skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With these "I had a wild overnight viral success, here's what I did" posts there is always secret sauce that the author leaves out of the equation.

I just love that in an article titled "How I got my startup to #1 on both Product Hunt and Hacker News by accident” that the author never actually answers the question properly. Chances are he doesn't really know why it went to #1, or is avoiding the truth to make it seem like it was just sheer sweat that pushed it over the edge.

The factors that pushed authors of these "how my thing became an overnight hit" posts to the top are pretty cut and dry. The winning combo was typically that they A) have already built up a key early distribution network of viral influencers via twitter a blog etc and B) that they have an uncanny knack for nailing down sticky, well designed, well positioned products in an exciting niche - a skill that for most people doesn't come naturally.

I know of at least 3 people who tried to make similar products that never got a lick of attention. Why? A) They have no audience and a social network with zero influencers and B) Their products we clunky/ugly and kind of sucked.

Just wish more of these posts stopped beating around bush and misleading junior entrepreneurs into thinking that simply building something is enough to score a hit. You need to have an audience to distribute it to, and you need to be really killer at nailing down product / market fit early on. That's the secret sauce.
Is the pricing for a single site, or does it allow for multiple sites?

Are MultiMarkdown features (linking to internal sections, footnotes, definition lists, etc) available?
Playing the Numbers in Digital Dating
Another advantage of full stack development. Code a little, chase a bug in the webserver, google site:serverfault.com in frustration, knock out a couple of tickets from users, finally drive to the dc to change a failing drive. Related, yet different, and get you to change the scenery.

Specialization is for insects.

Here's a paper with an evaluation of those techniques[1] and here's a pretty, high-level summary[2].

[1] http://psi.sagepub.com/content/14/1/4.full

[2] http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/assessing-the-evidence-for-...
> Should engineers get more respect? That's a valid and fair question, and companies will pay more respect ...

"You could do worse" is a rough straw-man in these scenarios.

I agree to that statement, but the cause of the outcry is rather interesting to observe, if only from an "anthropology of small tribes/startups" angle.

In particular that Engineers seem to be bound by "passion" and that this costs them from being economically rational.

When you equate economics to respect, then you get the message within the tech-crunch article.

The rationals beat the irrational players and that's pretty much the way the game is setup.
I completely agree with you. But when every single person in your life is telling you to just finish and article, it is really hard not to. I feel silly about it already, I only wish I had the balls to disregard the opinion of everyone in my life, but I really don't have it in me.

That's also why I want to move to the US, so I can get away from these risk-averse people who have my "best interest" at heart. Because they end up living my life for me, and enough is enough.

I also think people are more open to entrepreneurship in US, whereas people in Canada feel pretty comfortable with their situation.
Does anybody know how to really close a tab in vim? When I type t on a file to open it in a tab and then type :q, it looks like ist closed. But when I type :ls I see that its still open.
Everyone investing in JS is focused on it as an intermediate language. You support JS so things like asm.js port cleanly. Then you build a JIT which says 'oh hey, run this as native code'.

I would argue this means quite the converse - JS will die while bejng replaced by language ports which compile to JS. Python included.
It would be nice if the Java library allowed you to simply download the .jar instead of forcing you to use maven. This is supposed to be a game, not some massive web-scale project.
Stochastic gradient descent is a "crappy" method that works. Theoretically, it ought to be slow to converge and often involves annoying tuning parameters because you want to slow learning with each iteration. In practice, though, it works quite well. Quite a large number of successful neural-net/deep-learning implementations use SGD rather than second-order (quasi-Newton) or even momentum methods.

Pointwise SGD tends to be uncommon and too noisy. Mini-batch sampling is more common. Each iteration, you train on a bootstrap subset (say, 10,000 points chosen with or without replacement from the full dataset). If you have less than 10k data points, you generally don't need to use stochastic algorithms at all.

Does gradient descent apply to problems with many local extrema, or is it restricted to purely globally convex problems?

There are a variety of approaches:

* Multiple starting points. Often gets the job done and finds a good local minimum. The idea is that, usually, better (lower) local minimums will have larger drainage regions, a sort of "deep is usually broad" hypothesis that is often but not always true.

* Momentum. Instead of moving with a velocity proportionate to the gradient, it's proportionate to a smoothed average of previous gradients. This makes it far less likely that you end up at a bad local minimum or some other stationary point (at a local maximum or saddlepoint, the gradient is zero).

* Other stochastic devices such as simulated annealing or (for neural nets) drop-out.

