skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mysterious Time Traveler from a Charlie Chaplin Movie?
Way to destroy one of the remaining strong brands from the (relatively) early days of the web, CBS. (CBS owns CNET.)

Hope it was worth it.
Angry Birds Kids Shirt – Perfect Gift for Your Little One
This guy is a bit too heavy handed in technology is everything and provides some not so convincing examples. I get his point but I'm pretty skeptical that the bakery's core business is now software - in fact I'd rather not taste the products of a bakery that has a core business of software. Yes software is becoming increasingly important to business but many times (ouside SV) software is a tool to better the core service but not the core service itself.
Makes sense, my friend's TV screen is covered with greasy hand-smears from his kid who was weened on touchscreen gestures. :)
Agree with yours (and olefoo's) interpretation of #1; I singled it out because it raised a red flag for me as the kind of statement non-tech savvy people would make, thus calling into question the validity of this piece as a whole. (As much as I, as a software developer, would like to believe it!)
NASA's Overview of Research on Rossi's Claimed Cold Fusion Mechanism
I will try to skirt the politics as best I can, but one thing that I have come to realize with age, is generally those who complain loudly, are not smart enough to see the solutions. But others mistake their complaints as actions and intelligence. I will venture there, because both individuals in that article are guilt of the same, diversionary pandering. I see it in business all the time. It's an arch-type, the guy that comes into the meeting complaining about everything that is messed up, with no actionable recommendation on how to fix it. It's a form of bullshit based on facts and is intellectually lazy.
They're respected for the same reason bands respect labels. It's because often times the only way to make it big, really big, is to be a sellout and get in bed with a label/VC. Businesses need funding like bands and supporting yourself is a bitch so why not sell out and get a free ride?

So we read up on business news and learn how the VCs think so that one day a few of us will get "signed" and hopefully make it big. We all know it can be a kind of predatory relationship but at the same time entrepreneurs are all about taking that one big risk that pays off in the end. So startups, like bands, try to get VC backing in the hope that they won't become yet another company that was chewed up and spit by the VCs and instead becomes the next Google/Facebook/CoolestCompanyEverCo.

So are they really respected? Kinda. Depends who you are. Much of that perceived respect is akin to research so we can get in bed with them. Kind of like books on how to easily bed women except we read it right from the horse's mouth.
I'd believe it. I remember when I was just learning to program, I used to do crazy hacks to do stuff I had absolutely no idea how to do because I didn't know it was hard. That is, I tried anyway and tried weird ways I mightn't even think of now, simply because I didn't know any better. The code was terrible, but I got results.

Nothing near as hardcore as the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, and the first object-oriented software system in one year, sadly ;-)
I linked to the most interesting document. The FOIA request was actually made for 3 documents:

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Za...

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Ne...

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Bu...

These 3 documents are discussed here:
http://ecatnews.com/?p=1570
Well, how angel investing should be :) Should reward finding good companies early, giving them some funds to get their valuations high, and have a high multiplier on the exits.
I think the intent of #1 is clear (I agree with your reading of it) but the sloppiness of the statement is distracting. Same really for #2, though it looks like I'm wrong and Google does have three official languages..still I have a hard time believe a 30,000 employee company would not use many more languages internally in some capacity.
Ask HN: What's your Twitter beef? I'm searching for ideas.
Hi,

This is my first Ask HN so I hope the format is okay.

I'm looking to solve a problem that Twitter has as a weekend project.

I'd like to get a list of what problems others see using twitter (spam, whatever) and see if I can tackle one of them.

That's it, hopefully this is enough to go with!
Cellular voice is only VoIP once it gets to the cell base. It is still CDMA/GSM over the air. The cellular companies have spent many hundreds of millions of dollars researching how to most efficiently compress voice into a narrow spectrum. I would think that VoIP OTA would be quite a bit less efficient.
Missile Component Damaged in Accident
http://www.graphycalc.com/
A nice 3d calculator in JavaScript by Dean McNamee
They'd need to drag Lou Reed out for that, right?

http://www.theworldsbestever.com/2011/11/29/makes-sense-2/
I was the top math student in my school every year of my life, and I always hated math, and I even still shy away from it when I can.

I do educational research now (engineering/science/history education - but yeah I still shy away from research on math education).

The reason I believe is because kids aren't taught why math is relevant or useful to them.

For example I still remember in first grade, we got handed a big book of math problems and had to go through them all over the course of the year. It was so boring, I raced to finish it as soon as I could. I remember racing with other students in fourth grade, too, to see who could finish tests the fastest. That probably did have a role in my math abilities improving. There have been studies of having kids 'race' through math problems really fast so that they learn to do it more automatically, and this is apparently common practice in China if I recall.

