skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fascinating story of the growth of a giant. I wish they hadn't glossed over the early growth of the company and how it grew during the Cold War and the divide in Europe. Anyone know any more about that part?
API Talent Agencies
The original system was purchased via contractor work and then maintained/expanded by an in-house employee who later managed two additional developers. That employee then left and the company decided it needed to find an experienced development manager, which is when I was hired.

The first two years were essentially triage efforts to at least introduce some modicum of dependability and scalability while trying to avoid wholesale rewrites. Eventually some C-level management changes along with a couple of years of my insistence that delusions to the contrary we did not in fact have any in-house design talent, the company decided to finally address the woeful usability of their product and hired a usability/design firm to create a new front-end. Given that most of the original code entwined presentation, models, views, and sewage plumbing completely this was the opportunity to re-architect with the caveat that we wanted to limit the scope of that effort to purely customer-facing areas, because the homebrewed in-house "CRM" was at least as craptastic as the customer side of things but was a much larger codebase and dealing with a ground-up change was a recipe for disaster.

So in effect we have two systems running in parallel, with rational database design and separation of concerns on the customer side along with duplication of data into the older database to minimize impact on the internal stuff. The efforts for rolling replacement of the legacy system will then continue, removing a noun and associated verbs one at a time. Basically performing the old Ship of Theseus trick, except at the end a wooden row boat will end up a powered steel-hulled yacht.
Heilmeier's Catechism, item 4 and 5:

* Who cares?

* If you're successful, what difference will it make?

R.W. Hamming on problem selection: "[I]f what they were working on was not important, and was not likely to lead to important things, then why were they working on them?"

"About four months later, my friend stopped me in the hall and remarked that my question had bothered him. He had spent the summer thinking about the important problems in his area, and while had had not changed his research he thought it was well worth the effort. I thanked him and kept walking. A few weeks later I noticed that he was made head of the department. Many years later he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The one person who could hear the question went on to do important things and all the others -- so far as I know -- did not do anything worth public attention."
Well, they also assert that the supposed number of accounts (35,000~) doesn't qualify as "massive".
A friend sent me a link to this and I thought it was a great idea. Kudos.
Did the guy (Otto) pay for front-cover or did Forbes randomly picked up a successful billionaire who made up himself in the period of the German economic miracle?

I mean, there's nothing attractive to this story: Amazon is bad on workers and Otto is good, won't get you far. Especially in the Anglo-saxon world.
Except the copyright owners aren't giving anyone anything.

If Disney put up, front-and-center on their website, a download link for Frozen, saying, "It's our gift to you! No strings attached!" then your analogy would work.

When I do a favor or give a gift to someone, I do it out of the kindness of my heart, or because I care about the person I'm doing the favor for. But when I show up to work and perform my duties, I expect to be compensated. Furthermore, even if I _do_ do something out of the kindness of my heart (like staying late to cover an absent employee's shift) I still expect to be compensated.

There's a time and place for volunteer/charity work, and there's a time and place for compensated work. If everyone just did favors for others, there'd be a lot more people who get screwed over (and also less incentive to do very technical work)
Evolution of ideas doesnt follow your notion of "thoughtfulness". And remixing content, apps and ideas is great way to add value with relative small investment of time/money.
Wait.. so what can I do if I don't use a Mac?? I feel helpless!
This is awesome and it works great on iOS's Safari!
Fun game, hooked me for longer than I'd have liked. :)

Curious why you chose HTML5?
using the original sound source wouldn't work with the slomo effect he used.
Yes. I agree. I hope this post gets deleted asap. That's why I flagged it and comment on it :-)
How often is it repeated on HN that ideas are great and important, but implementation is the key? Why is it a problem if there is more than one version of the same concept? What if some people just aren't creative but are great when it comes to execution?

More important, who are you to complain about what other people are making?
Coding a biometrics system using photoresistors
Awesome site! This could really open up bitcoin to a lot of people… Wish I had thought of it :)
Would you support someone stealing a MacBook Pro or a Microsoft Surface?

I mean, both Apple and Microsoft are filthy rich, so what's a few thousand?
Can, uh, can someone please explain me how exactly you end up with a hundred mails in inbox? Every day?

This is a genuine question, please bear with me. I follow several high-traffic mailing lists, and I use e-mail as my primary means of Internet communication, because I started using it back when ICQ wasn't all the rage yet. But they're all tidied up and filtered. Checking my e-mail in the morning takes, what, five minutes, plus 10-15 minutes or so of reading messages from the mailing lists that I actively read because they're really important for my work. Every couple of days or so I spend maybe another thirty minutes skimming the other mailing lists, but an hour of e-mail is pretty much something that I've never done. Do various service-related e-mails pile up, like Facebook's neverending stream of notifications? If so, why is this news-worthy?

