skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must admit that I'm a little surprised at the number of people who have been so keen to heap praise on Microsoft recently.

I'm very glad that they are making moves towards increasing openness and collaborating more with other ecosystems. From my perspective, software development has always felt like it was split into two camps: the "open source" platform, and the "Microsoft" one, with developers working across both being pretty rare in my experience. Being able to break down those barriers and maybe starting to see genuine cross-platform Microsoft technologies is really, really exciting.

However, I'm convinced it's prudent to remain cautious. Microsoft have a long and colourful history of doing real damage to open standards, free software, and their own business partners. Even their development community has been harmed by repeated changes of direction in their development efforts – damage which is made worse by that fact that the ecosystem is traditionally so closed. Maybe we are seeing a core of developers who are actually too young to have experienced this firsthand, or at least with limited experience of other platforms, who are a little less skeptical.

Anyway, Microsoft's recent bout of openness is nothing but a good thing. It'll be a while before I'm comfortable deploying a cross-platform app on .NET, but baby steps…
Can Startups Surf The Huge Information Tidal Wave?
I can't imagine how much those 53-foot carbon fiber panels cost.
I find it hard to understand how you would be against Microsoft pointing out an obviously bad thing Google has done (in reference specifically to them altering the behavior of their shopping product). Since when is it a bad thing to highlight differences between your and competing products? In many cases your competition are the only ones with the resources to effectively alert your customers to such a change. This is market forces at work.
I was thinking more in the line of "is Betteridge's law correct?"
They have by far the best development tool set available and they are all in on making Azure an amazing product. I think their future is bright.
You did the Salkantay route! Amazing!
Hey nice - i've posted an Article at Namecoin @ Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Namecoin.NMC

Support and Like !
Since the siding is no longer metal, does that mean that it no longer acts a a Faraday cage, and will be susceptible to damage by lightning?
If you have started your YC application before the deadline (March 28) and submitted it at least once since then, you will no longer be able to edit it.

Applying late, with its low odds, is to give a chance to those who didn't knew about YC before the applications' deadline.
Hey Eli,

you've got an article as well at Namecoin @ Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Namecoin.NMC

Would be nice to get a like back ;)
I've worked in several fortune 500 companies over the past 5 years. Yes, wikis are becoming more common, but MS Office is deeply engrained in nearly every corporation I ever worked for.

It's easy when you deal with technology every day to say you don't see Excel spreadsheets and ignore your email, but for most people whose lives don't revolve around technology like you and me, this is all they know. I was just at a huge corporation and do you know how they handled their project management? With emails and Excel spreadsheets. They had just started doing Agile and even then, no plans to buy a software package like Atlassian, just keep on with the spreadsheets approach.

The company I'm at now? I privately held multimillion dollar company. We're in the process of a 2 year ERP project. How did the company they hire do it? Excel spreadsheets and email.

Sad but true. Considering companies like Atlassian have some amazing tools both companies really need and could really utilize, the sales job is an uphill battle.
FYI, I just submitted a pull request fixing this in homebrew. They're usually pretty good about merging PRs fast, but if you'd like your manpage right now, you can run:

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bbatsell/homebrew/spiped-1.3.1-fixmanpage/Library/Formula/spiped.rb

Edit: 1 hour later, it's already been merged.

brew update;brew reinstall spiped
To make windows machines truly useable they should create a good shell. I would even go as far as to say they should install and set up python natively. If I am not using MS technology there is no reason to use a windows OS. Of course I realize a huge percentage of users are not developers.
Shoebill – a Macintosh II + A/UX emulator for OS X
No colonies to rob?
Ask HN: Talk a solo founder through the high level stack to build
I'm a solo founder who has built the prototype and pre-MVP all by myself. I build (MS/BS CS)/hustle/hack well. This is a niche product, and I will not go into recruiting issues here. Users are itching to try the product, and I wanted to talk through the high level rough (correct) steps of the v1.0 build, and get input on best practices.

The objective is to build a minimally featured end-to-end system. Users can sign up, create an account, pay, and access the core technology that is hosted on the cloud. The core technology is a separate component that is not part of this discussion.

Specifically, this pertains to the website and everything that goes on behind the scenes during a user interaction.

Key considerations: this needs to scale, be reasonably quick to implement, and secure so someone else can take over at some point. Also assume that UI/UX design is ready. I expect that this will take time, which is fine.

I'm going to start this discussion with the first steps:

1) WP to get the front end up: 1-2 days
2) Flush out landing page: 3 days

Right away I know I'll need one or more of php/js/jquery and mySQL, and integrate with payment processors and gateways.

