skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't write fiction but when I write longer-form articles, whitepapers, and so forth I find that a good percentage of the time I end up going back and chopping out a good bit of what a former boss described as "throat clearing" at the beginning. Not always; sometimes by chance I hit on a good metaphor or story or some other lead-in that works. But at least as often it's way too much digression and backstory and setup in advance of getting to the actual topic at hand.

With respect to Anathem in particular a lot of the problem is you didn't really understand what was going on for quite a while and I found that made it a bit of an effort to keep going.
> So why not require HTTPS, and let a thousand "make HTTPS simple" startups bloom?

Much the same reason we don't all cut our hands off and let a thousand prosthetics startups bloom, I think.

> Seems like we're saying "we should just accept insecurity because we can't think of an alternative".

It seems more like we're saying "We should unnecessarily break the free Web and just cross our fingers that somebody figures out how to fix it sooner or later."
Cheer Upper – finds sad Tweets and allows you to cheer them up
Awesome work! Something I wonder, would an observer actually see a black circle? If the photons are fanned out when they pass near the black hole, wouldn't some of those photons serve to obscure the black hole itself?
Ask HN: Why don't more startups pay equity in form of RSUs?
So my understanding is that stock options carry a considerable amount of risk of expiring worthless. You have to be lucky, to get options at low strike price and stay in the company till it goes for acquisition or gets IPO-ed to gain anything significant, or unless, you get them from companies like Pintrest which will allow you to exercise them, 7 years after leaving the company [1].

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) seems a lot less riskier since they would always be something of value, irrespective of how soon the company gets acquired or how soon employee leaves the company (of course, taking account of the vesting period). But this type of equity grant seems a lot less common. Is there any reason why?

[1]: http://www.businessinsider.in/Pinterest-just-made-a-deal-with-employees-that-could-rock-the-startup-world/articleshow/46670004.cms
It's an excellent book, and I highly recommend it, but it's also very personal and idiosyncratic in much of its advice. King is a writer of a particular type, and he's talking about the way he writes, which may or may not be the way you write (it's almost completely antithetical to the way I write, which is why I learned so much from it.)
>He highlighted enough of my superfluous fluff that I finally got writing and how one must write as little as possible.

Right, because Joyce, Pynchon, and Nabokov would have benefited from being told to write "as little as possible".

If you're writing non-fiction, maybe. If you're writing literature, to hell with rules. How impoverished our culture would be if all writing held itself to the same standard.
Drastically is an understatement! I was 25 when I co-founded IMVU. My goals at that time were to become an excellent technical founder, CTO, and maybe even a startup CEO someday.

Looking back, I think if YC had existed, I almost certainly would have applied. But nothing like that existed back then and so I wound up making my own mistakes and then writing about them.
I think he meant it's a step in the right direction towards solving the technical problem of identifying who leaked the material.

More generally he could have meant that tracking the leak is a step in the right direction towards HBO having control over when their material is released. Even in a fantasy world where all entertainment is free I think artists should have control over releasing their own work.

In any case, I'm curious as to what the endgame is in the right direction you mentioned.
This comes up every time there is a drought in the south of the UK compared to the north. It really is hard to mentally comprehend the colossal amounts of water that a river is moving.
59% of coding bootcamp graduates report increase in salary
SpaceX F9 landing attempt – Planetary Resources satellite on board
As long as it includes ethanol, then it's sorta renewable.
"I assume that it is going to be at least twice as hard to understand the code in the debugger as it was to write it, so I try to write it using half my available cleverness." - real gem for me, I'd like more people not to rise to their maximum level of cleverness while writing code, so they can easier debug things.
I appreciate his consideration in saving me a future time investment. Plus everyone else now gets moved up a slot on the library reserve list. A win-win.
> AES-NI can decrypt at 3.5 cycles per byte. With modern consumer grade hardware you will not find symmetric streaming crypto to be a serious bottleneck.

The "old style" Raspberry Pi and, iirc, also the B2, don't carry crypto accelerators, and these are the first choice for people doing embedded linux prototyping.

Same for most other mobile chipsets.
Open Letter to Dave McClure: What's Going on in Marketing Automation?
This is probably the best piece of advice I've ever read on HN about working from home.

Especially the part about what normal people do when working from home. Very important to take that into account.
Thanks a lot Eric, I will surely take your first advise (with a small deviation), in fact I read a lot and sometimes feel overloaded with information and not knowing what to do with it. I guess I'll restrict my reading time to 15-20 minutes a day apart from the reading I have to do while researching on a particular problem. I guess this would be right for me.
Conversation Between Two Masters of Painting THE DEATH OF SOCRATES
You can indeed do that. Sometimes they even stop! Not very often, though. Again, the inconvenient lack of actual bullets.
How big is the market potential?
That was part of the payoff, though. You're confused at first, wondering wtf is up with the vocabularly people are using, it all starts to make sense about 3/4 of the way through the book.

