skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's sad but kind of expected that the average response to your question is essentially undergrads complaining about coursework. That's the common answer, but not the informative one, because the people who get caught up in complaining about the trials and tribulations of undergraduate life aren't generally the talented ones who are going to create great businesses. Life is about the management of bullshit, and the bullshit level is the same everywhere.

I think I'm in your camp. I left the research world after finishing a PhD, but before I did a post-doc. The first few years of grad school were great fun -- far more than any job I've ever had -- but eventually the music stops, and you need to find a chair. And that's when it starts to suck. The academic job market is dismal, and third-tier universities all over the country are staffed with graduates of top-tier PhD programs. You have to be a true exception to land a good professorship these days, and the ivory tower is littered with the corpses of the brilliant people who failed to reach the top.

I had always been eager to become an entrepreneur, but back when I was right out of college, there was no such thing as YC, and definitely no such thing as a college kid getting venture capital to try out an idea. So I went to grad school. Years later, I'm looking down the barrel of a crappy academic job market, but the startup world had become much more vibrant. So it was compelling.

That said, there's absolutely no way that your average startup is going to be as intellectually fulfilling as graduate studies in a field you love. Most startups are doing boring CRUD apps that take little technical ability or knowledge to produce, but a good grad program in computer science will let you work on the technology that startups will be hyping in 2032. There's no comparison.
Bob and his 5 year old dell are still running XP and that won't change. but chances are, Bob's next computer purchase will be an iPad, not another dell desktop. He should care about microsoft's salvo into the tablet wars because it means a viable alternative to purchasing an iPad.

ordinary users don't upgrade their OS. they get their OS upgrades by purchasing a new computer.
Formula 1 drivers seem to lose their edge as they get older.
The Web Is Awash in Reviews, but Not for Doctors. Here’s Why.
He talks like the statistics from 2004 have anything to do with the latest social search changes. There have been a lot of complaints and a lot of fuzz about the new privacy policy and the latest updates to personalised search, but do people really want it? I certainly don't, every time I've had a social result from Google+ come up, it was something useless.

Today I was looking up how to set a field to unsigned integer in mysql (result: you can't), and a post of mine where I mentioned MySQL pops up. Well thank you so much, what I already knew is what I was NOT looking for. I'll use Google+'s search if I want to find a post on Google+.

Also I may be the exception, but ever since I tried DuckDuckGo I liked it more and more. This is mostly thanks to that it's the default search engine in Linux Mint (I figured I should, as a good software developer, get some experience with Linux--probably going to switch to another distribution soon though), but since today I also have "d keyword" bound to duckduckgo search in Firefox on my laptop and at internship. It just works great for most things I search for.

Social search... yeah many things have been said about it, but a classic example is the restaurant. Wouldn't you want to get restaurants near you, rather than one in Iran (let's pretend that is a top ranking one)?
Well, no, absolutely not. If I want a restaurant nearby, I'll open up Google Maps on my phone, zoom to the range I want to search within, and search for 'restaurant'. Or if I can't do that, I'll simply Google for 'restaurant city-name'.
This localization is also rendered useless when you want to find a restaurant to take your girlfriend to and you are not whereever you would like to take her.
Oh and don't forget that Google can't really find the location of most desktop computers, it will only work on laptops and mobile devices when they share their location.

The only possible benefit I can see from this is that you don't have to type the city name when you mean the city you're currently at. Still though, I'd like it better if Google suggested "Did you mean: restaurant [current city]" instead of assuming that's what you meant.

I'd like to see how many people prefer Google's search now against how many prefered it 6 months ago. That's about the timeframe they really started releasing more social products.
BeOS did several things, I'll throw out the obvious one:

Separate the UI thread from main() (the thread doing the core app logic).

Yes, many OS's suggest spinning up a worker thread, but by default an app is single-threaded. The default in BeOS is 2 threads.

To the original poster, I'd like to point out that BeOS didn't (and Haiku doesn't) use a different compiler. What pg was saying was that we need a better compiler + language. Right now the programmer must manage every detail of the threads. A few abstractions are available - OpenMP, Apple's Grand Central Dispatch, etc. They don't really make highly parallel implementations though. The field is ripe for disruption.

Look at Verilog/VHDL for an example of a fully parallelized language.
"Why I'm going nameless at my next conference and you should too"
Royal Pains Queen's Diamond Jubilee Pins Made in China
The way they do it is elegant, and could be used in many other places than just the iPhone. All you need is a browser that supports websockets.

