skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, the web interface for that looks pretty nice but it'd take too much to move our mail systems to that.
My example shows, respectively, justification with hyphenation, justification without hyphenation, and left aligned type. You can keep backpedaling, but I have demonstrated that you can have more characters per line with justified text.
You have to see it this way: making money with ads has to be hard, because there is very little benefit for any person who clicks on ads, while at the same time there is a very low barrier to entry. So contrary to what the make-money-quick salesmen want you to believe, you have to work a lot to maintain this type of income.

Things get a little better if you sell an ebook, for example, although most money spent on ebooks is money lost. Progressing on the benefit curve you will see that things get very different when you create new technology (think of Apple or IBM) or invest your capital in something that people need to survive (food, oil, housing, etc). My philosophy is that you should work on anything that you like, but the money you make you should invest on things that have real value.
With Assembly (YC W12), ZenPayroll, and others, software is eating the company
Yep. I noticed the previous accounts doing the same thing so I just automatically flag them all when I see them.
To be clear about this, for future reference: is it doxxing to post the contact information for someone's public office, when speaking to people about their concerns is part of that person's job? (Indeed, even posting this information in anger, per se to encourage "attacking them"—but when the targeted person has encouraged such "attacks", created a separate channel for them, and thinks of receiving them as "just what they do" rather than something scary.)

For example, I don't think I've ever heard it called doxxing when someone puts up the address+phone number of a congressman and encourages people to write in. Nor when someone posts the "personal corporate" email of the CEO of a company to explain how to "go over the heads" of the CSRs of that company or to tell them about how you're boycotting the company.

I don't think doxxing is about contact information, per se; it's more about the line between someone's public and private personas. If someone actually has the equivalent of a public-persona "complaints hotline", then I would think it would be just fine to post that, no?
If you believe it's exploitative, why not take the other side of the trade? Go become a startup founder yourself.

Lots and lots of people in Silicon Valley do that, and ultimately, that's what's causes market correction. If there are way more startups out there than talented engineers capable of building products, then the engineers can negotiate a much better deal for themselves. Or they don't and go out of business, but if that's the case, then your initial assumption that they have no real personal risk in the venture doesn't hold.

I know a senior engineer (Boston area, not Silicon Valley) that's made multiple millions multiple times as an early employee. She comes in to startups after they've fucked up their v1 so badly that they can't bring it to market, negotiates a very sweet equity package, fixes the product, and then cashes out when they IPO or get bought.
Primarily, the WTC is known for its pristine use of counterpoint, or multiple independent voices working together to create harmony. This is mainly seen in the fugues, though the preludes have plenty of it, too.

In addition, Bach used this work to teach his students musical composition, and many of the pieces exemplify certain compositional techniques. For example, take a look at prelude #1. The entire piece is based on moving between chords by changing a single note, effectively demonstrating voice leading and harmony.

Unfortunately, the WTC was not particularly well known during Bach's time or in the century after. If I'm remembering my music history correctly, it was barely even published during his lifetime. Eventually, it was rediscovered by the Romantic composers and has been famous ever since.

I do not believe Bach actually had any hand in popularizing equal (or well) temperament. This might just be one of those legends attributed to the great composer. (We covered this in music history class when I was at university, but sadly, I don't remember the details.)
Show HN: Happy Party
I suspect there'd be a lot more carnivores if people had to grow their own veggies, too.
Rats, raised in clean conditions and fed properly, would probably make a good food source. People eat rabbits and squirrels, there's really not much difference.
The nasty Drupal bug from last October was discovered when a (name withheld) company in Europe paid for a professional security audit of Drupal's open-source code. Thankfully when they found the bug, they contributed the patch back to the community.
Hi Sam,

I have a startup in Brazil which is a marketplace for technical assistance. Within 5 months we have over 2k geeks (in 102 cities) and over 200 clients and we're only on MVP. Unfurtunately I cannot find my aquisition channel (also I'm not sure about the profile of my clients since they are very random). All the investors say's they'll invest only when we find this acquisition channel. Would you recommend me any cheap way to test my channels? We're running out of cash (which we have almost 0).

Thanks in advance
I used to see Sandy Petersen from time to time at roleplaying games conventions, in the UK and Germany. He had a black t-shirt withe the DOOM logo on the front and "Wrote it!" On the back.
Do people actually prefer the flavor of artificial sweeteners??? huh...
It has the "ick" factor regardless of whether ground up or not. And the article does talk about flavor, etc.
".... you have to work a lot to maintain this type of income."

