skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The CS department at the Ohio State University built their own language on top of C++ called RESOLVE/C++. A lot of students absolutely hated it, but it introduced a pretty awesome paradigm for working with objects: swapping.

If a function needs to operate on an object, rather than messing with pointers or copying the object, the function instead "swaps" the object with an initialized object. The function's "contract" specifies that it "consumes" the object that is passed in, so in code that calls that function, it is apparent that it better copy the object if it needs to access it again.

I think this provides a nice paradigm for allowing for immutability without excessive copying. The only functions that actually modify objects are the object methods themselves.

The RESOLVE/C++ language has been around for well over a decade, but it hasn't garnered much interest outside of academia. It's a shame, because it's a reasonably high level language that allows for mathematical proofs of correctness while still compiling down to machine code.
Yes. See Privacy Commision of Canada's report:

http://www.priv.gc.ca/media/nr-c/2011/let_110309_e.cfm
Reminds me of this article in the Economist: "Why do firms exist?":

"His central insight was that firms exist because going to the market all the time can impose heavy transaction costs. You need to hire workers, negotiate prices and enforce contracts, to name but three time-consuming activities. A firm is essentially a device for creating long-term contracts when short-term contracts are too bothersome."

EDIT: link: http://www.economist.com/node/17730360
I think this is proven at companies like Google, and Nintendo.

If you divide total revenue of the company amongst all of its employees, Google still makes say 1-2M per employee, and Nintendo has been reported to earn in revenue 2-3M per employee during the heyday of the Wii.

The key to making this work though is being able to have a product market fit. Or in the HN religion, 'make things people want'.

Secondly I think there are a great number of inefficiencies that can occur if say a product could earn you $3M per engineer/ hacker and you are able to get at-least $40k per engineer/ hacker, as you work to narrow that delta you will refine your nitch, and craft.

If however the revenue does not scale, meaning, it's not easy enough to grab something for your poor/ unskilled efforts, I think it's hard to wiggle your way to the top and reach $3M per person.

I think this is why HN/ VCs tends to fund people in strong existing markets which are begging for an update.

It's too expensive to educate someone on your value, and to build the market, even though there are some entrepreneurs that are really good at that.
As usual, Krugman is on-point and rational. President Obama has not shown the leadership needed, particularly in the face of the shameless and irresponsible behavior of the Republicans.
Download Ashampoo Burning Studio Elements 10 Full Version for Free | TechHew
I agree completely with this article. Every year that goes by, I'm absolutely staggered at the ridiculous luck, serendipity, whatever you want to call it, that I have experienced in all aspects of my life. And I definitely attribute it to having an open and light-hearted (yet focused) approach to life: I have just always believed that if you do your part, the right thing will present itself. You just have to recognize it when it happens.

I guess you could say, then, that I've always followed a sort of hybrid Panglosian/Yodan approach to life: i.e., be positive, everything really is for the best, and be focused in the present, while keeping an open mind and "letting go" towards the future.

Indeed, when I look back on what I had once perceived to be the worst, "darkest hours" of my life, I see now that they turned out to be the very best things that could have happened to me.
To make it on your own, you have to stop building what you think people will pay for and start building what they actually will pay for. Huge difference.

That's right. How hard is it to find such a niche? I'm looking for a niche where I can make $5K/month only. Here are the criteria:

- Be able to launch the SaaS in 3 months work.

- A small customer base (200-300) with monthly subscription.

- Requires 30 hours/week for support.

- Doesn't require physical stuff, or lot of expenses.

Any one who can think of such a service? I'm looking to build one this summer.
I think that's a pretty gross oversimplification of what Paul says, that quote is from pretty much right at the top of the essay, and he then goes on to spend several pages saying why it's not that simple.

He especially isn't talking about lone hackers working for themselves, but ones working at startups - the very first line of the essay is "If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup".

The difference between a lone hacker working for a per-day rate and a startup is the lone hacker doesn't have a value "multiplier", where 1 days work can be resold many times, whether through product sales or something else.

And for the lone hacker who is building a product, well, most hackers are really bad at doing a sales job...
Ask HN: What do i need to learn to build this?
I am a college student, taking the summer off. I know html / some css and plan on learning js over the summer.

As an alternative, I'd like to build a website to do the following, and wanted to know what should I learn to build it (I am a fast learner, I think). Should I go the ruby/rails way or the python/django way. The goal is to be able to start coding by mid may and get something usable by the beginning of july (before college starts).

The site would have a clean UI with just one comment box at the top, and below it would be previously entered text. Like twitter, but a little bigger text, and a bigger limit on the number of characters. It would not require any username/login (though I guess that would lead to more spam, and a whole bunch of issues). Also I am trying to build it for my campus, and was wondering what would be the fastest way to develop and deploy it so that I can get something out before the beginning of August ?

