skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What surprised me is that quite a few old-timey-sounding, probably-Biblical names ("Jebediah", "Ezekiel", "Jeremiah", "Abraham", "Noah") were either practically non-existent or otherwise rather unpopular 50 years (and further) back from the present.
Thanks for sharing, this is both informative and reassuring as I'm currently organizing my own hackathon coming up in 2 weeks.

It's a thematic hackathon ("Startup Weekend Immigration") happening on May 29-31 in SF.[1] We'll be hacking on ways to make it less difficult for immigrants to achieve a better life in a new country, and we have some great speakers including the CTO of Zenefits, who struggled with visa issues himself while co-founding Zenefits.

If you know anyone who would be interested, they can use the promo code "hn" on Eventbrite[2] to sign up for $25, which includes all meals during the weekend. (Early Bird pricing ends tonight at 11:59pm PST.)

[1] http://www.up.co/communities/usa/san-francisco/startup-weeke...

[2] https://www.eventbrite.com/e/startup-weekend-immigration-tic...
I believe that derives directly from what people like Fred Wilson or Mike Arrington have been saying:

"As I was reading Josh Kopelman‘s excellent post on the seed boom and Series A bust, I got thinking of some words of wisdom Mike Arrington once shared with me. He said “numbers always ruin a good story.”

What Mike meant by this is you can raise a seed (or Series A) on a story. But at some point, you will have numbers; users, user growth, revenues, and revenue growth. You will also have a burn rate. And those numbers will become the thing you are judged on and your nice story will be “ruined” by the numbers."

http://avc.com/2015/03/numbers-can-ruin-a-good-story/
This is a fascinating meta-post. First, it's a slideshow, so there need to be some posts about right arrows and general complaints about scrolling (as if Eich created this content himself to post to HN, instead of to be a speaker aid for himself). Second, it's about Javascript, so a bunch of people who really love lambda syntax and significant whitespace are going to show up and talk about how much better the web would be if we all ran python in the browser.

I think the web would be a lot better if we just ran lisp in the browser. Heck, I think lisp is pretty much the answer to all our problems. But nobody ever asked me.

As someone who was developing for the web in the (late) 90s, using web browsers and java as a cross-platform UI for educational software (mac and windows!) who tried to get java applets to communicate with each other (possible but difficult, and I ended up running a local java application that the applets RPCd to), I can say this with distinct clarity: the DOM and current (modern ES6) javascript system are pretty great. Sure, they could be better in some ways, but I don't trust Joe Programmer (just for example here) to understand re-entrant code well enough to write stuff that actually works in a multi-threaded environment, so single-thread event-driven is great.

People complain about this binding and so forth, but it provides a great borrowing / mixin mechanism to the language that is just flat out impossible in other languages. The prototype inheritance system is funky, but es6 classes mean you don't need to worry about it. If you want to, you can do some pretty rad metaprogramming with it, though.

Type coercion is kind of a pain, and frankly I'd love to be able to override operators (writing === semantics for objects over and over is kind of a PITA). But seriously, Javascript is pretty great. I pass around functions, chain together stuff with functional-based approaches (front-to-back no less), and can do all sorts of hip kinds of programming with it.

Maybe if we had some truly-different language driving the web, things'd be different, but don't complain about javascript and just put forward python. Put something like haskell or smalltalk on the block. Let's go big with the radical differences. I mean, c-ish languages are c-ish languages. I only wish CSS was as nice as Javascript. If I had my druthers, that's where we'd be focusing; that and namespaces within the DOM (hello, shadow DOM!)

Okay, longpost over. And late no less - serves me right for working all day instead of reading HN. Writing JS no less.
You mentioned fewer bugs, and indeed I feel that Scala is safer than Java (fewer bugs). Some reasons: 1) Scala has named parameters, so you can avoid bugs related to parameters placed in the wrong order (simply specify the parameter name, if you have more than one of the same type). And 2) when you code in Java, you'll have to read and write more code = higher bug risk. (But I wouldn't want to write super concise code in Scala, that could also mean higher bug risk.) And 3) Scala doesn't suffer from null pointer errors (assuming you use Option/Some/None). Java also has some Option class but I've gotten the impression that people tend not to use it.

Scala has the best collections package I've ever seen in any language so far.
Why Bootstrap Is a Bad Fit for Wordpress Themes(2014)
unintended consequences of artificially low rates.
If the sea level rises, does that mean the oxygen content at a previously high altitude increases?

For example, I could build a nice beachside villa in La Paz, formerly at 14,000 ft, and now live there without the aid of Bolivian marching powder and various other herbal remedies?
I know of several other founders who have a tremendous knack for selling a vision to investors. The same strength works on employees as well, especially after you have raised a round.