This may help learning math, but it doesn't help and possibly hurts interest & motivation to learn math. And studies have shown that interest and motivation are what correlate the most with our career choices, not test scores or abilities.

Finally, yes, there are solutions already out there that teach math in a way that makes it relevant and more interesting to students - they just haven't spread all over yet. The Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) project out of the Netherlands is very old, and there have been similar efforts since then. They are basically theoretically grounded in what is known as situated cognition. All cognition/learning is tied to the context. Jean Lave for example showed how some Brazilian street children had developed very sophisticated math skills on the streets. Some less depressing contexts for learning math skills might be in the grocery store, or in creating a game or other software app (which is how I came to finally see the uses of differential equations and matrices and trigonometry and the like after college - creating educational software applications).

John Dewey knew about this 100 years ago. He said we shouldn't educate students for the future (which is uncertain and unimportant to kids), but instead educate them for today. How is what you are teaching them useful to them right now, in their own lives, not the lives of adults or professionals.

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
On the other hand, people said the same thing about the telecoms pre-iPhone. The way I see it going down: Apple does an exclusive in the US with DirecTV, and gets a satellite raw feed to a 100% Apple interface. Since most people in the US can switch to DirecTV if they want to, if the Apple TV ends up becoming successful, the cable operators would have to also play ball.
It looks similar to http://keek.com which I saw today on MoMB as "the easiest way to share microvideo with friends, family and the world."

Which itself looks like a video version of the YC backed site http://dailybooth.com (and messageparty)

add: http://www.mobypicture.com/ could be best because it does a/v/i with sharing and apps (inc new iphone app http://mathys.vanabbe.com/proudly-presenting-the-new-moby-ip...)
No, I never used a book or any equations. People would give me questions with no context, and I would take a second to think through it and then help them. Things like solving systems of equations are easy - you just need to truly understand algebra. Similarly, high school geometry doesn't get far past the axioms themselves.

As a disclaimer to all of this, I was the type that had fun proving stuff in seventh grade and had already read through Spivak's Calculus by Grade 10.
If you run a bakery and know how to write software (or convince other talented people to do so for you), do you think you'll be more or less competitive than a bakery owner that doesn't?

Think about what software can do for a bakery:

- use the web to sell more product

- save gas money and time when delivering to wholesale customers

- make production more efficient

- use just-in-time ingredient ordering to keep spoilage and inventory costs down

Perhaps you build those systems in-house and they (in addition to a killer baguette) are what makes you special.

Or perhaps you productize your software and make millions selling it to bakeries (or spin off a company to do so).

How will the baker who knows how to make good bread but doesn't know how to leverage software compete with you?
2nd grade math
2nd grade math lessons, worksheets and homework help tips for parents.
You have to draw a line. If he's changing what he meant or something was mis-interpreted that's not entirely your fault so it's not entirely your time for free.

When you launch something, give him 15-30 days to find anything, that's it. Anything after 15-30 days is billable.

Make sure you have every feature clearly defined before building things. Get signoff at every step of "What are we trying to build", "How are we going to build it" via email so there's no room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding.

Customers will always be clueless, thats why they hired you. Educating them on how software works, interacts and affects things takes time, unfortunately.
I added some music and now I can't figure out how to add more. Anyone got any clues?
That's curious... I would have thought a land-dwelling mouse would have more G-force tolerance than a whale living in neutral buoyancy oceans. Are you using that as an illustrative example (eg. mice and elephants), or does that still hold for mice and whales?
This pressure is the natural misalignment of incentives of investors and entrepreneurs.

It's a cliche, but it's true: investors want you to go big or go home. Their outcome is binary. The IRR they see gets killed if you take 15 years to exit instead of 5. As an entrepreneur, you may very well make life-changing money by riding it out and making your vision work eventually, but that's not how (most) (professional) investors measure success.

Which is why you should think long and hard before you raise money about whether you WANT to deal with that misalignment in your life.

No doubt, raising money is viewed as cool (viz. entreporn) and may ease your path in other ways, but it introduces certain physics to your business.
But was this built by a couple of guys sneaking into the building after their contract expired? If not, it's merely serviceable.
What really got me was the lack of context. Here's some math - learn this stuff. Had the teacher just taken a few minutes to explain "look these equations are used in machine learning and powers google", that might've ticked your interest. Instead you developed this suspicious mindset where you couldn't really tell if they were wasting your time or not (which they often were).

