skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This should be trivially fixable. Nobody wants such an eventuality to occur, so the smart money is on wiring in a dependency on some externally supplied, scarce element; for example, ensure that one or more of the enzymes involved in mitosis require a supply of a rare earth element or a purely synthetic (non-biosynthetic, non-natural) organic molecule as a cofactor.
Animal studies have suggested fetal stem cells can take up permanent residence in the mother, so it's possible. See:

http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/002393/index.html

(...which is someone's cut & paste of http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725134.300)
"Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. "

Can you define "raw capitalism"?
A friend of mine has, although he had some American co-founders. Will try to get some more info.
There are already a number of excellent answers, but I'll try my hand. You don't know something until you can explain it 3 different ways.

Haskell excels as a functional language because it has excellent piping, Monads are just another form of piping with particularly great syntactic and psychological properties. They act as wrappers around a direct type and setting the return type of a function as a monadic type (such as IO () or [Int] or Maybe Bool) means that the primary type is () or Int or Bool, but there's something special being passed along as well.

In practice this saves typing since you don't explicitly pass the special monadically-hidden information. It also psychologically lets you think of simple types being wrapped in contexts which have certain properties. Some contexts can be unwrapped, some cannot. Some contexts can transform into other contexts directly, some cannot. Learning the behavior of each monad independently teaches you about these behaviors and then becomes important in advanced Haskell programming.

When learning, avoid them. Learn how to use IO by rote and ask in IRC about the confusing type errors that will arise. They usually translate as "you tried to combine two pipes which don't fit, so that monadic special sauce was lost". Part of learning Haskell is learning all of the joints and adaptors which help you to combine types effectively (including monads).

When you have a firm grasp of using compositions and maps and filters, start with the Maybe monad. Implement it and use all the general monad adaptors on them. Then learn the basic State monad because it makes the special sauce very explicit. Learn IO last because it's really a special case and should never be introduced as a monad.
That's tough. A lickable logo?
> Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science &
> engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes

More to the point, blaming higher education isn't filling the cubes right now. How is ranting about higher education going to solve your business's immediate needs? Even in a perfect scenario, where higher ed. is the problem, and even if a solution to the problem was implemented, how long would it take to see results? Are you going to just let your business languish until then?

(Note: 'you' is a generic you, not the poster. My comment was just inspired by misreading his first sentence on first glance.)
Then again, maybe the cranberry farmers and beer shippers are the people who are really running the world.
Programming is a rare and economically valuable skill. It's hard to train people to be programmers.
The video's not bad, ~3 minutes, and the sound isn't necessary to follow. But I wholly agree, text/image examples are 100x better for quick analysis.
I've been using emacs for years. It's definitely worth the learning curve. Plus, it's available on all the major desktop operating systems, so you don't have to relearn a new editor for every environment.
Why do you hate JavaScript so much? You can thoroughly ignore all notions of classes and use it as a lesser scheme.
17-18 cents (in Spain) is nowhere cheap. It's 60 cents if I want to SMS my daughter in the States. I'm actually considering buying both of us Blackberries for that very reason.

I could (sort of) do BBM with iPhone push notifications and a universal messaging app like IM+. Unfortunately, I can see my battery life drain away (literally!) while running IM+.
re: "Money" - a $100k job in NYC with living in NJ just isn't going to get you anywhere close the same living space (especially for a family) as that same money would in most of the rest of the US. Similarly, $150k+ would go a long way to help make up that difference.

Ultimately, it's just not a lifestyle tradeoff most engineering talent seems to want to make at those price points. Upping base to $150k (with something closer to $200k for sr-level talent) for startup engineers (vs ~$100k) would attract more talent the companies are claiming they need. If that's too expensive, perhaps 'startups' should locate themselves closer to where the resources they need are actually located?

Those issues of 'miscommunication' and 'changing priorities' are happening regardless of where the workers are, and I bet many people working at the main office were similarly frustrated.

I've worked on site and remotely, and understand the challenges in each. Neither is perfect, and having a remote team (and being a remote developer) requires certain skills. I'm dismayed, but perhaps not surprised, that these skills aren't actively developed and nurtured at more companies. The long term rewards will be great.
Find out what the signing authority of the interested executive is. If you're charging $1 mil +, in many companies that needs CEO/CFO level approval. That's hard to get, especially with a new technology product that the executive may not have time to understand.

If you're selling to a marketing director or someone of that nature, think around $100K.

Signing Authority is life in the complex sale.
Quite interesting...

I have a fear of human-language-like programming languages, after working on a Progress database. Too many keywords, too easy to forget how to do specific things, etc. Of course, that's a very basic one.

