skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the exchange rate atm being >7$/BTC, at the moment it is still profitable. As soon as it becomes unprofitable, I'll power down the machine. My miner costs me ~65EUR/month in electricity.

On the other hand, lots of other people will probably power down their miners, too, so that mining will become easier again. Then it could become feasible to mine again...

I am actually sorry about the waste of energy, but I decided that for once I'd join in the fun. I have never owned a car, so I hope that makes up for the waste to some extent.
Considering the depiction of #3, "editing" may mean "artificial shortcuts which conflict with the point of doing". In solving a Rubik's Cube, you don't tear off the stickers and rearrange them because that defeats the whole purpose of the task. Much creative output would be destroyed by "editing" which was not in the spirit of the execution: the Mona Lisa's background would require major overhaul, David would require a leaf, e e cummings' poetry would be capitalized, Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) would get pummeled with a dictionary, etc.

Old Russian proverb, favored by a former co-worker: "Better is the enemy of good."
> how is he going to feel about those ongoing commissions when you fire him?

As far as I know, salespeople are entitled to ongoing trailing commissions even when fired or they quit, unless otherwise specified in the contract.

But really, if you're still receiving value from the work they put in, why shouldn't they?
This article proves my thesis about superproductive programmers: that they (i) don't write user interface code and (ii) don't work for non-programmers. A third advantage he has is that he's largely working alone or in small volunteer teams.

A major source of "unproductivity" for applications programmers is rework. A lot of rework comes from poor specifications and from the essential difficulty of creating user interfaces. To get usable user interfaces it's generally necessary to try a number of things that don't work. You certainly can build one prototype, set a stingy budget, and timebox it, but odds aren't good that real people will actually stick with the product.

Another issue in commercial applications development is the NNPP's (Net Negative Productivity Programmers.) You'll have one on your "team" or you'll be maintaining code written by one. Either way, they'll sap your productivity.

Adding up these unproductivity factors you can find 80% of your time disappearing... And that this point it doesn't matter if you're a genius or an NNPP yourself... You're not getting much done.

Of all the programs, only QEmacs has a substantial user interface. And in that case, the user interface was largely specified in advance -- the folks at MIT did a great front-loaded job of user interface design for emacs and we've accumulated a huge amount of experience with emacs-derived.

A lot of programmers are intimidated by math-heavy systems programming, but once you get over the hump, it's easy to be productive. In projects like linmodem you're certainly going to have to deal with BS from hardware vendors, but it's nothing like applications programming.
We tried solving this problem in 2007 with the "plans" functionality in the first iteration of Localist. It's definitely a tough nut to crack, as a website/app will never beat the convenience/accessibility of email.

Here's the biggest issue we ran into, which I'm not sure WhereBerry has solved either:

Let's say Julie wants to see Fast Five (ugh), and she wants to know which of her friends would like to attend. At first, she considers using WhereBerry, as it's designed for such things. But wait, Julie's friend Joe doesn't have an iPhone. And I know her other friend Steve doesn't use social networking sites besides Facebook. Julie resolves to just send an email out to everyone, so she knows she'll get a response from everyone she wants to talk to in one step. Plus, she already has everyone's email address.

See the problem? Julie is forced to isolate her non-WhereBerry friends, or invite some on WhereBerry, and others via email (huge inconvenience). This isn't solving the problem. It's compounding it. Let's say WhereBerry tries to "solve" this problem by allowing Julie to invite non-members via email. We tried that, too. While it sounds good on paper, nobody wants to send their friends an email saying "Hey I want to go to this movie. Join WhereBerry to tell me your response!" In reality, they'll probably text Julie saying "Sure, I can go! Why didn't you just text me?"

It doesn't matter if 95% of your friends are signed up to WhereBerry. You'd need 100% to get people to use it in any consistent form.

It's not a tough problem to discover, as many products have attempted to solve it. But, no company has succeeded, specifically because of the scenario posed above. I wish WhereBerry luck, but I think it needs to solve the problem before being a "cool plan-making utility." There are millions of those.
Direct link for the tl;dr crowd: http://socialflights.com/
I don't understand the age discrimination. Is there a "Best Old Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011"?
Yet, here we are discussing that output on a major news/discussion forum.

