skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like when it's stormy outside?

Yes, but really, so what? That is a clever tie-in to the field you're in, but do you know for certain that it results in increased profit? Have you tested it?
typing in a destination

You mean speaking, right? ;)
Is there a factual error in the article?
Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=1...
Of course you can hack a human driver without a gun. Just distract him with, say, a bright light, or a member of the opposite sex.
The player is super slow. Here's the download link.

http://blip.tv/file/get/BIF-JasonFriedAtBIF4360.mp4

http://blip.tv/file/get/BIF-JasonFriedAtBIF4476.flv
You'll have to design your stuff to tolerate failure; use things like Chef for quick deployments so that provisioning new servers isn't a huge pain in the ass.

Further, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that your resources are shared. This is not too big of a deal for some applications, but for a database server, this can spell certain death (I/O doesn't virtualize too well; you can mitigate some of this by deploying a lot of slave machines for your reads.)
An opposite to a duct tape programmer is the "Cargo cult programmer".

He will research long and hard on the conditions in which programmers perform the best, then try to break programmers down to categories and figure out which one he fits into the best. Then he will research the psychological flow needed for programming and spend long hours planning out the IDEAL setting for the "flow to kick in". Then he will write a couple of articles on much flow rocks and how awesome it would be if everyone could achieve the perfect flow, and then go to sleep.

No actual programming (or even architecture astronautics) has been done during this process.
There are lots of bootstrapped companies that are not "pre-traction," and, in fact, making hundreds of thousands of dollars (or millions). You'd be very surprised. The "startup" press (including HN) is a real echochamber, and this lack of awareness about bootstrapping is one of the side effects. Check out my speaker list at http://schnitzelconf.com.

That's why I asked everyone I knew - and asked them to ask everyone they knew. I have my feet planted very high on the hierarchy of "famous devs" in more than one circle, so my reach is greater than the average joe. In addition to browsing every women entrepreneur's directory I could find. Including http://startupprincess.com. No joy.

Nary a female product bootstrapper around. Except the lady who's part of the team at Mite.
I'm a little confused. So on the new CEO's watch while at SAP, SAP stole Oracle's IP, for which Oracle is suing SAP for $2 billion. The same board that fired Hurd for some non-sexual hanky panky is ok with hiring a thief? Or the boss of thieves?

How is this a hatchet job?

Don't get me wrong, I have no love for Oracle, at best I'm neutral on them. I'd never want to work there. But at least it is a fairly well run business.

HP, on the other hand, seems to have one of the worst boards in the history of the valley. I just don't see what they are doing as making any sort of sense at all. Pick a thief over someone like VJ who has long time insider cred, well liked by the rank and file, well respected in and out of the company, nah, let's pass on that, we need a crook. Seriously, how can anyone justify choices like this?

Sorry for another rant on this topic, but HP used to be a hugely admired company, it would be nice if it returned to that, but instead it seems to be determined to do one wrong thing after another. Starts at the top and the top is the board.
I think this can only be addressed by stating it clearly and upfront. "Automated cars will kill people. They will kill people every year. The only thing they have going for them is that every year they will kill 10 times less people than people driven cars. Life is dangerous, and it's your choice."

Car makers initially fought putting seatbelts in cars because it made them look dangerous. Now seat belts fracture thousands of ribs a year and are required by law. Both initial fear and actual danger were over come due to the massive demonstrable benefit of the technology.
If you're interested in more, Brad Templeton has been singing the praises of a future with robot cars, and how to get there, for many years, both in all the futurism un-conferences I've visited in the bay area, and on his very thorough website:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/
You're assuming that the purpose of the public education system in the US is student education. The observed behavior suggests otherwise.

I said lobbyists and teachers organizations, but teachers support them.... And, when evaluation comes up for a vote, teachers vote against it overwhelmingly. They strike to get rid of it, and so on.

There are no technical solutions to social problems.
Google currently hires people to drive their streetview cars. They could save a significant amount by automating that collection process. Beyond not having to pay drivers, you also don't have to have vehicles designed to keep their occupants safe, which could be significantly cheaper to produce, operate, and maintain.

And even though it's not a core part of their business today, the first company that can offer a viable automated trucking platform is going to be strongly positioned in a multi-trillion dollar industry.

