skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting article. I guess I don't quite connect with it because I feel like the challenge, by far and away, would be financial, not social.

Living with someone and being married to them requires an intimate understanding of who they are as a person. Being able to work through those hard times is something I can do. Being able to make the hard decisions is something I can do.

Being able to go without a salary for 4 years, own a house, provide for a family, and work on a startup is something I couldn't do. In fact no one talks about this. I suspect many founders are either:

a. working on their second startup and have a huge bank account full of cash from a pervious exit

b. come from an extremely wealthy family where money has no effect on their decisions

c. are in fact paying themselves a salary (and hiding it from investors?)

d. have a significant other that can support the entire family
I'm not sure what your overall point is.

However, to the extent that cities seek to solve the problem by making certain behaviors illegal, I am skeptical about how dedicated they are to helping the homeless.

I'd rather force the cities to find new solutions help the homeless rather than allow them to push the homeless towards areas with lower property values (or to other cities).
Oracle remains popular because people are buying it for very different reasons than you bring up. Most of those matters (data types, really?) are trivial compared to things like its approach to clustering, partitioning, indexing, replication, OLAP queries, approach to locking, query optimization, and recovery. Having DBA'd and developed against Sybase, Oracle, and SQL server, Oracle remains both magnificent and horrific in its comprehensiveness.

That said, SQL server is quite competitive. I still prefer Oracle to the others, I presume it's just a personal preference.

Postgres or MySQL are fine alternatives if you really only need a small subset of the features. Trouble is, most enterprises like to throw on the pork with most projects.
Maybe not the Oculus Rift but that's coming out soon, one can only imagine what the next 10-20 years will bring. Here is Ray Kurzweil helping with that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=660oel93vZA
So you agree that if that precondition was fulfilled, banning food handouts to homeless people would be as permissible as banning businesses from allowing smoking inside?
A fingerprint is not a password because it can't be changed. If a database containing your password is leaked, you can just choose another one. What happens if a database containing your fingerprint is leaked?

And fingerprints will leak, as we are using them more and more.
I am so torn about this.

On one hand, I think that information should be available to the technological lowest common denominator. I hate apps that should be websites. I hate having my browser use 100% of my CPU for 30 seconds while trying to render a page with just 300 words of actual text content.

On the other hand, I work on web applications and I want to be able to create rich interactions using the best tools available. So I constantly wish I could require all my users to conform to some pretty steep minimum requirements.

I guess it comes down to appropriateness. There is a place for rich applications and there is a place for accessible content.
Zuck speaking Chinese
Gotta keep control over that ™ I guess?
Well, there's a point at which the word 'hero' won't make sense anymore if you use it this way.

Not having kids is a heroic thing to do since it's quite a brave decision not knowing how the older you thinks.

Leaving kids and working all the time is heroic because you are keeping many people in your company employed and you are selflessly working for their happiness.

Taking care of kids and not working is heroic because you said screw you to the corporate world.

And so on. See my point? It becomes like everyone is 'special'.
"Did you mean?" is great, but "Do you mean?" would be better. Achieving latter in Ruby/JS/... certainly feels harder.
Eventually it will just be a pair of contact lenses, or even an ocular implant.
The point is not being open, the point is platform lockin. Once you accept it, you will "never" be able to leave chrome because you have all of your things in chrome apps now.

It was a huge effort to leave the Microsoft lockin back then, and the Web(togheter with Linux, GNU and open source), a open platform did it! It was like the 'man in the moon' back then; And now we are simply going back, and we are just repeating the same mistakes again
Ubuntu 14.10 has landed – and it's not just for desktops
Show HN: Tool for back end-less apps
Hi!

I made this little script that one can use to save data from Javascript. It calls a remote API, which stores it.

The data is protected by SSO login (disabled in the demo).

Looking for feedback: http://jsfiddle.net/nbrogi/dod5ndaf/

What do you guys think? Could it work? Thanks!!!
What is this strange bizarre heroism around founding companies? I don't get what the big deal is. People have been doing business at least since we've had a market economy, centuries at least if not millenia, without writing self-eulogizing blogs about how heroic they are. Found a company if you want or don't, you are not some kind of martyr for going into business.