What did you deliver during those 20 minutes?
No. There are already vastly superior anonymous e-voting schemes. The only usecase would be if you wanted to put some restriction on voting but still leave it open to everyone in the world, so it'd be kind of like Namecoin but paying for votes rather than DNS.
How Big is a Yottabyte? [Infographic]
It is doing something useful, it's computing and keeping track of transactions that occur across the network.
If these new business models cannot support the current size of the movie industry they're still going to complain. An industry will never voluntarily shrink. Spotify is a great example, since IIRC they are paying most of their revenue to the labels yet that is still dramatically less money than the labels made from CDs.
Thanks. Do you happen to know a place that does list all these things?
Great app, thanks for sharing and good luck with it. One thing I noticed, is your about page says "It's less intrusive intrusive ...".
I was assuming a 700W power supply running 24 hours for 30 days, paying $0.20 per kwh. My cost estimates are admittedly a little on the high side, as I didn't want to be accused of overestimating the profit.
Agreed, it's bandwidth and the duration. In our household, we watch many 20-40 minute shows in a day. Probably a total of 2-10 hours depending on the day. We also watch lots of youtube videos, but it's 1-5 minute videos which amount to a total of 30 minutes or an hour a day.
What app devs need to know about the Lodsys in-app upgrade patent problem
One subtle point that I explain in http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/lisp/ghost-benefits.html
is that programmers who write big programs that need serious planning can benefit from the presence of programming language features that they do not use. Grepping the source files to count the number of times that advanced features get used is only part of the picture.
There are 7 essays; 3 are new, 4 have been published previously.
The quickest "explanation" of the FT I ever heard was in a casual aside from a professor once -- he referred to the Fourier domain as the "reciprocal domain". It took me a while to work out what he meant.

It was just that frequency = 1 / time. In this (barbarically reductive) conception, taking the FT is just a change of variable.

This relationship is one way to "derive" many of the standard Fourier facts.

For example, the scaling property, that if x(t) has transform X(f), then x(at) has transform (1/a) * X(f/a). It also "explains" why time signals concentrated around t=0 tend to have lots of high-frequency content (f = 1/t = 1/0 = infinity), and vice versa.

It also "explains" why the inverse FT formula looks just like the forward FT formula (since if f = 1/t, then t = 1/f). And, for the same reason, most of the duality relationships between the two domains.

All with just arithmetic! You can dispense with linear algebra, not to mention complex arithmetic, groups, or measure theory.
Peak Oil.
You use any index to measure inflation. What index do you prefer, and how would you measure inflation?

The fact is inflation will not go into hypergrowth mode (or even above a few percentage points of what the index gives you), which I assume the poster above is assuming. The hysteria over massive inflation is extremely overblown, and profiting on high inflation is not the best strategy when you're investing billions.
Most programs I write have an infinite number of inputs.
An excellent tool I have used for similar purposes in the past (although it can do other things as well) is git-subtree. I recommend checking it out: https://github.com/apenwarr/git-subtree

Edit a more useful page: https://github.com/apenwarr/git-subtree/blob/master/git-subt...
> but if we don't make much sales for our customers, our revenue will be pretty much stuck

If you don't make much sales for your customers, they'll leave anyway.

The answer to your problem seems pretty clear to me: pay-per-sale. It minimizes the downside for your customers: If you make no sales, they pay no money. And it maximizes your upside: Sell 1000 units, make 1000 x fee.
This is a good practical article. Maybe it's obvious, but I feel like it's missing one recommendation: weigh the risks and benefits. Are people going to die if the anonymization is broken, or are the consequences relatively minor? Are there ways to reduce the severity of these consequences? To maximize the benefits?

I take a bit of issue with Pete's statement that Naryanan's break "gave access to their complete rental histories". Rather, it gave access to slightly munged ratings a for possibly partial subset of the movies included in the dataset. While this is real, it's not quite the same as knowing their entire rental history.

To my knowledge, there was no damage done by this exploit: no one was fired because it was likely they loved Brokeback Mountain. By contrast, the Netflix Prize brought about a lot of great research that otherwise might never have been done much less made public.

I'm glad the data was released, and the contest held, and I think in retrospect the benefits outweighed the potential risks. I would hate for the conclusion to be that privacy must be upheld above all other factors. I would hate for the outcome to be that no such dataset will ever be released again.
You Can Be an Expert at Anything
I totally agree with this article. You can get much better information from actually working with people. You don't have to expose them to your system, you can create a small project for them that is related and tests their skills.
The younger you are the less time you've had to achieve something. Therefore it's more impressive when you do.
I really could have used this three years ago when I posted this question to Stack Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/205468/how-to-encrypt-a-v...

I don't really need the answer now, but I bet my old boss would be interested in this development...
Really cool to see several YC companies listed.

I really wish I could invest in YC.

I bet YC will (still) be a notable player in the industry 20 years from now.
Some interview questions I want to say 'do you realise how awkward that is to answer?' like asking people how their former colleagues would describe them, or what their weaknesses are. You couldn't do that in a normal conversation so I'm not sure it's a good idea in interviews. But who knows. Maybe it's effective or maybe it's simply the done thing.
If you're trying to have a go at a web startup, probably everything.
The gamble. Earning bitcoins is based on -luck-.

