skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a serious problem with the logical connection between these two statements:

They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems.

and:

But by and large, these apps do not exist to solve problems. They exist and thrive because they feed our individual vanity.

In the first statement, she is saying that these technologies do not do what technology should do. In the second, she says that their intention is not to do what technology should do. I think that the latter is more the point of the article, but the former is the more interesting question. Great scientific discoveries can be produced by accident. If a process regularly produces good things, we should be hesitant to malign it just because it was not the intention of those producing the initial technologies. The classic example is that penicillin was discovered by accident, but there are more. One of the motivations for the initial development of Unix was the desire to play games. Computers themselves started out as tools to crack codes and calculate ballistic trajectories. Technology naturally grows beyond its initial limits, and given how fresh these technologies are, we should be hesitant to characterize them as being without meaningful value for society, which I saw as the author's intent with this article.
RVM exists specifically to solve ruby dependency hell. Have you ever made a sandboxed app with it before?
yep -_-
A Conversation with Charlie Munger (Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway)
Suppose we solved all these "real problems." What then? We're done? No more startups or apps?
Here’s a problem: Many Americans can’t afford medical care.

Er, not sure where the author has been since the November 2008 election, but President Barack Obama made tackling this decades long problem a signature issue of his presidency, and actually got the problem addressed comprehensively. Sure, there is still work to do, but health care which makes up 1/3 of the economy was never going to be solved by programmers building web apps. And there are projects pushing technology forward in this area to increase efficiency.

Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck.

There are technology projects working on improving this, both within the school system and in the tech arena.

Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat.

I'm not sure how technology might solve homelessness, but there are actual real world answers like food banks and soup kitchens to address the hunger issue. The homeless experiment posted on Nev Blog shows how relatively easy it is for real homeless people (not those that panhandle, then jump into sports cars, or those with addictive habits to feed) to acquire food. (http://www.nevblog.com/homeless-experiment/)

The author reflects on some problems in America -- where even the poor are really not that poor by the standards of many other nations -- and seeks solutions in technology because technology is good at solving certain kinds of problems, especially ones mechanical in nature. This doesn't mean it can solve any kind of problem. Large, longstanding, complex socio-economic problems can't be solved by Twitter type applications. The kinds of problems of which the author speaks require a combination of educated people, politics, and economic focuses for making any real difference. Technology may certainly help, but it's not the sole answer.
363 days ago

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
Those were just example problems. A way to represent a class of problem. The real problem might not even be that Americans need a healthier lifestyle, it might be that it's really difficult to live that healthier lifestyle in the face of a food system designed to make you live the unhealthy one.
>video

What are you talking about?

> i think it is okay someone is exploring this

Not on the job, do it at home.

> i feel it is very interesting

What is? I'm having a really hard time understanding you.

>a pattern of abstraction

What pattern, what abstraction? An abstraction is a distinct singular entity, a pattern is multiple related datum with a a correlation in form or substance.
with unlimited public AND private repositories.
Having a complete and perfect kitchen
I agree, "HTML5" is a stupid name for what it's being used for... but what is the tech press supposed to call the loose bundle of browser technologies? They're going to call it something chosen by the path of least resistance.
DARPA Deep Learning develops concepts from petabytes of unlabeled UAV vid data
Tarsnap costs 2-3x more than Amazon S3, and S3 is already several times more expensive than it should be. What is the advantage of Tarsnap over S3 and one of its many clients?
Thanks, this is what I wanted to hear
I didn't, and wouldn't, use the words 'patent troll' for this case. My concern is more subtle.

Let's say I've got a novel idea right now of a wondrous invention, the Thneed. I'm the first in the world to conceive and refine the idea to implementability.

But, like everything else, it has precursors and dependencies, and will only be a hit if introduced at the right time. And, in our giant economy with lots of smart people, I was lucky to put the pieces together first.

If I were hit by a bus on the way to the patent office, two other people will come up with essentially the same Thneed idea next month. And if they meet each other, conspire to control the market, but then die from sharing a spoiled toxic Zagnut -- well, in two more months, four other people will independently arrive at the same idea. And by this time next year, hundreds will have independently realized it.

Further, the idea while wonderful may still, for hard-to-understand reasons, not be able to support a business for another 10 years. The infrastructure isn't there; the consumers need education; a critical mass of complementary products aren't yet available in enough places for economic production at scale. So my early conception isn't a boon to society, but only -- via either my speculation skills or a patent-granted monopoly -- a boon to me. By the time society needed my invention, it'd be 'obvious' to thousands of people.

Why grant patents in such a situation? They're not accelerating progress; they're arbitrarily reassigning the benefits of progress to a few lucky people. Patents may be retarding progress by encouraging overinvestment in prediction and speculative patent filing.

