skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two things:

1. In my limited experience with pitching/salesing when you say "Yeah I think we can probably build that" the customer/client will take it as "We already have this". There is no amount of rational talking and explaining you can put in place to prevent this. If they ask for something, and your answer is anything but an unequivocal "No." they will think you already have it.

2. Isn't the whole concept of MVP and lean basically going out to people and saying "We have this" then seeing if somebody pays, and if they do, making it?
THANKS, my main focus was to not clone existing social networks and make the app really simple and accessible
If it can do it for normal Rackspace Cloud instances, it can do it for OnMetal instances.
If there were any justice in the world, that article would be immediately nominated for expedited deletion, and every other wikimedia site spawned due to exclusions by wikipedia's rules would mercilessly make fun of them for it.
A lot of people are talking about how this guys doesn't understand Trademark law. Well, no shit.

This conference stole his identity. He isn't claiming he has a right to the name.

What the conference did was legal, but still not right.

All too typical of people trying to build themselves up in status.

They knew about this guy and they then they checked to see if he trademarked it. They knew they were legally okay, so they went ahead with it.

Legal move, but a dick move.
That's definitely what it feels like, a visceral reaction, but from everything I could piece together it was about much more. Dalton tried to create a platform for communication that could power a twitter-like service.

But... he never really explained it and in the absence of a message everyone had to figure out the message on their own using what's most obvious.

That's how it became a twitter-clone/wannabe.
Vagrant, developer's best friend
Warning: This response is for pedantic purposes only.

This is someone who is putting a gun to my daughter's head.

They don't want to vaccinate their child, which increases my daughter's chance of getting seriously ill or dying.

This is a fantasy about retaliating against the people who threaten lives. That's gallows humor.
Great to see Trello, Fog Creek and Joel doing well.

Joel/Fog Creek are one of the few entities in the startup ecosystem that I read about and think to myself, I want to be a CEO like Joel and build a company like Fog Creek.

A lot of startups claim they want to "change the world." And I think Joel can actually claim to have done that thanks to his influential blog and the humane company culture he's setup at Fog Creek. And this is without even counting stack exchange.
Ask HN: How did Stack Exchange succeed despite its awful community?
I just read a StackExchange discussion titled, "Are TED presentations academically credible?"
http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/26277/are-ted-presentations-academically-credible

The top comment reads as follows: "It's not clear to me how this is relevant to academia..."

Ugh!

Based on everything I've read (from people the who manage StackExchange) they consider pedantry to be a feature of their community rather than a bug.

Yet, every time I read a page on the StackExchange network I have to sift through comments questioning the appropriateness of the question. What's more, questions are routinely "closed" for being "off topic" despite high page views and numerous answers.

Why do people put up with this--seriously? I no longer intentionally visit their network because its such a miserable and frustrating experience.

EDIT: A typo.
It makes Nature look overzealous, while failing to teach the lesson. You can find less heavy handed parables in the bible. The dystopia isn't that exciting either.
Wow, sorry to hear about all this. Are you going to return the remaining investor money?
It's like you didn't read what I wrote. I was responding to your claim that people are rational. People are not, inherently, rational. Emotions hold far more sway over them, presenting them with evidence isn't sufficient because they don't want to be persuaded or because they can't rationally consume the evidence and draw conclusions from it.
Except that if you miss paying rent, they let you know, and quickly.
Well, Clojure also was a mess when I tried it (2 years ago maybe?). Leiningen (a/the build system) was pretty slow, and I couldn't find a way to use the language in a more lisp-like way easily, like editing a few files and (re)loading them into a running REPL (other than iterating through all buffers in Emacs and loading/evaluating them manually; there may have been other problems as well, I don't remember). You know, like you can edit a few Java files in Eclipse, press shift-ctrl-s, and have the new code hot-deployed into your debugging session.

Maybe the people who wrote the Clojure tutorials considered that question to be SO natural they didn't even mention it, but I found it very unintuitive. And running a very slow tool on every code change and waiting for the build and then starting the program is very unnatural and un-lisp-like.

Common Lisp is a bit old by now, but it's always been very stable and fast. Maybe Racket is a more modern+mature Lisp family member that's nice to try.
The debate on Democracy Now between Noura Erakat and Joshua Hantman was pretty chilling in the same way.

NOURA ERAKAT: ...As to the human shields, Israel continuously and repeatedly uses this mantra of Palestinians used as human shields. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Israeli Breaking the Silence, a group of former soldiers, have all testified to the same—

JOSHUA HANTMAN: Hamas admit to it. Hamas say they do it. They’re proud of it.

