skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the core of the problem is the idea of the 40-hour work week. It is inevitable that more and more jobs will become marginalized and automated. That is a good thing: the goal of technological progress should be increased happiness, of which one component is increased leisure time.

As more and more jobs require less and less work performed by humans, the obvious solution is to work less hours. Instead of family providers working a total of 60-90 hours per week, they should be working closer to 40-50 in the somewhat-near future, with that number continuing to drop over time.

We obviously have 3 possible paths:

1. We return to the single-provider days of old
2. We scale back "normal" hours to be 20-30 hours per week per person.
3. We have high unemployment while many are working 70+ hour weeks.

Currently we are going with (3), and it just doesn't make that much sense. Either (1) or (2) would be acceptable to me, but (2) certainly seems more fair. I would love to get to a situation where families get to spend valuable time together and kids are raised by their parents.

I think an average of 25 hours per week would hit a nice sweet spot. It would allow companies to have 10-hour work days, either alternating 3/2 10-hour days per week, or 5-hour shifts 5 days a week. Jobs like programming could be designed to have 2 8-hour shifts per week (to perform actual development) along with 3 3-hour shifts (to address meetings, squash bugs, perform customer service, etc.). What is keeping us from this?

Instead, we have something like 15-20% of the population overworking themselves while another 15-20% are under- or unemployed. Something's gotta give.
The solution to this puzzle has a lot in common with http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=18....
Yes but remember how important the "seed users" are, which is why Facebook started where it did. If they truly deliver on the non-corporate, privacy aspects and keep a slim interface then many "alpha geeks" will swap over. Do you really care about the 100 or 200 friends you have on Facebook or the core 10-40? Or if all your tech buddies and most of your clued-in friends are on Diaspora and posting content there they don't post on Facebook, which account will you log into first? What will your Facebook become then other than a viewer, rather than a place that you put content? Would you have much trouble shutting down your Facebook at that point?

I don't see any unfunded startup being able to do anything new in this space, Facebook offered interface over Myspace. Diaspora offers control over Facebook - and from this demo they seem to be dispelling the vapour accusations, although we will have to see how it progresses. Google and Twitter currently are offering things and will be offering more in this space also. What real other avenues or general areas do you see a newcomer playing to? Games? Dating? Work collaboration? An even better interface? I don't see many areas for traction. Yes there is probably something I haven't thought of, but I don't think you can place your "bet" on a hypothetical vs these guys with an interesting demo and plenty of money to keep developing, who have hype and who are attacking the most vulnerable privacy/information vector in this market without some reasoning to back it up.

Edit/addendum:
I also think these guys rubbed a lot of HN people the wrong way - although I am not accusing you of this necessarily - because they got decent crowd-sourced funding in a seemingly haphazard way. Yes they are young, but if you go back to their pitch it was very slick, and as I said above, this tech demo goes a fair way to dispel the concerns about their youth/inexperience.
Android soon to be able to distribute Python apps as .APKs
The One Stop Shop for Ubuntu Customization
This is false. You have a duty to do what the shareholders want you to do and what is in their best interest, but you are allowed to use your own judgement to a great extent to determine what that might be.

There is a great deal of caselaw dealing with this (you can google "shareholder primacy" if you want to jump in) but it is anything but clear cut.

If the duty of directors to shareholders was as absolute as many people on the Internet think it is, companies would have to shut down and go into liquidation every time their market cap dropped below book value. But they don't (even, in some cases, when some investors might prefer it) because directors have the prerogative to seek long term gains at the expense of short term ones.

(They also have the prerogative to do the opposite, and the market unfortunately tends to reward it, but there are many exceptions.)
The hope is that if it became good enough, it could be used for forensic evidence. For instance if hair is discovered at a murder scene, you could get evidence about where the murderer likely lives.
What this addresses is the lack of water once we have cut down the trees. Because we are chopping them down the way the soil holds the water changes. Deep in the earth it often raises the water table (which can lead to increased soil salinity as the rising water table dissolves salts). Critically however for saplings, the soil close to the surface dries out as the natural mulch and shade a pre-existing forest provides no longer exists.
What Nokia needs to do to survive
Yes! I love the way you put it. I wish I could have said it like that. :-)
Plan B for Unity on iOS 4
One of the major issues we have in Australia is people stealing the saplings. Likely the box would be stolen as well, mores the pity.
You sure it wasn't red?
The problem is how he defines 'smart'.

If you assume smart means you know more than an average person, it means you know a superset of the data/facts they know, and thus you gain nothing by asking them something.

