skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Suppose the internet has been shut down. I can still hand my neighbor a USB stick. I can still snail-mail my buddy an external drive."

As I see things, there's an important difference there.

Just like home taping didn't kill the record industry, and videotapes didn't kill the tv/movie industry, sharing usb sticks or hard drives with your circle of friends isn't going to kill any creative industry either.

As is common with computers, the sheer difference in scale of digitally sharing over the internet _does_ make a difference.

With physically sharing storage media, there's a small but not zero marginal cost each time you share something. A few bucks worth of usb stick or a few tens of dollars worth of hard drive, which you no longer have use of while your friends has it or it's in transit. That's going to practically limit the sphere of your sharing - think about your own social graph, how many of your "facebook friends" would you actually send a drive full of tunes or movies to? I know the subset of my friendlist that I'd go to the trouble to send a few bucks worth of usb stick is a reasonably small portion of the people that Facebook calls "my friends".

That's a _very_ different thing to what happens when you dump your entire media collection into the /torrent directory on your always-on campus network connected machine. The internet enables zero marginal cost sharing, which inevitably leads to orders of magnitude wider sharing. I suspect the Dunbar number of ~150 real social connections is the very top end of what most people would consider to be a sensible sized physical-media-sharing-network, and realistically most people would probably stop short at 10 or 15 individuals you'd expend the effort to share with if sharing required you to actually send real-but-small-cost atoms to do it.

(curiously, or perhaps obviously, these suspicions about sharing network sizes closely map my personal experience ~30 years ago with sharing compact cassettes and vinyl LPs in highschool in the early/mid '80s. There were 6 or 8 people who I'd lend/borrow LPs between, and perhaps a dozen more that I'd lend or copy tapes for.)
Thanks for this! I was confused myself.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=n%21%2F%28%28n%2F2%29%2...

seems to give 319830986772877770815625

It can also be done by thinking 39 * 37 * 35 * ... * 1
which also yields the same number. In that way, it is like selecting 1 person, who then has 39 people remaining, then selecting another, who has 37 left to choose from and so on.

I was super confused at first why it wasn't just 40 choose 2.
It's not node.js that feels unstable -- it's the shifting libraries that make it feel unstable for me. I was going to do my project in node.js, and might still, but a project that I get maybe a few hours a week is just not going to work with something moving so fast.

I think if I was on a startup with it, I'd feel comfortable as long as my first patch or two was accepted on the projects on which I depended.
we use newrelic
With your app it kind of sounds like you have a chicken / egg problem so you may want to just open it up to the most users possible so tat it is the "best it can be".

In the past we have tried both and I've found being more restrictive allows you to iron out things (most of the time unforeseen) before a full scale launch but you lack the large user base that you would get by just opening it up (Signup to be notified lists in my opinion and experience leave a lot of users out cold who don't come back).

In addition, larger betas can get you more traction quicker and also provide insight into new markets and uses for your app you never thought of while smaller betas on the other hand create a good core group of early adopters (because you can give them more attention) that if taken care of will help to champion your cause and spread word about your product.
I'm really not good with security & networking but how're you planning to prevent a Firesheep-like attack?
It's solicited. By McAfee customers. They're paying for various AV services and this is one of them. The site will only be blocked for McAfee customers that (I'm assuming) have this feature turned on. Clearly they couldn't run a site operator opt-in only list of malware hosting sites... right?
I think it's worth mentioning that another accelerator has sprung up in the Milwaukee area (http://spreenklertalentlabs.org/). Also Madison, WI has some great up and coming startups and existing companies.

I do agree with other posters that the tech energy just isn't the same in the Midwest. When I went and visited SF for a YC interview, I felt something different and I really enjoyed it.
For me, perhaps it was my ignorance of the subject that both made me miss the book's inadequacies and made it seem wonderful to me. The concepts were new to me and were counter-intuitive in a mentally liberating way. It was also during a zeitgeist that produced books like The Tao of Physics.
Grand Theft Attention: Video Games and the Brain
If only there was a small keyboard with a limited set of buttons that could be pressed to command consumer electronics devices. I would call it ... a "remote control".
sort of what mouseflow.com does
I would bet $10 that there aren't.
Continue with that line of reasoning very far at all and you'll be left with something that lacks any flavor or passion. Something very close to Newspeak.

What people should say is what they already say. English doesn't have a central authority, it's defined by common usage.
Don't you think, that initially, the Mac had a performance advantage because it was integrated? i.e. The hardware details, OS, software was all carefully designed to give snappy performance, despite low specs.

But this lead didn't last long, and the picture you describe came about within a few years.

