skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point about "someday we will look back and laugh" is an interesting one, and I'm not sure how true it is. I think the maturity of web design as a field must be a curve, and I find it hard to believe that website will change in such a jump.

Is there any layout or designer that a designer wants that they can't create on the modern web? Because there were many they couldn't back then, through the limitations of the browsers, and internet speeds.

The next big move, I think, will be to web applications, but I would imagine they will look fairly similar to the desktop (or perhaps iPad) applications we have today.
The underground is still out there. It's just underground.

Get in touch if you'd like to be invited.
Your statement is mostly incorrect, the metric they use to evaluate the performance of a site is clearly indicated on Area51 and you can see the progress (or decline) on the proposal page of each website.
If Google buys SO it will suck.
Diluted? They're the same people.
Grading on a Curve, Engadget Edition
"doesn't really do remote employees"

That might be the crux of your problem (and the problems a lot of other companies are having with hiring). This is just my totally biased outside perspective, but it's easy to get remote work right now. Why in the world would I ever want to move to California?

I'm seeing this become an issue a lot with companies that need good development talent but just don't understand that it might not be something they can find locally. Good developers can (at least right now) live wherever they want in the country and make plenty of money. Apologies to anyone living in, say, Wichita, but why would I move there* if I didn't have to? By forcing your development teams to be local, you're limiting your talent pool or you're picking up C-grade developers from other places who are desperate for a job.

* The barbecue -is- pretty darn good
Marcus, the guy behind Your Charisma Coach, is a very old friend of mine (I'm the one filming the bungee video!) - I've watched him overcome some of life's hardest worries and deepest funks with all the charm and charisma of Feynmann himself!

I was really pleased to see you referencing this site - the Feynmann piece reminded me of his attitude to interaction and life generally.
Apart from NY, my most recent trips have been mostly West Coast, and Chicago to LA. The real standouts have been national parks and Utah is amazing for that, but before I went I had no idea. Arches National Park is stunning and great fun to hike around but quite accessible to even non-hikers. Same with Zion (Angel's Landing and The Narrows!) and Bryce, also in Utah.

Did the Bright Angel Trail from the Grand Canyon South Rim and liked Yosemite, especially hiking Half Dome which was a favourite too.

The area around San Fran is cool, Chicago is quality, some of the smaller highway driving around Texas and New Mexico I really enjoyed. Mesa Verde. Antelope Canyon if you can handle the hordes.

If you're an efficient traveller, you could knock off three top-tier parks in Utah in a week without IMO rushing. Moving quickly yes, but not rushing.
I think this is a great article but misses some of what I think are the most essential points of what makes Erlang great.

Superficially, Erlang is Actor Model for functionalists. I could go on about the various advantages this model provides, but as other posters have so eruditely pointed out, MPI provides the same abstract framework for dealing with the problems that actors are intended to solve.

I'm not a professional erlang developer, but I've based and written a new NoSQL database thats intended to store billions of records in Erlang, altogether clocking in at less than 1000 lines of code, and after this experience, I can safely say that I will never try to build distributed apps, save some niche cases, in another language (even Haskell).

Here's what stands out about Erlang to me, in contract to comparable options.

Firstly, HiPE and BEAM may be the most advanced virtual machine systems in the world. People working with JVM will claim this an exaggeration, but in terms of reliability and speed, my experience with HiPE is unmatched.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, OTP.

Open Telephony Platform is the single best collected library for dealing with various problems that I have ever seen. The Generics (gen_server, gen_fsm, etc.) are a quick, fast and easy solution to problems and edge cases that would bog down even the best MPI developer. For example, dealing with internal state as a finite state machine is not new, but it's not nearly as popular as it should be, perhaps to this end it's apt to say that Erlang does for parallelism and distribution what Ruby on Rails did for web development -- It forces you to make intelligent decisions.

The systems responsible for controlling emergency services, global telecom infrastructure, many large MMOs, and countless other applications are Erlang. If you trust 911, you can trust Erlang.