If these situations are rare, and situations where the patent incented a necessary invention are common, then patents are still net-worthwhile. But if these 'assign profits a little early' situations dominate, then even if patents sometimes incent valuable inventions, then patents are a net-loss.

With Gelernter, I haven't read his patents -- as engineers wiser than me have suggested that for software, lay coders reading patents can only get you in trouble. But I have read Gelernter's other writings -- essays and op-eds and book excerpts -- as he's a tenured professor. And the tone of those is: "here are my predictions". Or "this is right and inevitable". Even if his patents are intelligent refinements on what he saw as inevitable, that makes me think his inventive claims fall into the 'prescient but not economically necessary' category. It's wasteful for society to grant patent bonanzas for that level of insight. Those insights deserve accolades and tenure and investment-to-productize and consulting fees, but not a legal monopoly.
i wonder if she had started it today if she would have been able to charge all the money up front?

as much as it's exclusive info, i think many more people would be inclined to start a similar company.

as it is, she has probably shielded off some would-be competition by her market share.
Last line is great:

"If you take out the 20 best transactions, our record is a joke," he admitted. "The 20 best transactions occurred over some 40 years — that's one every two years. And we work at it all the time. Life is not just bathing you in unlimited opportunities, even if you work at being able to find them and seize them."
>But, the specific case you've laid out leads me to believe that there isn't significant growth potential in this business. Am I interpreting that wrong?

It depends on what you call 'significant' - If we did everything right, we could be bigger than slicehost and linode. Now, it's a long ways from here to there, and the competition is tough, but that's the market.

My thought is just that, well, I've only managed to get this to a "it supports me and only me" level, and while I think we can sustain 10%+ growth a month if we don't screw it up (we sustain 10%+ growth on months when we don't screw it up, and I strongly believe that if we quit screwing it up, we could sustainability grow at that level for quite some time.) I'd like the option of continuing even if we only end up with 30% a year growth, you know? because we do screw it up. I went three months without adding new servers (I'm slowly working through the waiting list right now) not only did I loose a bunch of revenue, I hurt my reputation. I Look like some kind of amateur.

edit: I think part of what you are hearing is that I don't show "business guy" confidence in places where my customers will see me. (Nerds, as a general rule, hate that shit. Talking big means nothing. Show me.) Obviously, I think the thing has potential for growth. I'm living off $30K year when I could fairly easily be making 4x that working for someone else. I mean, the business guy promoting this would have said we could go after amazon. (which, I admit, is something of a stretch; at a minimum we'd need a giant wad of investment capital.)

But my real question here was this:

If your time is worth $130K per year, and the company is valued at $200K (and you assume that's a fair valuation) are you going to go work for that company for a year for $30K plus 5% of the company (valued at $10K)?

I mean, I guess you can take issue with the valuation. (I mean, I've refused to sell, more than once at what I think the market value of my company is. With this growth potential, I think it'd be stupid to sell at 1x earning) but still, this idea of giving a key employee 5% and expecting them to work for dramatically below market wages seems kinda silly unless you think you have 'emerging social network' valuations.
In his original post on reddit, the guy admitted to having a supply of weed in his apartment along with the GPS tracker.

This could have went south pretty quickly.
...training hard for the apocalypse?
I fail to see how overly bureaucratic paper-pushing and stiflingly ridiculous licensing and regulatory frameworks (which are the REAL reasons that medical care is the problem) can be solved by technology.

That is, it is not a technology problem, it is a problem of regulatory capture.
Dynamically stable, quadruped robot
They migrated to MongoDB from Postgres. Specifically because they needed distributed sharding which Postgres didn't have.

Jorge Ortiz, one of the developers at Foursquare said it best on twitter yesterday:

"Baffled by the Mongo haters. If foursquare had stayed on Postgres, we would've had to write our own distributed sharding/balancing/indexing."

"Two problems: 1) Our job is to build foursquare, not a database. 2) These things are hard. Odds are we would have had even more downtime."

http://twitter.com/#!/jorgeortiz85/status/26563381834
http://twitter.com/#!/jorgeortiz85/status/26563387808

Which sums it up incredibly well.

Your comment shows a scary lack of depth - this is the "dirty little secret" of ANY application that needs serious scalable data performance. You need to put your data in RAM where it is quickly accessible.

As soon as you go to disk especially on a low I/O cloud box you are going to be in 'extremely slow' territory. This is why, even before the current NoSQL movement, everyone was using Memcached all over the place. Not because it was a fad but because they needed speed.

SQL Databases have RAM caches as well which give you a pretty similar behavior. And big surprise - if you throw more memory at them - they run faster! Because they cache things in memory! In this case I believe that what Eliot was highlighting was that Foursquare's performance tolerance requirements were such that going to disk was not an optimal situation for them.

