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[ { "score": 0, "text": "I suggest that your client's apparent anger is nothing more than a negotiation tactic - whether they are consciously aware of this or not.If you have agreed a list of requirements and a price, and you have this written down and signed off by both parties, then you should stick to your guns. Giving in to your client's demands will most likely lead to them asking for more and more things not in the original list. They will simply stomp all over you.When I worked freelance I included a clause that said something along the lines of: \"Any additional work required that is not included in this document will be quoted for on a new project basis.\"I made sure I charged at quite a higher rate than I had done for the original quote, due to the extra effort involved in ensuring that the new request(s) didn't break functionality elsewhere or result in me having to refactor significant portions of code." }, { "score": 1, "text": "It is called managing expectations, and it requires communication, communication, communication.You may have the contract on your side, but in the end, building a successful freelance practice depends heavily on repeat business, so it is up to you, the expert on the subject, to bring this issues up early enough and make sure they actually understand what you are talking about.(I feel your pain)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is a terribly common refrain. Perhaps all freelance developers in a given area should collaborate (read: collude) and come up with an agreed upon, open source scope of work document framework? That way, setting aside variables like price, feature requests, and time estimates, there can at least be a common structure that developers in a particular geography can rally around to at least attempt to minimize the impact of this type of problem.This is the precise reason why I am trying my best to come up with my next start up idea, client work is a drain..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "You could increase your price or you could agree to get what was originally planned done first and then look at the new extra stuff." }, { "score": 4, "text": "i would try to cut scope on other items or at least compare the value of this item to other items. To do this you need a deep understanding of the core value of the app and how each feature contributes to the value.Ultimately tell him your bid is based on hours and you are fine to switch things around." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Wouldn't the next cycle be a better indicator? I am guessing it took a while for folks to get co-founders, work on idea towards a prototype, etc. -- all of which took longer than the past few weeks." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Could be that YC is being treated like Grad School. Something you do when it's not a great time to get a job." }, { "score": 2, "text": "At this point, I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to require a demo along with the application? As I recall, virtually all of the summer interviewees had demos, which gave them a significant advantage over other applicants. If YC only continues to get more competitive, I assume there will be no practical downside to requiring a demo, as the few applicants without a demo that are competitive with the top applicants with a demo are presumably not worth wading through all of the other no-demo apps.Or there might be some other way of capturing them.(Disclosure: I'm a no-demo applicant.)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Will YC fund a reconrd number as well this year?:-)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Could the bump be due to the large number of recent graduates who (presumably) can't get jobs right now?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Some unsubstantiated ravings:* Everyone I've encountered online who has used both Perl 5 and Perl 6 says that they like Perl 6 (the language) better.* This first Rakudo Star release is not optimized at all, which is fine and not a surprise. Everyone by now should know that one of the golden rules is: \"make it work, make right, then make it fast.\" Rakudo is (fwict) mostly still on the first step there.* There are a large number of Perl 5 users who, years ago, got excited about Perl 6, and then eventually needed to get back to work with Perl 5 and subsequently went quiet on Perl 6. I think you're going to see more and more of these people getting re-interested in Perl 6.* I keep hearing \"Perl 5 isn't going anywhere\". I think that's correct, however, that comment usually implies \"it's not going to disappear tomorrow\". I think it has a 2nd meaning, and that is: it's not going to continue to move forward very much now that Perl 6 is here.* Perl 6 needs its own real forum. Perlmonks has a decidedly Perl 5 feel to it, and although #perl6 on irc is a friendly place, users need a regular online forum. Someone needs to just choose one, install it, pick a pretty theme, slap a Camelia logo on it, and get it running. Not a mailing list, not a google group, not irc, but an actual factual forum. It doesn't have to have karma or voting or a chatterbox right now, it just has to have a working forum.* Go Offer Kaye! Keep those \"Gentle Intro\" blog posts coming. http://blogs.perl.org/users/offerkaye/2010/07/p6-gentle-intr... . Many new Perl 6 users will want to write in baby-Perl6, and little easy tutorials like these (and Szabgab's screencasts) are a great help." }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's great to see Perl.com getting revamped.I wonder what the editorial direction will be, relative to the other official Perl sites (which have improved tremendously in the last year)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Just built it on Snow Leopard (it's not on MacPorts yet). Sadly, there are a couple of independent documentation projects underway but no \"official\" docs. Since I have a day or two to spare, can anyone point me to a learning resource (Python/ObjC guy here)?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "with parallel computing becoming all the rage, i wonder why the makers of Perl 6 did not focus on it?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Make yourself familiar with Perl6!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "OK. please people, stop judging every fucking word people write. if you are going to submit a post just for using a word gangsta, please stop. we might as well start use the tag line \"we judge you for every word you say\" as tag line for hn now. should i say factorialboy is fucking offensive as a nick. is that what handles are coming to." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'd go to the interview wearing this:http://www.clutchtees.com/I-m-Pretty-Gangster-Myself-Shirt.h..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "So the Mafia are hiring Rails devs, cool I guess? How about people just move on and care about something more important... like beer." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Its a meaningless phrase, with meaningless implications." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Just stop naming companies after 37signals already" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "hiring a coder is going to be very costly once programming and design are includedYou should start learning about coding now, not with the intention of building the app yourself, but with the intention of becoming more knowledgeable about what the developer's job entails. If you find a developer and say "build me an app" you might get estimates like 12 months and $50k. If you know that you just need a news feed, you can say, "can you take this jQuery mobile template and wrap it in Phonegap, and create a simple database to store a data feed from the following sources, you might be able to get it done in a few weeks for $300 [1].https://medium.com/@morphmail/the-first-300-a-startup-launch..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "As always: That depends. ;-)The most important question is: Can you make a sustainable business with you app and will you generate money from it?\nIf this is the case, you could either find an investor (which may be very, very hard at you current stage) or invest some of your savings on your own.Then, how are you used to work currently? Do you prefer working with others or on your own?Finding a co-founder is often a good choice for startups because you find like-minded people which (hopefully) share the motivation for the project with you. However, doing something together requires a lot of trust in each other and empathy. If you find yourself comfortable with another guy at your project, go for it, that's the best solution, in my opinion. If you disclose some more details about your idea, I am sure, HN could be a place to start searching.If you find yourself uncomfortable with that and you're not willing to learn to program, go for oDesk or something similar as some other comments already suggested." }, { "score": 2, "text": "In an ideal world, you could partner with a developer who would built it in exchange for equity. There are ways to make that happen...go to meetups, put an ad on craigslist, etc. Just remember that developers get these sorts of offers ALL THE TIME. Make sure you stand out.Personally, I'd be wary of spending my own money on paying a contractor to build something. It will be expensive and there is no guarantee of a good outcome.Good luck!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "See if there's a way for you to implement a simple version of the idea without writing any code, and just using a blog or email newsletter." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I understand you pretty well because I'm in the same situation now. So what I've done? I've created something like a prototype using Prottapp (design was made by my wife in Adobe Illustrator). Another tool for this is Balsamiq. After this I'm going to create a crowdfunding campaign for further developing as I don't have enough money for it. May be you can try to do the same" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Aside from just what a solid company Optimizely is, I think that if you read Dan's blogpost you get a hint at the ultimate direction they may be going.\"We firmly believe that 10 years from now people will look back at today and be shocked at how generic, impersonal, and one-to-many what we call the web is... We are striving to become the layer on top of the web that powers that experience.\"I'd guess that Optimizely may be becoming less about page optimisation and more about experience optimisation. Should my navigation and experience at Tesco be the same as that of a mother of four or a student? My recommendations may be personalised but what if the entire experience at the site including the advertising, design and calls-to action could be personalised and optimised for key customer segments.If you've ever used Test and Target you'll know that it can get pretty complicated but equally that that that sort of segmentation can equally have a huge impact. If Optimizely can pull off a way to easily curate site experiences for different visitor segments and perhaps intertwine those experiences with social then they could have some huge topline impact in those companies." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Apart from the investment (well done guys!), the revenue figures here are staggering. That is an awesome achievement for what was completely niche when they started a few years back.It used to be that people would refer to VWO when talking about A/B testing. In the last 18 months, every new article has talked about Optimizely. I guess this shows they are completely taking over the market.Looks like awesome execution. This is fantastic guys!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I heard through the grapevine that no one wanted to fund Optimizely the first time they pitched for a series A because VCs pigeonholed A/B testing as a crowded space with too small a market. So then, Optimizely went out and executed like crazy, is now making millions per year, and was able to basically define whatever terms they wanted for their fundraising round.This story, if true, would explain why it's such a massive round: it's payback for the annoyance of having to pitch a second time around.Anyway, that's all hearsay. The team deserves nothing but praise -- I hear love for their products regularly from my customers (my startup is next-gen content analytics provider for large sites)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Why do people call things `verb`ly? Does it make more sense to native English speakers than to me?Some even go through the trouble of getting a Libyan domain, which is simply foolish." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I've been impressed by how many odd cases their website editor handles. When I first started experimenting with Optimizely I got curious and tried loading maps.google.com and replacing one of the map tiles with a picture of my dog. I didn't expect it to work, but it did.So then I made a little torture test page with all the different ways I could think of to insert content into the page dynamically, and they handled them all perfectly.Kudos to the Optimizely team: This is some serious attention to detail." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Interesting, has carsabi partnered with Craigslist? I always thought Craigslist didn't like scrapers and did their best to discourage and prevent them.Has that changed?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I actually kind of of don't like techcrunch's coverage of this event. Give us one page with extended coverage or run the risk of being labeled YC's PR department.Don't get me wrong, I devoured all of it. But part of me likes the idea of the closed door pitch day without the superbowl style coverage. Is YC demo day going to turn into a media circus ala Mac Conventions and the like?Let the effects of these companies on the market speak for themselves. If they're effective, they'll be written about. Keep coverage like this away from Demo Day, lest this become a \"startup Hunger Games.\"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Really no flutter on this list? These are all great companies but I think flutter deserves a spot as a company with potential to really change how we interact with our devices. It seems like one of the few that is inventing a new space rather than improving on one that already exists (not that there's anything wrong with that)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I've been doing Carsabi-style regression analysis to buy cars for years. A little sad that now everyone has access to it, I won't be able to snap up the best deals for myself." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Exec is hands-down my favorite." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I really like this. I had done something similar in a project, but this execution really ignites my imagination. Really well done. I am curious if chosen.js would have to be modified to handle backbone style async, I know it's been strange in cases like that." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Pretty cool and thanks for releasing for free! That said, why would you put a multi-step wizard inside of a modal? Seems like bad UI to me. Modals should be used for quick data collections, small actions or context-aware warnings/insights. Using one for something that is complicated enough to need a wizard just seems like a bad idea." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Great idea. Wizards are definitely useful for a variety of projects, so it's nice to be able to get one off the ground without having to consider the UI too much more than one needs to." }, { "score": 3, "text": "When I zoom in to view the page (on Android, but I guess this will happen with zooming on many browsers), the page is not scrollable horizontally, meaning only the center of the modal is visible on the screen. This seems to happen with almost every modal implementation I've seen." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Unrelated to this component, but the Monitoring Location step shows a limitation in the Chosen select library; the dropdown is attached inside the parent container.I ran into the same issue and went with Select2. It's forked from Chosen and solves this positioning problem (and adds remote AJAX loading and other cool features).\nhttp://ivaynberg.github.com/select2/" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Where is the definitive place to assess ones pagerank?edit:http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.phpLooks like Mibbit is a 7 :)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "http://www.overcomingbias.com 7... we get a lot of random incoming Google traffic.Though it's worth noting that our traffic stats fell off a cliff over winter break, for some odd reason. Anyone else seen this? Or is it just that OB is commonly read as a procrastinating substitute for school/work?Holiday cliff: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s28overcomingbias&#3..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Woohoo http://ticketstumbler.com is now a 5!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Can someone see if the Friendly Atheist (that phrase just written out as two words) now returns Hemant Mehta's blog site as the first result? For a while he was way back on the second page of results, even though he should plainly be in first place. (I used the wiki tools to modify results for that search on Google, so I can't tell if there has been an improvement.)I see a mixture of better and worse results with my usual torture-test searches. It still looks like brief entries on blogs get page rank that is too high compared to more substantive articles, presumably because they get lots of inbound links." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Matt Cutts officially confirmed a pagerank increase yesterday on twitter - http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/1087531183" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> My idea was to use augmented reality to virtually show DIY interior design and move around furnitures in your room.It doesn't sounds like you understand the scale of the technical challenge here. You're talking about developing a product based on a technology that is in its infancy! Meeting the type of dev that can execute on this at a meetup is going to be...dicy, at best.Secondly, okay you have an idea. What else do you have? The only things you mention here are your \"idea\" so...can only assume not much else.Thirdly, and directly to your question: it doesn't sound like you have the chops to execute on this idea, nor do you know enough about technology to build a business in any capacity, frankly. Join another startup, learn more about how software is built and how it works, then find something that you know is marketable. I mean, for Christ sake, this should not be hard for you--it sounds as if you have basically 0 invested here...Tangentially, this is one of those posts that makes me wonder: What is it with non technologists that makes them want to do something in software? Why would you want to work in a space that you don't understand or care enough to learn to understand? These types of people view software as a means to an end, which isn't inherently bad but seems to not fit in the patterns of success I have seen in the software world." }, { "score": 1, "text": "1) I think a lot of people have had this idea. It's kind of \"obvious\" IMHO.2) There's a big technical challenge, but...3) There's an even bigger content challenge. Where is this furniture content going to come from? Are manufacturers going to create 3d models? How/why? This is an industry that still seems to love to function using showroom catalogs.4) What exactly is the business model?If you think you could sell it if it was built, then just pretend it's built - and why not try pitching it here? Not just describing the UX but describing the end to end function of the business, content pipeline, sales cycle, and how it's going to generate appreciable amounts of revenue." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Dude, I have 7+ years as a highly technical mobile developer and experience writing augmented reality apps that businesses are using in the app store. I would place your idea in the 'very hard' box ... Picking this as your first project to learn development is insane. Augmented reality is in its infancy and what you're trying to implement is darn near impossible. Don't throw in the towel altogether, but time for a different project? Yes." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Have you done anything else ? Any track record doing things ? Have you even done an app ? If you are not really a developer perhaps you are missing the fact that some of the technical bits may be tough to implement.I would go for two options \n1) Can you do something small on your own to test the market, or test the technology\n2) Jump in with another technical team's start-up, and do their biz dev, and get your start that way. Maybe after idea is done they may need a pivot idea.If you are having trouble starting, and you don't have cash (esp. from investors) then I'd personally drop it until I was in a position to either do it myself or had a team." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Good ideas may not necessarily be good ideas for you. It seems like you don't really have the resources to execute on this idea properly. From your short description, you come off as a random person with no interior design experience, limited money, limited contacts. It's a tough spot.If you're serious about continuing, then try building out the storyboard and wireframes. Then you have a concept you can pitch and sell to clients. If it's easy to get clients and purchase orders, then you know you have something. If you can't, then the product / market fit needs some work.FYI, there are a couple startups doing very similar things already." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Personally, I mostly dislike news personalization. For instance, I always log out of reddit unless I'm actually going to post something or add a comment, because of the personalization issue. My selection of techy-related aggregators like reddit and HN are enough personalization for me.The problem for me with personalization is that it's annoying to always see the same set of things. For instance, I'm mostly a Python programmer. But I've found that if, for instance, I'm subscribed to the Python reddit, I get too much Python-related content in my news feed. That's not really my focus -- I'm really a programmer first, and a Python programmer second. I'd rather see interesting programming things -- regardless of the language or focus -- than I would in seeing Python-related content.As anohter example, I've found the same is true with political stuff, which I've mostly tried to handle using RSS feeds. I can subscribe to political content that I'm interested in, but then I find that I just end up reading the same things and viewpoints over and over again. I'd rather read political content that's interesting and well written -- regardless of its political stance -- than I would read political content related to some sort of viewpoint or interest. That's the value of a \"logged out\" reddit/hacker news, or the front page of a newspaper; I'll see the most important things first, and then do my own seletion of whether or not I want to read the stuff contained therein.One interesting sidenote is that reddit basically dropped the personalization filter thing a long time ago. You may recall that they used to have a \"recommended\" articles tab, which was supposed to learn about what you were interested in based on your voting history, and then by clicking on the tab you'd see the top articles that it thought were relevant to you. AFAICT this feature no longer exists, and now they just have the sub-reddits system where you get a simple mix of content from subreddits you're subscribed to. I'm not sure exactly why they dropped that (it never worked very well), but that might be something to ponder a bit." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Some guesses:One reason might be that the existing range of news portals is good enough for most people to get approximately personalized content. People can find one or more news outlets, aggregators, or blogs that more or less reflect their interests, whether it's HN, Reddit/Subreddits, Slashdot, CNN, Fox News, DailyKos, Lambda the Ultimate, or whatever, and they just read those, supplemented with links passed on from their friends via Twitter/Facebook/etc. So your market is the people who can't find any combination of those that works for them, which maybe isn't a ton.A different reason might be that Google News does personalization (via the \"Recommended\" box), and so already captures a decent part of the market for news personalization, at least in the newspaper-articles sense.A third might be that it's hard to do well. To really catch on, people need to rarely get articles they don't care about, and often have this feeling of, \"yes! this is exactly the kind of news I want to read, and which I wouldn't have found otherwise\". That's probably hard to do! The Google News recommendations don't really blow me away, for example, even though I've been using it long enough that it should have decent data by now." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I liken this problem to browsing a library or bookstore vs searching its card catalog or asking for specific information. If I have a problem, I know what I want and it may not be something I've wanted before. If I want to relax and browse, I often want something different than I've wanted before.So I think it is a hard problem, as said here, serendipity is hard to program. However, I am absolutely sure we have not yet figured out the best way to browse. Search seems pretty good, but internet browsing can easily be too time consuming and aimless." }, { "score": 3, "text": "No shared context. You cannot say \"Did you read the article in the NY Times about XXXX\" and expect that your friend, who you know reads the NY Time (online of course) may have done so." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It's not possible to can serendipity. No algorithm can make a leap like a human mind, connecting two things that a machine would see as separate. This is why I've never used any personalization. I don't want to see only what a machine \"thinks\" I should see." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> I hear something from someone and immediately come up with ideas about it. It's what I do. It's what I'm excellent at.That's not a rare skill. Lots of people do it. Many of them are also good at execution.The latter limits your market somewhat. You're competing for the attention of good executers who don't have good ideas with all of the folks with lame ideas, not just folks like yourself. There are some very natural reactions to that situation that drive them to prefer working with executers who have ideas instead of going with \"an idea guy\".The other problem is that there \"we\" have more good ideas than we can ever hope to implement.Perhaps you need a story that isn't about you or your ideas in the abstract. Most people prefer stories about them." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Didn't Edison say that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? I think he's right.I get cool ideas for things to do every day, probably enough to fill a few man years. I've got to filter that stream down to a very small list that fits my available time and resources. Since I've got a long backlog of my own ideas, I'm not all that interested in develop other people's ideas -- unless they're writing me a good paycheck.People's time in evaluating your ideas isn't free; turning one of your ideas into a rough estimate of the resources needed to execute it, and of potential market prospects, can be hours or days of work.One of my big complaints about X-Forge and X-Hub open source sites is that they encourage people to put out huge volumes of software out there without documentation, marketing materials, or even an elevator pitch that explains what the software does. I suppose some of that software could save me a lot of development time, but I know I could spend hours a day downloading, compiling and testing software that I'll never use... So I don't, not unless the people put some effort into marketing the project and explaining why I should care.The 'math deficiency' particularly concerns me, largely because of what I experienced when I used to teach Physics. One of the most common things I'd hear from the C-and-under students was \"I understand the concepts, but I can't solve the problems.\" Well, helping the student was a process much like debugging an expert system: and inevitably, along the way, I'd discover what the student had in his 'knowledge base' and find that he didn't understand the concepts at all.I've got a superpower which may be similar to what you've got: I can research a topic for a shockingly little amount of time (sometimes even 20 minutes) and impersonate an expert.I've given talks at conferences on all sorts of subjects -- if I had 3 days to prepare, I could be a stand-in for any speaker at TED and pretty much get away with it. That's despite being (historically) two standard deviations below the mean on appearance and many other skills related to presentation. I'm just really good at attacking a body of literature, building a knowledge base, and telling stories about it.That's a skill that kept me out of academia, despite my PhD, because it calls the whole system into question: why do you need to give people tenure and put them through so much training when this guy can come in and 'pass' for one of them.What am I doing about it? First, I'm targeting those areas where my interpersonal skills are weak. Second, I'm working on breaking down my narrative reprocessing skills into something a computer can do, to create something like an 'amateur system.'Now excuse me while I go execute my idea..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Schizophrenics are also ideas guys. An idea is just a fragment of thought. It's one step above the sparkles you see when you rub your eyes. Having lots of ideas isn't a skill as far as I'm concerned, just and indication that you have an inflated sense of your own importance and ability.Knowledge and experience are humbling, they teach you just how hard people had to work to get us to where we are now. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if you did have a sound base of mathematical knowledge, you wouldn't have many ideas because you'd realise just how hard it is to create a novel proof.Ideas aren't worth squat because the overwhelming majority of them are complete bunk. Ideas are like a big pile of dirt - the value comes from the digging and sifting and smashing and polishing that gets you the gems. Action is what creates value." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'm a \"doer\", but I'm always looking for good ideas. I'll take your ideas, and you can have 1% of the profits afterward if I implement them.Find enough guys like me, and you could actually make a comfortable living.Not sure how you'd actually implement something like that, though. No way to prove an idea was originally yours (because, realistically, somebody has probably thought of most of it before).I do like the idea of an ideas website, though. Maybe with a mechanism so other people can post theirs? Maybe with a donation mechanism... Entrepreneurs have lots of extra ideas, and the ones they don't have time to implement they post on the ideas site. If I make a million dollars off an idea there, I donate a couple grand to the original author." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Seems like you are answering your own question. You know ideas are only the seed. Execution, iteration, and persistence is what makes things tangible.So make your idea engine tangible. The website thing sounds like a fine idea to try - mostly because you will foster connections with other people.