I regularly hear about it, and regularly hear that Gmail is particularly adept at dealing with this. I don't use Gmail; I have an old account there, opened when it was still invitation-based because every techie had to have one of course, but I'm not really sure about what else it can do other than, you know, filter messages. Are there any additional capabilities here?

And, Interwebs, please don't take this the wrong way -- I'm not trying to put up the smug l33t h4x0r attitude who doesn't understand how kids nowadays misuse computers, I'm really trying to understand how people use e-mail nowadays.
Happy birthday world wide web
this is great! any mobile app?
Epic Games and Mozilla are demonstrating how the Web is continuing to evolve as a powerful platform [..]

And you're still using a youtube embed because a single, simple tag like <video> is too effin' problematic.

Yeah yeah, I get it. <video> isn't relevant to gaming. WebGL and gaming are cool new stuff, <video> is prehistoric crap nobody cares about anymore. The world has moved on.
> Chromium OS, for example, could have been forked and used in a lot of cool ways but that hasn't happened yet and I doubt it will.

Well, there's CoreOS, though the end result is rather different.
Anyone notice the Google Map under the video showing the location of the video? If anyone is interested here is a link with the video geotagged in Google Maps: http://112.196.33.85/solitaire/demo/will_brown_new/show_vide...
Yep, both of you are correct
HNES: https://github.com/etcet/HNES

Pretty much vanilla Elementary OS theme with Source Sans pro front.
just feel surprised there exist people who think using email filter is something worth showing off!
This is very exciting. I've had the chance to meet Brendan Eich a couple of times at Moz conferences, and he never fails to strike me as a visionary and a super nice guy. Between the asm.js stuff and Rust (which I actually had the privilege of witnessing the much-anticipated unveilling several years ago. Honestly I thought it was an overly-ambitious fools errand but that's why I'm not cto of mozilla), he really seems to be driving Mozilla exactly in the right path of where the web is going.
LinkedIN?
I use it within Nginx.
edit: for those thinking that unsubscribe is a good idea. it's not. changing your email to a junkmail email before unsubscribing from services you don't need anymore is a better approach

for mutt users this is really easy to accomplish even with many mail accounts. create a macro file eg. ~/.mutt/macros:

# have to be sourced on folder hooks
macro index,pager ,a "<save-message>=$my_account_name/archive<return>"
macro index,pager ,p "<save-message>=$my_account_name/pending<return>"
macro index,pager gi "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/inbox<enter>" "Go to inbox"
macro index,pager ga "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/archive<enter>" "Go to archive"
macro index,pager gp "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/pending<enter>" "Go to pending"
macro index,pager gs "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/sent<enter>" "Go to Sent Mail"
macro index,pager gd "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/drafts<enter>" "Go to drafts"
# vim: syntax=muttrc

now in your account hook do the following:

folder-hook gmail \
' \
set my_account_name=gmail ;\
source ~/.mutt/macros ;\
....

afterwards type `T*,aG` and all your current email will be archived. from then on you can use the quick bindings for accessing all your mail with those shortcuts
Please re-read. "Getting it" doesn't mean getting punished. It can also mean having a realization.

Also, it's an unwarranted assumption that teenage aggression is only held onto by teenagers.
Hi. My conspiracy theory is that Satoshi Nakamoto is the NSA.

You're welcome.
But does Java allow easy management of memory, like .NET? From building a moderately high-performance packet-processing system in F#, apart from a few specific encoding parts where the machine code was subpar, the biggest hit to CPU seemed to be the GC. Removing a single allocation from a path provided a measurable improvement. Most of the gain was being able to allocate memory directly (1GB managed heap on top of 16GB+ unmanaged).

With Java, you don't have the unmanaged or struct support, so doesn't that really add up? If you go "native", isn't there significant overhead since you can't have pointers in Java (right - the bytecode doesn't support it?)?

People pull it off, but it seems that GC overhead would be a killer.
Seems terrible, but it's only the beginning of the Anglosaxon leadership demise. Historically, empires usually fail from inside...
wow - how is it possible to send such tiny amounts?
> "collect all coins to finish the level."

put that in place of:

> "coins are good, take them."
This doesn't even use WebGL2?
The other day I saw two identical items next to each other and thought "right-arrow".
My problem with solutions like this is that they never seem to fit any other people's methods of working. Saying things like "Only check e-mail twice per day" is not going to work for 95% of the people that are reading this (rough guess).