However, if you assume smart means something different, like the ability to learn quickly for example, then it follows that an average person can know something useful that you don't already know, and thus you have something to gain by asking them something.
An offscreen computer on another seed posted some messages. They then propagated from one seed to the others and then websockets automagically sent the posts through to the users sitting at their browsers, which jammed them into the page as it received them (each of the six windows being a different user viewing their own seed and its feed.)
Ken Imboden on Lessons From MMC, Candlestick, and NuSym
If you look at the rewards the "backers" get[1], I bet they'll spend around half their money on buying and shipping all of that stuff. Possibly more if they pay someone to do fulfillment for them.

Also, the best way to waste their money is to say "well, people expect us to spend this money, let's find ways to spend it that sound useful." They shouldn't be afraid to spend it on worthwhile endeavors, but they also should be in no rush to spend it.

What do you really want them to spend it on? A few more developers might be good if they know good people, but wasting much time on hiring when they've just got a summer isn't worth it. (Btw, anyone know if they're returning to school in the fall?)

So they'll pay for their plane tickets, rent, and food. Hopefully they'll contract someone to help make the UI gorgeous unless one of them is really good at it (though it looks pretty good right now). And if they end the summer with $75k in the bank that they can use going forward, that's awesome.

[1]: right sidebar of http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...
“Your Freedom” is a failure. How to make it better
10 million voxels spinning at 30fps - with Flash, but could HTML5 cut-it?
Ask HN: How do I save stories?
I have a link in my profile where I can view my saved stories? But I don't see any option to save them. Help?
Helen Mirren Shines In Tawdry Brothel Tale « Film Production Investments
Further, enterprise software often has less than a dozen customers. If you work on Word, you have millions of people paying a little bit of money, but that adds up to a large budget. An enterprise system with ten customers paying a million a piece? That's only a 10 million dollar budget. Further, each of those customers need slightly different applications to fit their business models. It's ugly, even with good architects.

The money just doesn't exist to obsess over UI in these products.
Thanks, we fixed that. It was a forgotten debug console.log() call.
Higgs boson is also wrong. The biggest part of the mass is created by the strong interaction between the quarks in the nucleon.
Well, Apple made auto-crossover NICs by buying auto-crossover NICs from Sun. The important part was that nobody else did that.

Seems like you should be able to just handle batteries put in either way, though.
Google's Eric Schmidt: You can trust us with your data
And yes, there's huge opportunity here for someone who figures out how to overcome this problem in multiple ways:

1. Someone who develops a uniform beautiful interface and a great development kit. ExtJS is on its way.

2. Someone who figures out how to solve that 10-very-close-but-not-quite appplication problem in a more elegant way than spring.
The so-called 'hype cycle' is the biggest contributor to social network's success, at least at the very early stage. People join social networks because other people are there, not because it guarantees more privacy, faster communications, or special features. An unfunded/unknown startup is more likely to lack traction and fade out quickly, no matter how good it is.
Protobufs allow you to define your service, but no RPC system is included.
Make the diagram easier to read. Don't make the diagram in thin raise lines embedded into the plastic at an angle that it's hard to shine light on them and look into the device at the same time.

That's a nice dream, but taking a lot at most of my children's small toys, I'd say it's an impossible one. At the least, it's an incredibly hard nut to crack.

On the other hand, a small symbol that meant "insert the batteries any way you wish" would do wonders.
Unless they are destroying them or exporting them far, far away, then it's still a net increase in the number of trees in a certain area, no?
That's a very cynical assumption--how do you figure that?
That link lists stories that you've upvoted.
I agree that there is a necessary job there, but a lot of the problem they are "solving" is artificially created.

You've got to look where they fit in the financial ecosystem. First one set of private equity folks come along, structure a deal, and leave a previously healthy company saddled with lots of debt. (Private equity folks make guaranteed money on the deal, everyone else bears risk.) If that company proves unable to handle it, the distressed debt folks come along, buy up the debt at a fraction of the price, take control of the company cheaply, then forgive much of the debt they bought. The now healthier company gets flipped back to the same private equity folks who ruined it in the first place who, as is their standard operating procedure, load it up with debt again.

It is a magic cycle. Every iteration brings more pain and misery to the people working there, making the product worse, slowly bleeding the consumer base, but throwing off more profit for the private equity folks. And the sad thing is that the poor company didn't need to go through any of this. It started off fine and would be in better shape if the whole process hadn't ever started.
Or maybe they steal them in order to sell them back to you?
Augmented reality use by Alstom
Http://www.officialbay.com/womens-shox-nz-shoes-pink-p-028251.html
Then what does "it" in that sentence refer to?
Have you run benchmarks on this? If so, can you link me to them?

It would be relatively easy to modify protobuf's parsing code to operate on the encoded byte rather than decoding field tags. If it's worth doing I'll do it.

BTW, the default parsing code has no loops in the fast-path. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think both 1 and 2 byte cases are inlined. (Avoiding the loops is great for these cases, since default branch prediction will often be wrong.) All tags under 16 are one byte.

