skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think focusing only on programming skills and what will help you in your first jobs out of college is short-sighted.

I'm not sure this is even about programming, per-say. If your goal is success as rated by monetary gains, it seems short sighted to focus your learning on any specific subject ahead of time. You might find riches in programming, but you might instead find riches in producing a set of short Youtube videos, or maybe writing a how-to book about getting rich without going to college. Who knows what opportunities will arise? If your vision is narrow, you're going to miss them, that is for sure.

If you have a very specific goal of programming for a top corporation at the age of 40, maybe a degree will help you out. Again, who knows? You cannot prepare yourself for success. You might decide you hate programming when you reach 40. Who knows? Following in the footsteps of others will not lead you to success. That is one thing we do know.

I'm not arguing against going to college. I see that it comes with many merits with respect to personal growth and a is generally an enjoyable time for most people. I just do not see how it relates to business and why anyone would want to pressure someone else to go to college. Who cares what other people do with their lives? Whether or not one should go to college is a very personal decision and it is one that should not be clouded by misguided notions of future fortunes.
or a treadmill like in the video
Congratulations on making the first WebGL demo I've seen that didn't turn my macbook into a mobile space heater.
Steve Jobs Biography is a Book for Anyone who likes Good Stories
I wonder how much of that was deliberate or a seized opportunity at a later date? It never was very difficult to pirate Windows and Office back in the day.
How much does 10GB of HDD space cost these days? I would rather have the OS be able to recover from corruption or deletions than save 5 bucks or something.
I agree. I find Latex very limiting, in the sense that anything that falls outside of its (admittedly extensive) library of functionality is nigh impossible to do. Latex has a system of "environments" and a box model that satisfies the basic use case of spitting out a nicely typeset article, but it's not the tool I would turn to if I wanted to precisely justify a paragraph underneath an image (the above comment is correct: look to InDesign or something similar).

Latex (or more specifically, TeX) was groundbreaking for its kerning and typeface support. It still has the most extensive system for unambiguously typesetting complex mathematical equations. It appeals to a certain kind of person who wants to have a canonical source in plaintext controlling layout. But you're kidding yourself to say that it is the most flexible and powerful tool for typesetting on the market today.
Only 1GB? In my experience I've needed about 4GB on a modest install.. but then again, that may be including updates and service packs.
I use craigslist when I want to sell something, because that's where the buyers are, not because of its simplicity (or lack of futures). And ditto for ebay.

If I were a serious seller, I would want a shopping site with bells and whistles (a detailed admin area, user accounts, reviews, discussions, etc) that might contribute to the selling part.

This site would be a fantastic tool if it worked with craigslist/ebay.
So great point, the best developers are never out of work. How would you recommend a recruiter network with said developers? How do we build mutually beneficial relationships? I tend not to cold call people, just because I think there are better ways to meet people but not all recruiters have that type of network.

I suppose I am interested in a solution oriented debate. I hear how you don't like be contacted, how can we do it better?

Oh, and a technically forward HFT means that we are using decently cutting edge stuff, HPC, low latency code, etc. As for offering you better looks and sexual prowess I think I have to opt out on that one. If you find that job, let me know I will send it to a few ex boyfriends. :)
Yes, but that's not 'small businesses started by drop-outs'.

If it were then the odds would be substantially less. People start businesses at all points in their life, and the failures skew significantly towards inexperience.
Thanks, we'll look into this one
Google shows the limits of a free web
To those who know LISP, here's a response from benfitz which sums it up

)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
:-(
So the revelation that the NSA had been illegally wiretapping hundreds of thousands of Americans led to the NSA being more accountable? As I recall, it was swept under the rug and the blame was placed on the whistleblowers.
Simple / Complex: Hickey v. Snively
Necrology (1969 short film)
A simpler introduction to formal grammar
No, not credit...but the fact that elegance and simplicity is clearly a trend where complex and expansive functionality was the trend in the past (think MS)
Fair point. I suppose it depends what you considerable a reasonable amount of time to evaluate a potential employee. All in all, it took me about two weeks to run the gauntlet at my current job (a startup), and I don't think that's unreasonable, given how busy everybody is.

