skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the "smart" guy trying to save the world type of thinking. See what Steve Jobs said in his 1996 interview:

".... When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth. ...."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs.html?pg=4&t...
If sometimes thought about the e-mail problem.

I'd like to make an app that let's you do the following:

1) You sign up for an account.

2) You feed the app your e-mail address, username, passowrd, hostname. Multiple e-mail addresses if you have them.

3) The app would then regularly check up on your e-mail and combine all your aggregated e-mails like notifications etc into a single e-mail, which you could check out any time you like.

4) The app could filter some spam (if you have a host that doesn't have spam filtering)

5) The app could do smart stuff with your e-mails like pulling all the contacts that send you e-mail and creating a centralized contacts list automatically (maybe even attempting to parse signatures)

6) It would also be nice if you could use the app as your webmail, if your host doesn't already support webmail (they are out there)

And you could probably think of more features. It could be really helpful for people stuck with horrible e-mail hosts.
This is financial, but good move on my part. I invested in Apple the day before the release of the first iPhone ($120 a share). I then recently used some of it to buy a car way out of my league ($270 a share).
I agree to the extent that almost all regulation is aimed at the worst behavior of "evildoers", not the average bad behavior of "louts". Short of the worst behavior we all have "freedom", which starts to define what is acceptable, even though it shouldn't. Loutish behavior is best controlled by eliminating secrecy. Sunshine kills mildew.

My argument is that bank positions are determined by potential louts, not so much by evildoers. But either type depends on nobody looking. Give us (literally you and me) the right data and they won't be able to operate the same way anymore.
"Dont pull that Patriot crap. Probably all the Fortune 1000, particularly the drug companies, are flowing revenue through tax havens to lower taxes. There was an article in the past couple of months about it, here I think."

If you open a company in another country, tax collection is under the jurisdiction of that country, not the US. I'm also not advocating no taxes, I just wish the Obama administration would think about the consequences of these types of decisions.

I'm also not trying to "pull that patriot crap". I'm just giving you the consequences of making it difficult for me to do business in the US. I will move my business elsewhere, which will also mean a loss of jobs for US workers. I know I'm not alone with this.
You own the output of your calculations, not Wolfram?
Reverse Engineering an In-N-Out Animal-Style Double-Double
http://en.mochimedia.com/ => they use Riak
If that was a pun, it was awful. If it was a Freudian slip, it was epic.
BS.

There are tons of European startups. But the have 'revenue' and 'profits'. Which means no one bothers reporting on them.

Don't you think $10M for some strange social news reader app seems a little over the top? or $200M for twitter? They're insane investmensts. The only reason SV investors invest is in the hope that someone even more drugged up on SV koolaid will buy the company. Bubbles upon bubbles. It's unsustainable.

I'm really happy that we're more risk averse in Europe.

Get real. Get revenue and good solid business models.
Small businesses may use credit/debit cards predominantly, but I think you'll find a lot of medium and large size businesses use Purchase Orders.
Do the existing MacRuby features still work (ie autodiscovery of IB outlets/actions)?
Six Months Later: Seven Major Websites that Send Passwords Unprotected
Does it do anything yet? Or is this just a fake landing page for harvesting email addresses for future beta accounts?

I only noticed the very top bar the second time I loaded the page. I was looking for more content to help me determine whether this was a legit site or not, and I couldn't find it.

Breaking the bullets out into the grey boxes is awkward.

"Its pretty advanced"
I'm not sure you want to put qualifiers like this, it's either advanced or it's not. If your target audience knows about the techniques you are using for the calculations, there's probably not a need to even say it's 'advanced'. Maybe you could get away with 'sophisticated'?
[warning: common sense ahead]

Seriously. Chill out. The thing hasn't even been finalized yet, and there'll be public comment periods and reviews and all sorts of other stuff providing people an opportunity to go froth at the mouth about how this will be the end of the world or whatever.

In the meantime: take a deep breath. Relax. Read and learn. Get as much information as you can instead of going off half-cocked. And actually think through the things you'd like to say, because hyperbolic rants don't do anyone a damn bit of good.
The iPad goes on sale to strong demand in Hong Kong and Singapore
That's probably from the Virginia Postrel book "The Future and its Enemies":
http://dynamist.com/tfaie/index-excerptA.html
Plus TV watching can be a social activity. I can watch an hour or two of TV with my wife but she's not going to sit down and program with me.
Google Search is slowly becoming less and less useful. I find it harder to find the things I'm looking for than it was 2-3 years ago.
Cam here to make this comment. Wouldn't be too difficult to build a quick site that aggregates all your transactions, auto-generates appropriate 1099s and mails them to the company accounting addresses it has on file matching the transaction records.
We don't need a system that pits the smart against the smart, we need a system that pits the smart against nature. I'm sick of zero-sum competing to leech a bigger share of money out of the system rather than giving it to investors or investees.

