skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to some brief research, it looks like somewhere around 0.33% of Americans under 85 are deaf, and around 4% are hard of hearing [1]. I find it preposterous to optimize for that small section of the user population at the expense of the overwhelming number of our users who tell us that phone is their preferred method of contact. We're probably going to continue asking for a phone number, because many users would be frustrated if email were the only method of reply available.

What I'm NOT suggesting is that we fail to accommodate deaf users. We don't have a policy on how to accommodate deaf or sight impaired customers, but we rely heavily on non-phone based means of communication, like Skype, so I'd imagine we could accommodate deaf users relatively easily. We use well formed HTML with semantic markup, but could probably stand to do some testing with screen readers.

Come to think of it. This request has moved me to action. Staff resources are going to be updated with notes on accommodating users with disabilities, including links to TTY services in the resource handbook. Solving this problem is probably easier than you think. All the major phone carriers are required to provide TTY services [2].

1 - http://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php

2 - http://www.google.com/search?q=tty+services
bacteria to jellyfish (not proven) http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080928/full/news.2008.1134.h...

Now I have some prions to go BBQ.
Aren't those basically the same statement?

I'd agree more with your second phrasing, as it's more nuanced, but they seem to be getting the same general idea across.
> As someone else noted, you can buy Roundup itself at Wal-mart.

And who do you think makes money when you do that?

Hint: It rhymes with "Monsanto".

> that I know the basics of the difference between Roundup and the Roundup-ready GMO product.

Not in dispute. Dispute is over your claim of them getting something for "nothing" because they used RoundUp.

Monsanto gets paid if they use RoundUp. RoundUp, unlike seeds, doesn't grow itself.
The canonical way to program for Node.js is very functional.
jailbreaks?
New Heyzap Update Puts Your Favorite Android Games Up Front
Someday unified communications....

It will seem anachronistic that phones/email/txt/vm/video were all so disconnected. Each with different rules, and methods of connection. The first thing to go will probably be phone numbers. I can already imagine my future grandchildren saying "You had to memorize a ten digit number for anyone you wanted to talk to?!"

Makes me wonder what it will look like in the long run. Probably something like a chat client. Where you list modes of communication that are currently available (voice, video, text, draw), and indirect status messages.

A mismatch in communcation level could be handled with automated middleware. So if a company demands a "voice" channel, the author could send it through an automated text to speech, and the same translation would happen in reverse. In a pinch you could do something similar with language translation (text to text only).

I just hope it's a distributed and open system. Similar to how email operates today. I'd hate to think we'd embrace another communications gatekeeper (Facebook or Google as the new Ma Bell)
no they are not.
"Breaking Bad" remains great, but we miss geeky chemistry of early seasons
This essay sets up a straw man. The "creative class" was originally defined, in the book "Rise of the Creative Class," as people working in industries "from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts."[1] The essay focuses on the worst performing of these industries to imply the whole "creative class" failed.

Here's the actual core argument: "For those who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level — the working- or middle-classes within the creative class — things are less cheery." By which he apparently means "book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure" -- but especially journalists, since that's what the author is.

But it's all an exercise in tautology. Of course "the working class" of the creative class is worse off. If they weren't, we wouldn't call them the working class of the creative class.

Put another way: Professions are cyclic, and this guy is saying the creative class is a fraud because some of its included professions are on the down cycle. But that's what a cycle is - up and down.

In 2001, after the dot-com bust, there were articles about how no one was majoring in computer science any more, and Bill Gates actually went around to colleges encouraging people to do so. [2] Of course now programmers are very much in demand again and well paid despite overall high unemployment.

Likewise, finance workers were far better off in 2007 than in 2001, and are much better off today than they were in late 2008.

And, just to throw in a random creative class stat to show how unpredictable things get, there is for some reason a run on stand up comedians right now! [3]

So it's harder to be a journalist now than it was 10 years ago. So what? It was harder in 1994 than it was in 2000.

And also: "Video store clerk?" Was that ever a great job? I must have missed the big video store clerk hiring bonanza. Ditto musicians and novelists. Hemingway lived in France because, back then, it was actually really cheap.

If you're going to knock "Rise of the Creative Class" for anything, don't knock it as a lie. It's not. Any time you take professions as disparate as bond trading, lawyering, "high end" factory work and playing rock guitar and bundle them together, you can prove whatever you want. No, the creative class is crappy theory not because it's wrong but because it's so broad as to be meaningless. This journalist feels betrayed because he read the original book and thought it was about him. He conveniently skipped the bits about how it was also about people on Wall Street and corporate law offices. Whoops.

[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida....

[2] http://www.pcworld.com/article/118029/two_words_from_bill_ga... http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-10-12-gates-computer-...