Imagine a Steve Jobs-like reality distortion field. People are drawn in by that.
> While Clinkle’s brand had been tarnished by reports of its internal troubles, the companies were said to eye the variable reward system as a way to differentiate their mobile wallets and get users to demand merchants get on board.

Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung and Visa can't develop their own variable rewards systems?
I've never heard this in 7+ years at MIT. Is this from a different time period?
You could look here: http://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ or http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/san-francisco.shtml for a less fine-grained version.

One thing to remember is that while mean sea level rises may seem quite small, one also has to factor in tidal forces, which have both daily and lunar (near monthly) cycles. Tidal flooding looks set to be a major problem in the coming years; this report only discusses cities on the east coast of the US but I'm sure it will generate its share of similar problems here: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/impacts/effects-of-tida...
You're not a loser
This is how http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/worki...

Basically income inequality and a fading middle-class causes a downward spiral of the rich having too much money to care and taking ever greater risks for rewards.
Not quite as odd as http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gend...
Is hustling really that effective and I have been underestimated that all along?

There are different kinds of hustle. The good kind, which means working hard to reach a goal. The not so good kind, which means working hard and doing some not so nice things to reach a goal. Finally, the bad kind, which involves doing anything to anybody in order to get something. There is a difference between the not so good and the bad kind. In the not so good you are trying to reach a goal. In the way, you might get lost or not notice that you are doing some things wrong. After all, it is not simple to keep track of how your decisions impact the world over the long term. I'm not trying to excuse anyone here. Just stating that good people with good intentions sometimes do things that hurt others without even noticing. The bad kind of hustle is the one where you dont care who gets hurt or what gets broken. It does not take into account anybody but you. Always do your best to huslte the good way. Keep track of how your decisions affect others. Make a point about reaching goals in more than one way, i.e., not only financially, but morally and/or socially.

The good kind of hustle is the one you see baseball players do all year long. They train hard. They play hard. Above all, they go out to do their job as its supposed to be. All while giving fans something positive to look forward to. :)
I was a very dedicated supporter of VR from 2012 to 2014. Unfortunately I have come to the conclusion that VR will flounder, especially in the coveted "seated experience" category. When the DK2s began to land on the doorsteps of developers and fans, feedback began to pour into the forums. There are two kinds of people: there are people who do not get simulator sickness and those who do. After reading the feedback and stories regarding the DK2 I realized simulator sickness was a much larger problem that I thought, and that it wasn't going to disappear with better tracking, pixel density and refresh rate. Some people simply cannot tolerate VR, and I doubt that even the CV1 will be able to change that. But these are only the people at the extreme end of the spectrum, there are many others who straddle the boundary between being sick immediately and never feeling sick at all. The problem for people on the fence is that lateral movement in the game world is a major trigger for nausea. If your virtual body accelerates from standing to running, your real body expects to feel a sensation of acceleration. What this means is that if you move around too much you get sick. And for people who don't feel sick as soon as they put the head set on, movement is often the tipping point. This is a huge problem because there is no way to simulate that kind of sensation (within practical limits) and almost all of the VR experiences that people want to engage in involve moving around in some way.

This conclusion is based solely on rational observations, and it was arrived at in spite of huge optimism and engagement with VR and the VR community.
After four years of work and ridicule, early employees at the company
are said to have been actively encouraging a sale, even if it didn’t
come with a massive acquisition price. Sources say that many employees
didn’t have much to gain anyways. Duplan had offered only tiny shreds
of equity, convincing hires that Clinkle could be a billion-dollar
company and their share could turn into tons of money.

A lesson I've learned the hard way is to never let your sense of greed impair your judgment, especially around the relative certainty of success of a startup. A stupendously well-funded startup indicates only that the founders are good at fundraising, not that they're good at building a product or a company.
Joke's not funny when you explain it.
I like to bring this up whenever people start talking about not wanting GMO's.

If you are brushing your teeth with a toothpaste that contains peppermint oil you're ingesting a Atomically Modified Organism or HMO every day!

I prefer this article on the subject though.

http://pruned.blogspot.com/2011/04/atomic-gardens.html
I concur with this assessment.
Seems like they're using window.history.replaceState, which replaces the current history state. This is in contrast to window.history.pushState which adds to the stack.

I can't help but be curious if it's falling back to #hashurls for you (or something else). From my end, they've come up with a clever technique for persisting map state in a sharable way.
I will keep posted to your blog. Thanks for sharing the link. Always looking to learn about memory heavy operations. Currently am the lead dev on software that revolves around user generated content (images and audio). Its an ever ending road of (fun) challenges.
I was not good at selling my work in the 90s, and JS almost died as a statusbar-spamming popup-generating toy.

