skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cemeteries have endowment funds to ensure the land where people are buried will remain land where people are buried. Sites like this have nothing of the sort. I don't even see a business model.

Without something to guarantee people's memories will live long in the site, you run the risk of their loved ones being taken from them twice. You didn't even address this point on the first page, instead just start talking about your nifty features.

You really need to think about how your startup is going to avoid death if you are asking people to put their faith in you when they try to preserve memories of their loved ones.
Facebook is not about features anymore. It is about the fact that they have 500M users. When you want to compete with Facebook, you have to grab 30% from the 500M to your side to call it a competition. You have to convince them that you have a better service and that they won't miss the people that are still on Facebook.

P.S. 1% of Facebook users care about privacy. The rest are not aware.
You're only saying this because it was a Max Headroom episode.
I'm not sure why "you just need to be able to sell" was down-voted. At this time, his comment was the only one mentioning the obviously most important part of "freelancing."

Yes, all those other things mentioned here are important as well but I don't think anything is more important than being able to sell.

You need to be able to find clients and sell to them, but that's not all there is to selling. Selling is also important in being able to set good rates or project fees.
There's a TV series (Caprica) based around that...
What you do is stop the world for a moment, set a GC due flag, and then wait for threads to come to GC-safe points. At GC safe points, the set of live registers and stack locations is definitely known.
> prometheus

http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Promethease

(edit) Oh, it's a crippleware. They want "optional $2 payment" so that the program would run in 5 minutes instead of 3 hours. How cute.
You aren't taking it for granted if you are paying for the service as part of your luxury apartment's fees.
Most newspapers already run services like this one. It's not a new idea. All they're doing is making an internet-wide one. The business model? Sell it to end-users or sell it to newspaper obit sections as a managed service.

I'm not sure I see the risk here. Cemeteries are carefully managed because people care a lot about how their remains are cared for. They don't have anything resembling that level of concern over JPG's.
I would guess that the vast majority of those who believe that the moon landings never happened aren’t quite that crazy. They just didn’t think it through. Sure, there will always be people (also the most vocal ones) who will be convinced by no amount of evidence. For everyone else this is a small but powerful piece of evidence. Better as laser reflector data or long explanations as to why the shadows on the photos from the moon look like they look.
Ephemeralization of American Universities
The point is that the technology isn't about the things, it's about the people and how it affects your life.

Right. For example, the technology and social practice of a cable TV show can lead folks to incorrect conclusions about how to pitch technology.

Nobody cares that the carousel is a wheel. Just like nobody cares that your phone has a 1gz processor, or that your display has 1080dpi.

Uh... those are all false statements.

The 1080dpi is so that you can see your photos or video in life-like quality.

Sure. Or for some other purpose, depending on what you do. That's not what the linked clip is about, though.
In August 2006 Cephalon unexpectedly received a 'non-approvable' letter from the FDA for modafinil tablets branded as Sparlon. Taken in this guise, modafinil was intended for the treatment of so-called attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adolescents. The FDA's rejection of modafinil/Sparlon for ADHD was based on a single adverse incident during clinical trials. One child developed a rash suggestive of Stevens-Johnson syndrome - a serious hypersensitivity complex affecting the skin and mucous membranes. There is no evidence that Stevens-Johnson syndrome is more common in adult modafinil users. The physician who diagnosed SJS in the affected 10 year old later recanted the diagnosis.

http://www.modafinil.com/
Err... I have a laptop with a touchscreen, so I've played around with touch input a lot. A few things you may not realize without some experience with a touchscreen on a real computer:

The screen is most visible a foot or two away from your face, vertical. Make it flat and things get hard.

The hands like typing on a horizontal surface. Try typing on a vertical screen, especially one at the proper viewing distance, and you will type really slow, and your arms will fatigue fast. It looks cool in movies, but it is a ridiculous waste of movement unless you barely interact with the machine.

Portable devices work alright with moving the keyboard onto the screen, and they have no other choice, but for a real computer it makes no sense. If/when the standard desktop/laptop computer becomes obsolete, this becomes irrelevant, but until then...
That's an interesting perspective. I think you may be right. The problem is that, when I've understood a passage from Shakespeare -- really understood it -- I still cannot recite it verbatim. I can tell you what it means, I could write a paper on it if you wanted me to, but memorizing it and being able to repeat it back to you word for word has nothing to do with my understanding of it. So, in my experience, it's a really poor proxy to assess one's understanding of the text.
Twitter has network effect.
This is a case where, I reckon, if the mouse is the answer, we're asking the wrong question. What's better than the mouse? Not shoehorning everything we want to do with computing into the form factor of "a computer".