* Dimensionality reduction and regularization (weight decay) don't necessarily solve the "multiple local minima" problem but often make the search space smaller and the problem, therefore, more tractable. (The main purpose of DR and regularization, however, is to improve generalization performance.)
Ask HN: What it takes to become like Elon Musk?
Minimally Minimal
Lower Your Car Insurance Bill, at the Price of Some Privacy
Even djb software has your usual C-type security issues, though in less frequency than normal. qmail had an integer overflow that was theoretically exploitable, but couldn't be practically exploited in a normal configuration (djb admitted that was "pure luck"). And djbdns had an integer overflow that was exploitable (though in fairly unusual circumstances): http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.djbdns/13864
Just saw this, but I don't see it as an excuse for not travelling.
I also have a son in Hungary, still I left to Japan when he was 3.
I'm also writing checks (not too large ones from my perspective, but still...) We were not married ever though, neither did we permanently live together.

It was 7 years ago. I've never been back. During this time we found out he has Asperger's syndrome, but I just can't regret leaving them.

I married a 38rys old Thai lady ~5yrs ago; I'm 37. She has a daughter (15yrs old) studying in Thailand and visiting us in Hong Kong whenever she has a school holiday.
Before that we worked in Singapore and she visited us there. While I regret we can't live together, it's not sin not to. You should not treat it as such a hard constraint.

"I have my kiddo 50% of the time" cries for some clarification.

1, Does it mean you _have to_ take care of him every second day, week, month or year?

2, Or maybe - knowing the ridiculous laws - it's actually just the grace of the jury that you _can_ see him/her, _if_ you want?

3, Or is it the other way around that your ex-wife is actually not capable of taking care of the kid, _but_ the jury still granted her 50% of the time?

If the kid's age permits, you should bring him/her with you to Thailand when school holiday kicks in.

I don't see how your self-sacrifice is really beneficial to anyone really...

Were you born to get tanked with your life after all that effort you put into what's your passion was?
All the potential you carry in yourself can help not just your kid but many more people on the long term, young or old.

Having a break of a month or 2 can only be beneficial to your whole family.
ZenPayroll is hiring senior engineers
Good job not reading the article and skipping to the end, I guess?

>> This is in fact how many other dynamic languages work. For instance this is how lua implementations operate, how javascript engines work etc. The clear advantage is that you can have two interpreters. What a novel concept.
Show HN: PossibleEmail – Ruby gem to find someone's email address
Photography by Linda McСartney
I love literate programming, however my main issue with most tools like this one is that they do not properly support compiler/debugger error messages. This is a huge, often unstated caveat. It is very important to be able to read error messages and quickly locate the offending line in the literate source.

For languages that support file/line pragmas like C, literate programming works very well. Alternately, if the language supports goto and can sensibly unravel these statements, one can cobble a weave/tangle script to still have a 1-1 mapping between program and source line numbers.

Otherwise, I find that I need to program in a very functional style in order to force my tangled program to have the exact same line numbers as the literate source. This is possible, but it also negates the advantages of having natural language macro names, since they are essentially equivalent to the function names. In this case, tangle becomes an identity mapping.
I'm not sure I understand the criteria. He'd like to move into DC, but DC is too expensive. So he devises a filter that spits out (among a small number of other optimal locales) the Mission and Russian Hill in San Francisco. Both are among the most expensive places to live in the country.

For that matter, optimizing mostly for walkability, the filter spits out Lakeview in Chicago. But Lakeview is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Chicago, and isn't significantly more walkable than many cheaper neighborhoods here.
`:bdel` is what you're looking for. ;-)
I agree, but, have you looked at the cars today? I can honestly not tell the difference in silhouette between a mustang and an acura these days. You can stick as much chrome on the outside of the thing you want in different patterns, but they are the same car.

It's not that I don't know that the Leica isn't a super great camera, but the fact that they tried to make something to a higher design goal than, "it should just work" carries some weight. Just working is very important, but you can go past it. There were tons of mp3 players that just worked before the ipod. Arguably my rio mp3 player worked and sounded better than the ipod. however, the ipod was something that resonated with people. When you put soul into something your soul responds. I hate saying metaphysical junk like that, but anyone who has experienced a truly well designed object or seen a to a perfectly executed musical performance knows this feeling.

I mean, design these days is boring and unenriching. Go to amazon and search for water filtering pitchers. Do any of those inspire you? Are any of them beautiful? Are any of them even nice to use? If you read the reviews they are full of, "it filters water alright, but": the lid is awkward, the handle cracks off after a few months, the old version had more thought in it, the edges of the plastic are sharp, etc.

Something can fully and completely fulfill it's primary purpose and still be poorly designed. Still be a joyless disposable object.
I really enjoy Desktop Dungeons. It's easy to pick up for a short play session and then put it down. The game mechanics are simple on the surface, but some deep thinking is required to master the more difficult dungeons.

http://www.desktopdungeons.net/

It's also available on Steam.
Show HN: Product Hunt RSS feed – Get Product Hunt in your feed reader
"Viral and game-changing" is only determined in hindsight, not in a Show HN.
I'm sure they get their data from wikipedia, here's a start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBpedia
write. writing clarifies. it forces you to make fuzzy things concrete.

be mindful of when you are stuck. when a hard problem makes you walk away from it (it isn't easy to realize when you do, it requires practice), write the problem down. write the first small thing that you need to figure out to start figuring out the larger problem.

unfuzzy the fuzziness.
Exercise your brain in the way you want it to grow.
Twitter Is the Heartbeat of Social Media
> write. writing clarifies. it forces you to make fuzzy things concrete.