Smart people should be creating things. Discover/fund a new market and get rich? Great! First one to see a big trend and have the guts to bet against it, lining up market pricing? Good, I hope you get rich.

But playing video games in order to nip the largest number of pennies off of actual investment is just a giant waste of time, talent and money.
SAS clone maker World Programming wins court case against SAS
Buddhabrot Fractal in Canvas / CoffeeScript (with annotated source)
Was it hard taking the lower paying job at the time? Did you feel like you were letting yourself down?

How long did it take for your salary to come back up?
France coach Blanc drops all 23 WCup players
My point was that you can do your full time job, and do side work as well. As long as there is no legal problems with that. If you want to come home and turn off your brain, then don't complain its the job that is stopping you. You can work many hrs, just that when I come home I don't work for x hrs straight. I have inspiration, I work for 20 minutes here and there. I have none, tomorrow is when it will happen. I try not to overwork myself too so I can still be good at the main job.
No surprise. Microsoft usually does everything Apple does, a few years delayed and not as well.
Not sure I agree. As soon as something is public, it's part of the interface. That means the usual rules of stability/back-compatibility will apply to it as well. If you don't want that, or you're not sure you want that, then that's a valid reason to make something private in my opinion.
I think vitriol plays into the hands of the industry. It appeals to anger, which will fade and is not focused. I think we should be analyzing how to shrink the industry's size and influence, and design what should replace it. After all this site's readers are nothing if not problem solvers.
Here's the annotated source code:

http://jashkenas.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/buddhabrot/docs/buddh...

It was mentioned on a Changelog interview earlier today, so I figured it would be good to put up:

http://thechangelog.com/post/849754840/episode-0-2-9-coffees...
How to Rank on Page 1 of Google Without Buying One Paid Link
Concerning #2:

Does 'const' mean that the function is not allowed to change the contents of the string, or does it mean that the contents of the string will never change? Suppose the 'sum' function was running in one thread, while in another the string that was passed in as 's' is being continuously written to. While this may not make much sense to do, and the output would not have a reliable value, this optimization would be the wrong thing to do.
It's strange to me how products like source control manage this. Why is this different?
> Often register allocation is sensitive to the schedule (and there have been attempts to combine them into one pass.)

Yes -- for what it's worth, the compiler I'm working on at the moment has a pre-allocation scheduling pass and a post-allocation scheduling pass, and will also sometimes reschedule during allocation to shorten live ranges and thus ease register pressure.
This sounds really intriguing, thank you!

I've been looking for a post-lisp for some time now, and while I find Clojure very entertaining, RH took making it a Lisp seriously. This constrains it from the complete and utter evil I can accomplish with Io.
Personally: time with family.

Professional: trying to write an HA/clustered "Hello World" app. The knowledge of the deployment and operational aspects has served me well in my software career.

Financial: actively managing my own real estate investments.

The key differences between running one's own software business and actively managing one's properties are:

- it's a turn-key business where the "product" is so simple and in such high demand that it is relatively hard to screw up by any reasonable person

- a deeper understanding of the tax system; software consulting typically touches either Schedule C or Sched E (Part 2), while real estate involves schedules A, C, and E(part 1 and 2).

- a deeper understanding of protecting myself legally
I thought we already did pay students to become engineers - it's called "employment".

If students don't feel that the long-term rewards of an engineering career are worth the up-front costs (time, effort, money), why would the taxpayers want to add an incentive? If engineers become scarce, then salaries should go up (assuming a free market) and more students will want to become engineers.
Let's make a deal: I'll stop shitting on them when they stop shitting on me.
One of the best investments we've made has been in allocating time for family.

An example is finding a night nurse after we had our first child. It allowed my wife to recover from a tough birth, both of us to have some quiet together time, and it allowed me to get the rest I needed in order to keep working. The nurse would show up around 9-10pm each night and took off at 6am, and would wake my wife for the late night feedings as necessary.

It was pure gold and those 4 weeks allowed us to recover and adapt to the strange new world of parenting (and it also gave us a bit more confidence to handle novel situations as they arose).
In all seriousness, the Reddit influx is upon us, full tilt.
What is more risky than a startup?
I agree that to get big in the way google/facebook/twitter are needs VC but I think you can be very successful without.

I beleve one big difference over here is that the startups aren't aiming to be the next facebook, they want to be successful enough for the founders and angels to make a particulaly comfortable living from it.
Theoretically, an Age of Bureaucracy can last until a paper shortage develops, but, in practice, it never lasts longer than 73 permutations. — Adam Weishaupt

— Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy

I say great, bring it on! The sooner we Immanentize the Eschaton, the better!