If you keep getting passed over, however, I can see how that starts to really mount up.
One way to make sense of the risk premium is to think of the grant in absolute dollar terms. When a company is just starting out with no product and no funding, the value of the business is very low (more or less just the founding team's value). In this situation, the company is likely worth a couple hundred thousand to a couple million tops. 33% of that is likely in the hundred thousand dollars range.

Once the company has a product, funding and some traction, the business' value is now likely at least a few million to tens of millions. 1-2% of that is also in the hundred thousand dollars range.

Yes, the founders' stake is now significantly more, but it wasn't when it was granted. They built the company's value and their stock value appreciated.

When you join a startup, you have the ability to do exactly the same thing!
In astronomy, anyway, LaTeX is the default. It's probably different in other fields which is why the broader journals use Word.
www.placeiq.com
Colloidal Silver, Colloidal Silver Uses
http://www.hackruiter.com/ is maybe the only exception to the rule. But they're sort of an invite-only thing... so not exactly useful for most startups.
Why not simply have it get the data from an online API connected to something like Google Latitude or Apple's Find My Friend system? Then you could even have it make decisions when the users are much farther away, e.g. "he's 100 miles away, just keep the house above freezing" or "he's come back within 10 miles, return the house to comfortable levels."

I know some folks who have a heater in their winter cabin they can activate remotely (via text, I think) to turn on before they arrive for the weekend. An automated version of that would be even better.
Pew: Tablet owners consume a crazy amount of news but they won’t pay for it
Many people will say that humans are the exception, but I think it is nonetheless interesting to look at this from an ecological point of view. A common pattern of population growth for animals includes a period of exponential growth (as we are currently seeing), which ends with an "overshoot" where the population continues to grow past the "carrying capacity" of the environment. The population then decreases (possibly due to starvation or disease), and begins to cycle around the carrying capacity, creating an equilibrium. If one believes that this is a reasonable model to apply to the human population on Earth, the real question is: "What is the carrying capacity of Earth?"
Thanks, ark. I've been lurking on their mailing lists for a while, but haven't posted because my target date is so far in the future.

I will almost certainly ping you this week. Where are you living now?
That's not true. Did you see my comment about Jobs and Page?

And honestly, the iPhone 4S do take better video compared to this phone. I'm not trolling.
People have been about the same intelligence for a long time. Steve, Dennis, and John were no smarter than their predecessors, they were just applying their intelligence in an area other smart people weren't looking at. Woz was designing calculators before he designed the Apple II. So what's the next area a smart person can make a big difference in?
Stock photos is a feature that exposes a tension in our product - what's good for sellers isn't always good for buyers.

That said, you also make some good points why stock photos are bad for both.
Are Music Listeners Ready to Move to the Cloud?
Okay, sorry ahead of time for being a Debbie downer here, but there are no work-related or useful scripts in the repository. All the great stuff they talk about running builds, deploying code, checking on servers, getting test results are not there. I don't see youtube and google images lookups all that useful as a chatbot IMHO. So, what am I missing? It seems like people think this is cool, but I guess I don't get it.
BigDog didn't walk downhill passively, did it?
Interesting article. But I bet I can conduct a study that shows that the consumption of drinks with little umbrellas is directly correlated to skin cancer. The more I sit at my desk, the more coffee I drink, the paler I get. Need more details on this study. But now I have another excuse to grab another cup o' joe.
Joe Hewitt speculates on the future of Apple TV
Dropping Out: A Year Later
We're just shipping the foundation right now. A lot of our other stuff is tied to a substantial amount of other services (our CI, our special build layer, various other home-grown services, etc). Over time — and judging from Twitter, very quickly! — github.com/github/hubot-scripts will have a much more comprehensive set of scripts.
Thanks! Tags could be nice addition to search or act as a filter. I've always though that tags are hard for grouping things, since you can end up more groups than you have items.