Thoughts, best practices?
Show HN: The Rob Ford Themed Platformer
Look at:
https://www.facebook.com/Namecoin.NMC

Namecoin is a little bit more than just ... DNS

Have a nice day :)
who refers to local top 1%? That completely changes the picture. Most people in the so-called top 1% live in high cost areas. Changing the context invalidates any discussion.
Yes, and believe me the business world at large still runs on Windows/Office from top to bottom. I work at a major financial institution on a data team and we log into Windows 7, open up Excel, log it into our SSAS cube, make pretty graphs and tables, put the results into Power Point, and then send through Exchange to the execs. It will take a very long time to overcome that kind of momentum.
Ask HN: What do you use to track what your comeptitors are doing?
Do you guys track what your competitors are doing such as their social media, blog, press, website changes, backlinks, etc?

If so, what do you use to easily do this?
It's already a GPS... why not just time the routes directly?

(Assuming you're concerned with time, which I assume is at least often the case. For convenience and other 'softer' amenities, hints make much more sense.)
How it is news? It's been around for years already. Was there a major new development in scrypt that I didn't hear about? Or is this just "let's submit everything tar snap related week" as cperciva put it?
No, collision is not exclusively for hashes. The term can be used for any area where there's a high ability to encounter a value already in use. In this case, by guessing or incrementing.
You can try Secure Copy (scp) from your terminal. It uses ssh for data transfer and provides the same authentication and same level of security as ssh. Also, it transfers files and directories.

Examples at : http://www.computerhope.com/unix/scp.htm
Building a Software Deployment Pipeline
There are cops and firefighters who alone make more than 400k+. An average one in SF of each makes 185k a year. Thus combined they are over the 1% threshold.
The whole idea of white labeling it would be that we'd be trusting cperciva with the technical aspects under the hood, which he is Freakin' Awesome at, and patio11 with wrapping it in the kind of sales pitch / UI that I can show to a non-technical person and say "Yes, let me spend the company's money on this".
I was being entirely practical, not theoretical. In a theoretic (non-existant) internet then TCP/UDP can work similarly. But in the internet as deployed in the world, TCP is very hard to get through a P2P connection, and works infrequently. Because of firewalls and routers.
While I agree with this, I find it equally annoying when people send 3MB attachments as emails (and then keep resending them for every email in the conversation!).

It would be nice if a Dropbox link included a hash of the file, functioning more as a magnet link than a URL (emphasis on the "L - Locator" in "URL").
Somewhat related: "The Last Ringbearer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer - "an alternative account of and an informal sequel to the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings."

The novel is based on the premise that the Tolkien account is a "history written by the victors". In Eskov's version of the story, Mordor is described as a peaceful country on the verge of an industrial revolution, that is a threat to the war-mongering and imperialistic faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude has been described by Saruman as "crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the elves.

Author's article on salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2011/02/23/last_ringbearer_explanation/

The whole book in English here: http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/280578.html
They do work with js disabled! If you have a form, a button without a type will trigger the submission of that form. The demo does not include a form because is just showcasing the different possibilities for these buttons.
Breaking up the feudal system with its attendant absurdities would help

Feudalism is anything but absurd. In fact, it makes much more sense than capitalism: trust is built slowly, and enhanced by gifts of land and marriage bonds. It was a major cultural change that allowed people in the early modern economy to put blind faith in faceless institutions and unseen strangers. People living in developed countries often don't see how much trust is required to maintain it, and this trust takes ages to build. Children grow up seeing that the "system works" so as adults, they don't rock the boat (well, most of them don't). To them, rampant bribery and nepotism in developing countries seems strange and illogical, but it is the exact opposite. Those "backwards" systems are built around the idea of cultivating personal relationships because you can't trust strangers.

The lessons from this is that the converse is also true. A society built around capitalism (and I'm talking capitalism in general; not necessarily predatory free-market capitalism) requires, first and foremost, a lot of trust in the system. If that trust is lost, we go back to feudalism. There is no such thing as trust-free capitalism (specifically, because without trust there is no credit – which, literally means "faith" – and without credit there is no capitalism).
Can you tell us about them?
Right now Microsoft reminds me of GM. Capable of producing a good car model or two for a few years when the boss is really focusing the entire company around this. But utterly incapable of across-the-board Toyota-level quality. I'm asked every once in a while why I don't buy this or that American car and I respond (thinking about the decades of bad cars GM and Ford produced), "when most of the lineup a company puts out is clearly reliable and of high quality, and they can do this over two model generations, then I'll think about it." Because this means that the entire company culture has changed, and they've managed to sustain it. A bad care is then an anomaly.

Actually, I think Ford is pretty close to this. Hyundai is a very good example of this culture change. It wasn't all that long ago that people were afraid of driving their Hyundais at Highway speeds, now they build quality vehicles across the entire lineup and have for 3 or 4 complete model generations.

