skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is comparing indiscriminately violence to self defense against a specific identified person.

The lines are not that silly. Yes, you can defend yourself against someone pointing a gun at you. No, you can not use a nuke, or release biological weapons that kill indiscriminately everyone in the whole nation. Reactions should be appropriate to the threat, and indiscriminately violence is rarely if ever appropriate.
Need to pick up this book now — I appreciate the synopsis as lead-in to the larger discussion here, definitely worthwhile.
Neat idea. One potential downside: people like me, who are incredibly non-photogenic.
No need to break them up. They just need their virtually unlimited budget cut to the neighborhood of 1995 levels. A gas expands to fill its container. A political organization expands to fill its budget.
How children's understanding of gravity changes as they grow older
Nice idea + hot founder => 100k raised in 24h
I like the idea and I backed it. Book for kids can be as simple as picture books. Parents and mentors are the one supposed to help them to learn the hard stuff.

But I also want to say that I have some feedback for the video. I just thought there was too much "smiles". I don't know how to put it: but it's strange and weird to see someone posting a video of her smiling like literally every few seconds, throwing things every minute or so. A bit formal will be great.

There was too many moving. Scenes were constantly changing while the speech was on-going. It was hard to concentrate, pay attention to the dialogue and the animation at the same time. The main point wasn't delivered/pitched to me right away. I wasn't too sure what exactly would go into the book and how parents/mentors can help guide the kids in general from the video. Essentially, an ad that changes scene every 1 second is going to hurt viewers.

Here is another project (which I backed too), I am not trying to promote it (but putting out here is guilty of promoting it). Check wongfuproduction movie fundraising video on Youtube. That was a lot easier to grasp.

Just my 3 cents. Good luck.
Addition and deletion anywhere but the end seems overwhelmingly unlikely.
Gem Cutter for Open Quark CAL:

http://openquark.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_Framework
https://github.com/levans/Open-Quark
http://resources.businessobjects.com/labs/cal/gemcutter-techpaper.pdf
Mentors? Who in their right mind would mentor a criminal like this?
Couple things help this. Clock ticking, colors aren't known until late, it's part of the app (you could tap "back"). But honestly, many of these events we work with weren't scanning barcodes. They were just collecting the paper tickets (which obviously can be printed over and over again) because scanning felt overkill. It's not right for every event, but, think about a 50 person smoked-BBQ event at your local brewery -- they're having the event to build their community and scanning barcodes seems weird for them.
Google Science Fair 2014
That's the fact, Jack!
Institutional capital (eg, VC) - no.

An individual investor - maybe.

The VC game is pretty much a "hit driven" business; these guys expect most of their investments to return nothing, and count on 2 of 10 investments being big hits that return 10x or more, to keep their overall portfolio returns positive. As a result, VCs are not interested in funding a "lifestyle business" - they want to fund high-growth businesses.

That said, I think you should be clear on whether you really mean to say you're building a "lifestyle business" or if you're building a high-growth business where you just want to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Those two statements aren't necessarily equivalent.

The equation changes a bit for individual investors. They still want big returns, of course... who wouldn't? And they have to consider opportunity cost like anybody else - if they can invest in your company and get a 2% return, or put their money in a CD and get 3%, then why would the invest in you? Well, some might, because they are human beings and not cold, calculating machines who optimize solely for the maximum ROI. But if you aren't pitching a high-growth scenario and you want an individual investor to invest in your company, you may find that it comes down to them simply liking you on a personal level, or a desire to promote entrepreneurship in general, or other "soft" factors. And the investor probably won't be the kind of person who is part of an "angel network" (eg, a "VC lite") and focuses on tech startups... I'm guessing you'll have more luck with "random rich person I know, or somebody in my family knows" than somebody who thinks of themselves as a professional investor.
I'm a big fan of ShareLaTex, I'm always showing it to friends. It was very useful for me during my studies. I'm extremely happy knowing it is now under the GPL Affero license.
That looks cool!

