skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"wikis were such an enormous productivity boost at my old day job..."

For whom?

We IT people have a bad habit of thinking that a good solution for us is a good solution for everyone. From my experience in many enterprises, this is usually not the case.

First, a few numbers...

What I've typically experienced in enterprises:

IT people (programmers, analysts, admins) - 1%
indirect people (office, sales, management) - 10%
direct people (warehouse, factory, call center) - 89%

So a 1500 employee enterprise may have 15 IT people, 150 indirect people, and 1335 direct people. (The numbers may vary some, but you get the idea.)

In an engineering firm or software house, the engineers and programmers are the direct people, but I don't really think of these types of firms as "enterprise".

Remember, no one earns anything until the direct people do something. Their production absorbs the overhead of everyone else, including IT.

Why do I bring up these numbers? Because I learned from a smart mentor long ago that solving your direct people's problems delivers value magnitudes greater than solving your indirect people's problems. Kinda like Willie Sutton robbing banks because, "That's where the money is." It's strictly a numbers game.

Back to the question at hand: your people, especially your direct people need the right information and direction to get stuff done. Good application software and good management have always been the most effective way of doing this. Sure, gadgets have a place and deliver some value, but they are generally not the solution to enterprise problems.

Like wikis, intranets, and all the rest, social media is just another gadget.
also see http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/
Yes, so he should give me an up vote :)
This has an ARM Cortex A8, it runs Linux, and it is small enough for embedded robotics applications.

http://www.gumstix.net/Setup-and-Programming/view/Overo-Setu...
3) There's no discourse nor substance, only an endless stream of lowest-common-denominator prattling
Sorry to be a buzzkill, but the LHC beam circulates in an extremely high vacuum. There's no way a hand could even get in the beam without breaking the vacuum, thereby causing the accelerator to shut down automatically. Also, it's cryogenically cooled. Radiation dose aside, the hand would freeze and probably fall off.

http://www.lhc-closer.es/php/index.php?i=1&s=4&p=15&...

Incidentally, when I was working at CERN in the mid 1990's, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (the predecessor to the LHC) was shut down by an act of sabotage involving 2 Heineken bottles placed in the beam pipe. The electrons and positrons (and many physicists) were not happy bunnies. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/Beer%20bottles.p...

Update: Now I see that the vacuum point has already been made. There are no heavy ions in the LHC main collider, they're produced by bashing protons into a target in one of the secondary beamlines. Also, antimatter is frequently the byproduct of extremely high center of mass proton-proton collisions.
You know what I find pretty amazing is how much data is out there in the public nowadays. It wasn't like that 10 years ago. For a very long time AI has suffered from lack of automatically extractable knowledge about the world, lack of sources from which to learn, lack of feedback loops. And now, suddenly, we have so many sensors everywhere and we have so much public expression of knowledge, intent and action.

Shouldn't we be able to build machines that are much more capable of interpreting every day goings than we used to be? There is still so much boring routine work that people do. I think the next revolution in computing is imminent and I think the very recent abundance of data from which to learn will be what makes it happen.

The way I (as a robot) look at social networks is as a source of interactions from which to learn about humans.
Reminded me of http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata_player...
I've come to the conclusion that every language is broken from the point of view of people actually working with the language rather than relying on tools previously written in it. Ruby has broken out of this with rvm, maven kinda-sorta fixes Java but seems to come with a bundle of baggage, virtualenv with your own python build works well enough. CLBuild and QuickLisp, the Haskell Platform and from what I can tell Racket automate a similar approach. I don't know much about the Perl ecosystem, but at a guess I'd say that Perl's backwards compatibility saves it better than most. And this is before you start looking at the code quality and release processes of the libraries packaged in the languages' own distribution mechanisms.

