skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Biography and Profile of Maria Selena
Your comment confused me as well for a moment as I tried to grasp how Native Client might help with this.
800,000 iPhone 4S were delivered today by UPS
People are afraid of technology because of the crap tech from the past 20 years. What do you think happens when those people stop being afraid? Suddenly software development feels accessible to a bunch more people.

I'd argue that people won't stop wanting to tinker, that in fact more people will start to because they no longer think it's impossible.
My first ever job was assembling lawn mowers at a local shop at 14, before that I was selling software downloaded from select BBSes. From there I went into making pizzas and finally stacking boxes in a cold storage warehouse. Most of that stuff was from pounding the pavement looking for work.

My first technical job was doing dial-up tech support I found that job over IRC. Who knew typing +++ATH0 into mIRC could get you a job?

From there I worked tech support for the local cable company, and then wrote them some scheduling software in my spare time. After that they had me program instead of answer the phone.

I subscribe to the garbage man theory of value, do the jobs no one else wants to do but are essential to society. Avoid any job that seems glamouros it usually pays like crap.
Personally I'd like it if I could hack my fridge. And my thermostat. And my dishwasher.

But those actually aren't as important as a computer because I don't use them to make things.

I don't dismiss the power of giving access to information consumption devices to the masses. But I would prefer if we could put the means of production into their hands as well. So I agree to some degree with the author.

As for censorship, everything you say is true. It doesn't make fears of censorship unfounded. The iPad has close to 100% marketshare for tablets. And Apple actively censors its sole means of app distribution. That's a lot of power for a private company to hold. Not illegal or immoral, but scary.

I think a future in which everyone chooses to live in Disneyland is kind of scary, even if I can continue to choose not to live there. And the way to fight it is to convince people that there are alternative visions of the future. And that's how I read this post.

But please stop whining. <- This sounds more like whining to me than the post did.
> How is getting your head frozen investing in preventing such a world?

It isn't, directly. It is an investment in something else which makes that a more important issue to an individual. That affects the probability of the individual taking actions that favor the given outcome. The main purpose of getting your head frozen is saving the individual's life directly, but it does have this positive externality.

> If you want to improve the future, maybe you should invest your $25K in humanitarian efforts instead of a desperate attempt at personal life extension.

How does passively letting yourself die increase your incentive to plan for a better world in the distant future?
Hacking Your Vote
Nobody's gonna buy devices that let them create in those ways anymore? Surely there will be demand for things to be created in the forms that those devices aren't good at creating for.
Exactly!

It isn't hard to do. It's only "hard to imagine" for those who aren't doing it. It's like being a runner and having a hard time convincing couch potatoes that running isn't primarily dominated by sweating, side stitches, gasping for air, and near heart attacks.
Reading this made me think of THX1138.
A codified set of the builder's, crafter's, maker's rules
In 1951 you could have whined, "With the rise of pro-grammable computers, the Engineer can simply turn his brain off and let the computer do all the work. The era of craftsmanship has come to a close. No, no need to think dear friend, we have ourselves a Computer. Aughh!"

Then, in 1961 you could have sighed, "The knowledge of how to maintain a computer will be gone forever with this increase in reliability. How will someone ever know truly how computers work unless they have to fix them piece by piece."

Then, in 1971 you could have pined, "With the rise of these time-share based operating environments, the future programmer has all the hard things taken care of for them. All that you need now is a data-bank administrator and record input clerk. There is no future in computing!"

Then, in 1981 you could have lamented, "Baugh! The rise of these pre-built micros means that the future generations won't know how to work a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope. They will never use a soldering gun or know the joy of assembling a memory board because they will just drop it in the slot. Ug!"

Then, in 1991 you could have scoffed, "well with all these new fancy compilers, nobody will appreciate the joys of directly manipulating registers and stacks. Instead, they will spend their career in higher order abstractions without ever truly knowing the soul of the machine."

Then, in 2001 you could have cried, "This era of the world wide web is hastening the decline of single system software and entertainment consumption is simply supplanting productivity for the largest use case of computing. Programming has become nothing more then playing Oz in the Emerald City; pulling pre-built levers as the scarecrows and tin-men of the world marvel on the sidelines"
Watch the WWDC videos on Core Data.
I used it as an example as I know HN users complain about it quite often: here are some references. Call it what you will, but a lot of people seem to disagree with per-repository pricing for small low-usage repositories, just because they are private.

If Dropbox Used GitHub’s Pricing Plan -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2780955

Bitbucket now rocks Git -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3066828

"Yeah, it's ridiculous. I have enough repos that I'd need the Platinum 200 dollar a month plan." -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3023826

"For Git projects, the per-repo pricing of Github is insane. They don't even have a public pricing plan for the number of repos I'd need for my personal (and private) coding." -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2740757
Sorry, but this story is garbage.