JS succeeded in spite of all my "salesmanship", because it was fitter in its basics and of course its place of priority.
I'd like to be able to have users upload directly to S3 (obviously less infrastructure and code to maintain) but without being able to provide immediate feedback on the upload I've found it to be preferable to have our own application servers in the upload path. This lets us immediately detect unsupported formats and act on the completion of the upload (whether successful or failure) without delay.
combining the end-user and city-paid prices, it is

see, eg http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/the-muni-death-spiral/C...

• Your Muni is slow. With an average vehicle speed of 8.1 mph, it is far and
away the slowest major urban transit system in the nation. While some of
this can be blamed on San Francisco's congestion and density, there are
myriad methods of speeding up service other agencies have adopted that Muni
hasn't. This isn't just an inconvenience for Muni's declining ridership;
it's a major financial drain on a beleaguered system. Slow vehicle speeds
force Muni to spend more money to provide less service. Muni's lethargy is
literally costing it millions.

• For these and other reasons, Muni spends more to operate its vehicles than
virtually any comparable transit agency. For every mile Muni runs a bus in
this city, it spends $19.21; comparable agencies nationwide pay between $10
and $13. For every mile Muni runs a light-rail vehicle, it throws down
$24.37; comparable rail services spend between $12 and $22.
I think a large part of it is due to some sort of quirk in how we read words.

In the word "Berenstain", the first two vowels are e's, and I think the brain naturally expects the next vowel to be an e as well. Also, it's a show/book series aimed at children, and children are much more likely to misread/misspell/misremember things. It'd be interesting to see the demographics of people who remember the "E" spelling vs. those who remember the "A" spelling.

It doesn't help that some people, like myself, only ever read the books, and never heard it pronounced on the TV show. And even then, the "ain" pronunciation is still plausible for the "E" spelling (like "vein").

This is all purely theoretical, and I'm no expert, but it seems plausible. I experienced a similar effect when I realised I'd been spelling and pronouncing "Seinfeld" as "Seinfield" for a long time. I was much more willing to accept that I'd been wrong about that though, since, once I started listening a bit closer, I realised there was no way you could pronounce "SeinFIELD" as "SeinFELD".
>everyone involved knows that inventing the first successful distributed pseudonymous e-cash is much, much harder than inventing the first successful distributed anonymous e-cash

Assuming "much, much harder" isn't hyperbole, could you elaborate on this please? I'm interested in the tech aspect. The existing anonymous solutions I've looked at are all more complex and difficult to grasp than the simplicity of bitcoin's global ledger.
Arduino shrinks Linux-ready Yún to “Mini” size
Amazing that you can raise that kind of seed money without a working prototype. They must have been claiming some serious IP assets.

Also, $25 million seems like a lot for convertible notes. Each one probably didn't exceed a few hundred thousand a piece. This is an excellent example of how once you convince a couple key investors to join, there are dozens waiting behind to follow.
The sea level rise comes from melting ice that already existed on top of land. In fact, since the water is more dense than the ice (hence takes up less volume), the net effect on the atmosphere will be a slight compactification, as the air's average altitude decreases.
Automatic sentry-chicken turrets.

http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/DT2/
Mars' stunning blue sunset
Ah, right. It's possible to release BSD-licensed works in such a way that they're not open source, yes. But if you do receive the source code, the license grants you all the freedoms you require to be able to satisfy the open source definition.
It's also our one year anniversary since we launched our Beta - we've gone through a lot of improvements and new features.
Wow, Gamasutra really has no understanding of Free and Open Source Software concepts. That is really not a good place to announce this kind of things. When you read "going completely open source" and see what it actually means, there's only one appropriate reaction: faceplam.
In an earlier article I think it said his dad was the VP of a large bank, possibly Bank of America. I am sure that makes it easier to put together a nice seed round.
You only remember the polite remarks that came across fake. Like the author says, real politeness goes unnoticed.
I figure income inequality is principally fueled by anemic growth, which may well be caused by low monetary growth and low interest rates.

The rich now are just "paper rich" (outside of bubbly-again real estate) and the physical portions of the economy remain stagnant.

Some kind person on HN actually clued me to this, and that was s serious penny drop. And of course I lost the post...

Could be wishful thinking on my part, but I read "Monetary History" years ago and it took root.
It would most likely need to be only software based.

I run a million dollar company now and because physical products are involved, I can't do everything myself and I now have another business partner. We have no employees. It's a pure lifestyle business.