Fiction aside, I predict this law will get repealed pretty quickly and quietly before it goes into effect. The amount of added annual tax revenue from this is projected to only be $20 billion, and as soon as various interest and trade groups realize how much more the extra paperwork is going to cost them, then they'll be screaming at the Congress-critters. They already went through this process with SOX.

It's the Government's duty to maximize tax revenues, so if the cost of doing business in general causes a decrease in many company's profits, then there is less overall income to tax. If that amount of lost tax revenue is more than the projected increase of $20 billion, and I bet it is, then it makes sense to repeal that particular law.
Especially if you are blindfolded. Which are the conditions for the robot, I believe.
Some say Wall St is a "Ponzi scheme". If that was accurate, certainly one could argue big changes are in order, but is it accurate?

In a Ponzi scheme, you have an organization that takes peoples money, does some complicated things with it that are difficult to understand, pays internal people handsomely, pays back early "investors" handsomely, then suddenly collapses and all the investment the later investors thought they had is gone. This happened in 2007 before the governments of the world contributed in $3,000,000,000,000 keep the scheme going.

The difference between the Wall St. Ponzi scheme and your average couple-million Ponzi scheme is three-fold: the organizers are still running it instead of being in prison, it is a million times bigger, and scheme insiders are running the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury.

This is be made out to be a natural consequence of the complicated modern financial world, but was it unavoidable? The $3T bailout works out to about $10,000 for every person in the U.S.
No, I think this is a problem for the free market.

I keep hearing that there aren't enough scientists and engineers, but then I look at the pay for a graduate with a B.Sc., and it's a low starting salary - if there were really a shortage, the starting salary would be higher. Supply and demand. Paying students to become engineers would shift the supply curve, decrease quality and drive down starting salaries.
I can't make it tonight but I hope you have a great time!
The Invention of Sarcasm
Has a regular user of Digg and an alpha tester for Digg4, I have to say I am quite impress with the rapidity and the quality of the changes. The real-time digg count updates give quite a good feeling to the website in general since you have a feeling to participate in something bigger. The update has been on the right track and I hope the best for Digg.
I just read the article. Are these people for real or living in an ivory tower? Or are they just fucking lying to the Indian public to spite the $100 MIT Laptop effort? "No one had any doubt about the feasibility of the project. Everyone is enthusiastic and wants a quick rollout. But we have given ourselves three years before the first $10 laptop comes out." That sounds like politician double talk at its finest.
> It would be very hard to accurately account for a microprocessor's out-of-order instruction issue in a compiler.

This is true. However, a lot of modern processors do in-order execution, they just aren't made by Intel or AMD for desktops: GPUs, network processors, SIMD DSPs, etc. When I was hacking compilers (6 years ago), compiling for these processors presented difficult challenges and there was a real market for new compiler technology. One project was for a network processor that was not only in-order, but it was not interlocked: correctness depended on the compiler having an exact model of the processor's pipeline. Some registers were not registers, but latches. They got new values every cycle, so if you didn't gab a value on the right cycle, it was gone forever.
A second monitor.
"Programming Perl" (the first edition) by Wall and Schwartz. Reading that book helped me land my first programming job.
The beverage for video gamers to stay in the game
Hmm, you mean, look at HN as a Digg/Reddit/Slashdot look-alike? The "aggregator site model" is pretty simple to describe, really: screw quality, get moar users, ads, profit. It clearly works as a business model, but whether that plays to the strengths of HN is a completely different matter.
Could someone name other companies that do continuous deployment? I've only heard that IMVU uses buildbot.
It really depends on who you r company is setup. It is really a question of out of sight out of mind. If bugs bubble up from QA without causing your manger heartburn then you aren't in his view | on his mind. When new features go out the door he has some sort of involvement in their release so those devs are in his office | in his head. When new stuff comes up it goes to the guys he can remember.

If your boss was more involved with defects then defect fixers would get more respect.
So you put your previous work up and they found you?

Hah! I wish. No, I actively pushed it within its first 2-3 weeks and bid on bucket-loads of projects and proposals. Even started blogging actively while transitioning from being employed in Australia, to returning to the U.S. with not much to do.However, I heard back from no one. For some reason I took active interest in this random field and started reaching out to NGOs, government agencies and academia; helping them make good use of this. I even attended a few webinars, some boring shit, because I cared and wanted to make sure these public institutions got this mundane application of technology right.

