skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shameless (relevant) hijack: I want HN's advice on a book I'm considering doing.

Backstory: somebody on Quora asked about common startup misconceptions: http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-are-common-misconceptions...

Off the top of my head I named a bunch and it turned out to be a popular post. Somebody said, "Hey, that's a good outline for a book!" I thought, "Hm, let's give that a try."

So I could get feedback, I put together three sample chapters and a landing page:

http://williampietri.com/book/

Now I'm trying to decide: If I do the (substantial) work of writing it, will enough people read it to make it worthwhile? (Worthwhile is defined here in terms of impact. I'm sure it won't be as profitable as doing something technical, but there's an audience of first-time entrepreneurs I'd like to help.)

In particular, I'm wondering:

* Will new entrepreneurs bother to buy and read a book about problems?

* Will people who deal with entrepreneurs find a book like this handy enough that they'll make new entrepreneurs buy and read it?
Personally, I try to keep the dream and the motivation, but be choosier about action. That is, even if I want to build a giant system, I start small. Because avoiding the premature scaling is part of how I raise my odds that I'll have enough users to justify scaling.
This is the best thing I've read in almost 20 years.
That would be backwards incompatible.
http://hartator.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/fire-vic-gundotra/
My apple developer account name has @mac.com in it. Apple does plenty of throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.
Wow, a lot of this rings true. I've witnessed #5 directly, and it's maddeningly frustrating. Once the execs get this idea that viral is this magical path to user growth, the idea can't be killed. This is the plan:

1. Start with our product that has nothing to do with social networking

2. Spoon in some "social" and "sharing", and mix.

3. ROCKETSHIP VIRAL GROWTH OMFG!

...and when you don't get to step three, just keep adding MORE SOCIAL!

Force people to log in using Facebook! Put share buttons everywhere! Harvest the user's address book and spam it! Harvest their Facebook friends! Add Twitter! Add Google+!

What's worse is when you're resource constrained and you stop working on the core features of your product: the features that actually bring real users to your product to.
This guy seems to have a pretty good idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7862320
But we wouldn't know that if he hadn't tried :)
> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched

I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous.

It's one of those many weird cases where you sit there, hands on your desk, mouth agape looking at some Google property that was fucked over by the G+ project and just ask yourself "doesn't anybody at Google use this garbage?". Because the issues are so immediate and so obvious, it's impossible that nobody raised some red flags.

Which leaves two possibilities:

- Google is composed of such inept socially awkward people that no red flags were raised and they all just proceeded on course doo dee doo doo dee (a scenario I find very hard to believe)

- Red flags were raised and simply brushed aside.

The first scenario is hard to believe because it presumes mass and gross incompetence on behalf of most of the employees at Google. But I know googlers, I've been interviews by Google, I've had various interactions with people from Google, and most of them just seem like normal folks from a variety of backgrounds.

As more and more leaks out it sounds like the second scenario is where it's at, and the question is why? Was it just some dumb headed attempt to extract any money possible for the major shareholders by turning the brand into garbage? Or was it just an honest attempt at unifying the properties, just managed at an absolutely amateurish level?

It's all so senseless and stupid and now everything is broken.

The sad thing is, this is something I see all the time, one hopelessly broken pet project is carried by the good idea fairy to some senior manager, and they being a cascade of failures across the rest of the company on something they probably have convinced themselves is just a big gamble with lots of upside. By the time the damage is done and widely recognized, the exec is out the door on their golden parachute leaving the remaining veterans to pick up the pieces and unfuck things. Except in this case, the ultimate party responsible holds half of the majority voting rights and continues to blissfully push socially inept product ideas. The only remediation is a long unfucking process and some possible minor impact on share price, meaning he can only buy 2 300' yachts instead of 2 350' yachts.
The author is complaining about losing trust.
If you're looking for advanced web development, check out Real Python - http://www.realpython.com

Sure, we start with the basics, but we do get into some advanced topics - like BDD, adding Angular to Django ...