Thanks.
Some background on this: our prototyping tool allows you to write code in the browser, and the way maney people use it is they open a prototype on one monitor and then have the editor on the other one. So you save, alt-tab, refresh, just like you would if you were writing code offline.

After seeing LiveCSS (https://github.com/ooyala/livecss) we figured we could take the idea a step further and get rid of the need to alt-tab and refresh in the first place. It's a simple gimmick, but in combination with our prototyping app, it suddenly (in our eyes) becomes a lot more interesting. Why? Because your client can watch changes happen as you make them. You don't have to sit there on the phone/IM saying "refresh it now. Ok, how about now?" - they just see things change. Especially if they use a browser that supports transitions - it's way cool to see your design morph back and forth as you consider various options.
What if it’s 1996, not 1999?
L-Systems in Canvas
I think there are different facets to the bubble that need to be separated out to talk coherently about its implications...

You can look at the bubble from the vantage point of the schools that are competing to keep up with the spending of the ivys and have overextended themselves: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

And you can also look at it from the perspective of the students that are emerging from mid or low tier institutions with a hefty chunk of debt relative to their likely earning potential.

Peter's (or Sarah's) focus on the Harvard kids seems to be the least compelling part of a potential education bubble. These are smart kids who either leave school with no debt in the case that they are poor to lower middle class, and with parental support (of the monetary kind) if they're on the other side of the wealth spectrum. So maybe they're "wasting" four years where they could be creating a business, but they're not in dire straights upon graduation or necessarily compelled to sell their souls. Check out Harvard's financial aid policies: http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/hfai...

I do think there needs to be some different paths put before kids in general as they contemplate "college as the only option" but I don't think Thiel is quite right to target the ivy kids as they have the least reason to fear an education bubble bursting -- because of the lasting [perceived] quality of their degree, their lack of debt in a lot of cases, their campus-born connections to smart and wealthy classmates and alums, and their smarts.
a bit off topic, but how come this UI is amazing and all the other google services have such "boring" UI's...
The main confidentiality issue is not about whether you, the coder, cares about people stealing your groundbreaking idea. When you are doing work for hire, the code is not necessarily yours to publish.

Whilst sharing it with someone you could refer to as a colleague, employee, or contractor might be OK. Sharing it with the world, or someone who might share it with the world, is not.
The image loading issue the OP was referring to was already reported in September 2009 [0] and is still to be resolved for everyone. Along with this [1] infamous issue reported in October 2008. The Chromium team absolutely seem to prioritise adding new features before dealing with serious long standing issues in the browser. Not that they're entirely different from the competition in this regard.

[0] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20960

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3543
You can "buy it as a gift" and pre-pay the 1-year subscription.
I put my email in at least a month ago and have never heard anything, so I'm skeptical they're adding beta users very fast if at all.

There's an awful lot of python hosting startups now, and I suspect the small, slow-moving ones are going to get steamrolled by dotcloud and the like. Djangy already threw in the towel, and that's starting to seem pretty smart.
It looks like it was designed/created by the same guys that designed the HTC Sense UI: http://www.f-i.com/
To the author: "GNU/Linux, have you heard of it?"
honestly, I would use sinatra.rb, and deploy to heroku, using their free version (at first). For me that's the fastest way to get a simple idea up and working.
Don't get into the Rails vs Django war. Just pick up any one of them and start coding. Both frameworks are highly productive and very easy to pick up.

If you go with Rails, you can use Heroku for hosting which is free to start with. If you go with Python, you can use Google Appengine, which is free as well for starters.
>You purchase a product and blame yourself if you didn't receive the intense personal growth implied by its advertisements?

I do blame myself if my expectations didn't match the actual product I received. It is my responsibility to make the best choices for myself. Of course when it comes to college courses, much of the blame for incorrect expectations lies with your advisors. I had the same issue.

Another issue that I see all the time with people who consider themselves "good at math" is that they have no idea what real math is. They breeze through standard "applied" math courses (calculus and prereqs) and then hit a brick wall when they hit real math where you do proofs. This isn't a problem with the material or how its taught, its that people's expectations are way off. It just makes no sense to blame the teacher or the material here.

>I wish to do well by them, not blame them when I failed to inspire.

