skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I see the explosive growth in interconnections driven primarily by the Internet as something that, if ignored, can lead to dangerous situations

> Unfortunately, as the world has grown less stable

the author implies that super connectivity has destabilized the world, but that's an entirely unwarranted assertion.

he mentions a couple events (like the koran burnings which led to riots) with small beginnings and big impacts, but these are largely anecdotal and easy to counter. for example, i know a story where a guy eating a sandwich led to the beginning of World War II.

but consider a couple of better measures of stability - large scale human conflict and economic growth. we're in a period of relative global peace; no major wars have been fought between large powers in decades. compare this to the first half of this century (way before the Internet), when there were 2 WORLD wars in which the death tolls reached the millions. nothing even close has even come close in the past 10 years. in fact, as connections between the US and Russia have increased, they have made major war between the two nations LESS likely.

consider economic growth. look at this US GDP chart (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2010...) and tell me the economy is more unstable now than it was a century ago.

the reason the author is so off base is because if "super-connectivity" increases the impact of positive feedback loops, then it must also increase the impact of negative impact loops. as the world becomes more connected, it becomes easier to become more flexible.
Everyone here keeps saying to turn this into a platform. Though I agree that developers can capitalize on this opportunity, there's a road we can go down that in my opinion may make things too crowded. Yes, it would be great to have a central hub where I can browse through popular comedian's trailer videos and then download my favorite one for $5 DRM free. But, I think that'll just create so much competition between the comedians that they won't see the level of traction that Louis C.K. saw. Then again, it's a tradeoff and you can't really have both can you?
I mean as a new startup to Silicon Valley, not an already established, large company. In the long run, I definitely see how this saves a company money, but for startups where money is tight, I would be wary.
Human flying with bird wings
Tell Above, and Ask Below - Hybridizing OO and Functional Design
ZeroCater's minimum order size is 10, if I recall.

Imagine you could get an extra half-hour of productive conversations out of people for ten bucks each. That's paying people $20/hr! What a good deal for engineers in the Bay Area.
Linux Dir Permission Confusion
Firefox for ARMv6 based Android Devices
Sort of like haggis [1], right?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis
When you do a server side upgrade you are essentially doing an upgrade on behalf of every person who uses your product and it's sometimes difficult to roll-back. This is a really good reason to treat server side upgrades differently.

Once you are bit by a bad update you will be very shy about doing it again without a good cause. As an example, we updated to Recent Version - 1 of critical server software and had the thing crashing constantly thereafter. So then we upgraded to Recent Version and had a new bug that was introduced that was causing equal troubles. But now we were stuck and had to wait for next version to fix the bug. Made a really good case for not changing what works.
The book is available in DRM-free epub, mobi, and PDF, and PragProg.com can deliver your books to a Kindle or Dropbox automatically. That's how I read books across my devices.
Looks like it's the platform/network that Dustin Curtis has been using for his own blog (http://dcurt.is) and is finally opening up to other authors, albeit slowly.
By deluded, I meant inundated!
"I followed the next couple of books in the series, but couldn't get into them to the same extent."

Ender's Game is a bizarre series. The first book is a juvenile. An adult may enjoy it, but it's a light snack. Everything else in the series is high-concept hard-core science fiction. As hard-core sci-fi goes, by modern standards its probably a bit lightweight, but it certainly doesn't fit into any other genre. (Well, I guess I haven't read the really recent stuff, so I don't know about those.)

I am actually grateful it took me years to learn there were sequels. I only found them once I could mostly understand them, and a re-read several years later still showed me stuff I missed the first time around.
Amen. I'm writing a python script that'll install a demo version of our software on a Redhat system, and dealing with an outdated version of python makes things... unpleasant.
I wasn't sure what you meant with the term death march, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. I am still not sure what you mean exactly, but I am sure it is not a fitting metaphor.