Rent/mortgage, retirement completely ignored.

Plus he has the shittiest $82 health insurance plan he could find, and he doesn't calculate the costs of what will happen if he gets sick.

On average people after 65 spend $2,920 per year on medical out of pocket expenses (Source: http://www.newretirement.com/Planning101/Rising_Medical_Cost...)

Then his food comes from his garden, which means he has to work on that, and he conveniently didn't calculate the opportunity costs, tools, irrigation, chemicals, seeds, etc.

What about transportation costs, electric/gas, phone, internet, household supplies, upgrade of your old computer, clothing, shoes.

Then if you want to have a car (and it sucks to live pretty much everywhere in the US without a car), what about car insurance, maintenance, new car every X years?

Yeah, it's fucking easy to live on $7K per year when you own a house with a garden, don't pay property taxes, use 1995 computer, and have no safety net in case of a serious sickness.
Foundation framework for building prototypes and production code
In the late 90s and early 2000s operating systems were compared with airlines, in a humorous manner: http://www.webaugur.com/bazaar/53-what-if-operating-systems-.... Now it seems that the comparisons have become more serious than that. I'm using Unix/Linux every day, and I don't feel like I'm living in a monastery.
It actually does. I know because I've been testing with our app. It works perfectly. We build up a fairly large 25MB sqlite db and it doesn't show in iCloud anywhere.

In fact, if you use UIManagedDocument, it creates a .nosync directory in the document bundle to prevent it from syncing in the framework itself.
You're right, that was probably too hyperbolic.

But I think the author's point is that part of his penchant for making is due to exposure as a child. In a post-PC era, even if professionals still have PCs, many fewer people will than do today, because they won't need them. That means fewer people, fewer children will be exposed to them as the author was. I think it's a valid concern.
Agreed. The author is lucky to have a taste for the quiet life. My wife and I would bite each other's heads off if we stayed in a van eating salad and I'm sure my grandparents would have too. I'm happy to pay for a bit of light hedonism.
i'm sure you can modify the code to not use facebook. it's just javascript after all
Both are straw men that represent the extremity of a population.

There's a bit of rose-tinted glasses going on here, isn't there? I don't particular buy into this notion that the previous generation was oh so virtuous, while this one is just daft as a brick.
To be honest, I hate everything in one solutions for a couple reasons:

1. It never works. There's always some problems and since it's all in one package, it's really difficult to remove an item and switch it from something else. (For instance, I know it's far from being the same, but think django and mysql. You can use something else, but anyone who did it will agree with me that it's a lot of problem.)

2. There are *so many* already existing solutions out there that it's hard to believe that you can make *all of them* better. For instance, Dropbox is pretty awesome, Github is awesome, IRC is awesome, Gmail is awesome. Especially for startups, these are all free or *almost* free solutions.

3. It's simply impossible to fit everyone's need with a one big solution for everything. I've been in *big company* where you'd have a microsoft based solution with everything, or others thousand of dollars apps to manage authentification and email and everything, and they all truly sucked. And they sucked not because they were wrongly build, but they couldn't be the *best* for everyone. If you want to make it newbie friendly enough, power user will hate it. If you make it complex enough for power user, newbie will be lost and hate it. I know I'm making it sound trivial, but I hope you guess the point.

4. Finally, from my experience, it's extremely hard to change the way people already work. Just try to move someone out of gmail for instance. Now, try to move him/her away from *all* software he already use and appreciate.

You say you want to make it easy for startups to be like the big guys. That's one of the things I love about startup.. to NOT be like the big guys with all their politic craps.

Sorry to be harsh, I just wanted to give my personal opinion as a software developer. I'm curious to know what others hackers think about it?
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/DataMan...

right there.
Depends on your goals in life. $7,000 is definitely doable. But I don't want to live in an RV. Indeed, I want to live in a walkable neighborhood with groceries, low crime, and easily accessible entertainment.

The site probably isn't a convincing case for a general audience. Which is a real pity, because a lifestyle of $10,000 to $12,000 a year is very doable, even for a single person, even in the Bay Area, even with regular outings and entertainment, and even with flushable toilets.
Looking for partner for weekend project
Hey guys,
I am looking for a partner to help build a small web app over the next few days.

I was thinking backbone.js and node.js for the stack.

I run http://backbonetutorials.com and http://thomasdavis.github.com is my personal site.

Email me at thomasalwyndavis@gmail.com if your interested.

