skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My comment was not really so as glib as all that. We see hundreds of billions of dollars worth of speculative investments in "technologies", recalling the heady days of the dot-com era and the now iconic pets.com. Cures for common viral diseases, while surely not as monumental as daily groupons or facebook status changes, would be a boon for the billions of people who suffer from their effects.

Look, a hundred billion dollars is a lot of money. Enough to secure progress on major scientific fronts. Enough to launch half a dozen Human Genome Projects. If groupon is worth $15 billion, and facebook is worth $70 billion, it's not so absurd to wonder if the way we are valuing technological and intellectual resources has gone off the reservation. Memory of the dot com bust seems to have completely faded from the valley. The valuations we place on forms of innovation, intellectual achievement, affect where we are going.

Yes, I would rather pursue the cure for the common cold, flus, and other viral diseases, even with a low probability of success. The odds of creating the next Facebook are similarly astronomically low, and even if I succeeded, it would be less meaningful than even advancing the solution of the former. I would credit myself if I merely convinced a few smart people that this was a worthier goal towards which to apply their energies and abilities.

Imagine a world where (more than a few) hackers thought and communicated about the structure and meaning of dna. Wrote programs which probed protein structures and revealed their dynamics and interactions. That seems far fetched now, but decades ago, computers were extravagantly expensive devices maintained by a relatively small priesthood. The ecosystem of software which has evolved since the democratization of computing brought about by the personal computer and Internet revolution represents billions of man hours of work by smart, dedicated (and even not so dedicated) people. My point is that hackers can and do contribute a great deal to solving very difficult, truly important problems, and that we shouldn't be so obsessed with trying to create the next twitter or twaddle, because twaddling is so ab$urdly overvalued at the moment.
Re: "Being Liked"

If I were to say "I like having women at work, especially when they make brownies and are not bitches," I'd have an angry horde at my door.

But Jean Hsu thinks it is okay to say it because she is a woman?
Just curious, what is your backend? I guess it is not Twilio.
Basic backbone app with restful server tutorial
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Ask HN: How do you find things to do in your city?
My startup helps you discover awesome things to do in your city. Slick interface... simple.

I'm figuring out how people find stuff to do in their city: Yelp, Chowhound, Plancast, magazines, newspapers.

We're also looking for initial users. http://upout.com
Getaround is looking for interns on both the tech and business side.

We are a San Francisco based startup changing the way people use transportation. We have both paid and unpaid internships available and can provide transportation reimbursement for interns looking to commute to the city.

Shoot me an e-mail at avery@getaround.com if you're interested.
The Security Mindset (2008)
like kidnapping?
There's aview (ASCII-art image viewer which uses libaa); aview can render Ascii pictures to stdout.
you're = you are

I think you meant your.
That's a nice thought, but the real promotions often happen on the grounds of "leadership", "management" and "communication skills", which women are often perceived to lack.

Or maybe you work in a more egalitarian place than me.
College Cofounder of Min.us featured on Inc
Can I use my 800 phone number from grasshopper.com?
> If Linus fell ill Linux would continue relatively unchanged.

Linux development on the other hand... Linus is still the Steve Jobs of the Linux kernel world, so far as I understand it.
That's the marketing.
I can't find the word "doom" anywhere on the page. Yet this would have to be a strange coincidence.
I was rereading some essays a few hours ago and came across this and the essay by Ed Felten on Freedom-To-Tinker commenting on it, The Security Mindset and "Harmless Failures" (http://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/security-mindset-an...).

On of Ed Felten's points, "The second way is to think, "This looks like a harmless failure, but we should avoid it anyway. No good can come of this." The first way protects you if you're clever; the second way always protects you." Is also useful in protecting against other types of failure, not just security problems.
Hmm, I don't save stories. I check if they're in delicious (by who and what tags, and I've started checking pinboard.in. Stories that hit here or reddit or, say lambda ultimate, Artima, Infoq etc invariably get into delicious quickly);

Or if it's a topic that's really important to me, if they show up in first page of google or duckDuck Go results with me entering 3 or 4 reasonable sets of search terms.
Sorry I wasn't clear. I wasn't trying to pass anything off. Someone posted a link to paper - I read it and wasn't impressed with the reasoning. (And less than impressed with the over-reaching metaphors.)

I do disagree with the author's apparent contention that, say, a historical appreciation of the evolving nature of programming paradigms is somehow holding students back today. Aside from argument by assertion, I'm missing the evidence that his approach is the solution to a problem.