I often find after writing something, I'm taking lots of half-formed thoughts that were keeping my brain occupied and relieving myself of the burden of carrying them around and keeping my thoughts on an issue sorted out. It's kind of liberating and it let's me properly turn my attention to something else and focus properly on it.
The hypothetical law I described is no less "helpful" or workable than the legal and technical tools for copyright enforcement in digital media. For example, why shouldn't customers be able to reach into every government's and vendor's IT systems and control how their data is used? Vendors reach into our PCs and phones to control their supposed property that we bought.

Property is property, and my data should be my property. Right?
Huh. Now that's fascinating.

So, if my FE is still valid, I could look into the PE for software? I'm intrigued.

EDIT:

Link for Texans: http://www.tbpe.state.tx.us/software.html
Twitter tweaks policies to ‘better handle tragic situations’
Microdata reveal – Detects and presents the microdata embedded in a given page
okTurtles presented a demo video at EFF CUP at SOUPS 2014 conference that also explains the basics of DNSChain in what could be an easier-to-digest manner:

http://blog.okturtles.com/2014/07/okturtles-demo-at-soups-20...
Problem with ":bd" or ":bdel" is that it leaves open the last tab:

1) in the shell run "vim ."

2) hit "t" on a file

3) type ":bdel<enter>"

The tab is still open.
in that order.

note that it is also good to stop drugs that reduce intelligence before you try nootropics, i.e. no benzodiazepines, no chronic pot use, easy on the alcohol, etc. People who are tempted to try nootropics often believe in "better living through chemistry" and are already taking a lot of different things.
(Disclaimer: didn't read the article, just a response to the comment above.)

I agree that db field definitions are not "business decisions", but "edge cases" can be.

I think the trick here, as a programmer, is to realise when the different ways to handle edge cases of a design you've been asked to implement do become in effect business decisions, and then not make these decisions but instead push back and insist the decisions are made by the business whose logic you are implementing.

This can be hard work a) to make the product owners understand the significance and b) to get them to commit to a decision, when often at heart they'd rather you just "make it go away."

But it's much better in the end to be confident that corner cases and unforeseen consequences of a design have been ok'd with the decision makers whose actual job it is to make these decisions.

Rarely, but sometimes, you can open up or bring into view aspects of a product design or business process that no-one suspected even existed like this, as a side benefit.

This is from the point of view where there's a "separation of powers" between tech and product teams, of course. If you work in an environment where that isn't the case then you work with whatever process you have to make these decisions.
This is also why "rubber duck debugging" works.

Once you explore all of the edges while writing/taking things through, you often find what you were overlooking before.

Same for why teaching works to increase the knowledge of the teacher.

I like to write things I'm learning about as if I were teaching someone less experienced than I was.
Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
I came up with the idea for matching up employers and potential employees based on common answers to user-submitted multiple choice questions: the idea is basically an online dating site, only for employment. I told my buddy about the idea and he pointed me to a WaPo article about how eHarmony is getting into this space, launching in December (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2014/08/08/eharmony-wants-to-match-you-with-the-perfect-boss/).
At this point, I have an MVP (emphasis on 'minimum') prototype running at http://proqua.0xf1d0.net; but I'm not sure where to go next. One possibility is to try some sort of advertising campaign; another is to proceed directly to seeking capital (I have some personal money to play with, but not nearly enough to build a team and make a splash in a furious hurry). Unfortunately, I have no direct personal experience with either.
If anybody has any suggestions for what a good next move would be, I'd appreciate it.
I am missing a "Why should I use this instead of MacVim?" section on that website.
A balanced lifestyle appropriate to your body and its natural tendencies. This can be "subtractive" (cut out something) as well as "additive". Not all time should be productive time; idleness helps bring out confidence in your bigger ideas.
Great work, I'm sure, but this web page is unusable. I'm just getting a progress spinner as (I guess) it tries to load and reload the embedded document. This is even after going away and doing other stuff for half an hour while the page was in the foreground.
DOMLint – Test suite against HTML/DOM conflicts
Yep. Huge benefit I get from writing is persistence. Human brain is such volatile memory.

First step is to get it all down in some persistent form. Second step is to iterate: organize, clarify, simplify, expand, etc.
I can't understand why people who think about longevity miss the logical error built into it -- as biological causes of death are remedied, the prospect of non-biological causes of death go up until they become the cause of death instead.