It gets even worse because you spent six years in grade school grinding long division (oh god) then finding out it's almost useless. The introduction of more interesting math times out well with the rebellious phase where you stop trusting adults.

Only reason I ever got into math was programming. I'm just so happy none of the highschool computer teachers knew how to program and had us memorizing MS Word instead, because I'm sure they would've ruined that to.

As a tangent I was talking to a friend who studies astronomy. She does math for fun, but haaates programming and sees it as dull busywork. Her first introduction to it was through school and it's all "punch in these numbers and see what it does".
There are several layers the author is arguing.

First, he is telling developers that they are awesome. That's nice to hear, and of course will guarantee a friendly reception by developers. :-)

Secondly, he is arguing that all businesses will be heavily software driven, and if they don't invest in IT, they will be winding up buying from a "cloud" provider.

Thirdly, he is arguing that management needs to take a long position on hiring(non-pedantic note: a long position is where you expect a stock to go up, it is the "buy low sell high" approach), because it will pay off massively. Investing into software creators on the 50-year plan will provide heavy returns, because business are becoming software-ized, and it will pay off.

I think in the scope of the next fifty years, the author is correct in that software will be one of the core strata of societies across the board (I don't see us there yet by a long shot - some places don't even have electricity still).
What's there to understand? Every company in the world would like you to buy a whole new whatever-it-is-they-sell. If you don't need it, don't buy it.
I would imagine they don't play The Unforgiven trilogy live much because they seem to be more mainstream than what their fans (at the concerts) would like.
Huh?

thread management they're required to trap into the kernel to acquire a mutex.

Of course GC is handled by the VM. That's not the point here though - the point I thought you made was that the GC uses mutexes and they're required to trap into the kernel. (At least that's how it reads above) That's not the case on Linux. GC uses mutexes which are implemented as futexes[1] that stay in user space for most of the time.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/uclibc@uclibc.org/msg02787.html
Inaccuracies: SunSpider was not developed by Mozilla (it was Apple), and kraken is not based on SunSpider.
Ask HN: How many of you have been to DEFCON?
Would you recommend attending DEFCON?
Verizon is blocking Google Wallet on Galaxy Nexus
Starbucks accounts for 26M in mobile payments
Seagate's Hail Mary. The hybrid SSD/HDD Momentus XT
I use ^K all the time, but somehow I didn't remember ^Y from my dalliance with Emacs a decade ago. And now that I know I want it, I can't have it. Crap.
Based on the other replies (which I greatly appreciate - thank you), I think I have a better understanding of the paragraph. I was particularly interested in understanding the author's distinction between individualistic and guild-minded developers. It seems to me that he is suggesting the following:

When a developer find herself working in a company that undervalues her, she will typically react one of two ways:

1. "Individualistically": Such developers might begin by bargaining for better terms at their company, but they are quick to leave the company to 1) consult, 2) join/found a startup, or (following way in the distance) 3) join another company. Individualistic developers invest time in learning new technologies to stay current, because their ability to be so mobile exists primarily because they can work in such varied environments. These developers still seek large windfalls, so they "hedge their bets" - taking high-risk jobs more often than most people. Individualistic developers are probably younger than other kinds of developers.

2. "Guild-Minded-ly": Such developers will respond to workplace injustice by leveraging their connections to find another job - probably at a company with similar specifications to the one they are leaving. A guild-minded developer might be an ex-Google employee who - over the years - has built relationships with people at Microsoft and Facebook. In order of preference, such developers seek jobs with 1) another company, 2) a startup, 3) themselves (consulting). Stock options are less effective at retaining guild-minded talent, because they are not as concerned with large windfalls. Guild-minded developers are probably older than individualistic developers, and they also probably want to stay at a job for longer.

The above is probably not a 100% accurate representation of what the author was trying to say. But if it is, I don't much care for it.

While it's true that some of us are more likely to work for ourselves, or tend to be risk-averse, or desire long-term relationships with a company, I don't think the author's division of mindsets encapsulates these motivations.

There also seems to be a lot of overlap between his divisions: Both sets of developers are active in the community (individualistic developers via open-source, and guild-minded developers via whatever a guild is - and probably via open-source, too); both developers are very mobile despite attempts to retain them; and both groups supposedly represent highly talented ("10X") developers as opposed to average ("1X") developers.

I found the article interesting - though I'll need time to digest it and form an opinion. But his decision to close with an articulation of this division is strange. It seems tangential to the larger point, which is that good developers (of whatever group) are important.
If he's calling you to fix something that you gave to him, that was broken because you messed up: -Fix it for free. You sold him a bill of goods, and it's your responsibility if it's broken. Broken does not include things like a new feature that they feel should have been part of the original spec, but never told you about. It also does not include changes in the design that they had already approved.