NOURA ERAKAT: —to the same allegation—reports about this same allegation—and I encourage listeners and viewers to look up those reports—and have disproved that Palestinians have been used as human shields. Hamas might ask Palestinians to be human shields, but are Palestinians robots? Do they not have minds and hearts, and care for their children? Why would they—why dehumanize them and accuse them of mindlessly listening to Hamas, to whom they protest against? This is a dehumanizing discourse, and we should reject it vehemently.

Hantman's entire side of the interview looked like a studied attack to try to white-wash deaths with pay #6732B from some intelligence playbook. It is pretty interesting. I'd encourage people to give a listen or watch the video

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/11/gaza_debate_as_palesti...
Internal combustion vehicles can't be stored vertically, due to the engine oil migrating throughout the engine. Electric vehicles can be.

http://www.technovelgy.com/graphics/content07/robot-garage-i...
True story: I initially thought Cloud9 (the esports team) was sponsored by Cloud9 (the development environment). They've even both got blue cloud logos!

Maybe they should think about cutting a deal, if their thing with HyperX isn't too exclusive?
If I had to guess what the blackhat talk was, it probably was more about a systemic vulnerability than a specific hack. I'm guessing it got killed over ECPA legal concerns.
This is actually my favorite opening line to use at talks: "My name is Kasra and I run the mobile team at Stack Exchange. The first response I always get after I tell people that is 'why does the stock exchange need mobile apps?' and I'm here to explain that to you today, except you know, with the right company name."
>People are rational, and want to understand, but unless you make the information properly accessible in the UX sense, your exasperation is due to your own fault.

No. They really aren't[1], and they really don't[2].

Changing your mind is very hard, and most people don't do it. Even if you have been trained to change your mind, the longer that you hold onto an idea, the harder it is to believe the idea to be false. There is a reason Neils Bohr stated "science progresses one death at a time."

You are likely reading this and coming up with a bunch of reasons that you are right, and I'm wrong. Likely: "You missed the point, You didn't talk about UX", or "The doctor was still condescending," or more likely there is some flaw in my argument that you immediately see[3]. These thoughts alone should give you a good idea that it is difficult to change your mind.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...
[2] http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want...
[3] It is also entirely possible that you don't think any of these things. It depends on how strongly you hold to the belief that you shared.
That would make for a pretty neat integration with Navut[1], a local Montreal-based startup.

They offer data-driven information about neighborhoods that would be pretty cool to combine with the people-driven information that LocalFlow produces.

[1] http://www.navut.com/montreal
Right, he did. But apparently Nilay is actually going to be the editor-in-chief now for The Verge - unless he's meant to be the overall Vox Media editor-in-chief.
What's the most popular Ruby standard library?
Bitcoin faucets and the wild wild west
There could be a near infinite list of stupid article ideas that would just be fine for them, namely any top 40 song; points for a page dedicated to its video; individual episodes of select science fiction tv shows, or nearly every anime character.
There are a lot of comments here about the issue of how to communicate risk of different personal medical choices to patients who do not themselves have medical training. It is a tough problem. Professional stage magicians, and avid skeptics, Penn and Teller had an episode of their cable television series Bullshit report on the issue of risks and benefits of vaccination. Maybe a clip from their TV show (with language that many families would find inappropriate for viewing with their children) will help communicate the risk and benefit ratio of vaccination more clearly than documents written in a more clinical tone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo

(short clip above, long clip below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLcOz4EKrxg
It wasn't bad in the beginning.

There are a lot of interesting threads with a lot of interesting and often fun posts that would be killed immediately if they were made today. For example:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...

Even that was closed down. Essentially they wanted a great site, and did that, but then the pendulum swung too far the other direction and now I find the place groan worthy
Those were the words she used, which could be entirely different from her actual reasoning that she didn't feel like talking about. And if this were any kind of world where doctors overrule you because "your argument is invalid" then she will of course not be forthcoming with her doctor ever. She will instead learn the magic words "oh, Johnny had a bad reaction to a vaccine at his previous doctor in Canada."

The doctor's office is not a courtroom or an arrest where everything you say can and should be used against you.

I'm reminded of people who think it would be awesome to bug lawyer's offices or doctor's offices or confessionals to ferret out crime. It will work the first time, but after that you have totally destroyed trust so you haven't gained yourself anything and the public has lost a place to sensitive discuss issues with people they trust.
I dunno; my takeaway is Josh is probably a raging asshole. Imagine if you where an employee recruited into verge, and the ceo bails for a high salary. The ceo of a startup should go down with the ship.
I'd also say that one might do well to explore it, even if you don't plan to use it for everything. I'm definitely a Lisp neophyte (Scheme in college, no Common lisp, and then ~6 years with some lisp-like proprietary framework), but there are some things I really miss from it.