If you love what you do, it's not work...
Every so often, I use strings in my code. F# gives me no compile time checks against null references when I'm dealing with strings, nor any other reference type. I did mention that the constructs F# provide are not nullable, which is nice, but that doesn't mean that F# is NRE free. As I said, F# is a nice language, but the "no null reference exceptions" claim, if anything, is misleading.

(I'm not very experienced with F# and would be thrilled to be shown that I'm incorrect!)
...or a global plague... something similar to the black plague, or some of the really bad flu epidemics... without the risks from infectious disease, humans are pretty much un-checked.

I'm not suggesting that we actually engineer such a solution, but the fact is there are too many people on the planet, and the population is only growing... Eventually the real perceived value of life will decrease, and more militant solutions will start presenting themselves.

It's not popular, and my only hope is I don't live to see things get really worse.

Desalinization really should be something under much heavier research than it currently is. As should farming with less water usage, as well as cross-country water pipelines.
Genius (Rap Genius) is hiring for full stack, front end, iOS
Meet the man with an utopian vision for the Internet
Staying Focused While Learning to Code
Great insight, and very true. This edition is opinionated. The editor, Olivier Miquel, had some very clear "design goals" in mind. Not like "rewrite Bach", or anything like that, but he wanted it to be "playable" to people who may otherwise find the notation quirks of Bach off-putting. Some people will take issue with these decisions, but it's like you said - there is no one true WTC.
When you say free you don't mean free. Free means no one pays for it which means no one spends time making it. If anyone has to spend any time making and/or distributing this birth control it isn't be free by definition.
This is off the topic , but my problem with chrome is it become a OS itself , I don't need another OS on top of my OS.I just need a browser, Chrome was excellent one before they start pushing it to OS/framework level software.
Regarding (b): I think an employee working day to day gets a much better picture than investors. It requires time on the job, but my point is that it's not as one-sided as you make seem.
Would you sue someone with no money?

It may not be the only reason but it probably an important one.
Note that helicopter-style parenting is a complex social phenomenon, and not just some sort of personal failing (an implication which is similar to the "worst mom" characterization of Skenazy). Children who grow up in suburban sprawl, long distances from school and friends will require chauffeuring, scheduled playdates, etc. I would be surprised if most parents wouldn't be pleased if their children were able to be more independent at an earlier age (though I am sure some subset would rather maintain control).
> and that point is the point at which I determine that the hurt falls under the threshold I would expect every person to be prepared to sacrifice for any other person.

That seems like a good way to put it.

The number of people doesn't really matter, when it the amount of hurt per person is so small that you can say with all confidence something like "I believe that literally any sane person would agree to get one speck in their eye to save a stranger from fifty years of torture".
Guess who will be called in to help them get more water, somehow?
Just tried it and it works :)

Some Feedback:
* The ajax spinner looks horrible.
* "I'm feeling lucky" gives me always the same tweet.
A directory of vetted people willing work for equity
I always like to bring visitors to Padova down to the piazza for drinks. On some evenings, there's a guy who cooks up delicious octopus that you eat from a plate with toothpicks. My kids love this, and happily slurp up the tentacles and then ask for more. So do I, now, but it did take some getting used to.
Yep, this is the point I was trying to make way upthread. If "the engineers just couldn't do it" is treated as a physical reality due to the objective hardness of the problem, and Musk recalibrates his future time-estimates based on that, great! If "the engineers just couldn't do it" is treated as a failure of the engineers, and people are fired for failing to conform to Musk's rosy estimate, not great!

And the latter is what you'd presume by default of a manager. It might not be true of Musk in particular, but in absence of explicit evidence to the contrary, it's likely, which is why this kind of overeager optimism can be downright scary-sounding coming from a high-level corporate executive.

I have a feeling that, like you said, Musk listens to these people. Maybe he actually knows their potential better than they know it themselves; knows what they can pull off when driven, that they wouldn't think (or especially claim) themselves capable of otherwise. Maybe, in other words, he's like the protagonist of some military ensemble drama series. (Jack O'Neill in Stargate SG-1, say.)

And given how successful he is, maybe he is that guy! Someone's gotta be. But that guy is really rare. Most corporations, sadly, don't have that guy anywhere in them. And without that guy, you've just got unrealistic promises, followed by flops, followed by finger-pointing.
That sounded odd to me, so I looked it up: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_music

It's been awhile, but I don't recall DOOM music reminding me of Metallica. I guess I only hear E1M1 in my memory though.