I have the concept fleshed out, not a typical idea and specific to application development.
if you can't get an introduction, continue working on your product and gain traction, if you have a million users you definitely won't be ignored.
Could not agree more. I can only imagine how much closer my thirteen year old self would have come to building my iron man armor had I'd been armed with a broadband connection and a digikey.com account back in the 80s.
Why No One Company Will Ever Monopolize the Internet
Why scared?
There is nothing to stop someone from hacking a device - but then do we want all devices to be hacked? If Siri is somehow integrated into my car in the future, do I want my kid hacking into it and messing around with it, potentially resulting in who knows what.

The ability to play around and change things is always gonna be there and in fact with locked devices in some ways it's even better - you'll have to be more enthusiastic and perhaps more talented to hack it, and that breeds and entirely new generation of hackers.

And remember - even Apple ended up hiring the person who created his own version of an iPhone notification system on his jailbroken phone.
Once Magazine Brings Compelling Photojournalism To Your iPad
I'm sorry, that's not "basic economics". That's neo-keynesian economics. (They call themselves keynesians, but they aren't following what keynes said.)

The word "capitalism" comes from the word Capital. You accumulate capitals so that you can invest it in productive assets.

You could blow your money on a consumptive lifestyle, as you advocate.

Or you could save that money, and use it to start a business. Notice, your business has value, and if you do well, you will have turned the money you saved into a lot more money. You will employ people, and you will make products that make your customer's lives better... generally by lowering the costs for doing things, for them, making them richer.

This increases productivity.

Your argument is only looking at one side of the coin and kind ignoring most of economics.... but it is the perspective put forth by politicians who want to spend spend spend. They want to spend because spending gets them power. But it damages the economy (government spending.)

Henry Hazlitt wrote a good book "Economics in one Lesson". It's really a really good primer on economics.
Well, one thing I worry about is the ability of hackers to continue to develop their own OS's and load them on machines. Surely big companies will need to continue to be able to do this but it's possible to imagine that that might be only able to be done with a contract with the hardware manufacturer in the future, which could destroy the ability of hackers to load their own OS's on machines. (i.e. custom os's is something that there might be insufficient demand for despite not being able to create them with future devices.)
See, the form is used to submit your business plan. If your email is something along the following line like:

"Hi, I have an 'amazing' opportunity for you to invest 'early' in a new startup. I am willing to meet at time XXX or you can call me at XXX."

It is very likely that you will get ignored. In fact, I did send an email with a rough business plan about my previous startup to the above email before. And, someone from a16z replied me telling me that they were not interested in the market that I was in then.

Why don't you try to send an email with a real/concrete proposal about your startup/idea? It is more likely that you will get a reply from them in this way.
Do you want to start a startup? Or do you want to live your life in the burbs?
Not everyone will get an iPad. Most people will eventually go Android, and that's easy to root and replace with whatever you want.

Even if you get an iPad, you can always jailbreak it. Curious kids will always find a way to break into something.
What rorrr said, but not in quite such an inflammatory tone.

I think it's great that you've found a lifestyle you enjoy that also allows you to get by with very little money. What I take issue with is your judgmental tone in the article - as if there's something wrong with everyone else for not wanting to live in an RV.

This country faces a dire economic crisis, and there is no doubt that the income of the middle class has been getting shredded - and continues to drop. Unemployment is at an all-time high. It seems incredibly callous and foolish to sweep these all away with a "well, maybe they should be living like me".
I believe he does account for rent/mortgage, by doing an RV. And his idea is that he has handled retirement--he's living in retirement now.

The catch is that he had six figures saved up beforehand (he lives off the investment income), which doubles as a rainy day fund in case of serious illness.
Well you have a point, and this model of an alternative economy based on self-sustenance, producing what we need is something that is being tested by a philosopher Frithjof Bergmann. Unlike most (read all) philosophers, Bergmann actually practices his ideas which are detailed in his book, "on Being Free". He talks about such an economy based on producing little and necessary items within communes and trading them amongst each other:

http://newworknewculture.com/content/frithjof-bergmann

They are actually applying New Work to various parts of the world including South Africa, Iraq (in Kurdistan) etc. I know this because in undergrad I worked with him on this project for a year.

However, the main problem regarding an alternate system is quite philosophical; that what is the basic human condition? Hobbes came up with an answer calling life "nasty, brutish and short" and that our animal spritis needed to be kindered. In government we did it through Rousseau's suggestions that we need a system through which we do not kill each other. I don't kill and take your money/land, and you do the same for me. In economics, we came up with an answer through capitalism, and saw the biggest implosion of wealth ever in the 20th century. So it is hard to argue against that capitalistic/democratic mindset unless there is a viable alternative especially in the US, where it has worked the best for the better part of the century. As far as crises go, we have seen destruction and subsequent creation of wealth throughout this century, so that is not a reason to give up I think.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/10/stockmarke...
And if you did, you'd be missing the point. The explosion of computing in the general public over the past 20 years has seen the explosion of innovation - "the internet", as an industry, is really only 15 years old. Not even that. And yet it's innovated and transformed forever our modern societies.