[3]
http://splitsider.com/2011/10/due-west-a-roundtable-discussi...
I should just clarify for anybody here who's reading this ... the point wasn't that Cloudant is wrong. The point is that there's a massive void for values-based leadership and we should expect that from any leader, big or small. Values-based leadership is the future of the marketplace in my opinion, and hence the post.

I should also say that it's pretty impressive that this made it on hackernews. I wasn't expecting this to hit the front page. It's nice to see they are open.
I don't get it. In the case of the vector-add function, once you've happened to notice the more general solution, implementing it will take a couple of minutes. It's not comparable to an optimization, which would normally increase the risk of code errors -- it is a simplification, which would decrease the risk of code errors.

Two minutes to make a minor simplification and learn a generally good way of approaching things with the tool at hand (clojure)? Count me in.
Nor do they have morals or ethics. Only profit.
2600: $299: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115...

FX-8150: $279: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103...
I think they are both right (or both wrong). Or maybe they are not talking about the same thing.

I think O'Neill believes Monsanto to be a far worse company than pg (or I, for that matter) do. It's an agrochemical company that does engage in strong-arm legal tactics, but at the same time, it's not on the level of IBM working with the Germans in the 1930's. O'Neill does have a point in that in a free society, consumers have a right to choose which products to purchase and which companies to support, and if they want to politicize that decision it is entirely their right to do so. pg would likely agree with statement. So the only real disagreement between the two would probably come down to how "bad" a company Monsanto is, in their view. pg obviously views it in a far more benign light than O'Neill does.

the "99%" talk is irrelevant. The 99'ers focus seems to be (or should be) on the parasitic nature of Wall Street and their close relationship to the Treasury Dept. and the Federal Reserve, and not on corporate ethics in general.
>Let the market decide
That's the clever part of MIT/Stanford etc putting all their lectures online.

Whats the point of paying to go to UC when you can learn the same stuff at home? And then the UC diploma becomes worthless because everyone knows you just watched the same stuff as the guy at home.

The only diplomas worth having will be those that still have real lecturers - like MIT and Stanford!

A similar thing happened in the UK 10years ago. All the equivalents of community colleges were renamed universities.
This was supported by all the UK's IVY league schools!
The problem is that somebody going for a job with a degree from a mid-ranking uni is faced with an employer who isn't sure whether that is a 'real' university or a former college. So to 'play it safe' they only look for IVY league degrees.
By pretending to support wider access to education - the top 5 places destroyed neatly all the competition!
No, I'm saying fuck Monsanto, and by association, fuck anyone that celebrates doing business with them. This was one of those little cash cows that Cloudant should have kept to themselves. Any PR person probably could've saw this coming.

I'm sure there are many evil corporate dealings in the world that would warrant such a "content-free rant"; however, those companies are smart enough not to celebrate their evil doings on a site as popular as HN.

Perhaps YC should provide media training: Item 1; keep your skeletons in the closet.

EDIT: Furthermore, Cloudant isn't supplying Monsanto with something as simple as a car. They, as they themselves put it, are fundamentally helping shape the way Monsanto does business.

I also find it troubling that instead of addressing the issue at hand, or at least providing a defense for this company, you instead ridicule your own userbase for putting my "content-free" rant at the top of this thread. That seems infinitely more content-free than anything I've added/not added to the discussion.
I don't understand this debate that you think we're having, and because I'm pretty sure I'm not really a party to it, I'll let you have the last word.
But ... in the one case we are aware of, of a whole company, Amazon, using a service oriented architecture, they did it after the fact. The did bolt it on later, or rather, they (according to Steve) ripped everything up and re-did it in this way. I'm sure it was absolute hell to do this, but that is what they apparently did. So it isn't a requirement to build a platform first, then build everything else. It might be nicer to do it that way, if it's the best prioritization of resources at the time, but that's not what happened in the case being discussed.
The dangers of factions slap us in the face every day. (See Federalist 10, James Madison, 1787 AD.) Someone save us.
I'm not deaf, but I strongly dislike companies calling me. Why do they think I am using the web or email to contact them? SMS spam is a growing problem too, and hard to filter (at least with the old phone I use). It all feels like an invasion of privacy, and companies should be aware I'm unlikely to buy anything from them if they force me to provide contact numbers.
As much as I like ZFS, I do feel a little misled by the rhetoric about replacing "expensive" BBUs with slog SSDs... that are actually much more expensive.
IRobot is also helping America conduct safer wars. Where is the humanism is that?

An employee emoting isn't the company or its actions.
I've been using PasswordMaker for a long time. It creates new passwords for each site based on a master password and the url of the site. It has many other options as well. The advantage of PasswordMaker is that if you know the master password you can recreate the password for any site. If you lose your password with Wolfram you'll have to do some kind of reset/recovery.
http://passwordmaker.org/
>I personally wouldn't partner with Lockheed Martin if my tech was going to be used for weaponry.

