skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "and you can also use the time to talk on the phone, listen to podcasts or books on tape"

Agreed on the walking, disagreed on the disconnection. Personally I feel like people have gotten disconnected from the world at large and each other for little more than a few tunes and podcasts.

I see everyone everywhere with earbuds stuffed into their ears - drowning out the activity and life all around them, absorbed into tunes that they've heard a million times already before.

I am often tempted to do the same - but over the last month I've made a concerted effort to eliminate headphone use while out and about (including commuting), and I think I'm a lot better off for it. I've had many an interesting conversation, have been more aware of my surroundings, and generally noticed and appreciated a lot of the things around me in the city that I used to just walk past without the slightest awareness.

I highly recommend this to anyone.
Pretty interesting. I'd like to see it in practice.
ad hominem much?
"The use of easy-to-obtain metrics with little or no predictive value has interesting parallels in all sorts of places."

I was just wondering if there were parallels for this in programming.

The obvious might be the various approaches and "methodologies" to programmer or team productivity based on dubious or non-existent hard data.

But I'm more wondering if there are tools or techniques that don't get any accolades (like, say, MVC or TDD or the framework of the week) but have a peculiar synergistic effect that ends up providing significant (and possibly counterintuitive) value.

What's the "Shane Battier" of software development practices?

And how would you know?
All Facebook needs to do is create a few generic privacy profiles, and default to one of the more private ones. Privacy problem solved. But, I get the feeling there's a corporate culture of vicariousness, exposure and a touch of schadenfreude. That culture is permeating into popular culture.
> Mark Zuckerberg has been surrounded with allegations ranging from questionable personality traits, unethical behaviors and outright illegal activities.

It certainly seems he wouldn't fair well if he applied the concept of ‘radical transparency’ to himself.
For those who like to highlight text as you read, you can shut down the nytimes' messing with you, by adblocking all its js, from all its servers - and reloading. This filter worked:

http://*.nytimes.com/**/*.js
In non-Roman-alphabet countries, it's quite common to have two-sided business cards with English on one side and the local language on the other.
I feel like its 1994 and all my friends are on AOL, while I enjoy the open internet.
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I think the issue is not really the current severity of the situation, but the potential severity of the situation.
Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices
http://expressjs.com/intro.html
Has anyone else had a problem where the menus have no text. As in, I can't see the menus at all. I figured it might be a font problem but couldn't work out what it could be.
Wikis are designed to share information. Collaborating with others in your case seems to be about solving problems and accomplishing tasks. I would use tools that are best
for each purpose in the collaborative process, rather than lean towards sacrificing functionality for 'all-in-one'-ness.

I would recommend a shared blog so each person can share current notes/ideas/links- for ideas and brainstorming. This is the place for peer comments and discussions.
I can edit a blog post easier than a sent email.

A wiki would be great for separating known and unknown answers to the questions that arise during the project. This is the place to show what has been done and what needs to be done. Discuss these topics on the blog, not on the wiki 'discussion' page; post the _results_ on the wiki.

org-mode or something that simulated it would be great for prioritizing tasks. For those that are not familiar, it is an emacs mode that, among other things, allows you to create and move nested lists ( lists of lists ). This is the place to micro-manage the order of steps so that they are done most efficiently and keep people on track.
Maybe the attachment was named hot_tub.jpg?
I HATE videos with no transcript, but I like karma, so here's the summary I made for my bookmark:

Best piece of advice you received?
-- "It's the people, stupid." Everyone ignores it, he ignored it too at first. It's the same advice anyone who's been in business for a long time will give you.

What advice do you give entrepreneurs?
-- Find a great partner no matter what you do. Qualities to look for: high intelligence AND high energy AND high integrity. Every one of these is important.

How important is it to be in Silicon Valley?
-- A: It's more important than people outside the Silicon Valley really realize. He learned this the hard way: he started out in Boston. Networking. The atmosphere -- "It's in the air, it's in the water". If you're doing a consumer web business, it's winner-takes-all. No place for second Facebook, no place for second Twitter, so you need every advantage you can get.

What do you look for in an entrepreneur?
-- You're not evaluating the product as much as the person presenting it, what are they capable of. "Show don't tell." Separating talkers from doers.

How to get a meeting with an investor?
-- Sorry, didn't watch, it's irrelevant to me.

Whether you should be public or private with your idea?
-- Again, didn't watch, it's irrelevant to me.
This is the analogy I've been searching for.
I definitely think there are parallels in programming. The lines of code metric comes to mind.
Too bad the printable version omitted the diagram.
Is it just me, or are the pictures for #7 and (maybe) #1 a bit NSFW?
The guy has a lot to feel bitter about, I do believe he got a pay out that set him up quite well.