Damn, I need to read that one again. It's been too long.
I'm only seeing a blog post from 2013. Site is busted on mobile? Chrome/iPad.

Edit: Upon reloading, I briefly see an article about LinkedIn which gets quickly replaced by successively older blog posts. Scrolling doesn't seem to work. Permalink for those experiencing the same: http://blog.refresh.io/post/115300546551/announcement
This is long long long overdue in SOLR. The percolator feature is what has made me stick with ElasticSearch for the past 3 years, and has contributed to its increasing popularity over SOLR.
it was never really open.
Why? A couple years ago I was running a telecom, and we had around that volume of calls a day. Each call required not only routing instructions that hit several DBs, but also a transactional INSERT/UPDATE to account balances. Single node SQL Server handled it fine. (Though it was less than optimal at doing non-OLTP stuff.)

Twitter can handle this for people (like DataSift, providing historical lookback), or they can provide template to help them spin up. It's not gonna cost thousands of dollars a month in hardware.
Mystery of Ceres' bright spots grows
Not sure, you seem to have contradicted yourself. You open with saying you did not write the tools and then claim they only visit the site to use "your" tools?

Have you given credit to the person who wrote the tools?
I've been seeing a few of these sort of leaks lately. I have a feeling that it's to counter a shifting perception of Google. I'm willing to bet that this innovation will have the same real world impact as all of the other ones "leaked" so far.
It's there to advertise HBO. It's that simple.
Oh of course. I don't doubt something more sophisticated would be used in practice.
> How many other scripting languages do this?

Python, Perl, PHP, and TCL? Not really that innovative....
They also capture all your content and communications.
Really great article.

This is what Deming (old school father of the concept of quality control) was getting at with his view of organizations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

This topic is traditionally covered under the umbrella of Quality, with the premise that output Quality is primarily a function of the systems, knowledge, and understanding of the people at an organizational level—and is not a primarily technical pursuit, despite what most people think.

We need this discussion in the software world now more than ever. Really glad to see it.
> Good things happen when you treat your colleagues, vendors, partners, and customers like your family. All of us want to thank our customers for supporting us and providing invaluable feedback.

This acquisition might be great for the staff at Refresh, and the short shutdown window lets LinkedIn get value from the team quickly, but if you really treat your customers like family I think there should be more than 2 weeks notice of shutdown. This amounts to "so long, and thanks for all the fish".
This type of post isn't going to get much traction on HN. Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/forhire for finding someone.
Seems a little like you have a pretty efficient system for watching all that TV you don't watch.
It's not running your own CA that's the problem; it's remembering how to integrate with it for every project you do. Especially considering almost nobody runs SSL on their web apps - you will almost always terminate SSL at a load balancer of some sort, so it's not something web developers normally need to worry about nor is it reflective of how apps run in a production environment.
s/This the/Thus the/
There've been a number of psychological studies that show that face-to-face interactions build trust, regardless of the contents of those interactions (unless they're emotionally negative). When you're facing different stories from two people, one of whom you trust and one of whom you don't, who do you think wins?

This is also why many startups insist on people not working remotely. Startups frequently need to make decisions on very low information, such that the only conceivable reason you'd have for following through on the decision is trust.
Why software industry should “embrace the suck”
What I've noticed with Ycombinator is their advisor/partners seem to be very green themselves (usually a couple years working on a startup or two.)
The complete guide to promote your app effectively
I've outlined a blog post series about 30 headings long starting with this at the premise. There is a significant territory to cover, and it's difficult to present coherently.

The top-level topic is quality, in fact.
Ah, I feel dumb for not catching it. It is fair indeed.

About the article: that's not what I understand...

> a group approved by HBO to receive [the episodes]

What I understand is that the leak did not come from HBO but from one of their service providers or journalists or anything like that. Am I missing something?
Welcome to the startup world: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
I think this is the first post I've seen about Samza from a non-LinkedIn team. I'd love to hear any details about the Samza experience - it seems like it should be the logical choice for Kafka users, but there's not much out there about it.
Protip, you can hijack jsperf's java ns timer by loading the code in via a data://field to avoid cross-site script loading flags.
Also, it's possible the play was derived from Cardenio (which would explain the writing style), but is not Shakespeare's per se. They are very similar.
Yes, announced in 2011. Looks like it was launched with limited signups:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/page-spee...