By the way, the more I think about this, the less I seem to know even what a "language" is.

Is Lisp a language? No, it's a family of languages, but even Scheme is a language known for its minimal grammar and its infinite extensibility. A common critique says that one programmer can't understand another's Lisp code because there's such a great potential for redefinitions and domain-specific syntactic extensions. If Lisp has a slogan, it's "code is data." Is Lisp a meta-language, or even an anti-language?
I used your product to write my resume, and could finish it without having to learn latex top-to-bottom. Really an amazing product guys. Wish you all the best and hope you achieve great success!
I just thought of the possibilities of this being implemented in a classroom!

Years ago, I was a guest at my son's kindergarten's career day and I showed the kids how I could move around a cartoon mouse with Scratch. I'm not a great presenter or teacher, but the entire class, boys and girls, was completely engaged. They were tossing out suggestions and laughing and I'm convinced they "got" the basics. It was incredibly rewarding.
"It forms a sinewy band that's flexible, dynamic, and can be reused millions of times"

Doesn't say what kind of "reuse" they are counting.
I think pretty much only No. 2 is sufficient and almost necessary these days. That is if you have a community already, you can sell your project/book even if it lacks much substance(this project certainly has some substance and is a good cause).

If you do not have the early adopters who will also help you spread the word to secondary adopters, you are SOL.

There have been countless posts on HN where the author has made some amazing sales on e-book, SaaS MVP, apps, other software, and so on.

In pretty much all those cases, they already had some sort of community/e-mail list to kickstart(ahem) the sales.
How to be a Great VC
Any twitter follower you want to collaborate with would have to make a new Dropbox account, and that account wouldn't have access to any data that she already stored in a different application. So even if you made an app to bridge all these services, it would still be a huge pain.

Why is centralization a fundamental problem?
You can build trust! Blogs, email, the usual advice all applies, but you may also consider getting a professional take on design or at least adopting a framework (Bootstrap/Foundation).

People can spend plenty of time arguing the merits of those frameworks, but they were pretty much built for guys like you who are programmers and could use opinionated UI that's passed review in someone's design department. Use a theme/skinning site like bootswatch.com to throw in some variety with colors/typography and still have some thought put in the small details like "what should be the relative difference between your font sizes?"

Between your personal branding and the impressions created by first glances at your product, you can have some easy wins with credibility.
Legography
Good point. "Active" shouldn't be a binary term. It should be more like "active engagement". Technically I'm an "active" user of Google+ but I don't spend more than a minute on there if I can help it.
I don't see the visual language that comes with Lego Education's WeDo robotics listed [1]. It's a great language for teaching kids to program robots, my daughter (who is five) will sit for hours trying to make new things with it. It's not always robot programming, mind you, you can have it play sounds and present images in loops as well as make robots move and sense motion.

[1] -- http://www.legoeducation.us/eng/characteristics/ProductLine~...
Great point. The main difference is that Shopify is great at e-commerce but it stops there.

Stockor handles the entire supply chain from purchasing inventory to managing it and customer relations. You'd use Stockor to manage all your business processes behind the scenes.

Now that stocker's open-source I'd expect someone to write a shopify adapter for it. I've got an Amazon one already written that I'll be releasing soon.
You can't use folders as an analog to labels.

If I tried to understand English with a Swedish dictionary I would have problems as well.
Once information has been transmitted away from your device, it can never be undone. At best you might stop it from sharing future deltas, but once somebody has your data they will always have it as far as you can ever know.
> People are getting things done with Bootstrap every day.