The media does like stories, and nothing better than building something up to be huge, and then shooting it down. Recent episodes of this include Microsoft and Apple.

But despite what the media says, or how powerful the media seems to believe it is, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook are still strong and huge. The average person just does not concern themselves with what seems to be SO important to the media.

In regards to facebook, the simple fact is that we have all been losing privacy for many years, thanks to technology. We are photographed, filmed, tracked, catalogued so many times in the modern day, and this worries the majority very little. They still carry supermarket loyalty cards, fill out surveys, put in their real names and addresses.

I can't see this affecting facebook in any meaningful way. I wish I was wrong.
Oh, and the time when my bank's netbank SSL certificate expired, and it took them 3 days to get it fixed because it seemed noone knew what was going on... that was great! lol.
If you made a site and showed it to a guy that made a similar site now valued at $20B, you'd probably think about it a lot.

I think one of the main takeaways here is that an initial media backlash is the fastest way to kill a social site looking for its critical mass. It's like any party, if people think it'll be lame or unsafe because that's the word of mouth, nobody will go. Whether playing fair or foul, somehow Mark got the right words in people's mouths about his site and it took off.
It might not be that simple. I was reading an article earlier today that pointed out these privacy decisions have mostly been made to simplify the internal processes of the application. That linking too many different parts of data was having a huge effect on the growth of facebook, and this has driven the problems we are facing today.

It also helped them escape the growing pains we have seen form twitter and the like.
Thanks! We will post invites when the system is ready for testing.
A Customer Experience lesson from Jeff Bezos
Found it, it was from slashdot. Read the part about the "Fractioning Column"

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-8199-Breakthrough-Energy-...

Mirror, since they are down for maintenence:
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http://www.examiner.com/exa...
The article touches on predicting stats, and I'm wondering what kinds of predictive algorithms would be used in a situation like this?
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Sony Considers Developing Tablet to Compete With Apple’s IPad
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Okay, what's the appeal of "changing the world" for its own sake? I often hear things like "entrepreneurs endure the stress because they want to change the world."
Thanks Colin. Very informative.
Ah, that may explain it: the programs are constrained by the physical things that they're modeling.
Lift your right foot a few inches from the floor and then begin to move it in a clockwise direction. While you’re doing this, use a finger your right index finger to draw a number 6 in the air. Your foot will turn in an anticlockwise direction and there’s nothing you can do about it!

Hmm... this might be overstated. I could do it with a little bit of concentration.
Could you expand a bit on your comments about Poly1305 ("too difficult to implement" - but Bernstein has a library, right?) and Blowfish ("DON'T use")?
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> People's reaction to the 'less conservative' aspects of each other would have to change if there was no way of hiding them.

Has this ever happened anywhere? We've already seen absence of privacy in tribal societies, and those are exceptionally bad places to fail to conform. Only cities are large and anonymous enough to allow eccentrics to go unnoticed and thrive, which is what makes cities the wellsprings of prosperous liberal societies.

> It is rather analogous to gay people 'coming out of the closet'

Some of whom were murdered for it. There are still only a few areas (large cities, of course) where they are relatively safe. And it took them two generations just to achieve that!
A visionary stands on the shoulders of giants, but for some, a pile of small people will do.
The problem with this approach is that there are as many workflows as there are organizations/people?
Hey, I'd love to get in touch with you and pick your brain about that if possible! Thanks!
Are you really editorializing in a HN submission's title?
I agree about the Artima book; its organization follows the Scala specification (http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/ScalaReference.pdf) very closely. I'd almost advise reading the specification instead, but it's a slog.

The O'Reilly book is great.

Also keep in mind that several important changes or additions to the language have been made with version 2.8, and many books aren't up to date.
Since I've only the slides, I have a question about the following point:

> DON’T: Put FreeBSD-8.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso and CHECKSUM.SHA256 onto the same FTP server and think that you’ve done something useful.

I take it the FTP got compromised and people simply regenerated the checksum for a modified image?

Wouldn't signing the checksum file solve the problem? Using different FTP servers for distributing the image and the checksums makes mirroring probably difficult.
The $6 Dollar Google Job Experiment
'The Age of Facebook'...is just beginning?
That's a good technique, and I use it, but it doesn't help if English isn't your first language and you're having trouble understanding it anyway. Naval Ravikant speaks clearly, but he speaks fast, and having constantly to rewind to listen to something again makes it really, really hard.
I take it the FTP got compromised and people simply regenerated the checksum for a modified image?

