skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you look at competition as a form of mimicry, then yes, true innovation is almost impossible.

On the opposite end is the Blue Ocean Strategy. There's no competition because it's essentially a new product or service - an innovation. And that business is in a monopolistic position.
It's pretty much an example of everything to not do on a landing page.
Fixing Facebook: Introducing Facebook Pro vs. Facebook Free
Learn a Lisp with Python
Lol at the downvoters. I'm sure you can build a lifestyle business around a CMS that spits out a static site but honestly, unless your audience is Hacker News, people don't care whether it's static or dynamic and often times they'll ask for that one thing that isn't static and breaks your ability to sell to them.

So yes, this is a feature and not a product as evinced by the numerous plugins and projects that take existing dynamic web application software and can produce static sites (Flask Freeze, Drupal's plugin, I think even WordPress has one).

[EDIT] Which means, what's to stop the existing "site builder" companies from doing the same? They don't sell the feature (static builder from a dynamic site), they sell the product (build yourself a site), and people buy it. The "background benefit" is a slightly faster site and who does that really matter to? Not the customer. The service - reduction of bandwidth and server resources; the could easily introduce the feature, cut resources, and keep the margin.
Actually, it's even better. He was browsing pr0n when taking that screenshot. Google those imgur filenames in the downloads bar.... facepalm
> Step 2) It tries to acquire the lock in all the N instances sequentially, using the same key name and random value in all the instances.

> so ideally the client should try to send the SET commands to the N instances at the same time using multiplexing.

I am confused. Are the locks requested sequentially, or at the same time? It seem like if they are requested sequentially, the the random backoff time would need to be a large multiple of the combined latency.
But home and end don't as home and end!
In a native client, global mutable state makes many problems straightforward to solve. The web takes that away, puts the state in a funny format in a database or a very limited session store. Even native apps that relied on remote databases still had to orchestrate a bunch of state around the UI, and that was vastly easier without the world resetting every time someone clicked a button, which is traditionally what happens on the web.
This is our first serious Android app -- my co-founder and I would really appreciate feedback! We decided to put an alpha version of the app up on our website to download for free so we could solicit comments before we release the final version.
I have a similar problem with distinguishing speech from background noise - makes pubs / clubs / places with background music a nightmare for having conversations (and hence I tend towards the solitary these days since people tend towards those places for meeting.)
Yeah, I lost all sympathy when I read this:

'why i didn't seek job all these years? well, i can only say i procrastinate and is ok living on a dime.'

Maybe it's not that he doesn't interview well, its that he would be horrible employee.
There's a bit given little or no space in that article: Modi was denied a US visa as a result of the Gujarat riots. Will be interesting to see what happens here...

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Home/Lok-Sabha-Elections-...
Yeah. You really misread. I said those companies ARE jumping in. And it's incredibly surprising. Never would have thought we'd reach the penetration we are so quickly.
http://www.sendameal.com
A similar thing was done to another article from Habrahabr.ru.

Compare:

http://habrahabr.ru/company/ifree/blog/219201/

With:

http://kukuruku.co/hub/cpp/lock-free-data-structures-introdu...

The favicon also looks a bit familiar.

'made for hn'.
You say you believe that your ability to get a degree doesn't correlate to anything other than your tolerance to debt or how rich your parents are.

But you clearly believe that your 2:2 in Physics (for Americans, a 3.0 GPA) is worth more than someone else's 1 in Urban Forestry Management (for Americans, a 3.7 GPA) so presumably you think that there is some variation in difficulty among degrees, and presumably you believe that smarter people will be able to get better degrees?
Does every meal have to be enjoyed? Most meals are eaten for sustenance.

In the future, we might see a wider gap between what's eaten for sustenance versus enjoyment.
Like Erik Naggum, which is considered a troll by many, and also a great writer w/ deep knowledge of programming languagess if can get past the troll part.
this was great ...why i come to hacker news
> It's not like being socially awkward has to be an innate thing; they're called social skills for a reason, you can learn them.