EDIT: removed the quote
Oh....boy. Reminds me of the layoff at a social gaming company at which I used to work... Major layoff, and even though I wasn't affected, still felt sad and depressed to see so many people I worked closely with would be gone.

It's really tricky for the company... I don't think moral ever came back, and there had been continued attrition after the layoff. :(
OpenBSD is full of navel-gazing.
Why do you need one for scriptogr.am? don't you already have the source in your dropbox with that?

Edit: Sorry misread the to scriptogr.am
With that in mind, I recently wrote a series of posts about integrating functional programming concepts into everyday Javascript programming (and AS3, which is nearly identical). The last two, in particular, might be interesting even for programmers who already understand the basics.

http://www.alanmacdougall.com/functional-series/

I'd really like to see these techniques emerge into the spotlight, instead of just being voodoo magic hidden deep in the guts of frameworks.
I see it as listening to users.

But so what if it's admission of failure? What's wrong with that?
WNYC Radio Lab: The Turing Problem
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/mar/19/turing-problem/
I don't know if I'm going to be able to express what I feel but I'll try.

YC "bugs" are

- startups that are accepted and fail

- startups that are rejected and fail, but would have thrived had they been accepted

(Of course this last kind of bug is extremely difficult to track down.)

But if a startup makes a killing after being rejected by YC it means they didn't need you.

If you consider this a bug, there's some kind of moral problem because it means YC is trying to siphon every promising team in order to maximize YC's success, independently of who YC is likely to help more.

You're not just betting on horses, you're also training them: it seems what you should want to maximize is YC's impact...?
I know stack overflow gets around this by creating an account for every visitor and keeping track of which account you are by using a cookie. If you later decided to sign up, your credentials replace the cookie for figuring out who you are.
We also provide the library and you can create explanation boxes with it. You can even draw circles around elements, point arrows to important things etc. with it.

This is how you would create a tipbox:
Drawer.explain('element_id', {'title': 'Hey!', 'content': 'This button is awesome'});

It will detect the positioning etc. automatically for you so you don't have to bother checking the window width etc.

For more info:
http://drawium.com/pages/details
...and going up another two server sizes. Rackspace Cloud is easily scalable but painfully slow in practice. Lesson learned.
From the title I was expecting something nefarious on Amazon's part, which is at odds with the content of the article.

The core of which seems to be that Amazon has higher write speeds compared to other cloud storage providers, so all else being equal it takes longer to move information out of their system than into it because the other providers can't handle the speed.
I clicked on "Archival Database" and then "Find" (with no input) to see all documents. Using the filters on the right, I was then able to filter for Author = "Albert Einstein", Language = "English", and Digital Object = "Digitized Documents". Here's a link to what I got (sorted by title alphabetically): http://new.alberteinstein.info/vufind1/Search/Results?lookfo...

Even so, I am unable to figure out how to access the document. Perhaps I am missing something relevant?
This would be a problem a couple of years ago, but I think it isn't anymore. Any startup can lease it's own webserver(s) (be it VPS, cloud or dedicated) for prices that were unimaginable even 5 years ago.

And best of all, most providers that are appealing to startups (Rackspace, Amazon EC2, Linode...) offer some kind of pay-what-you-use plans, so you can keep costs low at the beginning.
I was about to post this, pay attention to the fact he's using 2 android phones to control the engines and wii motion sensors... truly astounding.
There's a link to it in the upper-right corner of dcurt.is that goes here: http://svbtle.com/

Edit: missed where tptacek mentioned the name of it. There's how you find it, though.
$1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms
I urge everyone to click around that site a bit. It has everything: UFO conspiracy theories, 3d modeling, recipes, MS Paint drawings, horror stories, ...
I'm guessing he's confusing him for the character he plays on Parks and Recreation.
Oh web rings!! And the format c:\ meme...what great memories!