This looks like it'd be a fantastic alternate database accessor, precisely for custom queries like the video shows. I'd hate to be a DBA trying to optimize things though, it seems the higher abstraction away from the actual query means optimizations would occasionally require unnatural query text.

All that said, I'm definitely going to have to look over the code. Thanks for open-sourcing it!
The "I dont care about comments" came from the original comment posted in this thread that was deleted.

I was clarifying that I understand that we're going to get obnoxious comments on us being girls and I'm okay with it, it comes with the territory.

Feedback on the show is welcome in general. That is why I'm posting. : )

Thanks for the feedback. And yes, TED is amazing!
Your call.

PowerDNS: "Over a thousand users are subscribed to our mailing list!"

djbdns: No serious vulnerability has ever been found in djbdns or, if almost a decade's worth of trends continue, will ever be found in djbdns, a track record unsurpassed by any modern Internet-connected software ever written by team of people anywhere.
From the late 80s through the early 2000s Lisp was my language of choice. The post author went through many of its advantages -- mostly true. I even went so far as to write an entire compiler and environment (a several man-year endeavor) to design two different runtime oriented dialects called GOOL and GOAL used in 8 Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter games. All 30-60 FPS action games -- 40 million copies sold. All written in Lisp! (more or less)

Eventually, it was Ruby that got me off Lisp. It does most of what made Lisp great, and the support factor is huge. There are clean standard libraries for everything, the garbage collector is good (the one in ACL is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty much had to turn it off.

I miss the S expressions and the macros. But you can do most macro like things with a good block expression in Ruby, and you can even do auto-generated macro like functions with strings. It just isn't as elegant as Lisp.

The Ruby class system is a bit baroque, but it's actually better in many ways than CLOS, which suffers from being too dated. In Ruby you can do a lot of very cool things with extend and include. It's just a slightly different way of thinking.

The implementation isn't the fastest, but it's good. The Lisp implementations were all clunky and felt like 80s codebases. Oh wait, they are.

Support. The rate of change in Ruby is 1000x that of Lisp. Some new website has an API -- someone writes a Gem immediately. In Lisp you don't even have a really standard networking library!
Contrary to some hacker's humorous remark intended to mock gawker, the Unix standard hash function crypt(3) has been crackable since at least 1990. It is salted, by the way.
The problem with metered internet billing is that the service isn't treated as a utility like power and water are. There would be no restrictions on service providers violating customer rights - and they generally have a defacto monopoly wherever they operate (a single provider to a building, etc).
You're saying men are an irritant? I'll buy that.
I wonder how many users visited that deactivation page just to see "x will miss you" once they heard about it, without any intent to deactivate.
Also, as people live longer, the care required to maintain/extend life gets more sophisticated and expensive.

And it doesn't help that many people eat crap and refuse to walk anyplace.
I'm just making fun of salting. Is that OK with you? :P
Perhaps the reason startups are struggling to hire in NYC is not because there are too few hackers but because there are too many startups. Most hackers simply do not have aspirations to work 80 hours a week to make some MBA jackass rich off of his website which promises to revolutionize the world for apartment brokers, attempt to make print media relevant online, or sell last year's handbags at a discount.
No.

You can start here:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=223259...

or glassdoor

or virtually any former dev there
Ask HN: Some wise words on 'escalation of commitment'
I've seen 'escalation of commitment' in many startups leading to failure. This means the management/investors see confirmation of their strategy/product/market/technology in rejection and gets more committed instead of less, sometimes beyond the point of no return, pushing the company over the edge of the cliff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment. Have you experienced this yourself or in your company? What happened? How to break the cycle? This is extremely important for entrepreneurs to understand and be able to deal with.
For a more thorough, probably better written although longer explanation, I say going to http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad... and reading through that, but I'll give it my own, shorter go and see if you can follow.

Monads are basically a design pattern dealing with special data types. Let's say you're in some situation where there's nondeterminism—each function doesn't return just a value, but several possible values. To use a pseudo-C++-like type system, all of your functions have a signature like

List<B> doSomething(A);

where it returns a list of B's to represent every possible value. You want to chain these together, and the naïve way is

foo = doSomething(x)
bar = []
for someFoo in foo:
bar += doSomethingElse(someFoo);
baz = []
for someBar in bar:
baz += doSomeOtherThing(someBar)

So for every function, you have to repeatedly accumulate the possible values for every possible value so far. If you have higher-order functions, you can encapsulate this in a function like this

def bind(f, list):
results = []
for value in list:
results += f(value)
return results

which means the above example could be rewritten as

bind(doSomeOtherThing,
bind(doSomethingElse,
bind(doSomething, [x])))

Now, the type of bind looks something like

List<B> bind(List<B> f(A), List<A>)

which is to say it takes a function from a normal type to a "special" type—in this case a list—and applies it to a "special" type—in this case, every element of a list. In this case, we'd say that List, together with the bind function, is monadic. The Haskell types look more like

bind :: (a -> m b) -> m a -> m b
-- or for our particular example
bind :: (a -> [b]) -> [a] -> [b]

The key here—and it's a simple example, so it's probably hard to see how it extends to the hype given—is that you've got a "special" kind of data and you're taking functions which operate on normal (non-special, in this case, non-list) data and writing functions to use them on special data with little work. The cool thing is that it's a really common pattern, which is why Haskell programmers mention it a lot.