There are plenty of applications out there using MongoDB without keeping it all in RAM; I've deployed and maintain several. The more memory you have certainly gives you better performance but it tends to be about a most frequently used cache.

It never "Shit the bed" here to use your sophomoric vernacular. As the post states, it started having to go to the disk after it surpassed the memory threshold which slowed things down... nothing "crashed" as far as the description states. But a read/write queue backlog on any database is likely to exhibit the same behavior.

Your postgres + memcached solution fixes what exactly? They would still need the same slabs of RAM to solve the problem, lest they go to disk on postgres and slow to a crawl the same way they did with MongoDB.
"Gap first hires someone to design a logo, and it's universally panned by the design community. They then ask the community "if our new logo is so crappy, why not see if you can do better?" Then, the design community bitches at Gap for not hiring someone to design their logo? Does this seem a bit odd to anybody else?"

Designers hate change (most redesigns are going to get panned). But they hate crowdsourcing way more. They were bitching in the first instance because they wanted to keep the old logo, not that they wanted the community to redesign it.

Also, logos for a brick-and-mortar store aren't like logos for a webapp (which a design rookie could do). The logo isn't just going to go on the front of the store, it's going to affect all of the materials in the store — bags/ads/signery/etc are going to be redesigned. Designing a logo as well as the entire branding scheme of the store is vastly different than sticking a cool pic next to a cool font.
If him having weed is his biggest crime then I would hope the FBI would have bigger fish to fry than catching a college stoner. What a waste of resources.
Sounds like they still will be tracking him to me. The "don't talk to a lawyer, you're boring" thing just seems like a pretty lame attempt to say, "just forget this happened," so that they can surveil him more. Personally, I think they feel he will lead them to someone 'big' or 'of interest,' which is why they also didn't bother busting him for weed (or they just didn't read the Reddit post).
Just as I was thinking that this thread was getting worse the further I scroll down I come across the best summation of this story
I didn't find the reasoning in this article very sound and the heated "high school angst" quotes hurt its credibility. e.g.

"These products feed and profit from our bovine adoration of mindless time-wasting."

That said, to address her point, I don't understand why tech start ups would be the answer to everything, especially a complex problem like homelessness. Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc.

The same with education, the problem with inner city education isn't technical, its that vast swaths of the population do not respect education. My wife taught in an inner city, had amazing technical resources thanks to grants and well meaning donors, but had parents who were totally checked out.

Furthermore, because some people use tech in a frivolous way doesn't mean there aren't noble uses. e.g.

Foursquare - Learn about resources in my town and places I visit I wouldn't have otherwise. Lets me provide info about areas I know well to those who don't. Makes my consumption choices visible and potentially incites me to make better decisions for the community and my health.

Groupon - Helps support local merchants who have difficult challenges marketing against national chains. Reduces risks for customers to try new things.

Twitter - connects me to people and bodies of knowledge that would otherwise be hard to tap. Lets me connect job seekers with job holders.

Zynga games - Creates a meeting place/activity for friends/family. Sure, at its worst it has "junkie" characteristics, but used sparingly it gives me a way to say hi to a friend and keep a little social bonding going.

Commerce isn't bad and tech isn't the solution to every problem.
Smells like an opportunity in the market!
Given that Google has already crossed this invisible line, what incentive did Skype have for respecting it?
Note that it's not a verified account.
I'm very disappointed in the fact that nobody recognized this as chapelle's show joke theft.
So far I like it, but I definitely miss Elements-style autosyncing. Switching to my main computer and then having to switch back in order to manually sync my work is sub-optimal.
First Buyers of Nissan Leaf Get a Trunkful of Perks
I liked that too, as well as: "The trick, he noted, is to find the few big opportunities that come along in life and attack them with a vengeance."

Buffett and Munger are very fond of making Kelly bets in life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
Other things get prioritized.
I was under the impression that this might also still be tied to the concession to Verizon. Maybe Verizon made them promise not to make a version of Skype in the US that supports 3G?
I don't know about how that font looks on the iPad, but my first reaction looking at it on my laptop was that it looks extremely awkward with those thick character-wide serifs. I know this is a bikesheddy thing to bitch about, but I'd personally be less distracted if Writer stuck with a familiar monospace font like Vera, Monaco, or Consolas...or if, as drcode mentioned, it used a proportional font.
Apple iOS 4.1 "Greenpois0n" jailbreak tool set for 10/10/10
I vote that all future bank bailout money gets spent on Costco "Food for a Year," and then let the banks fix themselves.
I work in medical and regulatory compliance isn't that big a burden. The simplest way to reduce health care costs in the US would be reducing obesity which tends to cause the most expensive diseases (Diabetes, Heart Disease, Stroke).
it does one thing very well
Why do you run redmine in VirtualBox? Isn't it ruby?
Firefox 4 beta for Android and Maemo released
Well - in many cases they leave the decisions in the hands of developers because they have made a conscious choice to let the developers decide.

