible self-employment tax he's close to using itemized deductions, but would have to add more personal deductions to get to that point.

Business income: $256,725.00
Business expenses: $65,000.00

Self-employment tax amount: $19,233.48
Self-employment tax effective rate: 7.49%

Federal tax amount: $34,625.50
Federal tax effective rate: 13.49%

State tax amount: $12,463.45 (assuming flat rate of 7.4%)

Total tax amount: $66,321.43
Total tax effective rate: 28.38%

Here's a screenshot of the sheet I used: http://cl.ly/image/1N3M3U3Z2X2x
I have a fantasy that 20 years from now, Haiku will be the operating system of choice for hackers with design sensibilities (NB: I didn't say graphic design) who want a powerful, flexible, programmable OS that just works and requires minimal configuration.

This niche is currently filled by OSX, but I think it's slowly falling out of favor because of Apple's increasing focus on the end user and "iOSifying" everything.

Of course Haiku is still some ways from it, but I've been following its development for a while now and I feel like it's on the right track. If one or two manufacturers end up providing good hardware for Haiku to run on when it's a bit more mature, it'd be wonderful and then my vision would happen.

There are worse foundations and inspirations to have than BeOS - a man can dream :)
I agree that a lot of the time intellectual pursuits are misdirected ways of solving life's problems (though the worst culprit here is wealth acquisition, doubling the critique of pg here).

There is a kind of wisdom that arises through knowledge of oneself and other people that comes with age. A kind of knowledge which helps you predict what is going to be worthwhile, etc.

However we shouldnt fall into the trap of saying "academic persuits might leave you unsatisfied therefore you can be blase about them whilst discussing them". You cant dispense with the particulars of physics when discussing gravity because your interest in "the universe" owes to a unfulfilled religious need.

"age" is a different category of knowledge and doesnt excuse or justify glorified amateurism in another.
The 1.8/1.9 switch was problematic and can be seen in parallel with the python 2.7/3.x switch. Rails 2/Rails 3 was a similar big jump that reengineered the whole framework. Rails 4 was a much tamer release in that regard.

But one has to realize that 1.8 was the series of Ruby that was started _before_ Ruby even got popular (I started Ruby using 1.6, which was even more problematic). So being aggressive in breaking stuff with the next iteration (basically, to do it proper, with more manpower and data to work on) also opened up a lot - for example, Ruby 1.9 to 2.0 is a much simpler switch and I have many clients running 2.0 now and testing on 2.1.

The fear I always have with python 2.7 is the distant future. It just irritates me to have a huge migration in front of me. The Rubyist in me wants to keep up with the current state of things.
It gets worse: if you scroll up and down through the page several times, there are so many history items that Chrome has forgotten all about HN and I can't get back there via the back button no matter how many times I press it.
I entered college in Fall 2001 and enrolled in my university's CS program in Spring 2003. While in high school, I witnessed the high flying late 90s dot-com boom from the sidelines, at times wondering if I should drop out of high school or skip college to join in on the good times. Then the dot-com crash and 9/11 happened and the country went into a recession. I had friends telling me I should not major in computer science, and that most jobs are being outsourced away. To be honest, the truth on the ground did not invalidate that opinion at the time. Internships were hard to come by, you either submitted your resume into the dark pits of corporate job portals, or you emailed your resume to small local companies no one has ever heard of. Even in a top tier university at the time (Univ. of Washington), many classmates of mine were happy to get interviews with IT departments of companies whose core business is not computer-driven, e.g. logistics or healthcare companies. Not every CS major lined up a lucrative summer internship then, and some had to graduate with minimal to no work experience, throwing them into the catch-22 of no-experience = no-hire. Must've been frustrating for many. The first sign of life came with the success of "web 2.0" sites like Flickr and Google Maps 1.0, and "modern" developer tools like Ruby on Rails & jQuery. What felt like grunt work just a few years before had turned into more of a joy. Within 2005-2007, I noticed increased enthusiasm from the web community to re-build old ideas with modern user experiences, and the web became exciting again. Then in 2007 the iPhone happened, which led to enthusiasm for mobile-optimized sites, followed by the native iOS craze of late 2008/2009. After that, YC and some of its early companies got recognized in mainstream press, Google succeeded with Android, and open source got real exciting with the emergence of Git & GitHub. From that point on, it was just a dizzying pace of change in web and data technologies.
TBH i never understood the reason for 2to3.
Wouldn't a 3 to 2 compiler would be much better?
Then people could start using python3 as intended, and simply compile back to python2 if they need to. I doubt there is anything it python3 that would be impossible to emulate with machine generated python2. And no one would care how the compiled python2 code looks, because it would be temporary.
It's one small but strong exception to the rule that software development is for boys.

