skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked these essays when I was young, because these were so encouraging. It treated us programmers as special snow flakes, and advertised us the romantic super exciting world of startups.
Now as I got older and more experienced I find these essays trivial, boring or simply not true.
I realized I no longer gain anything 'usable' for my life from such essays.
(I find less and less interesting most essays from Joel and others also. I am more and more interested in actual business opportunities and connections, and less and less interested in general essays about enterpreneurship and programming.)

Creating wealth is relatively easy, but I don't care about it anymore (except as a hobby), I care about creating money, which is much harder.
All the stuff about programmer productivity in this essay is first not true but more importantly not really important anymore in my opinion.
At most startups and big companies programming is a commodity. By 2011 we programers are good enough, programming became matrue enough that it is really a commodity now. Not a cheap commodity, but a commodity: a $100.000 per year commodity. I argue that in 2011 (maybe not in 2004) you can find really good people for $100.000 per year if you know how to find these people. You can find much cheaper in Eastern Europe (where I live) if you are not so snob that you think programmers in the West are so special. So unless you work on something very deeply technical or technicall revolutionary (so you are not John Carmack working on the fastest rendering engine on the planet or you are not the engineer behind Gogle's superfast javascript engine) your value as a programmer is someting like $100.000 or something. There is no '36x multiplier because of programmer productivity.' I think if the market is quasy efficient that means if your startup would be about programming then the expected value of your earnings would be sometinng like this value ($100.000) in your startup.
What kind of multipliers there really are:

- There can be a multiplier because of your idea, your product, your marketing, and your connections. But not programming (in case of not technically deep startups. Technically deep startups are quite rare.)
- There is a factor which is related to how popular it is to create a startup. If it is super popular because of marketing essays like this, then it is possible that there are too much startups of constant sized markets, so that your expected value of earning could be even less than $100.000. At the time of this essay, when starting-up was not that popular we could not really speak of saturated markets, so that your expected value of earning was probably more than $100.000. The more people start-up the less attractive it will be to start-up. So the more successful PG's essays will be the less true they will be.
Anything that could push ssd prices down in the long run is good news.

I am really hoping MicroSoft and Sony decide to put an SSD in their upcoming consoles, that kind of volume would help lower prices too.
I tried it a few years ago, but I had a hard time getting into it. (Back then, ) its documentation failed past the obvious first examples, which meant that the authors basically assumed you already knew everything about how to write realtime 3d graphics on modern hardware and recent OpenGL versions.

I'd assume that if I already knew all of that, I would've probably made some own code for it before, so wouldn't need Cinder for anything. Compared to Processing, Cinder's entry-barrier is orders of magnitude higher.

Or maybe I'm just too stupid. :-)
Same decree issued by telco authority here in Finland. Nice combo with the mandatory data retention laws (must use isp mail servers + isp must keep and hand out logs to authorities).
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37Signals is mainly a company that engages in self promotion. Very little of what they do seems to be about products, it's mostly to do with PR.

Making a movie about themselves seems like exactly the sort of thing they would do, and I'm sure it'll be lapped up by their followers.
Selecting a Seller's Yacht Broker
"“The Gary Numan” - 1 oz. Cocaine. Serve on rocks. Garnish with fire."

"“The Cradle of Filth” - 8 oz. Blood, 8 oz. Cough syrup. Combine in highball glass and serve. Stir quickly."

Made me laugh :) Although the 'Brahms' recommends 10oz of ecstasy, which seems improbable!
I suppose I just have a hard time getting too exercised about what is, essentially, a banal artifact of a highly idiomatic language. When I find myself getting bogged down over a particular expression, I step back and ask myself: if person A uses this expression, will person B understand what they mean? Really, this is all that really matters.
IMHO The best way to reduce spam is to identify the problems in the current incarnation of email and design a new system that takes such problems into account.
Why would it be? It's the same as the GPL, only difference is: modified version sources must be available to remote-network-interaction users. I don't see what's restrictive for business.
Thank you.

I find very few poor or middle class people who continuously hold the belief that "money isn't important" or they "don't care about money". Once you've got that FU money - you can say FU - that's why it's called FU money!

