skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Instead of a wearable camera, what if it was technology that could tap into your own eyes and connect to the internet? Same result, different presentation. Would that change perception do you think?
iEyes?
Let’s Have Fun Reading Way Too Much Into the Preliminary Schedule for WWDC 2012
> 1. Until you hit facebook levels and have to write your own interpreter.

Or use the one that Facebook open sourced.
Duh, makes total sense. I was initially unsure where he'd fit in at Google (Google+?, Android?, Gmail?), but as soon as I read the headline I thought "Duh". His angel investments have been super strong and his willingness to share his life has been inspiring. Digg and Milk didn't ever turn into Instagram, but he kept making great moves forward.

Kevin - keep sharing your thoughts online and to the community, it has served you well and will continue to do so. Congrats.

(Sorry for the lovefest HN, but that's how I feel.)
You are thinking of today's Glass. In 2-3 iterations, the camera will be so small and embedded in the frame that it won't be noticeable.
Luckily for Assange it wouldn't go down so well for UK-US relations if the president ordered a predator strike on Ellingham Hall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellingham_Hall,_Norfolk#Refuge
The second point could have been a lot less offensive and inflammatory if the author just said "it's cheaper."
I am not interested in playing this game.
Apple CEO: "incredible things coming"
PHP is a terrible language in which you can easily write code that will run basically anywhere. There are many cases (i.e. open source web apps) where the value of the latter vastly outweighs the former, but it's not going to be true for everyone.
For performance, not even Facebook levels. If you're having "scaling" issues that benefit from fast executing code (as opposed to a massive dataset management issue), PHP isn't really that fast at all. So why would you want to throw away CPU cycles when there are expressive languages that have a fast compiled representation, too?

I value dev productivity over performance in most cases, but it's silly to try to make a performance argument for PHP.
...is this what passes for "discussion" on HN?
I fail to see how photos which provide pleasure, foster relationships, enlighten and educate is not useful but a camera you wear on your head is.
the stream metaphore isn't appropriate for all types of data. memory allows a storage paradigm to be picked for the task at hand.

Consider redis which is a great example of this. How do you store redis' data efficiently? Well it turns that aof files are slow to start up and disk backed virtual memory is slow. The problem goes away instantly with NVM - the jib is done with no filesystem api used.
A lot of these could surely be argued reasons not to use PHP.
It's difficult to take articles about languages like this seriously without the author demonstrating some knowledge of other more and less powerful languages. That way they at least have some idea of where they sit on the blub spectrum:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Probably not a good day, but survivable with a modern car. Most crashes have some angle to them which reduces the forces involved. Hitting a brick wall perfectly perpendicular is rare.
How do you make wearing a headpiece cool? I wear glasses and imagine some teeny tiny thing embedded in one of the arms. What could 20/20 people do that would be socially acceptable? Maybe a bluetooth headset looking thing?
> Consider the case of video - it is better represented as streams of audio, picture and metadata.

Not true. Video components are packaged together because they go together logically. When you want to send the video to another machine or give a copy to a friend, it's entirely logical and useful that the various components are packaged together in some way.
There's no way this is legal.
Can you name a few startups anyone on HN is likely to have heard of that accepted cash investment from their employees?
Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Speaks Out
I don't agree with much of this, but I consider 6 & 7 to be php's great weakness. The signal to noise ratio is awful. There is so much garbage "docs" and examples that it is hard to find dependable sources. Search for python or ruby help and you can be reasonably confident that what you find isn't going to blow up in you face. This is the cost of being so popular with amateurs and semipros
Charlie Rose, despite his quality as an interviewer, is still part of "Old Media" and their crotchety inability to get "New Media". I don't mean Rose specifically, but the people he's paid by.

Also, I sound completely stupid in that paragraph but I can't figure out how to say it better. :P
Sure, but exposure to technology industry != exposure to startups.

A good thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3814407
Iwoca: Instant working capital to online-market retailers
I find that on eBay, used 10GBPS infiniband switches have been pretty damn cheap, so are the cards. Cables are more expensive though.
I think the big selling point for macs among the hacker community is that it's Unix, but without the hassles of Linux.

