skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software: I expect Android to become a very widely-implemented operating system and to become popular in not only phones and tablets, but more types of embedded devices and netbooks, even if this isn't what Google intends.

I expect Flash to become very insignificant, much in the way Java currently is on the web: good for a few complex applets here and there and on legacy sites, but most people could care less.

The Web: I expect the governments to try to continue to gain more control over policing the web, as well as corporate back deals.. but I don't think web will be much more different from now until next year except that more of it will go over cell networks instead of through the home broadband connections.

Hardware: More people will opt for Tablets and phones for the majority of their computing needs.

Programming: I can see projects like Google App Inventor leading to a plethora of new applications and interest in development.
The 70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet
This is pretty much a perfect example of a comment so bad, even its creator should have realized it and dropped it before it got anywhere near the reply stage.

Seriously, what idea have you implemented lately?
I'm not saying I don't support Wikileaks, but Paypal, Amazon, EveryDNS, etc., are all businesses with employees that depend on constant employment (relative in the current economy).

Lots of people support Wikileaks, but probably wouldn't want their company to lose revenue (and as a result their jobs) for the sake of supporting it.
A startup idea
Maybe this already exists... I know there are gift card trading sites, there ought to be a rebate trading site. I just bought a gadget at Fry's that has a $25 rebate that I don't want to redeem because it requires filling out a form and providing personal information that I don't want to hand over. But I should be able to give the rebate receipt and the UPC code to someone for, say, $10 and they can redeem the rebate and pocket the $15 difference.
Posted a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960002

FWIW, I know several of the people in this, and I found it intrusive and voyeuristic. I know that some of the people involved really didn't understand how they were being betrayed, and in truth, they simply aren't like that! I've spoken with some of their friends who know them better than I, and they found them almost unrecognisable.

Knowing the people involved, I found it quite unpleasant.
I have a Django project that might be worth discussing. Please contact me through the mail account on my profile.
You're being sarcastic, but there's truth in your comment: the best time to have free cash is when everyone else is crapping their pants at the bottom of a market. You get that cash by being conservative when everyone else is losing their mind at the peak.

Remember: this time, it's different. It's always different.
That's interesting. Why do you feel you're not in a position to be an entrepreneur? I ask because I was 26 when I started Mandalorian, which while not being an amazing world conquering business has paid my mortgage (and that of a fair few others) for the past 5 years.
Gamification is going to take off.

Everything in your life will be quantified and if you want recorded.

You can see actual stats and progress in your life.

A lot of boring things including our jobs will become more fun and merit based rewards at work will accelerate in growth around the world.

We talk a lot about this on our wiki at http://gamification.org .
Parent to Child Propagation of False Meaning
Mass-mirroring Wikileaks
Mail me. While I'm not in a position to hire, I have a good friend that often is able to hire for python-based consulting work in Django, Plone and Zope. He might be able to help, although I can't make any promises of course. Please attach your resume or github link to your email so I have something solid to send him.
Vassal is mostly used for wargames. There are some modules for eurogames, but they are few and not always of good quality.
It would be helpful if you mentioned where you are located.
My email adress is in my profile.
Why wouldn't you want the $15 rebate, though? I'm not calling the idea bad, I'm just playing devil's advocate. You cited personal information as the reason, but you'd have to give personal information to the rebate trading site, too.

Also, how would you confirm the UPC code was valid prior to the buyer sending their money over? Or even the rebate - most rebates have like a 30 day policy. How could you prevent people from using expired rebates, etc?
Things that are in short supply that are either essentials or are regarded to be able to preserve its worth. Food, water, gold, silver, platinum, strong currency, high art, etc.
The cables indicate that the American government has been fighting a pitched battle with intruders who have been clearly identified as using Chinese-language keyboards and physically located in China.

Does anyone have insight into how keyboard language and physical location get clearly identified? I can't think of how you'd do that reliably.

Keyboard language: can you build timing signatures for how people type on different keyboards? Then set up a keylogger on a known compromised host or a honeypot, watch the intruder type for a while, and match the signature? That seems pretty easily defeatable: do as much as you can via scripts, and if you ever need to type something, pass all your keystrokes through a filter that knows how to mimic each timing signature.

I can't come up with a plausible way to pin down physical location, but I'm sure someone on here has a better working knowledge of that kind of thing than I do.
To me, the best idea is to invest in areas that are less correlated with your own field.