As some have said, it's worth learning because of the way it can change the way you think about things. It sounds hokey and trite, or like someone's trying to be smug ("I'm in the secret lisp club!"), but I genuinely feel profoundly grateful to have been exposed to Lisp. (To be fair, I also really like programming in Python for _many_ of the same reasons I enjoyed programming in Lisp.)
How does Google teach a computer to tell stories?
Thanks for the kind comment, Walter. I'm based in NYC but I'll drop you a line next time I'm back in SF.
I agree the dystopia isn't exciting, but I don't think I can speak for whether Nature was overzealous or not. Only they could do that.

The decision to not inform yourself and your family about factual information that is related to the well being of the family has historically been frowned upon. We have taken action on matters like this by passing laws that state parents must afford their children a basic right to information as it is presented by society. Schools.

Given the Internet is causing a huge surge in the amount of information available for consumption (ignoring the opinionated bits), one would assume there wouldn't need to be laws in place to force parents to this decision. It simply takes care of itself because the child has nearly unfettered access to the information. Granted it could be curated better, but whatever.

The real issue then becomes ensuring this information is readily available to anyone that desires it. This desired outcome is only be affected by something along the lines of government (or terrorist) sponsored censorship and the current spat of anti-net neutrality arguments presented by big business. Fuck you Verizon. The logical conclusion this is why they are so horribly insidious to society as a whole. The net effect of anti net-neutrality arguments only serves to limit the spread of information .
they notice that? ;-)
the account was registered 16 minutes ago something tells me its not official...
Responsive Disco
EuroPython 2014 videos
Cue Deus Ex quotes:

"The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government."
Samsung Gear VR setup walkthrough, First look at Gear VR Manager
I think you can also be quite productive in Emacs in a much shorter time.

The difference is: the flexibility of IDEs stops after a while, and then there's nothing new to learn to become more efficient. With Emacs, you can keep on learning and optimizing your work environment.

Disclaimer: I work with Eclipse almost exclusively these days, also because for Java it's so much better, IMHO.
They do with taxes as well. But from the article, the IRS had an old name and address on file.
Archaeologists discover ancient astronomy lab in northern Peru
Same here. The intro course taught us emacs and vi in the first course. Then kinda left it up to us. Only a small handful stuck with them. People either loved it, or hated it.
SoftLayer has been doing this since 2006 and also offers virtual compute instances as well. Can be purchased hourly or monthly

http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers
This cannot be overstated. If you give the sales team any room or freedom, they will make your life hell trying to keep up with "features" that outdo everyone else just so they can get their commission check. They don't have to deal with anything beyond signing of the purchase, so they don't care that it sinks everyone else to get that purchase.
> Will the company be worth billions of dollars? Probably, because we're going to be the first movers on our platform.

You crack me up, Greg.

"Don't be evil" was memorable and conveyed an ethos. It was an explicit poke at Microsoft, the evil empire to hackers of its time. By comparison, what you wrote is extremely generic and fails to pack a punch. It's hard to imagine anything more flaccid than a motto based on a process that has increasingly become the convenient default of tech companies. Joel's motto isn't about the process (distributed, asynchronous, etc) but about the people, and it's anything but convenient to implement.
I thought she was like 40 something.
haha fuck you dude, I make more in a week than you make in an year.
LocaFlow is an app style of Reddit / HN from the point of view of news which are posted.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted because I believe you have made a non-harmful contribution to the discussion. Freedom is important, because once we've given up the right to refuse vaccination, we're a step closer to giving up other rights as well. Further down this path we could see criminals without the right to refuse sterilization or mood treatment.

This article of course is not about vaccinations specifically. It's about a woman with a black and white view of protecting her children. She ends up choosing the less safe option out of ignorance and stubbornness but she's ultimately trying to do what is best for her children.

This article assumes that her ignorance on the vaccination issue indicates ignorance about all things scientific, which is a fallacy. Likely, she only needs the right person (someone she trusts) to approach her with a proper explanation.

Yes, the vaccination issue is absurd but we will not resolve it by removing parents from the freedom to do what they think is healthiest for their child. That will not make them more open to logical discussion and more likely to trust the decisions of their doctors.
Agreed. Not sure why the top post ITT is a rant about copyright law vs trademark laws. @futurestack never claimed legal rights to the name, he's just saying that what New Relic did was a total dick move.
> edit: changed "absolute nobody" to "virtually unknown" to address rudeness concerns.

The author of the parent comment seems to have said that initially, based on his edit descriptions.
Seth,

Thank you so much for posting this. We all make mistakes, and for each of those, there could be ten thousand HN'ers who would come along behind us and say something like "But how could you do X? That's stupid!"

