skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like most of what SA has to say, but I think PG is coaching him in response to, well, me.

I saw this Quora comment last night and it reaffirmed my suspicion: http://www.quora.com/Hacker-News/Why-does-Paul-Graham-have-a...

People respond more to anecdotes than hard data. PG did, as the Quora comment mentions, give the world an anecdote of a good guy winning. After 2001, there was a huge morale crisis (because of the same ills as what we see now-- unqualified idiots raising huge sums of money, carpetbaggers from finance swooping in and calling all the shots) in the Valley, and it took Paul Graham to raise the banner and reconvince people that what was happening out there was right.

A "good guy winning" story, in a society on the cusp of awareness of its own corruption-- that is, facing a morale crisis-- can be really powerful in bringing back hope. However, for each PG, there are lots of good guys who lose at that game, but I'm one of the few who spoke out and called it for what it was. Most people value their own success more. I value truth. I don't want anyone else to fall into the career-damaging trap of the VC-funded startup game. It's just not for our generation.

With PG's account and my account, the impression that all this makes is that, yes, 15 years ago (PG's time) the Valley may have been a meritocracy, but now (for my generation) it's just another corporate ladder-- and an inferior one to that of finance.

In order to prop up faith in the Valley's claims of meritocracy, PG needs a "good guy winning" from our generation, and someone who can write well and see the big picture. He needs that person badly, and I think Sam Altman is really good in the role.
> "If I buy a mug from the pound shop (for 1 pound), and the VAT rate is 20%, how much of what I paid was VAT?"

I calculated it as 16p, but I think if you are presented with a bill that requires paying VAT, the actual amount of VAT should be explicitly stated. VAT is always rounded down, so an implicit sum has lost some information, unless the total number of pennies is divisible by six.

> I don't think AAT is a government body.

Whoops, poorly worded.
It's the current record for the acquisition of a venture-backed startup
Quite impressive if this is all WebGL in a browser
What about figure 9 that shows sustained 60+ hour work weeks drop productivity to 45% that of a 40 hour work week after week 4?

What about it? My only claim is that the answer is complicated. I'm not claiming that 60 hours/week is a magical long term answer perfect for everyone everywhere in every industry. It's the 40 hours/week people who are making that claim.

Additionally, you are never going to find research that discussed the magical unicorns you describe and not averages.

Yes, it clearly requires a wizard riding a narwhal to compute quintiles.

Without the quintiles/ventiles/etc it's impossible to conclude that an individual can't work 60+ hour weeks. That's a simple fact about distributions. If the 100+ years of research don't provide that, it simply means that more work needs to be done because we don't know the answer.
!sp == StartPage.

That's usually my first fallback before going !g
Radiation-hardened quine
I discover/back most projects via following my activity feed on Kickstarter.
Short term gains for centralized pools of power != long term gains for humanity. They are going to mine the data in WhatsApp so they can optimize the way they sell to you.

What we need to be doing is mining the Moon for power. We're going to need it for all the advertising servers.
One of the co-founders, Jan Koum, had 45% of the company at the time of the purchase, which makes him worth about 6.8 billion.
I agree. I'm sure many people do in the committee even. Unfortunately C++ can't introduce breaking changes even though now we know better. I wish D or a similar (sane) native language gained some real momentum, since C++ is a "lost cause" in this regard (I can't deny that the new standards make it much nicer, the problem is the baggage that is called backwards compatibility).
That's an awful article. Huge auto-playing jerky videos which show you nothing useful interspersed with tiny paragraphs. Someone call Tufte and his chartjunk remover.
I don't understand what are you talking about. In almost every linux terminal you can scroll with PageUp/Down and with mouse on most X ones(ex.: rxvt, xfce-terminal). In tmux one can press ctrl+b -> PageUp and scroll with keyboard or mouse.

edit: corrected hotkeys
Re the prior comments, I based my view on the instances in Germany. The products are usually good and prices really low. Especially the chocolate clones of some brands are some 30% of the price and 90% of the taste.

