skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So here we have a man who bills himself as "Google's top-rated futurist speaker". What the hell does that mean? According to his bio he doesn't work for Google, nor does he list Google among his clients. Oh, I see, he's at the top of the Google search results for "futurist speaker".

Frankly, I'm deeply suspicious of anyone making a living as a "futurist" least of all someone who's claim to fame is to have risen to the SEO challenge. Like all good futurists, his stock in trade is big, jaw-dropping visions of the future that drum up some headlines and grab some attention (not to mention that all important Google rank).

And his view of the future is simply preposterous. That teachers will disappear because now we have computers! Lord Jesus haven't we put that one to rest yet? We've been kicking that idea around for twenty years and we now know for a certainty that computers can be a useful adjunct to learning but in no way can replace the student teacher interaction. Or someday in the near future, 3D printers will be churning out iPads and blue jeans. I'm sorry, but this is a completely crock that defies the laws of physics and the boundaries of common sense.
Second time typing this, may have missed something. Got an expired link message.

USP - Unique Selling Proposition. Why you? What pain are you solving? What are they getting?

The very first thing should be:

Come to a four hour workshop and learn how to program an open-source prototyping board and interface with sensors or LEDs. When you leave this workshop, you'll be able to control an LED, read a sensor and control a device from your computer. Don't have an Arduino? You can borrow one or buy one from us.

The first thing I read should tell me precisely what you're offering - at that point, I need to know more details.

If you're looking for 18-30, you're probably exposing them to technology they may not have heard of. Why should they be there? Learn hardware, learn programming, learn some basic electronics, learn hardware interfaces, etc.

You should attend if you want to: learn to control an external device from your computer, want to control a series of LEDS based on inputs from sensors, etc.

At this point, you've hit them with the first paragraph that tells them what the expectations are and what they're going to learn. Now, you need to describe What an Arduino is, the workshop you're putting on, etc.

* utensil misspelled

Make a list of the development environment requirements, libraries that they may want to have handy, etc. You may have this in the confirmation email, I don't know. You want to have a pre-check to make sure they all have what they need - i.e. if you haven't worked with Arduino, show up 30 minutes ahead, we'll plug in an arduino, load a quick program and make sure it builds and runs. You don't want the first 45 minutes spent trying to debug and diagnose getting them working.

I believe for the event price, you're outside impulse purchases and you had too short a time from announce to workshop. I know you built it up in a number of the Hack and Tells, but, from presented concept to event, I think your timetable was too short - and is scheduled on an already busy (potentially expensive) weekend for some potential clients. That said, are vistors from out of town potentially interested in this versus the weekend on the beach in SoBe? Cross promotion could work, but, that makes for one very expensive weekend for part of your target demographic.

Referrals work, are hard to track, should be part of the event management side.

For the Arduino thing we talked about, I suspected based on equipment costs that I would need a 3-4 month announce to event and I still felt that would be cutting it close.

Alumni, college groups, obviously those in computer or engineering classes may be interested. I would think with your connections, you may have already covered this.

Find potential meetup groups that have some crossover. Neil is part of a hardware meetup - they may know students, etc. Perhaps the Android User Group (since there is an ADK that uses arduino, there might be some crossover).
Speaking of bubbles, the optimistic part of me thinks that this really is a bubble, and that the next time the Valley crashes, all the sharks and trolls will be reaped and only honest people will be left to rebuild. It's better to imagine it than the alternative.
Traditional Programming Language Job Trends - February 2012
see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3579128 (earlier discussion from when this was announced).
Siegler is a shameless bottom feeder. He and his ilk are an embarrassment to the tech community, who have sadly gotten rich off the sweat of others.
That's one test. But it's not the only one.

The Dost test establishes if an image depicts lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area. If it does, it's considered child pornography.

Read on the six Dost factors. Note that it's not a bright line test -- you don't need all six to be true for an image of the genitals to be considered lascivious.

The Wikipedia article on the Dost test is quite apropos:

>Concerning the lascivious display of clothed genitalia, the Department of Justice described use of the Dost test in child pornography and 2257 documentation regulations in a 2008 rule, writing that the precedent United States v. Knox, 32 F.3d 733 (3d Cir. 1994) did not prohibit ordinary swim team or underwear model photographs, but "although the genitals were clothed in that case, they were covered by thin, opaque clothing with an obvious purpose to draw attention to them, were displayed by models who spread or extended their legs to make the pubic and genital region entirely visible to the viewer, and were displayed by models who danced or gyrated in a way indicative of adult sexual relations."

The distinction is not nearly as clear as you claim it to be.
Bhopal neither killed nor posed any danger to white people.
Python has pychecker, which will catch that error for you (as I understand it solves the same issues that "use strict" does).
Unless you buy a Macbook that a year or two old, the best you can do is 10-15% which is pretty underwhelming in my opinion.

