jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Perhaps an example of how "small" a trend can be could excite you enough to look out for things that are "bite sized" enough to try.

I'm pretty deep in the Ruby world. A trend that has emerged (and is almost becoming a cliché) over the past 18 months or so is selling Ruby related screencasts. Peepcode started selling screencasts about 3 years ago but no-one followed on in a serious fashion for quite a while (until Peepcode "proved" it could work, I say).

Now, there are at least 7 - 8 unique vendors of Ruby related screencasts I can think of. None are Peepcode scale at all, but I've seen sales figures and know that some of them, at least, have done reasonably well. Even the people behind the more humble attempts are happy, see: http://codeulate.com/2010/03/how-to-sell-a-hundred-screencas...

Now, "Ruby screencasts" is a crazily tiny niche. Not only is "programming" a tiny niche in the world of business, "Ruby programming" is a MINISCULE niche in the world of programming.. and Ruby programming screencasts is ULTRA CRAZY MOLECULAR LEVEL TINY!

If people have picked up on a trend in such a miniscule market and are making money with it, that's says, to me, that there are millions of teeny tiny niches in which you can start to perform very simple "tests" that make money and which, ultimately, could lead you to that million dollar concept or market.

Picking up on these teeny, tiny "trends" can be tricky, but is a lot easier in fields you're already absorbed in. If I had to pick out some trends just from reading Hacker News recently, these seem like a few areas someone could make some bucks in now/soonish: node.js consultancy/screencasts/books, Posterous theming, Flash-to-HTML5 tools/consultancy/screencasts/books, non-college oriented compsci education.
That was fantastic, and I don't think I would have ever come across it otherwise.

Thank you.
Thanks! I'll take a look at those two.
I love Jamie Oliver and highly recommend his show Food Revolution. It's 100x more moving than his talk.

(just tried to find it on Hulu and it's not there, wish I could provide a DL)
Thanks, I think you're spot on. The surprising thing is probably just how small that problem has to be when it's just you working on something in your spare time with all the things that need to get done to get to that first sale ASAP.
They don't pay that extra $30k per year. That's a relatively sunk cost. If you can pay a $30k premium up front, then pay that employee less over time than the US equivalent AND that employee is locked to that employer, then it's well worth that $30k upfront. Of course we are stipulating that it actually does cost $30k on average, which I haven't seen the data to support (or refute) that.
Technical Details: http://www.cyphort.com/isc-org-infected/
"And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good."

So good he supports torture http://blog.sfgate.com/cityinsider/2014/12/09/ron-conway-bla...
Google recently acquired emu, an app that does pretty much exactly this. Look for it to happen soon.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/06/google-buys-emu/
> Dynamicity usually refers to the fact that you can execute code that wasn't fully specified at runtime.

As in eval()'ing code based on user input? That's pretty crazy, and I don't think (hope) a lot of real world security problems are caused by that!

> Back to our problem: A dynamic website will typically take user input (e.g. the user name) and build a personalized view of the webpage for the user

But this has little to do with the language, right? Now we're are talking about handling user input, which can be dangerous. The OP seems to get this confused as well, which is one of the reasons I claim he's not exactly an expert.

A TLDR of the original article: "Handling user input can be dangerous, it's safer if you don't." But we already knew that...

As far as eval()ing user input, well, just grep your code for eval(), no need to change language.
Yes they would. Tilapia fries would definitely eat mosquito larvae in the water. There were likely smaller species like guppies that would totally keep the mosquitos in check.
What are your thoughts on the war on drugs?
It is starting to look bright for the future of space travel.
Apple isn't in the business of tracking people?

http://advertising.apple.com/
Title has subsequently changed (possibly again):

> Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking

Seems the reporter got a fair bit of flack from folks on twitter.
You're right. The interactions can a lot more "natural" than it is right now.
Wouldn't that cause him to be an even greater threat? It would "justify" an escalation.
I saw a jingle truck in Afghanistan that was piled so high with hides that I was surprised it wasn't falling over, the pile extended far above the height of the cabin.
"But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable." -- Alexander Hamilton

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-01...
"Allow[ing] the terrorists into the building" doesn't follow from a single shot of opening a gate. For all I know, law enforcement is funneling people away from a position that they recently decided should be cleared. I have no idea (and as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else here).
> No, its one that taken on its face states a violation of the law, from someone who would be entitled to a remedy under the law, which the court has the power to remedy. Viability is a step or two down the road.