I don't gamble. This is not some religious thing, but simply because I like to have control over my fate, and gambling takes that control.
Ah. My power bill is somewhere around 1.5 cents per kwh..
Tutorial: Getting Started With SMSified and Sending SMS Messages
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A PC with one GPU is more like 300W (of course people buy ridiculously overpowered power supplies, but the rating isn't the same as the consumption).
yesterday, i watched one youtube video, 30 seconds long.

yesterday, i watched three netflix videos, 45 min long each, totaling 2:15.

i only count as 1 unique for each, but i used netflix 430x longer than i used youtube (not even considering bandwidth differences -- netflix was higher quality). just because there are more uniques doesn't mean that they're spending the same amount of time on the videos.
Bing adds more Facebook "Likes" to search results
John Carmack (id Software, Doom, Quake, Rage, etc.) was asked if he will develop games for Android. He asked the audience how many people had spent more than $20 on apps. No hands. 'nuff said.
Eight Out Of Nine American Bloggers Cannot Distinguish Between The Concept of A "Scientist" (As In Someone Who Devises Reproducible Experiments To Test Ideas To Determine Whether They Are Right Or Wrong, And Rejects The Wrong Ones) And Anyone In A Technical Profession.
I've been a passenger on a moderate number of business/corporate/government vs. super-rich-person jets, and a top quality commercial business class or most first class products are actually a more comfortable experience, at a much lower cost)

True in many cases, though not always. I think there are a lot of variables at play, all of which need to be accounted for: wait time and hassle at commercial airports vs. private jet strips; minimal to no risk of delays; and so forth. I agree that corporate private jets hardly offer anything approaching a luxurious in-flight experience, but in those cases, luxury of in-flight experience isn't the goal. Rather, the goals are roughly a) mitigation of delay risks; b) ease of travel and convenience; c) provision of a sterile, noise-pollution-free, whining-baby-free flight environment in which to conduct business and get stuff done in the air.

An uber-rich-person jet, on the other hand -- assuming we're talking about one owned purely for convenience and/or vanity, and not for corporate purposes -- is a more luxurious experience, with luxury as one of the core goals. True, most of these jets are too small to offer the day bed or stewardess service you'd get in first class on a major international flight. But I'd argue that those benefits of commercial are outweighed by power and freedom to fly at will, private catering on the flight, etc. Also, the most comparable use case is private jet vs. first class domestic, rather than private vs. first class international. International fist class is where all the bells and whistles come into play. Domestic first class is a pretty unremarkable experience; it is debatably the coach experience of 10 to 15 years ago.
Speaking only with regards to engineering marketing outcomes: allowing people to trivially conjure Bitcoins out of the ether early in the lifecycle, then making them increasingly dear, is a good way to engineer having a base of committed evangelists. It's kind of like genes, right? Genes don't have good features or bad features. Genes only spread. The gene for sickle cell anemia wasn't designed to kill people and doesn't care that it does: it just causes chemical reactions which have a tendency, on average, to create more copies of itself in an efficient fashion. The successful currency/social network/software/etc won't be the best currency/social network/software/etc judged by any standard of quality engineering, it will be the spreadiest currency/social network/software/etc.

I am being very value neutral in describing this feature of Bitcoin. This is about all I can say without being very unneutral in a fashion that would transgress HN's norms about politeness.
Congratulations, Jason Baptiste!

I made a point of meeting Jason when we lived in Miami at the same time. I had to meet this guy who made so many great comments here at Hacker News.

Glad to see you've moved on to bigger and better things. It was only a matter of time. Looking forward to hearing great things about Onswipe.
Wow, this was amazing.

Abbas
It seems that the optimal solution would be to obtain a modern device with removable media. I wish Apple hadn't decided to make storage size part of their pricing model, and offered a card slot.

My Motorola Droid phone has a micro SD slot, with a max size of 64 GB. It would be a lot more convenient to carry a phone and 6 memory cards than a phone and an iPod Classic.
Hmmm. Honestly, no - it's quite possible to raise a decent amount of seed funding today before you've got any metrics to share at all, based off of the team and how well the team presents the idea.
That's not at all a bad point. There are some activities that economists view aS rent collecting (or even wealth destroying) that are lucrative for the individual. Scientists and engineers are generally seen as the opposite of this (unless it's financial engineering). Almost every government actively tries to poach engineers from abroad...

Still, I recommend you read the rand study. They discuss ways to make sci/eng more appealing rather than launching a pr campaign to merely make it appear more appealing. The second could end up creating an even greater aversion to this career path.
When a company is paying dividends it is usually because the stock has been flat, and there are no expectations for growth.