Did you have any particular tracks in mind for comparison?
Men Are Harassed More Than Women Online
Even if they do prefer the city now. I just can't come up with a scenario where it makes sense for people to crowd in cities over the medium term. Heck, I can't make sense of why companies like Yahoo and Google insist on co-location, especially by tech companies, in this networked world, especially in vastly overpriced places like SF or anywhere in California for that matter.

I have a theory that co-location, especially in tech has more to do with tax and accounting policy and incentives than anything else.
Jailed hacker, “I used to read [Clinton’s] memos… and then do the gardening”
I would say it's possible that they did not receive a more rigorous education since we may not know what they were educated on beyond these questions. What if the students of the era were specifically prepared to answer these questions for this test much like how US children are educated today? A good portion of my children's education is tied solely to passing standardized tests. Sometimes to the detriment of a more balanced education.
I'm going to be seriously disappointed if bee larvae in my region taste differently than raw almonds and cow milk butter.
5 Reasons ECommerce Needs Consumer Video
I can think of these three right now:

- changefeeds if you want to push data to your clients
- joins (if you are on a system without them - like Mongo)
- human-readable query language (if you are using SQL)
Indeed. One of the things that Kimiko is looking forward to is the pedal. Chopin is extremely precise with his pedal marks, to the point where many performers overlook them almost altogether because they're so demandingly prescriptive. Kimiko, the purist that she is, wants to perform Chopin's pedalling as close to exactly like he wanted it as possible, and is looking forward to hearing what it sounds like on the Pleyel piano, in the hope that it will explain some of the difficult to understand aspects of his pedalling markings.
I always had a feeling that most of China's "success" is just centralizing wealth of the whole country in a few places under governance of not so many people. With so many people you don't have to be terribly successful at reform to produce a bunch of impressive cities etc. Per capita it has a long way to go. We'll never know until/if China breakups into multiple countries (or something similar).
> The basic reason it should follow is that not doing so makes you inconsistent and exploitable

I still don't understand whatever framework you're trying to put forward here. How does preferring specks over torture in some absurd hypothetical somehow lead to the conclusion that I should start blinding people?
Not only that, but they may well be unable to upgrade to even new versions of windows...

You need Windows 2018? You'll have to buy a new computer...
there is probably more behind that than boredom. Maybe they want many kids to support them when they get older.
Yeah, that's a Bandcamp thing. The Licence file in the download clarifies that it's CC0.
Whether the challenge of mass producing cricket flour is actually worth solving of course, depends on demand for the product extending beyond novelty value, which is part of the problem with edible algae, also widely available in stores and rather simpler to produce and yet far from being a mainstream foodstuff.

As far as I'm aware use of cricket flour is also virtually nonexistent amongst the many cultures that consider whole insects a delicacy.

On the basis of both of the above I'd hazard that cricket flour is unlikely to become a significant staple food even if niche businesses perfect the art of cricket-farming.
I understand your motivation. My point is that your advice on how to become a huge company seems a bit flawed - specifically because it ignores all the companies which failed even after following that advice.

Anyway, there is so little data on the topic that I don't feel anyone has good advice on it.
1br is around $3,000 now: https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...

100k = 25% marginal tax rate for Fed, but effective rate of 17.3% + 6.8% State tax rate = 24.13% = $24130 (assuming you are single)

$100k:
- $24.1k taxes
- $36k rent
- $12k food and misc
-------------
$27.9k

So you basically have $2,325 left over after expenses each month to play with.
It's a Bandcamp limitation. I put the license file in the download to clarify that it's CC0.
Replacing Photoshop with NSString
Curious to know how WhiteHat Aviator(https://www.whitehatsec.com/aviator/) would perform there, any ideas?
Perhaps the dualistic East/Western modes of viewing the world aren't enough.
At least the part where it's implied that "Someone from organization X used the basilisk to convince innocent bystanders to donate to X" is false, for any value of X that I know of. Pascal's Wager is/was (I imagine?) used to get people to subscribe to various churches and give them money.
This is awesome, I think it just unblocked my quad copter experiments :-)
We do this, but use a sliding scale. The middle of the scale is what's locally considered to be a fair salary and fair equity compensation for whatever role we're hiring for. The equity / salary offered at each end of the scale tends to fluctuate depending on the impact of the role.

So far it's worked out well. I think potential hires like the flexibility because it lets them optimize for larger short term gain (a higher salary) or a potentially larger long term gain (more equity if the company sells, IPOs, etc.)