Do you remember the "Through an incredible amount of programming, I wrote a script that will show you what time my VCR is set to"? meme? The user would click a link to a page that contained:

<blink>12:00</blink>

The good old days....
He created a company from scratch that builds rocketships. A company that has launched a pressurized capsule into orbit. If his company was a country there would have been a human in that capsule and it would have made a lot more news than it did, as it was it still stands as an impressive achievement. And achievements give you a lot of credibility.
I'm so used to this being the engine behind, and so unique to, dcurt.is that it actually threw me a little when it wasn't Dustin Curtis's site. I don't know who is/are the developer(s) but my feeling is that it would sit better with a low number of users. Or maybe not, maybe it'll just be like Octopress if it gets opened up.
There's a very impressive demo at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/demo/ too.

One thing I didn't understand from the diagram in the article is that some grey circles are connected to each other : Is that from that that the browser sees, or is it linkages that are known to exist (outside of the raw data)?
This is seriously awesome work. I know a couple places where I want to use this already. Thanks for sharing!
Review: Bad Apple
Spoilers: headline debunked as false.
I wouldnt classify this as a disruption - more like a useful middleman.
"Simon" Inspired Music Memory Game
Cosmic rays are energetic charged subatomic particles, originating in outer space; i.e. they will be affected by magnetic field. About 89% of cosmic rays are simple protons or hydrogen nuclei, 10% are helium nuclei or alpha particles, and 1% are the nuclei of heavier elements. The term ray is historical as cosmic rays were thought to be electromagnetic radiation. [Quoted from Wikipedia]
So he hasn't bought a new Samsung phone either, how has this benefited Samsung?
"Death march" is a common term of art in project management: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management...
Run your own CTF: Stripe publishes VM images
So you'd rather have some dinosaur sitting at a computer? Someone who doesn't care about programming, doesn't care about the latest or newest ways to do things? Doesn't care about improving themselves?

I must admit, I'm like this _sometimes_. But that's only because I'm using PHP :) If you have a problem with your developers doing this, you're doing something wrong.
High Performance Python
great video about how to improve your python code.
If we're talking about this, let's not forget that it also causes brain damage, in moderate to heavy drinkers.
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa53.htm
Is the wave-in-a-box thing serviceable? With all the companies that jumped on the Wave bandwagon I thought there'd be Wave service providers popping up.
I've been in the social games industry for a couple of years now. Zynga may have gotten more attention for some of its negative tactics, but Lolapps takes the cake for shady social gaming.

They consistently provided grossly inflated (by an order of magnitude) numbers for their user counts and revenue. I honestly would not be surprised if they had lied to 6Waves in order get a merger in the first place.

They were almost banned from Facebook for selling user data to third parties.

Recently, they were contracted to help publish a game developed by an indie. As publishers, they got to see a game that hadn't yet been released. They stalled the indie shop in publishing the game while rushing to create a blatant clone. They then ditched the indie shop and released their own clone.
How can Pinterest become the Facebook of products
Thank you very much for this awesome feedback!

We had implemented key bindings for an older version but then we removed it since we thought we would have to explain that too. Now after thinking more about it, I think we can do it and power users like you will figure it out on their own :)

Showing tour progress will definitely be implemented very soon.

As for putting more emphasis on the isolated content, I think it makes a lot of sense -- we will be experimenting with what you suggested and will figure out what we can do about this.
This is a terribly misleading headline (as is the article headline).

> the limits in moving data out of Amazon have much to do with the ability of Azure and Rackspace to accept incoming data.
You're considering success or failure as a binary outcome. It's possible that a startup is accepted and wouldn't have failed anyways, but that being in YC makes it a bigger success than it otherwise would have been (through mentoring or other intervention by YC). My understanding is that is the sweetspot for YC anyways - everyone is a winner there.
I shall learn Lisp
I'm glad this is working for you. I agree that different teams will probably respond in different ways to open-plan offices, and that not all such offices are created equally.