It doesn't have to be, true. But in the same way that a tone-deaf or rhythmically-challenged individual can probably never be even a decent musician, there are plenty of people who can probably never become 'socially skilled'. Consider autism, for example (in all it's degrees), and also the fact that it's probably quite a bit more prevalent in our profession.

> I get what you're saying, but I also tend to think: if they're so smart, why not learn some social skills?

Why are so many very intelligent people alcoholics? Why are so many doctors smokers? Why do so many psychologists have psychological issues?

There's a massive gap between knowledge and practice, and I've become increasingly convinced that not being aware of that gap is one of the primary reasons people have trouble turning 'saying/thinking' into 'doing'. We underestimate the difficulty.

For example. As a student, me and a friend of mine were living rather unhealthy lifestyles. Then a few years ago she suddenly 'got serious'. She started working out, implemented a healthy diet, and applied herself more to her studies.

A month ago I remarked that I really admired her strength, as I still struggle with these things (to a degree). Her answer? She'd been raised with a strong emphasis on health, her family was always into sports and they're all over-achievers. From her perspective, she merely 'dropped' a habit that was deeply instilled in her, and had little trouble picking it up.

I've found that most of the 'changes' and personal development that I see are not a result of mind of matter, but more a result of upbringing, social environment, and being in the right place at the right time. It's not just that, and I think it should't ever be used as an excuse, but it's much more that case than we often suspect.

A socially awkward person who doesn't 'value' time spent with others more often than not 1) just hasn't proper experienced the value of this, 2) has been actively shunned or bullied socially, or 3) just hasn't found the particular people that they can enjoy time with.

tl;dr: the value we place on things is often a result, not a cause. Or at least it goes in both directions.
This is mostly unfortunate. As an Emacs user, I have read a lot of his tutorials and they are very good, I will consider buying one of them (but I don't understand; does or doesn't he accept money through paypal?).

On the side note, he should really edit that bank account screenshot. These downloaded images really looks like they were downloaded from imgur. And if you type those filenames into imgur...
I did read the whole thing, several times.

His situation sucks, I'm not denying that. But why would his likelihood of homelessness be any greater than anyone else working minimum wage? Can he not do what everyone else with a shitty job does and get a shitty apartment with a bunch of roommates for a few hundred a month? Can he not get food stamps like everyone else with minimal income?

I'm not trying to criticize his current feeling of hopelessness. I'm just saying that his situation isn't, in fact, hopeless and that the only way it's ever going to get any better is if he realizes that it isn't hopeless and starts working his ass off to make it better.

And I'm not criticizing him for not having already come to that realization either. It's hard. It takes times. It probably takes help from others who have been there. But it is the only way forward.

It's wrong to be unsympathetic to his plight, but I think it's just as wrong to withhold the truth that many other people have faced the same situation and gotten through it by persistently working their asses off until things got better. He can do this. Anyone reading this in a similar situation, you can do this. It will suck. There's no point in being coy about that. But if you do what it takes to keep working, and work and save smartly, you can get through it. Don't give up hope.
Video background – Anistock
When I last used to be interested in Indian politics ( around 10 years ago). The man was supposed to be a local extreme right wing politician with genocidal tendencies. I am rather surprised that "pro-business" was the tagline the HN post finally went with. Has the man changed since?
What do you see as an example of something swinging back the other way, culturally? The examples he used (the alphabet, the printing press, TV) all seem to have significant permanent cultural effects without swinging back the other way.
As a user, your dream web is a bunch of closed blobs that I can't hope to shape or process in any way. Forget Ad-blocking, Greasemonkey scripts, Reddit Enhancement Suites or any kind of personalization not granted by the author. Changing a bit of a page becomes the equivalent of having to patch a binary instead of writing a couple of XPath expressions. Scraping changes from reading a DOM tag to extracting in-memory structures or in the limit having to do OCR.

