skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally, an outsider doesn't care that you got owned because someone you relied upon got owned. They consider it part of your job that you make sure all the people you rely upon are reliable.

I'm not saying this is fair.
Another +1 for Mandrill. We've been quite happy with them as well.
Financial reporting, where post hoc ergo propter hoc is often the limit of analysis...
I assume this message is aimed at me.
I'm not worried about ES6. ES6 classes are just syntactic sugar over prototypes, so it'll still confuse the FUCK out of java, c#, c++ and flash developers, because they are still SEMANTICALLY weird and confusing to people used to classical inheritence.

So I'm happy about that. As long as Java developers are unhappy with something, I likes it.

The awkward incantations you speak of are indeed awkward, I will admit.

I mean, how fucking confusing is

Object.create({ your prototype here });

am I right? This is much better:

MySpecialFramework.extend({ my prototy.. .*ahem* class here! })
Haha, I really hope they call this Nibiru just because they can.
Personal website of course it would be a big sum...
If you've actually got, say, a JPG file embedded in the middle of a CSV or something, it's just not designed for that IMO. But if you use the reserved control characters, you can at least output any text data without escaping (at least if "textual" is defined as "a string of characters that are not ASCII delimiter control chars", which ought to be easy to assume, unless something is corrupted or deliberately trying to mess things up.) I think you can actually more easily and reliably grep, because you don't need state to know whether the comma byte is a comma character or a delimiter. You simply use a comma when you mean a literal comma, and the control char when you want the delimiter. Anyway, as others have pointed out, there are other obstacles to widespread adoption of these control chars.

I agree that cut, sort, etc. are good to be familiar with. Someone else[1] linked a "csvquote" utility that pre-chews (and un-chews at the end of the text-processing pipeline) CSV data to make it work better with standard UNIX utilities. Looks neat, so I'll be keeping it in mind next time I'm processing CSV with UNIX utils.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475793
Wait, so just to clarify - there are only 14 questions?
Heroku hasn't changed pricing since they launched, actually. The only historical price reference I quickly found was that the EC2 was $0.085/hr for (what is now called) an m1.small[1].

Heroku launched with $0.05/hr pricing.

Amazon's new m1.small pricing is $0.044/hr, nearly a 50% price drop over four years.

Heroku still is $0.05/hr, the same price as when it launched. Heroku runs on EC2.

[1] http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2010/09/15/how-run-drupal-...
social media obsessed marketers, so, not really.
Brazil passes groundbreaking Internet governance Bill
200 million wow! When I think of Klout, I can only think of this brilliant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1057/
Hey there! Yep, bootstrap and angularjs in the front, Django in the back. Cloudfront CDN to handle the static assets (I've /really/ fallen in love with their product--so easy to set up). And of course, Stripe for payments.
Yes! These are the things your want to hear from companies :)
Kill Worker Dynos and Save $414 on Your Heroku Bill
As did I, quite some time ago. I found it did a poor job with rooms that had actual stuff in them, -particularly the corners. Seemed cool but I discarded it as an option even without an alternative. RoomScan has been making its way around the blogs and I tried it out the other day. It did a great job of capturing my non-rectangular kitchen (after I failed at my first attempt by ignoring the instructions to touch each wall, then the 1st and 2nd wall once more, then ending). Roomscan > for spaces with stuff and/or narrow spaces, or Magic-Plan > for empty spaces more wide open was basically my experience.

Easy enough to try both though.
I really can't understand this.
Do I just not understand how the "game" is played. OR am I just missing something? Someone please enlighten me!
Personally, I find it hilarious that a simple verbal interaction with another human being is now categorized as "manual labor".
Sony has one major disadvantage: they are tied up to the ps4 while PC's which are more powerful/upgradable are a better fit for VR.

There's rumors microsoft is working on VR. They also have an amazing 3d game creation platform for beginners called "project spark", very good at building developer communities a and would be happy to sell more PC's. Assuming they can create decent VR glasses, they seems to have the winning combination of hardware + content.

Even better - project spark content would be free, which is a powerful tool to achieve mass appeal.
Spoilers in its URLs? I'm on the search engine one and the URL says "compress-url-list"

I guess I was a bit off-base, I was thinking about using a database.

Well cool, this trie thing it suggests is pretty much what I was thinking, and something I'd thought about before without knowing what it was called.
That's getting a little off topic, but the TechEmpower benchmarks are open source and open to submissions. If you see a problem and you haven't submitted a pull request then you have no excuse for complaining.
Man, can I get your help writing sales copy? :P
Ask HN: Sales guy cofounder is tanking the company
Hi folks, posting from a throw-away account.

I'm PM and operations at an agency. Other partners include sales guy (majority owner), designer, devops/architect, and front end dev.