Also, in my experience IO has always been the bottleneck -- my CPU can easily keep up with 1 or 10 gig pipes I have access to.
Simpsons did it better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZGIn9bpALo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L2fsubA2-c
In Python i suspect you could use things like Twisted or Multiprocessing (module) here.

In Perl there is AnyEvent and luckily CPAN already provides AnyEvent wrappers around pretty much everything!

ref: http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=AnyEvent...

BTW, There is a (fledging but robust) port of Tornado to Perl: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Tatsumaki/
Well, once you go indoors you have a lot more control over this. Think quarantine scenario since this is basically what we're talking about. Nothing gets in that hasn't been cleared.
Modnique.com - Brand Name and Designer Merchandise |
Firefox Reaches 2 Billion Add-Ons Downloaded
PS: This is all assuming the accuracy based on the number of digits given you could easily have 3 +/- .0001 and 101.5 +/- 70.

That is the whole point :)
I think you'll get better responses if you focus your question a bit more. Right now, it's a bit too close to "how long is a piece of string?"

There are a lot of ways to generate $10,000 vis SaaS.
You can build something that 10,000 people will pay $1/month for, or something that 1000 people will pay $10/month for, or something that 100 people will pay $100/month for, or something that 1 person will pay $10,000/month for.

All of those are valid possibilities, and have their own advantages and disadvantages.

So, first step: identify a market need, and a service that will fill that need, and do the math on the size of the market, the cost of acquiring customers, and the amount of money the customers are willing to pay to solve that particular problem.

That's a place for you to start your thinking, at least.
The question is though, is it smarter to use some form of tariffs to create more American jobs, lower the minimum wage, or as a third option accept that Asia can do manufacturing cheaper than anyone else and people will be unemployed, but tax the American companies benefiting most from the outsourcing and redistribute the wealth to the unemployed.

Maybe at this point in time you have to accept a high unemployment rate, the problem you have to be careful with I guess is you still want to provide incentive to the people currently in minimum wage positions.
By the way: if you've done this a few times, should should have built up a fair bit of experience about what works and what doesn't work. This should make it easy for you to re-focus the question appropriately.
What do you think they should spend it on? What did you think they would use it for?

Creating something like this - or most web startups - isn't expensive, it's just time consuming.
Challenge: depict "insert the batteries any way you wish" with a "small symbol" that people will actually understand.
You could also try 99designs (http://www.99designs.com).

If you can't design yourself, perhaps team up with someone that can.

Good luck.
If you step back from the "hype", not to directly oppose the many views present on this board, and analyze their statements, it appears they have more reasons to fail than succeed. The most worrying thing I see is their reliance on pivotal labs. They mention it in passing, but it would appear that the 4 founders of diaspora have very little technical knowledge and have outsourced the majority of their code. They are relying on someone else to do the most fundamental part of their startup and that, in and of itself, is extremely worrisome.
Personally, I use facebook to communicate with friends and family - neither of which are universally geeks or techy. So I'd still use facebook.

Just because a few privacy freakouts and geeks flock to this I don't see any reason anyone else will yet.
Going to reply to all your comments at this rate. ;-)

Even with single-byte tags, the overhead can be quite significant; thus the packed = true option. Unfortunately I don't have any public protocols or data to show you, but by switching to packed = true (combined with some extra tricks) I achieved ~40-60% savings on some of our datasets. We use protobufs for our stable storage, and this change certainly saved us more than my yearly compensation package.

> For the next 2048 entries

Yikes! I hope you never have to work with a message type with anywhere near 2048 fields! :-)

In practice, more than half message types have less than 16 fields, which is why the "incredibly arbitrary situation" is justified, and really does end up saving a ton of storage. But, for simplicity, nothing can beat just ntohl and a cast.
Made me think about Web 3.0 possible definition - websites connected
Adding in that the Earth's radius is about 6.4 megameters, and starting with h=5 meters you get that the horizon is about 8000 metres away. So from 5 meters up the horizon is about 5 statute miles away. Then to double the distance, multiply the height by 4.
Is that asterisk part of their logo? It's really distracting. I spent a good few moments looking for a footnote, until it dawned on me that it was just a visual gimmick.

So instead of hearing about their progress, I'm scanning their footer. I say change the logo, because it's first thing on every page. Thus an awesome distractor for whatever they want to tell.
"Meanwhile, in 2010, science and technology are just two more things most Americans take for granted. We still have to fight the Scopes monkey trial every few years, we couldn't get back to the Moon with any less time and money than it took the first time, and especially since 9/11, we're no longer a place where the world's STEM students come to study and live."

You're actually very wrong about foreign STEM students (every US graduate school is filled with Chinese grad students and post-docs), but that's neither here nor there. One of the main points of the article was that it gets harder to educate a new generation of high-tech workers when the industries that have all of the institutional knowledge out-source that knowledge to China.