People criticize Google for being "just an ad company". Branching out with tech like this would put an end to that pretty quickly, wouldn't it?
An employee commented on the linked blog that the colocation facility prohibits it.
I have very very limited experience with EC2, a single small instance, for over a month, but I think that gives me more credibility when I say this, don't use EC2 unless you designed your whole app to run on servers you expect to catch fire and explode at any time, because my single little instance died within a month, then twice it, well, did something I've never seen happen before, blow out a device driver? So I couldn't ssh in, all I got was "PTY allocation request failed on channel 0", so now I'm on my fourth instance. I couldn't imagine the carnage if I had been running tens or hundreds of instances.
I would really like if Barnes & Noble released a proper, official Nook SDK and used their Pubit as an app-store...

Of course, text-based games would be awful with the touchscreen, but I assume other applications would be quickly developed.
The earth is getting colder, not warmer, while CO2 levels continue to rise.

I managed to find http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2 and http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.... . The second doesn't appear to show a terribly big difference either way, but the first appears to show a bit of warming and certainly doesn't show overall cooling (it does have a bit of a cold snap in 2008, but says we've gone back up to the 2005 high).
Cool post. I must have missed it when it was on the front page.
JESUS CHRIST - LEAVE THIS SHIT OFF HN.

If your post mentions Noam Chomsky, Glenn Beck or any other far left or far right figure and HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TECH OR STARTUPS - DON'T FUCKING POST IT.

If you do see something like this - FLAG IT!
Iran acknowledges espionage at nuclear facilities
I don't remember a "the period of forced anonymous on /b/". It's happened multiple times, although most people are already Anonymous so you wouldn't notice.

Although I also don't see what it has to do with this. Removing names isn't somehow more anonymous than just allowing no name. (And having a random name is the same thing as no name. Slightly more interesting too.)
JAOO: The Go Programming Language
Because an automated system would be less prone to congestion, and the average time for travel would go way down. You'd have to do the math to find the break-even point, but I'd imagine that you could add many more cars into an optimally flowing traffic system and still end up with less total running time.
Thanks. That is exactly my fear. Most of the commenters on our blog told us this probably isn't a good idea so we're very unlikely to do it at this point.

I'M JUST SO DAMN SICK OF DEALING WITH PHYSICAL SERVERS. :)
I think the difference between this and the Toyota incident is that the driver still maintains absolute control over the autonomous google car. So it could be argued that anything the AI does is still ultimately the driver's responsibility.
I've been sitting here thinking about this for ~20 minutes now. I'm about 70% sure you're onto something useful. Seems like it could be a nice way to do the trade-off between population variation and selection pressure.
Women aren't launching tech/web/software companies at twice the rate of men, so that's irrelevant. Few other fields do VC the way tech/web/software does.
I'd better switch from being a programmer to a software engineer!
Meebo has a postMessage replacement for IE7
This summer Meebo intern Kevin Irish created a technique to communicate between cross-domain iframes in IE7. This effectively makes postMessage universally available for use today. The Meebo Bar already uses it in production (for 150,000,000+ users / month).

He has intended to write a blog post explaining how it works, but hasn't had time. Upvote and comment on this thread to encourage him to write the post, so that everyone can benefit from his research and implementation!
This is something that I have been thinking about for a while, and I have implemented systems not requiring registration several times.

In order to try to keep the quality of the content relatively high on those sites I also do some very simple statistical analysis on the text of each post/comment. It works very well! I've had one of the sites up for over a year and haven't had any real problems.

There is a Rails plugin that I wrote for implementing a comment system without registration here: http://github.com/aarongough/has_threaded_comments

And that system integrates automatically with my system for doing statistical analysis on the text: http://github.com/aarongough/validates_text_content

Examples of both in use can be seen at: http://whyiamangry.com/
I think:

"computer software engineers" = "application developers"
"computer programmers" = "systems programmer"

In other words, programmers are spending more of their (paid employment) time writing applications instead of low-level stuff. Maybe because of how much of the development of lower-level stuff is happening in the open source world?
>And the quality of posts? The post kill-rate (removal) actually dropped -hovering below 2%. This is less than half of the number incurred when registration was in place.

edit: the above refers to an automatic spam-killing filter, and nothing else. From what I saw, at least.

-------

Some numbers:

Behind registration: ~4.5%, out of an estimated 125 posts/day * 31 days ≈ 174 spam posts over 31 days = 5.6 spams per day

No registration: An anemic estimate of 1% of spam killed, out of an anemic estimate of 2,000 posts/day over the rest of the graph (2000 * (108-31) * 0.01) ≈ 1540 spam posts over 77 days = 20 spams per day

Removing registration lowers spam? Not really. Comparatively? Yes, because you have more non-spammers, and registration is not a barrier to entry for a spammer. But it doesn't reduce spam, and non-spam quantity is not equivalent to quality.