If you do buy one that is over a year old, the discount can go up to 25%, which is a horrible deal for a computer that was released 1-2 years ago.

Personally, if I were going to buy a used model, I'd check out what's available locally on craigslist.
I have good credit, would you co-sign a car loan for me for free?

No?

How much would I have to pay you to make it worth co-signing?

That's the value of the loan guarantee to you.

The value to me is how much I save on interest due to your guarantee. Or, if I can't buy a car without your signature, the value to me is the difference between the value of owning a car vs. not owning one.
Well, it's only a $1000 laptop, but...

jerf@jerfhom ~/tv $ uptime
01:01:32 up 2 days, 23:45, 4 users, ...
jerf@jerfhom ~/tv $ free
total used free ...
Mem: 3904192 3682400 221792 ...
-/+ buffers/cache: 740212 3163980
Swap: 6297444 20584 6276860

Recall that what "matters" is really that second line, which translates to 740MB being really "used" and 3.1GB being just "stuff I happened to read from disk at one point", which as it happens includes rather a lot of media files. Loading another 4GB of media into RAM isn't going to help my system performance any.

This is with a respectable Linux dev loadout, but I'm not running my VMs, but that still tends not to strain my system any. $100 on RAM would just be a wasted $100.
Responsive Web Design... where do I start?
So, I've been wanting to redesign for mobile users. I currently have designed for fixed width (960px) and realize it absolutely the wrong choice. I am no CSS expert, but have never dealt with using percentages for my design, which I assume I'll need to do if I'm going to build a "responsive" website design (wasn't it once called "fluid" or I guess that's a bit different).

However, I'm not worried about using percentages over fixed values. That's easy. What I want to understand is if there is a way to detect a user on a mobile browser and give them a slightly different experience. For example, hiding the left navigation bar and enabling it to show up when a new icon (that only appears for mobile users) is clicked. Or telling the browser to zoom on only the content when someone tap zooms.

I understand the concepts of "fluid" design where you can user percentages to have everything scale down. However, there are definitely mobile-specific tricks I'd assume and I just don't know where to start...

Can someone help me out here? Any and all help greatly appreciated. Thanks!
CityGrid Places, Reviews, Offers and Advertising API Review
I had the same frustration, until I finally broke down and just fed my JS through jshint (http://www.jshint.com/). Keep a JS console open while developing and have it display relevant parts of the returned object you care about.

Unfortunately there's no reSharper for JS but eh... I feel like it's not as necessary with JS as its a fundamentally simpler language than C#.
I know what he meant. My point was that what he meant isn't what it sounded like at first glance (yay mixed metaphors!) and that's probably why daeken responded as he did.
Israel Says Iran Behind Attacks on Diplomats
No, libraries are rivalrous and excludible, hence a private good.
The wage of construction workers is $34,000, but what is the cost of employing a construction worker? I'm surprised if it does not double the total cost per worker. That said, your point is still taken that it does not explain the full price difference.
According to this, nuclear construction workers can make $75,000/year:

http://money.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2008/03/13/a-...

Presumably nuclear reactor construction requires more skill than building houses or whatever. And this is for people with absolutely zero prior experience, so not counting experienced people, not counting management, not counting various overhead (payroll taxes, HR, etc., which is often significant).

I would not be surprised if components had a similar story to the workers: nuclear means extremely specialized, and that means the normal rules for commodity resources may not apply. For such a political project, it also would not surprise me if certain things were required to be purchased from US suppliers even if they aren't the lowest bidders.

I don't know exactly where all of the difference comes from, but the situation seems more complicated than simply hiring standard construction workers at average salary and buying commodity components from international suppliers.
I think one of the challenges with growing up is that you have to work increasingly hard at preserving that which made you special.

As others have argued, "Don't be Evil" is Google trying to inoculate itself against growing up too much and always having a nagging reminder to strive to be the company they were in their youth. Perhaps the valley was never a gentleman's game, but it was (and still is) much more so than other industries.
Is it just me or does the homepage display noticeable lag when scrolling up/down? I'm assuming its due to the event handlers that trigger certain blocks' showing and hiding based on scroll position.
Actually not even within a year. People kept living there after the explosion. They had nowhere to go anyway. I remember that in Nagasaki (or Hiroshima, not sure anymore which one) they had the tramway back on track just one week after the nuclear bomb. Of course there were a higher number of leukemia and other health issues, but it recovered fast, very fast.
Getting Started with Working for Yourself
if there are 469 pages of best practices more important than "use strict", I think "insane" is a fair description of the language.

I'm not making the point it's impossible to write good Perl, because I know it's possible, I'm saying it's easy to write bad Perl - much easier than in most other languages I've seen.
I didn't have to do anything to get it.

You had to use -c; how often do you see Python programmers do so?

