skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How big is the "full" set of polyfills anyway?

Google's polyfills for custom elements that they ship with Polymer weigh in at around ~151Kb of JavaScript, around 10x the size of a small library like Underscore, and 4-5x times the size of an MVC framework like Angular. And they only cover about 5-6 specs (the 4 webcomponent specs and a few more to support them) Those are admittedly hard to polyfill features that will be bigger than most, but it turns out that polyfilling "everything" is hard and would add significant page weight.
Tim Cook + Bono finger touch can be thrown in for good measure
Keeping Secrets
So if another compiler wanted to use MPS in their runtime, they couldn't, unless binary distribution of programs compiled with that compiler was forbidden? I'm not a license wonk by any means, but it seems to me that programs compiled with CLASP themselves need to be gpl:ed since CLASP itself is.
Had a similar idea and an awesome name "What the Stack?"

Wish I would have went with it seeing how awesome this is.
ZergNet Scores $3.2M to Build ‘Pinterest for Content’
I dont know... We're pretty close to WYSIWG, as you can read workflows. It's just the beginning, but we have something that 's def more readable than code

And for the new interfaces, there will prob be some coding required, but let's build tools so that we can reuse them, without code
This was a great read. Something to consider in that moment is scale. It is impossible to be an entire company and survive. A CEO I highly respect told me that you can move a truck with a go kart engine, a big transmission, and a lot of coolant, but adding more cylinders is what makes it a truck. He was explaining to me that 'scaling' people was about figuring out how to take what someone was doing really really well, and turning that into a process for doing that thing. Then handing over that thing to the process.

The first startup I joined was run by a guy who had not, to my knowledge, ever been more than a line manager (directly managing people who did things, versus managing people who managed people to did things) He had a really really hard time working with the indirection, unable to feel comfortable that things were "in control" unless he went and talked to the actual people doing the work himself. As the company got bigger that became a bigger and bigger issue for him. He didn't scale, and I could tell that there would come a time when he would be 110% subscribed with tasks that he couldn't figure out how to delegate.

The message about getting home though is really really important. Too many people are sleeping at work because they have no home to go home to any more. If you can set a goal for 'quality hours with the family per week' and when that is in jeopardy due to work commitments restructure work to reduce its impact.
Five Questions About Working at Thalmic Labs (YC W13)
to be fair, pge did just blow up a city and completely fuck up record keeping for their gas pipelines

But... fuck comcast, their high prices, their annual price increases, their data caps, their shitty service, their missed appointments, their slow speeds. We need government owned broadband.
I had a similar idea for an app -- but allows filtering as well.

* How come not all entries have been added?
* Previous months?
Personally, I think Twitter is struggling because they're married to the greatest short coming of the product: the 120 character statically allocated array. Sure they've tried to shoehorn other things into it (photos, replies, tags), but always at the expense of these precious characters -- a product decision that came from aping SMS. The updates are often frustratingly limiting. As long as you artificially limit yourself, you're stuck and can't innovate.

I use Twitter, but I don't know what I exactly get out of it. I guess I use it out of habit more than anything.
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=BYigSwhw
> Google Earth is prevented from showing the faces of real people, both living and dead. Colonel Sanders used to be one, which means that his smiling visage is blurred out on the logo of every one of the world's KFCs.

Pretty sure Google's face recognition just blurred those out as a matter of pattern matching. If you look carefully in Street View you can see false positives everywhere.
I doubt that. If there is no reason, it can't be cured. But there are cases of depression being cured, so there has to be a reason for depression.
Rails Stats
>I think the main benefit of an unconditional basic income, however small, is exactly to help us getting over the worst of protestant work ethic.

Well, that presents you with a chicken/egg situation because for it to have any hope of becoming reality you will need to convince everybody (the majority of Americans) who believe that everybody should pull their weight.

>Do we really need to make existential threats to people who don't accept the work that the government thinks they should be doing?

Do we need to? No. Do I agree with you? Yes. But, most people think that it is a moral imperative that you should have to work for a living and we live in a kind of Democracy, so...

Until that part of our culture changes to accommodate we won't get basic income.

At the moment we're making existential threats to people who don't accept the work that the private sector (i.e. democratically unaccountable 1%) thinks that should be doing.