OK, this is going off into left field, and I really should blog this, but take the iPad. For what the iPad does - video watching, web browsing, reading extended text, certain classes of creative apps (eg http://hexler.net/software/touchosc) - it's easily the best thing on the market. It's the best Web content consumption device anyone's produced, ever, hands down, which means it's the best television and printing press ever produced.

But it's not a general-purpose computer. In fact, it's those things because it's not a general-purpose computer. It's in the notebook niche, and by that I don't mean clamshell, I mean spiral-bound; it's the nearest we've yet got to technological paper. If it tried to be a general-purpose computer, it would be much less good at the things it's good at.

That points to the ugly truth of our industry - and let's face it, it's something we all know in our hearts:

General-purpose computers suck.

They really do. They're a kludge. They're a set of dodgy tradeoffs, due to economic and technical limitations. They're unintuitive and fragile. They're expensive. They're rapidly obsolescent.

The computer I want to use for programming isn't the same as the research-and-content device I want to use for writing isn't the same as the piano-keyboard-and-touch-screen-and-dials device I'd want for writing music isn't the same as the book-a-like I want to read on before I go to sleep. One device can't be good at all these things.

When it comes down to it, the mouse is a hack to make a general-purpose computer sort of acceptable for many of these things. It's a genius hack, but it's a hack.
The rule with .NET is that any pointers passed out into native code needs to be pinned (so it won't move) with unsafe code (fixed statement in C#) or accessed via a GCHandle.
A lot of the press gets by by writing snark-filled criticism of anything and everything. Bigger names make for better press: the snark that pulls in the most eyes is the snark about the fall of the biggest Goliath. So, this segment of the press has wanted an excuse to tear into Apple for years—it's a very big name—but Apple has Done No Wrong (from their fans' perspectives), so they haven't been able to.

Now that there is something that consumers could, theoretically, get mad about, they're going to attack Apple full-bore, no matter how irrational it is on an objective scale.
robert schumann
I have been freelancing since I graduated college 8 years ago. I've been self employed so long I wouldn't even know what to do with a fulltime job.

I routinely accept projects that are well outside of my programming abilities or have unreasonable deadlines or budgets and always land on my feet.

In my experience you can get away with a lot less competence as a freelancer. Since clients have no access to your methods, freelancers can sometimes get away with awful code as long as they finish the job to spec and on time. I've seen it done many times.

The big difference here is managing yourself. If you're the kind of person that needs a lot of structure and a manager around, then it will be difficult. If you're pretty independent and can live with occasional cash shortages and work overloads, then you're good to go.
Also modern computers don't consume 300W anymore. Get a notebook or a netbook.
This is something I noticed when teaching my dad to use a computer; when I said "right" click, he always press the button with his index finger and will continue to do so until I tell him he have to press using the middle finger.

So my guess is, it has something to do with the fact that people are used to using their index finger to press something. Multiple buttons on digital camera are pressed using the index finger. Buttons on a TV remote are pressed using the index finger. Right click? Press the button? The intuition kicks in, and the index finger is used.

The "right click" that involves alternate pressing apart from what they are used to do so daily might be unfamiliar concept to those people. A vague, unfamiliar concept that is not intuitive to them are more likely to be forgotten. However, a set of rules for a specific task might be easier to remember even though it is unintuitive. A radio dashboard, for example.
In my case, it's all about getting into the computer science rather than "programming" per se. I love reading papers and articles related to the problems I'm solving and then working out if they'd help me. Taking sloppy O(n*n) algorithms I've bashed together and getting them down to O(n) - or whatever - is very fulfilling.

This might just make me weird though ;-) I guess I like to think I'm working towards actually making an academic contribution to the world one day, rather than just doing something to earn some money - that's a big driver for me in terms of life ambition.
I'm not experiencing this issue with my own HTC Incredible, for what it's worth. Maybe there's some glitch with Google's wireless network database...

As for the Incredible's GPS performance, I couldn't be happier. It's accurate enough that when I go cycling and let My Tracks record my ride, I can zoom in and see where I headed out on one side of the road and came back on the other. The biggest downside is the elevation inaccuracy, but from what I can tell that's an issue with all devices that gather altitude data from GPS (rather than an internal barometer).
The lack of hunger might be a give away.
Agreed. The network effect is their advantage. Features are for tech blogs to write about, real people care that their buddies from 30 years ago are online now.
The thing is, there aren't actually that many file types which you'd want to open in multiple programs. Maybe fifteen or so which you'd expect to do data interchange with - a handful of picture formats, ditto movies, ditto audio, ditto text/DTP, and Excel and Powerpoint.