Right now Microsoft has a couple open source projects, a couple multi-platform projects, and the rest is still more or less old Microsoft. They've killed Stack Rankings, which I think is helping lead to some of these new changes. But the across-the-board Microsoft still looks like Microsoft from 10-15 years ago. If they can implement this kind of "new friendlier Microsoft" across the entire company, and do it for two major version changes across all products, I think then and only then can we consider Microsoft a new company.
You didn't take away "the problem".

Your mom will say something in the line of: my son said that...

But still, when they buy a computer in the hardware store, the chances are plausible they would advice against Apple. From a business view, they don't have any interests in earning less. So advicing Apple would be bad for them.

Your mom's friends would still buy a Windows PC, after she talked to the salesman. And still, if they give her a possibility of a Windows PC and a MAC in front of her. Your mom's friend would recognize Windows and will buy what she is more associated with. The most used sales pitch for hardware salesmen is probably: you can have your classic menu back with that app.

Reprogramming is harder then you think, although i have to admit, i have never seen a company do it so fast (referring to Apple + Mobile, not OS)
Maybe time’s arrow needs ergodicity as well as entropy | Science News
Sorry I disagree, javascript is here to stay and it's safe to say near everybody has javascript enabled. Those who don't make a concious decision to break their experience on almost every modern site.

And as always, measure your audience. Why waste time and money for the 0.01% of users without js?
Cutting out left turn makes a bigger difference in cities where turns are more frequent and often require waiting due to oncoming traffic. It saves fuel for UPS, else and for everyone who isn't waiting in a lane blocked by a UPS truck that is waiting to turn left. Now if we can just get others to stop turning left (when it requires blocking a lane). Since not all routes are in cities with dense traffic, not all routes will get the same benefit.
All cool if you have one connection and don't share it. But real apps on real computers have multiple apps running - while you're trying to communicate, email fires up and scans a dozen servers; your progeny upstairs clicks on a video; ROKU decides to update.

Bandwidth and window size are a fiction over time. TCP believes they will be stable (for many seconds); its tuned for old server-to-server connections, not the extremely dynamic network conditions in the average home/business today.

So you end up in slow start and congestion avoidance, and only after packets are dropped and resent pointlessly adding to congestion (as you point out).

I've spent years now examining traces of TCP catastrophes. It's because TCP is NOT dynamic enough that folks like my company are driven to finding alternatives.

So yes TCP really sucks. For many applications.
I started using Anki this year to help me learn my students' names and faces, and it's been glorious. I was able to recognize about 75% of them on the first day of class, and within a few weeks I was solid on nearly everyone. That has always been one of my biggest weaknesses as a teacher, and I'm feeling great about the change.
Yes, I can't imagine a modern company of practically any size that doesn't revolve around Word and Excel as the cornerstone of the technology behind their business processes.
My father-in-law retired at 75. He was writing firmware for Perkin Elmer chip steppers. I've seen his code, it was pretty nice stuff.

One guy I met was 65 and about to start up another company. He was sharp and definitely knew what he was doing.

The group I was in at Microsoft (Xbox) had David Cutler in it; I think he had just turned 70. I didn't work with him closely, but he was definitely prolific (also more than a bit controversial, politically, at MS, but he had mellowed out quite a bit when I met him).

I'm 53 and have high hopes. :-)
Moral: its possible to live a life just as comfortably 'pursuing the lottery ticket' as in a corporate job. You call it a lotto ticket; I call it my job. Sail on, compadre, sail on.
>Nursing's Women Problem

While there are fewer men in nursing (and I'm sure being a man in a traditionally female-dominated industry comes with its own set of challenges) they tend to command higher salaries and faster promotions than women [1]. Compare this to tech, where women as a minority tend to be paid less.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/male-nurses-beco...
We must be reading different books, because the one I read clearly discusses the mechanics of large-block trades, and specifically calls out the fact that traders exist because you can't unload 100k shares of XYZ as easily as 10 shares of AAPL (unless you like screwing up the market and losing a ton of money).
We're definitely in "works on my machine" territory here.

Still it's good for building your confidence as a programmer, no?
> In Europe, industrialisation depended on the dissemination of ideas. The more know-how was spread widely, the more people could hear of an innovation and could copy or improve it, building an accelerating cycle of technological development.

This hits the spot for the patent system, which is actually detrimental as it is for technological development. Imagine if back then the "big guys" could sue/take the property of anyone daring to copy or improve on existing technologies? I also doubt that back then many would be interested in licensing the technology, but more in keeping it for themselves to "rule the world".
1. Working with Node.js will keep you relaxed with a unified language on both ends of your web application.

