skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I mostly agree with your larger point, but I'm not in love with your examples. The Mandelbrot set does consist of readily verifiable discrete data points, after all. I don't have any problem imagining myself developing a Mandelbrot set program using TDD.

A great example for your point (which might have been what you were getting at with the audio thing) is a test for creating files in a lossy audio format. The acid test is if it sounds right to a human being with good ears, I've got no clue how you would write a pure computer test for that.

In my own work, a great example is finding a NURBS approximation of the intersection of two surfaces. There are an infinite number of correct answers for a given pair of surfaces, and testing that the curve you've generated fits the surfaces is a distressingly hard problem.
I wouldn't say that it has anything to do with the competence or skill expected of a professional.

It's more a matter of decorum.

Edit: I recognize that there are those who would like to load more connotations onto the term, but I think that even the above definition is just a bunch of marketing fluff promulgated by those who stand to benefit from people believing that they'll get a better result from paying someone to do something rather than doing it themselves.
Android PCs and other Windows-alternative desktops are for real
Well, I disagree here. This does not have an awfully big downside. It has a much smaller downside than Monsanto style genetic engineering, or just trying some new random poison.

For something in biology, genes are very well understood. Targeting them has much less harmfull potential than targeting proteins, untargeted attacks, or spaying things that nobody understand the working.

Anyway, I agree that it's the wrong direction to go. But it's the one that's profitable for the research center.
it depends precisely what your goals are, but assuming you want to get some traction and data, i strongly encourage you to launch free. we would have if we could have afforded to (as we have hard costs associated with our product). once we were able to convert to a free model, our usage went up on the order of 20X.
I guess these correspond to what mathematicians and the like call "trivial" and "non-trivial".
The cool thing is Ev is rich enough now to pay back the full $25M personally if he decides to pull another Odeo/Twitter.

...though I imagine most investors will keep their money in play this time :-)
> GTFO is crass and doesn't belong in internet standards.

Oh, STFU.

Seriously, though, I see the point. I'm kinda torn on issues likes this. On one hand, language in a standard, particularly as it relates to implemented messages, should meet some minimum level of decorum and avoid colloquialisms. On the other hand, stuffy language battles are pointless and distract from the primary goal of releasing a usable standard with usable error messages. On this particular issue I lean towards the former winning out.

Edit: someone else mentioned the word I was trying to think of.
If the storage _wasn't_ separate from the client, wouldn't access time performance top out around the same levels as, e.g., Freenet?
Looking forward to this - the current design makes mirroring fail for most people, and mirroring is very important for our app.
But you decide to not provide additional information. You knowingly settle for not providing actual arguments to back up your claims.

Do you think that these qualities are what Ukrainian people would want their society to be based upon?
Doesn't seem like anyone is so much upset as advocating for a reasonable change to remove an unnecessarily crass and unfunny joke from a standard.
I've started using FB messaging - I live in New York, in a basement, and frequently hang out in places with plenty of Wifi, but zero cell signal.

In that situation, I cannot send or receive SMS messages, but FB, etc., work just fine.
"Faith-in-technology" would seem to imply that I have a moral response to this. I don't. It's at best neutral, and at worst, terrifying. But I think it's also true; traditional biological evolution has an enormous head start on technological evolution, and it's got some massive parallel processing built in, but it also has some pretty significant limitations. Eventually the head start and the parallel processing will not be able to overcome the significant limitations. Eventually from a sheer information theoretic point of view, technology will simply be able to process more bits than evolution can, faster.

This has nothing to do with whether this particular tech is a good idea or not; I highlight it as an interesting example of the sort of thing where we're going to get a permanent upper hand on conventional biological evolution. Eventually, even the ability to adapt in "one generation" is going to be too slow for biology to keep up. There's other research fields beginning this journey too; some of the latest cancer fighting tech begins to verge on this too, for instance.

