skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, but the chain of events for SOPA to kill someone requires it to pass (mixed probability), to survive an inevitable court challenge (unlikely in my opinion), and be enforced against a Wikipedia-like site (also unlikely in my opinion).

For the blackout to do harm, one of the many thousands of people searching for reliable info tomorrow just has to miss crucial information they would have otherwise quickly found. And it won't be Representative Lamar Smith, the MPAA, or the Attorney General blocking readers from getting that info – it will be Wikipedia itself.

I personally am most impressed by those who keep providing the services that they think are right, without regard to the edicts of misguided lawmakers, until the moment men with guns show up and give you no other choice. "You can have my Internet when you pry the servers from my cold, dead hands."

Not, "Oh, yeah? We'll show you, we're taking our toys and going home today. Nyah-nyah."
I'm just getting redirected to the original bootstrap page at http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
> I built myself a job I didn't want.

So the question isn't "how can I make money?" but "how can I create the job I want?". An important part of this is "what the heck kind of job do I want?"

The response "I want to be independently wealthy" seems to circumvent this, but it turns out that you will want a job after all. (If you don't believe me, you may need to find this out the hard way, as I did.) A good example is the viaweb crew, who got rich, then turned around and started another business (YC).

So why not create the job you want in the first place? Though it's true that for some jobs (like being a VC), it helps to have a lot of cash, and a lot of hard-won experience - so creating the job you want might involve doing a lot of stuff you don't want to do. Actually, the nature of "work" is there is always some stuff you don't like. (Yet oddly, we seem to need that to be happy - like the failed Matrix's.)

On top of all this, there are so many unknown unknowns in the world, that it's not realistic to even be able to conceive of your ideal job. (nature's imagination is greater than your imagination; There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy).

This is the very idea of lean, that you can't know what will work, so you can't plan it. Instead, you try experiments to get that knowledge, where an "experiment" is a low-cost way to get information. If it costs too much, it is no longer an experiment, but something else.

So... you can see yourself as on a journey to find out what sort of job you'd like. You might as well begin with what you think you'd like (e.g. where your passion is)... but it's overwhelmingly likely that your ideal job will come as a complete surprise to you. So it doesn't really matter where you start, as long as you start.

"What color is your parachute" has some exercises about discovering what kind of regular job you'd like, which can guide you in creating that job for yourself - but I think it's flawed in that you don't know enough about the world or yourself to be accurate. Still, it's a starting point.

The same goes for finding your passion. You can't know what it is, so start doing stuff. You'll discover more about the world, and more about what you like.

On this reasoning, it might have given you interesting information to have built that billing system, to see if you liked the PR business. It might have lead to something else along those lines; or caused you to definitively go in the opposite direction. You could still close it down - or sell it (or give it away). But if it really is in demand, a competitor would emerge! (this happened to me). So you aren't stuck with it, if you don't want to be.

In a wider sense, the feeling of having to support the project forever transformed an experiment into a life-choice.

BTW: I don't mean this to be targeted at you; I think your one idea per month for a year is really impressive, requiring a lot of guts and gumption. Maybe you were just a bit burned out at the end (I would be - I see "gumption" as my most critical resource). It's just that your story helped crystallise my present concern on "creating a job I want".
> "This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts," said Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a sponsor of SOPA. "Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy."

I'm sure the MPAA's Web site will be online!
I agree with you on this. They have some really good things that they squander with bad management. Delicious should have replaced what ever was being developed internally since it was clearly superior but the company is full of politically minded middle managers who are breading in fighting. Maybe they could start there at fixing the thing, fire the majority of managers.
I agree with your main point. But it's worth noting an interesting trend is developing. Amateur analysts are regularly outperforming professional analysts when it comes to tech stocks. http://seekingalpha.com/article/315207-apple-analysts-perpet... http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/02/bloggers-vs-pros-on-a...
Looking forward to this, as well as the nirvanacore project release.. Good luck on both.
This sentence is often abused, but it does look incredibly apt in this context:

"First they ignore you (the 90s - "internet what? here, buy some CDs instead")

then they laugh at you (2000s - "we can shut down those nerds in seconds!")

then they fight you (2010s - "let's write laws all over the world to criminalize new technology")

then you win." (2020s...?)
Apple did not spent a considerable amount of time tunning BLAS - they just took Atlas, an widely used open source implementation of blas/lapack (and took care of making sure it does not look like ATLAS at first glance, although a simple look at nm will show it is atlas all the way down).
but comments move around depending on votes.
What would really be the reaction if, in protest over - lets say legislation written by lobbyists from Silicon Valley that would make any variation of SOPA illegal - the big media companies had a one day blackout. Why aren't they considering this? Would people flip out because the new episode of Jersey Shore was supposed to be on? Would they understand the motivations and join in protest by contacting legislators?
I guess this technically was a security update -- that version of Java had known vulnerabilities that they could not distribute fixes for. (Because of Oracle's license changes.)
> "IMO continuous integration isn't mentioned at conferences anymore because it has won"