All I'm saying is that the government should provide decent jobs so that the 1% have to compete with the government and provide better jobs than they currently do.
it does tend to cut into giant ceo earnings; it's much harder to be a parasite when you have to compete with public utilities run at or near cost

it also puts a dent into the size of bribes available to the more venal politicians...
I think the fact that Twitter is overwhelming a negative place is a bigger issue.
You're right that it's just a heuristic. Open source can also lead to cargo-culting[1] sets of instructions for tightly circumscribed tasks: http://akkartik.name/about

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Show HN: Skyflower on Steam Greenlight (rougelike with bullet hell bosses)
From their SCFs, they raised $2.1B in last year's IPO, $300M in follow-on equity sales and $1.7B in convertible debt. They had great timing on the debt though, it's price basis was at a stock price of $75 (It closed today at $41).[1]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2014/09/12/twitter...
Severnaya Zemlya probably isn't censored: it's just covered in ice nearly all of the time. They needed to draw the outline because you can't see the edge of the land clearly under the ice.

Here's what it looks like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SevernayaZemlya.jpg
Although the author is a bit harsh, I tend to agree with him on the aspect that Amazon is largely creating second rate products and ultimately wasting a lot of shareholder money
(their inventory write down on fire phone inventory was $170M).

The markets have been punishing them for their tactic of throwing it against a wall and seeing if it sticks. Ultimately, I think what allows a company like Apple to get ahead was the ability to say 'no', 'it isn't ready', 'do this better', 'redesign that', 'this sucks - can the project'. Bezos does not appear to run his company that way. It seems like he has a bunch of lieutenants building things, but nobody telling them 'NO!'

The author highlights one thing: Amazon is trying too hard to be everything to everyone, failing to excel in most ventures.

Don't get me wrong, I love their core business', use amazon prime, the web services have definitely been a game changer and the kindle makes my life on caltrain nice. But I'm certainly not going to invest in them until they start to show that they've learned to say 'no'.
In some environments (like yours) it may make sense.

In the vast majority of the cases however, you can get away with writing un-optimized code and it generally makes no difference. Considering the egg problem, any computer would not care two shits about running through all 100 floors to drop the egg every single time.

Unless this particular piece of code is a bottleneck for your organisation, there is very little reason to check for/think of an optimal solution to this problem (if you don't know it yet).

That does not make you a bad programmer, just an economical one.
A website for posting small snippets of text that makes over $1B/year is certainly a business though.
There's a company working on this: https://grasswire.com/. Their goal is to democratize the news by adding things like fact checks to tweets. I know the guys running it and I've seen previews for their next release. It's gonna be killer!
fyi they don't need to power cycle your machine to remove it from the data center (if there is physical access); there's a battery backup that clips onto the power prongs while it's still 3/4 in the socket.
I'd guess the same way one gets any other domain - by purchasing it.

The choice of name isn't bad but at first I was confused for a moment and thought it was about something at the demoparty of the same name: http://www.assembly.org/
Same article is on the new company blog:
http://blog.confluent.io/2014/11/06/announcing-confluent-a-c...
A brief introduction to "polyfilling" and what that means would be pertinent.

I've never heard that term and have no idea what this is about, nor do I care.
I doubt anybody is wondering that. The very first section is titled "Origin at LinkedIn."
True but I didn't say all, I said most. I do think the requirement is banal because almost every piece of open source software you use requires some level of attribution.
I suspect people do it as social signaling because they don't want to be thought of as not dedicated.

If people were more worried about results than appearances, they would not do this though as working that much leads to stupid mistakes and burn-out.

It might make sense if you are just trying to cash out and want to put on a good show for investors by sleeping under your desk, though I would think this only impresses stupid investors.

Is instructive to see the environments where this goes the other way.

In Oxford and Cambridge Universities there is the concept of the 'Grey Man'.

These are the people who are seen to work hard and it used to be considered a terrible affliction and an indication of mediocre talents.

Consider this quote from Stephen Hawking

“The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was the mark of a ‘grey man’, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.”

Hawking calculated that he worked on average for about an hour a day as an undergraduate physicist: “We affected an air of complete boredom and the feeling that nothing was worth making an effort for.”

from here - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e59f5792-1a23-11e3-b3da-00144feab7...
I'm kinda bummed that all the considered sexy curves are cofactor!=1, beyond losing a bit of rho security, it makes implementations more complex and complicates derivation schemes. (I think it also shows there is more flexibility in supposedly rigid schemes than people give credit for; IIRC brainpool _required_ cofactor 1, but a speedup is suggested (montgomery ladder instead of using a slower constant time addition law) and tada, relaxed in future curve specs. This is especially acute for PGP where performance on this sort of scale is basically a non-issue: practically no one needs to verify tens of thousands of PGP signatures per second.