And I keep saying "biological evolution" because there is no escape from the general principle of evolution; if we all become cyborgs tomorrow, but do nothing to curb our warring tendencies, cyborgs will most assuredly evolve. But it will be of a different character, driven by intelligence rather than totally random chance.
One thing that's bothering me about the svbtle interface is the crazy contrast. Especially all of the white on the background, when I'm thinking I prefer lots less noise in my environment.

In svbtle, there is a lot of really bright and really dark areas, and I find this to be very distracting and annoying. Ideally for me, the whole website would be a lot darker and the text and boxes would be just bright enough to be visible, not full white but a more tame grey.
Understanding by the greatest possible number of people should be the goal here, in my opinion.

GOAWAY makes plenty sense when compared to GTFO, assuming that not everyone who learns of it intentionally is well-versed in that of which GTFO is a relatively smaller part. Grandma wouldn't necessarily get GTFO (right away, anyway) but she would likely pick up GOAWAY in a snap.

Of course, the above assumes a section of people who are fluent (enough?) in English to grok the spec.

EDIT: Grammerr.

EDIT: Clarification in response to Vonmoltke.
> Hacker News comments don't require the blood, sweat, and tears involved in writing a 1,000-word well-edited essay.

Some people do take the time to write well thought out replies.

> Hacker News comments aren't used by the owning website for potential profit.

I'm going to disagree. HN profits GREATLY from your participation.

> Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways

Not likely. Comments from an engaged community (no matter how cynical at times) still drives traffic, and that is a powerful in and of itself.
There are many applications delivered on the Windows platform. .Net platform, SQL Server, AD, ADFS, etc. I haven't cared about OS religious wars for a long time, dollars drive decisions for infrastructure and applications.

Why RHEL? Commercial apps are certified to run on it. Its easier to hire people who know it. There's a manual and vendor guidance who will recommend the "right" way to do things. I'm not going to stand up an application generating a few million dollars a year and discover during an outage that some change in Ubuntu breaks the app.

I love Ubuntu, and use it a lot on my personal projects. But in my professional experience, I've seen plenty of cases where some talented SA sets up a "special snowflake" Ubuntu/Debian environment, then leaves. The company is kind of fucked when nobody understands how things work.

My experience is from enterprise environments. Obviously in startups things are a bit different.
He probably just wanted to be listed on GitHub as a 'Contributor' to the http 2 spec.
I personally am a fan of professional tools breaking away from the need to be serious all the time.

It is just that I experience joy when I find little things like GTFO in the world which not only make sense in their context but have a bit of humor. So I guess I just disagree with the idea that standards should not contain anything crass.

Also I have a question concerning the 4th point as I am admittedly unfamiliar with the HTTP 2.0 spec.

"GTFO, if it really stands for "General Termination of Future Operations," has a surprising definition and may produce confusion. We should strive for absolute clarity above all else in editorial changes."

Can someone elaborate on what the confusion it would produce would be?
The type of people that actually get offended by this stuff are rarely those involved with actually working with the protocol.

I like this stuff. It reminds me that humans with a sense of humor build the things we use everyday, and not some emotionless robot.
And GOAWAY is not clear and understandable from its name?
I did before - multiple times.
Danger of Listening to Michele Bachmann
Not true. That purchase will lead back to the store you bought it from. Which could be a problem.
C is willing to hide a lot of numeric type casting details about doubles vs floats vs unsigned ints vs chars behind the magic of the "+" character, so maybe you're willing to endure a lot more type-dependent compiler magic than you're letting on here, despite so graciously speaking for many other C programmers. In fact, "p+1" might very well mean "p+4" if p is an int. Or maybe it means "p+32" if p is a FILE (on my compiler). Or maybe it means... Wow! Wait a second! That seems pretty type dependent to me, come to think of it! But that's just my opinion.
The Wrath Against Khan:  Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy
It's all about distribution. I agree.
Hey B0Z - thx for the interest and honesty haha. Unfortunately don't have android yet, but will be in the works soon!
We should get rid of HTTP status 418 as well. It is humorous and humor is unprofessional. /s
Vinod Khosala should allow public access to the beach with slight modification. Just charge $3000 access fee per person. If state didn't mind previous owner charging $3, charging $3000 should not be issue.
I played Eve for over 3 years, including as part of large alliances in some (now historical) wars.