With that said, strict mode should be the default for Perl 5 programs. Having to know the magic incantation to ask the compiler to help you is a barrier to novices.
رسائل عيد الحب13/2/2012 اجمل مسجات لعيد الحب لأول مره
اجمل مسجات لعيد الحب اليوم 13/2/2012 مجموعه من اروع واجمل الرسايل علي النت
مجموعه من رسايل عيد الحب المصريه والرسايل السعوديه
وكمان جبتلكم مجموعه بالانجليزيه وكل سنه
http://mobilatco.com/vb/showthread.php?t=5581
I, for the life of me, don't understand why people defend these gauntlets. Wasn't getting a degree from MIT enough of a gauntlet? Wasn't writing reams and reams of working, robust, well-documented code proof enough of one's software engineering skills?

I think so!
Sure, but there are limits. If you have a company that is heavily focused on web dev, you are naturally going to want people who have web dev experience. Maybe you won't mind too much if someone with a lot of talent has a history with Python or PHP and your current systems are based on Rails, but you will probably be a lot more cautious if someone applies with a background in programming IBM/360 systems and knows nothing about html or the web?

I do think it's important to hire on talent, but I think the other extreme of a super generic "computer-based problem solver" is very unrealistic. Not every company can afford the delay of bootstrapping someone into having expertise with the technologies the company uses.
Wild prediction: automated pizza delivery robots will start carrying a cat onboard to incentivize people to not destroy said robots for fun as they whiz by.
The Best of Convention Web Design
> Your argument is too powerful. It proves engineering as a whole is impossible.

No. It's an argument that we have no good way of estimating the damage caused by rare, spectacular failures in complex systems. But thanks for the down-vote.

> It's an irrational appeal to emotion dressed up in rational trappings.

No. It's pointing out an epistemic hole, one that is essentially the reverse of the sunrise problem [0], that has been discussed by countless philosophers of science, probability theorists, and scientists across dozens of fields. I suggest you read the article I linked and some of the papers it cites rather than make a spectacle of your downright hurr-durr ignorance of the subject.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem
"Hands, and not the robot kind either?" Why not use the robot kind? You're already investing in a fair little bit of capital. As a 3-D printing factory scales up, why wouldn't they invest in additional automation for handling materials that may products have in common?
SEO for Lace Front Wig Promotions
New jobs are created.
Sure. To expand a bit...

Backbone has always been intended to give you the smallest possible set of functionality that you reach for every time you work on a JS-powered web app. Model and Views and events to bind them together, collections with powerful functions for filtering and aggregating data, and shareable URLs.

There are lots of other directions and other needs that JS apps may have, but unless it's something that you're going to use pretty much every time, it doesn't belong in Backbone itself -- it belongs in an extension, or better yet, another standalone library. I'm talking about things like write-through localstorage caching, pushing data over websockets, TreeViews, query syntax for complex JSON, special cross-domain communication, specific HTML-generating strategies, or "mobile" widgets that mimic iOS controls.

Fact is, JS apps are still the wild west when it comes to patterns that work well -- there are plenty of fertile experiments to go around. You want a library that gives you a foundation, so that your app can rise up to meet it and extend it in new directions. I think that pretty much all of the apps in this list fit that description -- going far beyond what Backbone provides out of the box:

http://backbonejs.org/#examples
I feel like this is a part of the larger conversation of how the dynamics of Silicon Valley are changing (at least from my insulated perspective). I'm not going to sit in my arm chair and smatter Silicon Valley but I enjoyed and respected the culture and environment of SV much more 5 to 10 years ago. It may be untrue but I feel like SV is becoming increasingly dominated by hustlers and scheisters and it has become more difficult to effectively collaborate with the many true technologists there. Actually took a job last year outside of the traditional SV circle of companies to take a break from the atmosphere and have found it to be surprisingly more fun from a technological perspective than the consumer internet products I was building previously.
The only valid reasons to "leave" Perl apply equally to Python. Sorry, but it's true.

Compilers are good enough for type systems to be advantages, now.
I definitely see the similarities and would agree with it. Nearly every successful entrepreneur will talk at length about the incredible importance of company culture on success (as that culture in turn permeates through the product, customer service, hiring process etc). I don't see why the same principles would become invalid at the slightly higher level of startup ecosystem.
Hey. What are you talking about? The poster you replied to compares 3-D printing quality to today's textile manufacture and concluded that the latter was too coarse. Does the existence of historical weaving techniques, which may have been superior to modern weaving techniques for those who could afford them, render his assertion false?
Come be a summer intern at Heyzap and push code live to millions of mobile users
Any reason to switch from Dropbox?
Some of the human workers that the author sees fit to eliminate actually provide very useful functions that machines can't.

I can envision how driverless buses and trains could work, but in cities like New York where one hears about crime on public transit all the time, I'm not sure I'd like to be the last passenger on an unmanned bus at midnight. It would be a bit creepy.

