skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cruising HN probably isn't the place to find founders, honestly. Where do you live? Is there an established startup community there? Make friends in IT, and get introductions. Go to meetups.

Meanwhile, narrow yourself down to a single problem that you think offers maximum opportunity and minimum scope and risk, something that can be tackled with a MVP (minimum viable product). Design workflows. Learn wireframing. Create a business entity. Do everything you possibly can on your own that advances the project without actually writing the code. The farther along you are and the more viable it looks, the easier it will be for you to get a coder to help you.
Cynicism can cut both ways. You can be too cynical to believe a technical solution is possible, that legal action is the only thing left.
> Nobody I know uses TCL because they like it or because it is fun

I haven't written TCL in a few years, but back when I did (when I worked on MacPorts) I actually did think it was fun.
I only have a passing knowledge of how data security is handled by the government, but I suspect that the fact that they are discussing classified material which Schneier should not have access to may make using an SCIF more bureaucratically challenging.
But it's closer to the act of exchange, divorcing it from the act of production. I commented further down on it, but it could be fun to read up on the labor theory of value vs. the subjective theory.
No, despite it being written in an obscure language and sparse UI it has massive traction anyway. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Too bad I couldn't edit selectors and regex-es at this step. I could implement the filters I needed myself manually like this.
A short list of the most useful R commands
Learn to code. At least enough to prototype ideas.
https://thedaywefightback.org There's also a link there to a page that puts a #STOPTHENSA overlay on your Facebook and Twitter profile pics.
Ask HN: What's up with SoundCloud? [Downtime]
I've been trying to use SoundCloud for the past few days now to no real avail (interface keeps messing up), and now I can't even resolve a connection to the homepage.

Anyone know what's up with it?

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/soundcloud.com

EDIT:

Managed to find their status page; seems like they've been having problems for some time.

http://status.soundcloud.com
"Chief, shouldn't we use the Cone of Silence?"
This was a pretty thought provoking read for me; it put into words some of the beliefs I have operated by. However it's also important to remember that to be 'doing' you need to have a clear picture of why you're doing what you're doing. A lot of people I've met(and myself at times) do not know what they want to do; they've only learned about things they don't want to do in their experiences. I do agree it's best to gravitate towards projects that truly interest you though; if you don't believe in what you're doing you risk drifting into complacency.
LoopBack: Open-source Mobile Backend Powered by Node.js
It'll look a lot more interesting once the next rev of the website comes out, but right now I'm deep in coding mode. :) The code is telling me a lot about the product. Looking to go into beta in late spring at this rate. Drop me an email and I'll tell you more!
Congress required the NSA to clear some things with a court. The NSA lied to the court; that's not Congress's fault.
Programming the New Family Business
I'm not sure I'd say un-functional, just multiparadigm. But having at least some support for imperative programming is the norm in functional languages - ML does it, most LISP dialects do it, etc. Even Scheme, originally notable for its lack of loops, still has set! and idioms for combining it with closures and tail recursion to produce constructs that behave like loops.

And impure, of course. It's definitely an impure language. Personally, though, I'm not at all fond of conflating the terms "pure" and "functional". It's a terrible retcon that has more to do with the Haskell proselytism than with the development and history of functional programming or how its community has self-identified over the years. Note that the seminal book's title is "Purely Functional Data Structures", not something that's only three words long.
Not enough thinking leads to less consideration of alternatives and vaguer goals.

That being said, it's very, very difficult to dismiss mistakes, as wastes of time, as everything is a learning opportunity in the end. Of course mistakes have consequences related to resources (time, money, etc.), so it depends on how long your game is (and therefore how large of a margin for error you have).
An operating system that has more fundamental concept of "URI access" than "file system"; and which does zero-install of any application you type in the URL of, temporarily for as long as you visit the site, isn't really not a web browser, is it?
I wish they'll put some effort to make Linux client. Definitely a minus for me right now.
A very informal proof:

Let X = 0.999…
Then 10X = 9.999…

10X - X = 9.999… - 0.999… = 9 = 9X
Therefore X = 1.

Being able to do the subtraction infinitely is a little hand-wavy, but should suffice as a demo for middle and high schoolers.

More formal proofs involve limits that one wouldn't normally encounter until a course in real analysis.

Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...
Ok, Amiga was just an example I pulled off the top of my head.