The production team is excellent at processing work. Our operations are really slick and I have been working with our devops guy for years across different companies and we work really well together. Rest of team is newer but we have fully gelled over the last 6 months and have a strong culture.

We are insolvent. We are all owed significant backpay from what is a way-below-market wage to begin with (which we all agreed to originally during initial bootstrapping mode).

We have brought in a "Chief Restructuring Officer" who is a major badass who has done turnarounds for some huge companies in the last 30 years.

Reason for running out of cash is sales dude has deal fever. At least that's what our CRO calls it. The behaviour is turning every potential opportunity into an equal/competing priority and making everything into a JV or crazy science project (minus actual science).

No budget qualification up front, just showing off blue-sky buzzword improv abilities. Going after paltry licensing deals on the side and such. Not focusing on our core capacities at all.

I have developed estimate templates for each of our offerings that clients have actually paid us money for in the past (with a sustainable margin). I've designed lead gen criteria for each offering to give sales a clear and prioritized list of potential deals.

Despite intervention, sales guy seems incapable of reform or following a plan. The reality distortion field is too strong with this one and it's literally killing the company.

Naturally I turn to the HN community for opinions.

How do you turn a charismatic but unfocused person into someone who can do the One-Thing-That-Matters right now?

What to look for in a sales person for a typical Rails shop anyway? Where to look?
It is both. And the people at the top are various grant funding agencies that often move at the pace of government and are used to the post doc pay scale. Things are changing but the salaries places like google and amazon pay are just hard to match on a government grant.
With the multitudes of ass kissers, I'm sure criticism means very little to those who screw over average citizens and still want to be thanked for it.. no, loved for it.
Agreed. I feel that if a question is going to be about a "real world" situation like trading stocks, it should reflect real world constraints that should be stated up front.

I also found it curious that the example listed the stock price at 1 AM. It would be far more of a real world example to only consider times during the normal trading hours.

A question phrased about a particular real-world domain that doesn't makes sense within that domain just doesn't seem fair to ask.

But again, total nitpick on my part. The actual format in which the questions were presented was generally done well, and a nice refresh from the typical "interview prep" sites.
Upvoted, you built something cool :)
The Onion's Fake PicSong App Is a Perfect Parody of Pointless Apps
Text message or phone verification of details only you should know about the account history, payment methods, etc. As others mentioned, a waiting period during which they try to contact using any means s previously authorised for a response. Compare IP addresses and deny logins from strange countries or origins without further verification, etc. Of course, every measure and countermeasure needs to be justified, since there's an implementation and upkeep cost, but... It's possible to be "more certain," that something is legit or not.
It it even possible to enforce 'access modifiers' and 'constants' in any real way in javascript? Is this much more than syntactic sugar or is it useful (despite it's... aesthetic issues?)
> As this changed your mind about open sourcing the code or how you open source code now?

That question deserves an entire blog post.

Ultimately, no. But along the way it's made me much more cautious. Their use of our code didn't impact our business at all. It's mainly principle - they used our code and didn't contribute back any work they did.
Let me revised my wording: Any niche language ... ;)
It's fair to say that it's laziness, in my view. That sort of thing is just a manual implementation of what laziness would do in a particular situation. The closure that the thunk would hold is essentially diffused into the object that contains the lazy property.
No some chess program that is at good as chess as Crazy Stone is at go. This is actually a perfectly reasonable way of framing a discussion. Chess programs are stronger than the best Chess players, Go programs are weaker than the best go players, discuss.

Having said that I suspect there are problems with the two bishops and the 2100 Elo. Reading other posts, maybe it is 2 pawns or so and maybe 2600 Elo.
Hard to believe that someone is willing to pay $200 million for Klout. Maybe, I am missing something?

Just for fun, a year back, I made a simple Klout clone which was dependent on just Google search results, twitter followers, retweets and total number of tweets. I used a few known Klout scores as the seed data and generated a simple Heuristic to calculate Klout scores. I then tested it with around 100 celebs and regular people. The scores were remarkably similar to Klout's actual scores.

What were the (Lithium Technologies) VC's thinking?
There is precedent around making big announcements on April 1st, with full understanding of the impact of announcing on that day:

https://www.google.com/search?q=founding+date+apple&oq=found...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
According to her, she would routinely have one-time massive fee's credited ($1000+).

I'd assume since it's a spike in costs, Amazon has more interest in keeping you as a customer, at your much lower typical usage, than to have you abandon, even if you have a huge bill.

Obviously if this was a typical problem, you would need to rethink your architecture and infrastructure needs.
How Real Is “Her?” Five Myths About Intelligent Assistants.
I haven't heard that, but I don't remember much about Halo at that time. I do remember when Halo RTS was revealed, Bungie was talking about how they were sick of FPS games after Marathon and wanted to do an RTS.
Holy cat snacks, this page uses a lot of third-party JavaScript.
How many instances do you run? At $17.52 saved per year for m1.small that means you must be running over 10k instances to save enough for another full-time dev or two... if your devs are located in SF area.
I feel as though to top something like "Cracking the Coding Interview", you're going to have to get close to the breadth they cover for the price they charge. You mention they 'charge' $25 which for sure is more than your $5; however, they've got loads and loads of questions for each data structure.