Oh if only that were the case! It hasn't won per se, it's just no uncontroversial. Everyone agrees CI is a good thing, but you'd be surprised how many companies still aren't doing it.
MPAA CEO to Internet: You And Your Blackout Can Drop Dead
About your login issues, I integrated BrowserID to a project I'm working on the other day, and my god, am I in love. BrowserID.org is beautiful and very well made, easy to use and easy for the users to understand (you don't really realize you're at a third party website).

Integration with django took about ten minutes and I don't have to wrestle with all the forgotten password templates and workflows, changing passwords, storing them securely, etc etc any longer. Also, it doesn't depend on Facebook, Google or anyone else (if I want to run the verification myself).

I really hope it catches on, and I'd strongly recommend it to any dev.
It lets you insert shared links to any file in your dropbox by typing @ in any pad - it'll autocomplete by file name.
I would think that the time saved not looking up those numbers yourself and just dialing 911 would make it worth always dialing 911.
Those are the files I'm referring to - if you look in navbar.less for example, you'll see lots of

color: @white;

in the various navbar rules. It would be great if there was a single variable:

@navbarTextColor: @white;

and then all the rules could include:

color: @navbarTextColor;

which is essentially what I've ended up doing.
I'm 6 years in and still learning. I guess it's beyond travel at this point, but it's still an amazing country.

That said, I spent roughly 3-4 months back and forth staying in NY in 2010 and it was also an eye opening experience.

The key is to try and live like a local (as much as your persona permits) - and then address why you feel uncomfortable when you do, yet everyone else around you does not.
The bill threatens the existence of Wikipedia itself, its their right to do whatever they want to protest it. I think your're misjudging the situation a bit. This isn't the same as protesting some random cause, its something they believe can directly affect their organization's continued ability to serve its users.
The fact that MS made an offer to acquire at all helps make Yangs argument regardless of price. There is so much talk of fiduciary duty while ignoring that MS has the same duty to its shareholders. MS must have seen value in Yahoo at that time and offered a significant premium rather than wait for Yahoo to continue to fall and possibly get picked up by someone else. Or perhaps before Yahoo turned the corner and became too expensive for MS to buy.
There is no evidence that aluminum causes Alzheimers. Some early studies indicated a very faint correlation at the population level between aluminum in brain tissue and alzheimers. Some of those studies explicitly noted the likelihood that amyloid plaques were incidentally prone to aluminum accumulation, meaning that Alzhiemers might aluminum buildup, not the other way around. Subsequent research has largely failed to corroborate the correlation, and no causative relationship has ever even been proposed to my knowledge.

If aluminum did cause Alzheimers, then we'd all be screwed, regardless of whether we drink from cans. Aluminum is widely used to treat potable water. You consume large amounts of aluminum in your fruits and vegetables, tea, bear, and grains. You eat aluminum in antacids and pickles. The list goes on.
"It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services."

You (i.e. Mr. Dodds and cohorts) are more than welcome to support the book industry, who, like you, are having some difficulty adjusting to technological advances (though not as much), and purchase a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica for information to replace Wikipedia, which, as we all obviously know, is made up of copyright thieves (just look at all the [WP:Copyvio]s that exist!). But obviously that's not the solution, since you want free (as in gratis) information. /sarcasm

I'll admit it's not hypocrisy yet, but I'd say it's bordering on it.
Yeah, I had this problem at my last job. I had to read around 1000 pages a day of material. I couldn't remember people's names 10 seconds after meeting them. I stopped remembering phone numbers completely. Since I stopped that job life is a lot easier, my brain has so much more space.
Pest Control | Termite Treatment | Rodent Control | Termite Inspection Brisbane
What about googling [emergency room near <zip code>]? I don't know where the closest hospital to where I live or work is, since I have (fortunately) never needed one.
In chapter 2, you describe writing the master dataset to a distributed filesystem (presumably HDFS). If you create a new file with a new record for each update to the dataset, wouldn't this result in lots of small files on the filesystem, resulting of fragmentation. HDFS seems well suited for large files, not small (http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/r1.0.0/hdfs_design.html...).
Got it. Nice.
Or they can just use a mirror, like http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/
Oh god. I helped support an overly customized Confluence wiki that was to be THE wiki for the entire company one summer. I quickly grew to hate the software quite strongly. Took me a while to be objective about JIRA's other products when I used them later.
So it's really targeting people who are already mad keen to execute their exciting vision, and saying: hang on, before committing too much, just test out your assumptions in a low-cost way. It's validation, not search.