If google still doesnt think it has a marketable product after 4 years.. maybe a cloudflare acquisition isn't too far fetched.
Of course. The key is to learn as quickly as possible within the constraints of the medium you're working in. I've worked with startups that launched an MVP in days for $10 and ones that have spent more than a year and $10M+ to make the MVP.

But here's a spooky though I'll leave you with. Often times, when startups are looking at their tools they will say: given the tools I have, the fastest I can build an MVP is X. But if you really take the criticality of learning seriously, you might say: given my desire to learn quickly, what tools can I use to go faster?

And that's where a lot of breakthroughs happen, when you choose tools and platforms not based solely on their technical capabilities, but by their speed of iteration. (It's probably why Facebook was built on PHP.)
Free one-day conference teaching PureScript, May 21 – Boulder CO
The Bitcoin Remittance Myth
Hi Eric, our startup is hosting live video AMAs with entrepreneurs. Would you be interested in hosting a session at http://talkingnext.io/? We actually have an event scheduled for tonight with Raj Singh from Dronecast at 5PM EST if you want to check it out live.
Fetchnotes acquired by Driftt
Thank you very much for this advice. Until I can play this card how I act currently as methodology-champion is that I pre-think/pre-work/"pre-cook" every working step for every sandbox-team. So the volunteers do not need to start from zero - they get everything prepared, comment it and thus can get good quality results out of their work - even on a slow pace do to long intervals between meetings. What do you think about this? Can this work for the first BML-feedback loop per sandbox?
> You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later.
Funny you mention this: I was trying to find Markov tweeters recently, but Google only turned up a handful of accounts. I know I've seen more - any others you can think of?
Sounds cool. Email me (it's right on my blog).
And when you read it again, you might find that it's still too long!

I kid, I kid. I ended up loving Anathem too, although I seriously struggled to get going.
The new vocabulary was tough. It was a difficult thing to keep a track of through the whole book.
I said my tools because it was shorter, but yeah, they're not really. One is by me but didn't involve coding so I don't really consider it a tool. Two of them I bought on some CodeCanyon like website. Another's development was sponsored by me. The last one is credited to its author through a deal we made.
This is exactly analogous to what has happened with the part of a hugely successful computer / cellphones / etc maker I work for in Cupertino, in engineering. 5 years ago it was a wonderfully productive environment; since, it has filled with do-nothing middle manager detritus, who deeply impede results, and quell enthusiasm, perhaps the most damaging detriment. Thankfully, this hasn't happened across the entire company.
Sure, although GAE is blocked in China. AWS works, and has a free tier that will get by for a year, but doesn't give you free certificates.

Also, for a lot of newbies, installing SSL certificates is a PITA.

0. You realize you need a SSL certificate. You're presented with a dizzying variety of options and already lost. Are you supposed to get Positive SSL, Negative SSL, Essential SSL, Comodo SSL, Start SSL, Wildcard SSL, EV SSL, Rapid SSL, Slow SSL, or EV SSL aux Mille Truffles et Champignons? Most newbies ask, "Why isn't there a simple [click here to get HTTPS certificate] button?"

1. You get your certificates by e-mail, but you still can't install them directly. Your webserver wants a .pem file, so you Google "How do I create a PEM file". The top 10 tutorials tell you to concatenate THREE files: your_domain_name.crt, DigiCertCA.crt, and TrustedRoot.crt in that order. What you received by e-mail was FOUR files: AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt, COMODORSAAddTrustCA.crt, COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt, and your_domain_name.crt. You're lost, no tutorial is helping with what to do with FOUR files instead of THREE, in what order to concatenate them, and StackOverflow bans your question. You're fed up, quit, and use HTTP. (Not me; I'm describing an actual case of observing someone else's frustration trying to set up HTTPS.)

The only way HTTPS will gain popularity is if we can get rid of the certificate-issuing economy and make it easy for newcomers. The majority of content creators unfortunately do not understand the basics of security nor can we expect them to have the patience to learn it.
I found one of his best insights to be that the factory model has been shifting out of blue-collar work, where factories are automated and many people now work essentially as craftsman, into white-collar work, where much office work has become rote. (I would put programmers into the craftsman category.)

"Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements. Paradoxically, educators who would steer students toward cognitively rich work might do this best by rehabilitating the manual trades, based on a firmer grasp of what such work is really like."

On the office environment: "Either you can bend conduit or you can’t, and this is plain. So there is less reason to manage appearances. There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile."