I'd be interested in a moderator-killed post number, weighted against the users/moderators ratio. I'd bet it skyrocketed - anonymity is fertile ground to flamebait.
You failed to understand the Facebook statement of rights and responsibility. But you made some good points.
That's probably what Google Translate and speech recognition and text-to-speech probably all sounded like ten years ago. But now all of these are able to work together to make a universal translator, turning speech in one language into speech of another language. Pretty fking cool, I'd say!

A company like Google can turn an idealistic pet project into something truly game-changing with consistent time and resources.
It doesn't say "significantly reduce car usage" it says "reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use".

In the PR post two savings mentioned are "highway trains" and car sharing. Car sharing gets interesting if the car can drive by itself to pick up the next person, to leverage all the normal downtime in a typical day where your car is just sitting there waiting for you to use it next.
It is astounding that those so ignorant of the law are so smug about their ignorance. I am not putting forth some random theory, I am pointing out what the law says. It is black letter law.
Not to say it occurred in the article, but you can do a pretty fair hatchet job without once uttering an untruth. It just takes careful phrasing, selected emphasis, and selective editing of what information is provided.
Larry's idealistic pet projects _are_ corporate strategy. That's why Google dominates - they are unpredictable and creative.

Crazy stuff Google did:

* mapped all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers

* Android, groundbreaking in both technology and pushing the envelope on patent law

* launched a satellite

* deep tendrils of fiber optics and community oriented wi-fi projects to connect the world

It doesn't surprise me at all Google is building autonomous cars. Search and adwords are not even the most intriguing things to me about Google these days.

Imagine a mad scientist who has $12,000,000,000. That is Google's strategy... also lots of testing.
Apple to make iPhone for Verizon Wireless
We deal with that issue today. Who is liable when brakes fail? It's usually determined on a case-by-case basis. Why would this system be any different?
I'm in. Just released an MVP so will use this as motivation for the 1.x update!
You're a fucking idiot, and a liar. If you had responded to what I actually said, I might have given your arguments consideration.

FWIW, the socialist system you advocate is circling the drain. IT is a race between Europe and the States to see which collapses first, but it is, yet again, proof of the consequences of your immoral ideology.

You've obviously never read the US constitution. So, go fuck yourself.
It is clear that one day automated cars will make less mistakes than human drivers, and that such systems can reduce the amount of traffic accidents.

There is one big problem - convincing some people this is true, and that cars will make mistakes, but far less mistakes than humans.

The problem is there are many people that fail to see it that way. More than once I was in a situation of explaining the concept of automated cars to others, and always the opposing arguments go something like: "But, can you be absolutely certain that there isn't going to be one single case where a car makes a mistake and kills someone". No, I cannot, and I will not.

And, of course, once the self-driving cars become a reality, such cases will happen. And than there will be an article in some scandal-seeking newspaper how an automated car killed the father of two, and how this is a what happens when you let science control your life and when you let all those over-educated people do what they want... Or something along that lines...

Frustrating.
> It tracks what everyone in the world is thinking about

I think her point was that it doesn't track what everyone in the world is thinking about. It tracks what everyone wealthy enough to have the free time to commit to maintaining their social network presence is thinking about.

> universal customer loyalty system

2.4 billion people (about a quarter of the planet) make less than $1000 year. Only 500 million people's income exceeds $11,500 a year. (http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/income.php)

It is extremely significant that the businesses she picks on (not saying it's fair to call other folks' life's work pointless) focus on creating narrower and narrower slices of the 500 million. The 90% of the planet (!) that lives on less than $11000 a year is completely untouched by customer loyalty programs and social connections apps.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that the businesses you mentioned aren't doing the things you say they are. My life is richer because of the internet and specifically social networking. I am arguing, similar to the author, that the work Silicon Valley seems to be dedicated and that seems to get the most attention is not solving problems most of the world has.
True, but once you know what other cars are doing, and get data from cars ahead, you should be able to identify things like that before you even encounter them.

A tree falling on a car while it's driving: relatively unavoidable. Cars hitting that car: far less likely with computers. They don't get "shocked", or hit the wrong pedal, and have faster reaction times. And pile-ups due to an accident are often far more deadly than the accident itself, especially in busy areas where automated driving could make its biggest improvement in safety.