Right now we store the page content so you can do a full text search on title, notes and the content.
Awesome, knowing this, I'll definitely give it a try!

Thanks
This is a very common argument, and it may have some merit. In the current economic situation, however, with high and increasing college costs, it is probably advisable to find a less expensive way to obtain the benefits of a liberal arts education.
Global Occupy Movement: Who Are These Protesters, and What Do They Want?
Managing Ideas
The idea isn't to hold out forever, just long enough to let the innovation curve flatten somewhat. Remember, "from $4.00 a watt to $1.25 in three years". Buying now means you're locking yourself into a given year's technology and pricing for the next 30 years, exactly when the price per watt is dropping insanely.
I agree with both of you. As in politics, the two sides are talking past each other.

I think the dropouts look at people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, etc, and want to say "Look! You can be rich and successful and influential without requiring some silly piece of paper and a goofy hat!". Therefore, I don't need it!

The PhDs and Computer Science grad students are likely to look up to people like Turing, Church, Von Neumann, John McCarthy (as he's been in the news) etc.., and be satisfied pondering The Secrets Of The Universe and be stimulated by working on extremely pure intellectual challenges.

To the dropout entrepreneur/hacker, the prospect of working in an office proving the lower bound of a routing problem over ad-hoc networks is about as bland as you can get.

To the computer science professor, post-doc, whatever, the prospect of working as some web-app developer or "java engineer" and hustling for customers is completely vapid.

I tend to slightly side with the academic CS types, since many people can teach themselves to be successful hackers independently, few college dropouts are architecting the next generation of internet protocols, contributing much to computational complexity theory, producing the next RSA cryptosystem or homomorphic encryption, or contributing to the algorithms to make higher-resolution images from MRI scans. On the other hand, if you drop out of college, this isn't probably the kind of stuff that would interest your blood pumping anyway.
All points taken, except 5). In major urban centers, $25k is too little to save up. But in many other parts of the US (especially where I live in NE Ohio), a single person could save a good amount making 25k a year. People around here raise families on that.
I'm still on XP because there is no clear choice for an upgrade path. I have a pile of business, programming, and electrical engineering applications that work well on XP and maybe fine on Windows 7. I don't like the bloat, interface, and locked-down nature of Win7. But do I wait for Win8? Or maybe try some Linux flavour and run XP/7/8 in a VM? It's really not an easy choice. Larger enterprises must hate this.
>Unfortunately for you, the game's industry is slowly and inevitably moving towards personal subscription based purchases.

It's my guess that this model will work until the first major publisher, for whatever reason, collapses - or simply stops bothering with providing access to older games. Then people will realize how insane and retarded this entire system of "paying for access" is. Same goes for cloud computing, by the way.

Besides, you are confusing publishers and developers. Valve is a rare case where both are one and the same, making them a very weird exception, but in general, direct distribution is bad for publishers (which is a good thing). It's really the same as with the (major) labels.

>Imagine how much Portal 2 cost Valve to make, was it worth it?

Valve is also a rare case in that they still make games worth playing. Most of the rest of the industry is a sea of bland, uncreative genericness with fancy graphics. I acknowledge Valve for this, but I still refuse to pay for access to games. I want a copy that plays where I want, whenever I want, and that still works three decades from now.

Until this insanity stops, I hoist the black flag. Yarr.
Ok, I can buy that my perspective is slightly different on these matters. I see people who set their AC to 67 and their heat to 78 -- even with time regulation this isn't going to save energy.

IMO, Blankets and socks are a fairly universal solution, and that coupled with a few button presses saves an equal amount (maybe more[1]) of energy.