Anecdotally it tends to make negotiations easier for us. We basically end up presenting the entire solution space we're willing to offer for the ''what's my salary and equity'' problem. With the extents known, negotiations tend to settle around some point within that solution space. Your mileage, of course, may vary, though.
What LoL Taught Me About Game Design and Psychology
The uncounted: why the US can't keep track of people killed by police
I've had cookies made with cricket flour, they tasted normal; wouldn't have been able to tell you anything was different from the taste/texture alone.
Is this something the Bus Pirate device could also be used to do?
>but everyone who's relied on it exclusively has learned the hard way that it's just too unreliable and slow to have a failure mode which is an empty page unless a lot of complex code works perfectly.

FUD. I develop HTML5 gambling for a living and this anti-javascript sentiment on HN is getting really tiresome. You honestly sound like a bunch of old people, complaining that a PC isn't a typewriter or a fountain pen.

Yeah your fountain pen doesn't require power and it writes your name really well, but that doesn't mean that the PC isn't better.

Client side rendering means you will have to test in all browsers, writing android apps means you have to test on a lot of units.
sama said they don't do that but they actually did do exactly that with Quora. I guess they made an exception.
[Spoiler alert!] Reminds me of the plot for Die Hard 4.

The villain is waging damaging cyber-attacks, but his real goal is different: He's trying to force the government to enact on of their own emergency plans, which collects and stores the "digital crown-jewels" into a secret sort-of-offsite backup... One that he knows how to steal.
First, I was trying to relate the ideas behind the patent system not to describe how it works in practice. So, while I always like to talk about how gnu and Linux took over the world, it's not relavent to the discussion of rents vis a vie patents.

Second, Unix is a bad example because AT&T never tried to patent it. I'll ask my dad about it. He worked at bell labs during this time (he has about 2 dozen patents and an IEEE medal). I think the attitude around there was that software wasn't something you could patent. My dads research was in lasers so I heard much more about lightwave devices than software growing up.
Out of curiosity I poked around on your site and did some test searches using words similar but not identical to some of your titles. I did this just on articles I thought people might actually be looking for and that are over 1500 words. For example:

heartbleed bug what you need to know

Your post (http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-no...) was buried. I gave up looking for it after the first 6 pages of google results.

I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.

I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.

So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.
I made phc (http://phpcompiler.org), which is conceptually similar to HippyVM, before applying to YC. And I got into YC, and now run a post-Series A startup, so I probably have a tiny bit of insight.

Trying to sell a PHP compiler is a very bad business plan. In fact, trying to sell any compiler is a very bad business plan, because you're basically competing with free. You have to compete against OSS with massive communities (like gcc) or against deep pockets (like Visual Studio) or against reference implementations (like the OSS PHP engine).

Imagine trying to sell a PHP compiler. You can try to get wide community adoption and sell bottom-up. Good luck with that, the PHP community is not that interested in tools. So you can try to sell top-down to enterprises with slow PHP problems. Very few companies have slow PHP problems, and those that do could just use HHVM.

For 30 years, commercial lisp engines, C++ compilers, Java VMs, and tons of similar things have all been commercially unsuccessful (though not all failed outright). A PHP engine will have to compete with with Facebook's HHVM (OSS + deep pockets), against the Zend engine (community adoption + reference implementation) and against Zend corp (a known and established quantity in the space).

I spent a bit of time in compiler research and met with tons of compiler companies at events. One of them said that they couldn't think of any compiler company that didnt make its money off consulting, and that worse, about 85% of them made their money off a single client.

Quick, name a successful compiler company! There aren't too many and they weren't that famous. There is Coverity in the closely related static analysis space, that sold for $375m. There is Cilk that sold to intel for $100m. Dredging my memory there's companies like Anamorphic which was acquihired by Sun in 97 to work on Java.

You're almost better off being a HHVM consultancy than building a competing compiler and ending
up having to innovate on the product as well as providing consulting.
The source is on GitHub: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM
Cool Abstract HD Wallpapers
Thanks for the pointer to `cmdliner`. I've built a handful of command line tools using Command from the Core library (as described by Real World OCaml [1]), but I always have to have the book open to use it. This looks very nice and it looks like it might fix an annoyance I have with Core's `Command`, which is that it won't parse flags without spaces (i.e., `-r2` failes to parse as equivalent to `-r 2`).

[1] https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/command-line-parsing.h...
Startup Madness (Be the Underdog)
> you do not just publicly publish information hazards that might be real

But... for "might be real" to be valid at all, you have to buy into the Roko's basilisk concept in the first place.

If you don't, there's nothing to get upset about.
Given that your case is likely to become high profile, you might want to drop them a note to add CC0 to the list :)
And then you add a hardware emulator!