I took the reference to basic criteria of viability from the legal body of knowledge. Check your premises. Besides, alleged election fraud taken on its face states a possible violation of the law, the current President (represented by his lawyers) (who in turn represents the people voted him) is (are) someone who would be entitled to a remedy under the law. And the court has the power to remedy it. Essentially, what you say are the same things as the basic criteria of viability.

> That there were no actual claims made to courts based on the affidavits

That's factually false, as there were official court case filings, that carry their unique numbers, and the claims made in those filings are backed by signed affidavits. One of these filings is the Case No Case 4:20-cv-02078-MWB from 11/09/20: https://static.reuters.com/resources/media/editorial/2020111... The document mentions sworn statements regarding mail-in ballots and actions that could lead to election fraud, and that the case asks to be investigated.

And here's one of the vast number of signed affidavits that have their case numbers aligned with the main case: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/31-8...
Mt. Gox was popular. In an environment without some sort of central accrediting authority or standards body for Bitcoin businesses (the very idea would be abhorrent), popularity confers legitimacy, and convenience confers popularity.

I also suspect there were also more than a few people who trusted it implicitly because it wasn't a bank, they just assumed it worked because Bitcoin.

When you begin from the premise that the models followed by the financial world are at best obsolete and at worst a criminal facade, of course you might not bother referring to them if you start a business, or care to find out if an exchange follows the best practices of an industry you consider corrupt and useless.

I'm not saying this describes all bitcoin holders or Mt. Gox customers by any means, but the politics around Bitcoin do seem to lend themselves to an unwillingness to hold third parties up to any sort of standard.
>Is one thing for a user to add a RSS feed, its another to pre-package it in a commercial app.

The only thing they are pre-packaging is a link. Yes, it displays the content, but it's no different from any other piece of client software in that regard. They do not pre-package any NYT content, which was what I mean when I said it's only a link.

The ad material is the only place where the NYT might have a case, but it seems pretty clear that was not their issue, or they would have objected to the ad, not the software.
Somehow I can't see the BBC adopting this approach anytime soon...
Wow. It's okay you didnt get it, guy.
not the issue. the issue is that the nytimes was included as a default feed - and is used as a showcase for the app (note that they also make use of the nytimes name, logo etc.)
I think you are mainly right. There are a small subset of us ex-Army folks with special skills that weren't signal or intel guys. That number is dwindling every year, partly because those highly skilled jobs (mine was calibration related) are being pushed to the DA civilian side. Also (as you correctly mention), you can do a short 4 or 5 year active tour, then get out into the civilian world and make literally 3 times the salary doing the same type of job.

I think the Army tries to pride itself on training people to get out ("Hey we pay for college, we help find you jobs when you are outprocessing!"), but the reality of the situation is that most of the Army isn't getting trained for their exit to the civilian world.
lol, the brown video is actually well done
I don't buy that much shit so I would be more than happy to pay a premium to have something without having more shit I don't need sold to me.
Can you tell our listeners why? :-)
Programming virtue of the day - explicit is better than implicit.
This seems like a sensational ad for this guys new album, using fear-mongering to drive clicks and fame. It's a patent, not a feature. Besides, if they are so against surveillance capitalism, why use Google Analytics?
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I like Tim's style and I think he needs some time to get adjusted to his role.

It's still not clear to me, after being an Apple user and fan since the beginning and after reading Steve Job's biography, how much innovation Steve really brought to Apple. What I mean is: was Steve really the one who gave the initial impulse for some of the most innovative products we have seen so far (i.e. iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.)? In this case, I think that Apple is doomed.

If, on the contrary, Steve was the quality checker, the one pushing everyone else to do better, I think that the current Apple's executive team can properly replace this role and do good at Apple.
There's nothing invalid about a slippery slope argument when a cursory examination of history will show that the slope will be slipped down.

The slippery slope argument is only a fallacy because it's not a tautology: ie, it's theoretically possible for a government to not misuse laws and draw more power to themselves over time, and it's theoretically possible for insurance companies to not discriminate against their customers. Mind you, that's never happened once in all of recorded history, but it's theoretically possible. If you account for human behavior, any argument that you'd call a slippery slope fallacy isn't invalidated by that.

Besides, consider what insurance companies are doing these days. Imagine if insurance companies had perfect information on who was going to crash their car and who wasn't. What would they do then? Why, they'd sell insurance to those who they knew would never crash, and refuse to cover anyone who would. Now, what would be the point of their existence, from society's standpoint? None at all, save enriching themselves. They would be pure parasites, of no value to society whatsoever.

