skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dollar figures for "R&D" are really deceiving. Don't forget the "D" stand for development.

For a company the size of Microsoft, who has 130k employees, it's not unrealistic to imagine 40k employees are developers and/or product management.

At an average fully loaded cost of $150k per developer x 40k developers = $6 Billion.

So all the cost to just maintain their EXISTING product set, in this illustration, might be $6B ... none of which is "research"
40 liters per 100 KM = 10gal/60mi.

It's about 6mpg. Not great, not as bad as I would have guessed.
This is quite a good article on exactly that:

http://simontcousins.azurewebsites.net/does-the-language-you...

The same application written in C# and F# by the same programmers (the C# project took 5 years, the F# project 1). It in no way proves anything, but it's food for thought.

Personally I've had huge wins moving from OO to functional (Haskell and F#).
I guess the photo you linked to might have some kind of emotional impact on some people, but it doesn't actually tell us anything we didn't know 500 years ago.
Using APIs without reading docs
Native Netflix support coming to Linux
Wonderful opportunities) Great NLP, easy to use API.
>Talent on both sides is in high demand, but there are few organizations that are able to get both working together effectively on these hard problems.

Somehow Duo Security[1] has managed to do this phenomenally well. Their product is both a UX wonder and a security marvel. My first thought was "This doesn't feel like a security product. This feels like a solid UX design demo." But looking at their open source code, it's some of the more beautifully designed security software I've seen. I wonder what their secret is-- and if they'd be willing to share.

[1] https://www.duosecurity.com/
I disagree. Obviously data should be validated. But passing validation, I prefer to store data exactly as the user supplied it and then sanitize on output. That way you always have a copy of the original data assuming things change.
Yes, well, I guess that allowing people buying military vehicles, and driving them on public roads is all what you need for a successful society, isn't it?
Part of me wonders if security will ever be something people actually care about, and value.

Home depot had a huge, huge security breach. Their stock price? Up 12 points from last year.

I'm not sure what it would take for people to really value a major security breach. The tech guy inside me is screaming, "why wouldn't you care about this?", but the regular guy inside me thinks, "who cares? the banks will handle any stolen credit card info."
When i first started out i didn't know anyone but i was a straight commission salesperson in the past. I figured, just go door to door. How hard could it be?

Practically impossible.

I got so much resistance up front that I could hardly process it. i solved the problem by designing a ruler with a bunch of Excel shortcuts on it. i put my card right in the middle. the ruler was just card stock. across the top was inches and across the bottom pixels(72dpi)

when i walked in i just held up the ruler inbetween me and the first person i saw and said "here, have a free ruler" etc... worked like a charm. contact me if you want the design, i get them printed on plastic now. customers love them
They've kept things cleaner and have more people to answer questions in my experience.
Great, bookmarked! And here's one with pictures: http://www.designskilz.com/users/
> (MS and IBM were competing in the Notes vs Outlook arena)

If IBM was worried about Microsoft Outlook competing with Lotus Notes, whatever Microsoft Research was working on was surely not even worth worrying about compared to the fact that IBM's product was Lotus Notes.
I wouldn't say it was poorly written. It was long, yes, but I enjoyed the history.
Quote from the article:
"The driver had a nice sense of humour and at the first three police stops he was like:
- What's this?
- That's for our guys on the South-East."

...
I think he's already made the money (it used to be waaay bigger and make a ton more) and now wants to work on his new startup. Blaming Twitter for the trademark app was just a really easy excuse. Being able to call it an acquisition is even better.
Probably a smart move, if only because Microsoft was always going to have retention problems in Silicon Valley anyway.
Of course they have to make this atmosphere, in order to shock young people not to go to MS.
iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in Iceland
They should buy Buzzfeed
A Pusher server clone: https://github.com/edgurgel/poxa
> This proved to be so rigid that an entirely new string type had to be introduced, and we're still dealing with the fallout.

There are a lot of things wrong with, say, Haskell '98 from the perspective of a modern Haskell programmer. Strings are one, but monads aren't applicative functors, it took us a long time to figure out how we wanted to write monad transformers, lazy I/O is terrible and we should use conduits or whatever instead. But you picked strings. This example does not help your point for the following reasons:

1. You can't just change the implementation of the string type without messing up someone's program. For a fantastic example, look at the recent change to Oracle's string type in Java. In theory, the interface is the same. In practice, it made a bunch of people mad.

2. You can encapsulate data in Haskell. Look at the "Text" data type, and ignore Text.Unsafe which exposes the gory innards. This is module level encapsulation, which is just as good as class-level encapsulation (better, actually, since it's more flexible). You could replace Text with a UTF-8 implementation or a UTF-32 implementation or some magic implementation that switches between the types, and you wouldn't break consumers of the Text interface.