(Note: I am the co-founder and author)
I'm fully aware of that. I just tried, if at all possible, to minimize the damage I brought onto myself. And to also try and show my hoopers how serious the privacy issue is.
Had a similar idea while reading this article: I was thinking of a website "How to do things", crowdsourced like Wikipedia where anyone could contribute.
So examples could be: How to launch a ecommerce marketplace, or How to launch a Saas, etc. And you could read the manuals, edited by people that learned the hard way. And useful for some that didn't go through incubators. Plus we can extend out of startups/businesses.
I like this idea of your book, but if you get a particular point wrong you can't change it, whereas by doing a crowdsourced website anyone can improve. Just my midnight 2cents :-)
Rust doesn't, and (I think) D doesn't.
Qt Showroom – Calling all application developers
Why Would Anyone Want a Robot That Looks This Human?
I think there was already some idea of how to make the changes they wanted to make, so it made sense to fork since the maintainer wouldn't integrate the changes.
The problem was the G+ was pitched as a social network. It grew, like a cancer, into some weird meta-project that defies description, and along the way fucked over lots of people who worked very hard to maintain different identities and roles in the various on-line milieus they frequented. Sometimes it was as simple as revealing their real name to their model plane group. Other times it involved just shutting down real income generating youtube channels that people had poured lots of time and effort into (thousands of hours), or revealing to abusive ex-spouses where you lived...all without any real good reason and zero upside to the users of the various Google properties and dubious upside to Google as a business.

This was very costly for Google just on the employment front as well. Word on the street is that Google had upwards of 1,200 employees working on the G+ project. Fully burdened, that's something like $250-300m/year.

There was no upside for the entire project, for users or for google. So now, a couple $billion later, they finally realized what everybody else on the planet realized 2 years ago. They could have just surveyed users back then to find out where they were screwing up, but in typical Google fashion, that would have involved actually engaging with their users, which Google is borderline allergic to.
Simple solution: all browsers should have 3rd party cookies disabled, including iframes.
I agree with Joel Spolsky on this subject [1]. From what I've seen when people write something monolithic from scratch they just end up making similar mistakes and introduce new problems that weren't there to begin with. Vim's codebase isn't terrible, it's been going strong for 23 years, but it's accrued a lot of technical debt that makes doing somethings difficult. It's also controlled by a single person, and don't get me wrong this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it makes getting in the necessary changes to achieve the goals of neovim nearly impossible.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
I don't think it would have been better. We don't need another TextMate 2 on our hands.
Was wondering about this too - if it scales up to something NIF-sized. The article only talks about low-power/IC applications.
Monadic parser combinators in Python for FP beginners
Yeah, but Watterson clearly doesn't like working with technology. He's very much a pen-paper-human kind of guy, and I don't see him all of a sudden deciding to step into the internet.

I'll be darned if he couldn't find someone to work with who could handle getting his work online though. It's mere wishful thinking, but he could draw and communicate (or not) in whichever way he wants, and some trusted friend and gatekeeper handles all of the scanning and online stuff, which could be kept very simple and noncommercial. No ads, twitter, comments section or any of the usual "social media branding" stuff, literally just a page with a comic on it.

Sigh. Man, I still miss Calvin and Hobbes.
I went undercover on Ashley Madison to find out why women cheat
The standard doesn't seem to suggest that. Quote from http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-5.5.2

If the target URI was obtained from a source that does not have its
own URI (e.g., input from the user keyboard, or an entry within the
user's bookmarks/favorites), the user agent MUST either exclude the
Referer field or send it with a value of "about:blank".

Am I missing anything?
Right. Although the template method has its own issues. For example, once the element type size exceeds 64 bits, you can no longer assume an atomic write/read. This isn't a big problem considering that concurrent data structures don't usually rely on the write/read atomicity of the elements themselves (though they do rely on atomicity of modifying internal, structural data), but that's just something to think about.
Infidelity Modern Style: The Science of Cheating
That was 2012. The EU made the rules more stringent recently, at least, that is what the press reports. See for example http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1321606. On the other hand, http://www.dvice.com/2014-3-18/eu-says-all-mobile-devices-mu... thinks that the USB-to-lightning adapter will still be allowed.
FullCalendar 2.0.0 Released
Why Facebook and Google's Concept of 'Real Names' Is Revolutionary (2011)
I don't understand how this is news... It's been out there for months. It is much more interesting the "Made with Meteor" http://madewith.meteor.com/
It's 2014. Please move on.
As lawtguy's response illustrates, you need to be careful before trusting anything relayed by a propaganda mill like AEI -- validity and truth aren't their touchstones, whether something can be pushed under a headline that fits the ideology that AEI is funded to promote is.
> If it works well, the demand is there, but we all know that, don't we?