I think the main selling point is going to be geek lust and how pretty it is, however. The energy savings is a loose justification for the consumer to spend money on it.

[1] I wonder how much of the energy savings will be negated by people turning up the temperature in lieu of dealing with a little inconvenience and minor discomfort because they figure the t-stat will handle it.
Ask HN: What drove SoundHound Android so many installs?
Really cool stuff SoundHound is doing but I was curious about their Android app.

Looking at http://i.minus.com/ioLUSWTerE1zz.png

See how the Android Installs plateaued last month, I'm curious as to what drove it to go up so high, and we can also see how it dropped flat afterwards.

Thanks
The legal checklist every startup should read
Haha, yea I remember that post. Good stuff. LightningJS is really more focused on being "safe" as in "no library conflicts", rather than sandboxing the code itself. In general, end users are copy/pasting embed code directly, so there wouldn't really be a guarantee that the third-party wrapped their resulting code in ADSafe :)

Definitely would be interesting to perhaps include some concepts from ADSafe into LightningJS though - maybe in the bootstrap component?
We see ourselves as a good fit for small shops or market traders who find selling online through existing options intimidating or unwieldy.

We think there's also a gap in the market for one person companies who want customers to visit them in person. List could help them sell to existing customers, who are most likely to buy something else.
How gambling makes billions without innovation
I think the biggest hurdle is the regulation that would be faced from a say start up PayPal now.

As you might of heard Facecash nearly died because of the money transmitter act.

You might not need banking regulation but a money transmitter in every state would be very, very costly indeed.

However there is Venmo.
My parents paid for my schooling, so I had a free ride of sorts too. This obviously changes the numbers a great deal, and should certainly factor into decision making.

$25k a year is $12.50/hr. With proper job hunting, this shouldn't be too difficult to find with a high school education.
Was excited to come across this thread. Would like to read more about this. Great stuff here. Must visit more often.
One place it could help is with the problem that most houses have - multiple people playing with the thermostat. It could help find the compromise point where everyone's happy enough that they stop fiddling.
I think this is one of the things that good DRM can provide the end-user that has been largely ignored by everyone. I mostly blame the industry for ignoring the possibilities, but they're exciting. You could "loan" games to people without physical contact, you can securely transfer ownership of the digital item, you can play your games from anywhere, etc. There's a lot of potential in having strong digital copy protection that protects the rights of all parties.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is Coming Soon
"but it seems (as other commenters have pointed out) that there could be a real niche for techies to run a recruiting firm that know what they're talking about."

I'd love to do that. What would such a company look like?
Atomic swag-ger: Iran’s nuclear conference humor
findings, a platform for sharing and discovering what people are reading
Ugh they didn't take the left-right scrolling/history thing out in OSX Lion from the beta. Infuriating that I can't scroll left without going back one page.

Any setting discovered yet to turn this off?
It's a Slinky with legs.
Yep, I seem to have a tendency to shoot myself in the foot sometimes.

It's getting better though :)
Right, and even if the user does not play it the instant it gets decrypted, the user still benefits by having preloaded days in advance (especially with huge games > 10GB, i.e. BF3). So when the user finally finds time to play a preordered game, it's already sitting in the Steam library, ready to be played.
5 bucks is way too high. The cheapest drive with 4 eggs on http://forre.st/storage#hdd is is 23gb/$; 10/23 * 100 or 43 cents.
I give up. Off to watch reruns of "Ow my balls" and drink some Brawndo.
do you use jquery,Rails ? Is it mobile based social or web based ?
Please email me at sreeprasad.sp@gmail.com
Much has been said about whether or not to drop out of school (or whether to go college at all.) How about those w/ limited technical skills going back to school to pick up a CS degree?

Regards,
TDL
I was expecting Gapminder to have something useful, but as cool as it is, I couldn't make anything really interesting out of the total world population. http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly... But at least it's less "entertainment" and more straight-up data.
All good points, the other I'd add is that I really think joining as an early employee is optimizing for happiness. Starting a startup is really hard and more often than not results in broken relationships, tons of debt and several months of severe depression.