That is not an argument for correctness of approach. If there arose a cult of builders who decided to pour foundations with wheelbarrows and bags of concrete rather than a mixer, I'd tell them they're doing it wrong no matter how many houses they built this way.
Don't Amazon services such as Glacier effectively guarantee you wont lose the data? (as in, they take proper offline backups and everything?)
so.. you don't like it because it doesn't let you lie on your resume?
Granted it's not "deleting" a character but here, if you haven't seen it: https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/attack_of_the_cosmic_...
The method call was coming from... inside the method!
Or, you could reword your comment (which I upvoted):

It's not "it's"! It's "its".
One of my banks (HSBC) uses sametime internally.
I think the important difference between Hypercard and the web is the all-in-one approach to Hypercard. You ship a stack and it works. Single environment and not a huge number of different technologies.

I don't think VB killed Hypercard. Apple never got color, networking, etc. working and put no effort into it. Hypercard would have died with or without VB.
> Article 12.

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
FWIW, memcpy(&anInt, &aFloat, sizeof(int)) achieves the same thing, is not turned in a real call to memcpy(), and doesn't not break the strict aliasing rule, and does not cause incorrect code to be generated with using `gcc -fstrict-aliasing`.
The practical advice in this post is gold. Marketing to a select community is true for apps as well as Kickstarter.
"Most people here recognize that growth hacking is necessary for a startup to grow. The users complain only when the tactics employed do not result in a better experience for them."

That's such a gem of insight and wisdom.
Latest version of Mac OS provides useful features at a low price point. Latest version of Windows provides Metro. You're surprised?
It looked similar. Can you highlight the differences from Raft? Is it just that state is small so it can accompany the various voting/heartbeat messages?
The number of personnel in the Army was cut approximately in half (ok, more like 35%) after CW and Gulf War 1; the spending (and headcount) lagged new enlistment to a combination of inflation and Congressional protection (and the process of separating people being slow). BRAC, etc. was quite real. Capabilities were approximately cut in half under Clinton, too

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004598.html is a decent graph of headcount. Reductions in force lag 4-8 years, though.

We did have a massive ramp-up post-9/11 -- not arguing that. I'm arguing that in the 1990s the military was on a downward trajectory, which was good, and it was cut substantially and in-line with previous cuts.

Personnel count is a more inflation-insensitive way to measure defense spending, IMO. Part of that is due to increased contractor use, but that really didn't kick off until ~2001. The US military in the 1990s was objectively declining in size, capabilities, and mission, as it usually did after a war, until they developed the "perpetual war on a tactic" innovation.

The IC was the area which was cut a lot, though. CIA under Clinton was basically dumping ground for incompetent liberal artists starting their careers, with political motivations -- sort of like a third-string law school -- which was fine since there was ~no mission. The Cold War era people were essentially either of retirement age, or shifted to the commercial world. NSA wasn't growing much, either. NRO, I believe, was in sustainment mode. The problem is they ramped up the IC post-9/11 and did it with those people, and then bringing in trigger-puller types, including lots of "crusaders" (super-religious, relatively uninformed, un-nuanced understanding of any of the issues) people. It's kind of amazing we didn't end up actually invading Iran or whatever.
assuming exchanging bitcoin with usd becomes illegal with big enough penalties for both sides, what value would a decentralized exchange have, except for illegal businesses?
Yep. His main blog is here:

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
Yeah, fuck that shit!
Very recursive!
Hah, don't get me started on the new "automatic categories". It made my work e-mail basically unusable. Github and JIRA messages would get sent to Forums/Spam/Inbox/Archive seemingly at random, even before hitting my custom filters.

Add Mavericks' Mail problematic integration with Gmail to that mix and what I had was useless filters, lots of important messages going to "the archive" without me ever knowing, and useless desktop notifications popping up for messages I didn't give a crap about. Pull requests mentioning me? Those would go to somewhere in the Archive. Completely random comments or commits on other projects I'm not working on? Yup, here, have a notification. Aaarggh!!!

Luckily I found a completely random rack that restored some sanity.
> Then hoping the overhead for not only zero-initialization, but the myriad of cmp's and jmp's and re-zero'ing for cleanup get optimized away by some data flow analysis handwavy

To be fair, with move semantics in C++11, C++ has started to depend on dataflow optimizations for zero-initialization (or, to be more precise, zero-deinitialization). After a value is moved, typical objects will zero themselves out so that the call to the destructor won't do anything, and they count on data flow analysis to strip out the zeroing out and the overhead of the destructor call.