However, your claim that this has worked "really well" for you "for basically the whole life of the company ... by whatever metric" is not "plenty of empirical evidence." It's anecdotal, and most importantly lacks a comparison to a different arrangement (a control). You have no idea if any of your chosen metrics (however debatable for team effectiveness) would be better for your current team in a different set-up.

I also disagree that just because the conversations people hear are about the product, constantly overhearing conversations is therefore productive. If you need everyone in the team to talk about every decision at all times, this is probably either brought on by too few conversations or a lacking framework for productive communication.

> If you didn't hear those conversations, you'd be out of the loop.

Why aren't you keeping track of decisions and new information formally, e.g. by e-mail? How do you keep employees functional after they get sick or go on a leave? If you have processes for that, then it is not absolutely essential to hear those conversations; employees can read the important stuff at the end of the day.
I've come to expect better researched and sourced articles from the Technology Review.

Lion's most obvious failings are the frequent crashes of its mail reader, calendar program, and PDF Preview utility.

Mac OS X 10.7 ”Lion” started with some issues, as do all new operating systems--it was only released last July. But the issues weren't show-stoppers as the article implies. 10.7.3 addressed a bunch of issues and it was released on February 1st.

The Mac has also become less reliable for developers, experimenters, and hackers.

I'm mostly in this category of user and this hasn't been my experience at all. In fact, things have only gotten better for developers, tinkerers and hackers thanks to Apple's more modular approach to developer tools and support for command line toolchains with Command Line Tools for Xcode: https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action. Clang (http://clang.llvm.org/) is nothing to sneeze at either.

Now developers are reporting that Apple's upcoming "Mountain Lion" release will drop support for many computers that Apple was selling just a few years ago—computers that still run great, but which are no longer covered by the AppleCare warranty.

The implication seems to be that Apple is intentionally leaving these machines out of the Mountain Lion upgrade game because they're no longer under warranty, presumably to force those users to buy new hardware if they want to run Mountain Lion. Bastards! ;-)

Without mentioning that whenever Apple or Microsoft (or even Canonical with Ubuntu) releases a new operating system, there's almost always hardware that ran the older version but won't run the new hotness. Or if it can run the new thing, it can't take advantage of all the new features. This has been true in the computer industry for decades; it's nothing new.

It's less controversial, but how about that Mountain Lion requires modern graphics capabiity and hardware that can boot a 64-bit kernel? http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/16/os-x-10-8-mountain-lion-syste.... Apple also knows that performance would suck on older machines even if they could run Mountain Lion. Who wants that?

I could go on, but you get the idea: take a bunch of unreleated, unattributed things, put them in an article and suggest some wrong doing by Apple with basically no evidence and see what happens.
This article is going to be written over and over until someone finally takes the step and creates a way for people to download something conveniently (easy to find/quick to download/no DRM), cheaply and legally.
Casa Presidencial website defaced by Latinhack
why not a magnetic shield? like what earth has
Reminds me of a joke about Russian oligarchs in the late 90s (when Communism collapsed, a lot of state industries were privatized, and a lot of people got rich very quickly and messily).

Two 'new money' Russians are riding in a limousine in Moscow, and one says to the other "You know, I paid $1000 for this tie". The other guy says, "Idiot! I know a shop where you can get that tie for $2000!"
This usually holds true when the work is known and quantifiable. But in the context of a rapidly changing startup where one-off conversations can have major impacts on the direction of the product, this doesn't work as well.

It's easier to be dismissive of people that you don't see on a daily basis.
ZeroCater’s next market has yet to be determined

Pls let it be New York City. We'd love to sign up.
That is what Steve Jobs saw on acid.
This is the single best article I've read here. It is just spot on.

A small example: approximately 10 years ago, when I lived in mainland france I purchased all my DVDs by dvdexpress.com because it just removed all these problems. Then they went express.com and added restrictions, and thus lost my business.