Why is that relevant? Because with everything they do to more accurately predict who is more of a risk, they inch themselves closer and closer to becoming useless parasites on society. The entire point of having insurance companies is that a group of people can pay into a pool that actually protects them when they need it. The insurance companies are trying to make it so they never have to pay out to anyone. Why should we as a society let them do this? They need to be limited in their ability to discriminate against people, and drawing a line at spying on their customers is a minimally decent line to stop them at.

Much better would be if they were forced by law to insure anyone who wanted insurance, and they could only charge the highest risk class twice as much as the lowest risk class for insurance, but ending spying would be better than nothing.
> chloroquine is a very well known cheap drug. There is no new risk associated to using it that doctors arent already aware of.

I mean, you could say the same of practically any older drug. It's a fairly well-understood, cheap, somewhat dangerous drug.

> we do have a lot of statistics now on the outcome of patient not treated with that drug.

Sure. We also have a lot of statistics on the outcome of patients not treated with thalidomide, and morphine, and basically any other cheap somewhat dangerous drug you care to mention.

> if there's no suscipicion this drug could cause new problems

While I don't think there are, there's the certainty that it will cause the usual old problems that this drug causes. Which you probably don't want when you also have covid-19.

We'd be better off waiting on a proper trial.
I really thought Camostat mesilate was going to be looked at
we've been using jit.si in 2016 which worked well but it might be overloaded today idk. we hit some bottlenecks when trying to scale up and improved the situation by running our own jitsi instance on a DO droplet but that too would not scale to a large audience. I think that if you have more than 10 participants in the meeting then you have anyway other problems (the same issues when you have too many people in a f2f meeting).

from a technical pov I still wonder if running jitsi (or another similar solution) on dedicated hardware which is better tailored to a GPU intensive operation. This could then be easily deployed in-house (with all the benefits: full control and eliminating a lot of attack vectors). Seems like a cool problem to solve while in corona quarantine.
Those folks are obviously beyond having any sense of irony even if it slaps them in the face ("Honorlock" was mentioned as another piece of such software above), let alone an etymological understanding of their company name.

I completely agree with you that any form of exam in which such a system would even theoretically add any value is broken, meaningless and should not be used in the first place.

Ironically, nowadays Chinese schools (don't know about unis) are also among those who employ extremely invasive methods against cheating. Competitiveness for coveted spots at some institutions is orders of magnitudes higher than in the west, the tests are all completely standardized and students have shown remarkable inventiveness in finding ways to cheat.

Don't say: "Undress to impress & show your proctos to your proctor."

Say rather:

The cloakroom pegs are empty now, /
And locked the classroom door, /
The hollow desks are lined with dust, /
The students here no more.

They sit at home, get perved upon /
by proctors via cam. /
I raise my glass and praise the fact /
At school I no more am.

Am I qualified to do pretty much anything? ;-)
"it's the last programming language I learned. Ever."
This implies that you are going to stop learning, that you are not open to learning anything more, and that your ego is such that you think you are above having to learn anything else, having reached the peak of perfection upon which you can gaze down at everyone else as being not as enlightened as you.

This is, of course, folly. Just as one who thinks himself the best to rule the kingdom is probably the worst choice for the job, so too the one who thinks himself 100% enlightened is the least likely to actually be considered enlightened by his peers.
You're making a lot of assumptions about this person yourself, on the basis of nothing. I'm not sure who is virtue signalling here, they or you.
I can't begin to say how nice it is, seeing something like this. So often, we see complaints (often, accurate, but still complaints) about how bad things are. For myself, I try not to whine too much (with debatable results).

TBH, when I read the title, I was expecting this to be one of those posts that exposes the industry and the process as some kind of abusive fraud. I was really happy to see it be pure joy and positive affirmation.

I have more than a few qualms about the way things are, but it's still an awesome field to be in. I am glad to see you do well, and get acclimated to the engineering culture at these corporations. I suspect that you will have many opportunities, and wish you, and your classmates, well.
Early 2000s here but yes it contributed so much to my feeling that it was an engineer/hackers paradise. Now it’s all consolidated so much it feels like it’s just corporate. Hoping I’ll get the chance to find that sort of feeling sometime again in life. I hear shenzen is incredible for that since they still make stuff.
Most actives do. Commitment is the way to win championships, so any one moment you are not practicing your sport is a chance to lose the award. That things can/should be fun is lost. Scouting is a bit better than sports, but they still want your life.
It seems you are correct https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
I found myself agreeing with both of you at the same time.

I'm very interested in programming languages and expect new and better ones to be discovered in the future. At the same time yesterday I noticed that I'm not as hungry for new languages as I were before: Rust is good enough that I can live with it being the last language in existence.
I still remember the day I saw a quote on Twitter from an account that I think was called something like @PicardQuotes. Their tweets were usually little gems that could have been said by Capt. Picard. This particular quote was simply:

"Bald is better than balding."

When I realised there was no turning back, and not having hair would be a lot better than fighting against the inevitable, I started wearing my bare scalp with pride.

It's a great look.

It's also a lot easier to maintain.

Don't get me wrong, if I weren't balding I wouldn't have done this and that would have been fine. That doesn't change the fact that this is also fine.
"was gloriously good at extracting profits - out of existing, successful product divisions"

If you forget that they now have 12 or so divisions with $billion plus in revenue.
XML::Simple was glorious for working with 1-100K documents. I've used it on bigger docs and it actually handles them pretty gracefully although I've never tried at scale.
Some degree of bureaucracy is necessary and inevitable in any organization, as it's basically the glue that makes a group of people an organization. Imagine how difficult it'd be to collaborate on a project with even just one other person, if you didn't meet / pass notes / info on what each you were doing on the project, at least once. That process of passing info, is what constitutes bureaucracy, and bureaucrats act as the gatekeepers of such processes.

So unfortunately, there isn't really an " Iron" solution to bureaucracy (depending on what you mean by "Iron"). The best you can do is work to minimize the amount of it (akin to optimizing an algorithm so that it's more efficient), but some level or amount will always remain, and that amount is largely related to how large the organization is.
Well you do sometimes get collections of things that are a bit...toy...rather than stuff that's actually useful in a large (in my experience) proportion of projects.

But you have a point ;)
There are some interesting tidbits in the article, but it falls apart in the last paragraph when we see the true motive of the article: "Sadly, we are heading in the exact opposite direction. ObamaCare expands the role of the third party and practically eliminates the role—and the say—of the patient in the delivery of health care. Will they ever learn?"

And then you see the writer's bumper at the end: "Dr. Singer practices general surgery in Phoenix, Ariz., and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute."

So it's a Cato Institure article (Koch brothers) on the Wall Street Journal (News Corporation/Fox News/Murdoch) designed to end with an anti-'ObamaCare' message. How far the Wall Street Journal has fallen since Fox bought them in 2007.
How would that even work in practice? What's the use case that's not already possible via http://graph.facebook.com (besides hoovering up emails).

Besides, if they did somehow integrate further you'd all be crowing about how Facebook was doing an embrace / extend / extinguish maneuver.
I think your list is more about state of the art, not trends.
But useful too.
Privacy is achieved by encrypting records (1024-bit RSA, PKCS#1.5) and storing them using a sub-domain label known only to the counterpart (your friend). Keys are brokered by a service called TelFriends, and this is the only element of the system that's centralised. However, you only ever use it to make new friends, as your client is supposed to cache keys.

Of course, all of this complexity is hidden behind a pretty interface, so users don't have to worry :)

As for the dig command, perhaps your resolver (DSL router?) is buggy? Try Google's:

$ dig @8.8.8.8 andy.tel naptr (or 'txt' for my text records, and 'loc' for my location).

Hit me up on http://messaging.andy.tel if you want to chat about anything in more detail.
That's not most waiters.

Tipping sucks. The expectation that people work a full time job that does not also carry the expectation of being able to fund them existing and continuing to show up for work sucks too.

You've made the same, "but a few are doing great" argument made above.
You understand that most Google DCs are owned and operated by google, and serve only google, right?

So like even at best this is "Google contracted some dc operations to a company that violated labor relations law."

The more newsworthy part is that she was able to get recourse.
It is excellent! Music is a lot clearer but now I am noticing that my headphones are a bit lacking in the bass department. Thanks for the recommendation.
> That sounds good in a vacuum, but what about when it's a handful of companies doing all of the broadcasting?

... are there not enough giant companies doing this thing that didn't exist a few years ago?

You realize you can pay for a VPS for $10 a month and broadcast to hundreds of people right?

> If this were the internet of the 2000s, with a widely distributed network of self-hosted blogs and BBs

Pretty sure all that stuff can still be done. Do you not realize you can rent a server and buy your own domain name? You can even rent a VPS with 40 gigabit internet and 10 terabytes of upload for around $20 a month.

> What about the little guy? What if it's the historically persecuted who continue to be persecuted when this all shakes out?

Lol, who are the historically persecuted that aren't able to stream video games because they can't help but violate twitch's TOS. I have a hard time believing this is even a serious conversation.