Then again, I saw just recently a dirty one in Luxembourg, so my first comment should read "it depends" (which is kind of a non-comment) ;)
I wouldn't trust a 23 year old with little work experience to (really) know why "F500 executives work 80 hour weeks", if indeed they do...

And the "single most prevalent argument against working long hours", supported by research, is that there is more to life than just work and humans require a balance between work and other things that, unlike the author, they find valuable, e.g. love, family, friends, travelling, exploring and learning about interesting things unrelated to what you do "at work". There is also evidence showing that creativity comes easier during play time, not work time.

Nevertheless, I worked long(er) hours until I was about 28, and also at 31 because of my startup. The bottom line, for me, is that you end up missing out on life; unless there's nothing in your life but work, of course, and that, for me, is quite sad. And, like mrcharles, given the level of stress work I've been experiencing, right now I too feel anxious just thinking about coding (thanks man, now I feel more normal).
Yep, I wrote a few apps in WML. Here's someone back in 2000, (fourteen years ago now... wow) making the connection between WML and HyperCard:

http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/columns/mar2000/mobdev05.html
epic poem
The Story Of Sequoia Capital's $6.4 Billion 'Revenge' On Mark Zuckerberg
I've seen a lot of snide, dickhead comments on HN, but dropping one like that on a memorial thread for someone like Jim Weirich takes the cake.
I lost track of Sailfish several months ago... are they any better than Android when it comes to privacy and security? Is it feature-rich (some call that "bloated")? What about those Chinese investors?
It's the struggle to report more and more users every quarter that is damaging; this leads to the concept of users and their contact list as the property of websites and dark patterns like this.

Is there any evidence LinkedIn reports all members email contacts as LinkedIn users?

I have no idea if LinkedIn reports ghost users as real in annual reports but I'm sure they'll report users, and creating ghosts and deceiving users into thinking they are real will increase dramatically the number of signups for them, so it will help their overall stats, even if those people then do nothing with the account after they discover Robin didn't really invite them and should never have been on the site. This cult of collecting users as trophies or even faking them is both damaging to brands and user-hostile; in the long term it will fail and LinkedIn already has trust issues.

The g+ post just displays OP's confusion at "connect" really meaning "invite" in instances where contacts don't have a LinkedIn account.

The LinkedIn page is deliberately deceptive (showing a dead person as a member who can be added to someone's network), in an attempt to goose their stats and get more signups. There's no confusion here, and I'm surprised that you'd try to characterise it as that, deception might be a better word. If it means invite, it should say invite, and it should be presented as sending an email to a harvested contact, not inviting an already current LinkedIn member. This kind of dark pattern is where you end up if you trust certain metrics blindly and always make the modification which incrementally increases your metric (say user signups), regardless of other consequences. It is clearly designed to deceive.
agreed... i'm not sure if it's a consumer product (like twitter) or for developers... the .net throws me off...
The deal is only worth $18 billion if FaceBook can sell additional shares into the market worth $14 billion dollars without lowering current share price. Since the announcement of the deal itself influenced share price, such an opportunity seems unlikely. It's supply and demand. WhatsApp is in the same boat. They cannot dump $14 billion worth of Facebook shares into the market without likewise influencing share price.

Thus neither company values the deal at the headline grabbing number because the opportunity costs are low. Facebook doesn't have a lot of options to move that much equity and WhatsApp does not have a long list of potential buyers with $4 billion in cash plus the discounted value of Facebook equity.
Growland – Your guide to the growers world 
A forum where professional growers, suppliers, greenhouse managers, and specialists involved in the hydroponics industry can share experience and skills.
Humans have a natural response to vomit. Things that are vomited out may be spoiled foods or contain bacteria from the person who vomited it. This is why vomit is disgusting to humans.
It's some combination of loss aversion and the associated guilt that comes from negative consequences of positive actions.