I could go on, Hot code loading while old processes still depend on usable code? Built in failover? Function takeover? Automatic workload offloading? Good luck if it's not Erlang.
I've spent 10 years coding, and I'd be equally useless on a team building CPUs. Similarly, I'd be equally useless on a team building a kernel.

A company of one isn't much use, the corporate form allows people to come together to build more than they could on their own.

Who really cares if someone is or isn't 'technical'. One of the important roles of a CEO is being the interface between capital and labour.

A good CEO with a decent grasp of technology and a little bit of money can put together a team, they are far from useless. Everyone has a role to play, it's extremely myopic to think someone can't build a company simply because they don't code.

I doubt Steve Jobs had any idea how to program an iPhone and I doubt much of his code had anything to do with the rise of Apple once he retook the reigns in the 90s.
The other day I was thinking, what ever happened to Mz. Glad to see you're still around.

WordPress.org/.com doesn't really allow 'editing' beyond creating a page and setting it as the homepage, selecting templates, etc. Almost all of that should be able to be done through a web/tablet browser. This would be similar to most of the other companies wrapping WPMU as a WordPress hosting option.

WebFTP can be a possible solution if you're on a tablet and don't have proper FTP. Some of the inexpensive paid hosts offer it through their control panel.

I'm not sure how large your existing sites are, but, dropbox and other such avenues exist for making a backup. If you can tar.gz it, some email accounts have somewhat liberal storage allotments and you could mail the sites to yourself as an attachment.

As far as Android friendly, I don't know what would be actually be anti-android. Are you running into Tablet/Browser issues with javascript heavy pages? If so, perhaps one of the alternate sites like posterious (unsure whether Twitter's involvement will kill this) or tumblr will suit your needs.

The problem is that free usually connotes simpler, less flexible services, so, if you're looking for more sophisticated products that are browser manageable, you're probably going to have to put a little cash behind it.
Sites that frame bust like nytimes and stackoverflow will break this somewhat. I like the idea though.
The foundation didn't think the device would be so popular. They are ramping up production, so that should help with getting products out there.

As for equivalents: It's a 6 layer PCB, with BGA and other SM components. That's really hard to do at home. So you're unlikely to see hobbyist rip-offs anytime soon.

At some point there might be another similar device - mass made in China, more power, more ram, but probably much worse documentation. There's certainly a big market for tiny dirt cheap computers.
University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department
Even Upper-East-Side Manhattan, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the U.S., has average incomes "only" in the high 5 figures.

East of Lexington, the UES is upper-middle-income yuppies. Apartments are affordable but very small: like 400 SF for $2,000 per month. Not an option if you have kids.

Also, if UES is defined from 59th to 110th street, that includes areas in the north that are low-income and more like Harlem than UES. The change is quite stark.
That's quite interesting. I'd like to know what kind of games. Care to name names?
The worth of someone's time is not determined from how much they are paid for that time.
~95% of Americans individual income is less than $100K [1] and while there are sadly many people living in poverty, that the other end of the scale. $150k a year is more than enough for a multi-person single earner family, you just might have to forgo that penthouse with a Central Park view for something that, shock horror, is in the outer boroughs. You know, like most New Yorkers. (I'm sure there is a similar analogy for SF and East Bay, or something)

So, have some respect people. Stop acting like spoiled children. Oh wait.

[1] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032011/perinc/new01... via Wikipedia
It's not exactly a "tax dodge". It's a consequence of the fact that capital gains taxes are lower than the income tax. It's a problem with the game, not the players.
Absolutely not Cabrini College (Radnor, PA)
> Why are programmers so set on believing that there is nothing near as important as "writing code" in a business?