This does sound like a lot of work, but for me it was more like a game; I would have my laptop on the kitchen counter while cooking or prancing around the house, and ooh, a project! "typety typety type!". Mostly as a joke for me and my girlfriend since we had a few weeks between finishing my work contact, and actually taking the flight out of the country. It was just something we did mostly as tongue in cheek "hey, we're important" sort of a thing.

Out of the goddamn blue, almost 2 months later, here they are, private sector.

The work is best described as "research and analysis"; the deliverables are usually a report, an spreadsheet, a simple "API", or in most extreme cases a yes/no answer :-)

Come'on man ... this conversation ends here, I am not patio11.
Is he wrong? /programmer
I am not surprised.

The relation between IT departments and the rest of the company are often weird, it even more complicated when the IT department has two jobs rolled into one : administrating the system and developing them. And they work by ticket for all these activities.

They have been told to run IT like a business on its own so everything is done by contract. But IT never can make a profit, and reinvest in cost saving or modernization measures. Purchasing off the shelf software eases and clarifies a lot of all that. Just having you IT services provided by an external company often does not.
Yes, in 2010, a lot of these companies have been able to pay back the government. But in 2008 the whole system of credit was seizing up because lenders and investors, not knowing when the next pile of shit would hit the fan, were panicking. We can’t send a time machine back to 2008 and announce, “we are from the future and we certify that you can lend to these guys at 5%”.
An ARM-based Windows server would be desirable for anyone who is already using a Windows server and wants to maximize their performance per watt.

I'm not sure if ARM is powerful enough to support a next generation console platform. The current Xbox 360 has 3 cores clocked at 3.2 GHz supporting two threads per core, while the most powerful ARM processor, ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, has 4 cores that can each be clocked to "up to 1 GHz". Processors are a lot more complicated than just clock speed, of course, but I think it's readily apparent that ARM is less powerful than the current Xenon processor in the 360. Perhaps Microsoft could drop in several ARM processors or rely more heavily on the GPU.

I think it's more likely that this is a move to create a powerful in house ARM chip to use in their Zune HD and maybe for a to-be-announced mobile platform.
Is there anything better?
I am pretty sure they meant actually talking to and meeting people in real life.
Shipping the components or the final product from oversea isn't cheap.
Exactly, Flipboard should be three mates in a loft. I realy can't see how they need $10 million investment.

With That said it is a very nice app.
The fact that this comment has almost as many upvotes as the OP speaks wonders for the HN community.
Raising money as a first time entrepreneur
Ideally, the efficient allocation of capital is the smart against nature. However the nature of the current system injects too much noise into the markets, since trades and positions are generally secret, except as occasionally viewed by regulators or post-mortem as in the Madoff case.
Top News Today - 2010: India present to an audience $35 computer
Ah, I believe that was attributed to her, although I've never read / heard of her book. Thanks for the link.
I can give you a horrible APPL-related investment. I bought AAPL in '02 when it was $12-13 and sold 6 months later because I needed the funds. Purchased a hedged position via a CFD, was worth $400k, which would be worth $10M+ today

Lesson: do buy stock in companies whose products you use and like, and companies who are actually doing something new and interesting. I bought the stock on the back of OS X, which I was a beta tester of, and also on the iPod becoming an entire platform, hence Apple moving into consumer electronics and taking out Sony. Second part of the lesson would be to stick to your initial instincts and not doubt yourself. I ended up making some money from it, but sold far too early because a lot of people whose opinions I valued at the time told me I was crazy for investing so much in a 'tech stock'.
It depends on what are you measuring.

Let's say that your job is to solve some problem and want to use a genetic algorithm to solve it.

You probably have to build a model, a simplified version of the reality, and find out a fitness function which makes sense in that model, which is fast to calculate etc.

Probably you have to be clever, you have to somehow have an intuition of what matters and what doesn't. That is, you have to know
when your cow is too spherical.

This task requires intelligence, and I'm sure that creativity will certainly help making a leap forward, especially if the problem is not well known in advance, or you benefit from solving it in a completely different way.

But, this doesn't mean that each fitness function that will solve the problem, given enough time, will require creativity, or even intelligence!

Natural selection provided really ingenious solutions to a huge set of problems of any kind. The fact that we are discussing this very fact is an astonishing achievement of that very fitness function which is natural selection.

But nobody designed this fitness function, and so long we are interpreting the word "creativity" meaning "created by a mind", no creativity was required to design this "fitness function" or any of the products of that "genetic algorithm".

Of course, one could argue that "creativity" the very act of "creating" things, even without creators, even just emerging properties of a complex system (like natural selection).

Well, redefining creativity that way is certainly not wrong, but I don't think normally people think about creativity in those terms, but as an intrinsic characteristics of minds (and perhaps also human mind only, to most people, but that's another topic)