skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. Also, if you're a professional software developer, even your resume isn't a good description of what you are an expert on, so their one line description isn't adequate.

If I say I'm an expert on "linux", that could mean linux kernel code, the LAMP stack, or administration and then I get questions like "why do I not get sound out of my netbook on Ubuntu 9.10?"
Either that, or just have one person who is the leader and who has override authority on everything. Team consensus is not really a way to build a company - in the end there will have to be one overriding vision.
Nuclear energy could fix this problem in 5-6 years for about what we pay for coal, no need to go out on a limb with "space based solar". Sure it's cool, but a solution exists that is less toxic than what exists (nuclear radiation from coal) and is about the same price. Sounds like a no brainer to me.
Let’s remind everybody that the truth is not decided by a vote

One leading indicator that there's something fishy about the case for anthropogenic global warming is that people talk of a "scientific consensus" on the subject. There's a scientific consensus on Newtonian mechanics, too, but no one bothers to mention it.
Says the Call of Duty fanboy.
There's no legal precedent, but if you want to read a ton of legal speculation on a related topic (some by informed people, some by those less informed), there's a pretty large body of writing on the hypothetical issues of whether proprietary Linux kernel modules violate the GPL.

edit: here's a pretty thorough law-review article: http://web.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr...
> Is a toaster awesome because its operation is straightforward?

Yes. We all own one don't we? Ever tried to toast bread without a toaster? It takes far more effort, is far less efficient, and the results are usually far less consistent.
If you go to Home Depot with a hammer being a sucky screwdriver, they will replace it with a screwdriver--maybe the customer wasn't aware there was a better tool for that. Here google is home depot, not a hammer. Also, if your hammer is a sucky screwdriver and home depot doesn't have a screwdriver to exchange for your hammer, they better get some because otherwise the customer will go somewhere else. Finally, software is much more extensible than hardware, so the analogy is not exactly 1 to 1.
I'm sure that it's not great, having never heard of Fav4.org before today. I landed on the page and saw 4 buttons with links to pages that I visit regularly. "That's great, but I already have them bookmarked," I thought.

I closed the tab, but decided it wouldn't have been on HN if it was just 4 links. At that point I returned to the site and saw the "Settings" button in the bottom corner.

A landing page that hides the purpose of a webpage will cost you users in the long run
"Furthermore, it seems like “everyone on the SO team works remotely from home,” and a recent job posting suggests that might continue. I hope not."

I would love to have the author elaborate on why a small remote team is a bad thing.

Edit: also, FWIW, the product they are seeking funding for is StackExchange, which is built by 3 FogCreek employees who all work at the FogCreek offices in NYC.
Group based p2p video stranger chat in flash
Exactly, it's like having an intranet drive, everywhere. Without having to VPN in, and fight with bandwidth problems and other such issues. Plus, since it also stores locally, you can work offline on things that are in your dropbox and it'll sync as soon as you get connectivity.
First I'd increase my TCP window size. Otherwise I'd be latency limited :)

Being an IT Director I try to think of what I can't do without my local 1Gbps LAN. I'd say a big one is computer re-imaging. With that type of band you could build a good reference OS install and push it anywhere in the world that had a similar band.

I'd also turn this around and say "how will the content providers deal with that kind of demand?" Serving thousands of users at those speeds is a non-trivial task. The bandwidth demanded from the server is a multiple of the bandwidth increase to each client. If you solve this, your customers will have big money on the table. Rather than figure out the "what" will go over those links I'd figure out the "how".

With the current applications I'd say latency is a bigger issue. 100Mbs at <50ms is more useful than 1Gbps at ???ms. I don't buy the idea of "dumb terminals" AKA "web OS" without less latency. The biggest reason I use RDP, VNC, or Citrix is to trade a bandwidth issue for a latency issue, so why would more bandwidth == more terminal usage? If anything I'd expect the reverse.
I'm not suggesting you duplicate the feature set that Facebook provides. If a user wants to have those features, it makes sense to have them link their Facebook account.

But I would probably offer a more basic version that doesn't have friend lists, SMS reminders, etc, and let the user opt in to the additional features only if they wanted to. Otherwise I think you might end up artificially restricting the amount/type of users that use your site (e.g. people without Facebook accounts or people that want to keep their Facebook data private).
Literally millions of cleantech startups? Space based solar power? What are you talking about?
I once read a story about a Chinese company who built washing machines and found that they were getting lots of warranty claims after people had broken them trying to wash potatoes. Instead of putting a notice on the machines not to use them to clean potatoes, they successfully developed and marketed a dual purpose machine.

http://www.connectedaustralia.com/News/Trends/tabid/121/sele...
Thank you, that's a very detailed explanation.