Because most of the people who believe these things have nothing to fallback on other than their ability to code. It's generally the manifestation of being extremely insecure.
Haven't tested it with replica sets, it will probably not work. You're free to implement that though :)

I thought about making it a hosted service, but I wanted to release a minimal version and see what the feedback is, so I decided to make it open source instead of putting a credit card form on the page.
2 pairs of shoes:

1 Put yourself in the shoes of US commanders unhappy about the possibility of one day waking up and seeing little blips heading toward Iran. You would have 2 choices and they are both lousy. Business is good. Oil is flowing. Who wants it all to go up in smoke? Certainly not America.

2 Put yourself in an Israeli analyst's shoes/head and rewind date to day of release of footage. 3 possibilities, 1 obviously unlikely, and other 2 just "shocking". (And I leave that for you to divine).

Now, I assert that US president and commanders are sleeping easier, and that Israelis are no longer so glib about sending aircraft over IRI and taking US involvement for granted. After all, if IRGC can bring down America's drone, Israeli F16s could also fall off the sky near the borders of Iran ... by the "grace of God" ...
There's always the tried-and-true option of writing it in your spare time, and then finding a publisher or self-publishing with Amazon or the like.
Or a lot of startups are going to shutdown this year.
Using his language, I think he'd say you "don't care about" figuring out the intricacies of e-mail deliverability. It seems like "don't care" was just a poor choice of wording. A better metric would be just to ask what your core competency is, which is the actual content of the newsletter, not the technology involved with running a newsletter.
Julia, Python and Cython
I do remember now that Windows has a way to set up multiple "configurations" that you can choose at boot, but I don't recall if that will let you hop from PC to PC.
> Second, what if the CEO of the startup is older, has 9 children and expenses?

Does having 9 children make him a better CEO than someone with a more typical number of children? If not, then why is that relevant to what a company should pay him?
Of course you need fixturing: that's a given. Remember to account for the time and materials making up fixtures.

I would price the labor at around $15-$30 per hour minimum. You aren't going to farm this out to an assembly shop (not enough volume) and there isn't enough money in it to hire employees and deal with that overhead, so you're down to finding a FOAF or a student who can solder and is reliable. Factor into that that the person must be supervised.

Next, this isn't just assembly that has to work; it has to look good, so the assembler needs the skill and attention to detail to provide that. That means either you get lucky or you have a lot of rework, or you watch him closely. Soldering is not enough: need to pay attention to the cut ends of those thick conductors. The component lead terminations must look good and the components themselves should be fairly regularly placed and not look sloppy. Remember, you're selling primarily on looks. Also, if this assembler isn't always available, you have to make enough inventory to handle orders that may come in until he can make more if you don't have the time to do it yourself.

Volumes are uncertain, but the parts are cheap, so let's assume he buys enough to make 100 units at a time. The selling price has to reflect the risk that all those parts won't be used. Buy higher inventory levels and your parts cost goes down, but risk of "dead stock" goes up.

Having a small electronics mfg business on the side, I live this on a daily basis. Luckily I don't sell to price sensitive hobbyists :-)

But in the end, the price I'd try to sell it for has nothing to do with how much it cost to build: it's cool looking. That's where the price comes from.
more literate:

http://www.losethos.com/LTHtml/Demo/Graphics/Life.html

It's interactive -- you use the mouse to paint brush strokes and it makes them alive.
The default rule is a nonstandard rule.
Agreed - if I wanted something that'd make kids interested in what's going on, hiding all the "magic" in an opamp chip isn't how I'd do it. Something super simple, where I could explain exactly what each component did, and more-or-less how they do it (with the obvious handwaving requirement for explaining transistors to just about anybody).

Something like this: http://bigiain.com/onetransistoramp.html

Could be built for approximately zero dollars by just about anyone who's the sort of person who's got transistors "lying around" at home. I can easily imagine explaining how that works to the satisfaction of my "test" 9 year old. Not so much with the opamp version...
They haven't even announced WP8 at all - at this point the only piece of official info on WP8 (or rather "the next major version of WP") is that it will run WP7.x apps. There have been no announcements of WP <-> W8 app compatibility.
Yup - I commented on Chris' post and he responded saying "I'm starting to regret the title I used on this post (versus the more accurate first sentence)."
The reason this makes me sick has nothing to do with the number. I think that number is more than reasonable for most cases.