There is a trade off: fully automated transportation (planes or cars) will eliminate routine operator error, like falling asleep at the wheel. On the other hand, there will also be corner cases which humans could (sometimes) handle that the autopilot didn't.

And human psychology means that not only will we weight the losses more heavily than the gains, but when losses happen and people die, we will feel unimaginably guilty over the losses, no matter how many people were saved.
I strongly dislike those books. I think LPTHW is perhaps good if you already know programming. Otherwise, he's just trying to get you stuck. Not what you need when you're already barely hanging on.

I also HATE how arrogant he is on the web. I dislike him as a person and thus can't bother with his classes.
It's deceiving users into evangelising its platform in order to increase user numbers.
>Bonus paid to GoldmanSachs' employees

Goldman Sachs has over 30,000 employees and earns over $8BB in profit a year. That's real money in the pockets of stakeholders.

But, as seems to be common on HN, I'll bet you think bankers are scum and the people at WhatsApp are doing yeoman's work, selling ads and handing data over to spying agencies.
The author fatfingered the "spam my contacts and ask them to join" button. It's annoying, but it's one step less evil than the games on Facebook that spam your friends without asking.
That's...not actually all that far.
Octocat event acceleration test
Flagged because the comparison of asset cost to operational cost is nonsensical.

It's like telling someone buying a million dollar apartment "but you could rent a mansion for a million dollars/year instead".
Thank you for your support! There is a danger of sounding like a broken record, but when it comes to Dropbox sync: We're working on it, I promise! :) Dropbox recently released a new API end point that allows for long polling which should allow us to do instant synchronisation both ways. It's on our todo list!
I'd give up growing and self-healing if it meant not having to constantly lift to maintain condition and being able to swap out for a replacement in 5 minutes rather than spending weeks or months crippled while waiting for a self-heal.

We aren't there yet either, but when judging practicality you have to include biology's failings alongside its strengths :)
amazing! it works also on my macbook pro 13" early 2011! :D
Essentially. IIRC there are a couple of negative feedback loops, one local and one involving the brain, and they usually limit you to about a 1/3 duty cycle for each muscle fiber. There are certainly ways that ratio can be increased, just yelling can increase the maximum force you can consciously exert by about 15%. I have no idea what the maximum is, but I'd imagine that going much further than what you're normally limited to drastically increases your odds of tearing something during exertion.

The reason chimpanzees can exert more force is anchoring, their muscles are anchored to the bone further form the joint so they have better mechanical advantage. A human has a much wider range of movement, though, and I believe we better maintain force under movement. So which a chimp might be able to lift themselves more easily, a human ends up being able to throw a rock or spear much further.

EDIT: Also, ekianjo is right that lifting cars is an exaggeration.
No people put morality over "success of other". Most of the time when talking about something convenient, or you own business, people manage to bend their own morality with "rationalisation" or "carefully avoiding looking at the fact".

Our world has slaves.
Ubuntu introducing locally integrated menus to unity 7
I was about to say...

It really helps your sales pitch for a whimsical and fun book when you are attractive and have a cute smile that seems full of joy.
Firefox 26 on Linux Mint. It works fine in Chrome. There is no scrollbar on the page you're viewing, either.
WOW :D
All caused by C compatibility, while trying to bring C developers on board with the "pay only for what you use mantra".

C developers tend to think on micro-optimizations and Assembly level before writing any line of code, even when it doesn't matter at all for the problem being solved.

C++ would be a much better language if C compatibility had been thrown out of the window. However, it might had not spread into the industry as it did.
It isn't open source if it discriminates based on endeavour.

http://opensource.org/osd-annotated
Here is one instance for Germany starting in 2016:
http://www.zdnet.com/deutsche-telekom-tweaks-plan-to-bring-i...

Here is British Telecom:
http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10495/~/bt-br...

And finally here is a list on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_Internet_provider...