(Note: in Haskell, 'bind' is actually an operator written >>=, and the order of its arguments are reversed, so its type is

>>= :: (Monad m) => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b

but there are reasons for writing it the way I did.)
That 10% is the broader unemployment rate and includes all occupations. I believe the latest stats from the BLS peg unemployment among software developers at about 4%. Most good developers are gainfully employed, it's up to you to entice them away from what they're currently doing.
Laziness is an important positive quality in a business that already has too much to do. Teaching kids without the disposition or inclination to learn programming for themselves on the off chance a diamond in the rough might be found is not a good business proposition. There's a reason why no one does it. You are far better off just doing less.
"If you can't hire people at a given wage, raise the wage. Or whine online about the lack of employees."

Or move your operations closer to the less expensive areas of the country (there's 48 other states besides CA and NY!).

Some industries are lauded for moving entires factories overseas and making a killing on wage arbitrage. But somehow 'the money' likes to keep 'blessed' startup activity within 10 minutes drive from all VC offices, and this is seen as 'the way things have to be'.
Almost the entire article is BS.

We've ALWAYS had tiered broadband in Australia, and none of these things have happened. The one exception is Peak/Off-Peak usage. Yes, we schedule downloads after hours...but now with every ISP offering fairly healthy download caps, even that is a non-issue for most of us.

It hasn't made me want to "buy" instead of "rent" video content. Peer to Peer is not sending us all broke. We aren't all caching our data at our front door. We don't expect every website to suddenly start compressing their JS scripts. We don't all project our monthly usage. And I most certainly aren't concerned about streaming.

Most of the article is nonsense. The only REAL implication is that people who don't need to 500Gb of data, don't pay for 500Gb of data. Everyone else can.

Probably the only side-effect of the limited downloads is certain ISPs offering "quota free" downloads. E.g. Bigpond customers can download Bigpond movies without being charged for the data. IINet has streaming TV, also without data being counted. But these are nothing more than "value adds".
I don't think it's purely regional. I went to a talk about high-school CS education a few days ago by some NSF guy, and the statistics he was quoting were that only about 2-3% of U.S. high schools offer AP CS classes. So they're going to be rare anywhere in the country.

Looking at the College Board's numbers for test takers, there are about 19,000 who take the AP CS exam per year, less than one-tenth the number of students who take the calculus exam.
Fog Creek and Squarespace are headquartered in NYC.
How about this as a scenario: Such safety mechanisms are engineered at first. A rare earth element is used as the cofactor. After a number of years, an organic cofactor is introduced and becomes widely adopted by industry as it reduces costs. Since this works so well, industry becomes cavalier about the release of such organisms, as they all soon die anyways.

A rogue bioengineer creates an artificial organism that can produce the cofactor. Hilarity ensues.
qmail itself is secure, but qmail without 3rd party patches is pretty much useless. This starts with qmail's delayed bounce behavior and continues with fact that patches are required for the integration of DNS-based blacklists or spam filters.

Once you start to integrate all the patches required to make qmail usable the security track record looks somewhat worse than the one bug found in qmail so far.
Here is the list of Gawker passwords along with MySQL, FTP accounts http://pastebin.com/9rRmf6W5

Thousands of people still use "password" as their password.
Thanks! Ya, our problem is we are all F1 students, from what we learnt, none of us can officially "work" for the company... please do share more about your friend's experience (his role in the company, was he only a "consultant" of the company?). Really appreciate it!
GWT achieves reasonable speed by only supporting a subset of Java which is already basically compatible with the JavaScript runtime. So, you don't get things like threads, weak references, etc. To support such things (if it's even possible) would require writing (at least pieces of) a JVM in JavaScript. Want weak references? You now can not use JS GC -- you have to synthesize Java objects and write your own GC impl. Good luck getting that to perform.
Both times by the author submitting his own work
This article has more details on the breach, including some strong evidence:
http://thenextweb.com/media/2010/12/12/gawker-media-is-compr...