How would a driverless pizza delivery truck get my pizza to me if I lived on the 18th floor of a high-rise apartment building? If it couldn't deliver to my door, then it would be quickly put out of business by human drivers who could.

Also:

- Can we really envision being able to print construction materials that have the strength of reinforced concrete at anywhere near the cost of concrete? Could you print the foundation of a house? A road? An overpass? Can you economically replace a wooden 2-by-4 with printed plastic? What would happen to the price of oil if you suddenly started making lots of building materials out of plastic?

- Will an air conditioner-sized power generation unit that you own have the reliability of a large power plant? What will you do if it breaks down and you don't have the $10,000 it takes to buy a new one? Doesn't a centralized power structure bring certain economies of scale? There may be a lot of people working in various parts of the power distribution network, but it's not obvious that you could do it more cheaply or with fewer people if everybody owned their own power generation hardware.

- Those 3-D printed shoes certainly don't look like they'd be comfortable to wear, let alone walk in.

I'm very skeptical about these predictions, given that none of them come with any kind of analysis that compares current and future costs. But I guess that would be the domain of engineers, and "futurists" can't be bothered with those pesky details.
Ask HN: Should I sell or cash-cow my startup?
Hi HN Community,

Really appreciate your brutal honesty on this one. I run a social network in a small niche, and I'm trying to figure out my next steps for this business. Here's the situation:

THE GOOD:

* My team and I have been running this site for years and have successfully dominated our domain (more traffic than any other site in this space)

* Our business is profitable: we expect about $800K-$1M in revenue this year.

* We are bootstrapped and thus have no investor obligations.

* Costs can be controlled to under $250K each year--maybe much more.

* Only 1 or 2 people is needed to keep the business running.

* Finally, our business is VERY stable--unlikely for it to be disrupted in the next several years.

THE BAD:

* I've been working on the site for many years and I'm not emotionally excited about the business any more. I'm proud of what we've achieved, but I want to move on to new projects and learn new stuff.

* My team doesn't think there is much growth left in our space (both traffic and revenue). We could start to attack other verticals similar to our space, but I think our team doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to make it happen since we're a little tired of what we're doing.

THE CHOICES:

Scenario 1: Sell the business - An attractive option if we can get an offer. Our team can get some liquidity for all our hard work. With the right parent company, we may be able to more easily grow our business as well into adjacent verticals with a decent bankroll behind our efforts. However, in this scenario, we may be tied to a retention term of 1-2 years, which keeps us in this domain even longer than desired--this may be okay though at the right price and right company.

Scenario 2: Cash cow the business - Since our business is stable, we could stop new development on our site (our biggest cost) and reduce expenses/headcount to a point where the business throws off a lot of cash. Our business is quite stable and I think that we can go several years with decent profits and decent owner's draws. However, in a cash cow scenario we still will need to put in some effort--at least on a part-time basis--to maintain the site; that may be tough for us later on if we're emotionally tired of the business.

A Scenario we don't want: continuing 'as is' is not an option for the team. Raising money also doesn't seem right either.

*

HN community, how would you evaluate a decision to try to sell or cash cow? Are there other options I should be thinking about as well?

Thanks very much for your input. Also, if you might be interested in acquiring this business, feel free to reach out at thenext20years [at] gmail [dot] com
Something I thought was very interesting was the thoughts (augments) around pure single page apps vs. progressive enhancement. I think Yehuda almost flat out said its too much work to do progressive enhancement. (rendering views / view partials on the server)

Progressive enhancement I think has really become a law of moses in recent times, probably mainly due to the speed in which browsers have progressed, and the powerful browsers on all modern phones - it just isn't practical.

To be honest, I think having your app work without javascript these days is a little naive view about the future of the web. Javascript is here to stay and not that many people will be on non javascript powered browsers.

Which also persuades me to really care even less about the semantic web. Twitter bootstrap is a good example - it really is DIVitis, but really who cares? its rapid application development, it make the web look and act far nicer and more consistent, and it progresses the web as a platform.

Having your web app still work (through non Ajax'd GET, POST etc) for the 7 seconds it takes to download the javascript just isn't worth it - especially with html5.
This contradicts what you said in your first post: "they're small nukes, but they're still nukes. (and if they're networked, could be even worse than a centralized plant)"

What is the issue? That they are dangerous or that people perceive them to be?
A game can be a gentleman's game, but only if we all agree to play it like gentlemen.

There are days we can't even disagree like gentlemen here. :-(
Probably something in between "magic" and "I made it up to make myself sound important".
Ask HN: Where can I hire a designer for $7,500-10k?
Our site is now feature complete, and we are looking for a designer who can make things look great (as good as other YC startups). We have about $7,500-10k to spend, what's our best option? Thanks, YC!
A phrase coined in this insightful article:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/