Everybody wants to read business porn. Nobody wants to sit down and hear the ways they will likely screw up. Guess which one is more effective. We need this.

This took guts to do. It is one of the more useful posts I've read, and it will have a positive impact. Congrats.
I went to Puerto Rico recently and one thing I remember was how strange it seemed to me how much more popular Burger King was versus McDonalds there. I'm not sure if this is a general Latin American (including Miami?) trend, but I just remember it being a little noteworthy.

Here's a picture I found of (supposed) market share in Puerto Rico, for example:

http://dialog.scarborough.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Pue...
I think that makes sense. I wonder though if WhatsApp is an outlier - did they always charge a flat fee to use their messenger client, or is that a recent thing (after they attracted immense numbers of users)?
As a population, the people who legitimately cannot be vaccinated -- or who get vaccinated but a certain vaccination just doesn't take -- are small enough that the rest of us protect them. When people start voluntarily adding themselves to that group without medical reason things start to break.
I'm confused by the awkward grammar in the title. Is it intentional for humor (like xkcd's 'going to try science') or is that wording acceptable use in British dialects?

I'm parsing it as "You're not allowed <to use> science" or "You're not allowed <to know> science", but it's right on the line of believable that I could see that sentence being used genuinely in another dialect.
I worked for a founder who did this all the time and it's incredibly stressful as an employee. It would be fine in the limited case where the features are fast and easy to implement: say two days' work at most. I enjoy my paychecks clearing every other week, and losing a sale over small amounts of effort is dumb, particularly since sales where relatively large (low hundreds of thousands of dollars). But this founder didn't know and frankly didn't care about that; he talked about features we'd just begun to do basic research on as if they existed.

I'm being intentionally somewhat vague here, so it's hard to really relate the details, but in one case he discussed a feature (having to do with distributed markov chains) that not only didn't exist but, afaik, nobody in the world even understands how to do and is the subject of active research. Needless to say, not something that could be implemented in a couple days. Worse, we where talking to some phds who fucking understood the above, and they immediately started asking me how the fuck we did it!

And yes, it often made us look like complete assholes in front of customers.
Oh, the IRS and other tax authorities will definitely "remind" you, eventually. But yeah, it tends to take a bit longer.

And if you don't have visceral awareness of this fact -- you shouldn't be hiring people, and handing out salaries.
In North America, all the checks (cheques) use the same fonts. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognit...
I'm the first person to criticize free online media, but they should have remained free until gaining a critical mass of users and THEN charged them to stay on.

That's how Twitter should work...think Lady Gaga or Barack Obama are going to leave Twitter over a $200 annual fee now? Nope, but they're sure as hell not joining an unproven network with an upfront $20 annual fee.

Of course, you'd have to be clear about this in advance. Nobody likes an unexpected bait-and-switch.
Well, i'm not exactly sure about them hiding anything as far as the article is concerned...

They set up a litecoin mining botnet and out fear being detected - and more generally doing the right thing - shut it down / reduced it to only a few bots.... So it's not like they actively tried to hide it via some kind of rootkit or the likes...
an unnecessary solution to fix what should never have been broken in the first place

this is like boarding up every single entrance and door to your house and then cutting a whole in your roof and placing a ladder up to your roof

and then thinking you are actually solving the problem

whereas the intelligent solution is to not board up your door but to actually use it as an entry point

we know what good UX is all about, unfortunately can't say the same thing about google's UX team. they have demonstrated again and again that they don't know the first thing about the discipline they purport to work in
As a person born in Poland and living in the US, I'm proud that these two countries cooperate to advance common goals, and I can only wish that we work closer together (both openly or secretly).

As to what happened in those secret locations, the European Court is free to investigate (and potentially prosecute) CIA, which is the organization directly responsible. But then, wouldn't it make more sense to go after Guantanamo (or eastern Ukraine these days) first?
Of all the financial mistakes you can possibly make running a company, withholding payroll taxes and then failing to remit them is probably the worst. Be thankful you caught this before the liability exceeded your available funds, because company operators are apparently routinely held personally liable when there's a shortfall, and I'm not sure that debt is even dischargeable in bankruptcy.

What's worse, minor versions of this mistake turn out to be easy to make; I've seen (much smaller, much more easily fixed) incidents in multiple companies with things like state taxes and unemployment insurance. So: you can't assume this is a mistake that won't happen to you.

Without making any value judgements about the operations of this particular company, one valuable lesson from the post is: do not ever use the Bank of America Payroll feature.

Unremitted payroll taxes can come with a one hundred percent penalty, and you can be liable for that penalty even if you had no knowledge of the failure to remit. Payroll tax screwups are the scary story big startups tell to baby startups at bedtime. Shudder.
It's this reasoning that gave us the 401K.