When you look at it from a distance, everything we do is meaningless. People have done things like it before, people will do things that eclipse it in the future, and there is some person out there who will shit on you for doing it. That doesn't mean that it isn't meaningful up close, to some segment of the population going through similar struggles. The fact that this story is #2 on HN right now is indication that some segment of the readership here found it interesting, even if you didn't.
It's one thing for a city to discourage me from giving food or money to panhandlers. It's another to make it illegal.
libuv is the other major piece of Node, it'd probably need to be ported to the JVM in some fashion. I don't think there's any real technical limitations preventing a JVM based Node-esque platform, just no one's taken it on.

https://github.com/joyent/libuv
What about if you are using a screen reader?
We get into a mindset that this is the only way to start a business, particularly in technology. And while I think you have touched on a number of good points, as did the original poster, I think we need to come back to the reality that businesses have been started for a long time in many different ways. My father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great great grandfather have all been in business, they have all started them in different ways and in different industries. "If you start a startup, it will take over your life to a degree you cannot imagine." That is a strong and hyperbolic statement. In fact, with all respect to Sam Altman, his entire statement is quite hyperbolic.

Can a business take over your life? Absolutely not!
Can you allow a business to take over your like? Absolutely!

I have been involved in and started a number of successful businesses. I am also actively involved in my marriage (I have had exactly 1 wife, we've been together for just a bit). I have 6 kids. I go to birthday parties, soccer games, teachers meetings, and camp outs. I even volunteer at the schools.

What happens when someone wants to schedule a meeting when my wife has dinner ready? I tell them to move it.

What happens when an investor flies in and wants me to take them out for a night on the town when it's the choir performance night at the elementary school? I tell them I can't.

Have I had investors leave me because I would not play their social games? Absolutely! And I was glad that I didn't have to deal with them again.

Now, have I missed things? Yes. But I have gotten pretty good at looking at a schedule and planning around things. I want a close personal relationship with my wife and kids, so I have made that my priority.

When people ask me how I do it, I tell them honestly. I am the CEO/CTO/CIO, I make the rules for me. I am not a slave to my company nor its success.
...most of whom are from the Nokia acquisition, a.k.a. not US employees.
You Should Take a Codecation
I came here to make sure someone had posted a link to that comic. Thanks.
I have an ambivalent relationship with Ubuntu. Personally, I hate Ubuntu but I'm glad it exists. It means a few more people who otherwise would have used Windows, don't. I keep coming back to Slackware because it's in a nice sweet spot where "stable", "just works", "lets me configure it just the way I want" and "doesn't bother me with needless distro-specific cruft" all intersect. So Ubuntu is definitely not for me. For the people it is for, it does a pretty good job.
There are specific things you can do in Chrome Apps like access the Hard Drive.
I agree. Browsing is important enough that there should be browsers just for browsing.

What we have now are browsers that support browsing but also support access to web applications. The need to serve two masters makes the browsers we have now suboptimal for just browsing.

In particular, a browser just for browsing would be able to be significantly simpler than a browser that serves two masters, and as a general rule, when we are talking about something as complicated as a browser, making a program simpler makes it more reliable and makes it easier for a human to predict what it will do and consequently makes it less frustrating to use.
Attempting to install from the app store pushes an error saying it's no longer available.
There is this annoying "love your children" fad that has preoccupied a small number of societies for the past few hundred years, and along with it a silly notion that one should "spend time" with his or her offspring.

Don't worry. It will pass.
Totally agree. After 11.x, Ubuntu's "desktop" uses crashed for me and many I know.
That's a shit sandwich, though.

It sounds incredibly self-serving for VCs to be pushing that cultural expectation. It sounds out-right unhealthy. It sounds like a great after-the-fact excuse to make workaholics feel less bad.

I know it's hyper competitive landscape out there, but it's unreasonable. If Mark Zuckerberg found a way to learn Mandarin, then the rest of us should be able to go home at a reasonable hour.
Why though? Why not do it at the language level?

When you're returning an error, you can be a bit slow. So why not do some extra computation and return a better error message?
ASP.NET maybe? C# is one of the best-designed languages suitable to server-side dev in modern popular use. Using it with VS is the most convenient and efficient IDE experience I've encountered.
IE and Safari have self-interest motivated reasons for not supporting webrtc and for propagating their own technology, so no, I don't agree with this. I'm not going to avoid building apps that make use of technology that companies like Apple and Microsoft don't implement, and I don't care if that this is a problem for people. These companies don't really want to support the web as a platform. They want a crippled web because it beats their ecosystem lock in.
Why Apple Pay Is the Most Secure Payment Platform on the Planet
Discarded Power Mac G5s 'Upcycled' into Modern Office Furniture
> Yes, there's no national stranglehold, but it's an area of risk that nobody really seems to be aware of - it wouldn't take much to completely disrupt the global materials supply chain for the electronics industry.