(That said, I much prefer definite assignment analysis to zero-initialization. I tend to think zero values in general are kind of a wart in language design.)
I'll use a C example, GUI toolkits. Look at the code example for GTK+ at:

http://zetcode.com/tutorials/gtktutorial/gtklayoutmanagement...

All of the calls to gtk_fixed_put are of the form:

gtk_fixed_put(GTK_FIXED(fixed), button1, 150, 50);

For most applications, the leftmost argument is going to be exactly the same window/buffer/menu/etc. for several calls in a row. A shortcut version like this is nice if you are going to add 25 buttons to the same widget:

curried_put(button1, 150, 50);

You can do this sort of thing with curry, making a shortcut function.
A Fastmail account was the best technology purchase I made last year.
مباراة تشيلسى وايفرتون السبت 22-2-2014 فى الدورى الانجليزى .. محمد صلاح بالقائمة
To put it into one more perspective: ESA's Rosetta mission[1] ran over more than 20 years now and had a total cost of $1.4 billions (spacecraft, launch, instruments, lander, operations), which is 1/14 of WhatsApp.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft) (wake-up of the probe happened this January)
I know that's what they're worried about (assuming good faith on their part). The potential downside is not tiny[1], but the question is what change in the likelihood is produced by the change in policy. Remember that we are not talking about forgoing all intelligence gathering; we are specifically talking about focusing on HUMINT and targetted surveillance instead of mass surveillance. Resources spent on mass surveillance are not spent elsewhere. I contend that the change from shifting resources to mass surveillance is likely to be small (if it's even in the desired direction). And a small change is something I want to bear if it is the price of respecting the rights of innocent people, because I am not a coward.

[1] Though if we keep our heads - which is what I've advocated consistently - it can be small. Sadly, I don't think that's likely, but we should continue to push for it. Fear of terrorism is how democracies fall - anyone saying "you need to be freaking out about terrorism" is the enemy.
Out of Control Co-Workers clock each other in and out
Ask HN: I want to get out of finance but salaries scare me
I've been doing software development as a profession for about 8 years. I've done it for fun for over 15. I've worked mainly in finance, lately it's been predominantly in python. I'm very passionate about programming, but finance not so much. I'm currently making 200k a year. This isn't even a lot for finance, I have friends making double/triple+. I really want to move to a mainly tech company but unless it's a Google caliber I can't imagine keeping my salary. Has anyone made the transition? How did it work out for you? Any advice?
Flight delayed because schoolboy saw another passenger 'writing in Arabic'
Security scare delays EasyJet flight for two hours because schoolboy saw another passenger 'writing in Arabic'
> Meanwhile, the central actors Bitcoin doesn't have who received the trust that Bitcoin doesn't require ran into a smidgen of trouble running the bank that Bitcoin makes obsolete

Mtgox is not a centralized bank in the Bitcoin economy, has steadily been deprecated due to its ongoing problems, and long ago lost even a bare majority of Bitcoin/fiat turnover as people moved away from it (just as a distributed currency lets them easily do). Its problems are now between it and the customers who decided to bet on it in trying to take advantage of the famous Mtgox risk premium.

Bitcoin: working as designed.
Would really like to see a couple of starting pages from this book. I hope she has an idea about how to deliver this stuff to children: coding by itself is pointless for somebody who does not even comprehend the manifold of applications it can solve. Video games are fun, because they exploit the basic survival instinct within us. With programming, there is no low hanging fruit to reach for a child, as the mental link between writing code and receiving a reward is build by experience, which minors lack.

I find it hard to explain the fundraising which went way over the goal, without including gender into equation. Anyway – a pink-colored children's book about tech stuff, written by girls, sounds comforting in every way.
"This sounds like a great idea in theory, but in the current age of global communications I'm concerned that it's impossible to separate surveillance into "American" and "foreign"."