I commend you for this; we would all be better off if every teacher has this dedication. But, at some point the burden has to shift to the student to find their own inspiration. Once you get past a certain line, the time spent has to be dealing with difficult material, not making sure the students are properly inspired. The line varies depending on the subject. But when you're taking a college level advanced calculus class, you have crossed the line where motivation is your responsibility. I think what you learned taking the course is simply that proof-based mathematics isn't for you.
Is PHP running out of itches to scratch?
Amazon built Top 500 supercomputer in its own EC2 cloud service
Without much fanfare, Amazon officials last year built a supercomputer on the EC2 cloud service that placed 231st on the most recent Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. The 7,000-core cluster, de-provisioned soon after running the Linpack test, used Linux, Intel Xeon X5570 processors and a 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnect. Amazon's James Hamilton said the Top 500 run proves that a cloud service can be used to build "One of the fastest supercomputers in the world for $1.60/node hour."
My experience working in a ME/EE/FW/SW team is that the turnaround times in ME and EE are much higher and more expensive. Making masks for chips and molds for parts is extremely expensive and time consuming. Our EEs and MEs use high-end modeling tools and draw on a lot of outside vendor experience to get their work done. Turns can take weeks or months and that's after your prototyping phase and/or process development is done.

Whether it's harder to find and coordinate ME/HW resources is hard to judge. It doesn't appear like that to me and the disciplines have been around longer so there's more maturity in the industry. Typically you won't find the MEs bickering about the latest framework or tool to use. There's more of a get-er-done attitude, especially since the best MEs tend to be more practical minded people in the first place, more likely to go out and pour some concrete on the weekend instead of spending it at their computer screen.

My team mates frequently joke that my job as FW engineer is easier and I tend to agree - only half jokingly. On the other hand, more than once we've sent out firmware fixes to the field that prevented a gear box from stripping or some part from overheating so everything has its place and value.
Authorized biography of Steve Jobs to arrive in early 2012
For the low-traffic scenario there's also an older, much simpler solution: https://github.com/mtravers/cheepnis
Is anyone else annoyed by the term 'white hat'? It almost inevitably means there will be a repetitive and subjective discussion of "white v black hat" techniques...
As a vim/keyboard-only ninja I'll pass. Cmd-Tab, esc, /whatever, i, changes, esc, :w, Cmd-Tab, Shift-Cmd-R does not take longer than 3 seconds for a single change. But it's very promising.
Unless you are that customer. Imagine going to a carpenter and then receiving an invoice for him renting a hammer. Wouldn't that look a bit odd?

In other words it is commonly expected that professionals come equipped with the tools of trade. Not that this is set in stone, but that's the state of affairs and trying to do it differently is an uphill battle.
StripeSpotter turns wild zebras into trackable barcodes
I completely agree. Kay is criticising developers whose code breaks encapsulation. Has nothing to do with mutability.
While it is no iPad, the price point is certainly interesting. It could easily be a laptop substitute in third world countries, especially if the battery life is anywhere close to Apple's iPad. I could also see a lot of businesses (especially mom & pop shops) opting for one of these devices.
"Money for valuable effort" - world does not work like that.

World is built of cash pipes and 99% people just tap into them (salary) or builds their own thin pipes (lifestyle business?). 1% of clever people from time to time manages to build new fat pipe but who and when it's almost due to sheer luck. Experience and smarts don't help you win the lottery, they just buy you a ticket.

When you work for yourself you make an attempt at building new pipe but all you can usually do is build thin pipe and even if you are draining 100% of it it's still less than what you could get if you just tapped to someone else's fat pipe, even if your work doesn't do anything to make the pipe fatter or even harms it. It's most apparent for people in financial sector but I believe it's true for everybody.

That's why most people have salary and try to build something own after hours. This way they are getting a shot at building own cash pipe while still not passing on opportunity at draining someone else's fat pipe.

Oh and it's much easier to widen already fat pipe that to build your own as fat as the amount of the widening. That's probably the answer to your question.
Not sure how serious this is, but plenty of languages, particularly functional ones, use = for equality.
First thought: Wow, the syntax looks like AppleScript.

Looks quite compelling though - hopefully they'll tie in the PIM and GPS features - imagine being able to ask you phone how long you spent physically at work during the week, or who are the top 5 people you emailed in the last month.
Already out of date - 0.03 fixes IPv6. Please, get it from the site (if it hasn't been Slashdotted or something yet :/)
Very cool and great demo. I can see a lot of keyboards being saved with this.
Having read the awesome "iCon" when it came out several years ago -- and being genuinely shocked at the invasive story of Steve's life -- I'm very interested to read this and see how much his rather ... um, polarizing ... life story is diluted.
this has NOTHING to do with hacker news. Go back to reddit.
Isn't the printf also introducing a rounding error? This all seems like a futile test.
A culture as unique as Google - in a hedge fund
MIT has def. been doing some fantastic things in the affective domain.
why the editorial slant here? What's the problem with verizon not offering one year contracts?
People always half quote Kay on C++. He says "I came up with the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind", but if you listen to the actual talk this comes up in, he immediately follows with (slight paraphrasing here) "Of course I'm not sure I had smalltalk in mind either"
It is not unusual for contractors to rent more expensive equipment.
I was looking for something like this months ago. Thanks for building, and I'm looking forward to (at least trying to) contribute!
ERP. Forget about being fully SaaS but be SaaS enough so that what you build to scale in the cloud can also scale out of the cloud. Edit: what I mean is that most companies interested in SaaS are actually more confident to host their own little version of your solution for their needs.