I'm not aware of any problems with FreeBSD FTP mirrors being compromised recently. I wanted an example of data-adjacent-to-hash and most of the audience was FreeBSD people, so I figured that I'd go with an example close to home.

Wouldn't signing the checksum file solve the problem?

Yes. Or just relying on the FreeBSD release announcements, which contain SHA256 hashes and are signed.
Does anyone (who went there) have an opinion on the University of Phoenix or The Open University?

EDIT: Woah, look at this link http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/Company/University-Of-Pho... - so many complaints. I really wonder what is going on here. Is there any online university that is not a ripoff?
Yes, Bernstein has written code for Poly1305; but bus factors are bad. If you decide to use Poly1305, at some point you're going to want to use it on a new CPU or in a different language, and you'll find that DJB's code won't work for you.

You should avoid blowfish because it has a 64-bit block size.
You can titrate the amount of startupness

I think this is my favorite metaphor ever. (I'm titrating it all the way down to homeopathic levels myself...)
There is certainly room for better wiki options. I found JotSpot to be the most interesting and innovative, but it basically died when it was acquired. The current offerings are so heavily weighted toward power users wider adoption simple will not happen (in terms of editors).

I've had the chance to work at a large scale website based completely around a wiki, and the successes and failures therein became quite evident. There is definitely room to innovate, especially on the editing side of the experience. I have some interesting friends in the wiki community, so feel free to ping me if you want to chat about it some more and I can probably put you in touch with them.
I've been asked that during a hiring presentation before, and the answer I gave was that starting a startup was the most fulfilling thing I've ever done and you should definitely do your own if you have the inclination.

However, if you want to get a bit of experience working at somewhere where you can work on many systems at massive scale, want to jump a few levels ahead on the risk curve, or are interested in first seeing what a startup is like from the inside, then Justin.tv, Airbnb, Weebly, Scribd, Dropbox or any of the others are some pretty good places to do that.
Yeah, it was a bit troll-y, I know. But sometimes the Diogenes in me comes out and really, we all need to be slapped in the face and asked, "This? Is it? This is what we've done?" Hardware doubles every eighteen months. If it was a stock it would blow the markets away. Software is a T-Bill. It barely covers inflation. Shame on us for "having tried more sophisticated representations than text before" and then giving up when it didn't immediately pan out.

We can do better.
Good luck with this. There certainly is room for something light & inspiring.

I would like to see a tool that would, first, allow real-time editing of structured documents. Think Etherpad meets Wufoo.

Take the example of a team writing an RFP to buy IT equipment. Team members from purchasing, the business unit and IT would need to collaborate on a document with likely a pre-defined structure (technical specs, functional specs, terms & conditions, deadlines, etc). This is different from the lack of structure in Google Wave or Etherpad. I imagine that the majority of knowledge work in today's enterprise is about filling in templates rather than free-flowing text.

For this to work, as a minimum we would need:-

1. real-time communication
2. the ability to design templates with the right balance between strictness & flexibility

Second, it should support a workflow. Sticking with this example, the purchasing manager should be able to publish the RFP and invite vendors to respond. The bid manager at the vendors should then be able to turn (transform) an RFP into a bid template, invite his/her sales team to collaborate on a bid and so on.

Not sure how this would work, but perhaps the following:-

1. Access control
2. A way to transforming one document with a certain structure to another.
Microsoft’s Experiments with Software Transactional Memory Have Ended
Santo boat
May be perfectly valid, but many people don't know how to handle the 0 if they rarely make international phone calls. I agree with the article's authors on this point, albeit not for OCR reasons - if you've got an international phone nr on your card, leave out the 0, so that people only have to type what's actually on the card and don't have to think about archaic implementation details of phone systems.
Any chance of something like this in London?!
English is not my native language, and I use the spell-checker all the time.
First off I doubt Mark Zuckerberg believes that load of crap for a second. Its a red herring. He's trying to sell people on some sort of 'integrity' revolution because profile openness encourages more pageviews, better targeting on ads, increased opportunities for partnerships etc etc.