Say goodbye to the vast majority of technological, materials, and aerospace development of the 20th century.

>The fact is that Monsanto has a long history of harmful activities in the United States

So? Sequencing genes isn't one of them.

>Sure, Cloudant isn't a bio warfare company, but the fact is that they are proud to be associated with Monsanto

They're proud that their product has found such a demanding and high-profile customer. They should be. They aren't providing logistical support for Monsanto's campaign to crush independent farmers, they're providing the backbone for gene sequencing.

It doesn't matter what you think of Monsanto or some of their policies. Fact is, Cloudant has found a demanding and bleeding-edge customer for their product, which will lead to big advances both in its adoption and its underlying technology. That's a Good Thing.
Of interest? Vim, Emacs Google trend
I would call that very dangerous and very likely a premature optimization. Nobody cares you are a platform until they use your product, and if you spend all your time building a platform, there will be no product to use.

The path requires far more finese than "always create a platform". You need to balance over-engineering with the ability to re-evaluate previous decisions.

I agree Google has wandered far off this path, but imnot sure they are on any more well defined path than Yahoo. They just happen to be earlier.
Apple Error iOS 5
They actually do pay shitload of money to senior and especially principal people, mostly in the form of stock grants. They have really strange vesting schedule too: something like 5% first year, 5% second, 45% third, 45% fourth. To compensate for the dropped income they give you sign-up bonus for first and second years.

I left before my first vest as soon as interesting start up showed up (start up didn't survive, but at least it was fun).
Let's be more precise about what they've done. It's a processor designed for high single-core performance -- much higher than smartphone processors -- with good power-efficiency, on a much smaller die than would ordinarily be required for that.

And 8-core smartphone processor is very different from an 8-core desktop/server processor, and much simpler.
What confuses me is that I thought they made a boat load of money from the kickstarter campaign?
Independent of how you may feel about Monsanto (and industrial agriculture in general), this is good news for Cloudant -- both an endorsement of their technology by a technically-competent buyer, and a bunch of contributions to their open source codebase.

(I dislike Monsanto's heavy-handed IP enforcement, but the data scientists are pretty far away from that; it's like criticizing Microsoft Research for the Windows OEM bundling concerns. I prefer organic food, but I'm happy that industrial agriculture/the green revolution keeps billions of people from starving.)
you'll see in very multi-threaded applications (like compression or encoding) the AMD CPU actually keeps pace with the 2600k;

Er, no it doesn't. In integer limited operations, such as winzip it keeps up. In anything using floating point, its 20% slower at least. At AAC encoding its nearly twice as slow!
When we talk about vacation weeks, we mean sets of 5 working days, not 7. Right?

So e.g. 2 week vacation == 10 work days off.
Hey NY_Entrepreneur -- Steve Schlafman here from Lerer Ventures.

First and foremost, we appreciate your thoughts and I'm sorry that you had a hard time getting in touch with us. We receive dozens of business plans each week though our website and I personally review each one so I apologize if you've experienced issues. I can assure you this is the first time we've received this feedback so we'll have to work hard to ensure another entrepreneur doesn't experience the same pain point.

As for getting in touch with Lerer Ventures in the future, our website is certainly an option as is our twitter account. Additionally, we're all active on the social net, some of us have blogs and I have an about.me page which people use to contact me / us all the time. I'm also contacted by entrepreneurs via Facebook and LinkedIn daily so those are also channels I check regularly.

That said, good luck in your future endeavors and hope you're successful.

-Steve
Steve Schlafman
Prinicpal @ Lerer Ventures
@schlaf
IPod Touch Server: iOS 5.0 Edition
"If Monsanto's business practices bother you, factor that into your purchasing decisions. There are dozens of local organic farmers that would love to have your business. They usually charge more, because evil is efficient."

You've hit the nail on the head and that's exactly what I say at the end of the post. I have a feeling most people didn't make it down that far.

As for my own purchasing behavior (which isn't relevant to the post), I do try to purchase organic as often as possible ;) It's still debatable whether or not it's worth while.
Google+ Post to Wordpress (ifttt Recipe)
If he'd come on here and talked about their marketing strategy, such as how they are having to deal with a vastly superior product but which fortunately their customers don't have access to, then I'd be all over it, and HN would be a great place to discuss it. But to come here and actually attempt such transparent bullshit gets such transparent bullshit pointed out.
this "voting with your dollars" thing is a bunch of bullshit. It's virtually impossible to live in modern society, engaging in commerce with any number of vendors that are invariably linked to multinational companies which are themselves highly interlinked, without money going to many companies we'd prefer it didn't, any more than it's feasible to live in a town governed by a government you vehemently disagree with, without using the roads they happen to be paving. Monsanto's practices should be regulated, those regulations enacted by a government which we elect with actual votes, not dollars; end of story.