Seriously, unless you're working in C/++, I think it's only worth using the system-bundled languages if you're actually targeting the OS itself. If you're targeting more than one platform, using your own build seems to be the only way to stay sane. If you're only targeting a single platform, unless you're tracking a bleeding-edge-style distro like Arch, you can guarantee that all the fun development is going to be going on somewhere you can't reach.

Luckily, we have checkinstall.
If upstream won't, can't, doesn't want to fix an upstream bug, then no one wins. Distributions patching upstream outside of the original source is a bad a idea -- other distributions need the same fix most likely. Kindly convincing the upstream app to rework their app with the new stable library is the ideal.

I realize it's a give and take, but the blog post is putting the blame squarely on the java dev's shoulders.
"Tune in at TC disrupt for the exciting conclusion of.... Opzi"

I really like Euwyn and I'd give him a lot of time as an entrepreneur, but this article really does Euwyn and Opzi a disservice by being so vague.
"no opposing arguments are allowed here no matter how good they are".

In my experience that's not correct. I haven't been commenting much lately, and when I do it's often because I disagree with something, and thus have an opposing argument. I've never received any significant downvotes, though I have received my fair share of counterarguments, most of them intelligent and all of them in a civil tone. Interestingly my average karma per post has never been higher.
We're quite lucky, really, that Python by default installs cleanly into /usr/local.
You seem a bit obsessed with "socializing." Until it becomes required by law, there will always be a percentage of persons not wanting/willing to participate.

If only I could make everyone attend church...
Because if you disagree with my comment, but you think it is well written, you should write a response.

In my experience good content expressed in bad, offensive, or passive-aggressive writing isn't worth my time. Not as a reader, wanting to skim through the thread for the most cogent arguments, and certainly not as a commentator (these people are usually - well, not trolls per se, but close to the definition).
ddwrt is pretty neat. I install it on most of the consumer class routers that I put in. That said, they tend to stick to the kernel source provided by the manufacturer with their userland and GUI bits tacked on. This sort of amalgamated approach works faster, but is harder long-term to support, IMO. There also have been some questionable licensing practices in the past with ddwrt - this is somewhat common in the alternate firmware community, starting with Sveasoft. There have also been some issues with browser compatibility (broken in webkit, mainly) for certain versions of ddwrt.

Personally, I think the future is going to be for the tech savvy to build their own firmware with OpenWRT (http://openwrt.org/), which lets you building from more current linux kernel sources (thus you're more likely to get patches to kernel level security issues), and pick your packages. It currently isn't as smooth of an install as ddwrt, but it's getting there quickly.
Congratulations! Discovering the giant treadmill is a huge achievement.

Now You should accept the facts, step out from it, relax and fall in love with something still unknown and unexplored, and doing it just for fun. Or just fro lulz in a newspeak. ^_^

Today Open source is just another name of business. The next evolutionary step toward literally nothing. So, accept it and relax and try to find something that you could love.

I'm, for example, going trough MIT and Berkeley online courses after 15 years of being UNIX sysadmin and system engineer, without any ambitions to shake the world, just fro lulz.

btw, your question itself contains a big bold cue - just fins a new love. ^_^

You may also try to search in a realms outside CS, but I wouldn't advice you to do so. After so many years spent, it is better to stay in the field.
I'd love to see distros start to introduce (for instance) separate python-sys and python-dev packages. The OS would use python-sys for the admin and automation scripts, but if you wanted to use Python for your own projects, you could use python-dev, which could be a later version. Possibly python-dev could even track upstream more closely. Either way, you'd decouple the system's need for a stable, proven and predictable Python from the user's need for new(er) shiny.
Spark fun has a good set of tutorials that cover all of the basics.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php

The nice part about their tutorial is they take you through all of the details such as building you own PCB and other items where some of the kits have all of the electronics built for you. It depends on your interest but I find designing the electronics to be as rewarding as actually programming a micro-controller. I am also the kind of guy that likes to understand ever small detail as well.
>the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT department

I think: >my honeymoon with computers and IT seems to be over

should read: >my honeymoon with IT seems to be over

Be careful not to confound a distaste with IT with a distaste for computing in general. Thinking about negatives in a global terms rather than a specific terms is one the key depressive thought patterns.