Spend time studying OpenERP because it's succesful and you'll have to compete against it. Their platform is a great case study: it's powerful and modular while being difficult to take over. Their code base is a mess and yet they have developer's traction. There's a huge market, no matter what you plan (a platform or a solution).

If you go for a platform, avoid small projects.
Well, I've been using OPA for quite some time and it rocks.
Caveat: I'm a member of the OPA team. But it still rocks.
There's a subtle but big difference between what he said (at least how I read it) and what you said he said.

You're implying he said credentials are worthless or meaningless.

He actually was saying that there's a bubble in education. That is, the cost of education is overvalued vs the return one typically gets. Yes, he talks about the exclusionary nature of institutions but I don't think his point is that credentialing is pointless. His point is that the system has built a bubble (overvalued not worthless)
Wonder why people are downvoting this. SHA-1 being insecure is not something that is up for debate -- it is fact:

"SHA-1 is the most widely used of the existing SHA hash functions, and is employed in several widely-used security applications and protocols. In 2005, security flaws were identified in SHA-1, namely that a mathematical weakness might exist, indicating that a stronger hash function would be desirable."

"Earlier this week, three Chinese cryptographers showed that SHA-1 is not collision-free. That is, they developed an algorithm for finding collisions faster than brute force.
SHA-1 produces a 160-bit hash. That is, every message hashes down to a 160-bit number. Given that there are an infinite number of messages that hash to each possible value, there are an infinite number of possible collisions. But because the number of possible hashes is so large, the odds of finding one by chance is negligibly small (one in 280, to be exact). If you hashed 280 random messages, you'd find one pair that hashed to the same value. That's the "brute force" way of finding collisions, and it depends solely on the length of the hash value. "Breaking" the hash function means being able to find collisions faster than that. And that's what the Chinese did.
They can find collisions in SHA-1 in 269 calculations, about 2,000 times faster than brute force. Right now, that is just on the far edge of feasibility with current technology. Two comparable massive computations illustrate that point."

"It's time for us all to migrate away from SHA-1.
Luckily, there are alternatives. The National Institute of Standards and Technology already has standards for longer -- and harder to break -- hash functions: SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512. They're already government standards, and can already be used. This is a good stopgap, but I'd like to see more."
We Canadians really are a passive bunch. I'm not sure why this is so, maybe because life is pretty good for a sufficiently large amount of people? Maybe because we're busy with NHL playoffs coming up? I don't know but if not for Professor Geist's continued efforts in this area, these issue would never see the light of day. His articles on thestar.com are the only ones of their kind that I can find on any major Canadian news site.
Chrome doesn't use OpenSSL. It uses NSS. At least on Linux and Mac; I believe it uses the system-native crypto libraries on Windows.
> your nitch

Pet peeve: It's "niche." In spite of how it's commonly pronounced.
It's true that McCarthy had a solid basis of support for his program, especially at the beginning before people saw where it was going. There were, in fact, a wide variety of leftist groups operating in America and no doubt some had a long-term vision of imposing a communist system here with the assistance of foreign powers. This was not pure fantasy - it was actually happening at a surprising rate in the late 40's and 50's.

But McCarthy & co. did more than simple fear-mongering and "making political hay". They were using the considerable power of the US Federal Govt against individuals for their politics and for not-justifiably-illegal actions. They were destroying livelihoods and putting people in jail.

It's easy to see in retrospect that the US was not at risk of the Red Tide because the economic fundamentals were absurdly better than what was needed for the leftist revolution.

McCarthy & co. degraded America and damaged our principles out of stupid hysteria and demagoguery. This only went on as long as it did because there weren't enough level-headed people who were willing to pay the price of questioning it openly.

Wikileaks/Manning/ioerror are not an existential threat to America, but this path of systematically abandoning principles of protecting individuals from the abuses of government power absolutely is.
It seems like a lot of overhead to have to work in/maintain/convert between multiple apps instead of just using "the good one". Especially when a version from several years ago would still work on a current OS and would still have "more features than you'd ever need."
Some of us in the PHP community definitely agree with you, and are working on trying to change the culture amongst developers. I'm currently writing a series of blog posts to try and convince developers why this is a good idea, and how to go about doing it.

http://blog.stuartherbert.com/php/beyond-frameworks/

I hope you find it useful.