For Android/iPhone: as soon as the separate components become the source of performance (speed, battery life), rather than the intricate integration of them (SoC design, battery, display, OS, apps, appstore, toolchain, etc), then Android will win.

e.g. Currently, an Android with a faster processor is less snappy than an iPhone. But when processors are fast enough, the difference won't be noticeable - even if the iPhone is still faster.

My prediction is that if Apple can keep finding improvements that users care about (e.g. slimness, lightness etc) that offset gains in component performance, and benefit from how exactly it is all integrated, then it will retain leadership. I also think that this lead cannot last forever.

Apple doesn't expect it to - they'll be on to the next cool thing, where the benefits of integration again become crucial (e.g. the next smaller form-factor).

One thing that's different today is that ARM's SoC market itself is vibrant, and so the processor won't stagnate like the 680x0 did - even if Apple's internal team does stagnate, they can just buy another team (like how they got the A5 guys). They can even mix and match different components within the SoC. From what you're saying, this is what makes it different from round one.
I found Rails for Zombies big on theme but very small on substance. By the end, I asked myself... what did I actually create? Nothing! I typed in a few things into a Web browser that did some monkey-magic on the backend to tell me if what was in the textbox was "correct". They kept saying we were going to build "Twitter for Zombies", but I never did. What a let down.
Perhaps I’ve missed some obvious reason why the industry still does this.

It's called double opt-in. It proves you're giving consent to be a member.
Energy can't be created or destroyed, just transformed from one form to another. So nothing is really an energy source. I'd say "energy source" is the vernacular for stored energy, in terms of where humans source their energy for machinery, electricity, etc.
>a very anti-banning ideology (the cyberspace-as-unfettered-discussion idea that was popular in WELL-influenced circles)

The WELL might have had an anti-banning ideology, but it also had an ideology that everything a person writes must be written "under eir real name", with the dual consequences of much-higher reputational consequences for bad behavior and everyone's realizing that if the administration ever did decide to ban a user, getting around the ban would be a lot more involved than just using Tor, a TCP relay or getting a new IP or email address.

(Unimportant details: The real names of most participants were probably verified when they paid the monthly fee by check or credit card. By "under eir real name" I mean that every post had a Unix user name attached, and there was a policy that every user's ~/.plan file had to contain eir real name.)
HN also does this, although secretly.
If you haven't also worked in information theory, you're probably going to like it better...
> Why they didn't go all the way and advocate fusion powered cars is beyond me.

Isn't that what the hydrogen is for? <g>
I can only imagine that whomever has been backing him has been giving Sheen enough rope to wrangle millions of dollars, or simply hang himself, whichever came first.

Even still, it appears that Sheens self crucifixion was fairly profitable enough.

The problem is that he doubtfully has the presence of character or mind to realize he has worn out the welcome as a result of this, time to STFU, get clean and retire.

Although, I can only imagine the succubus of fame, as well as the siren of desire and greed, likely embodied by "the goddesses" will push him over the cliff of overdose via the sweet whispers of encouragement to milk the nectar of his success to the last bitter drop.

I predict he is dead within 24 months.
the easy solution to this is your email as a username/login. that way it's guaranteed unique. the only problem is multiple john smiths confusing people
Just watch as Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decides to shut this down because the developers aren't paying to buy the macs needed for development.
PS: As this is going through the courts right now, we’re afraid we’ve had to turn off comments on this one, but we wanted to let you all know how we see it.

Good thing that you can't comment on articles elsewhere on the Internet. Their legal strategy is saved!
I'm a little disappointed that (a) people have short memories or (b) everybody else is 10 years younger than me, at least

Fred has fallen into the seductive trap of comparing
Android and iOS to Windows and Mac ... What's
winning here isn't openness (which has many, many
definitions), it's commoditization

Windows "commoditized" PC hardware -- the differences between smartphones and what happened in the nineties are few and far between, even though you're struggling to look for reasons why it's not ;-)

The rapid development of Windows-based PCs,
both in terms of raw power and price-performance,
is really what killed the Mac.

That's inaccurate -- standardization between multiple PC makers and the availability of PCs is really what killed the Mac ... I don't live in the US; my first computer was built by a local company (it was cheap too). Apple couldn't and still can't compete with that.

Consumers, give enough power, start valuing
other things like the UI, the design of the device,
the ecosystem, the brand and so on

Before OS X, Mac OS was a piece of shit -- again, you're wish-believing; as if "price" and having a standard between multiple smartphone makers is suddenly less important.

Android competes in a lot of markets the
iPhone doesn't

Markets also converge -- in the early nineties IBM's OS/2 was promoted as this next-generation OS (and it was kick-ass), while Windows was the cheap solution for 286 PCs. SOFTWARE is so liquid that markets don't have clearly defined lines; and if you're telling me the iPhone is this superior alternative for people who want superior stuff, then the iPhone already lost the battle.