I think Ries has a story of three years building a fantastic exciting product that nobody wanted... and wishing to avoid that.
Reuters classifies Wikipedia as "the online dictionary Wikipedia"?
If you want to play this game, be sure your terminal window is sized to 120x40 characters.
Just discovered the refactoring feature.

Select some text. Click "Create Pad" and give it a name. The new pad is created with the selected text and the name links to it. This was a little disconcerting at first but it's absolutely the right thing.

I got the @User stuff to work. I think it matches contacts from my google contacts against other users who have signed up for HackPad. That's reasonable.
So Congress would accept some money up front to stop the gravy train forever? (Noting that some Senators serve for a half century or longer at a time)
What can the tech industry do to really disrupt the film and music industries?

What innovations can really change their business model?

What can really take the power out of the hands of these huge companies with their armies of lawyers and lobbyists?

If Silicon Valley is all about innovation, how can that strength be used to win this fight once and for all?
Yahoo!'s new spinoff, HortonWorks, can become a billion dollar Hadoop company down the line if they carefully navigate around Cloudera and MapR. Not sure how/if that affects Yahoo shareholders.
He has a valid point. Blacking out in protest is obviously an abuse of power, while bribing politicians isn't at all. Shame on the tech companies.
Most non-US based movie industries? MPAA is composed of just six studios:

MPAA’s members are the six major U.S. motion picture studios
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation
Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Universal City Studios LLC
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Show HN: TuneUP.fm
CDA 230 explicitly excludes safe harbor for intellectual property claims. DMCA 512 provisions created a safe harbor for that gap in CDA 230 (provided you meet certain criteria).
The things I am grateful for:

1. Rails and the wonderful community
2. APIs
3. Heroku

also New Relic is SO GOOD you should all use it.

Feedback much much appreciated :]
I know what you are talking about for knowing a book by it's thickness, But also, don't forget about the ability to textually search. I find it invaluable when trying to locate passages, and I really, really miss it when I have a paper book. Also bookmarks are good too.
Google Chrome – An Awesome Browser for Security & Speed
Full list of organisations Opposing and Supporting SOPA
UNCENSORED - A personal experience with DMCA - UMG vs Veoh
Jerry Yang Resigns From Yahoo
So protests and black outs in protest of a bad bill are an abuse of power but funneling millions of dollars to create a bill that censors the Internet isn't? I don't think I could detest the MPAA more than I do at this very moment.
I dont think I claimed that a vendor "cannot do things differently". Not sure where the downvotes came from, so just clarifying.

I would also hazard a guess that the tuning that you mention does not involve a change in the algorithm but are essentially reordering the steps of the algorithm to obtain better caching. I was responding to the parent post which conjectured that BLAS implementations use different algorithms. If you look at your two suggestions, none of them actually change the complexity class of the number of floating operations, but wall clock time oh absolutely.

Although there are matrix multiplication algorithms that have a complexity less than O(N^3) the constants for these are so large enough that the sizes of matrices for which there will be any appreciable benefit are extremely rare to come by.
Hard to say. I think many people on HN would prefer an on-screen keyboard, but that's sampling power users. Then again, it may be that the power users are the ones that are willing to take a stand.
That's a little hyperbolic. Also, what about the AOL-TimeWarner people?
Consider saying this explicitly during the sign-up process! I avoided using my Google account to log in, but I probably would have gone ahead and done it if I'd known that you weren't going to email my contacts.
Hollywood Accounting and SOPA - The Hiltmon
Hypothetical and unlikely? You're talking about legislation that is supported (if not written by) groups that don't exactly have a sparkling track record of being reasonable and not abusing any bit of power that they're given or feel that they're entitled to. Take the Universal/Megaupload fiasco for example.

The Wikipedians are taking action so that "unlikely" isn't even a possibility.

And while Wikipedia may be a central resource, it's not the only or primary source of information (see all the citations). At most it'll be an inconvenience but one that will prove a point.
Why does this go through a Google+ page? The article is at http://www.valuewalk.com/2012/01/how-to-remove-facebook-time...
> old sentimentally attached hardware work so well

I know what you mean. I was running NetBSD on an iMac G4 (the sunflower one) for years and it was great (then the macppc NVidia broke for several months so I switched to OpenBSD).

I use it as a photo server sitting on my bookcase.

Without wishing to get into a flame war, once you try a BSD, the Linux stuff feels a little...raw.
Quick note: read-only mode isn't very read-only. Pasting and typing quickly still works.

I clicked a checkbox within the page copy, and the entire page suddenly blanked. (It may have just been a coincidence, though.)

