skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A recent discussion on this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955472
If people continued to write independent programs, purely to replicate and verify claimed results, then certainly it'd be beneficial for them to have the source, in order to track down where the discrepancy arises. This is often how it works currently, in practice, in my limited experience; you mail the authors and ask them to help you track down the problem, and get either code, or support; but I acknowledge this wont always work.

My concerns are that
1) I don't trust people to do the hard thing, and re-implement to replicate, rather than take the easier way, and just use the code that's provided. There's very little credit currently given for replicating existing (even recent) results.

2) More importantly, when replicating a paper, thats a little vague, it'll be more and more tempting to just peek at the source; and suddenly the paper isn't the document of record anymore.
I feel that if we go down the route where the code becomes the detailed documentation of the scientific process, that's a very fundamental shift from the current model, where the paper is supposed to be repeatable, in and of itself.

If we go down that road, we probably need a whole different review infrastructure; are reviewers really going to spend the time to review large and hastily written scientific codebases?

I doubt it; so how does review work when: "The code is the only definitive expression of the data-processing methods used: without the code, readers cannot fully consider, criticize, or improve upon the methods."
Will it no longer be possible to criticise a paper for lacking sufficient detail to reproduce the results? Will the reply be 'read the source' ?

Maybe that's just the way things are going to go. There's a lot to like in that manifesto. But there's going to positive and negatives to letting the source become the documentation. The discussion around the manifesto on their website does not acknowledge such tradeoffs; its taking a pretty one-sided view.
Maybe that's just how you are supposed to write manifestos :-) But I'd like to see some discussion of these tradeoffs.
> 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.

As a (former?) game developer, I can say this is spot-on.
I second the other responses to this comment. However, I do think there is tremendous potential to create a company that facilitates this emerging process.

Instead of a school what we really need is a company that does some of what a school does (guided education/training/ credentialing), some of what a recruiter does (identify and matching talent), and some of what an HR department does (onboarding company specific training).

This is just based on my experience (not a pleasant one) in identifying and recruiting talent.
I use pwdhash for pretty much everything. It's great, but it can be a pain for signing into services on an application or device that doesn't support automatic expansion.
Well they existed before the concept of easy credit, so it's not really a matter of them being more self disciplined--just sort of the way things were. For most people, you saved up and paid cash for everything b/c that was the only option.
Motivation is the problem?

The poor are as easy to figure out as any other human being, they are not different from us. These are people laboring away in sweat shops and farms for 2 hours a day in hope for a better life. How is motivation a problem here?

The problem is that the current economic system is one of exploitation.
This is great because it now means you not only get PG's advice (and the YC team), but that of Milner AND AH to boot. Makes me really excited about October 31.
This doesn't make any sense to me. The presence of post-pc devices doesn't void the existence of the PC.

Today you can go on ebay and for a hundred bucks get a several year old laptop and install a totally free operating system. You'll have access to dozens of free programming languages, complete with free compilers/interpreters, tools, and documentation. You can go on the internet and find tutorials, books, ask questions, and have conversations with actual programmers. Things have never been better for those with curiosity, kids or otherwise.
I would say the top 10 schools in any area have enough "credentialing/signaling" value to be a good investment.

Outside of that top 10, the value is only in certain subjects (e.g. engineering, accounting, nursing).
I don't expect to survive with my memories all intact unless I am very lucky. However the complete regeneration of missing parts and restoration of lost functions seems like a very solvable problem.

The fact that a large portion of cryonics funding will eventually go towards this kind of research and thus help non-cryonics patients who have brain injuries is a rather significant spillover benefit.
I think it's more meant to be "bulk of computers people use in general won't be traditional desktops/laptops" and less "desktops/laptops are going to be eradicated"
Honestly, I would rather a site store my password in plain text than send it to me via email. At least if it's stored in plain text, it still requires a security breech to access it. Sending a plain text password via email is no worse than having an insecure (non HTTPS) login form.
If they encrypt they have the key and someone must have access to it so this cannot be 100% true, same as Dropbox etc.
Don't get hung up on the Khan Academy. It's only one example. The Great Courses my kids have watched have been, well, great. They do cost two orders of magnitude more than Khan Academy but that's still a four order of magnitude potential savings.
Well, suppose all you have is an iPad, and you want to write some code. Sad panda, yes?

Well, not necessarily.

Let's say you go plop down 50 bucks or whatever on a keyboard -- or maybe you don't because you have a bigger tolerance for trying to type code on an onscreen keyboard than I personally do.

Next, you have to locate yourself a web browser. And there's one right there on your iPad already, so you're done.