Deer / kids / unexpected obstacles: can be detected prior to them even entering the road by cars ahead, and flagged for caution for cars behind. IR cameras will spot living things for you, motion / blockage detection will spot things near / in the road. Once such a thing is flagged, it's reasonable to assume that other cars would leave more room between each other and around the obstacle, and probably slow down. All things which people should do, but only actually do rarely, and never collaboratively except at extreme cost and increased risk over something organized.
> My startup is me and a bunch of twenty-something guys. And if you’re a woman launching a startup, my advice is to stick with this crowd. They never stop working because it’s so exciting to them: the learning curve is high, they can move anywhere, they can live on nothing, and they can keep wacky hours.

Certainly, as a 20-something guy, that DOES sound pretty exciting, and I can't imagine any of my female friends going for it.
I just read the article the quote comes from (http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm). I think you're exaggerating the point to some degree by saying "there's no concentration camps in Cambodia", but I think you're generally right.

Later in the article, the source Chomsky gives for the number of "thousands" is a statistician working for the Cambodian government. That's not convincing.
I think you're right. I'm thinking the computer programmers are the COBOL programmers that are still writing code on the mainframes at banks and utility companies while the software engineers are replacing spreadsheets with .Net and Java apps (or on the web of course).
Chmod -x chmod
I'm a pre-traction bootstrapping lady. Pleasure to meet you.
'The reason is twofold: The growing ability for users to write and implement their own programs, as well as outsourcing the task of computer programming.'

Huh? I can change the oil in my car, but I don't do it much, and it doesn't make me a mechanic, nor do I build cars.

'This is one of the few cases where it hurts you to be in the digital field: Because your work is digital, you can do it from anywhere in the world.'

Sure there is globalization, but telecommuting jobs aren't ubiquitous.

'Plus, the work of computer programmers requires little localized or specialized knowledge. All you have to know is the computer language.'

This is so wrong, I can't even go there.
Other than the general use of sports metaphors in business, I can't think of a special meaning for 'athlete' during exec-recruiting.

I suspect Ray Lane was simply analogizing to a league draft, or choosing players before a pick-up game. Perhaps, he was even primed to think that way by the phrasing of an earlier question. ("Oracle would say they've already signed your star player. Was that a factor in choosing Apotheker, setting up a grudge match with Oracle?")
There's also the option of splitting your app between EC2 and your own servers, so you can run the more ephemeral stuff like web servers and caching in the cloud and the bedrock stuff like databases on your own quality hardware.

Then you'll have less physical servers to deal with :)
Google robocar breakthrough
What this is describing is the trend in job descriptions in vacancy advertisements, not career types per se. It's not that programmers are going down and software engineers, to the degree that they are different, are going up; but rather, the fashions of what to call this stuff are changing.
> I think you're exaggerating the point to some degree by saying "there's no concentration camps in Cambodia", but I think you're generally right.

"...that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing"

He says they were:

1. In areas not under the control of the Khmer Rouge (false)

2. Manages to somehow blame the United States for the few killings he does admit happened.

A lot of people don't realize that if the United States and South Vietnamese had won the war, the massacres in Cambodia don't happen. Cambodia would've been next.

American Withdrawl: 15 May 1975

Fall of Saigon: 30 April 1975

Khmer Rouge Genocide: 1975 to 1979

Wikipedia: "The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Vietnam War." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields (emphasis mine)

That wouldn't have happened with a stable joint American/South Vietnamese presence next door. Couldn't have happened, the USA wouldn't have allowed massacre on that scale the way the communist powers did. At the risk of getting into political territory, I think people like Noah Chomsky and Jane Fonda have a lot more blood on their hands than any of the military commanders they like to criticize.
I dunno. I think you're reading a lot into that train-wreck of a sentence.

software engineer: write the software

programmer: write the instructions for a computer to use that software

That doesn't actually line up very well with what you said. I think you're trying to interpret these words within the realm of your own knowledgeable perspective, rather than seeing it from the point of view of someone who probably doesn't even know what the word "software" really means -- like Cindy Perman (the author of this terrible article).

I think Cindy tried paraphrasing some random definitions without actually understanding them well enough to understand them, attempting to transliterate the definitions from terms too technical for her walnut-sized brain to terms she found more comforting, and hosed things up so badly that (like the credulous customers of a fortune teller) we impose our own interpretations on what she said to it seem true.
The article notes that while 'computer programmers' will decrease by 3%, 'computer engineers' will increase by 32%. Their description of programmer sounds more like a compiler, so of course that job is going to decrease.
Some cars out today have automated emergency braking systems. There are also assisted cruise control systems that use a variety of techniques for maintaining a safe distance from the car ahead of you, even in low-visibility situations, and sensor systems that will alert you when you start to drift from your lane (or someone starts to drift into yours). Not to mention traction control systems that have been in cars for years...