Otherwise, looks great. :)
Excuse my naivety but how exactly (excluding the handful of tech industry stock option scandals over the last 15 years or so)?
This is really slick! It's the first realtime, WYSIWYG tool I've used that still feels like a Wiki.
You're not the only one who lived through the transition. And IME the good practices that are used in Agile processes mostly are the ones that were well-known and widely-used.

People have written automated tests for decades. People have been testing at the interface level since the dawn of OO and before. Put those together and you've got what is now called unit tests.

People have been making small changes to improve the design of code without changing its behaviour forever, too. Fowler published Refactoring in 1999, but even then it was common practice among experienced programmers to work that way. I assume you're not seriously going to suggest that no-one thought of doing things like moving a method up and down a class hierarchy or splitting a long function into a higher level control function using lower level functions for the details before the book was out. (I'm not disputing that Fowler did a good job of pulling a lot of common knowledge together in a way that is helpful to those just starting out.)

I also assume you're not seriously going to dispute that long-term projects have been managed using shorter-term milestones for a very long time. That's hardly unique to software development, never mind to Agile processes.

Every project I've ever worked on professionally has seen developers naturally pair up or form small teams around the same computer or whiteboard to work through difficult problems or review each other's solutions.

People have been doing what is called continuous integration today for as long as there have been source control systems with check-in hooks.

I first had the idea of organising a big project by keeping a pool of little projects and picking out the most important one to do next when I was about 13 or 14, so I rather suspect that plenty of managers were using the same idea to prioritise long before anyone called it a backlog and worked through it in sprints.

I could go on, but I think you get my point.

Now, there are plenty of other practices required by various Agile processes that weren't (in my experience) almost universal among good programmers before Agile came along. They include:

- TDD

- Full-time pair programming (same computer, two keyboards)

- Collective code ownership (everyone owns everything)

- Forcing short-term milestones into periods of exactly the same length

- Frequent meetings (daily in some processes)

- Relying on organic designs that evolve through arbitrary refactoring by individual developers rather than a carefully planned architecture and smaller-scale designs that are peer reviewed by multiple people

If you want to claim those as the gifts Agile has given us, you're welcome to them. As I said before, most of the good practices were already in use, and the consultants mixed in a bunch of unproven ones later.
Yeah... who else thought, "Wow, 17 years ago... that was in the 80s" before realizing that there was no web to black out then?

I feel like an old, old, man.
Broad browser support for the visually interesting parts.
Ditto on the Omega 3/fish-oil. It's a must-have daily drug for me. If I don't take at least 3 capsules a day, I start acting all jittery and crazy.

Also to the OP: If you're drinking coffee, I suggest gradually stopping. It can cause seizure-like sensations for some people who can't tolerate it well.

Everyone else has some good suggestions: exercise regularly! sleep early, and cut down on the processed foods, and eat more veggies. Also, I recommend adding in some spirituality for good measure. All of these are prudent ways to prevent mental breakdowns as you get older. Programmers are especially prone since some of us don't get much social interaction everyday
Blacking out your own site to protest a law is as silly as cutting off your ear to woo a lover. I like Google's approach.
I personally am most impressed by those who see the possiblity of people arriving with guns (or whatever hyperbolic event you wish to imagine) and then work to avoid it /today/, rather than pretending that the future is out of their hands.
Directors solely have a responsibility to the corporation. The corporation has a responsibility to the shareholders.

This gets mucky on boards of publicly traded boards because large shareholders can be directors and may have divided loyalties. There are strong conflict of interest policies, requirements of care and so on that are intended to help manage this, but it can be a tough balancing act.

Wikipedia has a good outline on director's duties. If you plan on leading a successful startup, learn this cold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors#Duties

I've served on corporate boards and it can be a tricky place to serve in the interest of the organization, balance all of these requirements and stay true to your own personal sense of purpose. Its also very rewarding work and I recommend it highly to anyone that has the opportunity to participate, even for smaller organizations, non-profits, etc.
Playing around developing for a Rasberry Pi (or 4) is going to be one of the coolest/most satisfying things I do coding wise in 2012 I think.
The Stage is Set for an E-Commerce Explosion
I hope Google promotes such Wikipedia mirrors during the blackout as a fallback. (Google usually seems to downrank them.)
I'm not in America, but what about even just saying what key combination you should press to get through the menus to talk to a human?

I even hate waiting for the slow voice to read out the options!
The only problem I've found is that contracting gigs don't pay well and usually want you onsite. I've got 12+ years as a JEE dev and make a decent salary at a big corp but all of the contracting companies out there only want to pay you $50-$55/hr which isn't even close enough to being enough.
SOPA is BACK.
Wow, these guys have had incredible success in the press, almost as if they were first to market. Since they aren't, and there are many sites doing things like this already, I wonder what the secret is.

Is it their investors? Is it the name? Is it something I'm missing?