I'm not really aware of that stuff, but I'm a bit curious. Do websockets really work over mobile networks (which are, at least in my experience, transparent proxied, and where anything outside of HTTP-on-port-80/HTTPS-on-port-443 is blacklisted into oblivion) ?
"Why the Police Plan to Rain The Pirate Bay and you should too"
Now I'm just plain puzzled as to why that was downvoted. Care to explain?
At SEscout.com we used notifo for user rank change notifications until they announced they would be ending the service. We have been testing boxcar for a future replacement and are pretty happy with it. Feels like a solid product.
While Scala is not a framework, it can be used with many Java libs. It isn't necessary to use xml-heavy frameworks and app servers to write "enterprise" apps. Endless layers of OR-mapping and xml is not productive. There are endless messaging and persistence solutions available without resorting to xml-obsessed JEE and Spring.
While some of the comments may be negative...I just want to say that many many people here NOT like that. There are a lot of hard-working people who have hacked on projects, taken risks, and worked just as hard as Sam. But without the recognition, the acknowledgement, or the publicity. They hack on their side projects while holding a day job, while raising a kid, sacrificing sleep, health, etc. I feel some people just feel slighted when they see others receive a monetary reward because of this "publicity". But please.. many people here are also in the arena, just like Sam.
I don't believe daily deals is the solution to wastage in small business or large ones alike.

Or if it is, I really don't think it's being used for that purpose. But I agree there might be real problems that aren't to my liken but are situated in a large billion dollar market.

I just get the feeling that these businesses are extremely cyclic and not many will be around in ten years time.
Cross out phones (which I read as phone makers not "android") and users and you have Google left.

Which makes sense since many of the cited disadvantages ultimately lie with Android and Marketplace implementation decisions made by Google.

I'm not sure Andy Rubin would disagree much either but what he might say candidly is Google takes the long view. And the long view is that Google Play today is far ahead of the Marketplace two years ago and in 2 years it will be ahead of where they are now by an even larger margin. And the same thing with development tools. And the userbase advantage will be even larger.
"Why Reddit got a new CEO and you should too"
Understood. It can't hurt to ask.
"Why I'm Moving Away from the Play Framework and you should too"
I am not a lawyer but I know where the TOS lives: http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use
The print edition is typically available 4-6 months after the final files are submitted to the publisher. Yes, that seems like a long time to me, too.
Yeah, I wouldn't call Tolkien a middle-aged bloomer. His books were extensions of what he had already been doing that entire time, AFAIK: the stories were part stories for his kids and part riffs off his philology work.

I guess you could point at his ambition to create an English mythology as his middle-aged success, but I'm not sure he was actually successful at that.
Can't wait until we see SPDY support in Twitter Finagle.
SXSW Problems
I hear this "polluting the stream" argument a lot .. but what is really so bad about someone cross-posting from Twitter ?

Wouldn't that be a great way for Google to capture some of the Twitter content (which would be more valuable IMHO) ?
And I wouldn't install another app to receive a third-party implementation of push notifications.

If I install any app, I do not expect to have to download dependencies to make it function fully. To that end, this solution is useless.

My outlook is simple: there are native implementations of push notifications on mobile devices. It may cost time and money to set them up, but please spend some time implementing them.
Yes they do. We've tested them on iPhones, BlackBerry browser, and the Aurora browser on Android.
If we're talking about mere consciousness, then I think this whole thread is missing the point, because I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about self-awareness.

If we're talking about self-awareness, your original post was incorrect under any reasonable interpretation of the words "vast majority of life".

(I don't consider this arguing over semantics, but I'm not about to get into a semantic argument about the word "semantic"...)

That's pretty much the only thing I've been trying to say. "It is not true that the vast majority of life on this planet is self-aware."

If your intended point didn't rely on that claim, then fair enough.
Teenager hacks Google Chrome with three 0day vulnerabilities
This (thoroughly fictional) piece actually speaks to that in an interesting way:

http://jephjacques.com/post/14655843351/un-hearing-on-ai-rig...
I must say data portability lowers the barrier for people who want to build their next app with Parse or other such providers but are worried about a virtual lock-in with a provider.

I guess the next step is to develop standards in the cloud which allows portability of the application itself from one provider to the other.

If anyone from Parse is reading this - was this a user requested feature or was it on the road map for Parse originally? Doesn't it work against your business if you let people move out of your infrastructure easily?
I agree. Go ask a bunch of moms or business owners what they want. not hackers
Just curious, is the conference NY Tech Day? Because I received an invitation there and we haven't even launched our mobile app yet.
Very cool! Too bad the iphone can't lock, and that the wifi-only iPad can't benefit from this.

On a side note, UI related, when I am on this page: http://tether.com/iphone/ and click "Order Now" at the top right, the modal window opens behind the YouTube video.
Thanks, I'll get our web dev guy to look into that.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes buys the New Republic magazine
From what I understand, Craigslist is cool with client-side automation (look at numerous Android and iPhone apps that query Craigslist).
(cross-posted from a dup of this story...)

Although the move to the cedar stack introduced a lot of complexity, Heroku's flexibility is really starting to shine through - I've seen work on a smalltalk buildpack as well.