I am not suggesting all legacy platforms need to be cut. I'm suggesting that it's possibly an acceptable risk, and also if a replacement UltraSPARC simply cannot be sourced, there can't be that many developers working on UltraSPARC anyway. (Just as an example)
"if you happen to care about app's performance, you will have to carry wstrings around"

If those strings are for the user to read, he's reading a million times slower than you handle the most ornate reencoding. Sounds like a premature optimization.
A group of congresspeople agree to have a candid conversation with you behind closed doors, and you publicize the details of what was said. Good luck getting another conversation with anyone.
Hangout with Jeff Atwood
Fascinating. I can live without any of them--especially the service that he's egoistically marketing.
The US was primarily agricultural, but there was quite a lot of manufacturing, commercial, and government employment back then. So I think that "at all" is putting it too strongly.
> no right-clicking text selection to choose from a dozen OS-provided services

Ah well, this stuff is added into the browser engine already in Firefox OS.
I'd guesstimate that the READ load is served practically entirely from RAM (file cache) and the WRITE load is non-critical enough that it's done "eventually consistent" (e.g. synchronous_commit=off in PostgreSQL, or fsync=off elsewhere) - or at least that's how I'd run it. YMMV.
There is one for religion too: anyone less observant than you is a heathen, anyone more observant than you is a fanatic.
In Go, you can name your variables in Chinese† if you want.

In Go, strings are immutable UTF-8 byte arrays,†† and the language provides facilities for iterating over them either byte by byte or rune by rune (a rune is an int32, wide enough to hold any unicode character).

†http://play.golang.org/p/skyEYhxWg3

††http://blog.golang.org/strings
> In that universe, you'd just be complaining that Unicode was Russo-centric.

Yes, obviously.

> It does not let you put more than 256 characters into a single byte in a character encoding.

Which I have never claimed. (EDIT: I think we're talking past each other: my point was that things like Huffman encoding encodes the most frequent data with the lowest amount of bits. I don't know how UTF-8 is implemented, but it seems conceptually similar. There is a reason that I didn't want to get anywhere near the nitty-gritty of this.)

> Okay. Complain about instances where it actually exists, and in discussions where it is actually relevant.

Oh yes, I will complain.
Neat to see some real functional code. Production deployment stuff, not small clean examples.

(Disclosure: I'm the bazqux user who asked about this. My question was more or less, "It's not an academic or school
project. Yet it is written in experimental language. Why?")
Oh, it does bring a lot to the table that C and Python don't have. You're totally right, it is not a middleground per se, it is just the language I was looking for.

If I try to answer your points:

-> 1) The procedure keyword comes from Pascal. I am not shocked by it, when I learned programming the teacher used to call them procedures also.
The 'var' in procedure arguments could be considered the opposite of the 'const' of C/C++. Everything is const by default in Nimrod, but if you want something modified in place you indicate it.

-> 2) Herm... I got nothing. I haven't used include, I didn't see the use for it yet.

-> 3) 'when' is compile-time, 'if' is at runtime.

-> 4) Unnecessary? varargs is quite useful. For example, if you use redis, you can do db.del("akey", "anotherone", "otherkey"), instead of having to fiddle with an array. Varargs makes some calls cleaner.

-> 5) "The idea behind this is that this allows programmers to use their own preferred spelling style and libraries written by different programmers cannot use incompatible conventions." from the Nimrod manual (http://nimrod-lang.org/manual.html). It forces you not to name functions and variables too closely. So you won't be able to have different things named myStuff and my_stuff because it will refer to the same variable or proc. You enforce your own writing style. That is debatable. You have others enforcing a style, like with gofmt. The case insensivity did not disturb me, though (but I admit it surprised me at first).
Its about being a great LOCAL corporate citizen. That is what the issue is about. There is a huge problem for lots of people in San Francisco, rent prices. People are being displaced at an alarming rate that would be much worse if it wasn't for some rent controls that were put in place. People are angry, they are being forced to uproot from a place they called home for many years. Who's taking their place? Well paid people working for the tech startups. Who do people then blame for their problems? Tech startups.

Now, the question becomes... do the tech startups get involved in the conversation and try to find ways to help the inevitable gentrification that is happening hurt those pushed out less than it otherwise would? Or do they just take the line the everyone is responsible for themselves, quit crying and get a better paying job!

There are real people being hurt by Silicon Valley, for no fault of their own. And lots of these people are very hard working people who just want to live in a nice place like everyone else. But because their 40 hour weeks only clear them a couple hundred bucks after taxes they get pushed out to some other area that is probably more crime ridden and dangerous. Other posters are correct, you get a very clear economic class system happening.
You do realize that there are successful companies storing massive amounts of data in NoSQL applications, yes? I guess you don't have to call key value stores and such "databases" if it bothers you.

If you're making the case that traditional relational databases are still relevant today, I don't think you'd find many who would disagree. Databases of the sort described by Cobb are as valuable today as they ever were. NoSQL land has lots of competing technologies to draw the magpies. MongoDB was hot before. Now it's not. So it goes.