Currently, you're selling each question for about 35 cents. Although that's super cheap per question, $5 for 11 questions somehow doesn't seem like a great deal. However, I think people will be willing to pay the same for a larger database of questions e.g. I would be happy to pay $25 for 80 questions).
Haskell is a terrible choice for a production system.

I know well over a dozen programming languages. I have a stronger theoretical background in mathematics, computer science, and compiler design than most web developers. But Haskell has always been utterly mystifying to me.

I've attempted to learn Haskell several times, and I've had monads explained to me several times right here on HN -- but I simply don't seem to be able to wrap my mind around the concept.

To be sure, if I had a year or so to devote to studying the theory behind Haskell's type system, I might indeed become more productive writing web applications in Haskell. And I don't doubt that there are certain problems in logic programming or language theory for which Haskell provides useful concepts and powerful tools, to the point where the solutions to important problems may have trivial implementations.

I've always thought that a major problem with Haskell for web development is: (A) You'll have difficulty finding people who both know Haskell and are interested in web applications, and (B) you'll have difficulty training web developers in Haskell. The author of the article apparently has a training process that gets around (B), and I'd kind of like to know what it is -- a way to learn Haskell without a ton of study.
Well, you'll often get XML files with a single line and no whitespace between elements, and that makes things a lot more interesting. Basically, you can't rely it being practical to quickly poke around in the text of an XML file. I always feel sad when I have to read the text of an XML file to get information.
I haven't tried it yet, but will later tonight. I just dropped by to say that this is a great problem to solve. It addresses an emerging market.
In a nutshell, social engineering can be countered by proper software & processes engineering.

So if social engineering is possible, blame the software architects.

Maybe in extreme cases changing the email of an account might be needed, but there's no excuse a first level rep was able to do it. Least thing, he/she should've been forced by the system to escalate to someone above her, who has a much lesser chance to screw up.
Sat next to a businessperson on a flight to Vegas, and he was opining that "schmoozing" is becoming a lost art.

I'm all for being able to initiate billing inquiries online--in fact, I'm ditching Bank of America because I can't dispute charges on line.

But in Amazon's case, this isn't a dispute, rather this is asking them to forgive a (hopefully) one time transgression, which is much easier to do by speaking to someone, than filling out a form.

I find it similar to haggling for a temporary reprieve in my fantastically high cable bill.
UK Customs drilled holes into my hand-carved table imports... what should I do?
I recently exported 4 beautiful, hand painted end tables from Pakistan to the UK, sent by courier. The packages were perfectly fine when I shipped them form Pakistan but when I received them in London, the tables had numerous holes drilled into them; holes the size of a ballpoint head.

The tables are completed ruined, and there's no way I can use them now. GBP 400, down the drain. No one from Customs called me to notify me, nor did they leave a slip with contact information.

This is really pissing me off. I assume they were doing a drug check, but surely there has got to be a better way to do this. Do I have any recourse to get UK Customs to compensate me? How can they just get away with this?

The tables are items that I was importing to sell on my e-commerce/ home decor website, www.relovedapp.co.uk.
Georgia Tech Inventure Prize 2014 Live Stream
That's awesome, I was about to ask if it was inspired by the xkcd before reading your about page. How many people currently have the "adventurer" or "conquistador" plan? Can you provide examples of items you've bought in the past? Actually, you should probably put that info on your homepage.
From your description I would say that you are 5 - intolerant of normal bullshit. Every company, no matter how slick from the outside, will have some variety of disfunction going on inside.

If I did believe in my team then I would try to do whatever I could within my domain of expertise to help the company succeed. As a developer there are usually lots of things you can do to help. When a deal doesn't close - find out if there are any technical features that might have make a difference. Give the sales department tools to better sell your products. Give the business people tools to analyze stats so they can make better decisions. Maybe these are not sexy things, but they might be necessary to get a company off the ground.

Depending on the organization you may not feel that you have the authority to do certain things. But, if the team is any good then they would recognize when somebody is trying to step up and help with the big picture. I would probably use that as a yardstick to tell me whether it's me or them.
Hopefully this was purely an acquihire and the product is being shitcanned.
Honestly, yeah, you probably don't understand how the game is played if that is a legitimate question.

There seems to be a wave a social-related acquisitions going around. If you have a product that can be virally shared, or produces rankings or scores that people get caught up in competing for, you could be a potential acquisition target.