BigTable is more than anything a filesystem - it is NOT a database. It lacks true user configurable indexes, custom sorting, querying etc. These features and the data storage requirements to support them are a very different prospect from what a filesystem (even a distributed one) needs.
The real problem might not even be that Americans need a healthier lifestyle...

You just did the exact same thing Jolie O'Dell did - you picked an action, identified a problem that the action solves, and declared that new problem to be the original problem.
Some people call that innovation.
Google Tests Search Preview
just for fun i went there on my ipad and it also supports multitouch... mmm, a dozen of these suckers... so relaxing, reminds me of a simpler day...
UPDATE:

We had the meeting tonight successfully. Had about 7 people show up at peak. Last person left around 9pm. Martin May of BrightKite fame was there, and we ended up talking a lot about LBS's, among other things, in between beers. A little about Facebook and the movie, and somewhat about how to make the world a better place. One member talked about how he'd love a better way to find people who loved arguing so he could argue with them. This of course lead to several other folks arguing both for and against the idea, which then devolved into the Arguments skit from Monty Python.

I want to try a 2nd meetup in the next week or two. We may start using Meetup.com to help facilitate , not sure yet. Regardless, I will send out emails to everyone I can beforehand, and I'll try to post a notice to HN again as well. I'm also pushing to hold the 2nd meeting on the weekend in Boulder, and in quieter venue, just so we can experiment and see if that works better or helps get a different mix of folks than we could have otherwise.

Great meeting, and thanks to everybody that showed up!
It's the data that is valuable, what people are interested in.
So you've accounted for protein, but you need a lot more than that. For example, without vitamin C, you'll get scurvy. Without B12, your nervous system can be permanently damaged.

I'd highly recommend a diet of more than just beans, rice, potatoes, and fish oil. You need to include some fruit and vegetables, and if you're going to be totally vegan, some sort of B12 source (fortified foods or a vitamin pill).
I hated powerpoint (and still mostly do), so I ended up coding a presentation in BlitzMax (a version of Basic designed for cross platform game development) in order to make a presentation for my geometry class sophomore year. I had all different shapes displayed on screen and transformed them around and such to show off different proofs.
I would be interested IF I could read the nutrition label and ingredients. Ah, here is the PDF: http://www.costco.com/Images/Content/Misc/PDF/443250n.pdf

The inclusion of freeze dried fruits and veggies sounds promising, but I do wonder how the TVP would taste after a while.

Also, the inclusion of "hard winter wheat" means either boiling it to make a mash, or having a hand-powered or electric grain mill present in order to bake bread.

Further, the idea that "1/4 cup" of white rice counts as a serving, is certainly an idea that is foreign to most Americans and I am sure, many Asians as well. I suppose "48 servings of white rice per can" sounds better than "each can contains 12 cups of rice".

As a reviewer points out, this year's supply provides about 1220 calories per day. If computed as 2000 calories per day, the supply drops to 223 days.
The statement that stuck with me was that computer programming is the new literacy for our age.
http://www.trada.com/ Crowdsourced SEM
High cost of medical care is an orthogonal problem to a healthiness level of Americans. Even if Americans were the most healthy nation in the world, medical care and health care insurance would still be expensive.

As to the school example: if dissatisfaction with schools system won't lead to improvement or replacement, then what will? Certainly not satisfaction.

I don't see anything ironic in that post. Both the high cost of health care and (objectively measured) low quality of school system are real problems that affect almost all americans. The fact that there are other problems that affect them as well doesn't make them any less problematic.
I don't mean to criticize the article posted, and welcome many of the points myself. I am coming more from a software development perspective, although I understand that the article is geared primarily from a marketing point of view.

I agree with you that being paranoid about security instead of working on a human-friendly interface, or worse--a functioning product--will absolutely hinder developments to grow, but that is not what I'm suggesting. In my experience, the vast majority of crippling bugs are simple things, that can easily be prevented using methods such as the four I listed. These should be part of everyday secure coding practices.

I would never tell a developer that they should stop working on their product to tinker with obscure security fantasies, but I'd also say that they're crazy if they don't include basic checks (such as ensuring on a basic level that user input is clean) as mentioned above.

Development methodologies like TDD include this inherently in the software life cycle: tests reaching outer bounds and unexpected input are regularly created to make sure that errors are handled correctly.
satellite internet connection and dominos.com = solved.