No, the reason it makes me sick is that VCs and three-digit millionaires and billionaires really should stop copping this attitude. We get it, you guys don't need generous salaries, or salary at all.
I heard Jonas Bonér (Akka guy) talk about his motivations for building Akka. He said he started the project because he fell in love with Erlang but couldn't convince enough companies to deploy it. So Akka is a port is the essential ideas to Scala and Java.
You can build a library for doing Erlang-style programming, but there are lots of features that you can't reproduce.

(1) In C++ you may get hard crashes, so to get reliability you need to use high-overhead OS processes. Erlang allows you to hundreds of thousands (yes, really) of processes because they are really lightweight (76 words + heap/stack).
Also, copying within the same address space has much lower overhead (no system call/context switch) and serialisation is much simpler.

(2) Because of immutable data you can do have nice fault tolerance as follows. Imagine you have a request handler function that takes a state and a request. However, the request is malformed or triggers a bug in the handler. In a language that doesn't enforce immutability you have to restart the handler process because the state may be in an inconsistent form. In Erlang you would just discard the request (or send an error message) and handle the next request with the unmodified state.

(3) Pattern matching makes receiving a message very convenient.

I probably forgot a few things, but this gives you an idea.
Median family income in San Francisco is just over $81k. Almost twice that for an individual is comfortable. Make it work. Believe it or not, you can get the job done without being coddled with luxury.
This. In your 20s and earning more than £20k? Well done. Now shut up and ship.
Why I Owe My Life To Steve Jobs
Probably not, it's encased in acrylic. Acrylic has a thermal conductivity 10x that of still air.
What is the best monitor for coding?
Thanks for posting this, @camtarn - I launched about 6 months ago and tried HN back then, too. Reddit ate it up, but HN wasn't all that interested. I've since written a bunch of postmortem blog posts, although the site is now running stronger than ever. They may be of more interest:

http://petersobot.com/blog/the-wub-machine-v20/

(Also, the site is mostly open source: http://github.com/psobot/wub-machine)
A thought I have found inspiring is attributed to 19th-century Catholic minister John Henry Newman: "Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it."
How I Increased My Email Subscribers By 500% In One Week 
How I Increased My Email Subscribers By 500% In One Week
Disclaimer: MS Employee
To add to his comments about higher-ups dismissing his ideas. I don't know if the OP was in a technical role or not. But I regularly see emails from guys in my team with some radical new idea that they think will work. In 99.99% of the cases, the ideas don't work (Scalability issues, cost, complexity etc). It's very important for employees to also accept and see the flaws in your ideas rather than start bawling and throwing a fit. Likewise, it's very important for the leadership to keep encouraging these ideas no matter how stupid they are.
Our partner/principal SDEs do just that. They're always open to new ideas. This probably varies wildly from team to team though.
I'm skeptical.

All of the articles cited are indeed about civil liberties, but I don't see them as being problems that can necessarily be improved by developing better cryptography.

The social network propaganda isn't so much of a technological problem as a social one -- people assume that everyone's using social networks in a straightforward way, to express themselves and connect with friends, even though they have the capacity to be used in many other ways, including deceptively.

The NSA email-hoarding thing is also a social problem -- encryption exists, it's just that nobody uses it.

The "pre-crime screening" appears to be a statistical model. I don't yet know if there's a science of counter-machine-learning -- that is, creating examples that are hard for models to classify, analogously to making harder and harder CAPTCHAs. If government gets better at data science, what civil libertarians will need is not better encriptions, but different techniques designed to protect against statistical intrusions.

Likewise, I don't think better crypto is in any straightforward way a protection against biometrics or government bills to take down certain websites.