The future (IMHO) is about tablets

The future, from my perspective, is convergence of every house/office appliance we have to being a personal general-computing device, including your fridge and your toaster.

And you can call a PC by any other name, but it's still a PC.

Saying that the future is about tables is really shortsighted; here I was hoping for something as big as the Internet.
The actual Objective-C API is very small and can be (naively) implemented in an afternoon. I'd expect programs that already work in GNUStep like GNUmail could be had running by someone who has knowledge of how LD_PRELOAD works but no other experience with GNUStep and OSX in a week or two.
While dtrace is a wonderful tool, it is a little disappointing that when Apple adopted it from Sun that they modified it so that setting a simple flag in your code (P_LNOATTACH) will prevent it being traced. http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2008/01/18/mac-os-x-and-the-miss...
I come from Montana, and I hate this dichotomy.

The fundamental law of resources in this world is: if you can't farm it, you must mine it. They're a yin and yang. I come from Montana, a state which basically has only two industries: farming and mining. When you live that close to the land, it becomes very apparent who the actual producers are.

Everything else is wanking. Productive wanking, but wanking nonetheless. The welder is nothing without the miner. Without the farmer, he can't even eat. Me, as a software engineer, I'm so far removed from those who are actually producing things that what I do is as ephemeral as the wind.
I change states on a magnetic disk all day. I lift weights, run, and have a stand-up desk so my body doesn't decay while I do this ludicrously minimal amount of work each day, but because I know how to shape those bits in a certain way, society values me much more than the guy who feeds me, or the guy who mines the rare earths that make my job possible.
Simple incorporation is really quite low cost, and very quick. CA is the worst I know of, with its $800 minimum franchise tax.

I just (re) incorporated in Oregon. I think it cost $150 (was $50 until 2009), and took about two days. IMO it's well worth it for legal protection from losing personal assets.
While the safest, the waste will be with the Earth for a long time to come. Longer than any corporation will be around, or government agency. There has to be a clear cut plan to deal with the waste of nuclear power that accounts for it's life span, and possible natural disasters. Currently all waste is stored at the power plants and the only current plan is to encase the waste in concrete. But where to go with that concrete? How to label the concrete to make sure future generations know that it is dangerous? How to ensure constant security and safety of the waste? We cannot move forward with nuclear energy until the problem of its waste is dealt with.
Clearly they couldn't run a site operator opt-in only list of malware hosting sites... right?

Yes. :(

I'm just having a hard time coming to terms with the possibility that your site can be improperly flagged for all McAfee users and you have virtually no recourse because they happen to be understaffed.
As long as there are VCs that are willing to fund, companies that are willing to acquire (demand), there will be developers looking to 'mine' (supply).
If enough people who made 'loss' in this ecosystem were to exit this ecosystem then 'mining' will be obsoleted. However, there are always people/companies looking for a quick-buck/fix to inflate their bank balance or complement their product line, therefore perpetuating 'mining'.
This parallels GetSatisfaction and how they display support pages for companies that don't pay for their service as "uncommitted to customer support" or something to that extent. I don't think there are malicious intentions, but they do collect positive and negative feedback, and display it on a public webpage stating that the company isn't responding to it.

Sorry for the slight change of topic.
If you read the article I linked, the relating articles, or the original author by Simon, you'd know that he was sued for describing chiropractics treating things like ear infections as "bogus". Things that no poorly executed "scientific" study would ever even dream of asserting chiropractics can affect.

The extent to which chiropractics can alievate back pain, the only sort of thing they can have a positive impact on in scientifically executed trails, they are only acting as (often unlicensed) physical therapists. IF this is what you go to the chiropractic for, and IF they are a licensed physical therapist, then call them your physical therapist. If on the other hand, they're not licensed, then do yourself a favor and go find one that is.

"Many whiplash victims are also referred to chiropractors."

The industry itself doesn't seem to agree that whiplash is among the defensible things they treat:

"If you have a website, take it down NOW.

"REMOVE all the blue MCA [McTimoney Chiropractic Association] patient
information leaflets, or any patient information leaflets of your own
that state you treat whiplash, colic or other childhood problems in your
clinic or at any other site where they might be displayed with your contact
details on them. DO NOT USE them until further notice."

--the McTimoney Chiropractic Association

This all said, even IF chiropractics can effectively treat a subset of the things the claim, they are still quacks for daring to claim the rest.
Right. To do more is a hard problem.

This approach has been pursued before: http://hcpnet.free.fr/applebsd.html
Use npm (node package manager).
Great.

I can't drink milk, had to avoid water for a day or two, having problem finding relatively uncontaminated meat, 20 km or so of this country is probably going to be left unlivable and so on.

I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima. Mod me down all you want. I will be happy to pay attention when someone purchases land at a fair price near Fukushima #2 and raises his children there.