It never stops being tedious & boring and it never stops being an economic grind.

My dream is for a space game that's actually fun to play and explore in, but allows the same richness of player interaction/cooperation.

Maybe someday.
Yep, that's a picture of a Dumeril's Boa. Not even in the python family...
Ask HN: Will we be using Unix derived OS's for the next 50 years?
I like USENET too. Information should be organized in that way. It was just too old. If we put the search engine of top of that with a nice graphical UI, that'll be a lot more help.

This is what I'm always thinking about since 1997. Now I got the chance to put together something for people's daily life, but not perfect. It's in early beta now. http://kck.st/JNqv8z
Maybe that is something RSS is for.

In addition to that, I've found Google+ to follow some of the people that write about topics I am interested in.
Persistent Downtime Message?
Since the outage, I still receive the downtime message when I click either New or Hacker News.

Anyone else experiencing this or have any ideas of what to do to fix?

Windows 7
Chrome Version 32.0.1700.76 m
How projects use pull requests on Github
You've got to give them credit for their SEO strategy.
Good. Glad to see this change.
Right, because normal, balanced people don't expect customer service anymore.
The End Of The iPod
Markdown only? That's not "getting out of the way", it's limiting the ways of expression. Getting out of the way is providing simple defaults, why not depraving those who need more tools (HTML/CSS) of richer features.
Do you use any service to invoice customers after getting paid with Stripe?
Buying Windows == Buying HyperV. They are one in the same.

The argument for HyperV vs. VMWare is the same as KVM/Xen vs. VMWare.
SpaceX Mission Overview | THAICOM 6 Launch
"catch" or "cachet"
Simplifying your Django Frontend Tasks with Grunt
I like Medium's better because it's a story. It's got some emotion behind it.
Professionalism is much more than competence and/or skill, just like good sports is about good sportsmanship too.
How to install and run Linux on a Chromebook
"I used to admit that I pirate..."

From my personal observations, this is the only thing that's changed. As the copyright industry is so eager to make examples of those they deem worse than murderers, sharing is driven underground, folks use VPNs, darknets and private trackers, but are they really sharing less?
Ask HN: How to post under Ask section?
Not able to do it :( ..always post goes under New.
Ultimately HTTP 2.0 is like IPv6, no-one actually cares.

Having said that, people do get upset about 0xDEADBEEF and 0xCAFEBABE, those people need to get lives. Or come up with some other words using only 6 letters.
I've seen in print listings of the largest by market cap for each decade, but after considerable time on google was unable to find it.

The DJ is a reasonable proxy of it, though, as it's meant to be representative of the economy, and so by its nature will mean the biggest ones.
If we're really talking clear and understandable, id wager more of the world would understand FUCKOFF than it would GOAWAY, for example.

English profanity has a tendency to be better understood by other languages and countries than the appropriate western vernacular.
The Most Beautiful Sound In The World – FNBMG
You are correct sir.

I'm with you...I think that they should have open sourced a lot of the supporting software around windows server. I wouldn't really care if the source was available, it would be nice, but I personally think that System Center should be free to any customer with more than 100 servers.
Could be to get people who he respects around the table looking at it? Nobody is an island and I've see plenty of folks who raise money more to get talent at the higher end (e.g. Atlasssian raised $60m, to get the right people to help it continue growing and assist in the speculated IPO to come).
Software Engineering Middle Management: Toxin or Cancer?
What an interesting story.

Did anyone here ever meet him?
All standards should be crass.
There is a great moment in Stroustrup's talk when he shows a short error message in ConceptGcc and the audience applauds.