As an employee at an early startup, you can still get significant upside exposure (eg make millions or tens of millions in a success scenario) while being able to "just code", have a much more normal work-life balance, and having much less exposure to risk.

If you're decently good at picking good startups to join, it is probably also an easier way to get seven-to-eight digits rich than starting your own company, since a lot of the risk is already removed.
> The second hand game market really short changes the publishers, and it's very expensive to make a top title!

No, it doesn't.

"The second hand car market really short changes the auto manufacturers."
An object like this, which on its face evidences that a great amount of care and attention to detail went into it, immediately has my attention. Now let's hope it works as beautifully as it looks because I sincerely hate my thermostat.
Was playing with this a bit a lunchtime...

Modifying your main routine to do 3x3 super-sampling reduces flashing/aliasing quite a bit. Check it out.

void main(void)
{
float s = 0.0;
for( float xx = 0.0; xx < 1.0; xx += 1.0/3.0) {
for( float yy = 0.0; yy < 1.0; yy += 1.0/3.0) {
s += combine(vec2(uv.x*xpixels+xx, uv.y*ypixels+yy));
}
}
gl_FragColor = vec4(vec3(s/9.0), 1.0);
}

4x4 is better, but my puny Mac Mini GPU starts to hiccup at that many samples when rendering 1600x800.
How are you going to deal with fraud? (And you will have fraud)
All things equal, is there really that big of a difference in regulation between accepting payments and sending payments?
At Bump we tried Campfire, but ended up using IRC (and use an open source IRC bot, https://bitbucket.org/yougov/pmxbot/src). I'm curious why you decided to go with Campfire instead of IRC.
I did read your post and watch your video. It's an interesting idea.

FWIW, if you had an interface like that to generate a quick template as a starting point for a privacy policy, which I could then download to customise for my own business needs, and it was available for a modest fee per use, then that would be interesting.

However, I wouldn't be interested in any sort of ongoing relationship/subscription deal. I'd see this as a one-off job. If the service were cheap/easy enough, it's a one-off job I might come back to do again for any new sites or policy updates later, though.

The result would absolutely have to be some sort of text document or HTML+CSS package that I could download and modify myself, not a link back to your site. This policy has legal implications in Europe, as I'm sure you're aware, and having it hosted by third parties so my users are seeing something beyond my direct control would be a deal-breaker.

The UI itself looks very clean and easy to use, if you could only fix the lag/endless spinners that seem to come up all the time. To me, those would make it painful to come back and use over and over again, even if I used it once to get a starting point for my first privacy policy.

I stand by my earlier view of your launch process, though: This sort of service could have value I would pay for if it were relatively cheap (compared to my time and any legal fees it saves) and something I could just use instantly when I needed it. However, there's no way I would mess around waiting for it, and all that silliness with forced viral marketing looks like a social experiment rather than a service that's there to benefit me as a paying customer. Perhaps you've decided that this doesn't matter if you're not planning to continue with that approach once you've launched and are open to everyone?
How does he know that we can override genetic behaviors? Sure, we can try, but that doesn't mean that we can override them.

Given that you could view large parts of human culture as semi-successful overrides of instinctual behaviors, I'm not entirely sure what kind of thing your thinking of that might not be possible even in principle. Not feeling the instinctual impulses to begin with as opposed to not acting upon them?
The current conventional wisdom is that the birth rate is slowing in the industrialized world, and so overpopulation is no longer a serious concern. While this is the current demographic trend, I feel that such an assessment is short-sighted.

Natural selection (and common sense) tells us that individuals and cultures who value large families (Mormons, Catholics, etc.) will gradually out-populate those which do not. And as people who desire many children begin to make up a larger proportion of the population, it seems likely that overpopulation could resume its exponential trajectory.