If I only checked email twice per day, I'd just end the day with 500 emails that need responding to all in one bunch. On top of that, many of them would no longer be timely, disrupting other people's days and slowing others down.

Am I alone in thinking like this?
Minor nitpick but the page shows he's the founder of Grouper, not Groupon.
Except for the fact that the TCPClient library that they provide is broken and causes the core to lockup within a few minutes.
I'd expect a hefty fine... It seems like there's no penalty for being the landlord of an illegal unit other than having to cease and desist. He should have had to C&D and pay up a multiple of all the rent ever paid on the unit.

The tenant seems like a giant pain, but the landlord is guilty of illegally renting out a unit for years. She shouldn't have been able to remain there and the owner should not have been able to profit off his illegal dwelling.
The anatomy of a brilliant onboarding experience
Not really. Nigerian scams rely on human psychology, not so much on Internet. Those scams work offline, too. Bitcoin enables other types of scams that are not possible without it.
Finally made it-- cascade gif: https://vine.co/v/Mbb07Wh0UPM/
can't beat it my ass!

http://i.imgur.com/xKTvH81.png

:) great game. i enjoyed it! very similar to super meat boy
> No it isn't. You either infringe a patent or you don't. It is better not to know about the patent if you get caught infringing because of the treble damage possibility that nknighthb referenced, but "I didn't know about that patent" is a meaningless defense, you're still on the hook for the base cost of the infringement, just not 3x whatever that base is.

So yes it is, then?
It's not massive to Twitter's spam team but it seems reasonably massive by most standards. I just think it's a bit daft of TNW to dismiss the original author this way.
Oh yuck, they're bringing back the big wasted void along the top of my page? The fact that Firefox replaces the title-bar with tabs is my favorite feature of the darned thing.
MetaEvents for Rails: DRY Up, Structure, and Document Your Mixpanel Events
Why is git so god damn hard / complicated? I mean other than haven been created by and for Kernel Developers.
HN always likes the faster is better, I am a genius absorbing this much information quicker than you. Its been proven over and over that comprehension is way more important than speed of consumption. You guys fool yourselves into believing you can comprehend while reading at breakneck speeds, its way more fun & time saving to be able to imagine, driftaway in thought and understand what you are reading.
This is really awesome. I see this bringing the social/community aspect to bitcoin like dogecoin has. Any plans on adding gmail support?
Setting up this server-side software requires GUI configuration. That's insane. The code looks nightmarish.

I'm sure it's fine from a functional perspective.
I think it's more because of 'outsourcing' the bandwidth of the video to Youtube.
The personal attack just tells me I've made a good point.
that s pretty cool! do you plan to add up any features?
When I was first starting to really TDD with rails, cucumber was my framework of choice.

I remember the battles with myself for writing tests, how should I test, and the step definitions.

With cucumber there's just too much plumbing, not only that you need to figure out the test, you need to figure out how to set up the test and the definitions.

It never worked for me, it was just never in a state of flow like Rspec or any other testing framework for that matter, too much magic going on.

Today, I do 100% Rspec on the projects I work on, of course test-unit when I am working on rails, but other then that, I have never seen anyone using Cucumber outside of tutorials and just testing things out.

I think Thoughtbot are using Cucumber if I remember from their blog posts, for me it didn't work.

That being said, I love seeing companies share knowledge, especially in the form of videos, the editing time and recording time are not something that most companies want to invest. For that you deserve a kudos from me.
Ask HN: How effective have the job posts on HN been?
I do come across job posts on the home of HN. Job postings by Y Combinator alumni, which are guaranteed to appear on the front page for a period of time.

How effective has been these posts?
Anyone here who has out the job post and can share some numbers?
Anyone who has applied to these job posts?
Others, what do you do/think when you see a job post?

We are working on a startup idea, and this question carries some value in validating our concept. However, it is not related to job openings. Our validation is primarily to understand user behavior.
Will Microsoft's new activist board member force it to clean up its Windows act?
> At the end of the day, it's private property. She's not entitled to live there if the owner doesn't want her to.

That's not how it works in many places, including in SF. She was not entitled to live there because it was not a legal dwelling.
This is really cool. Though seems a bit risky to have your drone flying around with lava shooting through the air. Any idea on how they avoided ruining their drone?
>I, for one, continue to be excited about our drone overlords.

Genuine question: why do hackers and obviously smart persons believe in this cargo-cult "founding fathers" concept? As if some guidelines set by some 18th century guys are the be all end all in running a state or even mean much after centuries of "interpretation" and changing conditions (including technology).

Case in point 1: most of the things people now enjoy, from women's voting to the abolishment of child labor, to work safety laws, to the end of seggregation, were achieved by long, hard, struggles, protests and even martyrs (just like in Europe, for example), and not by some "founding fathers" decree.