What I was also missing, and am still unenlightened about after your response, is the relevance of his classroom approach to say, the readers here. It seems nearly monthly we have a story related to the virtues of SICP and that I get -- it's a great book that's changed a lot of programmer's perception of what programming is about. In this case, I'm missing a similar connection outside the classroom.
or a unicorn, manatee or narwhale. Pony in a pinch.
Thanks as always patio.

At least now I have, what I would consider a 'fringe' case. Not in a bad way, but a case that shows me the possibility of having a few K paid users with very light touch daily customer support.

Look forward to hearing others.
Yes, you definitely can port it or forward it. If you want to discuss, email us at support@tellfi.com.
interesting story and comments. i am going to print it out and read it loud during the investment negotiations asking for comments and advice how to avoid such situations.
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If anything, I think women generally have _better_ communication skills than men.

You do realize that we're talking in vast generalizations here. Engineers run the gamut; there will be sexist, racist and bigoted engineers too. But my experience in nearly 20 years of being in the field has been that engineers, _in general_, are more egalitarian. If someone comes up with cool shit, no one cares whether that person is a woman, or a man, or what color his/her skin is; if it's cool, everyone goes "oooh!" and s/he gets instant respect.
Lists of must see TED-talks
I'm 22, and I think we have the same watch. I wear it merely as a fashion statement, and indeed to quickly check the time. That's it.

Mine plays pong as an easter egg though.
Fascinating stuff!

Programmers (good ones) also have a different mindset - always trying to think of all paths, not just the happy paths. But we don't expect malice, just Murphy's law.
Thanks for posting those links. That explains a lot about where he's coming from -- I hadn't caught the Racket and HTDP connection when I posted my previous comment.
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This is just the start of using mobile watches to talk to phones, computers, you name it! These guys have great vision!
That's true, first time I heard it when applying for an internship, I had hard time to understand what the interviewer is talking about. Now I watch more conference videos.
really nice stuff :)
An alternative is being encouraged to go into product / management roles (read: out of engineering) because you've got "communication skills."
You're right. Once I learned about "Latin vowels" a lot of things fell into place in regards to pronouncing foreign names and places.

This goes far outside of just the Latin-derived languages. We use the Latin alphabet, after all. So if the language can be written with this alphabet somehow (even if the locals don't usually use it), there's a pretty good chance that you should assume they use the Latin vowels, too.

No guarantees, but I've managed to surprise more than a few people by pronouncing things correctly.
imagining him walking around, and nobody knowing who he is

Consider this was the Oscar; imagine the same thing happening to an actor walking around at a Linux conference.

Him being far more influential and more important than
most people in the room

Out of all people, I would think that geeks / hackers can recognize the importance of art for society. If anything I wish more Natalie Portmans were around; as soon enough we'll end up like in Idiocracy with people watching 90 mins of a big ass farting.

So stop with the condescending attitude, please.
This looks really cool. I've always thought that PreScheme was an interesting idea, it's been on my list of "maybe in the future" projects for a while now. This looks like a pretty nice update to it. I'd imagine that the combination of type inference and macros could lead to some really incomprehensible error messages, though.
I hope you typed in the URL manually.
Look it as an alternative to the bookmarking service. You never have to click on a button to record your favorite pages.

Personally I want to use a bookmarking service (currently using historious) because it works so much better than history ever can.

I love how I can search history through the address bar to find a site that I know the title or URL of (which, therefore, i wouldn't really have much trouble finding through a search engine if I lost my history), but I find that actually searching for a lost link in browser history is absolutely horribly.

Yesterday evening I got into an argument with a colleague over how GSM works (Vodafone's network in the UK had severe downtime in many areas for much of the day), and I wanted to look up an article I had read in the last month or so about the man who thought up SMS, and his quotes on why it was limited to 160 characters.

It wasn't interesting enough for me to want to bookmark at the time, but it would have been useful last night. I spent about ten minutes trying to find it (through searching for keyworks in the history, to looking for related HN topics, as I know I found that article through a link from this site - eventually I was just scrolling down the list at what I think was roughly the date on which I might have read it).

I definitely read it on this computer, in this browser, within a time period that it is still in my history. Somewhere, but I sure as hell don't know where.

Eventually I gave up and bothered to Google it, what a surprise, it took me hardly any time to find what I wanted.

Afterthought: Maybe the Google should offer to archive your history and provide a search engine of just pages that you've viewed. We get a much better way to trace our footsteps, Google get even more data with which to target adverts towards us, win win.
I guess nobody can realistically answer that.

However, if you have the time, resources and the inclination to build it (you've said you're already doing this), give it a try and see how it goes.

> is it worth to build new app for it ?