It also gives me hope that in the long run I'll be able to catch up on all the stuff I should have been doing, 30 hour days sound just fine.
Probably a combination of both (plus a little bit of user education on the MS side of the equation.) Recent MS operating systems and browsers are more secure then older versions that are slowly being phased out, most users are using firewalls/anti-virus enhancements, and users are more aware of the fact that certain attachments/files are not safe to just blindly open. On the Adobe side it seems like a decade of stuffing in useless bells and whistles to Acrobat to justify the size/budget of that group within Adobe is finally making the code too complex to properly vet and things that seemed like a good idea in the "what features should we add to the next rev" meetings are now looking like bad choices. The problem Adobe faces is that it is hard for a big company to remove features and they no longer have enough dominance over the spec or marketshare to create a "new and improved" version that enables them to paper over or rip out their mistakes.
Well, the time and motion stuff he's talking about actually go back further, to Frederick W. Taylor in the late 19th Century. Robert Kanigel's biography of Taylor The One Best Way gives a very good history and a much more in-depth analysis than can be compressed into a blog post.
Thanks for the Linux Dropobox Client.. we exist!
That's a really good way to destroy a team.

A better setup is to have someone who makes the decisions for any particular area (on a notify-but-don't-ask-permission basis). Then the others can challenge if they really care, but won't for anything immaterial because they know they delegated those matters.
Startup company data
was wondering if anyone on here knew of any resources besides crunchbase to find information on how many startups there are in silicon valley each year?
wow. thats really horrible.
(I am having a bit of an issue parsing the last sentence but I guess it was "hasn't")

Isn't the DaVinci/MLVM project an example of how Sun actually tried to move towards dynamic and non-java languages in the JVM?
invokedynamic & method handles are already in the upcoming java 7, and that goes a long way towards supporting dynamic languages on the JVM.
IPhone vs. Windows Phone side-by-side comparison of user interface
US govt. food data online; slow as hell, but also in spreadsheet form
In the article the subject was a man.
The difference between "simple" and "trivial" is functionality. Unlike the Safari/Chrome/Opera startpages, this is utterly, utterly useless.
I think that you are talking past each other because you have different value systems.

I've known plenty of people like dantheman before. They believe in and value the right to private property, which means believing that it is right to let other people do what you don't like with their private property. Add to that the belief that a personal business is private property, and you get the conclusion that no matter how much you personally dislike it, business owners "should" be allowed to discriminate.

By contrast if your belief in private property is not so absolute, then you're more willing to tolerate society restricting the free use of private property in ways that society does not like.

Different fundamental values leads to different conclusions. Even with agreement on the facts, the laws, and how bad discrimination is. And arguing "should not", "should too" back and forth will get you nowhere.
Sort of related: http://www.silicon.com/management/public-sector/2008/09/26/i...

It seems to me like Iris recognition is much more reliable, although I don't know how easy it is to fool the system. John Daugman's web page contains lots of _really_ interesting material: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/
Hydro Thunder PC   www.MyPaLe.com
FTA: "He had previously worked as a systems administrator but was laid off, Interfax said."

I find this hilariously ironic. The whole world has the consequences of recession and depression on its mind, so the article closes with this epiphany: Lay off your computer geeks and they'll find other, more novel ways to amuse themselves.
Xs4all is actually the most expensive consumer ISP in the Netherlands. The cheapest ISPs offer 20 Mb DSL for 20 euros per month. DSL is slowly becoming legacy technology due to high speed fiber and cable connections.
There's a possibility that this guy's opinion is also the consensus opinion in which case I'm not going to win any arguments. This was all a semantic misunderstanding. When I think of the word "awesome" I think of something that inspires "awe", which I think is beyond the scope of file syncing.

Let me ask you guys one thing though: Is there anyone here willing to admit that they would be incapable of making a workable clone of dropbox in a reasonable amount of time--not on the same scale, of course. The fact that almost everyone who comes to this website could produce something of that complexity is maybe a clue into all this irrationality. Most of us, by contrast, couldn't make Call of Duty (a game which, actually, I've never played). Maybe we're setting our standards where our capabilities are?
Semantically, Pluto is still a "planet" (as far as the definition of the word goes linguistically), but is specifically classified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union.

It strikes me as disingenuous, then, for anyone to authoritatively state that Pluto is "not a planet" without clarifying their use of the word "planet" - it leads to a lot of confusion amongst the public who suddenly believe something has physically changed, as we see here.
Larry and Sergey to give up control of Google
That is exactly what I am talking about!
They gave nice stats by country and platform.

I would also like to see stats, by free vs paid accounts? How many of the free account actually use their account are close to their quota limits?

It would be nice to know how big can Dropbox scale, how many servers they can afford, etc ... .
That article is a nice find. Thanks!
My house is my private property, I can invite whoever I want there, and can discriminate freely on sex, race and so on (not that I do, but I could) because the decision affects only me.