I own a part of the company and as a result
own a part of the profit

You don't own any part of the profit, even if you would have a majority share. You own something only when it is given to you, otherwise it belongs to the company.

Also, voting power is directly proportional to how much you own. Why would you expect to have any saying in how the company is being handled if you own something like 0.01%?

I am seriously implying that the managements in
tech companies do not necessarily know better
how to use the profits

Well, they got there in the first place, so they do have some credibility.
Judging from his performance review, there's definitely room for improvement :)

http://norvig.com/performance-review.html
I've been waiting for something like this for a while. Now, although there is too much noise in something like Facebook or Twitter, I run into the case where small apps like this don't have enough saturation into the market and so it doesn't work out for spontaneous events but rather acts like something I post into Facebook Groups. Speaking of which, it would be nice since there's already Facebook connect to grab my friends so I don't have to manually look up their emails and invite them.
> I'd love to know what you guys think.

Yes. Any of the things you mentioned, there are people willing to pay you for it.

Addressing your needs:

1. You be able to make money on any of those areas.

2. This is the hardest thing when first starting out,
there's tons of tutorials and blog entries out there on starting to freelance.

3. Again, it shouldn't be difficult to find someone willing to take a big discount for you to learn while doing your first project.

4. You're in Atlanta for freaking sake. There are people in Nowhere, Iowa making decent livings doing remote projects.

5. There's plenty of templates available online for wordpress or django. This shouldn't be an impediment.
Assuming Hardware = Wattage Output = Voting power;

US power sources overlayed on 2008 Electoral Map. Too close to call.

http://i.imgur.com/d1Fyf.jpg

I was too lazy to fix Alaska and Hawaii.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109973...
yes, real life pain is the first step of your immune system. The warnings in your log should be the software equivalent. Attending either or both requires human maintanance.
Training the body is equivalent of testing software.
Yes, there is something to learn from this articel.:-)
Agreed. If I want to see a movie, I already have a few friends who I know I could contact directly to see if they'd want to go. Same with going to restaurants or hiking.

I might have 300+ friends on Facebook, but really, I like to spend time with maybe 10% of them on a weekly basis doing these type of activities.
Did you think it's ok until someone used the word "lottery"? Would you feel better if it was called a "probabilistic" system instead? In reality the payouts are pretty predictable.
"Post Analytics" seems like a terrible label for that button. What does that even mean? Especially for the web dev folks that are probably reading that blog... am I POSTing analytics to the site? Sending my analytics to SEOmoz?

Why not "Show Analytics"? Why not show that info by default, without a button click?
Amazon's official linux build, at this time, is a custom distribution that uses RPM and is different from the Ubuntu/Debian world in several significant ways (e.g., a new libc implementation). Migrating your WordPress blog to a new platform might be easy, but when you're managing hundreds of machines running thousands of packages that sort of change is not trivial.

Running "time-tested" kernels is not really the best advise either in this case. Xen is a fairly new environment, and EC2's implementation has some quirks, so there's a pretty regular stream of bug fixes and other improvements in recent kernels that are often worth picking up. If I went to Canonical with a "time-tested" kernel bug they'd tell me to upgrade before they'd give any real support.

When we talked to Amazon about switching to their AMIs they advised us that it was probably _not_ worth switching, that switching might not fix the problem, and that the AMIs we were running were widely used and supported. They made it clear that they work closely with Canonical and other providers to get high quality AMIs into their ecosystem. Long story short, the people who you admit know the most about the EC2 environment advised us that they weren't necessarily the best option, or at least not the only option, for good AMIs (sort of like how hardware manufacturers aren't the best option for an operating system).

So the answers aren't really cut-and-dry here. Every time Amazon changes their dom0 there's a chance your "time-tested" kernel will stop working. And just because Amazon runs the infrastructure doesn't mean they're the best choice for a Linux distribution.
For those who commented on the age discrimination, Businessweek has this list of overall most promising startups:

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepren...
> It's called the desktop and offers all the native and low-level stuff you can possibly imagine.

Actually, I'd say it's called 'mobile'; The desktop failed to solve the sandboxing problem.

> And the only people that want to see it, are the ones who have forgotten about it.

As a desktop-turned-mobile developer, I haven't forgotten anything.

Simply put, I want a future in which we aren't forced to re-implement our applications multiple times for disparate, proprietary mobile platforms.

I already lived through that on the desktop. The only reason I haven't embraced the web for application development is that the technology stack is, by comparison, hobbled.

> Maybe there is a middle ground between desktop software and browsers, but personally I'd like to keep them apart.

Treating the browser as the sacrosanct temple of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is throwing away the limited opportunity browsers have to pre-empt Android and iOS as a first-class, standardized application platform.
Hack us, and we'll bomb you