Sure, it could disrupt the electronics industry, but for how long? Haven't we just learned that even in the cases where we have few current producers of a rare earth, the market can fairly quickly adapt, and new producers appear. After all, that is exactly what the article in question is about.

Interestingly, this is partly because the very fear of few producers being a fragile constellation drives the price up, and the higher price entices more companies to starting mining rare earths, because they can make more money from it.

What can happen is that the fear of fragility in the supply chain of a certain rare earth, will cause speculators to buy futures contracts for the rare earth in question (because they think the rare earth in question will be worth more in the future, because of supply constriction). This drives up the price of the futures contract. Now other speculators can earn money by buying the rare earth in the spot market while simultaneously selling a futures contract. This arbitrage between the futures and spot market pushes up the price in the spot market and the price in the futures market down.

And when the price increase reaches the spot market, existing producers will start producing more and new producers will appear, thus alleviating the original concern: that the supply chain was too fragile.
>I highly recommend volunteering for a couple weekends with a local homeless initiative

We should probably make it a pre-requisite for anyone who wants his/her opinion to be considered. First-hand experience is invaluable.
I sort of get where you're coming from, I remember being younger and feeling annoyance at parents acting like their time away from work was more important than everyone else's

That's said, seems silly to bring a person into the world if you're not going to devote the resources (time) needed to insure that that person thrives

and its seems like a sufficient big enough deal that someone can devote a blog post to how they're going to go about trying to do that
Ok, I understand you now. My experience has been working with devices which, while potentially dangerous, are voluminous enough that we can't have individual relationships with every end user. While we'd be offering warranties/exchanges if we discovered a fake chip, we'd have no way of guaranteeing that they wouldn't update their controller in the meantime or of forcing them to exchange their board for a newer rev.
Very good points. Part of why I was able to make the "startup leap" is because my wife and I both worked at Intuit for 7.5 years. We established a good amount of savings that allows us to not have to worry so much about things like the cost of daycare/diapers/etc.

If the finances were tighter, that would add another level of stress to the equation.
Why You Can’t Trust You’re Getting the Best Deal Online
10 Reasons Why Your Company Need to Invest in Mobile Apps In 2015
"I believe (though I don't know) that cities are unnatural in the sense that they don't arise in nature among other animals than humans"

Depends on what you consider a city. Ants, bees, termites, naked mole rats all live in densely populated 'buildings', with specialized division of labor between their inhabitants. Also, bat, bird or seal colonies can get incredibly dense.
Show HN: Tool for back end-less apps
Hi! I made this little script that one can use to save data from Javascript.

It calls a remote API, which stores it. The data is protected by SSO login (disabled in the demo).

Looking for feedback: http://jsfiddle.net/nbrogi/dod5ndaf/

What do you guys think? Could it work..?
TestFlight Beta Testing
Should people with uncontrollable addictions have rights outside of the right to treatment? I'm not so sure...

Even if you could make that case in theory, how do you define addition in such a way that doesn't allow any disliked behavior to be classified as "addiction"?
Facebook Launches Anonymous Community App Called “Rooms”
You might be surprised at what can be accomplished with HTML and CSS alone. Most of github.com works just fine without Javascript. Much of Twitter and Facebook work too. Facebook does give a warning, but they say you should enable Javascript "for a better experience" instead of "for any experience."

I agree that showing a "hey this is broken" warning is better than rendering a totally broken page, but it's still not as good as presenting at least a partially working version, perhaps minus all of the usual bells and whistles. Now, of course, this is not super-feasible if you've chosen to build most of your site using client-side code, especially if that's where most of the rendering happens. But then again, the lack of server-side rendering is the obvious downside of building your site that way.
I'm not sure I understand how this makes bricking better than simply detecting the problem. The advantage you discuss seems to boil down to the ability to identify bad units, but disabling them isn't necessary to identify them, so I don't really understand what's useful there.
>> A world in which everybody is happy and content with who they are and the circumstances they live in, how is that dystopian?

In his book The Man's Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl made the case that "happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue." He said that one can't simply be happy. Rather, they must have a reason to be happy.

This article does a great job of summarizing his philosophy and relating it to the current state of our society: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/theres-m...
I think that this would make people think they're secure while they are not...

You only fuckup once like the grugq says
Congrats! I have to say, though, that with a stay-at-home-spouse you're facing a different set of challenges than the article. Many things will be easier, some will be more difficult.
It sounds like your head is screwed on as well :-)
Until somebody gets sued and posts about it on twitter.
I Had a REAL Conversation with Siri and It Was Awesome
More like Reddit meets Geocities.