But if you're trying to make the case that SQL is the only way to store data, you lack exposure to the variety of data out there. There are situations in which using a traditional relational database simply doesn't make sense. Would you really want to run, say, an instant messaging application with millions of users on Oracle?
I've done a ton of this type of stuff for the medical and insurance industry. I'm not looking to be a technical co-founder but if you need input I could definitely tell you what you need and what to look for.
As my geologist friend pointed out, a century ago many laughed at the idea of plate tectonics, but it's now foundational to earth science. As commenters have pointed out here, we do ourselves a disservice if we do not allow the discussion of other ideas.
Made even more apparent by a contractor having access to so many of their "secrets".
Top 5 Ways How Outsourcing Can Save You Money
If my hard drive breaks it doesn't delete the file from their servers. You'd need to have a hard drive break in a specific manner in which it corrupts the file and then have the corrupted file be replicated. Even then Dropbox maintains copies of all versions of your files for 30 days, so you'd have to not notice the corruption for 30 days in order to actually lose the file.
I didn't say that it was their fault that the NSA lied. Its their fault that secret courts, the Patriot Act, and a number of other things exist. Its also their fault that the constitution has been systematically undermined for the last four decades.

It was hilarious watching a bunch of congressmen feign disbelief when they know that its their fucking fault. Its depressing watching the public believe them. If they really didn't know this was going on, they would be trying harder now to stop it instead of passing legislation to solidify the NSA's position.

The only thing that we can be certain of, is that our elected representatives' response to these revelations is going to be disappointing, misguided, and inadequate.
Google Notifier killed
I always preferred Murry Hill to Holmdel. I found the architecture more interesting, and the copper roof to provide continuity in the history of the Labs.
MySQL was a Norwegian company at the beginning, but you won't believe. It's one of the worst products when it comes to I18N and especially to Unicode.
They still kind of store unicode text as a chain of encoded utf8 characters, if I'm not wrong. Their stupid command line utility still defaults to LATIN1 for input and output despite my locale clearly saying .UTF-8. People in their IRC channel still refuse to admit anything of this as a problem.
I'm sure they have their reasons and they've already carefully thought through all of the most common suggestions. The project's been around for awhile.
Very cool! Could this be merged into jQuery, or are there reasons why that's not a good idea?
Stripe targets marketplaces too: https://stripe.com/connect -- you have your work cut out for you!
And we'd love to list Netflix, but they don't want to play.
http://blog.tanktop.tv/2013/08/what-happened-to-netflix.html

We do list LoveFilm - which is Amazon's UK service. We don't list Amazon Instant because we're UK focused at the moment.
Professor on ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ dead at 89
Oooh. That's a nice idea. We might just do that.
WebKit.js: It's happening for real, with Emscripten's help | Badass JavaScript
In what scenario, exactly, do you want to know that the text "ØÆÅ" is three characters long? That's almost never a useful question to ask or a useful answer to have.
Background Noise plus Distraction-Free Writing
Be careful on both. The hard drive doesn't need to "break", you just need filesystem corruption. If the file is readable by the Dropbox client, away we replicate corrupted data. Also, there have been instances where Dropbox has been unable to recover lost data, 30 days or not. It's your data though, be as cautious (or not) as you feel you need to be.
Agreed - Different users will have different reactions. Some will want to see the reasoning at least when they have just started using the service, just to see if the service works for them, while for others, it might be clutter. I like how Nara's iOS app does this (although it too doesn't do it perfectly).. they show you the recommended restaurants for you. When you click on any one result, they have a tab which shows you why they recommended it. That way, its there for the users who are struggling to make the leap of faith but not in the way of those who already trust the recommendation.
Google founders OK to build private air terminal at San Jose
I think it's very easy to get into a mode of selling something that cannot scale. If it's genuinely valuable to the customer you might be able to figure it out, but if you cannot somehow get LTV - CoCA positive then you will die painfully.
Is there anything that WePay is offering that Balanced doesn't?
Fun stuff. The LED strips are particularly amenable to this sort of design. It makes me wonder when this will go mainstream and "of course that shirt has lights in it." is the norm rather than the exception.

I'm also interested in more static effects. I like the EL Wire on the suit at the end, have you experimented with translucent tubing and leds? That gives variable color "lines" of light. The sweat question is interesting too, its pretty hard on electronics and folks like Pebble seem to have just gone for the full hermetically sealed as a solution. Is there a market for a hermetically sealed and wearable Arduino? If you did your own battery pack I could see something which was 5" square and may 1/16" thick as the base system.
[scott_s@local ~] history | wc -l
500
[scott_s@local ~] history | grep ssh | wc -l
191

Donated.
EE BrightBox router hacked - bares all if you ask nicely
The Economist Special report: Tech startups
Excellent distillation of dozens of patio11 posts. The key, and what I think is the blocker for so many potential consultants, is the amount of human to human conversation that it takes. It is certainly a stumbling point for me!
I'm very interested. I've thought of bitcoin bots but haven't had the time really get into it yet.

just a couple of questions:

How long is it between ticks?