> For example, try modifying a Haskell program to print a log every time a string is made. You can't!

This is a really contrived example. First of all, there is the question of whether you will need to create a string whenever you log something to a file, and presumably you wouldn't want to log those strings. Second, this is something you'd do with a debugger, you wouldn't actually do this to a program.

Besides, if you had access to the string implementation (which I'm assuming here is Text, because that's what most people use), you could just put some kind of unsafePerformIO call in front of uses of the Text constructor, and since the Text constructor isn't exported from the Text module, you're done.
that seems like a hard thing to prove in individual cases (without some sort of collusion).
You don't collect revenue * tax when you introduce a tax. The artificially increased price pushes down the demand and will likely force suppliers off the market, lowering revenue overall.

I could draw the supply and demand curve, but it's pretty straightforward.
They finally fixed it, but when this was first posted, the whois sites didn't do any sanitization of the TXT records, which meant that they'd just slap the record into the page. As the record included html saying, "hey, load this script from peniscorp", loading the page would let the script loaded there do various manipulations.
Given the existence of hotels and craigslist, I'd say extremely elastic.
After having my card cancelled from the Target theft, and now this, I'm done with Home Depot.
The secret about real world Java applications is they tend not to be very object oriented at all, in the way OOP is taught in textbooks.

Interfaces are very heavily used, along with dependency injection (boy, do Java programmers love their dependency injection).

Inheritance is now widely discouraged. "Java Beans" are everywhere, which are glorified structs breaking every single rule of encapsulation.

Java runs fast, is garbage collected, has great support for multithreading, great Unicode support, and many other advantages. But it's certainly not very object oriented, especially in the Alan Kay sense.
Maybe something like this? http://www.identitygenerator.com/
The Fellow's immediate reporting chain is to a subcommittee of the DSF. Effectively, they're "working" for the DSF (although as a contractor, not as an employee); that committee is responsible for working out if they're doing what they're supposed to do, whether the DSF is getting good value for money, and so on.

The technical board is there to provide decisions on technical issues, whether they come from the Fellows or from the general population. I'd be very surprised if the Fellows didn't regularly identify issues that needed the technical board to render a decision, but the technical board doesn't have any specific control over the fellow.
Textual Interaction with Data Visualization
Yeah, if anything, corporations are islands of communism where resources are distributed by central planners (i.e. executive management). And it has been proven over and over that central planning is a horribly inefficient way to distribute resources.
I have to wonder if they're not trying to speed up the rate of voluntary exits.
Chess is a simple game with simple rules in the same sense that poker is. If a normal person could get inside Phil Ivey's brain, the strategy would not seem very easy to grok.
I imagine this would be another attempt to kill the A-10, one of the most successful, dollar-for-dollar, kill-for-kill, aircraft in the last forty years.
I kinda feel like having to replace a lost/stolen card number is just part of the cost of doing business by credit card.
Well, the writing isn't news, it's magazine. Different communicative goal.
Winners of the 2014 Ignobel awards
So, I assume Apple Pay will solve some of these kinds of problems? Otherwise, what's the point?
Add the domain to your hosts file to make it not resolve, that should fix it.
Markets involve search costs, planning involves calculation costs.

Sometimes one exceeds the other, so one form of allocation emerges over the other: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
Your proposal is interesting, but it won't really 'scale'. An attacker can get a _lot_ of value out of a banking certificate, and could possibly continue to "milk the cow" until found, probably collecting more credentials then the associated BTC is worth.

Plus, how are you going to be handling validation? Can I just pay (presumably) a lot less then I would need to crack RSA-2048 (or RSA-1024, given the still-trusted roots) and go on an MITM frenzy?
Did I mention anything about my needs, or even about what society I consider successful? I've just stated an observation.
Another version: http://www.abc.net.au/news/scottish-referendum/results/
Yeah, it's Europeans that are gullible. You're the one who thinks everyone in America gets medical care no matter what their circumstances. There is no non-evil reason for an American to post what you posted.
Being optimistic, this will presumably generate loads of new companies.
I've seen bigger armored vehicles in the US owned by private citizens. For a cool $495k you can have a perfect condition WW2 Sherman Tank.

http://www.armyjeeps.net/armor1.htm
>The only Scot I know supports yes ...

Quite the sample size.

>As far as he's considered if Cameron and all his kind simply went away he'd be happy to be part of the UK.

Didn't Limbaugh threaten to leave the country if Obama was (re)-elected? Isn't that kinda the same? There are probably good reasons to break-away, this isn't one of them.
Sounds like owner is kind a stereotypical Scumbag Steve of startup scene.

"I cant get something? I will make sure no one can!"
This is huge for linux adoption. The major hurdle holding many people, including myself, back from using linux as an HTPC operating system is netflix support. This will be especially great if plugin developers can get it running through XBMC.
YC founder here.