Or a bulletin board, also knonw as BBS. Which is kinda like 4chan. Early forums grew out of the BBS/Usenet experience.
As a father of two - articles like this come off as incredibly pretentious and I have a really hard time even finishing them.

I feel like so many in the "startup" culture are completely trapped in an imaginary bubble that literally means jack shit to anyone outside it.

You aren't changing the world out there...you're building business.

You are a father and a husband making a conscious adult decision to put work over your family...writing this little "how-to" article does not somehow make you immune to that reality. Venting your elitist self-serving views to the general public does not make you any less irresponsible, much less some sort of "leader".

"From 5:30pm-8:30pm, I’m not a startup CEO. I’m a dad." <- That statement right there pretty much illustrates my point.

No amount of money will ever replace what you're missing out on at home - I guess you'll have to figure that out on your own though. Hopefully your wife and children will give you back the same 1/8th of their time and focus that you give them.
"3) Outlaw rent control. Now you have more abundant housing."

There's multiple interactions implicit there. That's fine, just noting it - I agree that would be a consequence.
Release of World Smallest Gadget of Its Kind. They Are Giving It for Free
Following a LPT from /r/programming, I'm trying video game soundtracks, which are supposedly designed to help you concentrate on the task at hand, whether that's grinding or a boss fight. No guarantee that you'll get the boss fight song when you're in the middle of something difficult, though, so YMMV.

Currently using: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/borderlands-2-original-sou...
So again, this is the kind of mentality I addressed. Your solution is no solution, a continuity of the status quo. What we're doing ain't workin'. Full stop. Yeah, that stuff is already illegal. It's also a nightmare to police and enforce, and you end up in the same moral quandaries. Do we treat Good Samaritans like criminals because of a few bad eggs? Do we now have to interrogate all pan handlers? The general and most effective solution is to ban all handouts that haven't been well thought through.

You even said it yourself, there's not enough money or support. So save the extra $3 you would otherwise be giving out and make a year end donation to a worthy organization. Maybe give a weekend of free time. That will go miles beyond just throwing cash out of a car window at a random intersection. Ever wondered how many homeless get hit by cars begging at intersections by the way? It's more than you'd like to know.
Awesome. Thanks for responding.

I guess my assumptions of YC founders are that they are 20-something college dropouts with no previous work experience. Thanks for proving me wrong. This gives me hope that my 25 year old self still has time left :)
Followed closely by facebook I guess.
The first thing I see is that in the bar chart, you've sorted the salaries ASCIIbetically. This is a problem^1, as this is not what users expect.

I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I'm finding the filtering confusing. Perhaps because I can't see all the data at first, I'm not sure what I expect to see after filtering.

[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/sorting-for-humans-natural-sort...
>Or they are mentally unstable.

Many of them are, that's the problem!
Or cocaine, or ecstasy...
My question is that I don't understand why someone buys a Windows laptop expects Linux to run on it perfectly. It's the same to me as expecting OSX to run on a Windows Laptop or to install Windows on a Macbook Air. Why wouldn't you just buy a Laptop with Linux pre-installed or at least a Laptop that is certified to be 100% compatible? And if you now try to say that there aren't as many options, take a look at how many options Apple provides to run OSX.

Links to certifications:
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/models/?query=&c...
https://access.redhat.com/search/browse/certified-hardware/#...
http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/pd031426

Links to "open up the cardboard box and plug in the computer"
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834314...
https://system76.com/
The Western Model Is Broken
I kind of did this once, actually during my first job as a programmer. It was a remote position, and for 6 months me and my friend/co-worker lived in the Guanacaste area of Costa Rica (Playa Avellanas). It was a really great experience, though we often wished we had more time to explore instead of constantly being under pressure with too much work. I'm actually going back to visit for 9 days in December and I can't wait to experience being just a tourist
Creating a "hackintosh" desktop is seriously difficult business.

I did it recently, and it's not that hard, if you stick with a subset of hardware known to work. Yeah, upgrades from each dotdot release take a little longer, but it's totally worth it.
Fingerprints are not bad for local authentication. For instance if phones become more used for payment I would expect my phone to contain a secret key for payment that is unlocked easily which a fingerprint could do. So in order to compromise this they would need to get both my private key and my fingerprint. If my private key were compromised, I could then get another key. The article is right though that fingerprints should not be used as the sole means of auth though for the sheer reason that it cannot be changed.