If he's saying "we need more libertarians and people concerned about civil liberties," then he's right. But I'm not even sure there are fewer than there used to be (look at the backlash to SOPA). I just suspect think there was a time when people had more hope in purely technological fixes to government abuses. I know some old-time crypto-anarchists, and they're largely disappointed with how things have turned out. In the end, preventing the abuse of government power is a hard problem, and it looks less likely that a small set of tech breakthroughs will suddenly make civil liberties violations obsolete.
HiPE is the native code compiler, BEAM is the VM.

otp is fantastic, however
In other words, it would require Greenspunning Erlang.
> You aren't going to farm this out to an assembly shop (not enough volume)

There are plenty of sub-contract electronic manufacturing companies that'd take on jobs of 100 units.

> I would price the labor at around $15-$30 per hour minimum.

Yes.
Only about 10% of the households in San Francisco have household income over $150k

If you are right, then 90% of the households in San Francisco are living in below low end housing. I have a hard time believing that.
To be fair, Gmail search takes several seconds for a basic query now, so I'm considering switching to Mail.app, which has the all-important conversation view.
Some Olympic Thoughts
Could you pass a US citizenship test?
You are not addressing the most important point:

Why do you want a CEO of a company who has investors' money, employee's livelihoods and the possibility to improve the world living with roommates, cooking his/her own food to save money, and wasting time when that CEO could be 100% focused on the business?

I'm not advocating we pay him/her $500,000/year, but $150,000 is very fair.
The probabilities all point to advanced life being close by, we just can't see it. Most likely because they don't want to disturb us. Like a lost tribe in middle of the Amazon, coming in to too close of contact with us would mean almost certain extinction.

Either that, or SETI is completely off.
Try not to worry about learning quickly
MegaUpload Trial Might Not Happen Due To Procedural Error
Are you reinventing design by contract using tests?
Robotic Drums
nice implementation! The color adds a lot of visual interest. Here's my monochrome implementation.

http://wsb.im/conway/index.html
The question is what should you care about?! The hardest part about building a software, especially a start up, is not what to put into software, but what to leave out. Pick your best thing and then stick w it (care the most about it). This may force you to neglect other aspects but make sure the things you care about are focused on and then outsource the other things you can (or put them on back burner).
solid real example - though not strictly quantifiable.. but in this piece Max Haot makes absolutely no bones that changing their name from Mogulus to LiveStream had a massive effect on their success (he says it over and over again)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/founder-stories-livestreams...

Certainly passes the smell test for me. Mogulus = huh? Livestream = Oh, I get what they do and remember enough to come back.
Another note about the 1984 prank. The Pasadena police and the Rose Bowl organization, which is a fusty old group, were not amused with the surreptitious entry of the Rose Bowl building. They threatened to charge the pranksters. One of the senior Caltech faculty (Carver Mead?) offered to pay for legal defense if required.

A more detailed story is here: http://today.caltech.edu/today/story-display?story_id=11464
I'm surprised that CS doesn't bring in enough funding to justify itself on those grounds alone. I'm a CS grad student, but I'll confess that I don't know much about UF's program.

As for article asking the reader to imagine the outcry if they cut football or other big sports, the ones that would cause an outcry are probably immensely profitable. It's a fair question whether college athletics has gotten too big, but it's almost entirely irrelevant to this article.
Alfred 1.2 — The Best New Features
This article misses the reason behind closing the CS department. Was it completely due to budgetary concerns? Or was the University having difficulty competing with other CS schools. The article mentions the Florida Polytechnical University, has the creation of this school meant that their aren't enough CS students to fill classrooms at both colleges?

Though I, like most, was initially shocked that a CS school would be closing, maybe their is more to it than just budgetary cuts.
No, if I've seen anything about civilization it's that a crisis averted is quickly forgotten. We'll have precisely the same 15 years to solve the problem, but we won't have the benefit of fuel for heat.