For example, a good friend of mine works at a mutual fund as an analyst covering banks. For him, his job is already highly levered to the performance of equity markets.

Rather than invest in more stocks for his personal account, he's been looking at places where he can diversify and earn a decent return. For example, he's been investing in rental properties. Another friend works as an oil & gas ibanker, his investments are mostly concentrated in commercial real estate deals.
Note that while some modules are hobbyst work, some publishers (most notably GMT Games) make the vassal modules of their games freely available when the paper game is published. It's a great resource indeed.
What else of Google's employees stuff do Google get to own? If they get into debt, does Google share that too?
Hey, I know you must be on an emotional rollercoaster right now, but just one question: why use a throwaway account?

You're just looking for work. There's no shame in being in this position, at least in this economy. And if you're going to refer to your reputation, why conceal your identity (which is probably already pseudonymous anyway)?
Don't you think that this system is at least a little bit unfair? Why does Google automatically get claim on work that has no relation to Google, done without compensation from Google, and without any of Google's equipment or facilities? How come these people need Google permission to assert a claim on their own intellectual property that is entirely distinct from anything involving Google? It sounds like this was established simply so that Google can claim things that they have no real right to claim and misappropriate an employee's work as convenient.

How come you can't just say "All work on Google-owned software is copyright Google. All work directly assigned by Google management is copyright Google. All work performed wholly independently and separate from Google by Google employees is copyright its respective owners."? I don't get it.
Moms' smoking in pregnancy tied to girls' (earlier) puberty
I'd say they are. Not something I'd use, personally. But then again I've never been one to clip coupons; I just find it's not worth the time.
Your thoughts about inflation are interesting, as I've been expecting them year after year. I'm now convinced there's an effort to spin plates for want of a better word on a more or less global scale. If one major economy goes down it would drag others down with it. I don't think we'll see hyperinflation in the conventional sense, but to put it into perspective we have seen massive inflation in specific targeted areas (food, drink, petrol) in specific economies. I think there may be interesting arbitrage opportunities for some next year resulting from this, but I don't see a major hyperinflation event occuring (at least not on the scale where oil went up to nearly $200) next year.

2012 maybe (but not for the UK due to the Olympics - yes I believe that event alone will cause a loss that will cost us dearly in the long run but may delay the inevitable).
1. For inventions, several U.S. states have law protecting employee's off-duty rights in a manner somewhat similar to California. See:

Del. Code. Ann. 805 http://delcode.delaware.gov/title19/c008/index.shtml

765 Ill. Code 1060 http://law.justia.com/illinois/codes/2005/chapter62/2238.htm...

Minn. Stat. 181.78 https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=181.78

N.C. Gen. Stat. 66-57.1 http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/66-commerce-and-busines...

Wash. Rev. Code 49.44.140 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140

(This list is taken from a treatise on software law I published a number of years back; more states may have enacted similar laws since then.)

-------------

2. For copyright ownership, in the U.S., and I think in quite a few other countries, a company's ownership of an employee's "work of authorship" would depend on whether the work was either:

(i) a work made for hire, usually meaning created "within the scope of employment" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire ; or

(ii) assigned to the employer - which an employment contract might require the employee to do.
From Breakout to Space Invaders, All Over Again
There is very little "rule set" in Vassal. Essentially it is a configurable electronic board; rules are enforced by the players, not by the platform.
Wikipedia says Java. And it use LGPL.

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

Respect, as the kids say. (-: Don't tell the old guy if the kids stopped saying that ten years ago. :-)

I implemented most of the design rules for an old love, Car Wars. It can be hard to implement complex board games.

(My CW stuff was planned as the first step of a full implementation. Steve Jackson Games didn't want that, even if they got to control the servers, so I gave up. It would have been legal to use for game owners, but I really didn't have the motivation to go against the wishes of sjg.)
VASSAL modules are created using VASAAL's GUI-based module builder and optional custom Java classes if needed. Modules run in desktop client app.

To run the modules server-side as-is, I think you'll need to use a server-side JSwing frameworks. Re module building part of VASSAL, I think it'll be easier to rewrite entirely. IMO, more serious issue is copyright issues in hosting VASSAL modules server-side.
If you're interested in looking at some hard data on this, you might look at a recent RAND study.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241/index.html

This study is mainly focused on PhD level degree recipients and compares salary and career prospects with "the professions" (jd, mba, md, dds, etc). By this standard, the study concludes that there is no shortage.