One major problem with convertible debt in that it is fundamentally debt with an X year term and Y% interest rate. If the startup chooses not to raise further capital, the note does not dictate what is done (at least ours didn't).

This isn't much of a problem if your investors are really nice, smart people. But if they aren't...

I've had the experience of a non-entrepreneur-friendly investor calling the debt (e.g. demanding repayment after the term had expired) at a time when our startup couldn't make a payment of that size. They refused to extend the term. The investor then threatened to liquidate the company if we didn't pay them back.

Some of my cofounders had made money in the past, so we repaid the debt by having them lend money to the company. But I'm not sure what we would have done if we didn't have that option.
They are not good at event discovery, maybe, but for setting things up between friends I've had no major issues (especially now that I can follow the wall of an event without RSVPing).

I think your use case is very different from how most people use FB events. Though it would be nice to have good event discovery (and they probably have the data to do it).
Rust has a similar website, http://play.rust-lang.org. Internally this uses playpen to sandbox compilation and execution, https://github.com/thestinger/playpen.
Ask HN: What has been your experience with self-taught engineers?
I'm a self-taught engineer. I took a programming class my freshman year of college, but that's been it. Everything I know I've learned on my own building various things over the years.

Most of my co-workers (90%+) are not self-taught. Most of them have CS degrees. In my 5 years of professional programming, I've only worked with one person who was self-taught.

I'm currently looking for a new job, but I'm not sure if I should downplay my status of a self-taught developer or display it prominently.
Twitter played hardball and lost. Besides search companies like Google / Microsoft (Bing), I can't really see any other acquirer.
Yes. The freedom for the government to swoop in and take your business away from you (and hand it off to some crony) if it becomes too successful!
It seems that satellite campuses are particularly hard hit with this round. I wonder if there is a desire at the top to move more things back to redmond.
A lot of the stuff we do that uses transistors doesn't show up as GDP.
A real period piece. It was great stylistically and a joy to read save the abhorrent biblical reference and the postface, which seemed grossly wrong to me in asserting that the writer is proposing humanity move forward with "complete knowledge", whatever that is. Where they found that idea, I don't know.

This piece of writing to me demonstrates the sense of common curiosity and intellectual inquiry that can frequently be found in 19th and early 20th century writings. To join with the writer along a series of discoveries about a subject, combining both practical and aesthetic observations, is really something rarer today: post-industrial, post-war, post-modern English with its emphasis on efficiency, function, and commerce (ie. mass-market appeal ... in a sea of predominantly television-affected, often non-native readers) seems to have lost this. And all the more to draw it finally in to a higher point! Clearly, a manner of elucidation far too obtuse for a modern readship.

It probably had additional appeal to me as growing up in suburban Sydney a family of French puppeteers moved in next door to us, fresh from Polynesia. Living for most of the last decade and a half in Asia, I frequently see puppets in both the shadow and water incarnations, and have begun to collect close up photographs of them wherever I can. In addition, I have recently been reading a fantastic book (also from a prior era of the English language) on Chinese Theater, discussing the stupendous training regimes and regulations inflicted on generations of performers.

Anyway, I for one am going to swing onward, my thinking propelled by this string of text as if by pendulum, to smash another problem :)
> In a democracy you often don't get what you want.

According to Tuna-Fish's complaint, the Scots never got what they want for 70 years and now suddenly there's an opportunity to change that. Seems to be the better alternative than continuing with the status quo or following in William Wallace's footsteps.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
> Otherwise, what's the point?

Funneling more cash to Apple?
Have to wonder if it is too late. Everyone I knew still using twitpic switched to using twitter for images following the issues and announcement a couple weeks ago[1]. Cannot think of a reason they would switch back. What is the value proposition?

[1] Prime example is the bostonfire twitter account. They were using twitpic, seemingly out of stagnancy in not changing services. When they couldn't post pictures on September 4, they switched to posting pictures directly to twitter. Cannot think of a reason to switch back.
This is fun, though I wish there was an option for white light - and a traditional prism!
Nobody said more freedom, just different freedom. Every place has its own advantages.
Definitely. If you quit, you don't get unemployment insurance benefits.

Microsoft is trading morale for money.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll look at adding json, additional data (suggestions welcome), and changing the temporary email domain regularly so it's harder to block.
> The big advantage of OO is that it acts as a distillation of how humans think.

I would consider this a disadvantage, not an advantage. Human thoughts are imprecise and carry rich but ambiguous connotations. The major advances of mathematics in the 19th century (or thereabouts) onward are closely tied to the divorce of notation and natural language.