A business is private property and I can hire whoever I want there, discriminating on factors such as suitability for the job, education and other associated factors.

Religion, sex, skin colour and other personal attributes are not amongst those and for very good reason, discrimination on those grounds affects the other party economically, individually and as a group.

In spite of all those rules there is enough workplace discrimination going on as it is, take those rules away and we're right back in the 1950's.
Maybe you're right... We have to think about it more carefully. Thanks for your feedback!
You're looking at the mechanics of it; I value the solutions it provides me. It makes several inconvenient tasks easier or disappear completely.
Apple does this with iTunes/MobileMe, and any cloud storage player is aiming for the same network effect.

The cloud storage play is huge for Apple... first they sell you the video, then they sell you the space to store the video, but it doesn't actually take them anymore hard drive space.

And as the media gets bigger and bigger (HD today, who knows tomorrow), Apple sells you more and more storage "space" and their costs only go up marginally.

It's the stuff billion dollar business plans are made of.
Another great interview Andrew.

It would be good to illuminate your face better. The lighting in that room cast long shadows over your eyes. Perhaps a light facing you to the left of the computer would help.
can good open source interface design be achieved? and if so how?

I agree with this, it has nothing to do with X. this has to do with design choices, and the method in which the consensus is achieved.

My friend Mushon Zer-Aviv is attempting to tackle this issue

http://www.mushon.com/2009/12/18/shortaudio-my-open-source-d...
Verizon slowing website access from Linux and VMs?
How do they know that it was actually a bot, and not an actual person inside Google surfing from within IE6? The logs show two hits about a minute and a half apart, which seems much more human-scale than bot-scale.
The problem is that if you discriminate against a minority, then you don't suffer from the limitation of the labor pool very much (since it's a minority). However, that minority can suffer greatly.

So market forces can't hold this sort of behaviour in check, and this can lead to the suppression of an entire culture, which is where the issue lies.
Essentially, yes. Perhaps not in enough detail to replicate the world's technologies in a time machine disaster, but certainly enough to create a consistent mental diagram about everything around me. Cars, electricity, furniture, plumbing, health, advertising, the economy, and most certainly, computers.

The desire to understand the world around oneself is one of the key qualities of a hacker, and is the central divide between this community and the world at large.
Oh, I thought it was middle of the range like Internode. The equivalent of Xs4all in Australia would be Telstra who's ADSL services start at 1.5M with 2gb (upload/download) for $39.95; additional usage charged at 15¢/MB and capped at an excess of $300.
| Has he even asked Tumblr for an explanation?

Yes, apparently he has: http://tumbledore.tumblr.com/post/393276231/this-is-in-respo...
Ufone GSM : Muskura Raha Hai Pakistan
I don't think there is any reason to make them change it unless Google complains (unlikely; I am guessing Tumblr is much more visible than ispyapp.com) - I couldn't find any ToS for signup about appropriate usernames.

You might want to inform the user that using trademarked names is frowned upon and offer to change their username, that if Google threatened your site over it, you might have no choice but to change it, and you don't want to make a dick move and just change or delete the account
Except it's not a resolution. Tumblr's response (http://meaghano.com/post/393246405/tumbledore-ive-run-pitchf...) totally contradicts it.
Just to be clear, you're not making the heat island argument, right?

There is definitely concern over absolute accuracy in the collection of this data. However, it doesn't seem like these concerns have somehow debunked AGW, and certainly haven't even put a dent in current estimated global climate change. I get very frustrated when people see the sausage of science being made and suddenly get angry. "What? Scientists are not right all the time? Well then they must be right none of the time!"
"There seems to be a kind of independence in these ideas. In the end, it is possible to doubt the divinity of Christ, and yet to believe firmly that it is a good thing to do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you. It is possible to have both these views at the same time; and I would say that I hope you will find that my atheistic scientific colleagues often carry themselves well in society."

Yes, it is possible to have both those points of view at the same time.
The funny part is that they also managed to gather the fingerprint of then German Home Secretary Wolfgang Schäuble (an outspoken proponent of biometric authentication technology) and published it in the club magazine "Datenschleuder". On clear tape, ready to stick it on your own fingertip...

http://www.h-online.com/newsticker/news/item/CCC-publishes-f...

http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6.7/fingerprint-schauble
Actually, I talked to him about librelist and Lamson in an email exchange awhile back. Cool guy.

I don't totally grasp his reasons for moving from rails to python other than culture, but I don't really care.
It's not bad; it just doesn't scale. I don't have any direct experience but I would expect it to start breaking down around 10-20 people.
I don't understand the thrash metal reference but I'm curious. Google only leads me back here.
I'm only a beginner but one idea which stuck with me was that of changing my domain of work ever so often. This is what Richard Hamming suggested to keep doing great work and this is what Eric Drexler recommends to get a good understanding of Science as a whole. If you think of programming as a tool for solving problems, then you could sharpen the tool by applying it to different types of problems every few years.
Misleading title much? They're giving up absolute control, but they still have 48%, so they can still make pretty much anything reasonable happen.