Thanks for picking two countries that dont have caps. I guess I shouldve been clearer.
Alice is such a massive piece of garbage
Girl Scout Does Brisk Business Selling Cookies Outside San Francisco Pot Club
Don't worry - I have not heard of it either. $19 billion dollars. For that.
Oh god, never saw this one coming. This would be huge.
It's still an ugly, user-unfriendly tactic that potentially causes embarrassment. It's not evil, but nether is it attractive.

Ethically, it is comparable to food that tries to pass itself off as healthy, while treading the line on sugar and salt content, in order to appeal to unwitting customers. It may sell more, but it also deserves a bad reputation.

Each such optimization for the purpose of revenue has a social cost down the line. There is nothing hypocritical about attempting to lay that social cost on the vendor.
There's also a reason why we don't use Peltier pumps in refrigerators. Electrons are great at heating things, not so great at cooling them off.
>What we need to be doing is mining the Moon for power

This meme of we should mine Helium-3 from the moon needs to die already. This kind of thinking is so backwards it's astounding to me that anyone can come up with it. Why would we mine the moon for power that we can't yet use? No one is going to go to the moon to energy for a fuel source that might be in use in the future. It's like spending billions marketing to people in sub-saharan Africa before you have a product designed, much less built.
Thanks for open sourcing! Looks like a pretty great concept, best of luck to you guys.
awesome. I continue to be amazed at Google's breadth of ambition. If it works, which I assume it mostly does, I think it will be beneficial to most. Some (perhaps even some division of Google itself), will do something totally asinine and attempt to subvert the original intents of the engineers and designers who are currently involved. But that's what happens with any new technology that broadens access and visibility. I don't believe anything Google does is inherently 'evil' on its face.. unfortunately, given their reach, they are a natural access point for some federal agencies to execute their primary tasks, as they fall under the same vague, broadly defined national security laws as we all do. The only difference is that we don't run the Internet and its major consumer touch points. Google does and they need to make money from their capital investments. It would be smart to use it and do something cool.
The OP is not necessarily talking about operation cost here. For the cost of what Facebook paid for WhatsApp I could launch 4.6 million kilograms into orbit on a Falcon 9, which is essentially the cost of lifting the ISS. When you're talking about space, the cost of launching should be included in your asset cost, because otherwise you're million dollar satellite is worthless.
All of the recent Atom brand chips for mobile deployment are SoCs. There's a CPU, a GPU and a shared memory package on the same silicone. Intel calls it a SoC themselves [1]

[1]: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012...

Onstage was the world’s first public demonstration of the forthcoming 32nm Intel Atom SoC for tablets and hybrids running on Microsoft* Windows* 8, codenamed “Clover Trail.”
Sounds a lot like Google+ at the beginning. "We have 100 million users!!!" Well no, you funneled people using search, gmail, and youtube into some annoying screen where they clicked around to make it go away.
This was a joy to read, really good writeup!
Be Careful How You see Stress
Ask HN: Any examples of currying that's not toy stuff?
I mean, we've all seen the "add N to value" kind of examples.

Are there also any uses for the real world, or does it only apply to a specific kind of programming and is only relevant there?
This is misleading. 34 new cities in 9 metro areas are being evaluated for Google Fiber. This is far different than Google planning on delivering fiber to all 34 of these cities, like the article makes it seem.

Here is the information directly from Google: https://fiber.google.com/newcities/
I used to use it, when it was a service for mobile app landing pages. The twitter-replacement I've never tried.
Google reveals Smartphone with 3D sensors
This is really inspiring! I had no idea that Linda co-founded Rails Girls, and for some reason I had formed the impression that she was an illustrator before becoming a programmer. I didn't know that she had learned to draw so that she could create the book.

This advice is golden, and it's pretty cool to see such joy, enthusiasm, and generosity rewarded.
It's also useful for other purposes.

http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1ygcay/rarely_known_c_c...