If he is calling you to add something (or change something) that he thought should have been part of the spec, but never actually told you about: -Charge if it's more than a few hours. Tons of clients sell a developer/designer on a spec, only to change their mind once it is all done. This is not your fault. Just because they don't like their idea once they see it, doesn't mean you should eat the cost.

All that being said, some clients (read: most clients) will always try to get some work done for free. If they are a good client, that has a proven track record of being understanding when you need more hours, or listen to your recommendations, then go ahead and do a few hours of free work to make them happy. But if this is your first project with this guy, you need to stand firm. Work is not free. New features are not free. Changes are not free. These are all things that take you away from the things you love in life, and you need to be compensated for. If they don't understand this, than they are free to search for someone who will work for free. My old coach (boxing) used to say, "Only a fool gets punched for free".

Don't let a client bully you into becoming a volunteer worker.
Acquired traits passed via RNA
A company can fix a problem without sponsoring a product associated with the problem, just like a company can release a product for a competing platform.
It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?).

Package managers are a great upgrade from having to manually update individual applications, and are still great for servers or other cases where upgrading can break crucial pieces of infrastructure - but for consumer desktop applications, there's no reason to waste your time doing sysadmin work.

When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)
When several dm messages are exchanged between two people (you and one other) in a short period of time, Twitter (or your client) will auto-detect and move into a chat mode.

The 140 character limit really starts becoming a serious limitation.

Perhaps you could implement this feature such that it would only trigger if both of you are on a fat (read: desktop) client so it doesn't cut off the mobile subscribers who may still depend on the 140char limit.
Also from Waterloo, but I think you got this mixed up. There is an outflow of talent because there are only few exciting, innovative places to work in Waterloo. So sure, you can call it a shortage of jobs, but really the culprit is a lack of innovative/entrepreneurial/managerial expertise. Things are changing for the better, but slowly.

Also, it's goina be pretty hard to convince someone from Silicon Valley, NY (or even Redmond) to move to Southern Ontario, let alone Waterloo, unless your doing some really cool, or you can pay them a lot. Obviously people who go to school here are much more likely to stay, but even then, most of them would take a job in California if they had the chance.
Webcam chat
This blog talks about webcam chat, video chat, and video calling programs and website. Learn more about the best video chat technology! if you are online, it always pays to be cautious about who you are chatting to and who might be watching in on your conversation.
Samsung tablet concept shows a see-through, bendable future (w/ video)
Why would that be (nearly) a firing offense?
Homer: Mr. Mayor, I hate to break it to you, but this browser is infested with Flash.

Helen: Think of the parents!
I would venture to guess that some of it may be due to American exceptionalism or better put the belief in it. Until recently optimism has been a pretty big trait among middle class Americans. It was not uncommon to have a conversation with someone and have them say something like it will all work out, or brighter days are ahead, with both parties taking it as an absolute truthful forgone conclusion. As such perception is reality, when people believe that they tend to not allow their mind to venture towards the negative and tend to offer advice that while valuable, is only geared towards the positive outcome. This may in effect reinforce the perception of optimism and exceptionalism. I could be wrong but I would suspect that it is a contributing factor.
Worth noting that CNet is under new owners (CBS Interactive).
Bought the app for previewing Fireworks PNGs, but how can I view pages in it?
The emphasis is on "core" - software is just a tool to enhance the core business as you're pointing out. If the bakery's core business sucks but they are great at software they will still suck as a bakery.
60/40 sounds fair if you already have a good deal of effort into it.
Coderetreat: A first-time facilitator’s view
I don't know about that, but I guess we'll find out soon enough. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt since this is all on Universal's words, they provide an amazing service, have license agreements with EMI and lots of smaller labels.
Just a few years ago, "41 shots" was the rallying cry. Now it is "41 million."
Trucos en el poker
That was actually a great explanation - to clarify a bit, yes, jwz doesn't have any issue with Emacs. But Mac used to use the same key bindings typical of Emacs, so jwz is miffed because for people comfortable in that environment, it's a pain to not be able to use the same shortcut for what amounts to copy, paste and cut.
This is the test that the school board member with multiple degrees failed.
Perhaps "questionable" would have been a better adjective than "quirky."
http://arewefastyet.com/old-awfy.php is the most impressive
Show HN: Write and deploy your first web app in 5 minutes, no setup needed
I'm usually one to wince upon these mistakes, but for all I know a Nobel Prize winner could be a hillbilly. Some people like to use their time to get things done instead of worrying about grammar. It takes some time to accept that.