Give me the very flawed, but still much more open web any day.
Four number software versioning
WebForms were the worst. The problem was, even if you wrote it properly, the end result always felt clunky because of all the server postbacks. The bill pay app for my electricity company uses it, and I hate it, it's like driving a car through molasses.

I think the component thing is good though; it just needs to be something client side. Probably something like React.
Right, so if i've got this right, 4,4'-oxydianiline is this (pairs of parens are supposed to be circles denoting benzene rings; apologies for writing out the carbons, i can't do plain hexagons):

C - C C - C
/ \ / \
H2N-C ( ) C-O-C ( ) C-NH2
\ / \ /
C - C C - C

The paraformaldehyde does its job as monomeric formaldehyde (the double quote is a double bond running vertically, horrific i know):

O
"
HO-C-OH

And the polymerisation is a straightforward condensation of the formaldehyde with one of the amines, so the monomer is:

C - C C - C O
/ \ / \ "
...-NH-C ( ) C-O-C ( ) C-NH-C-...
\ / \ /
C - C C - C

And here's a monomer with a bit of its neighbourhood:

- C O C - C C - C O C -
\ " / \ / \ " /
) C-NH-C-NH-C ( ) C-O-C ( ) C-NH-C-NH-C (
/ \ / \ / \
- C C - C C - C C -

There's nothing really radical in terms of the building blocks, but it's a novel combination. Cool.

I had never come across oxydiamine before, but i get the impression it's a common component in polymers, and it looks fairly boring and inert. I guess it's not a single big aromatic system, right? Wrong number of electrons.

The reason this is described as a "hemiaminal" is because the formaldehyde carbon can do keto-enol tautomerism and turn into this:

- C OH C -
\ | /
) C-NH-C-NH-C (
/ | \
- C OH C -

Which has hydroxyl groups and nitrogens on the same carbon, and so is a hemiaminal.

I couldn't figure out the "further cyclize at high temperatures, producing poly(hexahydrotriazine)s", though. Does that mean cyclising using linkages like this? Or is there some way the chains can crosslink?
An eye for an eye, a pain-in-the-ass for a similar ass pain. "He had it coming" seems a punishment far out of balance for "making me mad on the internet".
Note that 'pro-business' is a politically empty phrase. After all, no candidate in any election would claim to be 'anti-business'.

If the opposite to any given political standpoint is completely unacceptable, then IMO that makes the original viewpoint empty and meaningless.
You're absolutely right that social skills can be learned. But note that they can be massively harder for some people to learn than others. Social skills that come almost automatically to your average person can be a lot of a work for someone with Asperger's to learn, for instance.
Such feelings are ages old. Friedrich Nietzsche thought of these feelings as a long sickness that he was eventually cured of. He suggested laughter to be a reaction to the sense of existential loneliness and mortality that only humans feel. Having a job is a good thing. But that won't make the feelings go away. It just hides them for a time.
The post probably should've mentioned reader macros, since this is how you do this sort of stuff "normally".
I use fabric, I can type

>> fab push prod deploy

to push changes to my repo service, ssh to production servers, pull down changes via git, and restart necessary services/run associated tasks like symlinking to new static content.

Aside from "deploy" I have tasks to update the virtualenv etc, this has worked well for me for a few years.
I was curious about how content-aware fill works, so I did some digging. Photoshop's content-aware fill uses the PatchMatch algorithm, originally developed at Princeton:

http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/patchmatch....

Does anyone know if Pixelmator is using the same technology, or is it something new?
I get what you're saying, but I also tend to think: if they're so smart, why not learn some social skills? It's not like being socially awkward has to be an innate thing; they're called social skills for a reason, you can learn them.

It takes years to learn them. In an unforgiving environment. If you were punished or mocked every time you got even one answer wrong on a math test growing up, would you be terribly interested in math?