The ancient version of the Pythagorean theorem is something like, "The area of a square whose side is the length of a hypoteneuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the areas of squares whose sides are equal in length to the other two sides." A modern version is more like, "Let a, b, c be the lengths of sides of a right triangle, where c is the length of the hypoteneuse. Then a^2 + b^2 = c^2." You can see as time goes on, the text becomes simultaneously clearer, more concise, and more abstract.

This is why natural language programming is doomed to failure. Others have expressed the point better than I do (notably Dijkstra). But you can look at the examples of how inheritance in class-based OOP systems work and you will get sick just looking at them: examples of Dog inheriting from Animal, and Penguin from Bird (but penguins don't fly), et cetera. The real disadvantage here is that once people start thinking about taxonomy in general (which class-based OOP encourages), you're not thinking about programming any more.

The difficulty people have with even simple problems like "how do you describe squares and rectangles in a computer program" is another good illustration of how the class-based object-oriented system of thinking is unsuited for solving computational tasks, at least compared to the alternatives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwozgRPLVC8

this is a great video. it isn't working, but the concept is clear after watching.
No. Allowing psychos to buy guns, kill random people on streets and schools is all what you need for a successful society.
We're still well above the rates in the late 1950's.
Well, luckily, I don't go to Yelp for fast food reviews. You are aware that hundreds of people can review a local restaurant, yes?
Isn't that because stronger companies have more access to a Series A? I thought the point that's being made by other commenters on this article (grellas et al) is that convertible notes are frequently used for bridge financing to keep the company going when they don't yet have the product/traction milestones needed to justify a Series A. In this case, the alternative is going out of business. It's quite possible for the average convertible debt startup to be worse than the average Series A funded startup, and yet for taking that note to be a good move for any one single startup that happens to be in that position. The averages are bad because it allows more marginal startups to be funded; the specifics are good because it allows more marginal startups to be funded.

I suppose one take-away for founders could be to beware the signaling risks of taking convertible debt if you are, in fact, good enough to raise a Series A. Another might be to do everything possible to get traction before running out of money. Both of those are fairly well-known already, however.
Totally agree. Its security theater. I don't believe for one second its a sincere gesture. I would definitely not want to use a open source security project google got involved in. Its obviously an attempt to get a influence in tomorrows secure infrastructure such that it does not cut google out of the data their business depends on. Your.. private... data.
Well, we couldn't bomb people with drones remotely from half way around the world 3 decades ago....

But seriously, I blame the growth of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy not only takes resources needed for innovation, it flat out stifles it. This happens at many levels... the government, the employers... lots of people going to work and not only not productively working, but actively keeping others from doing so while loudly proclaiming their right to a share of the pie.
In one of the linked articles in the discussion it says the printed skull is made of PMMA. They must do something to it to make it last.

Edit: found it http://www.anatomics.com/products/cranial-implants/acrylic/
This reminds me of when AAPL was getting close to the value of cash and assets, pre-Jobs return. Was the perfect time to buy AAPL, but of course not clear whether Yahoo has a Jobs at Apple kind of turnaround in them.
Agree. They are both guilty as sin. Apple perhaps slightly less so.
I've seen similar studies. I wonder, however. Functional programming is somewhat esoteric, so a random selection of programmers who practice FP are likely to be more dedicated to the craft of programming in general. I think the truly interesting question to ask would be, "Can we make software better by having the same programmers use functional programming?"
Your suggestion is not equivalent. It is not realistic to ask the user to memorize the x.x.x.x IP address. The point of mrb's solution is that it fully takes care of problem of "typing <domainname> in the address bar and getting the content as quickly as possible without having to memorize IP addresses".
I don't really know much about this sort of thing. I assume that to the retailer that gets pwned, they get a few weeks or months of bad press then pass the cost of that breach on to future customers.

The "regular guy" in me thinks, "Meh, I'll probably ending up paying 5 cents more for light bulbs because of this. Oh well."

I feel bad for the sysadmin/security guys at these companies, probably screaming for budget and not getting it. What do you think they're doing now? Helping some high paid IR consultant restore logs from backups. Good times!
That wasn't really my point. If you don't want to learn something, you probably aren't going to. But even classes I enjoyed like Math and Science, I wouldn't do all the homework. I still learned all that I needed to. The fact is that a lot of homework just isn't necessary all the time, especially for quick learners.
Uber's financing program connects auto lenders and drivers
Ask HN: Which happens first, we become multi-planetary or an extinction event?
Ask and you shall receive[0]. Wrote this using Faker[1] after viewing the responses of this thread.

[0]: http://www.certifiedwebninja.com/fake.json

[1]: https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker
I would suggest not focusing on it either way. Just focus on the projects you have built, the technology you used, and your skills in delivering.
Yeah but in practice no browser does this. There is no system call on Linux or Windows to push data as part of the SYN packet. You would have to craft TCP/IP packets and their headers with a raw socket...