Next you have to find somewhere on the internet where you can do coding. Here's the first one I found from a quick Google search: http://www.coderun.com/ . It's a browser-based IDE for php or asp.net that allows you build, test, and deploy a website right from the comfort of your own browser. I'm sure there are other options out there, but I didn't look very hard.

So it doesn't seem like you're going to have to work very hard to find a way to learn to write code as long as the web browser doesn't go anywhere. Even on an iPad.
I absolutely agree and I would be willing to bet Thiel does too.

BUT, it's simply not cost-effective. So many of the benefits of college can be gotten outside of it without the ridiculous cost and without dealing with people who don't want to learn.

Now, what's really lacking is an integration of all these different opportunities (free online learning like Khan, the potential for social learning via FB, Meetup or other sites, the potential for direct access to top minds in the field (try emailing really cool academic authors with an intelligent observation or fact and you'll get a response!).

We have to remember Thiel lives with two feet in the future he's already envisioning college alternatives fully fleshed out, unfortunately, I think his futurism is so second nature he has a hard time articulating the potential. As a brilliant guy he may just forget it's not obvious to everyone.
The article comes from the same reason I'm running the A Buck A Plate blog http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com - doing it because so many think living well for cheap can't be done.
Chemical fixation would be the second in line, but the quality sucks compared to cryonics. Freeze-dried brains are even worse.
You're not taxed on work you do for yourself (, yet).
Samsung’s own lawyers can’t tell a Galaxy Tab 10.1 from an iPad
Ask HN: I'm joining a startup and I have a couple of questions.
Hello HN,

I've been invited to join a startup and I'm pretty keen on the idea so far. But I have a couple of qns that I need some help with.

1. They are offering me equity. Should I take it? Or skip this and stick to a higher salary?

2. They just closed a Series A and their product is already profitable. Is it polite for me to ask for figures?

(I'm assuming figures will be helpful for me to determine if I should take equity.)
Not arguing that it's a choice I'd make, just pointing out that he does include rent.

It'd be interesting to see his breakdown of the other expenses you mention, though.
Source code:

http://teagueduino.org/index.php?p=/discussion/22
so you have a host naming schema like the rest of us, big deal yawn
I could see a product similar to code search being integrated into services like github and others. Code search wasn't perfect, it basically just searched code. What if you had a product that could, like an IDE, follow method declarations and the like? That'd be cool.
> Can you explain how open vs closed systems relate to user interface or experience issues? Those are orthogonal to each other

You can have a better UI and experience in a closed system. Multiple reasons:

1) A closed system is more tightly controlled. The user cannot fuck every aspect of it, and so he wont. You cannot assume the average users knows what he is doing or what he is installing on his device. Historically he has been shown unable to do so. This is why even stuff like Nigerian scams (something anybody on HN would laugh off), are successful against the general population.

2) "Design by committee" has not historically produced a good end user experience, and this is not by accident. Good UI design needs people to understand UI design and be able to say "no". And an OSS project is design by committee --it's very difficult to fence the UI from clueless people wanting to add the "kitchen sink", say. It's also difficult to keep it stable enough (hackers need to hack, they get bored easily).
Totally agree on the browser.

But as an aside, can you program an Arduino if all you have is an iPad? Or would you have to go buy a general-purpose PC for somewhat more than $30?
Huh? You're 20. You tried something it didn't work. So go to school, go back to your high paying job.

And how many 20 year olds have high paying jobs to begin with?

Thanks for sharing, but if I were looking to hire someone (or recommend someone for college admissions or a scholarship). I would view trying to your own thing at such a young age as a big plus. You're all good, just ride out this bad funk and you'll be back in the saddle in no time.

I look forward to whatever company you one day create.
There are some cheap Android phones with ancient OS's and terrible screens. Maybe you aren't likely to end up with one, I don't know.

I'd still give someone advice about which Mac to buy, but I don't think an uninformed buyer is going to go wrong with any of the options.
I don't understand how the naysayers of higher education can argue that any amount of viewing lectures can replace legitimate interaction with an expert in the field.

I've taken a lot of classes where I could watch a video of the professor lecture 100 times and be completely lost without the ability to interrupt and ask "excuse me, but how did you go from the base case to the inductive case" or "could you explain that more".

If you take STEM classes where the class size is under 40, i.e. upper division classes, you are both able to do this, and you almost NEED to do it. I really don't see people learning operating system design, complex analysis, abstract analysis, circuit design, and organic chemistry, from Khan Academy ...
Today you can build a brand-spanking new computer for $800, less if you skip the fancy graphics card and speakers.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/03/ars-system-gui...

There may be fewer of these sitting around living rooms. But a greater proportion will be available to dual-boot as Dad won't be so worried about losing his TurboTax data.