Until then, you are handwaving for industry or for some vision of "environmentally friendly power". Put money on the table, or frankly, your opinion is worthless.

We need nuclear power. Unfortunately, the culture of misinformation and understating danger around nuclear power means it is going to be impossible for it to supply the majority of our power. What this means in terms of loss of quality of life is not lost on me.
As a point of pride I don't publish broken web resources, so it's disappointing to see that they still lack any kind of progressive enhancement support and don't seem to be working on it.
Off topic: asking for some advice, since this loader sounds close to what I want. The problem: I need to use a huge C++ codebase that is developed on the Mac, and is used to generate a shared library used in a Java app with JNI, SWIG, and loaded with loadLibrary. It would be fantastic to be able to build a shared library on the Mac, and be able to use it on both Macs and Linux servers. Maintaining and building 2 versions is a nuisance. (A complete build takes a couple of hours, even on a fast box.) Probably not possible because shared libraries are very different on OS X and Linux, but long term it would save me a lot of time if it is, even if I had to patch the Linux JVM.
I'm "partial red-green" color blind. So, saturated, primary reds and greens I see as distinct. But if start to mix colores with some reds and greens, then I can see two colors as the same that other people see as distinct.

Partial red-green color blindness is very well understood. Nearly all colors that should be distinct still are but, yes, apparently I don't see fire engines and carrots just the same!
Aside from the fact that this is not a solution aiming to fix wireless security, and other than offering the service via HTTPS - I am not sure that a "firesheep-like attack" is really a concern.

I suspect that the main argument against such a service would be the worry that your history / passwords / accounts what have you would be shared/sold/compromised.

I dont yet have the answers to such concerns, but I am interested in feedback on whether one would use the service assuming the stated security/privacy concerns were properly handled.

FWIW, I refuse to ever have a facebook account due to my complete lack of trust in that company's ability to act in a way I would be comfortable with as it pertains to any of my personal information...
One thread that is interwoven throughout the piece but surprisingly not called out explicitly is the role of the tech media in the glamorization of high-growth, high-exit-return startups and their investors. Nostrademons has some good points about the virtues of startups that Wil didn't touch upon (though I'm sure he's aware of them. His piece doesn't strike me as though he's blanket-bashing venture-capitalized startups).

The dollar amounts attached to these "lottery" startups (whether in investment or in exit) are awesome, but not outrageous, especially given who the investors are. The one thing that Wil said that did bother me was his assertion that a funded started is necessarily a "mining" startup, to use his metaphor. I see it his way, and it brought me down a little bit, even though I already knew it inside.
That consideration is the biggest.

Nuclear power is safe, intrinsically. Nuclear waste is devastation waiting to happen (if not now, in the future).
He's over the top because he plays it up.

Its not a documentary. Its a play and the actors play roles to a degree of excess (although tbf their roles are pretty close to their real life personas).
Alessandro Filippi
It's a bit much to say that a system that requires multiple elaborate systems of safeguards is "intrinsically" safe.
Sony CEO casually mentions he's supplying cameras to Apple
I hope both cooperate with the GNUStep and the Étoilé OS folks.

But I fully expect all of them to suffer Apple's full wrath as soon as they get noticed by their legal...

Perhaps it's time to start thinking on collective defense.
Obviously not the best-kept secret...
What you can't say
"Intrinsically safer" was probably the better term.
$99/year, regardless of whether Amazon is cheaper, is not expensive.
This loader will be buggy and incomplete, by it's nature, and won't really solve the problems inherent in loading a shared library from another OS into an existing native process.
The current storage facilities for nuclear waste proposed or otherwise are quite unreal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_re...
Nuclear power is cleaner than coal or oil.

We just need to build stronger and safer reactors.

Personally I'm glad OP posted this article. Fukushima was tragic, but it didn't give everyone the right to abandon rational thought.

I used to work for a state pirg banging on doors to complain about nuclear power. Spreading fear by barking "3 mile island, chernobyl" etc. Then one day I knocked on the door of a nuclear physicist and he explained to me why I was wrong.
Seth Godin made the same point last week--with a neat graphic:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-...

(He got his image from here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visuali...)
Earn money for your comments on Blobin
A fair question but since I read the book back in 1988 all I can say from memory was that it got me excited about the field, using IFS, etc.
www.blobin.com
That is why there is an old fashioned paper atlas in the seatback pocket in my car.
Framing error: You should think of it as "I'm not motivating and explaining this simply and clearly enough" instead of "investors can't understand".
that waste can be burned in another types of reactors. Unfortunately, because of extremely high entry barrier, there isn't much chances for these or some other new types of reactors to be developed and put into production. Ie. we stuck with almost 60 year old technology [pretty much the first generation with some slight modifications] of nuclear energy production.

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