Thinking about a negative as a global\general state is highly destructive: I did bad on this test, because I suck at studying\am dumb. The end result is learned helplessness.

Thinking about a negative as a specific event allows you to view problems as solvable: I did bad on this test, but it was because I didn't study or prepare enough in this specific incident. The end result is positive, you will study more in the future.

From your post it is clear you are getting stuck in the former thought pattern, I wish you the best of luck getting out of it.
It is probably relevant to both our comments that I previously worked at a software consultancy and probably 60% of our headcount were some flavor of engineer or engineering management.
Interesting. If you use Bing from Germany (with German UI), it works correctly, i.e. suggests "How I won the war".

Which makes sense, as "water" is not a German word...
Well, gmail was announced on April, 1, with an unheard of 1 Gig of storage, so I think Google likes to do this sort of thing on purpose.
I tried a bunch of search engines the other day when I couldn't find something specific. Bing was the least useful: it generalized "dice" to "die" and then gave me lots of hits about death. It should have been fairly obvious that the articles returned had nothing to do with dice.
Yep. This is old news. But more recently other companies have also decided to implement on-board batteries on their custom servers, most notably Facebook:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/11/27/shoul...

And yes, this story was real, despite the April 1 date. I attended the event, and saw the server. It definitely seemed odd to schedule a technology unveiling on April 1, but Google apparently launched Gmail on April 1 as well.
That is a good question. If a non-programmer can be a hacker that takes me back to the first of our ancestors who hacked his body and stood up to give us our first huge breakthrough: bipedality. Said that, I think Leonardo DaVinci was a Mitnick of his age.
Thanks Rhapso! If you're up for it I'd be down for a cup of coffee sometime, I'd just like to understand the world of programming better.
Measuring the magnetism of light [physics]
"that Dave McClure should be burnt and the stake for his writing style"

should be "Dave McClure should be burnt at the stake"
...the real failure...

Sorry.
1. I don't think you understand my point (or possibly the adversarial method).

2. Unless you generate an array ahead of time, you haven't broken randomized quicksort.

3. For an adversary to have the ability to generate elements on the fly, he must have knowledge of the array, which requires the array to be generated deterministically.

4. The purpose of a randomized algorithm is to prevent the adversary from choosing elements on the fly and forcing the worst case every time.

Putting these all together, for McIlroy's adversary to have broken randomized quicksort would be claiming that randomization is useless. We all know this is false.
Yes, I realize that rubular doesn't generate the matches. But they are both web sites where you primarily enter a regex in order to explore its behavior. The similarity is obvious.
I think you're probably right. Probably best to keep up the illusion of furtiveness!
On the vacuum fluctuations, Pioneer Anomaly and Modified Newtonian Dynamics
This retort to Twilio is just as unprofessional as their "poor service."

As others have pointed out, SMS is an unsupported feature and service outside the US can change at any time.

So in conclusion, apart from twilio losing one of there early adopters (task.fm isn’t a big customer, but that doesn’t mean we can be screwed over) they are also damaging there brand. They used to be all about developers.

I think only getting miffed that your OWN service wasn't perfect and then posting to HN about how task.fm was "screwed over" is more damaging to twilio (is it?) than an SMS outage.

The author didn't read Twilio's own SLA and hardened entrepreneurs don't burn bridges publicly everytime something goes wrong.

I know trying to build an awesome web application is hard and its frustrating when supporting services go down, but that is the nature of our beast. We build on top of each other, so we must respect and support each other. Getting mad and cutting off your own hand because you are angry isn't helping build anything.

Google's API has bugs that my start-ups web application runs into all the time. Sometimes they change API behavior, which the visualization screws up the entire UI in the process. This effects thousands of our users and we have to release work-arounds as fast as we can. But I don't blame Google - it was our choice to use their APIs.