These days all resources should be wrapped in some kind of manager class like std::unique_ptr so there's really no need to use function try-blocks for that.

http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/066.htm
Sure, because everyone has a Nexus 5.
Gluten-free grain mix and propulsion system win at SWIM pitch contest
Plan to divide California into 6 states advances ( State of Semi Valley)
I'm not sure WhatsApp is tackling the "many billions of possible combinations of human beings having conversations here on earth have never happened" problem. WhatsApp tackles the 'outrageously high SMS and MMS fees' problem.

Besides, the value in WhatsApp is mining the data for value. Eg. to target ads better, identify the key trend setters for special offers, discover what is trending, brand perception etc.
Certainly lends new meaning to the concept of "code smell".
Dependency injection using currying would be some real-world example.
Preferences -> Keys, see the heading 'Remap Modifier Keys'.

You can remap left command to left option, leaving right command as command so you can still cmd+tab out of iTerm. You might also have to to to Preferences -> Profiles -> Keys and on the bottom say that the left and right option keys both act as +Esc.

If there's a better way I'd be interested to hear it, but this works for me.
Thank you so much for pointing this out, Moretti! It drives me crazy when people talk about the extend feature like only SASS has it. People are always underestimating how similar Less and SASS are.
No. Looked at it a year ago, didn't feel like signing up.
JQuery injection for profit and profit
The interesting part (for me at least), and the real reason that you guys are having a debate at all, is because our notion of value is so far abstracted from human necessities these days that its hard to put a finger on what value is.

There are a few things that we inarguably need -- food, shelter, water, and so on. See the bottom two tiers of Maslow's pyramid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs .

It's the middle tier and above when things start to get fuzzy and hard to define. When most people globally were engaged in work towards the bottom, it was easy to understand the value that was being added (I grow food! I help myself and others survive!).

Now, when most people (at least in developed countries) are doing things towards the top of the pyramid or off of the pyramid entirely, its harder to define value. Money is one proxy (which you are using), but its probably a poor one. I would love to see better ones.
Funny to see shampoo and flush toilets on that list...
That still wouldn't be semantic. Their only reason for existing is for layout. If html/css were semantic you could write all of your html first without thinking about style or layout and then go do the css after, but that's simply not possible today.
I use it for Broadcast -- I have Broadcast set to send me a news story if it reaches 500 points on HN, and a few other sites that I like a lot that don't update frequently.
Oh, and since age seems to be playing a part in some of the discussion here, I'm 34 now, was 30 then.
The Summer Olympics games were really, really annoying.

I don't recall many doodle since, as I'm not using Google much and rarely from the homepage even then.
You definitely can--I do this all the time.

I do literally mean all the time. My current session has been running the same emacs process inside a tmux window for about 60 days now I think.
Makes me think that maybe I could write the code equivalent of "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" using Java
> Utah executive Christian Faulconer said, “Recording eight shows at once is, to be honest, a dream come true for me,

That quote made me double-check this wasn't The Onion.

Seriously, it's interesting that this includes no cities in the Northeast or the upper Midwest. I wonder what the reasons are.
Why? As far as I can tell, Emacs, when talking to an X server or otherwise drawing its own windows (i.e., not in a terminal), is a strict superset of tmux.
Well, this article is a complete waste of time, and it's #1 on HN, of course. What the hell, geeks can't help themselves. Seriously, people need to quit whining about stuff like this, accept it, and figure out how to solve whatever problem they'd like to see solved. The US economy is almost $17 trillion. Together, we're freak'in rich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

People will fund comic books, video games, etc on KickStarter. I think that market is approaching $1 billion. Perhaps, there's another multi-billion market for a private "space program", medical research, or whatever. Create more X-Prizes (http://www.xprize.org). They create a lot of value for the investment. You only pay the winner but you get effort all the participants.
If you happen to be copying with the mouse, tmux has prefix + z, which expands your current pane to fill the screen. prefix + z returns the screen layout to it's former self. Makes the need to copy easy regardless of layout.
I doubt it would ever have won, but the interoperability was (perhaps ironically) one of the nails in the coffin.
yeah, and I thought it was a bit odd that they were all sitting so close to one another
I never heard of it till this news came out.