The few that do may do so because of religious/spiritual beliefs, but almost everyone without enough money cares about it, because a) it's scarce and b) necessary to live.
What? How? Who?  would  drive you for award winning product.
I remember this too. The result was usually that I'd start panicking once I realized that I couldn't consciously see where the blocks were going. This resulted in making mistakes and the blocks piling up quickly.
It's open source insofar as the code, when it is released, will be released under an open licence. However, it fails the 'unofficial' criterion of a project that is developed in the open. See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ
Oh probably. But I'm pointing out that you can demonstrate a SQLI attack without having to completly take down someone's site.
Buridan's Ass and the decline of Object Orientation
مشاهدة مباراة الزمالك واتحاد الشرطة بث مباشر اون لاين
Having source on GitHub is not the only definition of "open source." The generally accepted definition is that the source is available (you may have to ask for it), it might be free (you might be charged for media, though that is less of concern here in the future), and the recipient can modify and redistribute the source.

It might be more appropriate if the site had text like "if you are interested in the source code, please email us." As it stands, it does seem like they are selectively releasing the source (and this is an assumption, right, since the site doesn't say "request an invite and get the source?").
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These guys sell 1.000.000-ish licenses of, say, $40 on average every month, with 25 employees (or something like that). Do the math on how much profit they're making. Now that they got bored of buying exclusive cars that match the Italy villa, they hired a filmmaker.

Why would they care what an investor thinks about that? The message to customers is, and will be, "so many people chose these products, they must be good". It'll take years for that trend to reverse, and by then they can just fire the filmmaker, hire one extra interaction designer and make another nice product that they can make everybody want.
Amusingly, it also gives terrible results for bands named after drinks...

"“The Dirty Martini” - 1 bottle Pinot Noir. Serve at room temperature. Garnish with maraschino cherry."

And searching for 'vodka martini' just gives a blank page.

'James Bond' gives an amusing warning from Last.fm - the 'artist picture' is a sticker saying "Put only the correct artist name in your file's ID3 Artist tag to avoid incorrect or duplicate results."
So what is the best tactic after finding one?
Driving in an underground parking lot and sticking it on another car?
No matter how nicely this is integrated. It is backwards thinking.

It is ABSOLUTELY possible to type fast on the iPad/iPhone virtual keyboards. It is possible to touch type on these keyboards as well. No you can't do it the same way as a mechanical keyboard, but it isn't that difficult. You just use different physical cues, not your finger tips.

Also, if you are going to type something that is going to take a little time. Why not just take a $69 wireless keyboard out of your bag?
HTML is a structured document format, with CSS for styling and presentation.

The web became so popular that developers want HTML to be an unstructured data format with a separate fully-fledged layout language.[1]

Neither idea is wrong, there's just an impedance mismatch between the two.

There are three options:

1. The status quo. Developers mangle technologies designed for something different so it does what they want, with an increasing use of libraries and abstractions. It's inefficient and messy, but it works and is backwards compatible.

2. Give up on the idea of structured data and try to mangle HTML/CSS to be closer to what developers want. You end up with a crap structured document language and a crap web application language, but the web application language will be slightly less crap than the status quo.

3. Create a new language actually designed for web applications with a proper layout engine and HIGs to go with it. Despite being the most sensible option, this isn't realistically going to happen. A lack of backwards compatibility kills adoption and browser makers will never agree. It took them a decade to agree on a font format.

None of the options are ideal. I suspect somewhere between 1 and 2 will happen in reality.

[1] Layout is also a really hard problem. I don't think it's been acceptably solved in the general case.
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What Advice Did Steve Jobs Give to Mark Zuckerberg?
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"If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year."

I'm not sure whether this was meant tongue-in-cheek or not, but ...

If someone's worth $80k to company X, they're worth $80k in the context of the value the provide to company working as part of the whole. At least some of the "corporate bullshit" is at least partially necessary to make the company run.

A developer "programming" outside the context of company X might be able to provide more value to a wider audience, but not without some level of "corporate bullshit" (legal, financial, etc). And they're not going to create $3m of directly accessible money without a decent amount of "corporate bullshit".

The same skills that are worth $80k to company X might have nearly $0 value to anyone outside the context of company X.
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Would a better alternative not be to not allow insecure mail servers? Why don't mail server providers disallow their programs from being open relays or have IP/Username and password restrictions in place.

I configured our mail server to only accept mail from our internal work IP address and from authorised users.

Obviously mass mail providers will only be able to impose a username and password restriction but I would say the best way is to stop people producing mail software that can be open.
Samsung Focus Flash: A Great Phone, An Awesome Price
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Show HN: Visually inspect Javascript events with Visual Event
Impressive how this site always have shacky blurred pics and claims to make a comparison. WTF is this seriously?