Indeed, PGP doesn't bring everything to the table (You fail to mention non-repudiation, but the fact that I can't authenticate a pgp message without producing a transferable signature is a pretty big flaw for general correspondence)... but, considering the the limitations and usability concerns, it appears to me to be most suited and widely used for higher security applications authenticating software distributions with long term keys, which effectively all the rest of our computer security ends up resting on it. Other things end up being protected by OTR, TLS .. or not at all. :( We effectively have no general widely deployed "high security" option for long term person to person encryption and authentication except PGP.
I don't think MS Office* has ever really held the low end though, no? That was held by Works back in the day, or even WordPad. And if it was Word, then it was most likely on some educational discount or hardware bundle, meaning not much revenue in the first place for Microsoft.

Lately Google Docs and Pages have filled those spots, but I suspect this giveaway is just shoring up or buffering their stronghold in the workplace.

Strongly agreed on the symbiotic relationship. I actually bought a full version of Win7 and VMWare Fusion just to run the "real" Office apps on my Mac. (Tellingly, the actual Office Suite was only $10, through the Home Use Program)

* EDIT: Changed "I don't think Microsoft has ever..."
I agree. Their best route is to position increasingly as a tool for media and those reacting to it or sharing it. Instagram and Facebook have them beaten for personal updates. But tweets are still being shared on TV broadcasts, and Twitter handles are accompanying TV and newspaper profiles.

I wonder if they've considered making available something beyond 140 characters to media partners. Like nested tweets, or chained tweets, or interactive tweets, or better galleries or listicles. Or tried revenue sharing as a trial with particular partners?
15 Tools for Startup Rookie
Personality characteristics and trait clusters in astronaut selection [pdf]
I can't help but feel the whole startup culture is a conflict of mission writ large in two ways. First, you're trying to make people's lives better while deleting the idea of a better life for yourself. Second, execution is everything. But when you're working like this the quality of execution inevitably degrades.

I've done startups. At the end I got better at what I was doing but I wasn't ultimately proud of the work I did. The startup even succeeded (I helped other people get rich, I just made a living). Many startups don't even do that.
Congratulations guys and good luck on this next adventure! How does Samza fit into this new venture?
> [A Macquarie Capital researcher] expects that this year alone, Apple's iTunes, software and services business should generate about $30 billion on a gross revenue basis, which would be more than 83 percent of S&P 500 companies. [...] Schachter believes earnings before interest and taxes through iTunes, software and services will account for 21.8 percent of the company's profits this year.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/03/24/itunes-and-app-sal...
Thank you for your advice. Those are the roles I feel drawn to so it's nice to hear some validation of those tendencies :) I'll keep an eye out for them.
Unless you're trying to be a delivery network.
It is surprising how long it has taken for the common practice of databases to be distributed. I'm glad that people are starting to move in that direction, and open source their work. This is a win for our industry overall.

We're working on a database/cache/messaging system too, http://github.com/amark/gun it is dedicated to removing the pain I and other Javascript/NodeJS developers had when it came to managing/debugging databases (devops and sysadmin work is frustrating).
Twitter's best feature is 140 characters of content. Also, Twitter has always amazed me by being the first place that I discover breaking and often historic news - an experience that has never been replicated on Facebook or elsewhere. The signs though seem to indicate that it struggles with product vision and leadership. Seriously, "to build the world’s largest audience" is not product or user centric thinking and is a step toward failure in my opinion. I think core users can still find value and a unique experience on Twitter, but Twitter needs to better understand and articulate what makes it so great. Yes, it is still great in my eyes.
BitXBay Distrubted Market
Yeah, but if anyone caught wind of it there would be hell to pay wouldn't there? You'd need some sort of secret court so that you could control exactly who has knowledge of what's going on and effectively subvert democracy. Good luck with that. You'd have to be pretty paranoid to believe the US would allow that kind of back room governing to go on.
The idea is that the app would have some pre configured items that you've previously ordered - i.e. it already knows the brand, size, supplier, delivery method, etc. Its just providing a shortcut to place the order itself. I see this useful in regularly occuring basket items like food/groceries.
How the CURTA mechanical calculator works
The saddest part of that whole story came at the end when the library of magic-related literature and artifacts Ricky Jay helped amass and curate fell into the hands of David Copperfield.

Not sure what the tech world equivalent of that would be--maybe a nouveau riche Tinder founder acquiring all the original artifacts of historic computing in the Computer History Museum, moving them to Branson, Missouri, and putting them backstage of a Yakov Smirnoff dinner theatre show.
I used to hang on some hobby osdev boards many years ago (losethos was there, when it was still called losethosOS). I never got much further than loading the kernel, setting up protected mode, printing some text and so on, but it was an interesting crowd. The long story short is, building a day-to-day usable general purpose kernel from scratch, alone, is next to impossible.

First have to decouple Go from its runtime before you could build a kernel in it, not to mention everything else that goes w/ writing a kernel. Similarly, you can't use significant parts of C++ when building a kernel w/ it.