Mr Wadwha is segmenting the "engineer" population differently - including all degree and experience levels, but also treating different micro-slices of the STEM workforce differently. This makes sense, and I think he's right - it does show that the issue is very complex.

If you've read my posts in the past, you'll know that one thing I find exasperating about Mr Wadwha is that he almost always includes the word "xenophobia" when describing people who look askance on visa programs designed to bring more engineers and scientists to the US. I respect Mr Wadwha's point of view (since I agree with him to some extent that we need to be open to global talent), but I don't think he gives enough credit to the people who oppose these programs. When a RAND study finds that there is no shortage of engineers or scientists, and that poor wage and job prospects are the main contributor to low levels of interest among US students, then it is immensely reasonable to question whether we should hand craft an immigration policy designed to bring more scientists and engineers here, as opposed to a more general, profession neutral system. Accusing people who hold this point of view of xenophobia adds nothing to this discussion, and drags it into the mud, as far as I'm concerned.
I know, that's a perennial problem with Ask HN submissions. Of course privacy is an issue, but often it's hard to suggest answers about a situation that could be anywhere (especially with legal-type questions).

PS: good luck, OP.
When you upvote a comment, if you have authored any parent comment in the the thread, your nick should be listed in the comment metadata ("Upvoted by commenters: tqbf, RiderOfGiraffes").

Upvotes/downvotes send conversational signals that incite responses, whether those responses have intrinsic value or not. So do critiques. Seeing the name of someone who just critiqued your comment in a list of your upvoters might neutralize some pointless flame wars.

To an extent, we already have this feature informally, because "I upvoted you, but..." has become an idiom on HN. I think it'd work better if it was automatic though, and it might incentivize "feel-good" upvotes.
I wonder if women who smoke during pregnancy are less likely to have a father present a decade later, which is also related to earlier menarche

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
- General IT

I see phone apps becoming more important than they are now. Apple TV will flop again, but the concept will start to gain traction with cable boxes (BT, Sky and Virgin Media already have this in the UK - I see them integrating the ideas into their set top boxes to cut people like Boxee out).

- your domain

Next year will be the year of cybersecurity. All the boxes you saw this year that deal with identity management will be rebranded as cybersecurity boxes next year. Bruce Schneier will eventually learn the difference between CNE and CNA and will finally start to talk sense on the subject (it took him about two to three years to get airport security mostly right, he's been doing cyber for about a year).

Someone will release a big bug in something important. A bunch of information will be stolen from somewhere. We'll all act like it's something new, when it's not really.

Sorry, I'm highly cynical about my industry.

- your life

I'm hoping to work on iuguy 2.0 once minklinks is out of the way. With luck and the will of the FSM I may well spawn before the year is out. Minklinks will go live at worst in 2011. iuguy 2.0 may follow in 2012.
I expect something big from Microsoft - something really really big.
This may not be the most glamorous option, but my company is looking for a contract QA person. Someone we can hire on a project by project basis and QA our apps. The work might work for the 'nights' half of your schedule and offer a good amount of flexibility. Feel free to email me.
Fascinating. I find it particularly interesting that Jobs, since moving back to Apple, has done nothing interesting with the Web, but so much with the desktop and hardware. Sure, iTunes delivers music over the Internet, but it is not a web application. On the other hand, he did create the iPad: "And then there's the typical hardware. It's possible that some people could come out with some very interesting Web terminals and sell some hardware."
Storytelling 2.0: When new narratives meet old brains
Really? I always hear that non-competes are generally not upheld.
Since watch only display one screen output, it doesn't play nice with something that does a little "hack" to output such as latex. I just figured this out a few minutes ago, and instead, you have to travel through all the output in order to make it run correctly:

watch latex --halt-on-error hw.tex | tail
That reminds me: there will likely be a default by a major country next year that will drag every economy in the world along with it. My belief is that it will be Ireland, which will affect UK tremendously, since a lot of the Irish debt is held by UK.
Let's put two and two together folks...

First: Wouldn't the person who leaked the news of the Chinese hacking have a reasonable expectation that his leak would come back to the Chinese through their hacking?

Second: Every nation is spying on every other nation all the time and diplomatic communication is one of the first targets. That is why diplomats are ... diplomatic. They know they are always being watched even when they supposedly aren't.