I am the customer. I want an item. I will pay for it. If you don't let me buy it, I will find a mean to get it anyway. You will just lose the opportunity to make good money on the transaction, and infuriate me for the time lost in doing your work - finding a way to get me the stuff I want.

Some people believe artificial restrictions from the last centuries still matter.

In this day and age, they don't. They are just problems to be solved or worked around by innovatives companies.

Any company that does this get the money. Itunes did a lot of things wrong, and has many of these issues left, but at the moment it provides the most gracious experience for the customer.

The company that will manage to find a way to circumvent all these blocks to satisfy the customer on other IP items (Ex: music, books, newspaper) will get the best advantage there can in the market: customer satisfaction.

At the moment my money is on google music's cheap mp3, but even more the kindle ebooks- because you can change the country settings in just a mouse click.

The company has the right scale to try and sign some worldwide agreement, or try to strongarm companies or governments that may stand in the way. I wish them the best of luck to satisfy us - the customers.
Top 5 Features I want in the Samsung Galaxy S III
joedoe,

I do:

After a really crappy end (for me) at a start-up in 2005, I took a look: Divorced, burnt, stressed, unresolved personal problems. I quit, dropped out, threw in the trowel. Studied yoga, learnt green home building, bought ground in Arizona and Baja, Mexico to create eco-villages. Deliberately did NOTHING in IT.

Well, the Housing collapse killed my eco-villages, at least for now. And I found that my brain, which was used to full-stack one-man-army development, was succumbing to the "devil will find work for idle minds to do" paradigm. Which was mostly dwell on what I missed working 70 hr weeks. All bad.

Now I'm getting back in the game, albeit slowly (my brains, they is a mush; and the tools are way diff than 2005). It's hard but exhilarating. My advice, which I am implementing, is:

May I suggest a long walk? Like a month? The Appalachian trail, or that walk in Spain featured in "The Way" movie.

Then go back to work on something YOU CARE ABOUT, and do your work using the eight hour burn. Forget about being a hero - no one remembers and no one pays for it. Do more than your fair share, and do it with integrity.

You'll need to schedule activities that will make you put down the mouse and get out of the house.

Life is a marathon - you will die trying to sprint the whole way. Maybe not if you're a skinny Kenyan.
This post seems like a success story, so far. So how is not interviewing them a bug? If you are seeking startups who need help identifying how to get customers and how to create products people want, then it seems that Codiqa doesn't fit. Codiqa has customers and is making products people want.

Said another way, the delta between where Codiqa stands today vs. where they would be had they been interviewed does not seem as large an opportunity as probably the opportunities you made for the companies you did select. Therefore, I'd say there's no bug.
What browser are you on? Thanks!
Gotta admit,

I was blown away by the builder interface design.

Well done, guys.
You use random() when you need the statistical appearance of random numbers, and potentially the ability to generate the same sequence deterministically. It's not intended for the same use case as arc4random() (which is itself probably not one of the best CSPRNGs).
By the way, the app that I'm designing in this eBook is a Rails+Backbone.js open-source chat app, kind of like an open-source Campfire. I'm working on it in collaboration with the Bushido (YC S11) guys. It's not out yet, but if you're interested you can sign up for the upcoming beta here: http://kandan.me/
If it goes in the direction of a nerdier Deck advertising network, with a common look/feel, that sounds great to me. More people I think should do those.
This article has already been written many times. I wrote it once back in 2009: http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2009/9/17/why-i-will-steal-mus...

Things have moved forward since then, but very slowly.
Awesome, we'll be implementing this ASAP! (:
Interesting note in the terms of service (http://azizansari.com/tos)

Linking to our site
"You must not establish a link from any website that is not owned by you."

That rules out 90% of social media..
We use Waiter.com's "virtual cafeteria service" here (a social startup in SOMA).

Basically, every day they pick a restaurant. I place my order off the menu. It gets delivered w/ my name on it. Works fantastic.
Mitel Networks suing Facebook