It seems like a lot of people are looking at Rust as a system programming language, though... (google rust kernel)
How are they solving the problem of people in the same room with different accents... that sounds like a really hard one to figure out. Google Voice needs some training for example just to be able to recognise the initial "Ok, Google".
You can calculate it yourself: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/
Microbenchmark – Go and C
> I find codezero's lack of historical perspective rather uninformed and somewhat naïve.

When someone admits that they don't understand something, it's generally considered gauche to insult them for it.
As someone who has been a product engineer and internal tool engineer I really appreciated that they made the distinction. Some other points to think about.

1.In the first version of the tool don't have the tool make a decision, just have it generate information, not make decisions. So if it is telling you which sales lead to pursue, first have it generate metrics on why you should pursue a lead

2. Once you have a tool that makes decisions always have a way to let a human override the tool's decision

3. Start with a process then add a tool. It's almost always either to work out bugs with people then software
Thanks, I hadn't read that jwz post before. This is another killer quote:

>But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk.
That'll get you on a lost fairly quickly.
Yes, I find parts of signs blurred out reasonably frequently. The only reason I could conceive of for that is face blurring false positives.
I do, using http://newsblur.com.
Is the Company Claiming Credit for #AlexFromTarget Really Behind It?
Awesome cover
I love it. It'll be interesting to see if browser vendors will start attempting to detect these sorts of polyfill services and respond with their own browser-bundled or -specific polyfills.
While that's true, I think it's possible to find your own corner of the world that's not obsessing over the issues du jour and generally worrying themselves to death.

After trying many time to cull the people I follow to create a more positive space, I ended up starting a new account and only following people whose positive:negative content is really high. So far it's working well.
The startup thing has been both amazing and incredibly devastating.

Haven't seen my folks in years. Spouse dumped me because I practically didn't exist outside of work. Absolutely no hobbies or traveling in years. No guarantee the company will be anything but a massive drop in my financial history. You're constantly running out of money, so you're cutting every unnecessary expense, and you're living on scraps for years, knowing that you could be making 10x that much in the workforce. You can't quit though because so many people look up to you for direction, they need you to be there and lead them, to be certain of where you're going. The stress can be so high you just want to roll up in fetal in a corner and disappear. You understand why so many founders end their lives.

The experiences however and the connections are priceless. The feeling of playing the game on your terms is liberating and the hope of the upside is exhilarating, but I still wish the price wasn't so high. The amount of personal growth is astounding: once you go through the above, everything else feels like easy mode. You have to develop resilience, charisma, diplomacy, discipline and so many other traits or you will sink fast.

In hindsight, I don't know if I'd do anything differently. When you're this deep, you try not to dwell on hypotheticals.

I remember many years ago when I was sold to the startup lifestyle by the sexiness of the message, but the dozens of PG essays and stories of success and freedom. Nowadays I caution people to truly dig deep and understand if this is worth it to them, ask them if they're ready to sacrifice everything for likely nothing at all. Ultimately we're slaves of power law and similar to Hollywood talent in our outcomes: a very small fraction of us is going to becomes gods through either luck or huge sacrifice, and 99.9% of us will be waiting tables for the rest of our lives, or decide to do something else.
We stopped all advertising on Facebook. It's a mess.
Everyone talks about privacy. My biggest problem is that even with those 5 or 10 functions, Alexa is still pretty much useless.

Suddenly needing to know the height of Everest while crossing the room? Yeah, that happens so much.

No, it's just that they don't have the slightest idea how to make it be useful because it only works on pattern questions like "What is the height of X ?" or "Put Y on the grocery list".

I am sure the list of allowed phrase templates is pretty limited. That's what disappoints me about Alexa, Siri, Google voice and other assistants.

Still waiting for HAL-9000 with its amazing conversation skills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8N72t7aScY
>I don't think I need to explain to HN why an always-on, internet connected voice recording device is something to keep out of your house. [1]

You just described many peoples computers
Classic article, and Ricky Jay is the real deal. But the first two tricks mentioned can be explained by the use of confederates: Gregory Mosher for the first and "Mort" in the second.
Blindstore – a private information retrieval data store
It's so obvious what Costolo should do that I feel shame of Twitter: sell the firehose data to small and medium size companies! There are a lot of companies who want to analyze data from the firehose but can't afford the entry price.

Google revolutionized the advertisement world in this way. Before Google the entry level for putting ads in Yahoo was very high and involved human assistance.
I had to read this part of the article twice because I thought I couldn't be reading that right. I finally understand what he means but if taking what written at face value then he is horribly wrong.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Values_(The_Outer_Limi...
But is role of the family dog so bad after all?