\"I will be shortly putting up a website where I will put all my ideas out there (I'm thinking under a creative commons license) for anyone to take and use and execute.\"Do it! And then share the link with us here on HN. Looking forward to it." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Warning: Does not actually mention how to tell when a startup has failed." }, { "score": 1, "text": "What are the implications of Techstars under-reporting the deaths of their startups? Not to knock 100K in notes (and the other benefits of being in a reputable accelerator) but these statistics vastly overstate the positive impact of Techstars.As for Crunchbase, they could do a reasonably good job of catching the death of startups by running a check every six months for basic social media updates. While it might be premature to call a quiet startup dead, they could include a line to call a startup \"inactive.\"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "IMO it's pretty easy to keep most startups going in a low-burn mode. The hard part is scaling back from high-burn to low burn, but assuming you can do that, you can probably find a way to keep the domain registered, minimal service operating, etc. -- assuming whatever you're selling is at marginal profit instead of a loss.Worst case, do consulting or get a day job.It gets complicated when you've taken outside investment, but I suspect any rational investor will convert to equity rather than liquidate. The real cost is opportunity cost for the people who remain involved (usually founders, although sometimes employees switch from salary with small equity to a much larger equity stake)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is what I like about old-fashioned business. You can tell when the business is a failure: you are no longer able to meet your obligations to creditors.Usually this happens when you run out of cash. It's one thing to have a solvent balance sheet where assets handily outweigh liabilities. It's another entirely when bills fall due and you have no cash to pay them.The classic example, to me, was SiCortex. They had a fantastic future A/R on sales pipeline in a growing segment. But they were also slowly moving from cashflow negative to cashflow positive, which meant they needed regular injections of cash to execute their plan. The GFC struck and cash stopped being invested; and that was that.This particular example sticks in my mind for two reasons. The first was because it was such a vivid illustration of income vs cashflow. The second because of the amount of beard-stroking BS about how they were a victim of x86 blah blah blah. Seriously, no. They ran out of cash.And generally that's what happens. The difference now is that lots of startups have short cashflow cycles. If they bill, they bill monthly. If they're on advertising, it's probably paid monthly. They frequently use Pay-As-You-Go services to run their business, and most PAYG providers bill ... monthly.So when the cash runs down to zero, there's really only a month of obligations to meet. In fact you can bail out a month earlier and never have to go through the very unpleasant and often very public insolvency dance.Meanwhile, most conventional businesses have lots of long term A/R and long term A/P. Cashflow is locked in months in advance, so if and when a crunch arrives there's very little to be done about it except to go to a bank or investor with a cap in hand. Sometimes they say \"no\", or worse, \"we've already given you $X, and now we want it back no matter what\". Boom, you're insolvent and people can see it because your creditors took you to court." }, { "score": 4, "text": "fts;dr - font too small; didn't read.Seems to be becoming a trend in technical blogs." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Due to the massive amounts of spamming going on right now I think there should be some sort of chat room system on there which allows you to create a room and send the link.Or you could even follow a similar idea to Omegle by pairing two people together but make it so it pairs two people who speak in different languages?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "{{{message}}} in handlebars means that if someone one gets around your server-side sanitization your client side is wide open to XSS ...also, rate limit the users, this is thing is managing to crash chrome!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I built a proof of concept for something like this for someone quite a while ago... what he had that you desperately need is channels. This is entirely useless with any amount of people (particularly when spammers can't be controlled, which is just how the net is). Excellent idea, but it needs some concept of segmentation to be useful." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I got through with this ';alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))//\\';alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))//\";alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))//\\\";alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))//--></SCRIPT>\">'><SCRIPT>alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))</SCRIPT>" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I choose the \"German\" flag. Does it mean that I should type in German or others' messages are translated to German? It's not at all clear from the wording: \"Choose your username and language to start chatting with the world\"...\nWhat if I want to type in English but read others' messages in German?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The plot in the article is an example of a "reliability diagram" frequently used in weather forecast verification. See, e.g., http://www.bom.gov.au/wmo/lrfvs/reliability.shtml. \nReliability is considered separate from accuracy in meteorology -- the former evaluates success conditioned on what was forecasted, while the latter is an unconditional evaluation of success or failure.Other facets of forecast "goodness" exist and are often considered in meteorology. A seminal paper on the subject was penned by Allan Murphy, who identified three types of "goodness" (consistency, quality, and value) and ten subsets of quality (including reliability and accuracy). See http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/seagrant/ClimateChangeWhiteboard/R.... [PDF warning]A popular companion to the reliability diagram is the Relative Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve. Here different forecast probability thresholds are tested to calculate likelihood of success if the event occurred, and likelihood of error if the event did not occur. This evaluates what Murphy calls discrimination (forecast quality conditioned what was observed) which complements reliability. See, e.g., http://www.bom.gov.au/wmo/lrfvs/roc.shtml.Curiously, accuracy tends to take a back seat in forecast verification to other aspects of quality, particularly in rare event situations. This trend first began in the mid 1880's with the "Finley Affair", a series of published articles debating how to evaluate tornado forecasts issued by the US Army Signal Corps. Murphy published a fascinating literature review on the subject and showed that many of the skill scores and debates born during the Finley Affair are still active today. See http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/brooks/public_html/feda/paper.... [PDF warning]" }, { "score": 1, "text": "This curve is not enough to evaluate the value of a weather forecasting service: if it rains, say 30% of the days in a specific area, you could forecast a 30% chance of rain every day and have good "accuracy". And yet that would be of no practical value.I think a better metric would probably be something from information theory like mutual information, but I'm not sure which one exactly." }, { "score": 2, "text": "If you're interested in the science (and some of the problems we have in the US) read UW Professor Cliff Mass' blog - http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "It would be interesting to repeat the comparison for many specific locations, then plot the measured variance geographically as a "heat map" or landscape of error [1]. Are there patterns visible that could be attributed to local geography, population density, or other factors?[1] It could be done, for weather.gov [2], using only data available from the web site [3].[2] I don't really care about the other forecast sources.[3] To trust rainfall observations obtained from weather.gov in order to compare them to predictions made by weather.gov seems vaguely wrong but there is no other comparable source of observations. They are physical measurements, after all.[4] Some geographic areas probably have a coarser net of observation points. In some places, e.g., San Diego, the weather is inherently easier to predict. Some local forecast offices may be more skilled than others." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I have enjoyed http://darkskyapp.com/In my totally un-scientific opinion weather.com has slowly gotten worse over the past several years. I think it's become a lot hard to monetize weather and the weather service has really stepped up the game on providing public outlets that are digestible by the general public.My guess is in the early days what weather.com and the weather channel where really doing is translating the difficult to understand NWS messages and helping the general public quickly understand: "Do you I need a rain coat today?". That said over time as NWS has stepped up their public interfaces that value add is sliding backwards and getting harder to maintain.That's my $0.02CPM worth.. :-)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "If he a.) plays at stakes where he can lose over a million in a couple days and b.) bases his decision to play someone (especially another pro) on emotion and recent short term variance, it's pretty much guaranteed he will end up broke eventually unless he actually has many many millions (like possibly in the hundreds if we're talking about enough to cover the swings of heads up PLO games at those stakes with Gus Hansen).It's hard to fathom how much variance really exists in poker. Lucky and unlucky streaks can and do last months to years for people who play thousands of hands per day. Statistics dictates that there will always be a number of outliers who, due to a combination of moving up aggressively and running hot at the right times, become millionaires in a short time and draw a lot of attention, but unless they're the real deal and sufficiently bankrolled to cover the swings, it will all go back, often as quickly as it came. Most of the famous players on TV actually fit this mold, go broke constantly, and only make consistent money due to endorsements. Among real high stakes pros (mostly math-oriented, highly self-disciplined nerds you've never heard of), a large portion of the TV stars are considered fish. I've always found it interesting how distorted the general perceptions are versus reality." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I played quite a bit of poker and blackjack to help pay for college; Some of my \"not-really-friends\" friends dropped out to play professionally.Playing 6+ simultaneous tables isn't as romantic (it's a boring way to play) or hard (there's software to help you keep track) as this article makes it out to be, when you're essentially asking the same question every hand, doing the same calculation. It gets to be mind numbing. There are few situations in poker that are truly interesting when you've played tens of thousands of hands.I'd liken the experience less to Command and Conquer and more to mining for gold in World of Warcraft.And that was the difference between me and the others in my circle that still play full time: Mental stamina.Seeing the chips as points and not money is really a defense mechanism to keep you playing rationally. Where many good, but not great, online players lose it is in the grind of constantly calculating pot odds." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I would badly like to sit this guy down with 'young poker hotshot' expected lifetime net worth graph, median lifetime net worth graph and 'likelihood you will go broke' worksheet, and convince him to dump $3mm into T-bills.Oh well. I wouldn't have listened either when I was his age." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I recently started blogging at http://www.rationalpoker.com, there's an intro post at http://lesswrong.com/lw/4yk/verifying_rationality_via_ration..., if you're curious." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Its very common for high level rts players to also play poker. During the time of starcraft broodwar before starcraft 2 launched there was not much north american/european interest in the gaming scene. Professional players use to play poker by day to make money and starcraft by night to practice for their next tournament." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This constant 'Microsoft is doomed' meme is really beginning to annoy me. Yes, their heyday has past when everyone had a PC running Windows in their homes, but that does not mean the end of Microsoft."Tablets and smartphones are the future of computing" to which I say bollocks. If I'm working a 9-5 job and need a computer, I don't want to be two finger tapping on a virtual keyboard. Can you imagine the epidemic of RSI that would ensue. I want a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor, and I don't give a shit what they,re plugged into, but I highly doubt it's going to be a £400 iPad with no access to the file system. I'd rather use a Raspberry Pi if I have real work to do.Yes, the vast majority of users just want access to Facebook and Twitter, but in business you want a Windows, OSX or Linux PC.If developers were to actually start developing all iPad apps on iPads I might consider the battle lost, but as far as I'm concerned the PC maybe in decline, but that's to be expected after a boom. It will level out eventually." }, { "score": 1, "text": ">Businesses are not going to put iPads on peoples’ desks any time soon, nor are they going to ditch Microsoft Office in favor of Google Docs.That's interesting, because at MPoW we've been using Google Docs for several years and at most meetings I attend, you can look around the table and not see a single laptop; everyone is using a tablet or smartphone.It's amazing how fast it's changed too. When I started here ~4.5 years ago, Office documents shared on network drives or emailed back and forth was the norm and if you had a meeting of n people, you can be sure there would be n laptops around the table." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Or to give it a slightly less linkbaity headline:"Microsoft's current strategy and product range has a limited lifespan, but it's so cash rich it could just buy it's way into growth markets"So, really, it's not doomed or dissimilar to most other mature large companies." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Microsoft is far from doomed, but it is interesting to see Digital compared to them. I have said since the iPhone came out that if Microsoft fails to compete within the mobile devices market that it would become another IBM or it would be merged into some other company. So far all signs point to failure on usurping the market from Apple or Google.I think that we are still a ways off from this situation, but I cannot see Microsoft as its own entity in two decades." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Doomed is obviously used for dramatic effect. Needs to, and is struggling to adapt, yes.Nevertheless, as the article hints, work (and even consumption and creation at home) is routinely done at desks. Whether we continue to call that "desktop computing" or "using a PC" or any other untrendy phrase is a matter of language. I believe tablets are sexy because of what they do, not necessarily that people like having to hold them or like small screens. They are great on the go, but when I am at home or at the office, I want large form-factor. I would prefer immersion.I feel Microsoft needs to steadfastly improve their principal area of strength: work and play at desks [1]. I also think that with the nascent swing back to users recognizing the value of control, Microsoft should take the (daring?) position of being the only tech titan to encourage a decentralized cloud.Reviewing my blog rant on Microsoft again, though, it's the nearly-last point about MSDN pricing that just has me shaking my head in disgust. The pricing is so unbelievably out of whack with today's development model.[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I know I'll get downvoted by the Indian crowd here on HN, but I feel this needs to be said:This illustrates the characteristically Indian trait of mindless hero worship. Our media has a tendency to blow such things out of proportion, even if it's immediately apparent to anyone even slightly technically competent that they are definitely not original, or as revolutionary as they are claimed to be.More examples:Recent coverage (in one of India's largest newspapers): http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/guwahati/Guwahati-te...Thoroughly debunked: http://technofaq.org/posts/2014/02/unmasked-afreed-islam-rev...orhttp://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/securi... ("Hacks")" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Dubious claims as ususal - "Rajesh is now working on a better prototype of the model, wherein mobile or any electric device can be charged without any wires. If the person keeps the mobile in his pockets and just walks, then the battery would be charged wirelessly."" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Ugh, for god's sake please stop submitting stuff like this." }, { "score": 3, "text": "In college, one of my physics professors put it this way: Even though someone else may have discovered a law or theorem already, doesn't make independently reasoning it out and getting to the same conclusion any less of an accomplishment.Good on him for attacking a problem, and for having the wherewithal to attempt more advanced prototypes." }, { "score": 4, "text": ">As per the preliminary reports, this shoe cum charger can light a bulb by placing a battery in the shoes.What?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Let's forget the rants against airlines for a while: The big difference in touch screen technology is about resistive (old-fashioned, \"soft\" screens) vs capacitive screens (cf. iphone etc.). The last time most airlines installed their systems was when resistive technology was still state of the art, so I assume that most of what you get in the recent airliners still reflects that date.Have we forgotten that decent touchscreens are still pretty new? Ferchrissakes, the first iphone came out in 2007…" }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's because everything in an airliner is heavily regulated by the FAA. Everything has to be rigorously tested and certified.This just increases the development cycle length. Compare to car nav systems, which also lag behind. Then add the length of the certification process, (even more extreme) conservatism in the industry, installation time (airliner must be taken out of service for a week or two, which is a lot of forgone revenue), etc.Also, there are power consumption and weight considerations. It may not seem like much for one seat, but multiply by 300 seats in an airliner and it starts be significant.Add that all up, and it's no longer surprising that the systems are outdated." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The quick answer, bureaucracy. It has been several years since I have worked in the field. From what I recall, companies developing airborne software have to be indoctrinated, trained, and certified. Then every line of airborne software whether it is for engine controls or in flight entertainment has to be certified by the FAA. These are not quick, easy, or cheap to obtain.http://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/air_so..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Well, there are a lot more regulatory issues they have to deal with in regards to EMi and such. The certification process of those kinds of devices is long and expensive. Plus, airlines are not exactly cash cows, so its not like they can afford to put a $2k entertainment system in each seat.So, what you're looking at is the 5 year old state-of-the-art-on-a-budget technology. With that in mind, the rest of it becomes more clear." }, { "score": 4, "text": "On a Delta flight, my screen was rebooting itself every couple minutes. By the time we landed I had nearly memorized the boot messages from Linux kernel 2.036, which dates back to 1998 or so." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "If it didn't, the NSA would not be so interested in collecting it. Paranoid people who believe they might be being listened in on are unlikely to reveal much directly in the conversation itself anyway, so in those cases the metadata is more important. Also, the metadata can reveal anomalous behavior, which they look for mainly because it's easy to find, but also because it can reveal important information assuming the targets are correctly selected.Anyway, the only reason they aren't collecting the calls themselves is because the storage required is not yet available, so their begging off about "but we aren't storing the content" is disingenuous. They can, at any moment, capture any call going over the long-distance network (which would include pretty much all cell phone calls) so the only thing they're unable to do is to retroactively listen in on calls. If you are flagged for whatever reason (you know someone who knows someone who knows someone they suspect of sending money to a bad charity), you may well be being monitored." }, { "score": 1, "text": "While this is certainly true, sentences like this one show that The Guardian doesn't understand the nature of the data/metadata distinction: "The researchers cite statements like that of President Obama, that the NSA was 'not looking at content,' and ask whether the legal distinction between metadata and content is matched by harm reduction in the real world."The distinction between data and metadata in U.S. law isn't about "metadata" being supposedly less harmful than "data." That has absolutely nothing to do with it. The distinction is based on the 4th Amendment's requirement that people have an expectation of privacy in the information in order for it to be protected. The idea is that if you have to expose certain information to a company in order for the communication to work at all, then you can't expect that information to be private. If you expose it, if you have to expose it, it's not private.The legal distinction reflects the underlying technical distinctions. You can encrypt a phone conversation, but you can't encrypt the signaling information and still have the system work. You can encrypt the contents of a packet, but you can't do the same for the IP headers. You have to expose this "metadata" in order for modern telephone and IP networks to work as they are currently designed, and it's this exposure that creates the distinction for 4th amendment purposes." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Researchers ... successfully identified a cannabis cultivator, multiple sclerosis sufferer and a visitor to an abortion clinic using nothing more than the timing and destination of their phone calls.Unfortunately, the political actors who are the biggest cheerleaders/defenders of total surveillance are also the ones most likely to be in favor of unconstitutionally severe pursuit and punishment of drug growers, in favor of ejecting sick people from the health care system (preferring that they instead die quickly and cheaply), and in favor of publicly shaming abortion patients.In other words, a result like this is particularly likely to re-enforce existing biases more than anything else. Plenty of Americans will respond to such news by suggesting such data should be used more, not collected less." }, { "score": 3, "text": "As someone said recently "we know you have called a phone sex line 10 times in the last month, and a divorce lawyer last week, but we don't know what you talked about."" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm not doubting that it's entirely possible to identify a lot about people from their phone metadata. I don't think it takes a huge amount of creative thinking to establish that someone who calls a hydroponics dealer and a headshop is fairly likely to have some connection to drugs, and that tracking their phone calls would allow you to spot that.But I'm not sure that this article really adds a lot to the discussion with statements like "Owing to the sensitivity of these matters, Mayer explains that the researchers elected not to contact the three participants for confirmation that their inferences were correct"If they could have correctly identified a drug dealer from a pattern of seemingly innocuous phone calls (and actually validated that they are correct) then this could have been at least vaguely interesting. As it is, the story is "if you've phoned somewhere that deals with MS relapses, we can make a guess that you could have MS". Well thanks, Sherlock." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I thought Referly was pretty cool and decided to sign up and created my own link for the new Apple MBP.But when I click on the claim rewards link: http://refer.ly/claimIt's telling me a different story (compared to on their main page - Earn rewards like whoa.)about getting the rewards.\"During the beta period we are not yet able to redeem your rewards, but we are saving them for you.We'll let you know as soon as you can claim them.\"I really felt like being Bait and Switch'ed.... Totally not whoa at this point." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I haven't read the referenced, Techcrunch article, but I can't get from A to B on the competitor claim. From dmor's article, she wants me to try her product, but when I did, I would have no idea they are competing in the same space as bitly. I was presented a registration wall to what sounds like a text-based Pinterest; not at all a link-shortening nor analytics product." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Danielle is the marketing and PR genius behind Twilio. So yes, this blog post was sort of clever PR campaign designed to make the HN home page." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I thought there was something in Facebook's terms that you can't sell Like's etc. in exchange for any form of currency? Not to sure though." }, { "score": 4, "text": "this is what i want to do: shorten links, share products and earn rewards. the current ui is beginning to feel like a shopping site. kinda like amazon divorced ebay, married bitly and is having an affair with pinterest." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Good post, but the tone of Joyent's posts so often irk me. Too much poking at Amazon while holding themselves on a pedestal.They're a competitor to Amazon, of course they think they're superior... just so smug.It seems like a bad practice, especially when you end up with pie in your face later. Not too long ago, they had an entire food fight thrown in their direction, so its not exactly like they're immune from issues." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is one of the key insights to take away from this whole AWS mess: When things start to go wrong, your automatic recovery code will increase the load on your system, and commonly lead you into a spiral of death.I'm delighted to now have a name for this: \"Congestive collapse.\"The first time I saw congestive collapse in a real-world system, it was an ugly surprise. And this is presumably one reason why Netflix runs at 30-60% capacity across 3 AZs: They want to be able to lose a zone without overloading key systems." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Joyent knows all about shared network drive failures.http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/joyent-suffers-major-downti...Which of course they solved by getting out of the business completely." }, { "score": 3, "text": "\"When the cloud goes down it becomes a fog.\" Funny quote from the linked Magnolia article." }, { "score": 4, "text": "No one sane runs code to automatically take out and replace EBS volumes from raids." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There's much more info about Snap, Yesod and Happstack (the three competing systems in Haskell-land) on the Haskell Reddit,* http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/search?q=yesod&sort=top&...* http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/search?q=snap&restrict_s...* http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/search?q=happstack&restr..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'm interested in web frameworks, and considering learning haskell, so I'm happy to hear about yesod. But I really have to question the value of linking to a testimonials page with two testimonials, both from the same company.Here is useful information: http://www.yesodweb.com/book" }, { "score": 2, "text": "For those interested in a lighter weight personal or small scale static site with Haskell, I recommend Hakyll:http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "What does Massive Tactical do? Information on the Internet seems sparse." }, { "score": 4, "text": "A Haskell post not submitted by dons?Pinch me." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "\"Larry Page used to use an Android. But that is now at an end with\" works just great. :)http://translate.google.com.mx/?hl=en#auto/en/Larry%20Page%2..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Looks like the 'filled with so much drama' quote is from here:http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/12/01/surprised.that.reader...Strange, it appears to be text from a random news article. Some kind of bad training data? Or memory corruption?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Interesting that you can reproduce the bug by asking it to speak \"filled with\":http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/filled%20withOr something like this (closer to the original bug):http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/patterned%20with" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Does Google still allow translation suggestions & help? Sounds like a cleverly executed prank that resulted in the database getting bad information added.I'd cite a page number but I don't have the novel on me. I seem to recall I'm Feeling Lucky mentioning that in Google's infancy, the user translation project left curse words on an alternate language version of Google's homepage for a short time, which led to the abandonment of user translated material for important Google properties.Edit: Mystery solved on the Reddit comments, it comes from http://fr.zicos.com/mac/i26331784-Hearst-magazine-CEO-offers.... More info seems to reveal that \"so much drama he now praises the iPad\" will be spoken if \"filled with\" is used on Translate." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I just tested this on my Nexus 4 and it reproduced. I guess I now praise the iPad." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "That library is in many ways deprecated and broken: At first, it uses only old-style classes because it doesn't inherits object explicitly. Furthermore, it uses print in a method; it would be more "Pythonic" to return a str object, which was formatted using str.format.I think the future is Python 3, and new implementations in Python 2 syntax are simply unneccessary. I would suggest the usage of Python-3-style syntax, which is also valid in Python 2.7 (which isn't hard)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I tried building a REST API once for a challenge if anyone is interested: https://github.com/mapleoin/newhackers" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Nice effort. Just a few remarks:- You should certainly use Requests http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/- The Story class seems somewhat redundant. \nYou could possibly use collections.namedtuple as a container for properties or simply a dictionary. The print_story method could just be the __str__ special method.- JSON output would be useful." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Does it use https://www.hnsearch.com/api ?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I think screen scrapping is not allowed by HN. Few tries with these APIs might get your IP banned!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "While this appears to be an alarming "discovery," I'm not sure what the news is considering Skarke and Ruppel were both included on a paper submitted in 2012 (and available in Spring of 2013) titled: "Evidence for extensive methane venting on the southeastern U.S. Atlantic margin[1]." Perhaps it's simply that the depth and length of time has now been revealed? I couldn't find the paper that the articles are mentioning.In any case, there's another paper (available for free currently) that goes into more detail on what sort of implications the methane can have on different sorts of oceanic conditions: "Seafloor oxygen consumption fuelled by methane from cold seeps[2]."[1] - http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/41/7/807[2] - http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n9/full/ngeo1926.html" }, { "score": 1, "text": "BBC version of the story: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28898223Does the actual paper exist yet? Both the NYT and BBC reference an article posted online on Sunday (i.e. today) by Nature Geoscience. That would presumably show up here: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/research/. But at the moment nothing there is newer than last Sunday. And the BBC's DOI link is a 404. Are they forward-referencing an article that hasn't been posted yet, but which they got advance access to?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "When the same starts happening in the Arctic, then we have a really bad spiralling problem on our hands.Bye bye ice. Hello higher sea levels." }, { "score": 3, "text": "```The methane is emanating from at least 570 locations, called seeps, from near Cape Hatteras, N.C., to the Georges Bank southeast of Nantucket, Mass. While the seepage is widespread, the researchers estimated that the amount of gas was tiny compared with the amount released from all sources each year.\n```Somewhat sensationalist given the source. I really hope articles like these do not distract from the larger climate change problem." }, { "score": 4, "text": "They could try blocking the leak somehow although it might be pretty difficult. But I think this could lead to earthquakes if they figure out a way to cap it." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Coincidences... I thought \"How come Warren Toomey (one of the guys of the Unix Heritage Society [1]), has never posted this?\"Turns out, this Github-repo is just a mirror/copy of his work, but with attribution [2]. Still worth reading through there, tuhs also stores some extremely old UNIX versions.[1] www.tuhs.org[2] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/primevalC.htmlEdit: Warren has written a paper on restoring ancient UNIX versions and C-compilers, you might like it [3][3] http://epublications.bond.edu.au/infotech_pubs/146/Edit2: Now that I've thought a little bit about it, I'm not happy that the sources are on GitHub in this form. This is Warren's work - he did a lot of work in getting these tapes to work again, and \"mortdeus\" just copied the work and didn't even change the folder-names - \"last1120c\" is the first tape, \"prestruct\" the second. And you still need Warren's Apout emulator to get these files to work." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Reading Dennis Ritchie's code is as close to reading a religious text as I'll ever come. The straightforward elegance of it is so inspiring!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "The declaration of printf is both scary and pretty cool.What happens when you have more then 9 substitutions specified in the string? :Dedit: decided the code was a bit long to have pasted into my post. Can find it at the bottom of http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/last1120c/c03.c" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'm ashamed for having to google his name but for others like me here's a glimpse:\"Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941; found dead October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist who \"helped shape the digital era.\" He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie" }, { "score": 4, "text": "He already used the right brace style (hanging braces, cuddled else) and the right indentation (tabs, not spaces)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Objective-C is less popular than Haskell? Java is less popular than Python?Doesn't pass the smell test: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2Cpython%2Cobjective-..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Does a really good job of showcasing what codeeval's target focus should be for their business, but this doesn't reflect commonly held beliefs as to what languages are seeing the highest volume of activity." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I really don't see why C# usage would have jumped by 100% last year. And I don't believe the 900% jump in the previous year.This probably shows they landed a big Microsoft shop as a customer in 2012 and a smaller one in 2013." }, { "score": 3, "text": "That's not really a good estimate... Just submissions in codeeval" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Here is a different set of measures that puts JavaScript first, followed by Java http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2014/01/22/language-rankings-1-14..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The Wikipedia Paradox: what's the most notable subject that's not notable enough for Wikipedia?Now, one could reasonably argue that merely being the answer to this question would not, by itself, be enough to make a subject notable. However, the act of arguing this point, if seriously engaged in by enough people, would, in fact, make the question (and the answer) notable, and thus the answer to the question would deserve inclusion in Wikipedia.Inductively, you can use this argument to show every subject is notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia. Take that, deletionists!(Inspired by a lunchtime conversation with a group of physicists and philosophers.)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Persuasive enough, mathematically. Practically, though, people wouldn't allow the definition to recurse like that.Consider a hypothetical person filling in descriptions for all the interesting numbers. \"Smallest prime\", \"Smallest odd prime\", \"Smallest square\" . . . He would get to the smallest uninteresting number and write, \"Smallest uninteresting number.\" Then when he got to the next one, he'd start to write that, realize he already had one, and ponder for a bit.The divergence occurs here.If he was a mathematician, he would shout, \"Aha! There are no uninteresting numbers!\" If particularly diligent, he would go on to write \"Was the smallest uninteresting number until that made it interesting\" on all the other numbers.If he was a normal person, he'd criticize the definition. Yes, he does think the smallest uninteresting number is interesting, but he doesn't think the next one is. So the technical definition shouldn't be recursive, and that keeps the initial annotation from being so self-defeating. He'd then go back and write, \"Smallest number which would otherwise be uninteresting\" on the first one, and leave the rest alone.I side with the normal person. A definition which allows so many numbers with the same description to be considered \"interesting\" doesn't actually correspond with what I think interesting means. I think it is reasonable to require that the definition of interesting be stable regardless of what order you evaluate the integers in, so a definition that allows for this sort of nonsense should be modified until it doesn't." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Does the same apply to HN submissions? ;)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "The theory also applies to trees, ropes and pipes." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This and the hanging prisoner paradox in the afternoon.Must be epistemology night on HN :)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Just a word.. not that it is really relevant but I wanted to share this with fellow hackers. To encourage the Clojure community/language, I've pre-ordered the book Joy of Clojure on amazon. On the book's website, it is clearly stated that you also get a free pdf of the book before the release date. So, I was pretty enthusiastic about starting to read the book.But then, I find out that you only get the pdf if you ordered from manning.. So, I email manning saying that had I know about the \"order at manning instead of amazon\", I really would have bought it there and that I'd be more then happy to blog about \"Joy of Clojure\" and give a link to manning's order web page.So, then, I receive an email saying (summarized in my word): \"Fu, it's your problem, next time buy it at manning, not amazon\".It really frustrated me.. I mean, isn't it the best way to demolish someone's best intention? I just feel like never ever buying anything from manning; never ever linking anything to their website, and spread the word about that story.Am I over-reacting? What's your thought on that, fellow HN-users?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "It would be nice, when there is a thread on Clojure, if at least one person chimed in and gave an example of a problem where this lisp dialect on JVM helped them to solve a problem faster than using an existing language, like Python, C#, Java, or whatever.\"Drinking through a fire hose\", \"understanding corner cases\", and such are just euphemisms. Where's the beef?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "4.2 on the Rant-o-meter. \"fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass...\" more Yegge yadda-yadda.Not sure if i prefer \"class-five tropical storm\" or a fire hydrant book shoved up. But those fire hydrant books, say,- Wampler / Payne's Scala book, or- Cesarini /Thompson's Erlang book- Syme/Granicz/Cisternino for F#- (dunno if real World Haskell is a fire hydrant; dunno which are scheme/common Lisp fire hydrants, and ocaml doesn't have one)are very important, not to read in their entirety, but to figure out where to find stuff when you're hauling yourself out of intermediate developer-ness i.e. get you up to understanding production code, and cover the edge cases so you can figure out the corner cases and save you asking hundreds of questions on stackoverflow. Somewhere in amazon i wrote a book review that tutorial books cover 1 sigmas of the language, standard libs and dev environment, but books that cover 2 sigmas are rare.And this is that book for clojure. And clojure does have that \"perfect storm\" feel" }, { "score": 3, "text": "\"Clojure has only been out for three years, but it’s gaining momentum at a rate that we haven’t seen in a new language in decades\"[citation needed]Unless the context is HN threads with \"clojure\" in the title." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Context: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht... is/was reasonably well-known, and people have been speculating on which language he meant ever since [EDIT: see reply by dpritchett]. Steve Yegge doesn't quite come out and declare his preference, but...Sadly, he's not written anything on his blog in a while." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I think the issue is the lack of consent. The data is freely available and anyone who wants to use it to compile lists of Perl developers can do so, but if you're going to put up a list of female developers without a) asking them first and b) presenting it in a context that anticipates and avoids the gender-politics objections to doing so, then you're going to get a negative reaction. It's probably something that shouldn't be creepy even without consent and carefully-honed context, or at least no creepier than a list of Russian Perl developers or Perl developers who use Windows or whatever, but that's not the world we live in.It looks like an honest enough mistake, but I guess we're going to have to listen to another bunch of white male community guardians parading their feminist credentials and belittling the original developer for his backwards lack of understanding anyway." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Additional discussion \nhttp://blogs.perl.org/users/steven_haryanto/2012/07/so-appar...http://blogs.perl.org/users/michael_g_schwern/2012/07/how-no..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "What about Twitter lists? I have created all sorts of lists without asking people first. No \"women who do x\" lists, but still - the idea was I think people creating lists of people who fall into a common category of their interest.It doesn't seem so strange that people might be interested in female developers. For all I know, that list could have been compiled by another female developer who wants to feel less lonely.In another context people will rush to present such lists to entice more women into the field. Also, the argument \"there are almost no female developers (in OSS)\" is common, so such lists might be handy to answer those arguments.I was just considering how I would feel about a \"black developers\" list - sure it is a double edged sword, but I think it could be interesting/valid for the same reasons. People will gather those statistics anyway, and I believe public data should be as accessible as possible." }, { "score": 3, "text": "It is not creepy in all fields. It is creepy in computer programming/science.The problem is the culture in this special field with a lot of allusion to pornography, sexual abuse, etc. When you have well known figures in the Ruby community explicitly telling that it is good to use porn to sell software technology, you have a problem.In my field, process engineering and biotechnology, even if some groups are extremely male dominated, I have never experienced such behavior in more than a decade of going to workshop/conferences and working with 100's of people all over the world." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Wow. This thing is totally inappropriate and extremely creepy in all contexts. Out of \"sheer curiosity\"? Jeepers.I hope this gets removed.Great message to send to the women in the tech industry: come join our community and we'll single you out in a git repository like a museum exhibit. Even better, the whole thing is a perl script, so anyone can programmatically do whatever they want with your personal information! It's all for curiosity's sake!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Consolidate your student loans into one loan. This is pretty easy -- you can do it online in a few hours. Companies used to throw themselves at students to get their consolidation business since it is practically risk-free (subsidized up the wazoo and nondischargeable in bankruptcy to boot).https://loanconsolidation.ed.gov/AppEntry/apply-online/appin...If you do this through a bank, they may do some of the legwork to rope together your loans for you. (If your bank has a student loan group which does this routinely, your permission and SSN make this a ten minute job for a junior employee, and since your business is worth a few thousand bucks they're happy to do it to get you in the door.)The other option for decreasing cognitive load is accelerating repayment. I got out of debt seven years ahead of schedule. It was economically suboptimal at the interest rates I was being charged, but the sleep it saved was worth every penny of opportunity cost." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Given that you've got an average loan balance of only around $2000 across those loans, how quickly would you be able to knock out some of the smaller ones and bring down that loan count? It's generally best to start on the highest interest loans first, but sometimes its more emotionally gratifying to have the visible progress of loans getting paid off.As for consolidation, it depends on a few factors. A lower interest rate in the new loan is certainly good, but that benefit is limited if the consolidation will result in fees, or if you plan to have the loans paid off quickly (which I recommend if at all possible). In any case, always be careful about the small print, especially when it comes to private student loans, which are NOT all alike and are notoriously prone to pitfalls and gotchas (hooray banks).You mentioned having loans managed by the Department of Education. I'm assuming those are Direct Loans (http://dl.ed.gov), which should all be accessible via the same interface. If you log in there and check your loan balances, they might also have a link to view the balances of other federal loans (eg Perkins) which are not necessarily handled by Direct Loans. I haven't visited the site since I paid off my loans but I remember it tracking the balance on my one non-Direct loan (albeit with some delay).For financial advice in general, I'd recommend looking at the Bogleheads Forums, which are primarily about investing but also have a lot of great information and advice on personal finance: http://bogleheads.org/forum" }, { "score": 2, "text": "> I can't manage my 12 student loans, suggestions?This is a one-time data-entry problem.Enter the details into quicken.You may need to ask each for a statement of accounts.The only way that a service can help is if it has access to the relevant records." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I have many loans too (a mix of Federal and private). But, I managed to get everything through salliemae.com. Its almost like consolidating without consolidating. I make one payment to them a month and a little goes to everyone. I'm not sure if you can move other loans to them or not.Have you thought about consolidating all the Federal ones and the Privates ones so you only have 2 payments to keep track of? Unfortunately I don't believe you can mix both together.If that isn't an option, then Mint.com also allows you to add different kids of loans and track them. I actually do this now because I find their historical charts and tools a bit more useful than what Salliemae offers." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Spreadsheet?While there's possibly a market there, I wouldn't be too geeked about trying to build a service to profit off of the debt of others. But there are some services out there targetting credit card debtors - a student loan is just another account with a balance, no? (yes, different legal rights may apply, but from a math and organization standpoint, it's the same)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It's great that manual compilation works for Matz. And his great work notwithstanding, it has little to do with the general user.As an occasional Ruby programmer, and frequent Ruby-based utility user, I do not want to compile and install Ruby or Ruby modules myself. If we go down that road, why don't we compile everything from Python to GStreamer ourselves (since they all have modules/plugins/...)?To the general user (as opposed to full-time Ruby programmer), Ruby and Ruby modules are just dependencies to the application they want to use, and installation should be automatic. One can only hope that the Ruby community understands this, and makes it easy for distributors to package their software." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'm seeing a trend in the comments re RVM and other suggestions.There are essentially two issues at hand here and we would all do well to remember the difference between the two.1. Ruby as a good citizen in a distro\n2. Ruby as a development tool for programmers#2 is mainly achieved via RVM for sure. I program both Ruby and Python and as well as some JS and Erlang. I LOVE RVM for ruby/gem management and actually prefer it to Python's virtualenv (just a preference! Don't bite my head off ;) )#1, however, is what we should really be talking about as it is what the original debian maintainer was complaining about. Matz is more talking about #2.I use Ubuntu as my development and deployment platform. I could never imagine if Python was not available, stable and usable as a base package on Ubuntu without me having to do some RVM/Virtualenv incantation each time. Sure, there could be a chef/puppet/script installation approach, but why? And for those who think this is trivial, think about all the packages that are in fact written in Python that are part of the desktop or base system. Python is literally embedded in everything!One of the greatest things about Debian/Ubuntu, and why I think it is the premier development platform, are things like: sudo aptitude install build-essentialAll that being said, this is a very hard problem to generally solve. I would hope that Ruby would be more Pythonic in the distro, but I don't see it being a priority for Ruby folks anytime soon....Side note: go look up the transition from Python2.6 to Python2.7 for upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 to see what is involved in such a transition. It is non-trivial to say the least but Debian/Ubuntu maintainers are doing a stellar job with it...it is a complex issue and much care is needed...And as another aside...anyone remember the Ubuntu rolling releases issue? At is core with rolling releases was things like Python2.6 -> Python2.7 transition...not something you can easily achieve in true distro rolling releases and again, just an example of why this is a complex problem and things like RVM are not appropriate for discussion of #2 as it stands." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Assuming this is a response to yesterday's news about Debian's Ruby maintainer, I don't see how it's relevant. Matz is almost certainly compiling his own Ruby (as many Rubyists do) and not using the Debian packages for Ruby." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Matz compiles. He doesn't use Debian's packaging." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I just don't get why this is supposedly a Ruby problem rather than a $LANG problem, when Lucas Nussbaum's complaints about Ruby's packaging situation (sans the whining about Japanese) apply equally well to every other language you might want to install.It's also pretty hilarious when a guy maintaining one of 50+ different distributions of the same software cries about division of manpower upstream." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm getting a little bit annoyed with the argument that 'Internet taking over these businesses is BAD because it's replacing quality with quantity! You won't get quality anymore because people are flocking to quantity and we can't afford to subsidize it anymore!'On one hand, I am somewhat sympathetic to the argument (Research seems to be funded at least partially in the same way at universities), but overall, if the great masses lack taste and are satisfied with their reality TV, books like Twilight, and Windows PCs, why should they be taxed to pay for the few aristocrats that demand literature?Or, if the value of such things is great enough, then the demand will be there to pay for it.Disclaimer: My OS is Vista, I like watching CSI, and I've liked books that are as empty as Twilight is rumored to be." }, { "score": 1, "text": "First Off: Many (if not most) film festival winners and even some Oscar winners (Slumdog Millionaire, Japanese's The Departure) don't cost a huge fortune to produce, esp. in relative to Blockbusters.Certain creative pursuits, like TV shows, might get back to its cheaper, more natural roots. I'm sure the cost of making a good TV show wasn't this high in the past. The cost is getting higher partly because of the competition for talents.With less money in the system, it's true that some talents will move to another industry, but many will stay and accept a less extravaganza lifestyle (which is not a great thing to emulate for the society at large anyway). People who really love doing the stuff will likely want to do it no matter what.Of course, certain sorts of movies/shows like those which requires a huge amount of detailed computer graphics will be harder to come by, but that doesn't spell the end of creative works.Lower cost for the whole system could potentially result in better quality (of a different kind) because of less focus on techniques and more on the arts and concepts." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It is a cycle. Most endeavors start out as labors of love. Invention. Creativity. Internships. Then as the product is developed and there is more demand for it, more customers, more money. The wheat separates from the chaff. The chaff makers lose customers who concentrate among a few vendors who then start charging more and looking for more expensive and talented producers but all the free and cheap stuff is gone.So then the young bucks come in and say, \"I can do this for less!\"Saṃsāra" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I disagree with the premise that there is a correlation between production cost and quality." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Once again, this article assumes that the current way of doing things is the only way of doing things. New business models will spring up. They always do, no matter how much people decry progress." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "For the first time in history individual piano notes have been made visible using the CymaScope instrument.Except for all the times someone fed the output of a mic amplifier into a scope and watched a Lissajous figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_curve Not to mention Duddell's photo oscillograph over 100 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope_history#Photograph..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"The CymaScope represents the first scientific instrument that can give us a visual image of sound and vibration - a cymatic image - helping us to understand our world and universe in ways previously hidden from view.\"\n... you can graph change in pressure over time to get a visual image of sounds and vibrations. It is safe to say people have been doing this for a very long time. And what about the page on \"sonic healing\"... What a crazy site!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "So, this is like Chladni patterns, but in 3D and high definition? Or just Chladni patterns with high framerate? I'm having a hard time interpreting this from very vague and pretty uninformative descriptions.Frank Zappa stated on multiple ocassions that he considered himself, in essence, an air sculptor. I'd love to see few of his \"sculptures\" animated in 3D." }, { "score": 3, "text": "So what do the images depict? Is it some density map in polar coordinates? Fourier? What am I seeing here?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I think I prefer the iTunes visualizer." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Ideas are not 30% of success. The reason ideas are worthless is because literally any idea you have come up with many other people have come up with too. Almost nobody bothers to execute. My recommendation would be to pick something you are excited about.Here is one, real time product insertion into uploaded videos (or even network TV/movies). Let people make their videos with blue screened objects or backgrounds and then have technology that lets advertisers insert real time advertising into the videos (meaning the advertising is not permanent but changes each time). One time the person is holding a can of coke, another time pepsi. One time the background says macys the next time it says bloomingdalesAnother one that some people have started on is real time traffic mapping. Work with onstar (others are using the GPS in phones) to write software that maps the speed on every road 24/7 where there is an onstar vehicle.something like craigslist but using a hackernews style rating systemfacial recognition that can go through my whole library of pictures and tag every person. Read the techstars book to find out who has the technology to make it happen" }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"Scratch your own itch\"http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Whats_Your_Problem.php" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Ask rich people what problems they have. Ask business people what problems they have. Ask business owners what problems they have." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Make a text file and just dump notes, everyday or every other day, on anything that frustrates you (or others) that you can vaguely imagine being a successful startup. Keeping count with each note of how many times you get that \"Ugh, I wish someone had solved this problem!\" feeling can also help narrow down things when you’re looking to build something." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Take a look at things that exist today. What do you wish was significantly better?What's broken that you have the skills to fix, or to at least investigate further?In general, I think people should start by building things for themselves." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Every comment here at time of writing is from people thinking that this is a way of searching the web using regular expressions. It is not.It is a way of taking a regular expression and an input and then applying that regular expression to that input. In this particular example it takes the regular expression:/(?x: (\\w+) \\s (\\w+) )/And applies it to:"hacker news"And then spits out the result:"hacker | news"Representing the two captured results." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Awwww. I hoped for a moment it was literally searching the web with a regex. Unfortunately no, although it may be a handy regex cheat sheet.Wake me when someone does this properly. It's only been done on a small scale or with very limited precomputed expressions, to my knowledge. Not many people would need it, but for those people it'd be insanely useful. But it's also insanely computationally hard - which means it'd be a really interesting technical achievement! There are no general-purpose reverse indexes that I know of that accelerate that as easily as keywords, but there are some data structures that might help a bit, although I can't think of practical ways to deploy them over arbitrary regexps specified at runtime! Plus some sanity heuristics and limits, of course, as regexps can undergo combinatorial explosion and some fun unexpected worse-case performance." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Google does not implement regex search support because they said somewhere that the data storage needed for the index would be huge. And since regex search is used only by a small subset of users, it is not worth the effort." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Does anyone provide Boolean web searches, with nested terms (e.g., "a AND (b OR (c AND d))"? I don't need it all the time but it would be very handy on occasion." }, { "score": 4, "text": "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=regexThis is also useful." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Anti-aging/life-extension stuff is all very interesting, but I fail to see how such technology would ever become accessible to the public at large. For that to happen, I'd think that there would have to be a significant economic benefit.As it stands now, we have an overpopulation problem. We also live in a world where, whether we like it or not, segments of the population can be considered either a drag on society or a benefit. Who decides?I have little doubt that someone will crack the code to indefinite lifespans within my lifetime, whether or not this breakthrough is publicized. But do we have any reason to believe that life-extension technology, even adding 10-15 years to the average lifespan, would be accessible to anyone but the super rich?I just don't see how regular joes would be allowed to have this, but I'd like to be convinced otherwise.ALSO: If you're going to downmod me, can you please explain why? This is a serious question, and people seem to want to shy away from it whenever it is brought up." }, { "score": 1, "text": "There are two measures which seem to be the focus of \"longer life\" aging research:1. Increasing average lifespan.2. Increasing maximum possible lifespan.This article deals with the first. I, and I would think most others, would be most interested in the second. I do recognize that the first is easier to achieve." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's not very hackerish of me, but I'm feeling increasingly negative about anti-aging research. World population looks set to keep rising until it hits about 9 billion around 2050, while fuel depletion and environmental degradation are growing problems = pretty much a formula for resource wars.Additionally, a greying population in the developed world means a much higher fiscal burden on younger people in the economy, even if governments begin raising the retirement age (which is probably political suicide)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Every mice cure story should include a specific explanation how this could apply in humans.For example we have cured cancer in mice many times over using things which are ALREADY in humans, because we are much bigger and live much longer then mice.Therefore all those mice cures, do absolutely nothing for us.That's why I want to see specific mention of how this applies to all mammals or just humans." }, { "score": 4, "text": "> The researchers caution, however, that using this drug to extend the lifespan of humans might be problematic because it suppresses the immune system — potentially making people who take it more susceptible to infectious diseases.There's always a catch..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I see a big parallel with the predictions for advances in neuroscience with all the predictions that were made prior to the sequencing of the human genome (the author touches on this a bit too). Lots of smart scientists really believed that once the human genome was sequenced, we would have the keys to the biological kingdom. What has actually happened is that we have discovered that the complexity of the system is probably an order of magnitude more complex than previously thought. Knowing the sequence of a gene turns out to be important, but a pretty minor factor in explaining its function. Plus we are learning that all sorts of simple rules we thought were true aren't always the case.I suspect a similar thing is playing out in neuroscience. As we peel back the layers of the onion, ever more complexity will be revealed. The things Ray Kurzweil predicts may well come true. He is a brilliant guy. But the timetable is very optimistic.The march of biological progress is very slow, in part because all the experimentation involves living things that grow, die, get contaminated, run away, don't show up for appointments, get high, etc... Lots of people from other scientific disciplines, especially engineering related ones underestimate just how long even the simplest biological experiments can take." }, { "score": 1, "text": "He would be correct if creation of AI depended on a thorough understanding of neuroscience. But I hope we needn't wait that long.It's the old \"Birds fly. To fly, man must fully understand bird flight.\" argument. Yet today we still don't completely understand bird flight but planes _do_ fly.The analogy is not complete: we have yet to find the \"air\", the \"turbulence\", a \"Bernoulli principle\", etc. of intelligence. That is to be determined. But this approach is the only reasonable one.As the author implies, waiting for neuroscience is like waiting for Godot." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Not interested in arguing about his time table, but the example of DNA sequencing only affording a linear increase in undersanding is bogus and he ought to know that. It has significantly accelerated genetics research by making mapping a matter of a browser search. As an example, the fly lines developed by Gerry Rubin et al, which can be manipulated to express any reporter gene in any genetically defined brain locus. That would have been completely infeasible prior to complete genomic sequencing of the fly." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The OP asks reasonable technical questions about medical nanorobots. I'm not going to defend Kurzweil, but some less-sloppy thinkers have written about this kind of stuff, like Merkle, Freitas, and Drexler. E.g. http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html\nhttp://www.nanomedicine.com/NMIIA/15.3.6.5.htm\nThey do tackle questions like how do you power these things; I wish he'd read and criticize them instead.A 7-micron-long medical nanorobot sounds pretty damned big to me, btw -- in _Nanosystems_ Drexler fits a 32-bit CPU in a 400nm cube, less than 1/300 of the volume if we're talking about a 1-micron-radius cylinder." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This article was a very similar one to ones that biologists were publishing in mid 80's when Kurzweil predicted the mapping of the human genome within 15 years. It's interesting how exponential progress is counter-intuitive even for those who have been experiencing it in their fields for years." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Didn't get as much coverage, but there are also new ThinkPads this week: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/22/lenovo-trots-out-new-thin...The 14\" models look good: 30 hours (claimed) battery on the T420, 0.83\" ultrathin T420s with discrete graphics.Edit: Here's the official announcement, which took a bit of digging around to find: http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1421 . synacksynack has posted a good link now." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Color me disappointed. I was hoping for:• Ditching the optical media for longer battery life• 4 cores in the 13\"• Max RAM of 12 GB (this one isn't listed ... maybe?)• The higher resolution 1440x900 resolution in the 13\" that the Macbook Air hasAltogether it's a pretty wussy update. Basically it looks like the diff (on the 13\" model, which is what I care about) is:• Faster CPU (finally!)• Thunderbolt port (count on buying another $30 display adapter like every generation)• 3 hours less battery life" }, { "score": 2, "text": "hmm - you need to go to 1799$ before you end up with a half decent graphics card and 2199$ for a decent card.Compare it with a Dell XPS 15 Sandy Bridge - $1049 for i7 2620M, 1920X1080 display, nVidia GT525 Optimus card, HD Camera.For a first time possible mac buyer (me) - is it well justified ?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Thunderbolt is the coolest thing here to me. The way I read this, Intel at least partly owns the IP on it, so it should be available on PCs in the future, too? (I hope so, because that will create a bigger peripheral market.)UPDATE: Answer appears to be \"yes.\"\"...the fastest way to get information in and out of your PC and peripheral devices...\"http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I was about to post something to the effect of \"I'm disappointed that the 13-inch model replaced the Nvidia GPU with an Intel one\", but it seems to be decently better: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-320M.28701.0.htm..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "With respect, the press is regularly quoting how many places now 'accept bitcoin' but it is all really a vanity metric. I know it is difficult to know how much these merchant accounts get used without internal information from the providers themselves, but from all internal accounts I have heard, the usage is dismal. For no surprising reason customers are generally disinterested in purchasing anything with Bitcoin that they can already purchase with their credit card.I think Bitcoin is going to be revolutionary but the application is lacking - entrepreneurs really need to find a real world application where the use of Bitcoin actually improves the experience. Remittances and International Money Transfers are the first legal industry I can think of where that will work, but businesses in that area need time to grow and navigate the uncertain regulatory environment before Bitcoin will actually see adoption that really means something." }, { "score": 1, "text": "What is an example of a service* or product* that is served better with cryptocoins than with cash, bank transfers or credit cards? What are people spending bitcoins on and why?That would be nice to know and definitely more informative than a graph of daily activity within the blockchain.* preferably something mundane and totally within the boundaries of the law" }, { "score": 2, "text": "So, if I had invested when I planned to a couple of years ago (or actually bought decent hardware to mine on) I would have made a decent return. But now I'm curious if we're in a bubble that will decrease in popularity or if it's still something that will continue to be on the rise.Seems to me that all of the recent news has brought attention to bitcoin which has helped with it's popularity. Is it something that will continue to rise or will it fall once people aren't talking about it as much?Can anyone weigh in with their opinions?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Is there really an exponential growth in transactions per day? The last I heard it has been constant for months:https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions[edit] I see he's excluding the 100 most popular addresses. Is there any justification for that? I'm sure he would have left them in if the chart looked right." }, { "score": 4, "text": "How do (real world) shops accept bitcoin? I thought that it takes some time for a transaction to be confirmed by the blockchain. Even if it is a matter of minutes, you can't expect customers to wait by the checkout until their payment is cleared. And yet without this confirmation, you are opening yourself up to fraud." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is just an extract from the Telefonica startup ecosystem report that can be found here: http://blog.digital.telefonica.com/?press-release=country-hi...It's an interesting report, though unless there's actionable information in this for you (there is for me, actually), it's probably infoporn rather than anything worth reading..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Quick question: Do people think the rising cost of living in a place like London will have a negative effect on start ups?Currently it doesn't look like it from that report but I'm currently on an intern's wage and have struggled to live here, I can only imagine how hard it is to potentially work for a small wage maybe even just equity whilst being a bit older than I am and potentially more responsibilities." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'd say the UK certainly has the lead in Europe in terms of talent pool size, legal services, tax regime and government support.I'll shortly be moving back to there and incorporating a company for my bootstrapped startup. I live in France at the moment and the decision to move and kick it off from the UK was a no brainer.One of the major attractions is the SEIS scheme and the potential this gives me to attract funding via a crowd funding platform like http://www.crowdcube.com This sort of startup friendly business environment just doesn't exist anywhere else in Europe (at least that I'm aware of).Edit: in connection to the above, would love to know if any UK HNers have had any experience with http://www.vwv.co.uk/ ? I need some legal advice before I incorporate and I've heard they're good and very startup friendly." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Last time I checked Tel Aviv is in the Middle East not Europe." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Tel Aviv is in Europe now?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "i work at a J2EE shop. We pivoted recently. We feel like a startup, we engineer like a startup, we work as hard as a startup, but we also have existing client relationships, existing revenue streams funding our pivot, and we already have a team of domain experts and strong engineers.When I give a talk and my bio says J2EE I'm a bit sheepish, and all the twenty-somethings are like LOL you use java, but that's silly - I work for a better, stronger business than all the little startups[1] emailing me on careers.stackoverflow. And the money is better. And we dodge the whole class of issues that come with taking money[2], like being told by your VC to collect and sell personal information.That's why I'm still here. I believe in this business, and when interviewees ask the founder about the business model, the answer isn't \"freemium\" - its how we've been paid to contract a product for a huge client but retain IP rights so we can reinvest the profit to productize something that the entire industry wants. and we have assets (domain experts, software, client relationships, functional sales team) that a startup doesn't have - there are tremendous barriers for competition to overcome. we're halfway through this, and it's working, and when you look at it you're like, duh, of course its working.[1] i don't want to pick on anyone, and there are a few awesome startups out there that I'd love to work for, and maybe yours is in this set, and maybe i'm not good enough for the ones in this set. What I do see is that the startups emailing me seem to need a decent rails guy to build their commodity webapp. rails apps are important, and i'm sure they have all sorts of challenges which i'm not aware of, but they aren't particularly interesting, to me. J2EE on a good team is about building out < http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsPayrollHard >, which is in a whole new class of scale/complexity that is, well, the type of hard which causes languages like Clojure and Scala to exist.\n[2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3107-99-problems-but-money-ai...edit: i'm getting lots of voting activity in both directions, it surprises me that this is controversial, i'd love to hear criticism." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'm sick of a different kind of BS. Generally speaking, creating startups has become almost as \"meaningless\" as trading stocks. You used to buy a stock because you believed in the long-term value of the company. Now you buy a stock because people panic on that given day and you feel you can take brief ownership of it to squeeze a few pennies out of it, before dumping it back on the market.Why do VCs love startups? Because you can create value where there is none. Somehow 1,000,000 users capable of generating $200,000 in ad revenue per year (never mind the startup is burning 2 million a year!) are able to create valuations of $50 million. But hey, hot investors X, Y, and Z are in on this deal so it must be good! And thus the creation of companies no one gives two shits about continues.How many startups are actually profitable - that is, genuinely creating more cash than they are burning? I think I can count them on one hand." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I blame it all on the Facebook movie, it over hyped startup world. People don't understand that more then half the time, we are knee deep in code or running out of cash." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Ah, this is material for a \"captain hindsight\" meme. \"If you didn't want your founders to party it up, you shouldn't have pointed a fire hose of money at them\"There may be \"hard work\" going on in the start-up world, but you'll have to seek it out. For every \"serious\" start-up you'll find 5-10 Zynga/foursquare/etc... clones." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The BS is not limited to start-ups. Check out the break-dance troupe kicking off JavaOne. geez: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/07/PS080733.p... (credit: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/07/J1D1)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I had it password-protected with .htaccess and then accessed via HTTPS, but I switched to using ssh+svn. There were some odd bugs with the WebDAV interface to svn where it wouldn't update my working copy properly on 'svn update', leading to a lot of manual deletion of .svn/wcprops to get going again. I finally said enough is enough and just switched to accessing it over SSH." }, { "score": 1, "text": "You could:\n-password-protect it with .htaccess, or better yet:\n-make the repository only accessible via ssh, and \n-set up Trac or something similar if you want bug tracking and friendly svn browsing over http.I haven't set up either of these myself so I can't help you there, but I would be willing to bet that Google can answer your questions :)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm not sure I understand the question. Look at yet-to-be-written code? I know version control systems have been called \"time machines\", but they show you what's in the past, not what's in the future.Generally speaking though -- if you don't want people to look at files, don't put them only a web server." }, { "score": 3, "text": "You can protect you repository with apache http authorization.\nJust search for a tutorial, here's what I found: http://svn.spears.at/#3.2\nYou add the users/passwords with htpasswd and then in httpd.conf add Auth entries.\n" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Password protection withhtaccess might be the way to go if you are hosting your development code on a web host instead of having your own server on your local network that is not web accessable. " } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I am currently participating in the 3rd round. I stay in Santiago. It's rated #1 on the NYT list of 41 places to visit last year. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/travel/09where-to-go.html?...\nMy experience with Chile and Startup Chile have been very positive so far. For me, it's the best way to bootstrap a company.Here is my answers to a few of the FAQs.Lack of MentorshipThough there is no mentorship program from Startup Chile. There IS a 3rd party program that matches you up with powerful Chilean business people.You fill in a questionnaire about what you are looking for, and they try to match you up. I was looking for someone with lots of marketing experience and gets technology. They come back with exactly the right guy for me. My mentor works for TVN (equivalent of CNN in Chile) and used to be marketing manager for P&G, BP, and Coca-cola.I frankly cannot imagine having a mentor with similar experience elsewhere. Being a Startup Chile entrepreneur definitely gives me lots of leverages within Chile.ReimbursementThis has been a concern for lots of people. But it comes down to being organized and be sure to bring enough dough down here.If you keep track of the spending, it's really not such a big deal. Sure, paper work sucks. But it's nothing that an organized person cannot handle.If you have hard time adopting to rules, look elsewhere. Seriously, you probably should just take a job and not play the survival of the fittest game.Not SFI've never stayed in SF. But there are lots of Startup Chile participants who had lived in SF in the past. Sure, it's the center of the universe for startups, but the price you pay for living in SF or even just another North American city is the tunnel vision.Living in Chile has given me so much more perspective about how the rest of the world operates. This could be handy down the road.Giving back to ChileYou can travel to teach entrepreneurship in other regions of Chile. It's a great way to travel to other regions of Chile as well as giving back what you know. I am half way through the program, and I am already done with my RVA points. It's really pretty simple and fun.There are 20 of us who taught entrepreneurship in a university in Temuco. Where is that? Exactly, how else would you travel to the beautiful southern part of Chile, teach university students about entrepreneurship and get almost all travel expenses paid for?Language BarrierThere are tricks to go around this.I am paying a Chilean intern to help me with setting up customer development meetings. So far we have done 5 sessions in Santiago. Almost all of our clients speak English.And if you want to learn Spanish, the program pays for the tuition!Below is a list of my surprises so far.Friendly ChileanI got invited to Chilean family parties. I served tequila to grandpa all the way down to the people who are barely legal to drink. And I speak very little Spanish. I am totally surprised by how friendly and welcoming Chileans are to foreigners. If you are friendly and positive, you will have little problem adapting.Living expensesBy far, this is the biggest surprise for me. Before coming to Chilean, I read some report saying that Santiago's living expense is 30% of that of Vancouver. That totally throw me off.The living expense here is actually pretty HIGH. I would argue it's pretty much the same as any other North American cities.But the program pays you a sufficient salary as well as your monthly rent. So, that definitely helps.Other EntrepreneursThis has been stated over and over again, but I didn't expect to meet so many talented entrepreneurs from all over the world. I got helpful feedback on my product from people who worked at 37signal, pivotal tracker, london school of economics, stanford, harvard, microsoft, techstar, Skype… The list goes on an on.The community here is superb. No wonder it was recently rated #12 tech hub in the world:\nhttp://techcrunch.com/2012/04/10/startup-genome-compares-top...ConclusionMaybe I am just very lucky. But I cannot imagine what I would do if I didn't get into Startup Chile. Prior to coming to Chile, I was burning through my savings on a $2000/month burn rate trying to bootstrap my business. My other option was to go back and find a job.Startup Chile gave me the chance to continue working on my business. The only thing they ask for is to give back to the Chilean entrepreneur community. This is a no brainer for me.The program is getting increasingly competitive every round. So, there is really no better time to apply to get your $40K equity free grant while living in the jewel of Latin America.If you have any other questions, send me a tweet @tianjerry" }, { "score": 1, "text": "@jot (from Round 1) made some great comments a few months back:\nhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810821I added a few notes too (I'm Round 2) - definitely think more along the lines of £10kGBP (about $15k) if you want to have a smooth ride. Two months from landing to getting money in CLP into your Chilean bank account (it'll only go in your new Chilean account) is a minimum. Sending money aborad is a pain and requires bank visits (online banking here isn't brilliant).There's a comment on this post about Mentorship Groups - I setup the first (as best I know) which we've been running for 3 or so months, details here if you want your own:\nhttp://ianozsvald.com/2012/05/16/mentorship-groups-in-startu...The lack of mentorship will apparently we changed for Round 4 (fingers crossed). Definitely come here knowing what you want to achieve and take all collaboration/support as an unexpected bonus.Overall I rate my experience here as positive, it certainly got me out of a rut back in the UK. The participants and staff are supportive (and generally lovely), the push to make us achieve is rather weak (hence starting our self-mentorship group). The programme will improve with each new round." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Spamming HN with positive comments is the worst way to convince us to apply: http://cl.ly/3C2T0B1X1s0e222c0m2CFlagged." }, { "score": 3, "text": "My thoughts on SUP after 4 months.Start-Up Chile is great for early stage start-ups. But, if you are already receiving traction and trying to land investments, I would recommend being located closest to your domestic market.For our company, Student Loan Hero, it made a bunch of sense, we were able to pivot our business model from the beginning without feeling rushed to pursue a bad business model, as opposed to the feeling I think I would have in a 3 month incubator.I do recommend each member that comes to Chile have at least $5-$10k USD each. (This is excluding flights and the costs of getting to Chile) This should cover your rent deposit, and float your cash flow until the reimbursement starts to hit. (Typically in month 2 after arrival)As for mentorship, this has been the weakest part of the program. Young entrepreneurs need experienced veterans when solving business model roadblocks. SUP is actively working to bring more investors, mentors, and support from all over the world here to help improve this situation.Although, there are plenty of brilliant people in the program who are willing to help you as well. It is what you make it, and you need to hustle. There is little accountability and pressure to show results, hence leaving you in ultimate control of what you get done in your 6 or 7 months here.One really positive comment about the program is it like a \"family\". I can't speak about YC, MassChallenge, or other incubators, but all the SUP companies are in this together versus being competitors to each other. This atmosphere fosters positive collaboration between our start-ups, and I know I can go to any other company in the program and ask for help.As for the environment, SF and NY are much better for meet-ups and meeting like-minded people, but surprisingly a decent tech scene is also developing here.My experience has had it's ups and downs, but overall I have learned a lot, met amazing people, and given the chance again - I would still have decided to come to Chile.To sum it up... You get $40k at 0% equity. The rest is up to you." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Remember, you'll need $5-10k USD to front for airline tickets, housing, etc before the reimbursement process kicks in. Supposedly it can take 1-2 months after arrival to see your first reimbursement." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "They probably hired the same security consultant as my bank, which requires your online password to be exactly six characters long. My hypothesis is that this is a technical limitation due to the password being stored as a char(6) in their database." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Almost all big companies handle security on this kind of cargo-cult basis, because it's easier than finding someone who understands security and letting them overrule stupid ideas." }, { "score": 2, "text": "So, this is just someone on the BritishGas twitter account. We do not know if that person is repeating accurately what they've been told or just making stuff up.Assuming they asked the correct people in BG website accounts security, and those people said "it's to prevent brute force attacks" we do not know if that's the real reason they do it or if it's just what they say to people who ask.What is really frustrating is that there is no possibility of getting this changed - allow people to paste their passwords and use rate limiting to catch brute forcing.Having said that, some aspects of BG's computer system are horrific for customers so I don't doubt that they do stupid things for stupid reasons." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The tweeter (probably a non-technical support person, so go gently on him or her as an individual) has revised the statement:"@passy I'm mistaken about the website security certificate but avoiding pasting of passwords is good practice & protects our customers 1/2" https://twitter.com/BritishGasHelp/status/463679554306203648"@passy especially when using public computers. Alpha numerical policy ensures your protection without making special characters necessary^S" https://twitter.com/BritishGasHelp/status/463681274092462080" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Reminds me of a password security policy that listed few SQL statements that can't be used in passwords." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": ""Optimizing for 6 hours of sleep""every day, getting out of bed is one of the hardest things I do""Every night, when I crawl into bed, I’m exhausted by all I’ve done that day."Your body may be telling you that you need seven hours of sleep. Or eight.How would your life change if you went to sleep an hour earlier, but you woke up feeling good?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I've taken two separate part-time jobs while working full time elsewhere.The first one was while I was working for the federal government. I commuted one hour each way and after spending two years in a mid-sized bedroom community I still had no friends where I lived. I got a job at a local coffee shop filling in where needed which was usually either opening up from 6 to 8A.M. or closing up from 6-10P.M.I immediately got to know a lot of locals from the college students and young people who worked alongside me to the professionals who came in earl to the stay-at-home moms and dads that came in mid-afternoon.I learned how to make a great espresso made some spending money and a bunch of friends. It was a great experience.The second job was while working remotely as a developer in a tiny rural town. I took a job as a fitness instructor at a local studio and, again, met a lot of people I wouldn't have otherwise and got to make a real personal impact on many people's lives helping them get fit and stay healthy.The author does a great job summarizing the benefits of this kind of job. There's so much more than money that can add tremendous value to your life." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I used to landscape professionally. Which - in my case - is a fancy way of saying I cut grass, dug ditches, raked leaves and spread mulch. I picked up some useful knowledge along the way.Thing is, no matter how much satisfaction I get from a problem solved, elegant or just effective code written, etc - it isn't quite the same thing as when I could look back at a yard/park/complex etc at the end of the day and say "Yep, that looks good. I did that." Something that not only I could appreciate, but everyone driving by would notice on some level.I'd not want to go back to that full-time. Intellectually my work now is far more satisfying (mentally designing algorithms while walking behind a bobcat tends to result in both poor algorithms and a poorly cut lawn). And it's easy to forget the long days, paychecks at the mercy of the weather, being constantly sore and always finding dirt and the damndest of places...But I am thinking about finding some part-time work in landscaping this year for just that reason. I enjoyed it, I was reasonably good at it, and it felt good to be doing. With my hands." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This story hilariously epitomizes the gulf that lies between the tech scene and the rest of the population. For you a low paying job is a hobby to keep you in check, I'm sure only so long that it doesn't impede your "real job". For most, these jobs are an important source of income. Doesn't it strike you as slightly obnoxious to take such a job away from someone who needs it? I can see this story ending up in Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley". Here's a better "hack": hire smart people away from low paying jobs for your startup, pay them more, and go for a bike ride in the morning." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Comments here seem to be missing the larger point; that being surrounded by tech all the time can be a disorienting experience.Really, this issue isn't specific only to tech circles. You can get used to your own surroundings in any job and forget that a wider world exists.It is extremely important to stay grounded so that you don't lose touch with the world around you. I think this guy's approach is admirable, though perhaps he should be getting more sleep." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It appears to be fixed in Linux 3.4 [1]. According to the original commit [2] it's been broken since 7dffa3c673fbcf835cd7be80bb4aec8ad3f51168 [3], which appeared in 2.6.26.So, kernels between 2.6.26 and 3.3 (inclusive) are vulnerable.[1] https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2....[2] https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2....[3] https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2...." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Google uses a \"leap smear\" and slowly accounts for the leap second before it happens.[1] As long as you are not doing any astronomical calculations or constrained by regulatory requirements I think google has the right idea.[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-l..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "2012. and we still have problems keeping track of time. This is both fascinating and scary.P.S.\nfor people wanting to know more this video is simple to understand but really amazing\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX96xng7sAE" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Not surprising. In spite of all press that Y2K was just a silly waste of money, its events like these that makes me suspect it would have been a much bigger deal if everyone had ignored it and fixed it after things where shown to break." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Fear the Unix 32-bit time-becomes-negative bugs, in 2037.We have 25 years to get ready. I still think we'll be patching at the last minute.(Yeah, lots of systems will be 64-bit by then, but there will still be a lot of embedded crackerbox systems running 32-bit timestamps. It's all the embedded stuff I'm worried about)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There was this one guy in The Original Series who appeared quite often as an extra. He was a roman guard in \"Bread and Circuses\" and also a red shirt in \"Trouble with Tribbles.\" He was also in other episodes as an extra. I'd like to see a full face index, including the extras, so I could figure out how many episodes he was in.(And, no I'm not talking about David Ross/Lt. Galloway, who appeared in 9 TOS episodes. The extra I'm talking about was uncredited.)EDIT: I've been browsing Memory Alpha. There are quite a few actors who appeared in a bunch of episodes, some are in more episodes than major characters!64 eps - http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/William_Blackburn32 eps - http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Roger_Holloway59 eps - http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Eddie_Paskey" }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's only a matter of time before someone creates an algorithm and app that takes publicly available and tagged photos of people (think FB profiles), and then uses the info to identify all of the people in a photo at a political rally, crime scene, or amateur porn site." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Great marketing, timed for the release of the new Star Trek movie. (Assuming that it's not an old demo, and its just proximity to the movie responsible for it being posted and up-voted here.)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is just my opinion but I think the polygonal outline (which mimics your logo?) you use to show the face id makes the technology you've developed appear less professional than it should. Perhaps, a more processing-intensive desaturation/alpha blend (like they do in 20/20 with surveillance videos) where you highlight the head area?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Anyone guess which algorithms they're using?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is a terrible idea, and ruby used the wrong implementation. If you want this behaviour, you should just define a higher order function/decorator, and put your \"block\" in its own function. This is a case where there should be only one way to do it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Seems like a good way to make your code harder to read and harder to debug." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Can someone give me an example where using a code block is better than using a simple function? And is the added complexity and loss of readability worth it?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'd like to see some before-and-after examples of Python code that's been rewritten to take advantage of blocks using this module." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Interesting, but I'm having a hard time seeing how this syntax saves me much in terms of code size and complexity compared to just wrapping the code blocks into named functions and passing those." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Oh my..."Too often investors look at short-term returns and are unaware of corporate policy decisions that may affect long-term financial prospects. After today's meeting, investors can be certain that Apple is wasting untold amounts of shareholder money to combat so-called climate change. The only remaining question is: how much?" [1]Let's all ignore climate change. Clearly that would give us better long-term financial prospects. And will definitely not be a huge economic disaster.[1] http://www.nationalcenter.org/PR-Apple_Tim_Cook_Climate_0228..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This group, NCPPR, has a long history of not only denying climate science [1] by misconstruing their sources [2], but also defending the tobacco industry [3] and denying involvement in corruption scandals [4].1. http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA388.html2. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/295/5554/476.abstracthttp://web.archive.org/web/20050414163144/http://www.nature....http://web.archive.org/web/20050414163147/http://www.nature....3. http://web.archive.org/web/20030930182136/http://www.prwatch...http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA198.html4. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a9s0n...http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Think-tank-he...http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/23/politics/23indian.html?_r=..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It seems to me that these folks are using the shareholder meeting - and Tim cooks response - as theatre to get in the public eye. I'd never heard of them before (and now I know to avoid them) and they've succeeded in getting their message in front of many more people.This is the reason greenpeace and similar target apple publicly, even though apple was already doing much of what they were asking for." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Was anyone else amused by the reference to "the Al gore contingency in the room"? For non-native English speakers, I'll note that there's a noun "contingency" with a meaning related to the adjective "contingent" (meaning roughly "conditional"), but not directly related to the noun "contingent" (meaning roughly "faction")." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Apple should disclose at least basic information about the scope of their investments. This is just common sense, and it's especially important at a time when investors are panicked about the future of the stock." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I think the simple answer would be economies of scale. As more and more customers sign up, they can drive their per-server costs down significantly. Their labor cost per customer would also decrease significantly. Meanwhile, your run-of-the-mill VPS provider is sweating decisions like \"do I rent another rack\" or \"can I afford to hire another engineer\"..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Could this be rephrased as, \"Why is linode so damn expensive?\" I don't know the answer to that question. Maybe Hurricane Electric is both unreliable and expensive." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I am paying about $18 per month for my linode instance. I am not going to migrate to $10 a month VPS for a saving of $8 per month. Linode knows this and is under no pressure to drop their prices.It would be a totally different story of mu hosting needs costed me $1000s." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Hardware are getting cheaper & faster. The same is with Storage. Virtualization Tools & OS are mostly free. Worst if I compare the US VPS prices against those in Europe. E.g HostEurope or Leaseweb.VPS just dun make any sense." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Conditions inside Amazon don't necessarily reflect the state of every business in the industry." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "No its not too late far from it.I finished grad school in 2010 (I'm 23 y/o) and most of my classmates were 25-38 range. Grad school really is alot better for mature students far far better. I felt I learnt alot more not from the subject matter/university but from the peers I was around who were all very mature even at my age." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think it might depend on whether you're aiming for a career in academia, where there's a certain amount of (de facto, not necessarily conscious) age discrimination.If not, I doubt it matters, but either way, 2 yrs seems fairly trivial. I finished my master's around 30, and I'm doing fine (in a non-academic job)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I know plenty of professionals who started their master's anywhere from 3 to 5 years after finishing their bachelor's. There are some programmes, including many MBAs, that require this." }, { "score": 3, "text": "There is no age limitation for education. You can do Bachelors when you are in 50s... so doing MS in your 20s is fine.\nFrom what I have seen, at my college, most people are in the range of 23-35 doing their MS (I am 23, myself), so you would be comparably young @ 25." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It's never too late to start a new degree. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/guwahati/100-year-ol..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This overlooks ProxyCommand, the single most useful reason for using an ssh config file.e.g.: Host internal-*.example.net\n ProxyCommand ssh -T external.example.net 'nc %h %p'\n\n\nBasically, specify as ProxyCommand whatever command needs to be run to give you i/o to the remote sshd - in this case, sshing to a bastion host and running netcat. This allows me to do, for example: ssh internal-dev.example.net\n\nWhich will (in background) ssh to the bastion host external.example.net. I can even do port forwards to internal hosts using -L or LocalForward directives. It's a huuuuge timesaver.ssh even automatically replaces %h and %p in the ProxyCommand with a host and port, though you can of course replace those tokens with static values if it works better.(Also, note above that one can use wildcards in Host declarations.)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "> Personally, I use quite a few public/private keypairs for the various servers and services that I use, to ensure that in the event of having one of my keys compromised the dammage is as restricted as possible.If you keep all those private keys on the same machine and tend to load them all into ssh-agent frequently, then there's little point in that. People forget that keypairs are not like passwords -- if Github gets compromised, nobody can do anything with the public key you gave them.Unless you treat the keys very differently (like having a special key that you rarely ever decrypt), there's no reason to have more than one per device." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I now use Mosh exclusively over ssh. It's great on slow connections as well as on fast ones. For example, I can start an ssh connection at home on my laptop, drive to the office and resume like nothing ever happened. One of the best discoveries of the past year for me.http://mosh.mit.edu/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "If you add the following to your .bash_profile, you'll get command line completion of your hosts: function _ssh_completion() {\n perl -ne 'print \"$1 \" if /^[Hh]ost (.+)$/' ~/.ssh/config\n }\n complete -W \"$(_ssh_completion)\" ssh" }, { "score": 4, "text": "A great option to enable for servers where you're constantly SSHing to (either opening a shell or pushing a repo) is ControlMaster, which lets you multiplex a single connection and cut down on the initial connection time (including authentication)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": ""Theft Of Electricity" (on the basis that a computer doing something for an unauthorised user would consume more electricity than if that user was not issuing commands) was one of the first offences used in the UK to prosecute computer hackers in the early 1980s, before specific hacking legislation was introduced.Obviously, not a whole lot of electricity - fractions of a penny, at a time - but enough of a "wrongdoing" to get the case into court." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This title is incorrect. 'Openbaar Ministerie' is the Dutch public prosecutor, not the police." }, { "score": 2, "text": "By definition if you obtain any monetary benefit from a criminal act then it is Money Laundering. It encompasses a lot of different possible activities. Tax evasion is a crime but if you take that money and transfer it to an overseas account then that is money laundering." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Original article (also in Dutch): http://tweakers.net/nieuws/95169/politie-pakt-nederlander-me..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Sounds perfectly reasonable to me... it's certainly not the most efficient method." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "\"The Brothers Karamazov\" - Fyodor Dostoevsky.Perhaps the very first existentialist novel ever written. Dostoevsky was an existentialist before anyone knew what existentialism was." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Albert Camus - The FallAll-time favourite. Heck, the fact that my all-time fav band is named after the same novel doesn't hurt." }, { "score": 2, "text": "On Man and the Universe - Aristotle.(Relevance other than stamping \"Ask YC\" to the front of it? Just curious)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance By Robert M. Pirsig" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "On Firefox (and now Chrome apparently) web developer plugin.http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ Tools -> Web Developer -> Resize" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Just an FYI - the Web Developer Toolbar extension for FF and Chrome has this built-in." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Nice, but I can't help but think this would be better as a browser extension instead. That way you could use it on your own URL without going back and forth." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Here is the javascriptlet:\njavascript:window.resizeTo(400,400)I was able to crash FF 3.6.17 with javascript:window.resizeTo(999999999,999999999999).Just something I found interesting." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Cool utility - one minor change that I would use ... put in an INPUT box, so that I can paste a URL in there ... then when I click on each size, open the tab and point it to that URL, then I can quickly see my site in all of the different sizes.Well done, quite sexy :)\nA" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I helped write this post. Note that we're very interested in anyone who has been keeping raw packet logs from before the Heartbleed vuln. was public. If you find 18 03 (01 | 02 | 03) 00 03 01 in them, please let me know or post pcap files. Contact info: https://www.eff.org/about/staff/yan-zhu" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I must admit to being suspicious about this. I would consider myself very very careful about password and other security issues because of various human rights projects I work on, yet on 16th March at very unusual but clever time for attempting such a thing against me (at the time I would have tried this, if I was targeting me and collected relevant pre-attack information) someone from the UK used my exact and recently changed password to login to my email service - traced back to a very unusual location for attempting such a thing. Luckily the service I use for low-level mail security noticed this strange login and blocked it.It has puzzled me quite a bit as nothing like this has (knowingly occurred to me before) and I take a lot of precautions (which for obviously reasons I'm not going to go into) against keyloggers, malware, MITM, etc etc. With such target hardening I was very suspicious of how it occurred.Ofcourse maybe I was sleep talking my passwords again :)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This would be so easy for the NSA etc. to do that I think we have to consider it as inevitably having occurred.All they would have had to do is take a close look at any new changes committed to OpenSSL and other critical infrastructure software. Surely they have people doing that -- they would be remiss not to." }, { "score": 3, "text": "What worries me, is that the Snowden leaks didn't seem to have a strong emphasis on SSL encryption suggesting to me that they could circumvent it.For reference take a look at this article from September.\nhttp://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/05/net-us-usa-securit..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Pardon me for being cynical about this, but from what we've heard about NSA hacking and industry collaboration I would say it's highly likely that a large number of the Certificate Authorities themselves are compromised by the NSA or GCHQ and so it renders the question moot.4 Certificate Authorities control > 90% of the market 3 of them based in the US and 1 in the UK. With access to the CA's keys they can sign any number of certificates they want." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Congratulations on releasing Mjolnir!Here is some feedback: I have never heard of Mjolnir, or Hydra, before. I visited the page you linked and skimmed through. Here is what I learnt:- That it's a "Lightweight automation and productivity power-tool for OS X"- How to try it out- How to uninstall it, or install it to $HOME- How to install it's doc sets- How to work with modules- FAQ on some very technical questions- Some high-level phylosophical comparison with other apps ("Mjolnir is more modularized, Slate is more all-in-one")- Thanks, technical changes, license etc.I still have no idea what is it, what problems could it solve and what are some typical examples of automation, apart from a single paragraph"start writing some fun staff" in "Try it out" section.I'm certainly interested in automating tasks on my Mac, but after reading the landing page I have no idea what kinds of tasks it could be. Is it better that Automator? How does it compare? Is it better then writing shell scripts? etc.If I were you, I would spend 70% of the page to explain what someone can accomplish with Mjolnir and why they should care, and 30% (or less) on the technical stuff. May be I'm not an intended audience." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I can't read that page at all (I'm rendering it in XFCE in debian, because I am broke and between Macs.)to clarify, I can see that there is text, but it's so thin and faint on my crappy LCD that I'm getting a headache trying to read it. No, this doesn't happen on most sites." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I was going to ask -- isn't this exactly like Hydra? But some Googling indicates it's the same project and was renamed. Explanation of the name change here:http://sdegutis.github.io/2014/08/11/the-history-and-current..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "How does it compare to Amethyst [http://ianyh.com/amethyst/] ?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "It'd be awesome if there were a brew cask formula for install/setup." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Very slick. My only suggestion is to allow a bit more terseness by adding static versions of all the calls that can happen at the beginning of the Query. The static versions would just create a new SQL object and pass the call on to the SQL object's call.Instead of: new SQL().SELECT_ALL()\n\nYou could have Query.SELECT_ALL()Ideally Java would be cool with having Static and non-Static methods with identical signatures and names, but alas, looks like a static class Query or whatever would be the way to do this." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This looks very similar to jOOQ in my first impression. http://www.jooq.org/I wonder if the author was aware of the existence of jOOQ?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is opinion only, so please don't take this as me being negative: I really like the idea, but there's one thing which need to happen for this to be upstream.Most decent IDE's (Idea and few others) are clever enough to understand the SQL between quotation marks and if connected to database will give you instant errors if something is incorrect - misspelled names, missing commas, etc. Sometimes this can be a big time saver." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I wrote something like this for C# just yesterday as I couldn't find an sql builder with a real fluent interface. I found one which pretended to be fluent by returning itself after each method call, but that completely misses the point, because you want each call to create a mutation but leave the original in tact. That allows me to build a query using all of the WHEREs and then branch it off into two separate queries.. one for COUNT and one to select the actual data.Just wondering.. did you create this to be used in the read layer of a DDD/CQS based system?Edit: actually looking at the source it appears this one is similar to the one i saw in C# where each call just returns the same builder rather than a new version" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Looks cool. I love DSL style API for chaining calls. Make it so simple." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The SR-71 was developed using 20th century technology. It was envisioned with slide rules and paper. It wasn’t managed by millions of lines of software code. And it wasn’t powered by computer chips. All that changes with the SR-72.Oh oh." }, { "score": 1, "text": "What's the deal with all the SR-71 posts in the past few days? They're a cool relic of the cold war age but what has happened recently with them that's warranted all the attention?Also if you're really enamored with them you should definitely check out the national airforce museum in Dayton, OH: http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/ You can see one up close, along with all kinds of other planes, jets, and missiles. Admission is free, and expect to spend at least a full day walking around the place." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm not that familiar with military aircraft development timelines, but this stuck out as my favorite part:A hypersonic plane does not have to be an expensive, distant possibility. In fact, an SR-72 could be operational by 2030." }, { "score": 3, "text": "So given Lockheed's track record on the F-35, we'll see this finally cancelled around 2040 (the first $1 trillion aircraft program) when everyone else has built similar planes better, faster, and more reliably." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Part of what made the SR-71 incredible was Kelly Johnson's ability to keep the team small, fast, and focused in designing it. Not sure if that's the case here." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I will sidestep particular suggestions for a general comment.One kind of general background is taking (many) steps toward figuring out who your market is, and not assuming that you understand the target population, which translates into: \nWhat is the business model that will work for your idea, and how should my idea change as a consequence of what I learn?Steve Blank's venture / startup blog discusses fairly frequently the search (and iteration on the search, and the learning involved during the search) for a business model, answering the question: Who is the population that is willing to pay for the service? This is a distinctly different from the the search for, construction of (and iteration on) a minimum viable product or service.Nobody really knows their market when they start, or how to find it. They discover it by trying many things, in many populations, revising as they go, from learning experience to learning experience.Asking people to pay, right now, is a very instructive process toward discovery of your business model. You might have a perfect product, but no buyers. Find the buyers. Ask people why they're not a buyer.See:An MVP is not a Cheaper Product, It’s about Smart Learning\nhttp://steveblank.com/2013/07/22/an-mvp-is-not-a-cheaper-pro...Who’s Doing the Learning?\nhttp://steveblank.com/2013/06/03/whos-doing-the-learning/" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think Twitter ads are a great place to start. You can get setup with the in under 30 min. You can start with a very low budget. You can start seeing results as early as tomorrow.To give you an idea, for http://www.BromBone.com we target the followers of just one account. The people who follow this account are very likely to find our service useful. Overtime we will expand to other accounts. We spend just $5 per day, and that will bring us about 20-25 visitors per day, plus a new follower or a retweet every once and a while. Our ads started running within 24 hours of setting up our account.This probably won't scale well enough to get all the customer you need, but it can give you a starting point. It can allow you to collect some potential customers email addresses so that you can talk to them and figure out what they need. Or maybe no one signs up at all. In that case you need to make some bigger changes." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It sounds like what you want are the basics of marketing. This is a common need for CS grads. Here are some places to start at getting traffic:http://www.quora.com/Startups/Whats-an-effective-way-to-driv...http://derwiki.tumblr.com/post/40523233923/getting-traffic-f...If you post your site here, you may get some good advice. Alternatively, I have found criticue.com to offer excellent free feedback." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Recruit them manually. This thread has a lot of great tips.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765" }, { "score": 4, "text": "http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo - This should get you a start on the SEO side of things." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Don't let clients anywhere near their own domains and hosting.Before you know it, you're drenched in trouble, trying to get some hack-cheap-registrar to unlock domains or whatever, while the client is desperate because his e-mail doesn't work, or figuring out why the website broke, only to find out the boss's nephew tried to install a BT tracker on the site, and by the way, no, he doesn't have a backup, didn't you take care of that?Get a small VPS at SliceHost and host the sites yourself. Forward their e-mail to GMail accounts, or setup apps for your domain. Charge $20 a month, paid a year in advance. One billing round a year, if it takes you more than half a morning, you're doing it wrong.The only point of contact the client has is you, the only bill he gets is from you, and you're pretty soon pocketing a few $100 a month simply by not screwing up the server." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Make sure the client knows what they're doing with regards to a web presence: E.g. they can manage e-mail / hosting set ups. If they don't, they're likely to get burned, even with your advice.I would advise getting a small VPS from Slicehost. Set it up so that it automatically backs up (they charge like $5/month to do machine replication, but having an always-ready-to-go daily backup of your client's machine should be a closer).If you're going to go for old-school hobbyist shared-hosting, I'd suggest Myhosting.com or http://www.nobullshithosting.com/I'd also advise you to stay away from Dreamhost.com. Their servers have terrible bandwidth, lose emails, and their TOS is ridiculously restrictive to the point where they can justify closing your account for any reason -- the primary one being that you're actually costing them more they're paying (e.g. using more than half the \"promised\" 500GBs of space their $9.99/month account gives you)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I tend to point any clients that want low cost hosting towards GeekStorage.com - they have a $35/yr plan. Another is A Small Orange, but I have had much more problems with ASO than I have with GeekStorage.If you're looking for something 'beefier' - I'm currently with WebFaction.com - awesome guys, great if you need some cheap hosting for your Django/Rails apps (and don't want to pay for a VPS)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "All the cheap hosting places suck. Dealing with the customer and the non-responsive $5 / mo hosting place takes more time and effort than just hosting it yourself.If they are truly low traffic, just host them yourself on a business class connection. You can pack a lot of low traffic websites on one machine. Graphics will load slowly unless you pay for more bandwidth, and you have to do your own backups, of course. Have your customers buy the domain themselves, but then have them log into godaddy or whoever they used and do the setup yourself.Should the business relationship end, they control the domain and can just point it somewhere else, and you can mail their backup to them on a CD, and thus not be accused of holding anything hostage." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Why not Weebly?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "If Bill can get 8% returns on his money every year, he might wanna start a hedge fund. Or at least borrow as much money at 5% as he can and invest it all." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"How can that be? College degrees bring higher income, but at today's cost they can't make up the savings they consume and the debt they add early in the life of a typical student.\"That's a very interesting analysis. I've read for a while now that for many young people who pursue college degrees, the economic return of the investment to gain the degree is actually negative. There are some broader societal implications here too, as much of funding for college study is third-party payment funded by taxes on people who never attend college at all. Some economists of education, notably Mark Blaug, point out that public subsidies for college study are massive wealth transfers from the poor to the rich." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I have read that Newton would not put numerical examples in his writing because he feared people would pick over some small error and use it to claim the whole work was wrong. I think that's what most of the negative comments here are like that - you guys are probably right about different ways to run the numbers, but you are missing the forest for the trees.The investment in a college degree is so large, and involves speculating on payoffs that are so far in future, at a time when whatever you think you will do as a career will likely change several times, that the pay off has to be an enormous no-brainer. If the college investment pays off if the interest rate is 8% but not if it is 5%, the college loses just by a bird-in-hand rule. The college guy has to beat the non-college guy by something like 10 times no matter what back of the envelope estimates you make.Some related personal observations:-- Ten years ago online forums argued about how to get into the best college, no one even raised the question of if college itself is useful. Now articles and discussions like this are commonplace.-- No one I know really uses anything they learned in college to make money. Even people working in the same field their degree is in, had to learn how to really work in that field on the job after they left college. College was a big time and money consuming initiation ritual.-- Most the people I know who earned a large amount of money -- not those who inherited it -- either did not attend college at all or did very poorly in it; nad none of them admitts to using any college education to make money.