Everything else is special-purpose, so as long as you can mail the document, you're fine.

iTunes and iPhoto already handle the majority of those. Add a personal office-document-management tool and you're already pretty much there.
I think the main parts of project management are to take the heat from upper management and remove roadblocks so my people can do their work.

The best information I've found is David Maister's "Managing Professionals" at
http://davidmaister.com/podcasts.archives/3/

He's more practical than Drucker, Harvey-Jones and Heller. They say what to do; Maister says how to do it.
"The answer to that one is pretty straightforward, well known, and easy to understand. And it has little to nothing to do with race." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_for_...

Based in part, as I recall, on Irish family history.

The "America is simply not an egalitarian society" simply doesn't explain how blacks uplifted themselves for nearly a century after the Civil War ... and then it ground to a halt or I think worse, such that Moynihan could write about this in 1965.

Note also that "The gap between rich and poor" is seldom a concern for "the poor" if they're well off enough. [ Insert usual statistics on calorie consumption, TV and car ownership, etc. ].

You claim the poor are worse off on an absolute scale; that's not true to my knowledge and I'd like to see some evidence of that (before the Great Recession, of course; in the rest of argument you are saying the gap is the problem.

As for your initial paragraph, yep, cui bono, that's an elephant in the room, although I don't think it's quite as dire or racist as you posit. More an issue of class and politicians and those connected to them making a buck (and for the more ideological, trashing the hated suburbs)), but the article was long enough as it was.

Note also the mention in passing of "urban renewal", a "great social experiment" somewhat like this one (or so I gather, I've not studied it).
Yeah, sleep mode works. But you won't be online. There's no notification. You still have to pull your information manually.

Plus if you're on a modem there's a lot of manual work involved in getting online whilst with 3G there is just no being offline.
Meddling, Oversight, and Agile, Oh My
Depending on the level of clients you plan to have, you may need to learn to be ruthless.
I disagree - I actually want my Computer to do as many things as possible. I don't want to clutter my house (or my purse) with a multitude of devices.

I think it is a fallacy to conclude that just because Windows sucked, all computers suck.

Also I don't see the iPad replacing computers yet. I don't own one, so I am not even sure I consent to it being the best device for watching movies - the screen is small, and presumable I have to keep it on my body at all times to have a good viewing distance.

Also, I don't understand your argument that it is the wrong question. Apparently there still are tasks that require a mouse - how do you suggest replacing them? That there are tasks that don't require a mouse doesn't invalidate the concept of a mouse.
I haven't done any iPhone development, but can't the GPS sample rate be overridden in software? I know it can on Android -- My Tracks will let you tweak the sample rate if you want, for example.
"Where The Fear Has Gone There Will Be Nothing. Only I Will Remain."
literally flawless speech recognition with natural language parsing for commands

No way. I can type much, much faster than I can speak. Simpler, strict non-natural commands are much easier than natural language commands (hell, people have difficulties giving and understanding verbal commands all the time) - never mind the fact that languages like English are terribly ambiguous and peoples everyday speech is too filled with local slang.

Also, if I have to talk to my computer, I a) cannot use it in a group environment or, say, when someone is sleeping and b) when I type I can see what I typed and I can edit it if I make mistakes. If I speak commands, I cannot do this. An exaggerated (but still realistic) example: if I type "delete foo" instead of "delete bar" and notice before I hit enter, I can fix the mistake. If I speak "delete foo" then foo will probably be gone before I can correct myself. Finally, what about different words that sound the same? Sometimes spelling or capitalization is the only thing that distinguishes things (eg, file names) - with speech you couldn't do this.

In summary, in my opinion, speech recognition is a terrible form of input for general text input and command input tasks. (It may be useful to augment more traditional input and it can certainly be more than useful (or even required) for disabled people, but for the majority of people and tasks, I don't see the attraction)
You need to be competent enough to know which jobs you can't manage in a timely manner and turn them down. Practically speaking, that means you should be able to write a simple crud app in your sleep. You should be able to sprinkle some fancy JavaScript ui here and there, and you should be comfortable working with APIs. I'd say you should be familiar with payments, but services like Chargify make that so easy, it's no harder than working with Twitter, for example.

If you can do all that without wasting too much time learning, you're more than qualified to freelance.

Note that I said nothing about scaling and other back end magic. Most clients don't need scale. They need front end development.

Be selective at first, and don't take on anything that you can't do well. Referrals are gold, and you get them by doing a great job, not be stretching yourself. That's what side projects are for.

And I would say, always work for full price - period. Again, free is for side projects.
Are you posting this to get people to ignore this topic or in support of the article? I thought the conference was fine. I was shocked they played that snooty stuck up video.
I can not remember cmd+f11 (my guess would have been f3). I don't use it often enough. I can remember the little button next to the start menu that looks like the desktop. I can remember to try second mouse button when I want to do something special with a file.