I've got an even better idea: No surveillance at all!

What do Americans gain from the all-encompassing, algorithmic surveillance? -Why precisely nothing, of course. On the contrary, they suffer massive losses in privacy.

So why is it done, then? -Not for the people's benefit, that's for sure.
Can you link to an example? I've never heard of this technique and I'd like to learn more.
CloudLinux OS
Where is anyone releasing a nuke or a biological weapon indiscriminately at people?
That's a fairly large assumption.
> Here’s the most important effect of this new trust model of trust-by-computation: no one actor is trusted, and no one needs to be trusted. There is no central authority or trusted third party in a distributed consensus network. That

That should be the future of the Internet, where we don't have to trust whether someone is a "good actor" or a "bad actor". This is also what is needed so we don't have "balkanized Internet" because we can't trust countries like US or UK to not spy on the rest of us anymore and get our data. If the network is built in a way that no one can be trusted, then the network can remain truly global again.

That's why I'm glad to see projects such as the Turing complete Ethereum picking up steam, and I'm hoping they succeed. I'm starting to believe more and more that the future of the Internet is going to be "Bitcoin-inspired" in a major way, and it will bring us a lot more distributed trustless applications than exist today on the current Internet, making it a lot harder for "bad actors" to exist in the network, be that for-profit hackers, "cyber terrorists" or even malicious governments.

It's also what will save us from the evil of certificate authorities, the OpenSSL monster, and other such patched up security tools that are meant to protect us right now, yet mostly fail to do so.
Yeah! Yet there is no way to configure that sort of stuff. I mean, we've apparently already committed to a Kitchen Sink effort in the damn General tab, why can't we have rules to manage that stuff in there, too? Instead, I've got my phone bouncing at me like a schipperke with spam from websites I had the unfortunate circumstance to have actually signed up for.
Yeah, this is just the response pattern happening with every one of these 20 billion dollar exits lately. People should just get used to it and stop thinking about it too much.
For pretty much anything anyone could describe as a "web application" if you have the HTML for your sidebar copied around 20+ pages instead of stored in a common template somewhere, you have bigger problems than whether your HTML is semantic.
Yes, I would agree that should be a fourth point. Another point along those lines is her work with Code Academy and all of her connections there.
Yeah, that's awful.
Naw, evolution gets an Abraham Lincoln ==):-)=
I'm not gonna argue this is cool, but an iPad Mini is 249€ and you have larger support of "apps" (web or native). Sure, it's not waterproof and you have to have it connected most of the times, but you get a color screen and better touch capabilities.
Somehow a lot of core libraries manage to be major version binary compatible, through things like pimpl. I don't see why device drivers couldn't as well, I think it is a sound compromise.
Still, imagining that I already got it and what should I do now would help me to accept the risk.
Patio11, I have much respect for your work and _love_ reading your email digests, but your comments of late about Bitcoin have such a decidedly negative slant that they become hard to digest at face value.

Yes of course businesses built around the Bitcoin protocol will melt down occasionally, as many businesses do within the course of operation -- but don't you see how your attempt to conflate Bitcoin businesses (Exchanges, specifically) with a discussion about the new model of trust employed by the p2p network is probably a bit deceptive?

Yes, Bitcoin is scarce and therefore commands a market price. Commanding a market price has some qualities that suck. One of them is that you have to deposit assets in a market to keep an order book to discover a price. This is fallible. But it has nothing to do with how we (the human race) have discovered a way to create a scarce and transferrable peer to peer asset over the internet. Perhaps you should stop and consider how you can personally deconstruct some of the negative bias you have against Bitcoin in your public discussions of such.

Much love.

[Edited for grammer]
Pretty cool, much simpler than Nitonal (aka Muscle wire). Sigh, and another cool thing to build in my "spare" time.
What's the story here? I'm always willing to purchase software if it's actually good.