Middle-achieving Chinese students have an incentive to come to the US for higher education -- it helps them get jobs back home. What incentive to middle-achieving American kids have, when the bottom 95% of high-tech jobs are sent to China?

The unspoken Myth of economics is that just because we've transitioned from an agrarian to an industrial economy in the past, we'll be forever able to use efficiency improvements to drive employment in the future. In real life, it's just plainly, obviously untrue. If nothing else, the simple fact that human intelligence follows a bell-curve should tell us that there's always going to be a large class of people who cannot function at the highest level of production. Those people need factory jobs, or farming jobs, or other lower-skill industries that pay a decent salary.
It'll be a fair bit less than half, probably around $50k.

Shameless but very relevant plug: http://nerdlife.net/diasporas-upfront-costs/
Help us to establish "makespace" in Cambridge, UK
1000 sounds like a reasonable number here you have George Michael going to a park and hooking up with random people. http://www.celebitchy.com/1243/george_michael_has_sex_with_r... the guys go to the park to have sex with random guys hence how the other fellow was there too. I believe some some software offered by one of the YC companies is most used for same-sex hooking up. But I am speaking from a point of jelousy as it would be nice to have such a hetrosexual culture without a monetary exchange.
The trade is mutually beneficial; it's not a zero-sum game that necessarily has winners and losers.

From the trade, we in the USA get cheaper products and low-cost loans/investment.

We then enact counter-productive feel-good policies that make us less competitive:

- employment-depressing labor rules (ranging from minimum wages to complex and expensive mandates)

- corporate welfare (including bailouts)

- subsidies for politically-popular activities (like home ownership and acquisition of often-superfluous academic credentials)

These choices are not the fault of the Chinese. At worst, because our trade with the Chinese makes us wealthier, we can then afford to make bigger mistakes elsewhere before correcting course. We spend the surpluses from trade on our anti-competitive policy luxuries.

"Winning" won't require getting tough on the Chinese, but getting tough on ourselves.
Excellent Dragonballz online games to Play
Yes, but as loewenskind pointed out. It is exactly like quarantine. think about it this way if we can keep entire football fields dust free for years at a time to fabricate micro-processors then surely we can do this?

Something that really amazes me is that technology has been pushed to limits that we can't imagine. Who would have thought that we are now engineering things 100 atoms apart? Unbelievable.
They're focussing on features, not benefits.
Could try finding consult/contract work.
Both protocol buffers and thrift are primarily designed to handle older or newer messages (than your program was compiled with) gracefully. Speed and compactness appear to be secondary goals. (Especially for Thrift, which does not seem concerned with compactness.)

Rather than version your protocol, the generated code is able to parse newer messages. If you modify a field on that message and serialize it, even the parts of the message your binary is unaware of will be retained. (As opposed to dropping them.) This means you don't need to push all changes at once, and you can have binaries talk with older and new binaries without problems.

The basic wire format is [(tag, payload bytes)*]. The tag identifies both the field "number", and the wire-type of the field. Wire types include fixed 32 and 64, length-delimited ranges, and, for protos, variable length integers. The parser knows how to skip fields of all wire types, so any unknown tags are skipped (and retained in memory) during parsing.

Some caveats apply -- you can modify your protocol in several backwards-incompatible ways. For example: add a new required field. Your new binary will reject all serialized messages from your older binaries. Alternatively, change the type of a field. These are pretty easy to avoid, but given enough people on your team, it is bound to happen once or twice.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You insult the whole community with your glib response. But it still stand Gandhi was racist in his early days.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/oct/17/southafrica.indi...
Air Jordan Alpha 1 (Black / Black / Metallic Silver)
I still don't get why everyone thinks Augmented Reality is so great. For live TV, ok; but for live performances / talks (like this one) your in the weird position of having to watch the performance happening in front of you, on a screen.
Sure. But the mantra is "Release early, release often".

And I guess early means that you don't need to wait until your code-base is feature complete or at 1.0 to release the code.

By the same token I think you're allowed to do what the Diaspora guys are doing and lay the foundations first, set the tone of the project and the general direction and style.

I hope these guys do well but if it ain't them it'll be someone else cuz peer to peer federated social networking is in the near future of social networking and I'd much much much prefer if it was open source than not.
After several releases of your app, you'll have several wire formats in the wild. One of the main features of libraries like Protocol Buffers is that they can parse old messages, so you don't need to maintain an increasingly hairier parsing routine.
Well, the thread is also about 3 years old.
The coming shortage of helium and how government policy is creating it.
There's a mandate that sales cover the costs associated with the helium reserves, so they've lowered the price to increase the sales in the short run without regard to the long term strategic value of having a huge chunk of a limited world supply.