Generally, this sort of thing will continue to happen with all web service APIs. As a community of developers, I would ask them why it happened and provide constructive feedback about how important it was. You might just find they'll listen and you'll have more pull.

Great start-ups have a short list of early adopters or engaged users that they trust and continually go back to for product advice. Writing a post like this pulls the rug out from under your own service because you refuse to use it, it will cost you more, and twilio will suffer from lack of valuable constructive feeback.

Really just my POV, but hopefully you'll find why posting inflamatory articles like this only hurts entrepreneurs and our community at large. At most it sets an example of how we treat each other.
Chargify. No additional cost to start, flexible back end options for you moving forward.
Try my new hosted Linode memcached service (BETA) 
Dear Hners !

I did it, I'm opening it, for you to see and test. Well, it took me one week but hey, that was fun to hack into memcached. So, I'm opening a service for Linode users (Dallas data center only for now but more to come !) that lets you share a memcached server.

The idea is kind of an experiment : you share _one_ instance. I don't provide you with fixed and different memcached servers, but you read it correctly : only one. This one is having a 200MB bucket for now but will be upgraded if needed.

How it works: you connect your memcache client to the linode which is running the memcached and I let you in if you registered to the beta. You can use the 200MB bucket as you wich, provided that the maximum expire (TTL) is set to 30 minutes (1800 seconds). Don't ask more, it won't work :)

Well, for the security, you'll probably be happy to know that you can't read/delete/modify keys that are not yours.

You can see this service as a super bursting and free (for now) super service !

In the future, if it works, I plan to make it a paid service but surprise, I would charge only 1 or 2 dollars/month. This way, you can temporary burst a 200MB (more coming !) memcached server for nearly free.

Hope you enjoy it and I'm opened to any suggestion for improvements. To participate to the beta, please visit this webpage which will explain you what you can/can't do , and the way to get it.

http://www.henri.pro/2010/09/25/memcached-shared-instance-beta/

Have a nice week end everyone ! (As usual I'm on #startups my nickname is henri if you want to chit chat)
MakerBot’s New 3D Printer: The Thing-O-Matic
There's actually a reported case of someone getting hit by a proton beam on the head in 1978:

Bugorski was leaning over the piece of equipment when
he stuck his head in the part through which the proton
beam was running. Reportedly, he saw a flash "brighter
than a thousand suns", but did not feel any pain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski

He is still alive.
Clickable http://www.henri.pro/2010/09/25/memcached-shared-instance-be...
I'll have a look back for the main one I used and had success with. They offered delivery reports, raw data sending etc I never had any trouble with SLA when I was using them for sending out ringtones. Will see if I can find the provider I used. It would have been British.
Sony Ericsson abandons Symbian for Android and WP7
This sounds like something to look into. Are there any resources in particular that you can recommend?
Maximizing Serendipity
Get a WNDR3700 and install OpenWRT on it. It has gigabit, dual radios for wireless and is a pretty modern and robust router. There's also little danger of bricking it.
Rich and Geeky
Reading code like that makes me want to puke. So, he wants to increase productivity by making us think about and write theorems in addition to our normal code (don't underestimate the time you invest in this), making our code even more static and less reusable in the hope that the reduction in time for bug hunting and testing will make up for the time invested in thinking about and creating more complex code? Hard to believe. Do those language designers create this stuff to show off how intelligent they are or just for the sake of having fun or are they seriously trying to make development easier? I can't imagine building a website with this. But then again, maybe those languages are designed for satellites, space shuttles, and simulations (i.e. where correctness is far more important than productivity)? Well, I think most of us have to make a compromise between productivity and correctness. It's the same as having 100% code coverage. Nice in theory, but it makes refactorings and development too costly and still doesn't guarantee that your software is 100% correct. Here's a nice post if you still believe 100% code coverage is the ultimate #1 goal of your project:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cashto/archive/2009/03/31/it-s-ok-no...
I am around your age and have had similar feelings lately.