On learning a hands-on trade: "Occupations based on universal, propositional knowledge are more prestigious, but they are also the kind that face competition from the whole world as book learning becomes more widely disseminated in the global economy. Practical know-how, on the other hand, is always tied to the experience of a particular person. It can’t be downloaded, it can only be lived."
> What helped me is to use earphones, isolating the noise and signaling that I'm working and not to be interrupted.

Hah, that looks like a line people would use while arguing against an Open Office model.
Interesting link. My interest being more about volume than mass, lithium ion batteries have about 1/12.3 the energy of gasoline per volume. Does make for a better showing.

While volume isn't mentioned in the link, I'm surprised that supercapacitors fare so poorly per weight.
Reminds me of: youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight/
He actually seems to cover this point in "know the market." If your market is high literature, then the words that would be extraneous in a newspaper aren't extraneous there.
How does Lean model work in case of marketplace? Should you first get good amount of sellers on board before opening the beta version as marketplace ?
I hate to be a downer, but I'm not very optimistic that this will work. The limiting factor is that you can't learn for another human being, they have to do it themselves.

Maybe you can ask a few of the volunteers to join you for an extra-curricular set of meetings, like over a weekend, to try and give them a tiny taste of acting like a real startup.
Eric--for the above-average engineer (lets call him a 3X-5X), but not a 10X or 100X engineer--what advice would you give if they were interested in beginning a tech venture? How much does personal will play a factor compared to personal ability? Do they stand a chance to compete? Can you think of founders that have achieved great success despite lacking supreme talent? And, finally, to expand a little-- can you think of a character trait that is MOST important for a founder to possess other than great intelligence / clever execution?
"Lack of political will" ignores the complexity of the situation, when actors are motivated to cheat or exclude themselves from consensus. It's not a far cry from saying we lack the political will to end all wars.

I'm an engineer. Rather than complaining about what I wish I could do if I only had the resources, I think about what I can do with the resources that I have. In the case of something like fossil fuel, I think about how to create a less expensive alternative. Truly cheap wind/solar would put oil out of business by default.

This is also why I idolize Elon Musk. Rather than complaining about the lack of political will on the part of governments to get humanity off Earth permanently and stop using fossil fuel altogether, he created SpaceX and Tesla, and is making it profitable to solve humanity's deepest problems.
I liked it, but I am a big Stephenson fan. I skipped Anathem and the baroque cycle books, but Diamond Age is one of my favorite books and I also like Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon a lot.

Reamde was pretty good, and this is an interesting setup.

Edit: Anathem not Anathema (thanks __david__ and lmm)
This is Michael O Church you are replying to here..
Reid Hoffman: Bitcoin Is in My Five-Year Investment Plan
Racing to Buy Homes Sight Unseen
> Can you point out where I suggested that all users of Apple products are brainwashed?

I never accused you of saying all users of Apple products are brainwashed. Misrepresenting my comment isn't a very effective strategy when my comment is right there for everyone to read. And you very specifically used the term "brainwashee" in the context of Apple users, so yes you did in fact accuse some users of Apple products of being brainwashed.

> I didn't make the argument you thought I did

You said the Apple customer base has "a lot of True Believers" and having people you think are "brainwash[ed]". That's not a description I'd expect to see anyone use for any company other than Apple (even if you personally think there are customers of other companies that exhibit the same traits, you almost certainly wouldn't think to apply those specific labels). Which is why I asked my question. Why do you think those labels are appropriate, and what portion of Apple's customer base do you think they apply to? If you think that this description is only appropriate for a very small number of people, why even bring it up? If you think it applies to a large number of people, what justification do you have for describing Apple's user base as if it were a cult and do you really think that this does anything other than make anyone reading your comment dismiss it out of hand (which is the same general reaction to a comment including the word "fanboy").

> I don't really need any straw men.

Do you actually know what a straw man argument is, or are you just using the term to try and shut down conversation?
Sorta wish they had shipped IE9 with Windows XP instead of Windows 7 so companies would have more incentive to drop IE9 support.
Nope, that's almost certain to fail. Why should sellers join if there are no buyers? And if you do convince them, how can you ensure that they will have a good experience on launch day?

The only way to test a marketplace is to get a small number of highly-interconnected buyers and sellers to transact in low volume by hand. Think eBay and beanie babies or Facebook just on the Harvard campus. Read PG's http://paulgraham.com/ds.html for more.
You're confusing cause-and-effect here. If you're highly-paid, you're also highly-valued and your employer will be far more likely to let you have the latitude to work from home if you want to.
I don't know if he was saying it always originates from the top but more that it's always allowed to perpetuate from there.

If management doesn't have the visibility/inclination/time to peer into problems and gain understanding, they are encouraging whatever has happened to continue happening for better or worse.