We do? I don't think I'd replace my keyboard with this even if it worked flawlessly. I like to have tactile feedback when I type.
Google can't put you to jail. NSA (and the government) can.
Why? Vim is a well tested codebase. It has many features. Starting over would produce better code, but in what timeframe? I think the neovim contributors made the right decision to refactor.
Right. Still, I find it strange that almost all attacks on personal freedom in America have been done by private businesses (or in the name of private business), and almost all defenses against such attacks have been placed by the US federal government, and yet some Americans still trust private corporations -- that have hurt them again and again -- more than the government that has rescued them from the clutches of corporations time after time. If there is one country in the whole world that should definitely trust its government more than its corporations, that would be the US.
http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/clickit/
My startup is in a relatively new industry that has had multiple investments/acquisitions in the past year or so, and we've not been able to pursue conversations with some of these acquirers because we don't have financials in order. We're bringing on an accountant now, but it's never been a priority for us historically as we're in a high margin business with great cash flow. If I could do it again, I'd hire an accountant/hr/operations person a year ago (1yr after starting the company) rather than today.
A quick summary, from the slides:

The mechanism PyParallel uses is that it still has the one, main thread with GIL. It also has parallel threads with their own heap and a trivial pointer-incrementing allocator in a thread-local pool that deallocates on completion by dropping the whole pool. Either the main thread is running, in typical Python fashion, or some parallel threads are running. When parallel threads are running, the main Python heap is all marked read-only and all reference counting is disabled. I believe communication from parallel threads to the main thread is done by sending serialised objects.
The obviously relevant US government (since it's the one that ended slavery, fought the robber barons, passed the Civil Rights Act, recently passed health insurance reform, and has limited powers compared to other western democracies) imprisons 216,896 people[0], or less than 0.07% of the US population.

State governments are not "the US government". If someone says "the US government", they are either referring to the federal government, or need to do a great deal more research before speaking about US governance.

[0] http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/population_statistics.js...
As a data point, an organist may have to deal with latencies between few hundreds to seconds. So it's not that we can't deal with latency at all.

Ninjam[1] arranges realtime music collaboration by exploiting musical structure and its construction in intervals. Human collaboration which can be similarly structured could still be arranged to work with.

Counter examples: games appear to work over latencies because a lot of them are about restricting other's agency and making an experience worse (i.e. not true collaboration)
2d fighting game can be seen for instance as two game designers attempts to make a game worse for the others. It would be interesting to study why games like left4dead (which requires team play and collaboration) still work.

[1] http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/
Hi there,

I work on the IPv6 team at Comcast - please email me with details... nathan (underscore) owens(at)cable(dot)comcast.com

Thanks,
Nathan
I work on the IPv6 team at Comcast - please email me with details... nathan (underscore) owens(at)cable(dot)comcast.com

Thanks,
Nathan
So Charleston
Most of the millionaires in this country are self-employed, so statistically, owning a business probably the best way to get rich. Unfortunately, most startup employees, even though they have stock options, don't have a meaningful enough ownership stake.

This said, if you're going to earn a high salary as an employee and want to invest heavily, I don't know why you would focus on startups. Most fail, it can take years for the equity to be liquid if ever, the equity is extremely vulnerable, valuations are currently exorbitant, and you can only bet in one direction. The public equities markets are far more attractive.
Short answer, no.

As you've observed, even under theoretically perfect conditions, the latency is much more than would be tolerable for true real-time applications. And that's not even counting the time spent in hardware, on the various cpus in the path, buffers, etc.
This is a form of pre-emptive scheduling. It doesn't happen when the stack size needs to increase, it causes the stack check to fail. A bit of classic Dmitry cleverness:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ETuA2IOmnaQ4j81AtTGT40Y4...
http://golang.org/doc/go1.2#preemption

Anyway, I was just offering this scenario up as a bit of curious humour where somebody might think they are providing an escape hatch but the compiler in-lines their call foiling their plans :)
One idea I've toyed with is building a "terrarium" (marsium?) with Mars imitation soil and atmosphere, and attempt to bootstrap some life in there.
Brianna Wu – Nine ways to stop hurting and start helping women in tech
>What is Java's startup and JIT overhead?<

Wouldn't that depend on the program?

For a tiny program (meteor contest) that only needs a fraction of a second on a 6 year old quad-core desktop, maybe 99%

For a tiny program (nbody) that needs a few tens of seconds on the same machine, maybe 0.4%

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.php#java
a lot of methods used by people throughout our history are no longer considered "good" by western culture...

bath houses and sauna (sweat lodges also), fasting, fish and potatoe diets, beer and wine consumption (maybe was not considered good, but was common)

all seem to have lost ground.

i could also argue that eating sushi or seaweed is on the list, also, peace pipe (!), and 2-sleep days (sleep+"second sleep").

im currently leaning towards these being better for us that 9-5 coffee strung out + staring at a lcd all day... by a lot
What about a fragmentation of the area - what would be the radius from your location where you would be able to collaborate with others at <=10 milliseconds of latency?
What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs?
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.php#whymemory
US City Open Data Census
I think there was a more thought-provoking part than the "broke everything it touched" line:

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt told National Public Radio digital editor Andy Carvin in 2011 that if people don't want to use their real names, then they shouldn't use Google+. He explained that Google should be considered "an identity service" with Google+ as the foundation across all its products.