That innovation has been driven by the masses being able to create things on their computers. Something that potentially restricts the ability to innovate across the masses shouldn't just be handwaved away like yet another whine.
Why are you using xargs to read to an entire entry? Why not set it as a var and place it in the comment or take it as stdin?
Internet access of some kind or another can be found almost everywhere in the world now. It might have been from a cell phone or a shared computer at some nearby town. The point is, I don't think it matters where or how any more.
That's insignificant in light of the real sea-change, which is that almost anyone in the alive can.
This is true. Most worthwhile ideas/opinions are developed by people who feel strongly about a subject, otherwise why would they take the time in the first place.

However, pointing out potential bias is still appropriate.
Living "frugally" is so that I can bootstrap a startup. And I live within 5 blocks of an inner BART station. No desire to live in the burbs at all.
Is it bad that people no longer learn how an MBR works, or how useful command lines are, or what real memory versus protected memory is, because we have GUI operating systems?

Is there less people going to hack their own chips, connecting wires together and learning how to write micro code, because we have devices that don't require it?

Technology always works like that. Today's kids start with an iPad and iPhone. A few years ago kids started with a GUI OS like Windows of MacOS. A few years prior they started with DOS. Before that they started with a Commodore or Amiga. It's just evolution, and every time you add another layer of abstraction.
With possibly-inlined, SSE-optimized strcmp variants that compare 8 or 16 bytes of a string at a time (at least according to Valgrind), how much speed is gained these days by casting and using the standard integer comparison instructions?
The children of the post-PC future will only have access to iPads. Or Kindle Fires, as pure a consumption device as I can imagine.

Why would you think that would happen?

And while I'm at it, why is "consumption device" an insult? Books are consumption devices. Nobody sneers at a child with a book.
Yes, college may be a worthwhile endeavor. The question is, should it be a required endeavor.
I think it's a good idea. Books are an appropriate answer to questions, but sometimes I might not want to read an entire book to get to the part that's relevant to me. Maybe you could find ways to cross-reference certain parts of books with questions. (I see issues with getting content rights, or having to build a referencing system that might be more effort than the value is worth.)

Questions beg for conversations to start around them. I'm not certain if this would be clouding the simplicity of your offering...but I think there isn't currently much to make your site "sticky" so the user wants to return. They come for a recommendation, maybe they ask a question, but there's no reason for them to participate further. They got their book. Discussion seems like a perfect compliment.

The other thing that could probably improve is the search experience. This might be a little harder, but you don't only want people to find their burning questions, you want them to stumble on questions they didn't know they wanted an answer to as well. This could be in the form of related questions in search, n-th degree of questions to another question, or other interesting discovery mechanisms.

Does this make sense?
It is hard to argue against the underlying principle of the growth economy because it is the ONLY principle that has served has so well over the past century and gotten so many people out of poverty, and increased overall wealth, distribution of wealth is still a problem though. We are unequivocally better off today in standard economic terms than we were a 100 50 or 25 years ago. Growth can be tempered and slowed but you cannot look at growth in entirety.

In Europe, Japan, Singapore you have a shrinking population and as such you need to create less wealth to support growth, whereas in China India you absolutely need exemplary growth to make those lives better off.
The point is that the "post-PC era" will make it so that being someone who thinks that you can modify or change the computing experience is relegated to "oddball hobby" status, like it would be if someone today wanted to start playing with vacuum tubes.

The current PC ecosystem lets you explore and create and play and learn on the same tools that you use to consume. You can build a lego kit with the instructions, or you can use the pieces and make something that's uniquely you. You can run the apps on Windows that you download, or you can write your own without asking for anybody's permission.

In the magical "post-PC" world, where everyone is inexplicably using an iPad, you can run what Apple says, period, and if you want to develop something they don't approve of, welp, too bad.

This loss of flexibility, exploration, and sense of wonder is bad for future computing developments and bad for future computer users.
Facebook Rolls Out New App Authentication Flow That Ups Privacy and Transparency
Neutrinos not faster than light after all
This shouldn't take more than 5min:

I would love it if you could go to boardgamecalendar.com and tell me one thing I could do to make the product or my description/presentation of the product more appealing.

Thanks.