Oh i know. Bullshit that's what. They don't even care.
Few tips to DSA pass Driving Theory Test
It is very easy to score 50/50 in this section, if you know exactly what to expect on the exam day. And it's not about how much you study but how well you study. Follow my tested study pattern and score 50/50! You just can't fail with it.
It's pretty stupid, but the only problem I have with using something like Arch on my desktop is I can never seem to get the fonts to look nice (ie. like they do in OS X or Ubuntu) when I've installed/configured Xorg myself.
There is already a 100% open source version of Amazon S3: Openstack swift (http://swift.openstack.org). Swift is in use by many companies, and it is the software that runs Rackspace's Cloud Files product, storing petabytes of data and billions of objects.

Swift's code is available on github (http://github.com/openstack/swift) and devs and users are almost always available in #openstack on freenode. There is a wealth of info available and more available to anyone who asks.

I'm all for encouraging many people to solve large-scale storage problems. However, as others have pointed out, nimbus is claiming to be open without providing much detail.
The article doesn't make the assumption of linear change in science, on the contrary, studying nobelists means you have only those who made the big leaps forward. There were big leaps in medicine and chemistry, and the pattern seems to be valid: to my knowledge in life sciences you have few young geniuses and many awards are given to collaborative work. Seems like a natural consequence of the fact that science has become increasingly complex and computational.
Wow. at first I thought you were linking to something actually interesting and thoughtful regarding the nature of security and open source software. Turns out you were being boorish, prejudicial and wrongheaded about the absolutely normal and acceptable use of language. There is no such thing as linguistic prescriptivism. What you are espousing is the linguistic intellectual equivalent of creationism. It only exists in unfortunate circles of bored, annoying laymen and their grammarian fore-bearers, who were equally unfortunate bored and annoying. For 10,000 reasons why you should leave everyone alone with your silly prejudices, see Language Log or any other of the dozen or so blogs linguists run. </rant>
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Christian jewelry in wogwear.com
WOG Wear, Inc. has released the first of several religious and
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contain the entire King James Version of the Holy Bible, all 788,280
words of it. The Crystal Bible(TM) also known as the Nano Bible(TM) which
is based on silicon chips is currently the world's smallest and stores
millions of characters, and hundreds of pages on a very small area. The
text can be viewed with the help of a 400x microscope with a light
underneath. Now happy customers will be able to keep the Word of God
(WOG) with them as a reminder of their faith at all times by wearing <a href="http://http://www.wogwear.com/" target="_blank">Christian Jewelry</a> like necklace, bracelet, pendant, or key chain.
Asimo seems quite a bit more advanced overall than those robots. They are designed for quite specific purposes and domain - it's hard to tell but they also don't seem autonomous. With Asimo, Handa is going for a general purpose robot that can emulate a human while Boston Dynamic appears to be going for more specific military needs with things like BigDog.
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At 3% equity, he would need either a really, really big hit or a lot of big successes to become a billionaire. From YC's modus operandum, I think pg cares more about shaking up Silicon Valley than he does about maximising return on investment.
Remind HN: Off-year Elections in the States Today
Just a reminder for all my stateside friends to get out and vote in the off-year elections today. No matter what your political views, the rest of us need your participation.
As others have said, being open source is important because it gives you more control over your data. If you have access to the code that is storing your data, you have the option to host it yourself or pay someone else to host it with the same client. I've written about this more on my blog (http://programmerthoughts.com/openstack/democratization-of-d...).

If you are looking for an alternative to S3, I'd ask that you look at Openstack swift (http://swift.openstack.org). It's 100% open source, proven at scale in production, and, if you are hosting it yourself, can offer lower op-ex than using S3 (of course, there is a cap-ex cost to buy your hardware).
Hodgkin and Huxleys seminal work in neuroscience was done in their late 30s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodgkin%E2%80%93Huxley_model

Feynman formulated the path integral at age 30
Have you tried this? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration

Fonts needs some setups indeed before to get something good.
Spoken languages versus programming
I excelled at learning a 2nd and 3rd language at a university level. Do you think this skill could translate to learning the languages of programming? Why/why not?
I started last week and compiled a stable Redis 2.8 this morning.
I know this sounds over the top, but 500 Startups hires http://www.micro-documentaries.com/ to shoot for them all the time. I'm sure at some point it's cheaper to hire a full time person than constantly be hiring out to a shop.
That is quite a normal concern. Fortunately, the Archlinux wiki has good info on how to configure fonts: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#Ubun... (that link leads to the section about Ubuntu-patched packages, but the whole page is a good read).

If you use Archlinux, make sure you use the wiki and bbs to their full power. Most of the problems you think of have been solved in a way or another. It usually just requires installing some packages, which is a breeze.
"Arch Linux is a very fun and stable distribution that successfully blends the bleeding edge, stability and hackability of Linux"

let's define 'stable' http://www.tuxtips.org/?cat=3
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Despite me cynicism I now think that business coaching can help
Linux Mint Pulls Ahead of Ubuntu
Dyson: Design and invention can power us out of recession
I configured our mail server to only accept mail from our internal work IP address and from authorised users.