It seems that Stroustroup was suprised by the applauses.
Monad transformers and stacks of them are pretty standard though it's something library writers engage with more often than "users".

There are more adventurous and specific ways being explored to handle things like "effects", but that exists mostly in SHE or Idris.

mtl is still the practical way to go for now.

I keep wanting an excuse to futz around with this: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/layers
What future can bitcoin have if more and more countries will ban it?
6) if you go to a public WiFi point, leave your phone at home.

7) On the way there do not fill up at a gas station, do not use the subway with an identifying pass.

8) Thwart cameras, try to disguise yourself, but in an inconspicuous matter.
Should I stop using NFS, or should I remove the Linux kernel from my filesystem?
Show HN: A simple URL shortener in Scala
Build a mini web app in your browser and learn Local Storage
Only if the legislation there also permits doing away with ineffective measures. Not to mention that this will then lead to a push for more effective ones.
Just to make sure I understood right. I read some translation of your post, and I think translation was not 100% correct, so I wanted to ask you.

In your phrase “So the company began the process of forcefully moving developers who'd worked on Linux for over 15 years to platforms they felt uncomfortable and unproductive working on”, you meant that developers who wrote code for the product for Linux, were forced to start writing code for Mac/Windows?
Not that they were forced to change their actual development environment OS from Linux to Windows or Mac?

Thanks in advance.
this person is amazing! I remember the 180 websites in 180 days project and it's so encouraging to see how far she has come.
Extract the Images From Any App in the App Store
You had me at carbon fiber.
Even after launch the struggle remains to balance between exposure and financial gain -- should you offer a free trial or a free tier?

From the question I'd presume the product will be paid in the end and not supported by ads and external revenue stream. Given this I don't think one can test the market-product fit without actually charging money.

There are exceptions, think big social launches that turn into businesses (like Ghost blogging). For me this always seems rather hard to pull off. Like expecting that at launch day there will be 10k signups.

See this for one take: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ab-test...

To answer your question, it highly depends on the nature of your product, business model, competition and financial backing. So I do not have an answer, more like a ramble to help clean up your head.

One thing to warn, at least in my experience it is very hard to turn free users into paying one (conversion-wise) (free tier case). Free tier user and paying user have very different characteristics. Yet a lot of successful SaaS companies do have free tier. At the same time there are successful known companies who have removed a free tier (and/or doubled-tripled pricing without any public post to notify new users). I'd guess existing users at least kept the pricing.
The most impressive thing I find about the creator of yumhacker is that she just does what she wants to, even if she doesn't know "how" to do it she eventually figures it out. From her 180 websites to 180 days challenge, to this.

That kind of "Just F*$king Do It" attitude is so rare to find.
This looks extremely useful - thanks for sharing!
Top 10 lists might be the lowest form of journalism but accepting articles as top 10 lists allows us to avoid the "fake article that actually is a top 10 list" situation. A nice price to pay.
I'm rather partial to surf myself, which you can find at: http://surf.suckless.org/ . It's best suited for *nixes under a tiling WM, so YMMV.
Right now, Medium is little more than a nicer looking Blogger. But they are vying for the future of online publishing.
You're presuming that the people who come up with these fantasies know anything about history besides "Jesus was born in 0 AD."

Yes, I'm aware that 0 A.D. is not a thing.
Just wonderful, congrats!
Tom Perkins discussing Kristallnacht, Class Warfare, Watches
Sorry, it's for UT Austin PhD students only.
Chvrches is awesome!
The scary part for me is uncommenting it, because the code has been removed from normal QA and testing (automatic or manual) and you don't know what evils you are unleashing upon the world.
This is a very good summary. Coming from a different angle I can relate to most of these points. The biggest issue is that people there view the USSR as the height of Russia, and pro-Russian Ukrainians are glorifying what Ukraine was as a country when it was a part of the USSR. Remember, the propaganda machine was incredibly strong in the USSR. People were constantly told that the USSR is the greatest country in the world (much more so than in the US being told about exceptionalism). People there grew up on the idea that communism was the one true way.