It's not particularly fair, but social awkwardness does tend to send a signal about what people value. And what a socially awkward person clearly does not particularly value is time spent with other people.

Think of it this way: your brain has a number of very, very powerful "vector units" which do certain types of specialized processing insanely fast. Most standard "neurotypical" humans come with their "vector units" preconfigured to analyze and anticipate the reactions of other humans. Some of us don't have such preconfiguration, so we learn to apply them to interesting things we find in the world, like math or programming or board games or something and we become pretty good at intuiting about deep, complex systems. But we have to learn, from square one, things about sociality that everyone else just seems to assume you already know -- and, again, is willing to punish you for not knowing.
Thanks! That was definitely a big mistake - examples are on their way!
Do you think that making fun of people in desperate situations (for whatever reason) is the way to lead a virtuous life?
Thank you so much for what you did. And for saying this publicly.

When your own situation is comfortable it's easy to lose sight of how being unable to get work makes you feel totally worthless and life hardly worth living. It is not right to throw people away and deny them the chance to contribute because they are imperfect in some irrelevant way.
It might also be worth mentioning the numbers here.
The BJP, party to which Mr. Narendra Modi belongs to, alone has got more than 50% of the seats in the Indian Parliament and nearly 60% with allies.

The INC (Indian National Congress) has suffered a historic defeat with not even 10% of the seats. Which also brings the interesting fact that the NDA will not have a Leader of Opposition as none of the other parties hold more than 10% of the seats.
This was something I really loved during my time in Common Lisp. This was a gem that I was hoping would make it into Clojure, but I think around version 1.3 they decided to abandon the idea and add a library to "make anything throwable" which totally missed the point in my opinion.

Are there any other languages that allow the calling scope to specify how lower-level functions handle errors without unwinding the stack?
It occurs to me that what BuzzFeed's doing is that following the mantra of "Don't create something unless you're sure you can sell it"

They've mastered the art of selling a product (Journalism, faux or otherwise), now they're attempting to produce as much of it as they can.

They've also realized that there's a market for all sorts of it, from the low-brow click-bait up to the hard hitting investigative stuff and are attempting to fill all the slots.

The next decade (or just 2-4 years) is really going to be interesting.
All pretty forgettable. The Verge has really tanked in quality in the last few months. A good proportion of their content is now blogspam from other sources. Case in point, see anything 'written' by this staff member: http://www.theverge.com/users/casskhaw
It really depends on the location. I wouldn't assume its below market rate when you don't know where the market is.
I'm inclined towards this thinking also.

Not learning crucial skills is just lazy and self-centred.

I've met amazing devs with no social skills because they didn't want to put effort into learning anything except what they enjoyed.

The world doesn't owe you anything - it's up to yourself to do your best to acquire what you want. You don't get what you want just because in your own opinion, you deem yourself to be deserving of it.
When I was much younger, I used to think that I was so awesome that people would have to bend to my social needs if they wanted my awesomeness. They would come looking for me for employment, for relationships, for anything.

Needless to say, that was foolish of me. Other people are humans just like me, with their own strengths and weaknesses just like me.

Maybe this was on my mind because of the "RMS FAQ" also on the front page. Enough people want to deal with RMS that he is able to give checklists of what he does and doesn't need. And even he still has trouble making ends meet with speaking engagements, since the $10 check-clearing fee needs to be covered.
This is a huge problem with new consoles I find. I don't remember having to update my N64 every time I wanted to play it. But my PS3? Every time I want to play I have to spend like 30 minutes in downloading and installing an update. Every single time. I don't play that often but still do play from times to times and I haven't had a clean launch for years.
With his deep ties with big business families I doubt this "pro-business" is anything but pro corps.