So if one of your office PCs catches an e-flu, it will have no trouble using your mailserver to spread spam.

The way I see it, the only way is to make SMTP authentication mandatory _everywhere_ (except perhaps on your desktop localhost, which should accept mail from you, but should be required to authenticate when pushing your outgoing mail to your upstream mailserver).
Css3 background transition (workaround)
The words "Conscious" and "unconscious" to describe thought states is like trying to cram an array of ints into a boolean. I always saw my mind as a collection of states ranging from "Front and center, obvious when I'm wide awake" to "mysterious process I cannot control". Like night time brain optimization strategies, night time breathing, squeeze-loosening process to get the small intestine to flow, etc.

We need a better resolution picture of "Conscious" and "Unconscious".
Beyond the Infographic: Parallax Scrolling Landing Pages
Perhaps he's not the first one to do it? Only the first to tell Apple that he did it.
maybe if YC were acquired by another VC firm, he might be able to get a large multiple off of his ownership stake.

either way, that would be cool to see pg become a billionaire. I wonder how he would shake up philanthropy? He might be able to find a better charity model than what currently exists today..
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Well, the same problems apply to postal mail, IM and phone calls, etc.

I think the two properties which a comms method needs to have a spam problem are:

1) it is inexpensive to communicate with someone

2) it is has a fixed, human-memorable "address" which can be communicated out of band (business card, verbally etc)

Once you have these two things, such lists of fixed address can accumulate and be circulated - and they can be spammed.

(2) implies that your comms method accept comms from unknown people. (1) is necessary for spammers to bother to do to use that channel to communicate with you.

I think you have to give up one or the other of these things to avoid spam. Note that (1) is a sliding scale. Physical post is significantly more expensive than email to send, and suffers less spam - but it is not non-zero.

Basically if cost of "customer acquisition" < "cost to send spam" on that comms channel, then you'll get some (if (2) is met).

[*] I suppose some heuristics to decide if it is OK for "random unknown user X" to contact me can help. But false positives are the very devil here...
Actually, many people consider it. Some are simply cautious about hosting their data with a third party. Some are prevented from using a third party for compliance or regulatory reasons. Also, it's generally more cost-effective for extremely large datasets to be self-hosted rather than hosted by a third party.
Plumbr: Real-time JVM app monitoring for memory leaks
Everyone at Apple who does security knows of Charlie Miller. The guy has a phd and hacks Apple products and wins prizes and writes research papers, etc. If they don't know of him I'd be very surprised.
Running, jumping on one foot while turning 90 degrees. I think that is just remarkable stable.
Take a look at this slowmo-footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifl55QShWfE
It looks like the legs are constantly adapting. But ofcourse this could be programmed.
He wasn't detained in the UK for holocaust denial. He was detained because there had been a European Arrest Warrant issued for him.
pg's multiple comes first from how the programmer is deployed, and only then from the talent edge. His example of a programmer deployed in a lacklustre way is maintaining and tweaking a piece of software.

Look at it this way. Before Google, there were plenty of very smart people working on improving search. Page & Brin might have had a valuable talent edge, but what made them able to jump ahead of the other, far better resourced, search companies is that they were applying their skills to the right problem, namely, how can we best analyse the whole corpus of data, rather than how can we tweak HTML content extraction to support indexing. There's luck in Google's success, but it is clear that there is a big difference in deployment.
That's actually pretty sinister. I'm in Norway, and although there hasn't been any push to centralize and consolidate the e-mail servers in the name of spam, the EU data retention directive was passed here in April after lots of resistance.

I hoped that our neighbors were in a better position to fight these attacks on liberty online. Is privacy on the web really under this much pressure in Finland?
Banks overspend by 40% on IT
Probability of this Eidul Adha is more than hundred times higer than last year.
So that if one of your office PCs gets compromised the SMTP authentication is also compromised, and therefore you have the same problem. This is assuming you don't require that someone type their password everytime they send a message--that'd be ridiculous.
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Apple Store app v2.0 is out with EasyPay self-checkout
Well, once the factories in Thailand are back online next year (read somewhere, can't find the link, sorry), wouldn't it make the scaling redundant ?
If you already know how to program, then maybe. Why don't you find out?

If you don't already know how to program, then no. Programming languages are precise and unforgiving of "obvious" errors in ways that human languages aren't.