Long-term this trend is only going to accelerate, where we can assume an app-receptacle (lxc-containers, heroku's 'app', etc.) is setup properly out of the box. There are almost no downsides to this when executed well on the provider's side, and infinite upsides.
This was a 3-day hack to test a mobile version of our iPhone app (Tiny Review). It worked out pretty well; next week we'll convert our existing site tinyreviewapp.com into the same hmtl5 mobile format.
Ok, this is why this app is winning:
http://tinyreviewapp.com/sx/post/48579/
Google Against Charging for YouTube Embeds
How Google set a trap for Pwn2Own exploit team
I have to reinvent myself, newer, better and with bootstrap, twitter of course
What does the fact that some people may not be able to immediately afford the latest innovations have to do with accepting a "class-based social hierarchy", or recognizing any social hierarchy at all?

Who is 'granting' any 'privileges' to anyone - where do these kinds of notions even come from?

Reducing the particulars of actual people's real lives to instances of abstract categories is silly, inappropriate, and insulting; if you know someone who you think would benefit from this device, but who can't afford to buy one, then you can buy one for him yourself. If you know many such people, you can start a foundation to buy them for people, and contribute your own energies to developing even lower-cost open-spec implementations, a la Raspberry Pi.

There are plenty of actual solutions you can pursue when you address problems within the particulars of their own contexts. But those who instead prefer merely to dawdle with abstractions, propose preemptive universal-scope policies, and cast people's real circumstances into arbitrary taxonomies are themselves the one promoting some kind of "class-based social hierarchy".
Are you kidding? Did you miss the whole 2008 financial crisis? The quants thought the could control risk, but couldn't.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?curr...

It's a waste of resources as moving paper around does not contribute to economic growth, whereas say spending time and energy on AI or nano might.
I think he's simply stating what has made many Java programmers very cynical about frameworks such as these. Java EE layers abstraction on top of abstraction. App servers like WebSphere use a ton of memory before you've even deployed your app to the server and they charge you an arm and a leg (yes I know glassfish and jboss are free). Java code is verbose and ill-suited to crafting systems which generate html. The Java enterprise camp was championing the idea that web applications should have JSP talking to session beans, which talk to entity beans which then talks to your actual data store. By the time you've coded it all up you realise that it's slow before you've even added any business logic. Things have improved since then, but they lost my trust a long time ago. Spring seems to love having programmers take java source and translating it into XML so it's much more verbose than java (quite a feat in itself) and hides some of the most critical code from the IDE. The "benefits" provided by such approaches are marginal at best. The ironic part... I'm a huge fan of Java the platform, just despise the culture of bloatware which has sprung up around it. The world is moving on to lightweight solutions which don't require app servers which generate stack traces so long that they span 3 screens.
Maybe, but how could we ever know ;) Unless you're the one defcon guy who's business card I've still held onto, with the hilariously vague job title of "scientist".
I think it's more likely the case that HN readers are familiar with the genre trope of cybernetic sex-slaves and that one phrase allowed the piece to be categorized as falling into that bin.
This just quotes a subset of the original:
http://pypy.org/tmdonate.html
We've always had data portability in mind. We're all developers and know that easy import and export are prerequisites for these sorts of platforms. This feature will certainly allow people to move out of our infrastructure with greater ease but, more importantly, it will allow many more people to become comfortable building on Parse and trust us with their data.
I don't think anything PG says in a talk like this is going to make a bit of competitive difference to a YC startup that works on this stuff full-time.
Farewell Zazu.
Boxcar is great. It was very cool to be able to curl the Boxcar API and have a notification on my phone in a fraction of a second.

My startup uses Boxcar for deploy notifications, new paying customers, etc.
Apple Begins Shipping New iPads
Eight years today
Looks like a great service, unfortunate that they're subject to the HTML5/browser limitations (can't lock, etc).

Is there another way to distribute their native version besides through the app store?

My company use TestFlight (https://testflightapp.com/) for iOS game development. Is there anything similar, but better suited to end-user distribution?
If this thing does anything to de-dupe, it would be a must-have, would-pay-for-it app.

Trying to use Craigslist to find a new apartment means sifting through the same listings, posted day after day after day. They lower the signal/noise ratio a great deal.
Even better when your friends can arrange for you to get paid a couple million for that.
I know this isn't obviously startup related, but it is. Please read.
I know you meant this to be a nasty remark, but do you realize you're actually saying something very nice about VCs? You're saying that they're driven by loyalty to their friends rather than by profit.