Case in point 2: an armed population then was a major counterbalance against a corrupt government, being effective almost at the same level as the government's forces (as evident in tons of revolutions and stuggles around Europe for example). Today? Not so much. So this naive belief on the "right to bear guns" for this purpose is mostly BS cargo-cult.
Call me maybe: Kafka
Much of western ND today has nothing in common with the western ND I grew up in. City populations are tripling, and they often aren't the people you want moving in next door. Violent crime is skyrocketing and stretched thin police departments can't keep up. Schools have trouble finding teachers because they can't offer a salary that matches the absurd cost of living in these cities.

I go back home a couple of times a year and driving through cities like Dickinson is an experience. It's barely recognizable. The roads weren't designed to handle the traffic they're seeing. The expansion these places are seeing is insane.

I'm glad I moved away before the oil boom, it isn't a place I would want to live today.
I might have phrased that badly, I mean what kind of service are you offering? Gaming? Software?

With things that are developer-focused, you might have to write some code inhouse or server side (we use mp.track server side too), because those types of people have close to 100% adblock use-rate (the only time they don't use it is when they're forced to use IE on a work machine or w/e), which would render a lot of client-side funnels and tracking solutions useless
The new UI (Australis) has landed on the Firefox Aurora channel, if you'd like to check it out for yourself:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#aurora
That's a little dramatic, don't you think? :-)
http://minimaldesks.com/
Please make it work with Google Docs (maybe make one of those recently announced Docs add-ons?). I want to read PDFs like that, that I upload to Docs.
MMM Receives Legal Threats
Oooh, you can work on Web 2.0 AND 3.0. I'm not sure if Web 3.0 is backwards compatible, though.
Serving videos off YouTube allows them to avoid bandwidth costs.

P.S.: YouTube uses their HTML5 player wherever possible.
Hi, Michael. Both of us are now in a labelled graph database of identities, were the label signifies how strong the connection is. Right now it's 2/10, but by responding to you it's now 3/10. And if you (yes, you) are reading this comment, assume that you just got a 1/10 label to me [1].

You're welcome.

1: More efficient representations probably exist. Maybe we are all uniquely indexed in some database cluster in Utah. I'd call it BACON-BINLADIN.
Facebook Makes $54 Trillion Bid For The Internet
Please do not confuse Lua with LuaJIT. Whilst LuaJIT claims to be ABI compatible with Lua 5.1, 5.1 is not the latest release of Lua. There are some in the Lua community that consider these two different languages or at least that JIT is a fork.

https://sites.google.com/site/marbux/home/where-lua-is-used
http://github.com/mpv-player/mpv
http://github.com/rweichler/cylinder

Both of those aren't games.
I do not agree with Otto's benevolence. I think it is just show. When you see what he is doing with his Hermes business, he is not benevolent at all but throws many people even deeper into despair.

There was also a documentary about his life-ruining business but the big "benefactor" just found covering slogans to disguise what it is really about: To rip people off. When his other businesses work the same, than it is a big benevolence show. Of course the German government bought the show (why not, our politicians are of the same kind!).
> My contention was simply that it doesn't track that malware on a computer is anything like a soldier demanding to use someone's home as a bunk house.

I don't disagree, and IANAL, but there is a case to be made here that the spirit of the Third Amendment is to prevent military, or military-esque actors, from commandeering civilian property. On the other hand, in writing that, I realized there is something called commandeering and there are probably interesting relevant cases to go over to find whether or not that has any sense.
And this is a good explanation of the motivation behind the design, and how it is used in practice:

http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what...
> I can't for the life of me understand this pursuit of a (fake) linear history.

Because we, the rebasers, don't consider the repository to be "history".

If you stop thinking of it as history, your whole perspective changes.

It may fool you into thinking that it's history because there are dates everywhere, but it's really just a big collection of ordered changesets.

With that in mind:

> - accidental reintroduction of commits rebased upstream are the result of wrongly rewriting history upstream. You can't rewrite history when history is replicated along several repos.

Of course you can. Your local repo and the remote servers you have access to are malleable and can manipulated however you'd like. I happily force push when the situation calls for it.

However, it does place a burden on everyone else who fetches/pulls from that repo and so one need to take that into consideration. For major screwups (like the 50gb file accidental checkin from the article), it's very, very good that this can happen.

For one of my projects I'm using git-multimail[1] on our "master" repo and it handles force pushes brilliantly (sends out emails with a list of commits removed/added). This is a great way to communicate with the rest of the team when you have a rewrite-after-push culture.

[1] https://github.com/mhagger/git-multimail
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz