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Former Apple CEO John Sculley Launches Two Android Phones: SF1 and SJ1.5
Hrm... A while ago, I worked on a project that is somewhat like what you described in that it's a cart where you have the full ability to use any CMS you want (or none at all) for product listing pages.

There wasn't an API, though—most of the cart-specific functionality was done in JS. It's just a different approach to solve your problem.

I never finished the project, but it's really close to being ready for launch. I'm interested in discussing it with you further! Shoot me an email (it's in my profile).
I think you nailed my original intent quite well, thanks for the post.
Generally speaking, you don't. In my case it's worse. As a user of Firefox Nightly my User Agent is more unique than most.
I'm not a consultant, I'm a programer and graphic designer.
So there are times when I'm asked to simply restart a service on a server, make a few changes on a site or retouch a few photos.

It's not recurring enough (from single client) to justify a monthly fee. It's also an almost zero stress job, so it's hard for me to say no. Not the most stimulating work to be sure, but it sometimes leads to bigger, better projects.

But I agree that hourly charges are not a good dynamic for everyone involved.
This World of Ours: Mickens on Security [pdf]
I may be misunderstanding your point, but that's just a well-done function which could be written in virtually any language, the advantage isn't inherent to Clojure.
> I wouldn't say that Internet always watching can have the same effect

Studies of whether someone would steal a bagel/donut from a box, where payment for the pastry is on the honor system ("Take a donut for a dollar!"), show that if you paste up a pair of cartoony eyes above the food, theft rates are reduced.

So it's not just about whether people feel like the Internet can be fooled. Just the fact that the Internet feels like it's watching could be enough to cause (most) people to behave ethically.
Right, and so what you get is people saying something is "simple" when what they really mean is that they like it. Which is of course not Hickey's fault, it just irks me for some reason.
I think it's quite reasonable to make that argument. The idea that high growth vs. low growth as an attribute matters more than the "industry" a startup operates in. So all high growth companies are more like each other, than high and low growth companies operating in the same industry. Therefore startups (i.e. high growth companies) are their own industry.

Nassim Taleb makes a similar argument about size. He says that small things and big things of the same type are more different than they are the same. They should be grouped by size rather than by their nature.
> You'll take your target down, but you'll also end up at a disadvantage relative to someone who just stayed out of it.

This is touching more on game theory and behavioral economics. And we know how the Prisoner's Dilemma is solved. :P
> why do so many patients (and their families) do their own research online [accordingly to Google, 70% of us do], even after the doctors tell them their best suggestion?

Lots of reasons.

Some because they are socialized into trusting other -- often very unreliable -- information sources, but you still can't get the actual treatments except from a doctor. So they still go to doctors -- and try to get from them what other sources have told them they need -- but don't actually particularly trust the doctors.

Some do it because they recognize that doctors are fallible, and have less at stake in any decision than the patient -- some of these people also have the skills and knowledge to be reasonably informed readers of things like medical reference and research literature (even if they aren't practitioners) and are active participants with their doctor in their own healthcare.

Some people just want to understand the meaning of the medical jargon they've gotten from their doctor.

There's probably a lot more reason for doing independent research even after getting information from a doctor.
from the article ...

"In general, I think that security researchers have a problem with public relations. Security people are like smarmy teenagers who listen to goth music: they are full of morbid and detailed monologues about the pervasive catastrophes that surround us, but they are much less interested in the practical topic of what people should do before we’re inevitably killed by ravens or a shortage of black mascara. It’s like, websites are amazing BUT DON’T CLICK ON THAT LINK, and your phone can run all of these amazing apps BUT MANY OF YOUR APPS ARE EVIL, and if you order a Russian bride on Craigslist YOU MAY GET A CONFUSED FILIPINO MAN WHO DOES NOT LIKE BEING SHIPPED IN A BOX. It’s not clear what else there is to do with computers besides click on things, run applications, and fill spiritual voids using destitute mail-ordered foreigners. If the security people are correct, then the only provably safe activity is to stare at a horseshoe whose integrity has been verified by a quorum of Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman.
Show HN: EMP – ⌘+Enter to Comment+Unsubscribe from Facebook Notifications
> Wouldn't parasites be a constant factor in the death rate? How do you explain an exponentially rising death rate?

I don't think the death gene works that way. It doesn't just turn on and poof! you're dead at the exact time specified.

More like a factor that controls average life span, which would result in an exponentially rising death rate.

Recent research suggests it's something in the blood.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/04/can-we-revers...

> If you have bacteria in your bloodstream you're already in septic shock, infections can't explain, say, heart disease or most types of cancer.

Those disorders may be caused by parasites, we simply don't know.

But even if they aren't ... they simply wouldn't be a part of the equation.

I'm not saying this "death gene" determines lifespan absolutely. It determines it on average. Other shit can still go wrong. Like a lion might eat you.
The Clearbit Enrichment API
I apologize for the disillusionment that will follow:

1) Negligible senescence occurs mostly in organisms radically-different from humans and we have no idea how to edit those pathways into humans or if those pathways actually hold any value to humans. Hydra cells still die but the organism itself doesn't age. If you want to apply a gene-level anti-senescence therapy to an organism, you have to transfect the traits correctly into every cell of the organism--trillions of opportunities for catastrophic failure.

2) Gene editing probably has downstream cascades that we can't foresee.

3) Organ transplants become more risky with age, and the mortality risk from anesthesia does as well. If you were to replace your body, your brain would necessarily be the same age--and since we can't fix the (conjectured) senescence pathways in a living organism, you'd eventually be a senile individual in a young body. There's some neuroregenerative therapies that hold promise, but any "regenerative cell therapy" could also be read as "may create proliferative tumors"

4) Cryopreservation of a living organism is assumed to kill it, or at least alter it radically enough that its original functions will never be restored. Reconstructive nanotechnology is probably impossible due to heat dissipation and brownian motion--you'd have to hope that somehow a human scientist figures out how to engineer a new class of cell that is capable of navigating and repairing all extant human cells, which is more-or-less Clarke's Law.

We are not here forever. Oxygen metabolism literally rusts our bodies over time, disrupting and destroying countless pathways. Aging and death was part of the mitochondrial bargain. Tortoises have been evolving against the bargain's drawbacks for longer than humans have been around, and they still aren't immortal.
Sorry, I deleted my message (don't ask how..)

Prev message:

"
I don't think specialization requires hierarchy. It merely requires... specialization. Specialists require support from society. Where does hierarchy enter into this? I don't think it enters at all, merely on grounds of efficiency, nor do I think that if that were the case, that such a utilitarian mode of reasoning justifies hierarchy.

If it were merely efficiency that justifies hierarchy, no one would need to fight to establish it. What we observe instead is that hierarchies are intimately tied up with the mechanisms that enforce them: Usually violence of some sort. It would not be hard for me to accept a line of thinking that started with the idea that an acceptable definition of violence is any force required to enforce a relationship of domination.

> Do you think companies could do without CEOs?

Well I think as a worker that I do best working with peers who value their relationship with me and respect my autonomy. Management versus worker is an adversarial relationship and its manifestation in my work environment is deeply rooted in a much more violent, oppressive relationship that persists to this day in some places.

A CEO is useful. That does not mean a CEO cannot be accountable to their workers instead of to property owners (hierarchies upon hierarchies upon hierarchies). Management democratically accountable to labor seems perfectly reasonable, in fact, perhaps a desirable evolution on the model.

The only problem is that it contradicts the hierarchical structures that shape our society. This isn't a meritocracy of ideas, there are a few ideas with all the guns that are actively hostile against anything possible outside of their paradigm.
"

New message:

> Have you seen the US political system? Do you think if you apply democracy to management then it won't be corrupt? I only see people voting for the manager who promises the biggest benefits.

That is because we live in an adversarial economic system where everyone is supposed to pretend they are an individual with needs that are at odds with everyone else. The only reason we need to accept this is because we want to 'reward' 'better' people with more resources, power, status, and ability to control our destinies.

We don't have to accept that. A lot of effort is put into making us accept it. A lot of propaganda goes into teaching people that property is good and that the state is good, and that an individual exists without taking into account their social relationships with other human beings.

We cut people up into individuals, tell them they have no common lot with others, then force feed them a lot of ideology in order to convince them that they are freer the less they care about others and the more they try to accumulate wealth for them'selves'. The system clearly benefits the fraction of a percent that reside at the top and steer it towards their own self enrichment far more than it benefits me, someone who is somewhere between the middle and the top, and far, far more than it benefits those at the bottom.
If only most venture capitalists were nice, or were looking for nice founders. In my experience, and I've met probably 250 VCs over 20 years, it's not the case. Especially if they've had a few drinks, when the truth is revealed.

There are exceptions, always. But too many are not really that nice. They'll put on an act to pretend they're nice, but they're not.
Well, the formula is defined for a probability of living to any age -- it gives some positive probability no matter what you put in.

But the probability of living to age 130 under this formula is already so low as to be hard to visualize.

I think this formula is a bit off at the high end because I evaluated it for 120 -- an age that at least one person has lived to -- and also got a probability suggesting that this would never have happened in human history. But it seems like the formula is still pretty close for almost all of the population.
I'm not sure I'd call "monopoly" in economy a paradox - after all, it's the very carrot you hang in front of every participant! Market economy basically works by telling everyone to play a zero-sum game and collecting the side effects.

But getting back to your main point, I really like how Yvain summarized it[0]. One quote from the essay:

"Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price."

(There's more of that, CTRL+F for "under the bus")

The post is very long, but it's golden.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I've discovered D six years ago after reading Andrei Alexandreuscu's article "The Case for D" in one of ACCU's publications. D was a gasp of fresh air especially for people coming from C++ like myself.

I used to frequent C and C++ forums on Turkish web sites and was aware of the need for up-to-date software documentation. I saw D as an opportunity to ensure that for once, Turkish documentation would not be behind the English ones. I started writing HTML pages without any idea that they would become a book later on.

Then I've decided to use the tool Prince XML (free for personal use) to see the pages in book form. I made that PDF version available as well.

I had never thought that my work would be valuable for an English-speaking audience. Then, Andrei and others convinced me that it would be a good idea to translate the book to English as well. I did that, added many more chapters, edited heavily (mostly by Luís Marques), and it worked!

As far as I know, the book is the first software documentation that was translated from Turkish to English, as opposed to the other direction.

D is a general purpose language. I don't know the status on the IOS/Android front. gdc, the D compiler using GCC back-end; and ldc, the D compiler using LLVM back-end can produce code for the platforms that those compilers support. However, don't take my word on that. I would expect issues.

D is a compiled language that is as low as C (and of course inline assembly) and as high as Python and others. One benefit over Go is the fact that D's template support is the best that I know of. When compared to D's C++'s templates are almost unusable; very clumsy.

Ali
3 ways Steve Jobs made meetings insanely productive – and often terrifying
I was introduced to http://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-vector-... not too long ago on HN. I don't use clojure so I was paraphrasing my somewhat limited understanding. Thanks for the clarification.

That part about speed was more about my general frustration with the "immutable is fast" and "mutable is slow" meme that I hear too frequently. While that can be the case, it isn't always 100% true. Your language and how you use it can play a huge part.

I'm hoping to learn more about clojure data structures in the coming months, so much good stuff.
First demo of Code Lauren, a programming environment for beginners [video]
Turf War: Reviving the heritage of turf houses in Iceland
The startup scene has it's own definition of startup.

Some, but not necessarily all of the following apply:

1) Younger people

2) Educated (can be self taught)

3) College grads or dropped out of college to do a startup

4) Have more to gain than to lose by participating in a startup. (Little assets, [1] not leaving a traditional job but perhaps going from another "startup")

5) Working primarily with other people's money

6) Has the interest and/or money of "angels" "Vc's" or "incubators".

7) Doing something that could get big and stands a high chance of failure. (In other words, not starting an Italian restaurant that's going to be a single location sauce and cheese place)

8) Located or able to travel and possibly relocate to a place that startups are typically. (Silicon Valley, NYC or the other hubs..)

What am I missing? (Please fill in the other things I am almost certainly forgetting).

[1] Unless they have family money or have done a previous startup where they hit the pay window.
Review: Tesla Model S P90D
PostGress is too much and SQLite3 might be to little. You might wanna check out other options.

What is the problem with Maildir/ ? I/O heavy?? I don't think that modern computers & filesystems will struggle with maildir.

Please add GnuPG support. Also you could add mail folder encryption (e.g. having the emails encrypted in the system, key required to unencrypt them when mail client starts... key could be saved in the keychain for lazy users).
The Wonderful “Old Maps Online” Database Now Has Mobile Apps (iOS and Android)
Efficient Tabular Storage
> 'It is entirely possible that, even if plaintiffs are granted discovery, the government may refuse to provide information (if any exists) that would further plaintiffs’ case. Plaintiffs’ claims may well founder in that event. But such is the nature of the government’s privileged control over certain classes of information. Plaintiffs must realize that secrecy is yet another form of regulation, prescribing not “what the citizen may do” but instead "what the citizen may know."'

If secrecy is another form of regulation, then any such regulations must be subservient to the fact that a citizen is entitled to due process and to protection against their affects being seized.

This means that the government asserting state secret to block the judicial review of a case about them failing to uphold the constitution is a breach of the constitution, and subservient regulations like state secrecy must be set aside to uphold constitutional obligations.

Or at least, that's what my lawyer would probably say on appeal.
Pixar Lamp Robot [video]
The cheapest way to ensure those things is to do it in software, which is how we get into this situation in the first place. Modularization will cost more, and what manufacturer is going to willingly sign up for that?
What do you mean by microphone?

Is audio analysis of keyboard chatter a thing or are we leaking passwords when we verbally communicate them to a co-worker?

I don't think this is related, but I found this keylogging technique combining microphone, camera, accelerometer data to approximate finger/thumb positions for PIN numbers:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/pinskimmer_spsm13.pdf
While rather cynical, this advice captures the current zeitgeist. The alternative is of course ignore the VCs and their ways and just get on with building your business.
Elixir can be optionally typed with the Dialyzer which will bring you to about the same level of static typing as go (if not more because the dialyzer allows for generics).
Well, WebRTC is indeed a way, but it's very far from a standard - Chrome and FF supporting it only - and has some issues. It's difficult to do multi-casting with it and eats up a ton of CPU resources. If it were scaleable and usable one of these multi-million dollar businesses would adopt it by now don't you think? I haven't seen anyone pick it up.
> Hm. A monopoly doesn't have to worry about losing business nor employees to the competition. They can squeeze both for the last drop of blood.

But then again, they also don't have to worry about competition undercutting them. So it's more likely that they'll stop exploiting their employees at some point, if only because the CEO has conscience. But add in some fierce competition, and silly things like conscience have to go out of the window.
What about Zappos? Isn't that a counterexample ?
manufacturing the conditions for luck. Sheesh.
> Fair counterpoint, although it raises the question on what is considered "word of mouth."

The question is whose mouth are the words coming out of and what are they actually saying. So much of the talk about Meerkat and Secret was "this is interesting" and not "I'm using this and you should too."
If you're someone like John Carmack, I imagine being able to get, say twice as far with your rocket project due to low taxes and cost of living is rather valuable to you.

If he spent $8 million on that in SF, I don't think he would have gotten nearly as far.
WebGL bindings for React
Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall St
Yeah, it seems obvious but for me it seems their network is probably half the problem with the tech industry. It's a bit of an incestuous relationship where new ideas are passed by because it's not from SV. Eventually, it's going to bite them in the butt when some other upstarts finally beat them at their own game.
This appears to me to be a clear-cut example of prior restraint, if common sense standards of free speech are to be applied to source code.
Audio analysis of keyboard chatter is a thing that had a proof of concept years ago. I have no idea how often it is done, but it is certainly plenty possible.
short overview how it is done: http://makezine.com/2015/08/25/pixar-robotic-desk-lamp/
I devoted a several years to studying continental / post-structuralist philosophy (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Irigary, et al), and while I can't claim any authoritative knowledge I'd say I've at least done my homework, and I have to agree with Chomsky.

Post-structuralism essentially begins from the feeling that the rigor of modernism/structuralism is stuffy and oppressive. Post-structuralism's main project, then, is to deny the kind of stuffy rigor typical of the sciences any privileged position - that is, to deny that it is more correct than any other type of analysis. This is done through a variety of means, but you can find a good summary in [1]. The works in this area employ a dauntingly huge set of concepts that often serve as a barrier to entry and mystifier for outsiders. Science/mathematics is typically only donned to give a philosophers work an intimidating edifice to the non-mathematically inclined - see Badiou for a great example of this with set/category theory. Overall, it's a questionable project that seems to contribute little - see [2] for a good summary of this.

Overall, skip it if you can.

[1]: http://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf
[2]: https://debate.uvm.edu/NFL/rostrumlib/SchwartzmanMar'00.pdf
The term is monopolistic competition. If you can extract monopoly-like power by not being the only company, but simply the best one, or the one that most closely fits your customers' needs, then you can afford to treat your people well and do right by the community. It's only when you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else that you have to join the race to the bottom.

It gets complicated when competitors start trying to do the things that you do, and that's what prevents you from getting lazy. Monopolistic competitors can never just do the same thing they've always done because points of differentiation can disappear practically overnight. But what they do have is a head start, and if they continue to innovate, they can maintain their lead over other players. An important factor for innovation is attracting and keeping top talent, and you don't get that by treating your employees badly, or being viewed by the public as "evil."