He's trying to create a debate around the topic as if there's some fundamental change to human behavior occurring here, when in fact nothing has changed, in fact the necessity for privacy has been nothing but reinforced. The irony is he probably has one of the most guarded public vs private personas on facebook. Total BS
I would say it the other way. When we can really free ourselves from text, we'll have made the main core changes that have been needed to make programming better.
I can only speak for our company, but I run technical hiring at JTV and will be there presenting. On the other hand, to say that we will hire you "on the spot" is probably disingenuous: I think both candidates and our company are better served when we make people go through the full interview process of doing a technical problem, coming into the office for technical interviews and to see what the culture is like, and then giving both the candidate and our company a day or two to think about it. That being said, of course it is our full intention to move as quickly as possible.
This is a nice article and a really cool library, but damn it, why do people persist in using such maddeningly tiny font sizes? Pressing Ctrl-+ made the whole page vastly more readable, and did not adversely affect the page in any way. I know it's tempting to try to cram more text onto a single screen, but readability is important.

Tiny font sizes are the new <blink> tag. Please avoid them.
From personal experience, many professors are more interested in themselves and forget that the primary mission is the development of students.

I've seen this mistake a lot. While you may believe that the primary purpose of professors is teaching, this is not true at many institutions. In fact, at heavy research institutions the benchmark for tenure is not teaching performance, it's grant success and publishing.
XML and spreadsheets would be lame. And they would both be better than a text file.
It is becoming difficult to take Mr. Gruber seriously. The way he managed to frame Apple's actions as in any part 'in the best interest of the users' is just plain silly. Apple is interested in total control of the App ecosystem for several reasons and most, if not all, of them are solely based in the interior of Apple's money chest.

"Users have a system where they can install apps with zero worries about misconfiguration or somehow doing something wrong."

I've never ever thought twice about installing an Android application. The security model on Android is more impeccable than on Apple's. Apple's requires me to trust Jobs to tell me what I can, can't, should and shouldn't run (literally. My understanding is that there is little isolation between apps from an architectural security perspective). With Android, I simply have to trust an open source Dalvik engine which, at its very core, isolates the applications.

"Adobe [...] knows that the best mobile platform, the one whose aesthetic and audience most closely align with their own, is the iPhone OS."

Maybe, for now; I'm not even convinced Adobe's target audience is iPhone OS users (wouldn't Adobe's target audience be ALL mobile OSes), but who cares? That's like whining about my target audience being Cuba, it really doesn't matter does it? Eventually the Cubans will go elsewhere if they want US goods. I don't really understand what it means for a mobile OS to have an "aesthetic" that aligns with, what, an entire company? What does that even mean? Adobe is clearly NOT aligned with Apple if Adobe is interested in /being on iPhone OS and Apple slams the door in their face repeatedly/. I think it's abundantly clear that Adobe is happy enough to throw their weight, voice, etc (as small as it maybe perceived to be) behind Android.

It's like someone charging you twice as much for a dish that tastes half as good, but drizzles it in fancy sauce. When you peel back the superficial appearances, you see that one platform has more developers resources, more "openness", more transparency, and generally treats developers better. If you think the iPhone OS is "slick" or you enjoy the current App market dominance (hmm, first mover advantage ANYONE?), fine. But those things are more than at risk of being dethroned by Google's continued Android development.

It's going to be hard to point fingers at Android when Dalvik gets a huge performance boost and Flash runs more or less flawlessly on all new Android devices.
Using YC's influence and reputation to bring talented candidates in the door at the investee companies is always something I'd hoped for, so I'm super happy to see this. Quality deal flow has always been our bottleneck for hiring (like all technical companies, I suppose we like to think we're super picky :D).
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bingo. Facebook is a habit and becoming the start page for millions of people.
I don't suppose you're planning to tie these recommendations up into an open source C99 library with an NaCl-like crypto_box interface? Oh, and can I have a pony too? :)
How to spot a psychopath at work
The second "proposal" reminded me of the South Park World of Warcrack episode, where Cartman....you know. Let's just say he didn't need to get up to fulfill basic bodily functions.

Anything can be taken to the extreme, even productivity ;-)
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One point I think crypto-people need to hammer home to non-crypto audiences is that they should not encrypt and transmit anything that will remain sensitive for more than 5-10 years via any form of encryption relying on factoring, one-way hashes, etc.. (Pretty much everything classical short of one-time-pads exchanged in person.) Credit card transactions? Fine. Affairs? State secrets? Not fine. If you're interesting enough, your coded messages will be archived and cracked within a decade or two (or less).

A lot of crypto algorithm's are theoretically secure for thousands of years (or longer) assuming an eavesdropper has access to existing algorithms and classical hardware with Moore's law scaling. Unfortunately, it's currently non-existing attack algorithms you really need to worry about. Advances are relentless. Then there are things on the horizon like quantum computing...
Wow, this is great. I have few questions, is the per-item url now part of Cappuccino or something custom for this app? With this in place would it be difficult to add back button support?