Another point: most people currently in power in Russia and Ukraine were either members of or had strong connections to the communist party. You can change the form of government all you want but if you don't change who is in power can you really expect different results?

Finally, it is extremely important for Ukraine to break away from Russia and define its own identity. It is hard to provide an adequate metaphor for what 70 years of communism did to Ukraine as a country and Ukrainians as a people. As one example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor. If Ukraine was to give in and be absorbed by Russia, the Ukrainian identity would be destroyed. I do not see that kind of ambition coming from the EU, which is why I am in favor of more close relationships with the west.
Hopefully that means better software support. The newest update has a bug with video playback after using iTunes Radio, video plays "through" the UI and no way for me to downgrade.
Commit 15 Minutes to Help a Student Break Into Your Industry
Jason Calacanis launches Inside, a mobile news-curation app powered by humans
Compare Skydrive
I wasn't supporting the notion that corporations have "hundreds" of titans sitting around waiting to be activated. I'm just saying that I would double or triple your number and I would be more likely to agree.

The last report I saw suggested over 70 titans destroyed. You don't commit that many highly expensive ships to a battle unless you can replace them, or you are really really desperate to keep that system.

Also, keep in mind that this is apparently just another skirmish in a war that's been waging since October where dozens of Titans have been lost so far.
Professionalism requires some decorum. Imagine if doctors called the release form the GTFO papers. If we want respect in our profession we have to stop acting like all we care about is pizza, red bull and acting like little teenagers.
Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to track my productivity
We didn't have a choice last time.
Putting the startup accelerator model to work for non-profit world
So when's a dogetipbot hitting HN?
Insert as many 9s you want in 99.9%, it'll still be a finite amount, so it's not "aways".
Indeed, I meant Square, thanks for catching that.

Funny name confusion, they're both payment processors, one deals with magnetic stripes and the other one is named Stripe.
Good move.

GTFO is less than ideal not because of the F, but because of the association with the "Tits or GTFO" meme.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tits+or+GTFO

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tits-or-gtfo
Perhaps it would be better for everybody if "professionalism" focused more on competence and skill, and less on politically-correct bullshit.
Work where you have comparative advantages
but I have the default messenger on 4.4.2?
I use freshbooks [0] and it is awesome. They also have integration options with stripe [1] even though I personally have not used it yet.

[0] http://www.freshbooks.com

[1] http://community.freshbooks.com/addons/view/stripe/
I think this is a good change because GOAWAY is simpler, more obvious, and has a tone matching the actual operation. Plus, the har-har pretense that GTFO means "General termination of future operations" is childish.

With that out of the way, the pearl-clutching about the word "fuck" and how unprofessional it is irritates me. We have this weird notion that it's OK for us to curse individually but that there's this wider world out there that hates cursing. I don't think that's true and we should stop acting like it is. More generally, I think this almost arbitrary division of professional vs unprofessional things [1] does a big disservice to actual differences in professionalism like courtesy, personal responsibility, and reliability. "If you follow these silly rules, you can pretend to be an adult!"

[1] Joel Spolsky has a great essay about this that I wasn't immediately able to find. It mentioned, among other things, how silly it is that the smell of popcorn is said to be "unprofessional".
They do support code blocks (cmd-6), but unfortunately, they're not styled in any other way (syntax highlighting, etc.) which makes code blocks somewhat unpleasant to read.
Please, won't anybody think of the science?!
Heh. My mother did in fact program in binary (well, octal), back in the 1950s. Even assembly is a "high level" language from that perspective.
Does anyone know what 'tbm' stands for?
Though, I must admit guilt in this as well; that time I 'contributed' to CoffeeScript by fixing an ascii art inconsistency in the cup of coffee's water vapor in the README:

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/pull/3193
Angry Birds Developer Fires Back and NSA
I like the idea...but I wish the site did more. What features are you adding next?