And here's Gawker's official response:
http://gawker.com/5712615/commenting-accounts-compromised-++...
Here in Australia we've always had data caps. You have to take this in to consideration every time you use a streaming service (still never stopped us).
Are you sure startups in NYC are struggling to hire?

A years ago, I was in the states under a F1 visa. I was looking forward to do an internship in NYC. I couldn't even get an interview. I spoke with at least twenty recruiters.

I was at that time an active OS contributor, I had commit access in projects like Rubinius or in Sputnik Tests (Google conformance test suite to test V8). I had also two years of commercial java programming experience, and personal projects in rails, sinatra and django. This was just after I finished a internship at Google.

What compensation was I asking for? Enough money two rent a room and buy food.
The Earth, Destroyed by Asteroid (HD Video)
A $1000 prize[1] for the first person to find a privilege escalation security hole in djbdns was awarded[2] in March 2009 to Matthew Dempsky.

[1]http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/guarantee.html
[2]http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.djbdns/13864
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djbdns

Of course, this may not qualify for "serious", given the very specific nature of the issue.
I blame Sourceforge rather than the Free Software community. Take a look at my 150+ projects on Github; 90% of them have at least one commit by someone other than me. Look at the ones that have more than 10 watchers, and they all have commits by several people.

This is because Github makes collaboration and attribution easy. Sourceforge? I didn't even know it existed past 1998.
Right now I'm a one man operation but hopefully I'll have the need to hire after launch. But for a startup I'd never consider taking on an English degree college major and teaching them to program. Marketing, sales, etc..sure, but not to program. If you never got the coding bug by the end of college, I'm sure not going to be spending my time to teach from the ground up.

In a startup every person has to pull their weight and there really isn't time for a formal training. I'd venture to guess that in almost all cases, this new hire will decrease the value of your company as a programmer.

That said, this approach could work at a large firm with stable revenues, a formal training program, and relatively straightforward IT requirements.
You said it better than me :)
Yes there's a mismatch between the jobs available and the skills of the unemployed. But the rest of the article is pretty much wrong.

Plenty of people aren't cut out for programming or just don't like it. Trying to force them into jobs where there not a good fit isn't good for anyone.

Business schools should teach a wide range of case studies from a range of sectors. Yes that includes farming and food logistics.

The beer company InBev ships $36 billion dollars a year of beer. That's more than market cap of Facebook. The Beer industry is probably worth more than the combined value of every startup featured on Techcrunch in the last year.

Let's not exaggerate the importance of our industry in the wider scheme of things.
This is one of the things big engineering firms in other areas do better, I think (though they do some things worse). A company like Boeing doesn't expect you to come out of college having exactly the skills needed to design a 787 or run a wind-tunnel test. Partly this is out of necessity, because they use a lot of in-house software packages, equipment, and proprietary methods that your university couldn't teach you even if they wanted to. So they focus more on whether college graduates have a solid grounding in engineering principles, rather than whether they know how to work exactly the stuff Boeing is going to want them to do.

Similar story at petrochemical firms; my dad is a process engineer mainly for PTA- and polyethylene-manufacturing units, and they surely don't expect most incoming hires to know how the PTA synthesis process works, or even necessarily to know what PTA is (it's a chemical used to make polyester). They just expect a general chemical-engineering background; they don't want to have to teach the entirety of what engineering means, what process modeling is and how you might use it, what debottlenecking is, etc., but they don't expect incoming knowledge to be very specific.
I don't know if teaching code in school really matters at all. I never took a class in programming in elementary, middle, or high school. I didn't take a class in programming until junior year of college.

I got my first job at a startup writing code when I was a freshman in college.

I was an engineering major, and I taught myself how to program in middle school, but never did I ever take a class on it.

Of all the various things I have learned, learning programming has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any. I really think it is a waste of money to focus on it in school. Most of the kids that I knew who took AP Comp Sci were ruined by it. A multiple choice test for basic programming? Yuck.
At the University of Maryland College Park, Systems Programming is, or was, course CMSC 415. Maybe you should have gone to a better school or, more likely, have paid attention when you were there.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head. Nobody in the Valley or NYC wants to train employees, they only want fully-formed engineers right out of school. This is a huge problem because a convincing argument can be made that CS programs don't teach programming-- they teach computer science.

There were a couple of submissions here in the past about a certain UK firm-- name escapes me now-- that takes Oxbridge grads in English and other liberal arts with no programming experience and trains them. I understand they are very successful in developing productive employees. Anybody remember the name of that corp.?
Every startups is struggling because very few of those 10% live in NYC and have the relevant education or background.
Last i heard, they had 1500 people running their LOIC app. So, not all that much...
I may be daft, but what is the point of coding on an iPad when you cannot compile or execute the code on it? (Except for Javascript I suppose.)