2. It has also proven to be faster and more smoothly scalable than Ruby on Rails.

3. You'll find a good community support and lot, a lot of modules for nearly any purpose you seek in your application.

4. Many industries are moving to use it (Microsoft, LinkedIn, PayPal, NYTimes ... )
An image. Excuse me, but that's not a remarkable hack, that's just B.S. hack, which can't be fairly called sending an "email".
I would have appreciated if you would also had described the downsides of using DynASM compared to other jitters.

E.g. In lightning you don't care too much about the target architecture, as you jit to an abstract RISC machine. So the jit library is portable (not in DynASM), does handle the calling conventions for you (not in DynASM), and does register optimizations automatically (max 6 with lightning), again not in DynASM).

The real trick you seem to like is the syntax abstraction, using | as prefix. But normal C can do the same with __asm(string) and it's easier to use C macros for portable ASM, and LISP jit libraries have long done the same, with the advantage in LISP that the JIT macros in lisp are part of the normal language. No need to deal with restricted C macros.
I'm not sure that the device itself is the costly part though (other than the research to develop it). The main cost right now seems to be the surgery, brain surgery ain't cheap, especially when it's experimental procedures. An easier surgery is really what is needed. If surgeons could just lift up the eye and clamp the device onto the optical nerve then the cost would decrease dramatically.

There are some research teams working on the lower cost method.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2195683/Bioni...

Most of the transplants are lower resolution to reduce device size (smaller computer components and battery). If you can perfect the lower resolution device then increasing the resolution and adding colors would be relatively easy.

I'm amazed that scientists can "talk" to the brain and how successful some of these procedures have been, truly fascinating times we live in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurostimulation#Visual_Prosthe...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfac...

I was about to say that you'll never see a BCI kickstarter, but sure enough there is one: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openbci/openbci-an-open...

It can't talk back to the brain unfortunately, but it's a step in the right direction.

http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/BTO/ was launched 5 days ago (NOT an April fools joke), usually DARPA does a pretty good job of rapidly advancing technology.

http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2014/04/01.aspx

http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/BTO/Programs/Reliable_Neural-I...

I guess the true holy-grail for this would be to pack in some "putty" into the eye-socket and let the eye re-grow based on your DNA, I doubt that will be available soon but a biological solution to blindness should definitely be explored as well.
> The only reason microsoft is the dominant platform is because of inertia.

I don't know, I think the fact that you can buy a sub-$400 family PC at WalMart might have something to do with it too.
way too late, i've bought 3 things from Kickstarter before giving up. The place is overrun with fraudsters.
Dutch, British governments pay to keep Windows XP alive
If you pick apart the intent of the law, rather than getting caught up in literal semantics, you'll see that the law is suggesting that when a headline asks a question intending to cast doubt or contradiction on some accepted fact, paradigm or otherwise, that the doubt itself can be called into question because if were based on any solid evidence, then it would not be presented as a question but rather as a statement of fact. Hence it still applies to your example without contradicting the intent of the law; in your case "yes" is the correct answer.
c.f. J.K. Rowling. She wrote a series of books with very little internal consistency, yet made billions doing so.
So that the site still functions if JS is disabled or unavailable, which can happen for many reasons including network policy, browser support, personal preference, availability (especially if you're hosting the JS on a separate server), or bugs in the source. Explain why you would choose NOT to implement a fallback plan, given that 99%+ of the time it is trivial to do so.
Bear in mind, it would take 1 Billion users posting 18 Billion times each, to reach 2^64. I'm not holding my breath. (and computers can actually handle 128-bit numbers just fine)
Why you want replace Microsoft software in that area? That's exactly the type of stuff Microsoft is good at.
Facebook And The Linux Kernel
Considering how primitive the tech looks, someone could surely reverse-engineer it... but good luck trying to get funding for it and trying to find surgeons willing to take the risk of it blowing up in their face, because they will inevitably take the blame for any "bug" the tech could have :)

The old doc was probably brave enough to do it while circumventing the whole regulatory process and using his personal reputation and charisma and professional relationships to pull it through and get the funding he needed, so again, good luck finding anyone to replace him.
Well, just made it to the next chapter where you talk about AST. :-)
That misses the point of the discussion again. People trade for things because of scarcity. This new 'post-scarcity' economy won't/can't/shouldn't work like that, at least for the necessities of life. The whole question is what to do when folks DONT trade for things.
You’re So C#, You’re in a Class of Your Own
I love the whimsy present in some of these, especially in `flip-open perspective`.
Thinking about it, I do the same thing with my Ruby library mime-types[1]. The library is only useful if you load some data into its registry, so it does so automatically, unless you specify RUBY_MIME_TYPES_LAZY_LOAD in the environment.

I've just put myself a task to reverse the behaviour so that lazy loading is the default.

[1] https://github.com/halostatue/mime-types