That would depend on what you consider 'worth', won't it?

For some, the worth would lie in creating something. For others, it may lie in $$. For yet others, it'd be worth doing to enrich their CV/experience/portfolio.

Where does your 'worth' perception lie? :-)
Box2d is amazing, and powers about 90% of physics flash games and now a good portion of iPhone games as well.

It's also a great example of a creator having buyers remorse about the licence used. At somepoint the creator decided to be altruistic and release it in a way that it could be used far and wide in applications across hundreds of platforms. Now people are using it in fabulous projects and very rightly, getting famous and wealthy through those creations.

That said, Angry Birds isn't successfull because of it's physics engine. In fact, there isn't one single element of the game that makes it successful. The Rovio guys studied their audience, listened to feedback, and invested everything in creating a killer app.

Box2d was one bolt in the process, and if the licence had prevented the developers from utilizing it, they would have swapped it out for another model. It wasn't the lynch pin to Angry Birds' success.
Just think quantum computing. You could write down everything you know and every piece of data you have, eliciting by hand your utility and priors, and then press go on the mcmc. Awesome.
I'm going to assume both you and Jean Hsu wouldn't be serious when they said that. In that case, if you were to say that, the angry horde would consist of women that didn't know you and were taking your words at face value, because guys have been known to actually feel that way. Those women would give Jean Hsu the benefit of the doubt, because there are few women known to have actually ever felt that way. However, with people you know, who understood the broader context of what you were saying, it wouldn't (shouldn't) be a problem.

"I like some female colleagues among my male colleagues for a number of reasons, but the fact that they tend to bring brownies definitely stands out for me, because I love brownies." There, defused the entire problem?
Shriram Krishnamurthi is a genius; I saw him at a conference last year and regardless of the topic of the talk given, he always had insightful comments and questions that were close to a level of having done the research himself. Honestly, I have never met anyone more competent in such a variety of topics.
For a second it felt like Digg in here, people talking about content degradation. The idea was fine, just a placeholder nothing more.
It's not polite to check the time when you're with company, but it's a hell of a lot less rude to do so on a watch than a phone.
Yes! I can't tell you how many people have tried to steer me away from development because I speak human AND code, and can actually make eye contact.
That'd be a very interesting data set. I'd love to explore it too - I'm also sure personalized news feeds are achievable and valuable.

PG: why not make an anonymous sample available for us all to play with?
Sorry, I can't hear about gender in engineering jobs anymore.

The likelihood that you will see a blog post about the "benefits of being a male software engineer" is exactly the same as the likelihood to see a blog post about the "benefits of being a male social worker".

We do not need to artificially try to bring in more engineers of a certain gender just because the numbers don't make sense.

And we do not need more blog posts calling out our oddities as engineers. We all dress like dorks. We all have our quirks. Get over it.
DNSimple has been in business since June 2010 and has just over 300 paying subscribers. I usually average 1 to 2 support requests per day. I may only get 1 to 2 pre-sales inquiries per week - most sales occur via self-service. I hand craft each response for support emails.

HTH.
It all comes down to the search. I know we have a lot of work to do on that front.

Bookmarking mostly never worked for me, because like you pointed out in the example, you may never know what information you might have to recall.

We may come up with a way to 'star' a link to help bring up the favorite pages.
This isn't Twitter, type out your URLs.
Yeah, but how hard it is to give one guy credit for the free fish you got; and why did he had to ask for it?

That's why I've been saying it - a gift economy on the Internet does not work, except in very few instances / narrow niches. In the future, we'll get more DRM and more restrictive licenses, not less ; as most people are just leeches.
I once sold ice cream. We were graded by how many additional items we got customers to add to the ice cream (those cost extra).

Over time, I learned to positively associate certain combinations (graham cracker crust goes well with fruit, for example) and negatively associate others. So, even if I didn't like that particular kind, I could just suggest whatever things people frequently ordered and get a lot of sales.

I was #1 so consistently that my manager took me out of one of the contests to give the other people a shot.
Have you actually read CC?

Another point: Which books deal with "the most interesting aspects of designing programs" in your opinion?
Which, in the end is why we couldn't keep him. Sigh.
So, given that all these hackers want to know whether they can trust this, I downloaded the pkg and had a look at the source code. The main file seems legit. I don't understand the popup.html file and the call to flickr though. (also, the packaging is a bit sloppy with two copies of the same file).
May take longer than half an hour, but I'd like to volunteer for this [Chrome plugin for "Saved Stories" extraction]. Planned to do something similar for a side project anyway and it sounds like whatever you're cooking up might benefit the community. If RoG is interested, feel free to get in touch: username[ at ]creventures.net
Sorry about that. You are right, i think I forgot to remove popup.html file, which was an example from Google.
The biggest lesson I've learned from various startups is that "all-in-it-together" is an awful lot like asking "How are you?" (The correct answer is "Fine!", even if your arm just got torn off, your cat died, and your spouse left you for a monkey): It's conversation, and nothing more.