-- A handful of the most agressively and purposely stupid people I have ever met have advanced degrees ( medical and legal). I suspect that some part of the culture of those evironments educates people in the stupid direction, not the smart direction, in a kind of \"reverse education\", encouraging aggressive pronouncements of certainty on uncertain questions, for example.-- Taking a personal sample of the people I know who have made a lot of money (avoiding those I hear about elsewhere -- just people I personally know, to avoid a media bias but replace it with a personal bias), the way to get rich is to fail out of college after one year of hard drinking, and inherit enough money to buy a small business such as a restaurant or retail franchise and work your ass off for about 15 years, expanding to a chain of those businesses.-- Most of the people who I know who are going to college now, don't really actively want to go to college. They want to not be at home, and to be around people their age particularly of the opposite sex, and they are passively following the path of least resistence.All of this sounds bad, but I see a great thing in it: if we as a society really only should be sending about 5 to 10 percent of people to college (perhaps half of them only after a few years in the work force), then we can hugely increase the productivity of our economy very easily. I think, like medical care, we spend a lot on education in this country to get something that is at best only the same as what is available in countries that spend much less." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Depends on the field. According to the American Chemical Society, starting salary for BS Chemical Engineers is 58K in 2007. This is higher that the numbers mentioned in the article, and I suspect the oil biz is a reasonable gig. I think everybody's in agreement that the starting salary for, say, orthopedic surgeons is a little bit higher than this. And Wall Street paid those MBA's quite a lot up until recently.So, maybe SOME degrees are worth the hassle. Others, less so unless you're really turned on by the subject - I really love history, but I'm not going to try to get degrees in the subject.As buugs said, don't get one if it's not what you want. Get one if it's what you need..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Don't get a degree if you don't care what you do? What an insight." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This module doesn't seem to make it possible to type-annotate map and filter, which are Python builtins.I believe that dynamic typing results from frustration over generics, rather than over static typing in general. (Type stuttering is another problem, but modern languages solve it with local type inference.) I mean, annotating non-generic functions is always straightforward doesn't introduce much complexity: # s should be str\n # returns nothing\n def print(s):\n ...\n\n # just becomes (using Py3 annotation syntax)\n def print(s: str) -> None:\n ...\n\nHowever, it's much harder to write a type annotation of generic functions. Worse, remember that Python's map is variadic. # for any types t0, t1, t2, ... tn:\n # fn is a function that takes arguments of types t0, t1, ... t(n-1)\n # and returns a value of type tn;\n # seqs are iterables of types t0, t1, ... t(n-1);\n # returns a list of type tn.\n def map(fn, *seqs):\n ...\n\n # How to write this signature is non-obvious\n\nMany mature static typing systems would allow you to express such types (usually called parameterized types). But any one of them would require more than those trivial notations in print.That's when the dynamic typing people get annoyed and go "fxxk static typing systems, I can handle this in my mind". Which is about 65% (totally random estimation) the point of dynamic typing in my opinion.Any type checker for dynamic typed languages that doesn't seriously try to solve the generics problem is not genuinely interesting." }, { "score": 1, "text": "As a somewhat new python programmer (~2 years) coming from statically compiled languages like C#, C++ and Pascal this is something I have thought about a lot. My initial impulse was to wish I had static type checking. But I have come to the conclusion that I just hadn't fully appreciated the differences between interpreted and compiled languages.The article says that the lack of type checking "lets through" a certain class of errors. However, let's be specific here: there is no build-time static analysis phase in the transformation of python source to executable code. So "lets through" means the same thing whether you have strong typing or not: the error is going to be found at runtime. What we're really talking about, then, is converting AttributeError ("YourObject has no attribute 'startswith'") into something more specific ("Hey, this is supposed to be a string!"). Honestly, that seems to me to be a pretty minor increase in diagnostic information.So the bottom line for me is that I feel I didn't really understand duck typing. I used to joke that the term actually meant "no typing," and that is in some respects true. But what it really means is "the thing can do what the method expects it to be able to do." If the thing can't serve in the expected role, then the existing errors that result are sufficiently explanatory, imo." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I've been checking types in Python dynamically for years now. My library, Obiwan https://pypi.python.org/pypi/obiwan/1.0.2 uses type annotations, which I think nicer than decorators." }, { "score": 3, "text": "There's one thing that doesn't sit well with me about adding type-checking to the CPython implementation of the Python language. Type-checking is generally used at compile-time to check that your program won't do nasty things, and then run-time checks are done only when you do something overly dynamic that the compiler couldn't check (i.e. casting an Object to some concrete class in Java). However, all type-checking implementations for CPython work purely at runtime! And type-checks are invoked each time your function is called! This seems not only wasteful, but also defeats the purpose of type-checking before running your program.I would rather see a more generic pre/post-condition contract system, to be used in select top-level functions, that gives a lot more flexibility in expressing what is supposed to happen (i.e. I expect to be given a not-None value with a __str__ method that doesn't throw and will return an iterator yielding consecutive not-empty, not-None strings), including what assumptions you're making when you call a function that you got from a random object (i.e. here I'm calling a function that I got somehow as a parameter and I'm going to assume it can take a string of the format "ipv4 address:port" and returns an object that is a database connection), together with a mechanism for recovering from broken contracts - we are doing runtime checks, so there's no reason to restrict ourselves to Java-style type constraints, which don't even work for Python in general. Or, alternatively, a lighter system that can be checked at import time once before the program is started "for real". Preferably both of those." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This is the single biggest thing I miss coming from modern Perl. Pythonistas seem very anti-type validation/checking, but with Moose classes the type stuff simplifies a lot, is declarative, self documenting, and vastly reduces certain classes of bugs.The closest I've seen is the traits thing from Enthought, but there doesn't seem to be much buy-in from python users." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The article touches upon cultural differences in how publicly flaunting wealth by openly giving large sums to charity is perceived. In Europe, from my perspective as someone living in the Netherlands, we find it hard to imagine to attend a flashy fundraiser dinner to finance good causes or even politicians seeking election. The only thing that comes close are auctions for charity, but these are generally frowned upon in traditional circles as vehicles for celebrities and the noveau riche in their attempt to appear in the society columns of the less respectable newspapers. We love participating in state sanctioned lotteries for charity (the only kind allowed here in the Netherlands) and collectively open our wallets whenever a natural disaster strikes (e.g. the tsunami of '04 or more recently the floods in Pakistan or the disaster in Haiti). Our reaction to events like that is to broadcast tremendously successful fundraiser shows on the public TV channels (like NPR in the US) that feature celebrities appealing to the public to give money. I suppose these natural disasters remind us of our own battle with the elements, like the flood of 1953. The problem with that kind of aid, of course, is that it isn't very effective, because it's hard to put all that money to good use in areas where all the infrastructure is gone while dealing with corrupt governments that can't be relied upon.That being said, we do try to imitate the US. Things like fundraiser dinners are starting to happen on a small scale. There is no self respecting (pseudo) celebrity that doesn't work on a side project as the 'ambassador' of some kind of animal shelter or what not. A cynic would say that these activities are great publicity for people that want to stay in the spotlight. Of course, there are also a few people doing productive charity work, e.g. on education or micro lending, so it wouldn't do to be overly dismissive.A major difference between European welfare states and the US is taxation. Our (upper) middle class pays a 52% income tax and that is just the first in a long list of fiscal burdens. This raises different expectations from the government, because unlike the US we actually give them the money to pursue the dreams of ambitious politicians so they don't have to overspend the budget. As I'm of the persuasion that private initiatives are infinitely more promising than anything the government comes up with I envy the American culture where the wealthy don't look to the government to support the causes they care about.Of course, the downside of the American culture is that the way politics gets financed (with the Obama campaign as a positive exception) seems a bit sketchy at times. Not that our own system is preferable, because we've taken it to the other extreme and have our government pay for the election campaigns of our politicians in order to avoid the suggestion of political debt to private benefactors. My main worry about charitable giving in the US are the incredibly well financed religious groups that force their creationist fantasies upon helpless school children or hold back things like stem cell research. The right answer to that, however, isn't to change the American culture of giving, but to make sure that voices of reason can match the deep coffers of religious pressure groups." }, { "score": 1, "text": "One thing that's never mentioned in these types of articles is that the top two categories for donations are churches and schools. Fully one third of US donations are to churches and another 13% for educational institutions (including private colleges and K-12 schools). That's nearly half of donations going to organizations that perform very little actual philanthropy and spend most of their money with organizational self-interest in mind." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That's unacceptable.http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,710972,00..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This article sure doesn't answer the \"why\" question well. I'd love to see some deeper analysis, especially related to tax breaks, the number of available charities, and correlation between giving & religion." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I think it would be more fair to rank based on per capita or percentage of GNI. Maybe I'm just Swedish." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux[1]. It was sold in boxes at stores such as CompUSA (remember?) but was also available for free download from Red Hat.Then, Red Hat decided they could make more money by spinning off Red Hat Linux into a separate enterprise-only product called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which they declined to make available for free in a ready-to-install binary form. Fedora[2] was also spun off at this time, as the free successor to Red Hat Linux that was supposed to be only suitable for home users. Fedora development was/is sponsored by Red Hat but they did not offer end-user support, in contrast to RHEL.Meanwhile, there was demand for a free version of RHEL. Since it was built with GPL software, Red Hat was obligated to make it available in source form, but their trademark policy prohibited anyone else from using the Red Hat name. Therefore, a group of volunteers took RHEL, removed Red Hat trademarks, and called it CentOS. To avoid confusion, CentOS explained the origins of the distribution on their web site. For their efforts, they were threatened by Red Hat's legal department and forced to remove all mentions of Red Hat and even links to Red Hat's web site from the CentOS web site. CentOS complied and began referring to its Red Hat derivations using the euphemism PNAELV[3].Now, Red Hat has again decided they would benefit from being more directly involved in providing an open-source, freely-available enterprise Linux distribution. We've come full circle.(Flippant depiction aside, I intend no antagonism, but merely find the history of these projects interesting.)[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux\n[2]: https://fedoraproject.org/en/about-fedora\n[3]: http://www.pnaelv.net" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Congrats to the CentOS team. You filled a much needed gap when the Fedora / RHEL split happened.As someone who used Red Hat Linux in the 90's / early 2000's, you had to be there to know how large of a gap the CentOS team filled.Historical background:Red Hat Linux (RHL) was the most widely used Linux distro in the late 90's / early 2000's. Overnight, RedHat destabilized RHL by turning it into Fedora with it's rapid release cycles, lack of back ports, bleeding edge packages etc. RHEL became a closed distro with only source distributed, but none of the tools to easily replicate the build.RHL users (who were the majority of Linux users) were faced with a choice. Pay for RHEL or switch distros. This really sucked b/c RHL deployments were largely servers that were designed for long term deployments. The community was faced with a large scale migration of servers which involved a large population of web and edge of network deployments.This is when CentOS stepped in, created a binary compatible build of RHEL, and allowed long time RHL users to continue with a RedHat-like distro.RedHat has been a major contributor to OSS. However, projects like CentOS have filled very important roles in the Linux and OSS communities. Again, congrats to the team." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I really wish that, when RHEL/CentOS branches from Fedora to make a new release, they would also keep and provide a snapshot of Fedora's repository at that time, just like what Ubuntu does when they sync with Debian Sid (i.e.: packages in 'main' and 'restricted' repos are supported, all other packages in the Debian archive are imported and made available in 'universe' and 'multiverse' repository for your convenience).That would work a long way to make CentOS a viable Linux distribution for everyday use. In my experience, EPEL isn't enough and rebuilding packages seems like a wasted effort since they were there when they branched off to prep a new release.Add a somewhat predictable release schedule on top of that (again, in my opinion Ubuntu hit the sweet spot with 24 months here) and that would be the icing on the cake. Heck, RHEL 6 was first released in 2010 and there's still Python 2.6 on that!I know that I could shut up and use Ubuntu (I do), it's just that I like RedHat way more than Canonical but they don't make it easy for me to use and love their products (speaking as a former Fedora user and contributor)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Does this mean we can finally stop referring to RedHat as an unnamed "Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor"?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I hope this will make it easier for me to use CentOS at NASA. They only want us to use Linux distributions that are actively supported with security fixes and for some reason they don't think CentOS qualifies, since it's not a "real" company. They prefer us to use RHEL, Ubuntu, or Suse. But if this new arrangement increases the perception of timeliness for updates, then maybe we can start using it and save some money.Edited for clarity." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This does not belong on HN" }, { "score": 1, "text": "As far as I can tell as a non-American, Americans are getting the news coverage they want. Even ardent Democrats seem to be extremely reluctant to face the fact that this is not a matter of a major political divide, but a bunch of fundamentalists extremist holding the government hostage.There are no two equal sides to this story." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I love articles about the structure of systems of people. Tells me what might work in technology teams (or not). And I'm not afraid of controversial or political pieces, as long as the HN community can comet civilly on them.But I had to flag this.Why? Not because I disagree with the author, although I do. It's because the author has no understanding of how the American system of governance works or is so blinded by this latest manufactured political crisis that they're incapable of it.Legislatures win out over executives, whether it's their special law or not. In the states we've had this discussion at the founding, and the reasoning then still holds. And laws passed by one Congress do not have to be funded or encouraged by another. If so, what would be the purpose of electing new people?More to the point, it assumes that agreement is somehow more important than representation. That's a dark and dangerous alley to go down, one I hope to never visit in my lifetime." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I don't get why they keep calling shutdown while it's a default." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I have several problems with this article. First, I don't see why it is on Hacker News. Second, the article seems to argue that the media should not be objective, but should take sides. One doesn't have to be a reader of "The Nation" and "National Review", as I am, to know that there is a full range of ideological media out there taking all sides of every issue. Finally, it is ironic to be lectured by an Arab news organization criticizing our democracy." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I used to work for Blizzard. The Chinese government requested that we modify the WoW client so that they could intercept all chat. As far as I know, no-one said anything, including me - and Blizzard, of course, was more than happy to comply, given the size of the market and the risk of being forbidden to do business there. There were plenty of other MMOGs happy to play ball and eat that cake.I didn't say anything. It was happening to "them", Chinese nationals. Not only that, but "they" should know better than to say sensitive things online, because even if we didn't install the back door, I reasoned, it wouldn't be too hard to get that data through various other means.I really regret not only my participation, but not making a big stink about it. No-one did. I strongly suspect that that same system is being being used domestically, now. Clearly it was the wrong thing to do. I've regretted my role in that implementation for several years. I shouldn't have participated, and I should have protested. Even if it didn't stop it, at least the company leadership might have felt the heat. But I was a coward and I didn't want to lose my job, didn't want to fight a legal battle, and, like I said, it was just China spying on it's people, which everyone knew they do anyway.And who knows? The news probably would have been ignored, or, if it wasn't, I might have been branded as a coward and a disloyal employee, betraying the people who put food on my table. And I being under 30, overpaid, over-priviledged, etc. I can hear the Fox News commentators even now. That, to me, has been the most difficult thing about Snowden, is that here's someone who did the right thing, who revealed wrong-doing on the part of our government, and there are a lot of people who say he's the wrongdoer, who attack him as disloyal and worse. A back door in a game used by China? Who would even care about that? And if they did, I'd just be torn to shreds, unemployable and with heaven-knows-what kind of future.The reaction to Manning and Snowden, particularly the lack of strong public support, sends a strong signal that people don't want to know. They don't want to upset the apple cart. They don't want to challenge the government, they don't want to question it, not even when it's clearly violating it's own most important rules - the rules that, presumably, we've been fighting to promote these last 200 years. It seems hopeless." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Here's an alternative vantage point, my vantage point, one I think makes these kinds of ethical quandaries easier to navigate:* I'm not a "white hat" or a "black hat"* I'm not deliberately involved in any kind of "cyber" conflict* I don't do what I do because I'm battling the forces of evil, or organized crime, or anything elseInstead: I do engineering. The same way a contract driver developer does, or a Rails dev. I happen to work in a particularly challenging problem domain. My work happens to have some interesting implications. But those implications are not the reason I work in the field; I work here because it allows me to grapple with compilers, number theory, low-level networking, hardware, OS kernels, and every imaginable development platform. It's about the craft.I find this vantage point, which appears amoral, makes the ethical dilemmas easier to resolve. If a company like Narus asks me to help them make a network monitoring system harder to evade, I don't have to put that request into some ethical framework that considers the good that application might do. I just turn the work down. Same goes for the US Government; no, sorry, not interested.Total respect for Alex (the "white hat consulting company" he founded is iSec Partners, our sister company and former archrival). I get the sense that Alex engages intentionally with these dilemmas, that he wants to be a part of something larger than himself and, I think, larger than the craft. As a result, sure, he has to live a carefully examined life, and make sure the projects he's working on aren't skewing his compass. I admire him for picking his way through those problems. But I'm every bit as engaged with the field as Alex is, and I'm here to tell you that you don't have to get tangled up in these kinds of ethical problems if you don't want to." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Great presentation and something that programmers in general (not just infosec) need to have a personal decision model for. Everyone should be able to make their own decision to these questions as they see fit, but the more we talk about issues like this the more we see where other people like us (who maybe were put into this position in the context of "work") have decided on a stance (and the repercussions of said stance) the better off we all are. We who work on machines and not man don't have an oath that we are taught to follow and/or live by, and I don't necessarily think we should. That being said, the Jr. programmer working for a small firm can encounter decisions of ethical importance as much as a black/white/grey/green/mauve hat infosec can. To me, this is the core value of what a site like HN provides and probably the main reason I read the comments on HN more than I do the articles." }, { "score": 3, "text": "My favored moral framework for most situations is the noblesse oblige: If, by chance or by choice, you have the privilege of affecting a lot of people, you now have the responsibility of supporting the most marginalized members of that group, regardless of whatever prejudice against them you may have had.This is, in a lot of cases, a nearly impossible obligation to completely fulfill, but in application, it leads to both a closer examination of privilege and to moral decisions and outcomes that are progressive." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'd say correct answer almost always is to leave quietly. Let's leave doing immoral things to immoral people and let's hope their employers starve due to elevated fees.Also if you live in US you should always put your own safety in the first place. US justice system becomes most significant threat to capable citizens." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "\"Hi, I'm Linux. Lots of stuff will almost work, but not quite, and that's all part of the fun. I can sometimes do WPA but frankly it's going to be easier on both of us if you use WEP. I like to pretend I'm easy-to-use, but you need to be picky about which hardware you run me on - or I might not work. I can auto-update software, but sometimes we'll take a trip to dependency hell which will take hours to recover from - think of it as a form of intense mental workout. I've got a bunch of programs which will almost do what you want, but it won't be long before you're missing your old favourites like Office and Photoshop. There are lots of competing versions of me, and sometimes you'll get dragged into meaningless debates about which is best.\"I use Linux every day, but sometimes I get a bit jaded about this kind of thing." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The french one looked fun and well-done, though I couldn't understand what they were saying.The first one on the page with the music and still images is unintentionally hilarious. They cycle through pictures of people that I guess are involved with Linux, with the caption \"I'm Linux\". Probably around 95% of the people shown are white men. There is only a single woman.Well, two points for honesty." }, { "score": 2, "text": "So, does it strike anyone else as the first time \"I'm X\" makes any sense? You can't be Mac or Windows...because Apple and Microsoft will sic a pack of highly trained attack lawyers on you, if you try. But with Linux you really can be a part of it. Anyone who has ever helped someone on a mailing list is Linux (where \"Linux\" is as good a mascot for the overall Open Source experience as anything). Anyone who has submitted a patch to their favorite project is Linux. Anyone who has burned a copy of a Ubuntu or Fedora or CentOS or Debian for a friend to try out is Linux.There are many things you can say about Linux that aren't flattering (m0nty covered them sufficiently already, and though I disagree with many of them, or feel like it's unfair without following up with, \"Of course, both Mac and Windows also have an equal or greater number of seriously irritating quirks and flaws, but I already know how to work around those so I don't complain about it.\"), but Linux is a community, a movement, and a set of freedoms and capabilities that Apple and Microsoft simply can't deliver on. Linux and Open Source is so vastly over-powering in that regard, that it's...umm...I dunno...astonishing to me that so many folks focus on the little nits (without actually doing anything to fix them--since with Linux, you actually have that power). If Linux were less capable than the alternatives, I would understand it better...but there are so many things I do in Linux every day, that would be impossible, require a huge investment in third party tools, or otherwise simply not be as nice on Windows or Mac OS X." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Maybe it's because I've been up all night dredging through PayPal's api docs trying to figure out what version it's at, but as soon as I saw this I thought about a bunch of penguins ordering different things in a Baskin-Robbins. Linux... It's like ice cream. There's a flavor for you." }, { "score": 4, "text": ">The winner will receive a free trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009.Cool idea, and a trip to Tokyo sounds nice. But it's hard to get excited about going to a symposium." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Notes for the next time I want to make a fun video with friends at school:- Arbitrarily remove 1/4 of our male participants. Replace them with female engineers. If only one female engineer available, trim the team to four participants (3 men, 1 woman). If no female engineers, no video.- Trim people based on their color skin. For added humor, tell the people I remove from our friendly video that \"at least they won't have to take a train\" or something related to racist treatments through history. Because after all, the only reason I am removing them based on their skin color is to fight racism.- We can't have nice things. And we can't mock people either. If an actor is mocked in a video, make sure to blur him completely in post-processing to avoid any of this actor's features to be recognized: earrings? hair? skin? five fingers? Be serious people, we can't mock an actor with five fingers on each hand, think of the stereotypes involved!- People can only use skill that their \"ancestors\" and \"culture\" created. This means if this friend wants to showcase his Didgeridoo playing but he's no Australian mate, he WON'T play the Didgeridoo. Same goes for reggae tunes which can only be used if you are all jamaican (This is a very important point: while I may think this is doing a tribute to Bob Marley, this is actually \"stoner racism\").- Include minorities in my video. The more tokens, the more communities will watch my video and like it.- Remind myself that if a \"white male\" is ever in the front row of my video, I am promoting white supremacy and sexism.- That girl who wants to dance in the background because she thinks it's fun and doesn't like singing/doesn't want too much exposure? She can't. Feminists decided (for her own good) thatshe should be on the front row, having 1/4 of the verses.Anything I missed before I rent the GoPro and call down my friends?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "This callout strikes me as ridiculous. The video could have been shot on an iPhone and probably had a budget of $50 (for coffee and cheap plastic sunglasses). As for the participation angle, unless there's any evidence that other students wanted to participate but were excluded then I don't see a problem. It's entirely likely that other students simply weren't interested in participating." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I am a current student at Purdue, and here is the video that the commentary is about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFbWXuR_2Ow" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Calling out racism and diversity might be a problem worth talking about, but it's a shame to me that this community seems more interested in having that discussion versus reflecting on why it continues to be called out in the first place. It seems like we're all about solving the worlds most difficult problems until it comes to the ones that hit closest to home." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Isn't it more offensive that the authors of this article assume the females involved couldn't possibly be engineers? Why? because they aren't white, male, and look like they are having too much fun? Seriously?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Ugh, that site makes me recall why I found stack overflow so annoying until you get a few points.\"Dave, I'm sorry, I can't let you (upvote|comment|put links in answers|do much of anything)\"" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Is this essentially the Ask MeFi for HN? I'm confused." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Am I the only one who's getting sick of the StackExchange sites? I like StackOverflow, but all of the StackExchange sites fall right into the uncanny valley for me." }, { "score": 3, "text": "i was gonna register, until I saw that you only take openid." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Does anyone know what license is used for the stackoverflow code and where/if it's currently available? From reading the article is sounds like Jeff and company are making the software available to the public in some form. I'd really like to learn more about this." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There's phpmyfaq which looks more like the specific tihng you have in mind, but I really think a wiki is a better idea.Mediawiki is the best choice if you don't need to do funny stuff like setting up closed groups.But like jacuesm said, the trac wiki is also nice but only if you intend to use the other trac capabilities IMO." }, { "score": 1, "text": "That looks really nice - I like it. I've used Cerberus Help Desk in the past and it was nice. ZenDesk, Kayako, Helpspot, and more fill this gap. Check out this past link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404963" }, { "score": 2, "text": "We have used http://kbpublisher.com/\nIt's pretty clean and powerful." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I've just started using Trac after some hints here (I wanted a self-hosted solution), and it comes with a built in wiki." }, { "score": 4, "text": "A wiki is really good for this, such as MediaWiki or Trac." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Quote of the day: \"This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business\"There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots." }, { "score": 1, "text": "To counter his disclaimer, Japanese and American web sites are very different:http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/25/the-puzzle-of-japanese-web...This doesn't address his core point. I've always believed that users will tolerate a surprising amount of crap to get what they want. Godaddy isn't exactly suffering." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Every piece of \"bloat\" has two consequences: it annoys some users -- possibly to the point of scaring them away from the service -- and it convinces some other users to do something profitable.The fact is, savvy users are much more likely to stick with a bloated system than we like to imagine. I still buy tickets from Orbitz, despite the pages of upsells I have to click through, because I have an account there and I know their quality of customer service." }, { "score": 3, "text": "There's good stuff here, but one worry... The stuff about fading customer acquisition and needing to upsell existing customers more... This sounds an awful lot like the trap that many \"mature\" companies get into where growth levels off and they switch their focus to squeezing the maximum amount of revenue out of existing customers.There's a tradeoff, and all of the business practices involved in squeezing more out of the \"captive audience\"--pricing, UX, everything--drive some customers away and alienate other prospective customers.This drives the need to squeeze even more out of captive customers, and the business and their most entrenched customers begin to circle each other in a deadly embrace.The author isn't advocating any of this, of course, it's a post about UX. But I did get that feeling like the argument was part and parcel of this dilemma facing businesses as they mature." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm not really sure where this is coming from, but really any sensible UX person will say \"good UX is requiring the least out of users to allow them to achieve their goals while having enough to deliver your business objectives\" and not \"less is better\".Obviously there is no perfect balance for any market and bloat is a completely subjective value to tag on to anything. Bloated in relation to what? In what context?For a site that sold £1000 shoes Amazon's UX principles would be a crazy strategy to implement, but if you apply the same idea visa-versa I imagine that Amazon would be able to measure lost revenue in the tens of millions. But there will be an underlying essential UX requirement because both sites are based on the principle that people have actively chosen to look for an item, and by making that decision they are, more than likely, willing to put up with more than, say, someone looking around a support site for help with their printer drivers." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I like TransIP[1]. They're also using SSDs, they're price competitive with DO, they're hosted in Amsterdam and they've never given me any trouble.Note: the discounted prices are just for the first month, and they don't include VAT (21%).[1] https://www.transip.eu/" }, { "score": 1, "text": "DigitalOcean for last 1.5 years. Was using servermania before that.Referral Link: https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=4d7fb2079a96Direct link: https://www.digitalocean.com/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "DigitalOceanref link https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=34a8a2d54244non-ref https://www.digitalocean.com/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "DigitalOcean.comPrometeus.comHost1Plus.comHostGator.comSiteGround.com" }, { "score": 4, "text": "RamNode is the best I've used so far." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Now there's a nice surprise, Nightly (Firefox-alpha build) actually scores one percent higher than Chrome Canary. I do hope Mozilla catches up in other areas, there needs to be more than one large non-Webkit browser out there to push the web forward." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Very nice. One quibble - The warning in the top right is a tiny bit ambiguous, it would read better as:\"Caution: This test checks which CSS3 features the browser recognizes, not whether they are implemented correctly.\"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I am actually a bit surprised the latest Opera didn't score better than 56%. Oh well, I guess I'd complain about the speed if everything was implemented." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Here's Lea Verou's (the creator) blog post about this:http://lea.verou.me/2012/02/exactly-how-much-css3-does-your-..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "What is it? I loaded it up in Internet Explorer and the page wouldn't render." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": ">(On task switching) \"Nothing else I’ve seen comes close.\"So true. It just feels SO much more like multitasking than any other platform.And notifications? I agree, amazing.I wish the article had covered the Gesture Area. I know the Touchpad did away with it, but the Gesture Area made everything so fluid, easy and intuitive.Another interface feature I LOVE is the swipe-to-delete. The super-hot iOS ToDo app \"Clear\" has that exact behavior and people love it.And how about TouchStone charging? Sooo nice. Pretty sure Palm was the first mainstream phone maker to have this functionality built-in.One more feature that was amazing was the ability to bump-to-sync with other newer webOS devices. It's like the popular app Bump on steroids....And of course we all know how the apps were HTML/JS which was a brilliant idea. Why make everyone learn a new language just to write apps?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I know lots of Apple fanatics are extreme minimalists but I really think iOS should also steal the back button from the Android. I very much dislike when one app causes another app to open, and then I have to press the home button and find the original app to go back to it. And if I'm lucky, it's still in the same state as before." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I never got to try WebOS, and I really wish I had (I know I can download an emulator, but you can't emulate day-to-day usage).That said, I'm using a Windows Phone these days, and it's fantastic. No, really. The UI is amazing, and going back to my old Android phone feels incredibly clunky by comparison. I wouldn't recommend one just yet- there's still work to do. For one, third party apps can't interface with native apps- for instance, the Messaging app seamlessly combines SMS, Facebook and Live chat, but I can't hook in GChat. If/when they get that set up they'll have a very loyal customer in me." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This article is a wonderful articulation of some of what I've been feeling since I replaced my Palm Pre with an iPhone 4 nearly a couple years ago.There are simply some things that WebOS's UI got better than iOS - and nearly two years later, using what is generally lauded as being the best mobile UI in the industry, I still miss some of those things.I have a recurring daydream where Android incorporates the best of WebOS into its next release, and it's suddenly far-and-away the best mobile OS." }, { "score": 4, "text": "One of the cool parts of webOS being released under the Apache license is that it makes patents much less of an issue. The Apache license's patent grants mean that Apple, Google, Microsoft, or anyone else can freely take the best parts from webOS without having to worry about HP suing them. (Palm had a lot of valuable patents on mobile/smartphone UI, which are now essentially off the table.)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I like the concept.You should categorize because someone people wouldn't care about certain issues but will fight tooth and nail for others.Like us being entrepreneurs, we would have an opinion on \"fast fail\", so we would want to get to these topics more quicker than something related to politics or sport.Categorising allows you to focus resources on which categories drive the most traffic to the site.Also, try to be more specific in seed content. Having broad topics thesis doesn't make for good arguments. For instance \"which team is better Lakers or Celtics\", may become \"which team would win 2010 champion-Lakers or Celtics\". It's narrower and more focus which makes for an easier argument. Broad categories require much wider and deeper knowledge to begin to address the debate." }, { "score": 1, "text": "With the up vote and down vote arrows, have one or the other light up when you mouse over a specific one, instead of having both light up. It will make it clearer which arrow you are about to click.I like the layout of the two sided debates over the debates with more than two sides. The two sided debates have the sides and results right in the middle at the top of the page. On debates with more than two sides, having the sides and results off to the right makes them easy to miss at first. The first debate I looked at was a more than two sided debate and because of the layout, I was a bit confused on what the sides of the debate were. It seemed like the comments were the sides because of their placement and the up/down vote arrows." }, { "score": 2, "text": "My friends started a debate site a while ago, and I'll tell you what I told them.For an part-time and fun project this is a very cool web app. I like the simplicity and it seems like a fun way to talk about various issues.As a startup idea, you would do better finding an idea that doesn't revolve strictly on creating a web community from scratch." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Oh yea have anonymous posting.People would like to post stuff quickly without having to signup.\nEventually, they will realize that \"hey I want to track what i posted\", so they sign up." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Allow pictures to be uploaded with your debate thesis.\nSometimes a picture or video can say more than words can." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "\"Our hedge fund is using existing technology to steal your money.\"This is absolutely certain to be true, also goes for mutual funds, and it happens in the plain sight of almost every investor.Hedge funds typically get two and twenty: two percent of your investment per year. Twenty percent of all gains. Apply this incentive structure to any sufficiently large pot of money and you make out like a bandit. Investors, not so much. Thankfully, if you have enough money to invest in a hedge fund you have enough money to pay someone who knows this to explain it to you.Actively managed mutual funds charge a management fee, typically in the neighborhood of 1.5 ~ 2% a year. (These are, thankfully, coming down.) This compares to 0.2% a year for index funds. Since actively managed mutual funds do not add value -- another secret in plain sight -- this will, over time, result in approximately half of the investors' gains accruing to the money manager. Most investors just pick whatever their broker recommends (brokers shudder) or pick the default choice for their retirement plan, which is generally set via splitting that huge fee with whomever is tasked to do the recommendation.Buy cheap index funds (or, if that strikes you as complicated, open an account with Vanguard and get one of their targeted retirement date options -- they'll work out the math for you)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Mr. Adams says he's a fan of conspiracy theories, but I don't think so, since he suggests conspiracy theories are typically \"any wild story\" engineered to sound feasible. This definition goes against the whole reason for including the word \"theory\" which is supposed to suggest underlying assumptions are at least in part based on observations. He unwisely paints such theories as black or white in terms of how feasible they are, without acknowledging that the truth of many popular conspiracy theories may (often likely) fall somewhere between completely false or true.Take his first example of a small group of rich people secretly running the world. Have people in the past conspired to influence outcomes at a local town or city wide level? Certainly. How about a larger scale than this, such as at a state or country level? Again, in many places, most certainly. Could that scale be increased even larger? Are there super wealthy people with power and influence? Certainly. When viewing things this way this \"unlikely\" theory becomes a lot more feasible, and the truth is probably somewhere between zero intentional conspiring, and one evil mastermind with an underground hundred-monitor supercomputer.What about aliens abducting people? I don't know about implanting chips in people's necks, which Mr. Adams seems to have thrown in to conveniently push this theory into the complete nonsense pile. I've always heard simply about alien abductions. Now, most credible sane scientists will tell you that it's more likely than not there is alien life in the universe. If we've now established alien life likely exists, we can also reason that it's possible that some alien life is further evolved and advanced than humans. In my opinion, the first place the abduction theory breaks down is the likelihood of any actual contact with aliens in existence (the universe is a really, really big place). I would say that's unlikely enough to effectively kill the abduction theory completely. However, if one lets the mind wander and play then maybe sufficiently advanced life forms could have discovered a way to leap through spacetime akin to the Starship Enterprise's warp speed ability. Sure, that's still a huge stretch, but it does give a bit more entertaining feasibility to this abduction theory Mr. Adams has so completely dismissed.To me that's how a true fan of conspiracy theories entertains them. ;)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "#1 Sounds plausible, but I know nothing of it; 60% confidence seems a little high to me on conspiracy theory \n# 2, at least with respect to the following leaked items, which are perhaps not especially surprising, but are a little more than \"baaarely embarrassing\":1. US pressuring Germany not to pursue criminal investigation of US agents' kidnapping and torture of German national (who happened to be innocent, but that's not especially relevant)http://harpers.org/archive/2010/11/hbc-900078312. US allegedly obstructing Spanish investigations of torture of Spanish subjects at Gitmo and use of Spanish facilities for extraordinary rendition program.http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-900078363. US diplomats spying on foreign diplomats, including the UN Sec. Gen., (although some do seem to think this is all de rigueur).http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The problem with his Wikileaks theory, in my opinion, is that he fails to account for the fact that only ~0.1% of the cables have been released at this stage. The philosophy behind a staggered release? As stated by Wikileaks and Assange, releasing them in waves will allow the public and the press to digest all of the material in a paced, stable manner. This implies that subsequent waves will have important, valuable information that needs to be digested and processed.I have seen this \"US Government is behind cable leak\" theory a good deal in the past few days and I do not believe that it holds any water. I think that it's reaching, to be quite frank." }, { "score": 4, "text": "1) is partially right. The extra volatility is probably caused by trading programs, but they are intentionally installed, not a virus.\n2) I actually came up with this one myself. I even posted it in a former comment on HN. I draw a parallel to the Zimmerman cable, which the British intercepted and had to find a way of leaking to achieve their aims.Conspiracy theory is an overloaded term, though, it doesn't have to be outlandish. Any group of people can conspire to achieve something." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Raw data!http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/2012/01/first-public-r..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"Only 50 such scans have ever been done.\"\"The aim the $40m programme is to map the entire human neural wiring system by scanning the brains of 1,200 Americans.\"" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Awesome, this kind of things really amaze me. I'm just curious what are the possibilities once they have everything scanned. Yes we can probably cure some disease or fix some stuff, but that's kind of old news, I am more interested in what they can actually do. Can they upload new language into your brain? or what else?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "This TED video is a good explanation of the concept of a \"connectome\" for the layman:\nhttp://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.htmlThe simple connectome of c. elegans has been mapped, and there is an open source project to use this dataset and other data to run a full simulation of the worm in a virtual environment:\nhttp://openworm.org" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Pretty cool.I wonder what fraction of the wiring in the brain these represent.I guess these are only the largest \"pathway\" structures?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "What an irresponsible headline. I'm not familiar with the research in question but I've worked on cancer during my PhD and the headline alone is sufficient to discredit the article.Every kind of tumor? Really? Because we don't even know all the kinds of tumors that are out there. What we do know, however, is that, to this date, no commonality between _all_ tumors has been identified. The smart money is on the hypothesis that there is no commonality, since many possible combinations of cellular malfunction can lead to tumorgenesis.For instance, I distinctly remember having read a review in Nature a few weeks back about a study of certain brain tumors that can either be caused by mutations of some genes, or alternatively can be caused through a purely epigenetic mechanism. How about that!So given all this, how likely is it that the antibody they created blocks CD47 in cancer cells and only cancer cells but of course all types cancer cells, as the article claims?Why don't journalists think/care about the consequences of tabloidizing cancer? These articles play on the feelings of very desperate people, just to get some asshat a few more click-throughs for the monthly metrics." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1217/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "So...Fox News gets their story from a Reddit post referencing a two year old article.I don't know anything about drug trials. I do know that terminal patients often cannot get experimental therapies. This Fox article has around 250k Facebook shares....so far. Surely this will create a lot of pressure to fast track trials, wouldn't it?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "This does not appear to be new - there's a story from last year here: http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2013/may/cd47.html" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I hope they will someday eradicate cancers, or at least make it less lethal :)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The python tutorial is a good place to start.\nhttp://docs.python.org/tutorial/\nDive Into Python is also pretty good:\nhttp://www.diveintopython.net/" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'm a big fan of The Quick Python Book[0] and Dive into Python [1]. The former is especially good if you're coming from a similar dynamic language.[0]: http://www.manning.com/ceder/[1]: http://www.diveintopython.net/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is one tool you can use in your toolkit for learning: http://www.coderbuddy.com/ -- free, social web IDE with testing environment and integrated publishing to free app hosting on Google App Engine (up to their quotas)would welcome any feedback on it..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I like \"A Byte of Python\"http://www.ibiblio.org/swaroopch/byteofpython/read/" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Zed Shaw's awesome book Learn Python the Hard Way. http://learnpythonthehardway.org/" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "A Bit Off Topic: If anyone has interest in how it was before smart steering wheels, here is a vid clip of the master Ayrton Senna at Monaco in real-time as it happened.http://youtu.be/rh6bwZ4ooTIIt is deemed the best in car F1 vid of all times by fans. It is raw and not sped up." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Its an interesting UI case. Everything happens so fast, there is no time for modality so every function needs to be directly accessible at the top layer. You end up with a steering-wheel full of single purpose buttons and knobs.It kind of feels like the old days when you'd get "mission control syndrome" because the controls were tied to actual relays that actuated functions so they could only do one thing. In this case, its entirely justified." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Video of the 2014 Ferrari Steering Wheel:\nhttp://www.formula1.com/news/technical/2014/0/1180.html" }, { "score": 3, "text": "One thing that is curious to me is that the display for speed takes a significant portion of the screen space. I would imagine that knowing speed would be incidental information for a race car driver, given that there are no speed limits. I suppose that they might have marks to hit for straightaways or something to limit wear on the engine - but in those cases a simple LED or flash would be more effective for that." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm a little skeptical that a human can do a better job on these than a computer. I guess the computer doesn't know the drivers intent, so he needs to control things that will change after his next action (speed up/down, etc).But I wonder if instead of controlling the parameters directly, instead you switch to an intent based system where you tell the computer what you are going to do.Makes me ponder about computerized auto racing - same kind of car, track, and rules - just with a computer at the wheel. Then even on a human race the car pretends it was driving and adjusts things based on what it would do with the assumption the human would do the same (or close enough)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "We do regressions with rb-gsl. require 'gsl'\n x = GSL::Vector.alloc(array_of_x_values)\n y = GSL::Vector.alloc(array_of_y_values)\n c0, c1, cov00, cov01, cov11, chisq, status = GSL::Fit::linear(x, y)\n\nIt's not nearly as much work, and it's much faster than doing it in pure Ruby. :)(It also does weighted regressions and exponential fitting, among a host of other things. That wheel's gone done been invented already.)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Ruby is great for data prep, basic calculations, web app development, and scraping aggregating data and R for visualization. I find them to be a joyful combination. Great for small data sets, quick estimations, and various small projects.Larger data sets and performance intensive operations are better handled in Python (or Java, C++, etc). Lots of statistical analysis is way below the threshold of Hadoop and company." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Math stuff in ruby can be greatly speeded up by using the NArray library http://narray.rubyforge.org/ Method list here: http://narray.rubyforge.org/SPEC.en" }, { "score": 3, "text": "...and at the end he shows you how to do the same thing with two lines of R.It's very useful to code basic statistical algorithms yourself so you understand how they work, but for any serious analysis you'll get more reliable and performant results with a library." }, { "score": 4, "text": "And this is why we don't do statistical programming in Ruby." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "You need to figure out who will pay you money. To do that you need to go talk to clients. Thats the hard part. Ie figuring out the problem.Implementation is straightforward because you already have a timeline for it. :) (Seriously!)Steps:\n* choose your best 3 ideas* create mockups for each* find customers for them - linkedin, twitter, blogs, google, your \nfb friends.* interview them and see if they will pay for a solution.* select your strongest idea* tweak it with feedback* Implement a simple solution and iterateDont be surprised if by the end of the month youve just looped through all these steps!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I vote for 3. You already have a product that you need to promote. However, boosting your page rank? Page rank is 4 and you're already number 1 in google for \"grafting tool\". Are you sure you have a pageview and pagerank problem?Maybe you want to rank for gardening tools as well? Create some content on the website to increase your ranking for long tail keywords, and participate in gardening forums and communities would be a start (building backlinks at the same time)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "First two seem over populated.Third seems like a solid idea if your research shows there is potential thereFourth also seems solid, but gotta look at your competition (and why wouldn't a big player do that?)Fifth seems like a for sure if it meets a need you have found to be unaddressed..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The first 4 seem a little unoriginal (perhaps that doesn't mean non profitable!)The last option seems generally different and you may have found a small little niche which is going to be you goal. I would just work on that for one month then reassess." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The fifth - isn't that a simple \"onClick\" event? Or are you doing something more interesting and complex?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> the effects of the pill lasted longer than injected insulinA non-diabetic might think this was a good thing, but it's more likely to be a serious problem. The actual research article (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bm401580k) is paywalled, so I can't see what its pharmacokinetics are, but I'm not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt; unlike most drugs, insulin needs rapid uptake, precise timing and precise dosing. Even if it did survive the digestive tract, interactions with foods that altered the effective dose, or sped up or slowed absorption, would be likely to sink it in actual use." }, { "score": 1, "text": "One thing I've learned from my Type 1 wife is to never get excited about this sort of stuff. Her father was a Lilly executive and they tried to get her to use the insulin nose spray back in the 80s. She passed, and a few years later it was pulled from the market as it was destroying the user's nasal passages.She was also a beta tester for a blood meter that didn't need disposable test strips. It got pulled by the FDA.I always root for advances in diabetes management, or dream of dreams, a cure. But I'm not expecting it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "one thing to worry about - insulin cross-reacts with the IGF receptor and insulin is a mild carcinogen; but insulin variants and insulin reformulations can be extremely potent carcinogens. Presumably they did IGF cross-reaction studies, but the post-digestive tract form might have different properties even, and before getting too excited, I'd want to wait for results from a longitudinal study in the clinic." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Here's the link to paper, if someone wants to take a gander: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bm401580k?journalCode=bo..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The Indian media is a bit breathless in declaring that this is the first time an insulin pill has been developed, but that doesn't seem to be the case [1]. Not to take anything away from new research, but I wish these discoveries were reported with some moderation because there's a long way between a discovery and a pill that can actually be sold.1. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/09/us-novonordisk-ora..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Not that it lessens the blow any, but it's worth mentioning that these figures are across the entire employment spectrum. Some of the commenters mention large hits in management, but it can also represent the freefall in construction and other especially vulnerable blue collar/service industries.Probably because I am in the midst of starting my own job search and targeting SF/SV, I got a little unnecessarily worried. This is not a tech job specific figure." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I personally don't see this myself. I work for a profitable startup in SF and we've had a hell of a time finding good hires. The problem may be that we do PHP development and the market is saturated with ex-lifers who are Java and .NET aficionados. I know a handful of other startups feel the same way." }, { "score": 2, "text": "As my cousin says, \"unemployment payments mean that my startup is funded.\"" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Last time everyone left for Austin... where's everyone going now. I don't really see the same kind of departure." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Bubble was a equity problem, not something affecting the general public." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The demise of CSS seems a little dramatic. Sass looks sort of cool, and I'm glad it exists, but it seems more like a small nicety rather than a fundamental, web development game changer." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I won't use Sass, Haml, LessCSS or things like that until I see Sass, Haml and LessCSS in Firebug or View Source (or whatever your choice of web development tools). The claimed benefits are nice in theory, but I think it is a debugging roadblock to have to mentally translate and associate your source code with what the web server serves.If I code in CSS and HTML, that problem is practically nonexistent (excepting things like templating). The CSS and HTML the web server serves are the CSS and HTML in the source code." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Notice how similar this is to what happened when programming computers was made easier through the introduction of high level languages. CSS (and HTML) are the the Assembly Language of web page layout. The more standardized they become, the more it makes sense to use higher level abstractions in order to produce code. JavaScript frameworks which hide particularities of the different browsers are another part of the same equation. This is progress." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Someone should write an article on why technologists are so excited/desperate for the future in which they believe all the right things must surely happen because all the right reasons are in place." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This reminds me vaguely of what Coffeescript does for Javascript (http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/). It's a nicer, more modern syntax than the underlying language.The killer is that they both require a compile to make it usable by a web browser. It would be far nicer if the compilers were written in JS and processed the languages dynamically.The final compile before deployment can still happen via command-line tool, but this lets developers work in a simple edit-save-refresh environment." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "If you're looking to learn iOS, I'd suggest contributing to an open source application.An app requires a bit of setup so taking someones app means that most of the minutia is set up. Therefore you can take on manageable size chunks. Also, and maybe more importantly, you'll have an experienced iOS developer review your code.https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios is a good one. Shameless plug: https://github.com/Ink/ThatInbox, ThatPDF, ThatPhoto, ThatCloud are ones that my company open sourced.Related: https://learn.thoughtbot.com/ios is a good listing of iOS resources to get started." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Emacs plugin you say? I would love to see someone create an emulator-dev minor mode that would take a code project like is defined in the emacs-project-mode and create a disk image that could be loaded by a target emulator.Ideally it could be set up to configure and launch an emulator which would then build the code tree with the platform's native development tools (if needed).Here's a concrete example: 1. Use emacs to write an AppleSoft BASIC program, myfile.txt"\n 2. C-x <run-on-emulator>\n 3. Automatically create a *.dsk file image, with the following files\n a) PRODOS and BASIC.SYSTEM installed\n b) a STARTUP program that executes the file, i.e.\n 10 PRINT $CHR(4);"-MYFILE.TXT"\n\n 4. Create (for example) a linapple configuration file to load this DSK image\n 5. Start the emulator" }, { "score": 2, "text": "A few thoughts:1) Scrolling through http://firespotting.com/ I found this nice idea: http://firespotting.com/item?id=2353 - Common app for Jobs - Maybe linkedin integration or even just something simple you can open source for startups to use or do what http://www.crowdhoster.com/ did for kickstarter2) Give this a read/inspiration: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/rainy_day...good luck - be sure to post code on ShowHN" }, { "score": 3, "text": "When I browse, I often have multiple windows with lots of tabs open at once. Chrome gives me an option to "Continue where I left off" but only does this for a single window at a time.Create an extension that lets me press a single button to close all of Chrome. It should also automatically restore all these windows when I start Chrome. My current workaround is to kill the Chrome process and it'll attempt to restore when I restart Chrome.I'm not familiar with Chrome extensions so I'm not sure how hard this would be. But if someone built this, I'd definitely use it!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I love re-interpreting existing tools or ideas as practice and fun, like how an artist does studies of master artists' work to improve their technical skills or just to gain some perspective.So perhaps if you can't think of something new, try re-inventing something that exists, in a new language or one you already know and like?Though I'm partial to people building doodads with things like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. :)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There are polite and impolite ways to express skepticism, and I'd encourage anyone to give Ruiu the benefit of the doubt as far as his motivations are concerned, even if you can think of an uncharitable explanation. "Here's some odd behavior I've seen and a possible explanation" is far from a hostile or irresponsible thing to say, especially when there are long histories of state-level and non-state level bad actors engaging in behavior to warp the target's perception relative to observers' of what's going on. [1][2][1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting" }, { "score": 1, "text": "But at the same time, this is Dragos Ruiu, a well-respected researcher for 15 years. If he says he's got an infected BIOS, I'm going to believe him.My first impression was that badBIOS was an elaborate troll on the part of Ruiu, to make the point that just taking what even a "well-respected researcher" says at face value is NOT good security practice." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Would someone please explain how the firmware dumps of the infected computer are being made?Is it true that if you control the firmware, then you control what the dumps of that firmware will look like? The only way I can imagine getting a clean dump of that machine is by desoldering the chips and imaging them via some specialized tool. If the machine's firmware is rooted, how can you trust any signal the machine sends, especially firmware dumps? The virus could trivially hide itself by detecting a firmware dump is in progress and sending a decoy (clean) image." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The Ars Technica article is nothing short of offensive. It's an article that does not need to exist. We need to sit down and have a nice long talk about the ethics of fear mongering in the security industry, as well as the idea that a "well-respected researcher" would not only hype up his findings, but not even reveal his findings until a conference that he organizes. Talk about a conflict of interest.I'm willing to give Dragos the benefit of the doubt here and just assume that Dan Goodin has his head so far up his ass he can't see clearly and that Dragos has no intention of misleading people.But having these issues for 3 years? Let's just say that extraordinary evidence needs to come out fairly quickly now. Or at least a massive correction of the hype here. Surely, in 3 years, someone else would have discovered this thing." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I can't believe how presumptuous every one is here. Let's just wait and see. The idea is completely plausible. I like to operate off of facts and right now we just don't have them." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I've been using Fargo since it was launched and highly recommend it.I use it every day for jotting down quick notes, keeping a work journal, as well as planning out larger projects.There's already an active community of programmers and writers using it to do some pretty interesting things. And the guys behind it are constantly listening to user feedback[1] to build functionality to match how people are actually using the product.If you're hesitant about connecting to Dropbox, give http://littleoutliner.com/ a try. It uses the same outliner code as Fargo, but uses your browser's localStorage for the storage mechanism. It's really pretty cool.If you do decide to give Fargo a try, make sure to open the Community Feed (Docs > Community Feed). If you can't figure something out after going through the very thorough documentation[2][3], feel free to shoot us a question.[1]: http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/may/mathewTaughtMeSomethi...[2]: http://smallpicture.com/outlinerHowto.html[3]: http://smallpicture.com/fargoDocs.html" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Those who remember this family of Software might see some similarity ;-) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Userland_Software#Frontier\nJust look at the article for protocols that they introduced and popularised.There's lots of other cool stuff under the hood that you probably won't notice at first, like:- It's a not just an outliner but it's also a outlined chat/collaboration tool.\n- It's not just an outliner but it's also a Javascript programming environment. i.e. you can execute functions that that you write in the outlines.\n- It's not just an outliner, it's a front end to your blogging platform.Also, don't worry about connecting it to Dropbox. It sandboxes all it's activities under the Apps/Fargo folder so won't go crazy with your files.Already there is a lot to try out and hopefully this will be the new frontier that we have been waiting for." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I couldn't figure out how to delete an item. Also kept getting \"you have 1 synced document\" growl notifications on Mac. Other than those issues, this looks to be really useful!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I've been a longtime workflowy user and recently started using Fargo. Here are my likes, dislikes and feature requests.Likes:\n- Dropbox storage\n- Calendar outlines as well as free form outlines\n- The 'Instant outline' communication modelDislikes:\n- Too much mouse, keyboard interaction due to Fargo's quasi-implementation of the vim like command-mode (structure) and insert (text) mode sans vim-like idempotent 'esc' and 'i' or 'r' toggles. \n-- So, Enter in fargo lets one exit out of structure mode by opening a sibling node, (== vim 'o') - The lack of an 'esc' however forces one to use the mouse to get back to structure mode and than keyboard 'del' to remove this empty node.\n-- A mouse click on a node in structure mode gets one into insert mode. (== vim i)\n- To navigate up/down by keyboard requires one to switch from down arrow to right arrow at an indent. Why can't i just use the down arrow?Feature requests\n- Auto-convert all http:// entries into <a href= links\n- Support hashtags like workflowy\n- Allow intra-outline linking\n- Allow devs to build plugins / macros so they can customize it to suit their needs.\n- Allow for multi-line outline entries (maybe a shift-enter)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Would be nice to be able to see the application without linking it to my Dropbox." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Javascript just keeps getting cooler and cooler. The more I learn about it the more I find myself loving it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Web Workers look ugly to me :(\nSad that they thought of this as a good idea. It's just a horrible hack that'll lead to horrible code.Threads are usually misused. When you add threads and it speeds up your code, you're usually doing something terribly wrong (When #threads>#cores)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "So now any website could setup a web worker in the background of pages to massively improve there processing power.Very cool feature though, makes the entry level to distributed processing very low." }, { "score": 3, "text": "How long until some high-traffic page owner decides to resell his visitors CPU time ?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm rather amazed that this is available in Firefox and Safari today." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Jokes aside, it makes perfect sense for both of them. Adobe's CS and Microsoft Office are naturally self-complementing desktop giants. Both companies make a ton of money selling desktop software to the enterprise, yet outside of Flash/Sliverlight battle they don't cross each other paths.I, for one, welcome this development. It brings some hopes for better performing Flash, which I hate with a passion but its a fact of life. Flash is in need of some engineering muscle. There are many things Microsoft can possibly do to it and most of them are good, see: kill it -> good, open source it -> good, merge with silverlight -> good.Same thing with other Adobe products: they used to be best in class some time ago, but I'm convinced that company cannot code anymore, but Microsoft still can.No way this is bad news. The worse that can happen is nothing changes.Edit: also, lets stop this nonsense with applying \"still somewhat profitable\" and \"dying\" to these companies. Both are doing great financially. Adobe's profits from CS keep breaking records - look at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/2010..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I suppose this is feasible if Microsoft is looking to acquire Adobe's enterprise customer base - the PDF, document management, etc part of the company. Having Air/Flex/Flash might also be nice, but doesn't seem like a good fit for Microsoft's traditional Windows-centric strategy (one they should abandon, in my view - the days of owning the market via the desktop are rapidly coming to a close).What I'd love to see is Microsoft buy the Flash/PDF side of the company, and then the creative arm (CS, the type foundry, lightroom, etc) be spun off into an independent company that was once again run by people passionate about design and great software." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This has one major implication that makes me want to root for the deal to close:Photoshop & Flash would be covered by an MSDN subscription.So, instead of dishing out $1000 for CS6, we need only enroll in BizSpark (or whatever Microsoft's next version of its ISV thing is called), and pay $400 for all our OS's, all our dev tools, and all our graphics stuff in one package. Now all they need to do is buy Codesmith, Red Gate and Jetbrains so that I never need to pay full price for software again." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I've often wondered why Apple doesn't buy Adobe, kill all development for PCs, and leave Microsoft high and dry in the creative market.Just saying..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Such a deal could be worth $15 billion or more based on Adobe's current market value.Adobe is worth less than half of Facebook? Rolls eyes" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There may also just be a cultural difference. Dramatic & tragic as it is, a hijacked commercial plane is not an existential threat to a nation. "9/11" aside, most hijackings are resolved peacefully as fuel runs out and perpetrators discover surrender is the only survivable option. Viewed as a police problem and not a military concern, I can see those in charge deciding it wasn't worth pouring enormous resources into for little more than an irrelevant show of force.This in contrast to the US's increasing approach of militarizing absolutely every criminal transgression down to growing the wrong kind of plant.Cultural choices." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is one major advantage of the EU. Not everybody needs to prepare for every eventuality, since their neighbors have their back.Articles like this are helpful now, because the Swiss (well at least some of them), seem to have forgotten what benefits their close cooperation with the EU brings." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is stupid Swiss bashing : Switzerland is such a little country surrounded by peaceful neighbors that they don't need to maintain a costly air-force in peace times.I think they have agreements with France to cover their air space and probably Italy too judging by the article." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I thought the new line of thinking was that if the passengers don't stop the hijackers it is basically game over.According to a poster on reddit, the way the copilot controlled the passengers was to turn off oxygen in the cabin." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This is kinda symbolic, of the fact that why Switzerland is the venue of most major peace summits, various UN offices, and what not.Additionally, probably people are thinking that Switzerland should have 2, only two aircraft at least for such emergencies of civil nature, which is viable. It would be better than relying on others since its possible that there can be major problems on a coordination level in case of civil emergency in future. Though it seems unlikely this time around, it could be a problem in future, if Swiss culture and of its neighbors grow in different direction (even if not hostile).Someone sitting somewhere can say in that case, "umm.. should I take help from country X or Country Y.. who should have operational command? "" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm in a very similar position myself. I'm about to enter my 3rd year at UT Austin, with a double major in Business (MIS) and Computer Science. I have gotten offers to co-found 1 or 2 startup ideas with adult founders that have had very successful companies in the past (that they started!). I was originally only MIS, but my interest has always been in tech tinkering so CS was a must.I've talked to tons of people and asked this same question and I've learned that a CS degree is VERY useful. Besides engineering, it's one of the most valuable degrees you can get. Many companies don't care about you grades if you're in CS / Engineering, they care about your experience, intelligence, etc. I would strongly recommend working on a startup idea on the side and/or getting an internship in the semester (if no startup) or a full-time internship next summer. Grades are important, but honestly if you have around a 3.0 - 3.2 and you're doing a technical field and you got good startup / internship experience, you're much better than a 4.0 CS guy with very little experience, hands down." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Let me tell you a story....In 1997, I was precisely where you are right now. I had just started the third year of an accounting degree, I hated every moment of every single class, and my grades had started to slip from all 90s into the mid 70s. Being a good Gen-X'er, rather than outright quit, I decided to be a slacker for four months while I slowly started doing market research.By early 1998, I was ready to drop out and start my own company. That company was reasonably successful and I sold it later that year (for a price I would laugh at today, but I was 21). Most importantly, I learned more in nine months than I had in my entire University career. About a decade later, I went back to school and finished my degree.Basically my friend, if you're not motivated and if your marks stink, why waste money? You likely aren't learning much of anything, so either go out and start something or get a job. Higher education is hard enough when you are motivated; it is a waste of time when you are not.Just my two cents - best of luck!" }, { "score": 2, "text": "It depends on how skilled you are. If I were young, had little debt, and no responsibility, I would go to college, have a blast, and build something on nights and weekends. You have plenty of time, enjoy it." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Finish! You can start working on your startup on the side, but with only 1-2 years left, you'll have a degree that can be used in case of emergencies to get you a job." }, { "score": 4, "text": "One year left: finish the damn thing. The ROI is pretty good there. You can also do other things at the same time like trying to sort out your career plans.People who dropped out of college and founded some giant tech company didn't do it because they had bad grades. They did it because they had already started developing the company and no longer had time for anything else." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I almost feel as if it isn't fair. My university offers none of these things at the undergraduate level -- compilers isn't even offered at all. Although I am an advocate of this paradigm shift taking place, and am happy to be alive during a time where radical changes to education are surely to be made, these courses being offered make me really have second thoughts about putting all my time towards my university's summer courses to graduate as soon as I can. I hope they don't start charging by the time I finish undergrad.TLDR: i jelly" }, { "score": 1, "text": "One other website that people might find interesting is MITx's program. http://mitx.mit.edu/\nSo far, I've tried Coursera and Udacity. \nUdacity:\n1. Of the classes I took, only Udacity had programming exercises. For one of my friends, \nwho had never taken programming, the course managed to capture his interest.Udacity's courseload is:i: video followed by a short quiz(multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc.) or a programming exercise(Create a function that takes 2 numbers and outputs the bigger one, etc.) There are generally anywhere from 25-40 videos, each 30 seconds to 4 minutes long.ii: A series of homework assignments. These can be either quizzes or programming tasks. You can submit them, but you don't know whether you got it correct until some deadline, when your homework is graded. THe programming exercises are quite a bit harder.One of the ones my friend struggled with for a while was a task to build a function that checked whether a sudoku square was valid when entered in a certain format.\niii: At the end of each week, there is a time where they have some kind of IRC/audio channel set up, and you can ask them questions live.2. All the courses are the same quality. Also, they seem to truly have adapted learning into a digital environment, as opposed to certain other places, like MIT's OpenCoursewareCoursera, on the other hand, seems to be a series of lectures that they then overlaid questions on too.Some teachers' classes are quite obviously just lectures, with some quizzes added on as an afterthought, while other teachers have incorporated them\n quite nicely.\nCoursera, my guess is, will also probably have more courses on offer than Udacity soon, since it's a collaboration between several schools.TLDR: Try them both. I personally prefer Udacity, but there's no harm in signing up for one and then dropping it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Shameless plug but here is something similar I am currently working on: http://coursebacon.com/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Can very much recommend the Udacity's courses. They are well planned and a big plus is that the homework spans from quite easy task, to some rather difficult." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I will also add that if you're finding scheduling conflicts to be a problem with finishing homework, Udacity is offering CS101 and CS373 without homework deadlines. \nhttp://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/34839/we-are-l..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "\"\n'The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it,' Mr. Obama said in a statement issued in Hawaii, where he is on vacation. 'I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.'\n\"I don't think that saying you disapprove of something cuts you any slack when just a few minutes later you sign it into law anyway. This is just as bad as the people on Youtube who say \"I don't own the rights to this video\" and think it exempts them from copyright infringement." }, { "score": 1, "text": "There's a lot of hysteria on the net over this bill. A pretty good and reasonable examination of it was published at Lawfare:The NDAA: The Good, the Bad, and the Laws of War–Part I: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/the-ndaa-the-good-the-bad...The NDAA: The Good, the Bad, and the Laws of War–Part II: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/the-ndaa-the-good-the-bad...They also published an earlier look at it:NDAA FAQ: A Guide for the Perplexed: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/ndaa-faq-a-guide-for-the-..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "\"The president, for example, said that he would never authorize the indefinite military detention of American citizens, because “doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.”\"While I support Obama, it doesn't feel correct to sign a bill and to fix it later(maybe). Especially since that bill can be used for such awful things, like the ones cited above...Also, it's kinda ridiculous, after saying a few months back, that he wouldn't sign it." }, { "score": 3, "text": "How can a President sign a bill that is clearly anti-Constitutional (in this case, the Fifth Amendment) into law? Don't they even bother reading what they're signing anymore?Maybe the HN community should just start campaigning for Ron Paul. Who knows whats next, have a startup, get foreign investor, go to jail forever?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "nice spin in the submission title" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The avg for the last YC batch was 24.5. Range: 19 to 35." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think the better metric isage / (# of startups)\nin my case: 36/3 = 12\n" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This post is crying out for a bar graph based poll." }, { "score": 3, "text": "43 and 43. (My first startup was at 31. My partner/wife's first startup was at 20.)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "26 when we started, turned 27 in June" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Offer the building's super the barometer, if in exchange he'll tell you how tall the building is. [1]Did the author of the article not bother to investigate the actual answer?[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question" }, { "score": 1, "text": ""The top of the Golden Gate Bridge is almost two inches wider at the top than the base because of the curvature of the Earth"http://datagenetics.com/blog/june32012/index.html" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I don't like his method of measuring the curvature distance.I think it will be very difficult to align a local to the local tangent of the earth's surface. Over a distance of 700m, the earth's surface deviates by about 4cm. This means we would have to align our laser to within 50 microradians in order to accurately measure the deviation of the earth's surface.Further more, his two beam system is setup using two lasers spaced about 4m apart requires even greater accuracy. Let's imagine system 1 is aligned to the local tangent at one end of the terminal (x = 0m), system 2 is aligned to the local tangent 4 m away at x = 4m, and heights of the two beams are measured at the opposite end of the terminal (x = 700 m). The height difference between these two beams will be about 1 micron. If we assume that the beams are large enough that there is no spread in beam size, then each beam is about 3 cm in diameter. This means we need to measure the beam height to better 0.003% accuracy relative to the beam size. I think this will be a very difficult measurement.I think there is a way you could very accurately measure the relative angle between two beams in a larger interferometer and two lasers, but I'll have to think about how it would look...Regardless, it's always fun to think about this small corrections to our expectations. To be honest, I was a little surprised to think about it, 4cm of deviation over 700m is actually a bit larger than I expected." }, { "score": 3, "text": "One could also use the bowling ball to answer the level vs straight question. Ignoring such nuisances as friction, on a straight floor, a ball let loose would roll towards the center of the hall, and oscillate around it.In practice, it may be possible to somewhat reliably measure a difference in deceleration rolling the ball towards an end of the hall vs towards its center.And of course, if one also has a scale, the weight of the ball can be used to see whether the floor is level." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Getting on for a century ago this 'problem' was solved:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experimentTL;DR - use a theodolite with measurement poles at each end and in the middle. No iphones, laser pens or bowling balls needed. Sometimes it comes down to having the right tools for the job." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It seems to me that Facebook has always been stuck with a damned lot: to make their product profitable, they have make their product worse. This is exactly the problem with \"social\" games. These games are lousy exactly because the lousy features make them money. With the direction that Facebook is going, it seems to be a service where users volunteer to receive spam. I do not think any company in this position is setup for long-term success.On a philosophical note, I have always felt that Facebook is just a slot machine company. They make a fancy box that takes advantage of the weaknesses of the human brain (obsession with novelty, gossip, and visual stimulus) to keep users doing an activity for much longer than required to get the benefit of that activity. I could be radical and say that I think Facebook delivers no value to its customers and that most people end up actively regretting the time they spend on Facebook (I think it is uncontroversial to say that no one goes to bed wishing he had spent more of his day on Facebook), however there is always someone with a story about reuniting with a long-lost elementary school friend due to Facebook. Nonetheless, even if this value does exist, in no way does it justify the amount of time most Facebook users spend on the site nor does it describe the majority of user activity. This is not to say that Facebook is doomed any more than Las Vegas is doomed, but maybe people will wise up and be more careful about how they spend their time...A bit of anecdote: I have noticed people on reddit commenting that they now use reddit more than Facebook as all the good content on Facebook is just copied from reddit. If reddit had some kind of social interface, it might move aggressively into this market." }, { "score": 1, "text": "1) If you read in a literal manner the reports companies file with the SEC, you'd think each and every one of them is going to fail. Know that when companies list all the \"threats\" they \"believe\" they face in SEC reports, you have to be aware that it's basically legal-ass-covering, and doesn't really actually reflect internal sentiment. They basically include those so that if they get sued by shareholders they can point to those reports as legal evidence that they informed them of all the risks. Anyone who has read multiple SEC reports will know that this is pretty mundane stuff.2) The OP's right about the coolness. Facebook is not seen as cool among teens anymore. It's seen as necessary. You are seen as an unusual person if you don't have a Facebook. The same applies to having a cellphone - it's assumed you have one, and it's a surprise if you don't (disclosure: I'm going off personal experience from high school).But you're right. It's not seen as cool anymore. I think this is a great thing: Coolness brings you users. Necessity bring you the money.It goes without saying that Blake Ross was being sarcastic about his reason for leaving." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Don't agree 100%, but the quality of FB overall as a product has definitely degraded as of late as they've been pushing Gifts, Commerce, and other revenue streams onto users very strongly.I've noticed several annoying redesigns / changes that hide convenient functionality in order to make the user click through \"No, I don't want to give a gift\"... Very annoying, definitely makes me less pleased and less engaged with the site." }, { "score": 3, "text": "> \"Then we have the recent departure of Blake Ross, the company's Director of Products. In his now removed goodbye letter he mentioned that he did an informal survey and found that teenagers would actually answer 'no' to the question of whether they still viewed Facebook as 'cool', and this influenced his decision to leave the company.\"Blake Ross was being sarcastic." }, { "score": 4, "text": "As usual, the title is a little bit sensationalist. According to the company, Facebook is curently being used actively by 1 billion users. For Facebook to go the MySpace way (let alone in single year), something incredibly extraordinary would have to happen, akin of Google as a search engine becoming irrelevant. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's a bit naive to suggest such thing because teenagers engage less with the site these days." } ]