The devices supplementing or supplanting them will give kids access to the entire library of human writing prior to 1900, plus an extraordinary ability to review art and musical history. They'll be one copyright violation away from K&R. They will essentially be dropped into the Library of Congress, with the Louvre and the Hermitage bolted on at one annex. In the basement will be the nightclubs of Harlem and the salons of Vienna. This is before anyone uses these things for anything _new_. And these contraptions are somehow _limiting_?

Nor will they remain closed. Proprietary tablet systems will suffer the same relentless competition that has grown $600 of desktop from pipe-dream to humdrum commodity. People and companies will code these things precisely to match the capabilities, and revenues, now locked away.

I get the philosophic distaste for closed systems. But haven't the past ten years demonstrated that, in a free market, they can't stay closed? Or that the revenues available to proprietary innovators can motivate accelerations in innovation? Worries about "closed" were one thing in 1995 when people thought they were doomed to Windows. Maybe it's time to adjust the anxieties for what we've seen of the long-term competitiveness of "open".
"good github account? big companies get so many resumes that they don't even finish reading many of the resumes, so forget about looking at code on github."

They might be better off not accepting resumes and just recruiting people with outstanding github accounts.
Joshua Komisarjevski Is Guilty in Invasion Charges
Tiny JavaScript DOM selection library for modern browsers and IE5-8
The docs specifically say directory, not file. Maybe that is the problem?
But they're not bouncing photons up to and down from a GPS satellite; they're only using GPS for clock synchronization and measuring the distance, which is accurate to a lot less than the distance light travels in 60ns.
> when they boarded the plane back to PNG, we were the ones racked with envy – envious of their joyously interdependent community, their clear understanding of what mattered in life, their rock-solid roles, simple pleasures and ample leisure time, their lack of mortgages and debts, their indisputable “goodness.”

I call BS. This is not an honest appraisal but just a good line to spew forth at cocktail parties. Anyone who really believed this stuff would find it relatively easy to join one of these hunter gatherer tribes. (For instance, Napoleon Chagnon lived for decades amidst one of the fiercer tribes [1]. Read the first pages of his book and you'll see he wasn't much prepared for it, either. But a few iron utensils go a long way towards acquiring tribal goodwill.) Any relocation inconvenience would certainly be over-compensated by the very fundamental benefits described.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon
You probably just need to aim a lot higher than what you're shooting for right now, is my opinion.

Does this quote not get you pumped up?

"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs." - Joseph Weizenbaum

How about you, let's say, write a computer game that will make people stay up all night, or an interactive fiction novel that they can't put down? But don't give up because it wasn't hard enough or whatever.
I love dmr. nobody's questioning dmr's contributions to computer science and technology. I love them both.
If the cost is literally 0 (obviously time, etc., need to be accounted for) this is a gap of infinitely many orders of magnitude, not 6.
> This is why even stuff like Nigerian scams (something
> anybody on HN would laugh off), are successful against
> the general population

Nigerian scams are not a 'tech only' issue. Prior to email, these were sent through faxes or snail mail. The basic idea is that people can be stupid, especially when you put the possibility of a lot of money in front of them. This has nothing to do with a open vs. a closed system.
I know for a fact that some aircraft are able to operate on three by using altimeter information to resolve the ambiguity between the two possible points. It's not as accurate as using four satellites, but it's still pretty damn accurate. In a boat you could get similar results by assuming that you are at MSL.
Tech titans Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker in 'drunken fight' over Spotify
Thanks. This pretty much aligns with my philosophy. If your budget is readily available, could you post it?

I've been seeing a lot of "we live on $XX,XXX" online. That's nice, but what really inspired me was when people just posted their budgets, which since you already have one, would probably take less time than articulating the philosophy.

I personally don't set a budget (I've tried it but I spend just as much with as without a budget), but for those who do, please post as it makes your claims more believable.
>That is entirely true, and yes that is part of the problem. The polished nature of a proprietary operating system is like a polished jail. It may be nice and roomy now, but what about in 5 or 10 years when everyone has an iPhone and Apple has one or no competitors? Can we stop them from shrinking our room if there is no free alternative?

Well, for one our room was fairly small itself before the iPhone. Actually, not small --inexistent. The only reason the touch-smartphone room exists is because Apple made the iPhone and then everybody copied it. So, if they have no competitor in 10 years, more power to them.

But I think that that can't happen. Even MS at the height of its power has had competitors... And today we have Android in several versions already.

> Actually, no. You can access the filesystem, but you can't install your own free (or proprietary) operating system on the iPhone because there isn't one.