Also, this story first came out ~a month ago. Only new thing is that they officially filed.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I wasn't being intentionally obtuse, I was just trying to state the case as clearly as I could and answer any objections/clarify any misconceptions. I agree often people fundamentally disagree about core issues, but it only manifests itself at higher levels.

I hope we didn't jump into the "should not"/"should too" argument.
Techzing 32 - Think Like an Entrepreneur (instant audio)
I continue to get better, and I'm almost to the 4 year mark. I've improved more in the last year than I did in my second year. (First year programming professionally remains the largest leap, although perhaps the least significant.)

As to how I become better, I am an obsessive generalist. I don't like not understanding the stack that makes my projects tick. I don't get into wasteful/unproductive levels of implementation detail, but I do my best to grok the things I'm working with.

(I'm capable of patching django core for custom purposes if I need to, for example.)

I was pretty clueless on CSS until recently. Now I'm very slightly better than clueless. (I have a better grasp of display and position now, for example.)

I continue to use tables where they're (probably) inappropriate but for my users, it doesn't matter. Too many IE users and not enough mobile users to really care.

I just keep learning unfamiliar things and re-integrating what I learn into my daily grind. Everything I've ever learned about computers and programming and front-web web dev makes me a better Python programmer.
RHIC press release: http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=1073&t=pr

I couldn't find the actual paper -- the most recent paper on Arxiv from STAR, http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1641, is about the electric charge balance function.
Technocalypse: an 18-part Transhumanism video
That was my first thought too, and just because you notice this one doesn't mean they don't have more stealthy crawlers making sure you're playing fair.
If there were any justice he would be hired (or at least given a brief gig as a consultant) by the company that serves the video billboards to increase their security.

I'll bet they had a default login (like admin:admin) and just relied on obscurity to keep their billboards safe.
There is a scientific consensus on Darwinian evolution, and it gets mentioned all the time. That argument is used against non-scientists challenging scientific consensus.
> When I think of the word "awesome" I think of something that inspires "awe", which I think is beyond the scope of file syncing.

I see your point. But having struggled with file syncing for literally decades, having somebody come along and make it so easily that it seems unimpressive and obvious really is very cool.

It's kinda like the old adage, "the best special FX in a movie are the ones you don't notice."
The first rule of Lua
I's the "elevator pitch" issue above all else.

There aren't too many things out there sophisticated and ambitious enough to actually be worth doing (or describing) that can also be summed up in a pithy 10-second haiku to appease a frat boy making smalltalk.

For obvious reasons, the laboriousness of such an exercise relative to the level of genuine interest in the details from the audience makes it unappealing.
How is this related whatsoever?
So someone in Indonesia, using only a computer with Internet access, got a man in England arrested, labeled a pedo and disowned by his employers and family? We live in interesting times indeed. Hey guys, I live in Moscow, wanna set up a little extortion racket? I hear it's pretty easy to buy stolen credit card numbers in bulk.

...And also I'd like to go on record saying that the real villains in this story are those who fan up public hysteria about child porn.
For me it was the stroke of luck in my first programming experience being punched card FORTRAN IV (but more like a II, no logical IFs) on the IBM 1130 in the fall of 1977.

I realized there had to be a better way and so I went straight to the library and read up on the software engineering of the time ("structured programming").

Since then I've read a lot on the practice of programming and applied it to my programming. And kept reading and applying stuff; the key here is to never stop learning.

Studying good software was probably the other major way. Back then, it was learning the UNIX V6 kernel with Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code plus reading the sources of all sorts of things and working on some of them.

If you haven't read The Pragmatic Programmer, AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis, something by Gerald Weinberg and something by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (Peopleware is pretty much required reading), and The Mythical Man Month I strongly recommend them.

The recent Coders At Work is really good, although at a somewhat higher level.

My other recommendation is to get serious knowledge of other domains that have useful ideas and metaphors; for me that would be science in general and biology in particular.

Hmmm, reading a lot of classic SF (from the '40s on) and studying nanotech also helped. You want to have a big bag of problem solving tricks.

It also helps to gain a top to bottom understanding of how it all works. There are many approaches and books for this, I like The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming (SICP) for the higher level stuff, but also be sure to study some EE, digital design and low level architecture. And operating systems.

And if you're at all good with your hands, build (assemble) yourself a computer and get UNIX/Linux running on it. Design and implement a network with routers and static IP addresses or something like that. Etc.
November 18, 2009 isn't exactly what I'd call inactive. Sure it wasn't super recent, but still, it's less than 3 months ago.