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghabahree/2014/03/12/doing-big...)
Relevant article from F8 where facebook claims MVC does not scale: http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/05/facebook-mvc-flux

Having built out largescale backbone apps & android apps, I'm inclined to aggree.
Don't the poor and those in hardship have the right to beg? Besides, as sanxiyn said, he does have something to offer in return.
MVC has some nice properties but the thing that always bothered me about it is that it introduces a mental hurdle that shouldn't really be there. "We use MVC, therefore the kinds of objects I can write are models, views, and controllers" seems to be the default, if unarticulated, position of the inexperienced developer. Realizing that no, you can actually write other classes and functions outside of your controller is now a epiphany that one must have to grow as a designer of code. Would these people be writing a jumbled single class containing even more without MVC? I guess, maybe, but a 2000 line controller calling a 2000 line model is only a slight improvement. Anyway, I've had to deal with enough fucked MVC code in my day to question whether or not even giving the methodology a name is a good idea.
I sure wonder what makes web development such a problem.

It's not any one bit, it's the fundamental design upon which it was all built. We're stuffing applications into a document viewer.

A very good document viewer that has through the path of least resistance had more and more tacked on until it evolved into the terrible application VM we know it as today.
It's because the Web is a giant pile of hacks upon hacks. It is the ultimate manifestation of New Jersey design philosophy. Systems can only be as conceptually sound as their underpinnings allow. In this case, the broken design of the Web forces everything built on top of it to be a ridiculous mix of HTML/CSS/JS.

Users not closing their tags? It's OK, we'll complicate the parser to accommodate them. Users want to interact with what should be static documents? No problem, we'll throw a scripting language in there. Users want to interact with hardware peripherals? OK, we'll just expose that.

The real tragedy is how much of systems research has died at the hands of this crappy sentiment of Good Enough that pervades the Web. Literally everything the Web touches gets infected with Good Enough.
I remember this guy! Blast from the past! He used to make trouble around comp.lang.java.programmer, i think. He was clearly intelligent, but unhinged and emotional enough that he didn't really contribute anything useful. A sad case all round, really.
It can also be an occupation, such as working for the government, or the Free Software Foundation.
But you clearly believe that your 2:2

Nope, I believed that. I now realise it's total bunkum, as while one degree may be more challenging than another, from a hiring manager's perspective it's the GPA/class that counts, and little else, and value is in the eye of the beholder.
I don't think that's really what that essay is about. Arguably, the point is the opposite of that. Read the part about Thiel interviewing for and not getting a Supreme Court clerkship. That process involves out-competing people: the pool of applicants looking to get into Stanford Law, the pool of classmates looking to get a circuit clerkship, the pool of circuit clerks looking to get a Supreme Court clerkship. Out of the 100,000 people who apply to law schools each year, 36 will get a Supreme Court clerkship 4-5 years later. Being in that 36 just requires doing the same thing everyone else is doing, but doing it better than the other 99,964 people.

The moral of the story is that Thiel became incredibly successful by doing something nobody else was doing. If 100,000 people were all working for 4-5 years trying to create PayPal, maybe Thiel's version wouldn't have been the best. But that doesn't matter, because those people were off applying to law school. That's what Thiel seems to mean by "monopoly." Go find an area where you can make money, where there aren't 100,000 people trying to do the same thing you're doing.
how many of you people that site Xah as irresponsible would be homeless in siz months if they lost their income? I'm a slightly older hacker and I've seen bubbles like this before, they dont always last and just because you are riding the wave at the moment doesnt give you the right to look down at someone who has made a few wrong turns. If half of you critics had found yourself in his proposition you wouldnt have the skills, resources, or courage to try fight you way out of it. Its shameful that you think your minor contribution in 1 or 2 companies gives you the right to look down on someone who has done so much for the community
As opposed to your comment, which contains an eloquent refutation of belorn’s comment?

Don’t simply call people trolls or strawman-slayers, use good arguments to counter bad ones. Otherwise we get bad arguments countering bad arguments, followed by meta-arguments, tone arguments, etc – don’t let it happen.
See this comment for example; Is this comment not better with the second paragraph than without it?