edit: my wife and I do in fact work at a local food coop and buy about 90% organic or at least locally grown; they sell a few products linked to companies like Monsanto but these are clearly labeled with things like "GMO" - we certainly don't go near them. But we're lucky enough to live in a place that actually has a non-profit food coop and the economic freedom to have the time to work in such a place.
Even high-profile applications sometimes use weak password hashes. For example Windows passwords can be cracked at a rate of 8.27 billion password/sec on a Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, because the NTLM hashing algorithm is weak (simple raw MD4 hash of the Unicode password string). All Windows versions from NT4 to 2008 R2 are vulnerable.

http://hashcat.net/oclhashcat/
Where is the 'search this repo' button/field?
I just read a bunch of your old comments so I could understand who I'm talking to. You're clearly a pretty smart person. And you've been here for a little while now, so you're presumably somewhat invested in the community on HN.

With that in mind, help me understand what you hoped to communicate with this comment. Did you feel like you were maybe pointing out something I hadn't considered? Did you expect a comment like this might change anyone's mind? Or cause someone to say, "you know what, I hadn't thought of Monsanto this way before"?
And at least from my perspective, cell phones are only making this truer given that you get interrupted wherever you are and whatever you're doing. In my case, that means I basically just give my cell phone number to people I want to be able to reach me. Everyone else gets a work or home landline number. And good luck reaching me on one of those--especially if I don't recognize the caller ID. I don't even check messages when traveling. (I do still maintain a landline primarily because I sometimes need to make high quality calls for business purposes--and other options aren't as reliable.)
Oracle's control over Java has seriously dampened my enthusiasm for it.
I was going to start a new post but I think you covered most of the points I would have made anyway.

Reading that article just irritated me, how can someone make so many factual errors in one blog post?

He's never worked with Java to write a web application. Deployment xml configuration files can DIAFF.

He also completely missed the point why all of those Perl++ languages became popular, and it wasn't because disk speed slow/database slow so language being slow didn't matter, it was because you can genuinely get more out the door and tune your way out of performance issues (arguably :))
But heavy usage of robots and large-scale food growing are exactly what conventional agriculture is about, and small-scale, local, human labor-based growing is the goal of the organic movement.

Not saying that undercutting Monsanto is impossible, but any startup will have an uphill battle to win over "organic" supporters.
There are so many problems with telephones as contact. They of course work by voice. They are synchronous, and so require timing. They are very expensive. They don't internationalize well. They are a link to a lot of personal information.

I don't mind being asked for a phone number, so long as it's optional. I will not sign up for any service where my only means of contact is by phone (though I do permit "I physically walk into your office", for local-ish services).
Android Phone Spy
A big part of building it into the OS is that it only takes a single action to activate, instead of the half dozen or so plus a considerable amount of waiting that it takes to activate the standalone app. I believe this will result in a qualitative difference. The app was mostly a novelty that was usually slower and less convenient than doing things directly. The OS service is likely to be considerably faster and more convenient than the other paths that exist for achieving what it can do.
Globe & Mail celebrity photo caption writer FTMFW
Effectively enabling gzip in nginx - increase your Page Speed score
Akamai close to being acquired by Google
Google Engineer Calls Google+ a Pathetic Afterthought
Exactly. Consumers are now choosing products and which companies to support based on values they see that company (and companies' leadership) stands for. The older generation maybe don't see that but it is clear trend: your story as a company must match what your customer's world view.

So this Cloudant news just show that their values don't match world view of majority developers / hackers / libertarians and as result of that they should not expect to be very popular on hacker news.
So email is the unified communication.
Not your average HN fare, but I just can't stop reading the captions to these celebrity photos. Absolutely hilarious!!
The Way Forward - Alpert, Hockett, Roubini
I am going to sound callous here, the human race can make more people. The level of shit-getting-fucked up by Monsanto could make it really hard to make new people.

In long term shittery, Monsanto beats Cisco.
Tottally on your side, we stop the phone support in the company since we started lol .. email ist a way more helpful without a doubt
Don't listen to your family/friends. They are raised from birth to be employees (they seek security), but your desire for freedom means that you have a different personality and would be happier as an entrepreneur or small business owner. They are just crabs trying to pull you back into the trap. If you want to do this, then you need to fail many times over.. so learn to embrace failure. Failure means you have learned something.

Read (or listen to audiobooks):
Robert Kiyosaki: Rich Dad, Poor Dad & Cashflow Quadrant. He also has one called "Before you quit your job", but read those two first.
Steven Pressfild: The War of Art

Also, you need to start surrounding yourself with like-minded people. Ditch your old friends and make some that will inspire you to push yourself harder. Try meetup.com.

Good luck!