How easily will it be to get money in or out of your system?

Is there any long term storage assigned to the bots? (something that will survive a server reset)

Edit: I just realized that the example uses a storage variable. Can you give me details about that (how large, stable, secure, etc it is)?
Check out RethinkDB: http://rethinkdb.com/

Supports joins out of the box, and has much saner locking. It is in its infancy still, but I believe are coming out with a LTS release shortly.
Lots of operations people want to do on 'strings' don't make sense on unicode text. There is no 'length'. There is the size in bytes of various encodings and there is the number of code points and there is the number of grapheme clusters. The latter is often what people really want, but to get that you need to know about the fonts being used to render the text.

Similarly people want to iterate over a string character by character or take substrings by range but with unicode text that becomes iteration over code points and ranges of code points (unless you go all the way and use a text rendering system to give you grapheme clusters). Code points can be decomposed diacritic marks etc so you can't just blindly insert or change code points at a certain index or take arbitrary substrings without risking breaking the string (you can end up with accents on characters that you didn't intend, or stranded at the end of a string and probably plenty of other types of breakage that I can't even think of). Functionality exists to deal with all this but it's pretty burdensome (e.g. NSString has -rangeOfComposedCharacterSequencesForRange:).

That all adds up to a pretty hefty performance penalty as well as potential layering violations (needing to consider fonts and rendering when parsing some protocol if you really are going to treat strings as a sequence of grapheme clusters).
That's not true at all. I have a good friend who is treated for "bi-polar" (not the real term) disorder. He had an issue a couple of years ago. Granted, he didn't hurt anyone, but he wasn't stable. He got treatment and is a highly functioning member of society. He holds a full time job, has a wife and a child. Just because someone isn't completely disabled 100% of the time so that they are institutionalized or homeless (and should be institutionalized) doesn't mean they don't have real mental health issues. Its not an on or off switch. In fact, you wouldn't even know this person had an issue if you weren't told.

If you don't like sympathy, maybe you could try some empathy. I'm sure your high horse won't mind if you get down off of him for a while.
The way I'd put it is that software only matters when someone is using it and getting something they want out of it. Its value starts at zero on release and increases when you get more customers to use it. (Assuming it's not a complete misfeature.)
Ok I will be the one nagging here.MP4 you usaually refer to the Containerformat specified in MPEG-4 Part 12 and Part 14.My prof was so strict about that MP4 is not a videoformat, I still have nigthmares from the MP4 analysis... (There is a Box in a Box in a Box and you have to describe each and every property). Sorry for the inconvenience
Perhaps I am being too trusting of their service. Thanks for the wake up call. I'll back up my data.
All you libertarians aren't real libertarians unless you honestly answer the points raised by Geolibertarianism and Georgism. You should google both of those terms, but here's a good primer: http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

Another way to think about it is this: If you believe in the free market and it's ability to find the "right" price for everything, even the abstract (e.g. the time value of money), then how can you support a government enforced system that allows a finite amount of money to purchase an infinite amount of something, which is what ownership of land in perpetuity amounts to. Property taxes are a weak proxy for the time value of land, and is not determined by the free market. If we want a true free market, all land should belong to the commons, and we have a free market of long term leases. The proceeds go to the community pot (e.g. pay for government services, or checks sent to every person). Gentrification thus costs the gentrifiers and pays those who lose out. Please read the above link and understand the arguments before responding to my claims in this paragraph.
Already using this while coding and must say it is the best among the background noise generators!!
I haven't attempted to argue against public education existing.

I know you haven't; that's why I took the trouble to point out the implications of taking freedom of thought to its logical conclusion. Most people (including you, it appears) don't like that conclusion; but that necessarily implies that freedom of thought must have limitations. Any system of public schooling must violate freedom of thought in some respects.

Personally, I would be fine with abolishing the existing system of public schooling altogether, and replacing it with something like this: take the money that used to be spent on public schools and divide up among parents as vouchers. The parents can use the vouchers to send their kids to private schools, religious schools, whatever, or they can use them to acquire the resources to enable home schooling. (For example, the voucher money could eliminate the need for both parents to work, so one of them could stay home to home school the children.) But I don't see any realistic chance of a system like this happening in the US.

Also, to be fair, there are arguments on the other side as well. For example, someone upthread pointed out that public schools can help to equalize opportunities for children whose parents simply don't care about whether they get a good education.
Ignoring the political implications for prosecuting a congressperson for leaking on the NSA, you have a lot of legal precedent to overcome.

Article 1, Section 6 (the speech and debate clause) of the US constitution states:

"...and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they [Senator or Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other Place."

In the case of Gravel v. United States, Senator Mike Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record. This was held as protected.
what's your favorite graphic interchange format?