Why that is? Because the OSF/GNU etc never cared about a mobile OS until Apple made one. Suddenly freedom in the mobile apps was important. Why wasn't it important when Nokia, Sony, Ericsson et al ruled? Because it took Apple (and Google after that) to show that a mobile OS can be a nice platform to use.
What the writer is trying to get at is the idea that people will just accept that computers work by magic. That's by far the dominant way most people view automobiles today, for example.

And while this is distressing in some ways, I don't see it as necessarily a show stopper. People who are curious will find a way to peak under the veneer of magic and fiddle with the internals. Maybe kids will tend not to learn programming via command line apps written in basic, Java, python, or C, but that won't stop them from learning Javascript. And it won't stop them from learning C eventually either.
I'm intrigued by your comment that you have an advanced degree in economics. I don't, but it seems obvious to me that you're missing something (I'm happy to be corrected here!): the problem isn't the lack of consumers so much as a lack of incentive to produce.

If everyone becomes an entrepreneur, compelled to be stingy and just do productive things for the fun of it, then they're still being productive, and the world is still getting useful stuff. But, it seems your concern is that if everyone just does the work they'd like to do then there will be a misallocation of labor: certain things that need to get done won't get done.[1]

Is this really true? Are there well-organized economies that are stagnating while people are engaged in their own independently productive pursuits? Is Japan's economy stagnating because they consume too little or because they are working too little?

[1] An immediate counter-argument here is that people are likely to be more productive when they love their work.
The opening line of the article:

> "Imagine if legos didn’t exist. I don’t think I would be where I am today".

Working at legoland?
A16z doesn't have the bandwidth to start one of these, I think.
Similar situation in 2007.

If anyone had any doubts, Google is the new MS. In the mid 90s, any time I talked to people with ideas for new ventures, the inevitable "how will MS play in that market?" question came up, and often killed ideas before or just as they were getting started. People had seen MS buy up companies then shelve things, or enter a market (whether they should have or not) and effectively take the competition out of it - no one wanted to compete with MS. Maybe they could get bought out, but competing would be hard, and investors would think twice before investing against MS. To the degree that it validated a market or idea, that was good, but they were too big for people to think they had a shot at competing.

Few people are afraid of MS, but Google seems to have replaced MS in that role - intentionally or not. When your goal is "organize information", almost any endeavour could fall under that heading. I don't think people are necessarily as afraid of Google as people were of MS 15-20 years ago, but the effect on many ideas - like saurik's - is the same outcome.
IPad 3 is entering production, primed for early 2012 release
The advice is: "just make something"; so of course your question is then, "what shall I make?"

http://shawnpresser.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-become-game-...

^ That's an ordered list of projects, sorted by increasing difficulty. Basically, start with "guess the number".
It disappoints me, but I have to agree with you (at least in part, I wouldn't call his story garbage).

I say it's disappointing because his blog really inspired me to make some changes and I agree with the overall thrust of what he's saying.

But the problem I have is figuring out how he accumulated his wealth. Of course, being a former physicist you'd think spelling that out in a simple spreadsheet would be a trivial problem for him. I haven't seen that though.

From what I have put together I think he got very lucky in the stock market, which quite honestly takes a bit of the wind out of his sails. Based on what he was earning, saving and investing, it seems that only outsized rates of return could explain his nest egg.

Nonetheless, his overarching theme is spot on.
One way implicit casts for void * are pretty big safety harness actually. You can still interpret any random pointer as "a register width thingamajig". Interpreting any random void * as a valid pointer to a particular type is obviously dangerous.
Mark Pincus on building an Internet treasure (2009)
Ask HN: Optimal language for mobile app coding.
What language are you finding are the most efficient to use when coding a mobile app? Needs to be able to hold down dynamic info from servers, and audio and video files. Anyone working in the space and can save me time by pointing me down the right road I'd really appreciate it thank you.
Start by being very clear in you mind _who_ the target of your product is, or your reason for publicity. HN/TechCrunch won't help you much if you are targeting Accountants or Moms. For a startup you generally want to have a sustainable, differentiable, competitive advantage. Pick one key part of the 'what's different/new', and pitch or place that point with bloggers, online groups, editors, etc, who are focused on your target as an audience. Overly simplified, but doesn't require pre-existing network, just doing outreach to those that might have interest in exploring 'what's new' with you.
I think when more traditional celebrities inevitably begin to transition over to content targeted specifically at internet audiences, the revolution will begin. Google has the power to nurture raw talent, as well as attract artists who have already been vetted by traditional media into the new media sphere.
To me, this says that two people that were at one point brilliant technologists have crossed the chasm into celebrity. Did I browse to the People web-site by accident?
The reason you are being down voted, just so you know, is because you're being flippant and dismissive.