That isn't really true. The main reason most VCs are friends with people is because they think they can make money out of them in the future. But it shows how far into falsehood you've leaned in your attempt to be nasty when you end up unintentionally implying something so nice it isn't true.
I'm also working on a Chrome and Firefox extension which uses Craigslist as a data source, and this is my understanding as well

I think that rich client-side js apps packaged as browser extensions offer some interesting opportunities in general - being able to behave more like a normal client, instead of a giant aggregation host, allowing you to avoid angering services like Craigslist, being able to ask the user for permissions for increased localstorage limits (the default in most browsers is a measly 5mb) and the ability to do cross-domain ajax requests, etc.
I dont found this usefull, is it so hard to write html?
Nobody is shooting the messenger. You're saying "oh noes, the government is evil! look!" where in this case, there is no evidence of that. Without inspecting every packet on the Internet, they still got this guy with something equivalent to a regular wiretap.
I felt Paul's analogies about copying things and selling smells in talking about copyright were a little awkward. They were a response to an audience member that asked how he could justify disparaging the music industry selling copies of music in view of software depending on that model.

In fairness, as he stated himself, he wanted to write a proper essay first about it so was attempting to come up with something on the fly.

I felt the proper response should have been something more along the lines of: Copyright only exists because society in general recognizes that right. So if society in general no longer believes it is a right, then business models will have to change to reflect that.

I personally don't know what the right long-term answer is, but clearly, since you can copy bits for "zero" cost, it's going to be even harder to convince people to pay in the future as they come to that realisation collectively.
The linked to examples http://cache.ustwo.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/0... comparing skeuomorphic apps to their minimalist counterparts are very misleading. The skeumorphic apps are well designed while the particular minimalist apps are not. Neither trend can rescue bad craftsmanship. The W8 notes app can still show notes in the background just as iOS does, it does not go against recommendations. A fair comparison would be between the default white/gray/blue iOS aqua theme and white on black W8.

The main design problem is not with the visual skin of the apps. Skeumorphism is in the very concept of the apps. They took notes from the physical world, put them inside the computer and in the case of Nokia's W8 app, removed all references to real world but in case of iOS they kept them.

But the physical concept of notes is still there. The concept was not redesigned to take advantage of computers, so what's the point of redesigning the visual skin/aesthetic?

When we redesign the concepts then skeumorphic visual skin will naturally fall away.
http://zeromail.com/ seems interesting.

I always thought that a simple first step would be to group messages by senders, but AFAIK the only client that does that is the concept client persona (http://personamail.info/).
Also somewhat related is Zed Shaw's Utu. It's a chat room where all messages are encrypted, and if you start annoying people they begin increasing the amount of work your computer has to do to encrypt the messages sent to them.

http://www.savingtheinternetwithhate.com/
I have an Asus Transformer and use this regularly, and it has suited me quite nicely on numerous occasions. If I go away for extended duration of time, I don't have to lug around a laptop with me.

Also note that I do a lot of my active development in VIM, so take that into consideration.
Nice. I'm building one for the iPad http://worqshop.com (sans executing code on the iPad, forbidden by Apple)
How to check who unfriend you on Facebook.
Agreed - I am a dev and a bit sick of seeing Bootstrap splashed across quickly designed sites. That said, I demoed a site I built using Bootstrap recently to some business users and was complimented on my design ability.
Google wants the Android platform to move away from SD Cards, their Nexus series really shows this. The Nexus S, their second Nexus phone, had no SD card. However, due to the requirements of a separate filesystem for USB Mass Storage, they partitioned the internal storage into two.

Then you get the Galaxy Nexus, with only one partition. It features Ice Cream Sandwich, with MTP (Mass Transport Protocol). MTP allows access to a filesystem without unmounting it, so the phone can continue to use the filesystem. The only real disadvantage of MTP is that OSX and Linux support is limited, since it is developed by Microsoft. It should also be said that ICS still supports USB Mass Storage, but the Galaxy Nexus cannot.

The Asus Transformer also does this, using a large internal storage with no SD card. More phones might switch to this model, but for now the SD card is not going away.
Boston Ruby Group - February 2012 Videos
This was beautiful, Paul. And you're right, it is definitely related to startups. Thanks for writing it.
Chad Fowler's at BostonRB: Measuring and analyzing things that matter
I do hate personalized search. When I search the internet, I'm usually looking for things I'm not already familiar with. Having my search results overwhelmed with stuff that I already know where to find is very frustrating.

These days, I usually find myself spending most of my time in incognito mode, so that I can access the internet and not my own personal bubble.
This was incredibly sad, but one of the most deeply relatable stories I've read for anyone who has lost a loved one or struggled with grieving. Thank you for submitting, it brought back a lot of memories (good and bad). This part is the must read: I keep looking for meaning, but all I've found so far is that in order to be at peace with the present, we must be at peace with the past, because the present is a product of the past. Accept.
For a company that will be handling all of my web browsing, I would have expected them to not store my password in clear text.

Doesn't inspire confidence :(

Great product idea though!
Empire Avenue Ditches Influence for Engagement with Relaunch
What's the best browser home page for developers?