Key combinations are impossible to discover by exploration. With the right mouse button, you can solve every problem by exploration.
I have a playlist of 90's electronica (underworld, prodigy, aphex twin, orbital, future sound of london, the orb, daft punk, etc) called "AMPED" that I made for if I'm losing focus. If I ever fade out, I put that on and it gets me in the zone.
Same.

I think the key here is persistence. Recently, it took me over four days to solve a certain 3D animation problem. It was frustrating when it wasn't working, but because I threw all of my spare time at it, it eventually got done, which is very satisfying.

I don't know how to want to be persistent. I just am. Getting started each day is usually the hardest part. If I give in to the temptation of playing a game, it's almost a guarantee that I won't be getting anything done for a few hours, if at all.

It helps a lot to be very interested in the problem domain. If you're avoiding a task, try re-framing it to make it fun. For example (I'll use a gamedev example since that's my field), instead of writing a way to play a 3D animation, write a way to blend between a bunch of different animations simultaneously, then play the result. Sure, it's more challenging, but it's also more fun. That kind of "re-framing" is very valuable.
Wait.. are you trying to tell us its easy by introducing yet more odd and complicated buttons to the mix? Command + Click is too complicated - use Enter or FN+F11 instead? What??? I'm really not buying into your argument here!
I knew about this problem before I bought my iPhone 4, I didn't care then and I care less now.

The iPhone is the best tech device I own. It helps me run my life by managing my diary, email and contacts with a easy to use interface that my old blackberry could never aspire to.

It rocks and I don't care if I loose one call in every 50...it's a small price to pay.
Is the US grid system really in that miserable of a state? It seems to work just fine where I live. And is the right solution really building more power lines? It's not clear to me why that would solve any potential problem with the system, other than that more power needs to be transported than can currently be. And if that is so, how do things work at all now?
How do you drag a photo there if it is in iPhoto? Where does iPhoto store it's photos? Is it even legal to just copy fotos out of the iPhoto folder?

I also tend to have problems on OS X because the finder sucks and dragging files to the task bar -> window opens -> drop on window often does not work for me (I suppose it should work?). If you open the finder, it hides the email window...
I don't think you're understanding his point.

Regardless of the content or meaning of any text, you can memorize it without understanding it. Memorizing may be a proxy for understanding it (you have to read it over and over again), but it is not the same process at all. If you can recite Godel's incompleteness theorem verbatim from memory, does it mean you understand it? Similarly, you can memorize verbatim the Wikipedia article on String Theory, but does it mean you understand it? All you have committed to memory are the words which are pointers to concepts and places and bodies of knowledge (among other things), but unless you understand what those words mean (unless you dereference those pointers), the text is meaningless and opaque. Having memorized X lines from anything is a 'cool' feat to some people, but it's an entirely orthogonal endeavor from understanding what the text means.

Edit: Also, just because someone repeatedly disagrees with you, it does not mean they 'just want to be contrary'.
I've been thinking about getting an iPad for my father. He has always been interested in computers, but a keyboard and mouse are just a bit much for him. I got him going on a TomTom GPS with touch screen, which, after a shaky start and fat fingers, he got going on and is confident with. I've recently set them up with a Tivo, and again, after a shaky start, is building confidence with the menu system.

I've talked to him about an iPad, told him it is touch screen just like his TomTom. He understands a touch screen interface - you point at something and you get it.

Those wondering what the big deal with a mouse, keyboard and everything else - older people have less flexible hands, someone who has worked hard all their life don't have the fine motor skils to move a mouse around and click and double click. A keyboad is an abstraction away from the 'thing' - which is the screen. Old people also have bad eyesight and often wear bifocal lenses for reading, and looking up and down constantly between a keyboard and a screen is taxing and frustrating. If you think a keyboard is simple, ask 10 non-tech friends what the 'scroll lock' key does, and see if you get 10 answers that match.

Traditional computer devices haven't moved on much from the hobbyist days of the Apple 1 where you plugged the box into a TV screen. The iPad is a genuine step forwards in design for people who don't want to learn a complicated control interface. At the same time old people know the future is online, and their children and grandchildren work, play and communicate online. They know they are missing out, but it's hard for them to undertake the near-vertical learning curve of learning how to start, work and run a traditional personal computer.

I'll take my Dad into the store and give him a play with one, see what he thinks. I'm pretty sure he'll be nervous and anxious not to look silly but will gain confidence quickly.
It wasn't me, but probably because you need to be able to produce as well, at least if you want to get paid.