This graphic (PDF warning) --

http://www.nsc.org/news_resources/injury_and_death_statistic...

-- shows that a person's lifetime (say, 75 years) probability of dying of any of the top four non-biological causes of death (suicide, car crash, toxic exposure, falling) is 0.033 (roughly 1 in 30). Let's say this is for a normal biologically limited lifetime of 75 years. Using this as a basis, the Binomial Theorem shows that we have a probability of .000448 per year of dying of any one of these causes, and, for 75 years, this probability produces the quoted chance of 0.033 for any of these four causes. For longer lifetimes, this outcome means that:

Age Probability
----------------------
75 0.0330
100 0.0438
200 0.0857
500 0.2007
1000 0.3612
2000 0.5919
5000 0.8936

This outcome, for four common non-biological causes of death, means that there is no "indefinite lifespan" -- all that happens is the way we die changes. I hate to rain on your parade, but this discussion of longevity fails to notice an elephant in the room.

My Python code for this result:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from scipy.stats import *

k = 0
p = .000448

print(' %8s %12s' % ('Age','Probability'))

print(' %s' % ('-' * 24))

for n in (75,100,200,500,1000,2000,5000):
r = 1 - binom.pmf(k,n,p)
print(' %8.0f %12.4f' % (n,r))
Building a community is very hard. Good luck!

My advice is to remember to post interesting things in the blog. A few of the most successful communities were bootstrapped with the readers of a blog. For example:

* StackOverflow started with the reader of the blogs of the founders (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ and http://blog.codinghorror.com/ )

* HackerNews started with the readers of one of the founder (http://www.paulgraham.com/ , well it doesn't have "blog post", it has "essays").

* Reddit also had initially many readers of pg, because he put in the essays a link for the discussion in Reddit, because he was an investor. I can't find the exact quote, but I remember a comment that said that HN was an attempt to build a site with a similar level of discussion of the early Reddit and /r/programming .

Also, when you have a long, interesting, unique blog post, remember to submit it here, for example http://teenpro.net/blog/podcast-ep1-seth-godin .
I'm not sure the distinction is as clear, or as relevant, as you imply. At what level are 'business transactions' defined? Is there a separate transaction with your ISP for every packet you send or receive? I would have thought that the relevant business transaction occurred once per month, when I paid them $X to carry Y GB of data on my behalf (and similarly with phone companies). Anything more granular than that is an implementation detail of the service: sure, the ISP has the ability to observe and log the full header+data contents of any packets I send, and might even have good business reasons to do so, but it doesn't follow (to me at least) that every packet I send through this connection is now a business transaction record over which I have no reasonable claim to privacy.

It's clear that there are some forms of metadata (call records, packet destinations, etc) that are useful and perhaps necessary for service providers to observe and log, in the course of providing their services. But insofar as the privacy implications of releasing that data fall almost entirely on consumers, not on the service provider, it makes sense to give consumers some say over what happens to it. In this view, metadata really is "my data" in the sense that a service provider should have an obligation to protect it, analogous to medical records (which are records of 'business transactions' with my doctor that they nonetheless have an obligation to protect) or documents provided to an attorney under attorney-client privilege.
I really hope this can pierce California's bureaucracy.
the review was nicely written, but after seeing the sample photos it steered me more towards the Sony RX1
> you keep going back to the rain in vancouver as being a negative.

Here is the total precipation over the last 3 months

Vancouver = 103.1 mm
<
Montreal = 366.4 mm

SRC = http://montreal.weatherstats.ca/charts/precipitation-3months... ( environment canada)

Next your going to try to convince us that poutine > sushi
What on earth would possess someone to downvote a statement of fact.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll work on some better screenshots.

Is there anything from the content that you dont understand, that I could make clearer?

Is this something that you would use?
A ho-hum remake, like Python 3, that breaks compatibility without much important to offer, doesn't cut it. If you're gonna break compatibility solve real problems people have.

Exactly this. Python 3 was an unfortunate triumph of purity over practicality. We'd be in a much better place if half of the effort expended in the Python 3 transition was instead focused on the issues you listed, and I'd also include browser support by compilation to JS.
Humans Need Not Apply – CGP Grey
I have low enthusiasm for this project because I don't see a big added-value above NerdTree and CtrlP.

But I would love to see more cross-platform Gui wrappers and more embedded Vim. I'm hopeful that NeoVim will help make this happen.

NeoVim seems to be making really good progress. There are packages for installing on OSX and Linux. In my daily use NeoVim has been solid. I love the direction that NeoVim is taking, and believe it will be a great foundation for embedded vim.
ugh more OSX embrace extend extinguish. Apple doesn't even have to pay people to write more lock in anymore.
The next GoDaddy! Perhaps they're planning an IPO.