I think a lot of people on HN focus on solving real problems and making the world "better", which is certainly a wonderful endeavor. But that's not the path to mind-numbingly high acquisitions most of the time.
Mattermark founder here, and to be clear we are not "prognosticating" - the Mattermark Score has not been proven to be predictive in any way. It is descriptive, describing which companies are getting more and more people to care about their existence on an ongoing basis. If anything, this might be similar to "traction" and might help companies raise... but as we all know many startups who appear to have traction still fail. What we hope to do is make investors aware of companies who are gaining traction that they might overlook, and in the long run we hope we can encourage them to look beyond the echo chamber of tech and focus on the echo chamber of a startup's actual customers. We'll see how it goes...
what language do you think it's like?
The basic principle proven so far is that, with an invasive surgical procedure, retinal function can be permanently replaced with technology that electrically stimulates the retinal ganglion cells (i.e. the side of the optic nerve that terminates in the eye) - and that it works in some blind people.

This predicts nothing about augmenting the optical input in people with healthy eyesight. I mean, who is going to volunteer to have their normal eyesight irreparably damaged to play a VR game?
And by acquiring Klout, they now have Big Data in The Cloud!
You should fault Sendgrid as they specifically have a policy NOT to perform this change of email request (from the article).

Sendgrid can also change their systems so that phone support personnel can NOT perform this change or perform this change with approval from a supervisor.

Sendgrid being in the business they are in should also know that they are susceptible to these types of attacks and what they can lead to (many, many systems which can have password requests sent to email addresses).
AudioScrobbler and Last.FM were originally separate concerns that came together. (I wrote the first Windows Media Player AudioScrobbler plugin back in '02 or '03 but lost interest. One of my poorer decisions!)
…because, in case someone hasn't noticed already, there are are more end users than programmers.
2-3x profit, right, not revenue? 10m units at $300 would not land anywhere near 3 billion in profits once you get to the bottom line. Lots of licensing fees coming up though.
Don't forget http://grooveshark.com

Don't even need to restrict yourself to indie. I've got a Spotify Premium account that my wife sometimes hijacks to listen to at her business. Since you can only listen on one mobile device at a time, I'll just hop on Grooveshark if she stole Spotify. I've never not been able to find what I was looking for on Spotify on Grooveshark, and often it has songs in the catalog that Spotify does not.
I can't answer for grandparent, but you should check out https://github.com/notogawa/graceful
As a tech worker who is more focused on the back end than the visible product, I have found a very low correlation between my belief in the product and my satisfaction with the job. I find that my job is pretty much the same regardless of the actual product. This experience is likely different for people more directly involved in the actual product.

I get much higher signal to indicate whether I will enjoy a job from my coworkers and the culture of the company. If I am working with smart motivated people, I will be happy no matter what I'm working on. If I am in an environment where people are continually innovating and pushing the boundaries of the status quo in the field, I will be happy with my job.

This awareness leads to a very different typo of job search. It's easy to start a job search by thinking of a product you like then trying to see if you can work for that company. It's harder to think of a culture you want to join and then look for that.

I thankfully have not been employed by a company whose product I actively despise; I'm sure that would have a disastrous effect on my job satisfaction.
When it comes to companies like Google and Amazon, I don't think that's a worry.
We have a use-case down at the office.

Some of what we do is processing legal files. This involves managing 'our' ftp site, provided by the vendor.

Turns out this is a 'windows' server, connected via iscsi, to a directory where their FTP server dumps the files. This is, judging by the hostname, a vmware host.

I suspect an AWS workspace would be a lot cheaper to run than a VMWare cluster.
that's been possible for years.

Pull your understanding of what javascript is out of 2005.
Funding is harder if you're unaffiliated - unless you collaborate with people in academia. There are more ways to do this opening up though, crowd funding (http://experiment.com) for example.
your life is an early April fools :P couldn't resist.
I've heard so much hypocritical anti-facebook on this ... from people ... using facebook. I don't use facebook, and I despise it; and it's takeover, so I agree. But please, only bash facebook if you aren't using it.
I don't think people should attribute today's FB action to the Oculus acquisition or its price/terms. A slight negative chatter (Read: "Amateur CEO wasting money on useless toys") could easily make big momentum reversals, especially in case of a stock that mostly priced by sentiment versus intrinsic cash flows.
Disclaimer: I'm by no means disparaging momentum strategies.
Email accounts are the weak link for many things... DNS registrations, web hosting, etc. Get the email account and you have it all.
I'm done with haters
I find it a relatively trivial exercise to model my thinking onto any language that I have a relatively broad understanding of, including PHP, Javascript, etc.

So it's always confused / annoyed me why folks seem so hell-bent on bashing language 'X' or language 'Y'.

Finally I had a moment, where the answer became clear. Those folks are just on a different playing field than the rest of us in the way they (at a fundamental level) receive, and process information / experience phenomena. They're looking at a forest through a microscope.