If she doesn't want to be recognized for her work as a model, I'd respect that, but she lists it in her SO profile, so it's probably not a big deal.

I'd love to see more examples like her, sending the message to young women that you can be a coder and still be feminine.

(...This is a touchy subject, especially on HN, so if the thread gets busy, I hope any replies won't immediately assume I'm somehow sexist or an idiot.)
> Additionally, your advice is broken. Take a look at this example, with the shelve module (from standard library).

His advice was sound, and referred to your example of TCP stream data (which is binary). Your example regards the shelve library.

> So in this case, my byte string can't be used as a key here, apparently.

shelve requires strings as a keys. This is documented, though not particularly clearly.

> so your advice about "just using byte strings" is invalid.

Let me attempt to rephrase his advice. Use bytestrings where your data is a string of bytes. Use strings where your data is human-readable text. Covert to and from bytestrings when serializing to something like network or storage.

> Conversions are inevitable.

Absolutely, because bytestrings and (text)strings are two different types.

> And this annoys me.

There is no real alternative though, because there is no way to automatically convert between the two. Python 2 made many assumptions, and these were often invalid and led to bugs. Python 3 does not; in places where it does not have the required information, you must provide it.

> when implementing existing protocols, or reading file formats that don't use Unicode.

I'm afraid it's still the same. A protocol that uses unicode requires you to code something like "decode('utf-8')" (if UTF-8 is what it uses), one that does not requires "decode('whatever-it-uses-instead')". If it isn't clear what encoding the file format or protocol stores textual data in, then that's a bug with the file format or protocol, not Python. Regardless though, Python doesn't know (and can't know) what encoding the file or protocol uses.
I think there's a smear campaign against Silicon Valley right now. ValleyMag is the main agitator, but not the only one.
Nathan needs to get a CPA to do his taxes. I finally got one about 2 years ago and had him look at some of my older returns. Turns out I wasn't accounting for rental property income correctly, and he was able to get me several thousand back (plus interest!) from the IRS. Totally worth it.
Not to mention his academic qualifications: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programme...
How did the moon green cheese myth start?
2014 - The Year of Technology Backlash?
I travelled around the USA a bit earlier this year. At one point I was at a small regional airport in Florida where I was running late for my flight.

The TSA attendant, a Good Ol' Boy, asked "Do y'all have the Pre?"

I said I didn't know what it was. He cracked a grin and said "It don't matter, we don' got it anyhow". We then had a friendly chat about life in Australia before he waved me through.
Non-funny non-interesting one-liners.
Differences in userbases could be part of it. Scientific computing is an increasingly important part of the Python community, for example, and they tend to be averse to backwards-incompatible changes. In part that's because you have many good but very lightly maintained libraries that stick around forever, so people prefer if they stay working when nobody touches them, rather than bitrotting and needing constant updating by thinly stretched maintainers. Heck, old Fortran stuff is still in regular use, some of which hasn't been touched in years.
>None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on.

You don't get insights into these by getting a degree from some university on the subject. You get insights into those things by studying them, practical experience, and more importantly thinking.

If anything, the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors.

And REAL thinkers, the kind that leave a mark in history, from Socrates to Sartre and from Kierkegaard to Popper and Wittgenstein to leave it to philosophy, are full of scorn for academia in general and professors in particular, and even if they sometimes happen to be working as such themselves, they are greatly atypical to their "churn papers" colleagues.

Not that pg is on that level, but critisizing him because "none of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on" is bullshit.

Your a priori abstract attack that he lacks insights has no meat at all behind it. You could just as well have said that "he has tons of insight into what he writes" -- and it would be exactly the same.

If you want to provide something worthwhile, do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere, and tell us what is wrong with it by providing counter-arguments and rebuttals.
He isnt "echoing their thoughts" any one who has read Adam Smith systematically would know that the very first few lines of this are explicitly rejected by him.

They're childish research-lite versions of a 50s-style classical liberalism. It is much the same as Ayn Rand another amateur philosopher who knew very little on the topics she was writing about.

I dislike the "talking head" approach to serious topics. I dont think "giving your opinion" excuses a lack of serious research. Half-baked, under-informed opinion isnt truth or even the attempt to reach it; regardless of whether it is phrased with feigned objectivity. I wouldnt be too annoyed if he wasnt glorified by other $-eye'd idiots.
Maps and the Geospatial Revolution on Coursera
Everybody standing on the sidelines with no skin in the game is always proud to point out the engineer's mistakes after they have been made.

I comfort myself with Teddy Roosevelt's "man in the arena" speech.