In the end, everybody is unpredictable. If you don't protect your rights from the start, you'll have problems. Even (especially?) if you're BFFs, everything should be spelled out in advance, including metrics for conceptual terms such as "success", etc.
"You also get the added bonus of seeing people's confused reactions when they ask you if you're in marketing, and you tell them that you are a developer."

This sentence really surprised me. How often does this happen? Female engineers are a minority, but I wouldn't have imagined it would be that big a deal to run into a female engineer.
Haven't we already done something like that, in a sense, with HN karma?
Done. http://stanford.edu/~grantm/cats.html

It actually turns _all_ images into kittens, but I think it's an improvement. :-)
In my opinion the daemon was just one big deus ex machina. It definitely is not in the same league as Snow Crash.And I don't think Suarez had a very good sense of tension. The book is fast-paced, but it never takes a break. And the protaganist was poorly written. He basic had no control over events in the story, he just responded to the antagonists actions. But it seems to be popular on Amazon, and I haven't read the sequal.
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I reluctantly switched to GoDaddy because none of the TUCOWS-based registrars could handle IPv6 glue records, and I wanted to get my external nameservers running dual-stack. GoDaddy was surprisingly ahead of the curve on IPv6 support.

Their marketing is truly cringe-worthy though. I only keep the registration of that single domain there, and I will probably move it elsewhere when it expires in a couple years.
RMS at the party might have been a sight more interesting than Linus...
Absolutely, more often than not.
It's almost as if there are billions of them, with differing opinions.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but the 750 million figure is way off. According to Wikipedia:

"As of November 2010, [gmail] had 193.3 million users monthly"
Downvoted comments are greyed out, but possibly contained links stay black. This gives them (unwanted) attention, so they should be greyed out, too.
I agree. I'll gladly mince my words to avoid being called a sexist.

The issue here is that either Jean is being serious, in which case she's undermining workplace equality, or she's abusing the fact that she can facetiously say such things because she can get away with it. What is she trying to accomplish?
February 2011: nine Cisco vulnerabilities
And here's the same story from a less sensationalist source.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/28/overheard-gdc-credit-where...

"What physics engine did you use for Angry Birds?" --Man
"Box2d" --Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio
"Would you be willing to credit it?" --Man
"Yes" --Vesterbacka
"I'm the creator of Box2d." --Erin Catto, creator of Box2d

Following this exchange -- which took place during Rovio's panel on its multi-million-dollar franchise -- a smiling, caught-off-guard Vesterbacka said that the company would credit Box2d as the physics engine it uses if Catto would see him after the Q&A session.

AFAICT, this controversy is completely fabricated by the MobileCrunch tabloid.
Yes, on one that has sarcasm.
Yes, He's missing a closing quotation on one of his links. There's a good couple of sentences in a link.
How did you pick your list of companies?
"But I wear a wristwatch because I can tell the time at a glance."

Incidentally, this is one of the main advantages of not wearing a wristwatch - I'm less stressed about the time.

I do wear a wristwatch when jogging though.
Their "personas" didn't do a very good job.
What is Apple doing with QuickTime? (could have been QT, not Flash, on the web)
Nescafé and Methylphenidate (prescribed, of course) are your friend.
I recently wrote an autobiographical paper from the perspective of women in technology for class. I found that women represent under 9% of the developers/designers at the company I work for, under 5% of the core developers on open source projects I contribute to, and under 3% of the contributors to those projects. So while I personally wouldn't make that assumption, it's probably not a bad one, statically speaking, for many software engineers.
I would be very interested in seeing your top ten list of books that every programmer should read, tptacek. First, because I value your opinion, and second, because I honestly believe that most of the books on this list actually are books that every programmer should read and I'm curious as to why you're so averse to them. What would you consider 'a book about the most interesting aspects of computer programming'? Do books like SICP and 'Introduction to algorithms' not fall in this category?
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Fat chance of discouraging people from abusing anything routinely described with a straight face as a "cognitive enhancer".
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I'm very glad my girlfriend is not a developer (and she is very glad I'm not a geologist). I quite enjoy the escape from coding that she provides for me.
Do you have any details about your unique functionality that you can share?