Perhaps Wikileaks got far more than any other nation could expect to get through all the spying that goes on. But I doubt it.

What's out so-far hasn't been especially embarrassing to the US. That could be because the US is all sweetness and light. Or it could be because there's difference between 'secure' and 'secret'. Secure channels for things that shouldn't get out but wouldn't be a disaster to let out.

On the subject of Wikileaks itself, this brings up the point that whatever wikileaks winds up with through "humanitarian" leaking is going to be less than enemies of the US will wind-up through adversarial hacking.

Shouldn't the US public know at least as much about US behavior and motivations as the Chinese Polit Bureau?
The web can only be controlled so long as it's a wired affair.

If the concept of a wireless mesh can be realized, it's game over for anything but a silly illusion of control.
United States Code at 18 U.S.C. § 2381 states "whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
This isn't some paranoid crazytalk from a government driven mad by Cablegate. It is a fact that classified data isn't declassified by nature of having been published. Apparently, contractors who are cleared for handling classified data (here you learn that Matasano doesn't do government work) are quizzed on this routinely.

It's apparently a basic rule of information hygiene that you can't ignore classification just because something becomes public, so, ignoring the fact that data is classified may demonstrate to a prospective employer that you don't understand how to take classification seriously.
I recently took a lower paying (but much lower stress) job to allow me more time to bootstrap my own startup.

Probably that? Might not want his employer to know that he is trying to gain more paid work around his work with them?
Bullshit, these documents don't belong to them, which is why most ISP's are refusing to host them.

I also happen to find that not everything the government is doing should be public, even in democracies like the US. If you think that 100% transparency is a requirement, you really have no clue how the world of diplomacy is working.

A certain amount of privacy is necessary, just like it's necessary to keep the salaries of employees secret to a certain extent in companies. Chaos would ensue otherwise.

I'm all for airing dirty private dealings and scandals that the government is doing, but the way Wikileaks is doing it is wrong.
Actually, he did get clearance, that's not immediately apparant from his thread, but he was granted permission to release code into the Snap Framework under Google's copyright and an open source license.
Upvoted. Mike (one of the founders) is a great guy and very helpful. I currently run ninjapost at my startup (details in profile if you want to check ninjapost out).
But in this case, we released the code , under Google Copyright, into a BSD project and under a BSD license.
Good question.

Vision - 5 years: Want to see an activity commerce market grow out of existing social commerce/health site models + activity data + geolocation, other data.

Intrinsic incentives for behavior change work less than 10% of the time, but current rewards are cheesy. I idealistically hoped 'social proof' and motivation using your existing social networks would be enough to incentivize not just a 1x healthier act, but repeated and routinized behavior change.

Unfortunately learned over a year of getupandmove/imoveyou this doesn't work well, and even the most motivated users drop off. Lots of room for problem-solving here, but hard to not lose first mover advantage or be cloned.

Goal: Your action should be able to provide currency, literally and figuratively (points earned for calories burned converted to rewards/reductions in insurance premiums, which lots of new folks are working on).

Business model was this:
1. Sponsored campaigns for hospitals, health insurers, etc. (more social media than action - quant measurement of success was impressions). Enterprise model w/campaigns between 15-250k (we hit the low end but not the high end).
2. It was "Evite for healthy actions."
3. It was easy but time intensive to sell here given connections/experience in the space, but we spent a lot of time and human capital working on a glorified consulting model, even though we were successfully able to sell/close enterprise partnerships quickly (less than 12 weeks). Not scalable. Also, we found out we sucked at user acquisition with the direct-to-user model, and never 'went viral.' Our growth graph has a nice steady up and slightly to the right trend with no hockey stick in sight. Enter pivot.

Business model post-pivot:
1. Verify activity. Become middleware layer for 'proving' someone has done action or challenge using different types of data (example: geolocation, social proof/logins, accelerometer/fitness devices like FitBit).
2. Offer the verification to partners with potential for big distribution rather than go straight direct-to-consumer. Use founder strengths in this area.
3. It "will be" Paypal for verified health/wellness activities (individual and group).

Business model includes percentages of these factors which evolve over 2-3 years:
1. Sponsorship/campaigns (50% first year)
2. Lead gen (% cut; 25% first year)
3. With verification, conversions/cut of per action market completion + purchase, especially where actions include purchase of item.