Google, particularly its senior executives, have been utterly unrepentant as they've systematically trashed their once hallowed "do no evil" philosophy. The thing I find disappointing is that more people didn't take Schmidt's advice and stop using Google's services.

There are plenty of alternative search engines, e-mail services, video hosting sites, mobile operating systems and browsers. Outside these five, Google have relatively few big success stories anyway. Their track record in recent years has mostly been one failure after another, even sometimes damaging their established brands like YouTube and Google Maps.

And yet despite all the complaining, a lot of users seem to stick by them. I can understand that behaviour with Facebook (and Google+ itself) because of the inherent network effect, but the longevity of Google's brand loyalty is remarkable.
>It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook

The Facebook (as a product) ship has sailed. Even Facebook knows this, which is why it's offering and paying billions to any products/services that can and/or have stolen its eyeballs.

Perhaps the worst mistake Google made in all of this was strategic: rather than trying to out-Facebook Facebook with a competing product (and nearly destroying their own ecosystem in the process), Google should have focused on using their considerable resources to snap up companies that were indirectly taking mindshare and audience from Facebook.

In so doing, they could have left Facebook's core product to Facebook and virtually surrounded it with other products/services for that inevitable time when people were ready for anything but Facebook.

In other words, they should have pre-empted Facebook's current strategy vs. it's prior one. As it is, Google is one step behind.
I didn't link my ID's, then one day I clicked the wrong button and ended up using YouTube with my real, full name (gross!). I looked for my playlist containing all the private videos I'd uploaded of my small children and it was gone!

I found the playlist later under my other, weird shadow YouTube account, but in the moment when I thought all the videos of my son's first years were gone (I do have backups... somewhere), I can easily imagine crying my eyes out.
They aren't. HTTP has a layered design, and the structure of requests is a lower level feature than the semantics of specific request type -- a request can always have a body, but that doesn't mean that there aren't request types (e.g., GET) for which the body is meaningless.

> Does that not violate REST principles?

Most attempts to impose semantics on GET bodies would violate REST principles as well as breaking HTTP (given that GET responses are cacheable and the body is treated as not relevant to the response.)
The circumference of the earth is roughly 40 thousand kilometers.
This is great. I really want to try Telescope for maintaining & tracking feature requests within our team.
Yep, updated. Sorry for the typo.
What are the advantages of the Hurd over Linux/BSD? (2013)
Yes, they have valuable uses in medicine, until we find a better substitute at least.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/leeches.html

There is a mechanical leech but it doesn't work as well at the moment and there's no real downside to using real leeches.
A Scientific Guide to Saying "No": How to Avoid Temptation and Distraction
Let's assume that this product works faultlessly.

What proportion of keyboard users are touch typists? I'm not.
There's something wrong with breaking the semantics of GET; all the revision does is clarify that the syntax of HTTP is method-independent so that message bodies aren't syntax errors, but GET bodies still have no semantic meaning and ascribing one to them is likely to mean you server is doing things that clients, caches, etc., won't correctly handle.
> Red flags were raised and simply brushed aside.

People working at Google are smart (and majority that I know are smarter than me). Smart people are going to point that something is wrong. But they will not bitch too much because that will be "career-limiting move".
Just paid 8.25% sales tax on a Tesla in NY (Long Island). OUCH. (vs. 0% in NJ!)
Right. I should have qualified my statement with languages that I'm aware of.
> Instead of just using the URL as the caching key, use URL+body. Same URL and same body = same response.

Well, except that since the body isn't defined as having semantics that determine the response, an cache based on the HTTP protocol spec has no reason to do that.
is this the fcc? a lobbyist should not be able to influence regulations that are contrary to the public good. he should be excused due to conflict of interest. as a matter of fact, the whole motion should be excused!
G-Unit Reunites with R&B Star Mack Benton For New Song
G-Unit
These 10 things are never going to change. Why? Because pedantic, well-paced software engineering isn't sexy. You know what's sexy and exciting to a startup exec (especially one with an ego)? Tight deadlines, going viral, going head-to-head with the biggest companies on earth, and dreaming big. The worst part is, all of these things actually work in Sales.

I've read this same advice in one form or another many times. This is all well-known stuff and "clients" still aren't learning as far as I can tell. I don't think they'll ever learn because proper software engineering practice is counterintuitive and the attitude of management will not lend itself to these practices.

Instead of talking about the problems, I think we need to arm engineers with techniques for defending proper software engineering practices. Lean and Agile methodologies have helped considerably, but I think more work is needed to truly ease many of these frustrations. I'll let you know once I've figured it out...