I automated a ton of the business with software that I wrote (otherwise I would need to hire employees), but some things just can't be automated and require a person to do the work.
Probably mostly towards the end of getting a good story, two of the behaviors mentioned in this article as erroneous are somewhat intentional (though all the effects aren't). Light specifically mentions that he is making his deaths visible because he wants people to know that there is someone behind it, playing into the idea that he has gained godlike powers and will use them to change the world. He also goes out of his way to bait L to some degree in an attempt to eliminate him, believing L to be the only true obstacle in the way of achieving his end goal. With hindsight this is obviously the wrong move to make (he gave away a lot of information for no good reason), but you can see why someone faced with an invisible enemy might feel like drawing out their opponent is a good idea.

All that said attempting to anonymize his targets probably wouldn't have done him that much good anyway. As a Japanese person his sources of news and information would be at least on some level biased towards hearing about events which have some connection to Japan. Even if he was able to overcome that through the internet, people have a very noticeable habit of treating things physically closer to them as being more real than something on the other side of the world. Adding entropy within a limited information aperture only gets you so fat, I'm pretty sure he would have still had information leaking just through that lone.
But it's not a difference between metadata and data. It's a difference between structural representations. Either or both representations can be used to encode data or metadata, but that separation comes from the interpretation of the markup.
This one:
http://codecanyon.net/item/hide-my-wp-no-one-can-know-you-us...
There have been lots of rather funny articles on Valleywag about how truly awful a boss we're talking about.
Babio: an app helps parents track and remind everything for their babies
> Wonder how that works with the BSD-3-Clause?

You can put whatever you want in your license. You can say it's based on GPL and add an non-commercial layer on it. You don't have to restrict yourself to licenses already written.
This American Life has a funny story about a man's distinct memory of seeing Jackie Kennedy Onassis waving to his wife, but his wife insists he was not there when it happened. It's short and very amusing.

Animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxQ9Gx2-ceM

Transcript (the segment is about half way down the page): http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/226/t...
"After approaching Google about a potential deal, a team of Clinkle’s top engineers visited Google to go through rigorous testing to see if the startup was worth acquiring. Sources say Google declined to issue an offer." I have a mental issue of a line of engineers on tables undergoing colonoscopies.
"the consumer is very mobile and we found this out in the hand calculator market"

I've been spending a bit of time studying pre-Tramiel Atari recently: Racing the Beam, Business if Fun, Antic Podcast, etc.

The Antic podcast in particular has been conducting a series of absolutely amazing interviews with people who worked at Atari during the 8-bit microcomputer era.

It's kind of amazing where Cyan Engineering (and Atari) was in their development. What's kind of interesting to me is not that they predicted future (often they didn't), but the kind of alternate future if they had been able to bring product to market. Atari's notoriously bad management killed all of this off.

One of the most interesting interviews I remember from Antic was with Rich Pasco, who came to Atari from Xerox PARC and wanted to take Atari computers into a direction that ultimately became the modern desktop OS, he was systematically shot down by Atari management until he was put in charge of building an iterative memory management chip for a mild revision of one of their 8-bit machines.

Atari could have been Apple.
Dropbox acquires Umano
Various projections[1] estimates a sea level rise of up to two metres until the end of this century, so that would put La Paz at 13,994 ft. I don't think oxygen changes would be significant.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise#Projections
it seemed like some combination of payment replacement + wallet, presumably eventually linked directly to bank accounts / venmo / loyalty program ala belly/punchd/punchtab
> Clinkle’s first investors were Duplan’s parents. His father is a well-respected software entrepreneur. They told him they’d back his startup as long as he agreed to get a college degree, so Duplan kept his promise, obtaining his bachelor’s in computer science in three years.

http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of-clinkle-2014-...

It looks like his father is Neno Duplan, who founded Locus Technologies.
Can't speak with authority about Clinkle, but I strongly suspect that the founders have an "extreme alpha" personality type.

I have seen people with that personality type be able to just basically tell people what they want and get it. It's really a sight to behold.

"I need 50 million." "Okay boss.

I think there's two mechanisms at work. One is what you might call the "reptile brain," which reads such signals and simply interprets them as "this is my pack leader." The other mechanism is I think a cargo cultish belief in the power of those personality types to just always succeed no matter what. "Man, he seems like a winner." (This personality type seems to almost always be male, at least in my experience. Definitely not trying to be sexist. Might be being a bit reverse sexist though, since I do not find this trait redeeming.)

You would think that VCs would be inoculated against this kind of thing. You would think. But I personally know of two examples of people with off the charts alpha personalities who were sort of serial killers of wealth. Raise, burn, raise again. Their alpha personality trumped any notion of merit or track record.
> "source available" and "open source" are not the same thing

To be fair "open source" is a bastard wording in the first place. It was created by people who did not understand the Free Software movement and did not want to relate to RMS. The only true legal term is Free Software, Open Source is close to meaningless without a license attached to the term.