I had a Tomy Tutor, and IBM XT, a PS/2 Model 50,a 486DX-33, and others. I started on BBSs in 7th grade.

I've always felt, the majority of those that make it big, get out of the game. We've seen some come back (Paypal mafia), but I feel the majority of the talent exits the industry.

With each cycle of this, we are left with a different group, which I think explains the "chrome" you mentioned.

We saw the dot-com bubble firsthand, and maybe we want to be part of that again? Of course, it was never really sustainable, but the optimism and salaries of the 1990s were nothing to scoff at.

Now, to see again, approx. 15 years later, the same 640x480 screens we grew up with, in cellphones, so we can watch movies while we drive or walk down the street.

We were optimistic about the year 2000 since birth, and looking back, some promised devices are beginning to emerge, like multi-touch input devices and sleek tablets.

The majority of the innovation and technology we evolved with, is now used to license consumers digital goods.

The internet and computers are mainstream now and it is mostly about money. Some BBS operators did it for the money, but the majority did it for the love.

When we were kids, we could stay up until the wee hours of the morning exploring with our PCs, while our parents took care of us. Now we must pay our own bills, and developing software as a job can do this, but when you get home, you don't want to work more.

Some coders I've worked with have a true obsessive compulsion for writing code. They write code from when they wake up to when they go to sleep. Others need to take breaks.

As many others have mentioned, take a break (if you can afford it). Otherwise, you may have to take a lower-paying job in a different industry and trim some expenses, but the mental health aspect could be worth it.

IMHO, the most amazing advancement to come out of any of this is...
http://www.khanacademy.org/

Maybe get involved with Khan? That is the one site on the internet that gives me hope this technology can and will be used for progress.

Thank you for posting this. Lot's of valuable insight from everybody.

NO CARRIER
I was in the same position as you about 3 years ago. You know what I did? Quit my job sold my house and went traveling for a year.it literally took 3 months of travel and quiet contemplation before I was able to start thinking creatively and having fun.

If you can, take a long chunk of time off and go away (this is tough to do if you have a family). You can get so beat down, and stuck in the 'don't think just do' mindset from working a job, and that's not so easy to fix.

Since coming back I've started my own business, and while I'm not rolling in money I reserve at least 50%! of my time for creative projects (which right now happens to be a. Ruby on rails beer site) and I'm more excited about technology than I ever was.
Braking radiation ? What they don't teach that in school anymore ?

Just kidding.
The hard part here, of course, is coming up with something else to do. While basically sound advise, after years of a wakeup-work-eat-bed cycle while worrying about the negative content of the bank account, thinking around a corner is hard, let alone thinking outside the box. But I'll try not to force the issue and see what comes up.
Agreed, this seems to overlap completely with Google Places: http://www.google.com/lbc
I use Asus WL 500GP with Oleg's firmware http://oleg.wl500g.info/, http://code.google.com/p/wl500g/ Learning how to cross compile my own programs for it using http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ was a worthy experience. It's amazingly slow producing the cross compiling environment. It's tricky. I experienced the effect of http://xkcd.com/456/
Tom Siebel on Being Gored by an Elephant
Obligatory question: why would I use a shared memcache when having memcache on own server is as easy as sudo apt-get install memcache?
but you just exactly demonstrated my point. you can try to tell people how they should use the buttons, or you could accept the reality that people will ignore you and adapt the interface to suit their usage. isnt that what good design is all about?
I would consider using it if its cheaper than turning on another node within my cloud environment. One thing less to manage.

edit- Just realized you have to being using Linode as well. Now I question this too. I thought this was going to be Memcached as a service.
Isn't "I'm sorry" the very first thing he says after "Hi Anthony"? And as if that wasn't enough, he goes on to say "Our apologies" later in the paragraph.