If you find yourself asking why Unix over Windows, it's really because the dev tools and the command line environment it offers are much more powerful. I recommend starting with Linux. Play around with it for a few months, learn as much as possible, you'll be pleasantly surprised. The get a mac cuz it's a million times more convenient and polished.
He also seems popular from his TechTV days, and then his time on TWiT, and then of course Digg Nation or whatever his video podcast for Digg was called only made him more famous among technology enthusiasts. He seems like a good face and name to have around when you couple the insight with the fame.
Celebrities.
It was a talent acquisition from what I remember. I don't think anybody made much money with that deal unfortunately.
Hard to be depressed when Jesus got you....
I'll give you the one good reason to use PHP: Everyone and their dog offers PHP hosting for pennies a month. It's just there. It's the Windows of programming languages. You can distribute something like phpBB or MediaWiki and any doofus webmaster will have some understanding of how to install it and stuff the data into the shared MySQL database next door.

So if that's your target audience, or if you're happy sitting around on Dreamhost setting up your site's shopping cart as quickly as reasonable and then doing better nontechnical things, fine. Use PHP. Pray you don't get hacked, but you'll probably be praying in any language at that scale.

If you're out to sell technology or something, or handling real business (like, millions of dollars) with your website, there are probably better ways to build a long-lived robust technical solution, and most people here would appreciate it.
Well, that's been true, but there's hope. I'm a robot hobbyist and I need lots of linear actuators (like dozens or hundreds) for a project I'm working on. I can't believe how expensive they can be (between $50 and $150 a piece). So, I've fixed that for myself that by starting my open hardware project - http://bitbeam.org. My first stab at my DIY actuator: http://youtu.be/YO-7tiwibiY

Doing it myself (with a laser cutter at TechShop SF), I'm able to get my own linear actuator cost down to about $3 per actuator. Not perfect, but way better. Next step will be to figure out how to make my own DC motors to drive down costs further. :-)

As fab tools like 3D printers (MakerBot) get cheaper and tools get easier to access (TechShop), more robot hobbyists will have robots and cheaper parts. :-)
Former Apple employee explains upside-down logo
But inflation is good for debtors themselves, and debt-made money eventually requires some inflation to make the debt load maintainable.
I don't and never will have. The marketing is pointing to deep integration like this.
"Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing."

That statement spells it for me. With Google I see research, I see pushing tech boundaries and hardware experiments, I see new ways to interpret the world. With Facebook I see a huge lump of data but nothing really too groundbreaking. I don't deny Facebook's momentum... it's huge and it's valuable... but is it future proof? Are they thriving on momentum alone?

Which wins the race? Dunno yet. Maybe it's just not the same race.
Dealing with colleagues asking you to hide problems with their work
iBalls?

Oh god. Why did I even say that? Someone kill me now.
A GPU implementation would be cool.
I don't think they care so much about communicating facts as much as they care about ROI from their SEO investment. If static images work at getting page views from gullible people, then why change?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias
Things That Derail All Database Projects
But improper use over something as simple as typing (at least typing as implemented by popular languages these days) _should not be a problem_.

If I create a bug by multiplying by a string, I'd ideally find out immediately after writing it, as the background compiler/analyzer detects the problem. Saying "Oh, well, we'll just assume that an integer times a string is 0" is just... dumb.

Seriously, if a program has a bug like that, what's the point of continuing execution? What's the real-world use case for this? The only use case I can see is "people screwing around making a home page, where nothing really matters and if they make a mistake, hey, just try to go on and maybe that last line wasn't really important anyways". It's the Visual Basic "On Error Resume Next" mindset.
I find it amusing that "PHP is stupid easy to scale..." but his site is overloaded right now.
>If you use a safe programming language which doesn't piss over memory (I.e. Haskell, Python, Ruby, Lisp etc) you won't need to reboot.

This is a man who's never used Xmonad (which is written in Haskell) for an extended period of time before. If you use it for a long enough time, it gets slower and slower until workspace changes start taking whole seconds.

Eventually you say fuck it and reboot...

...'cept you can't do that without a filesystem with a "base state" to reboot from.

GG
As well as Reader.
> Best documentation on the web

No, no, no. Poorly or completely undocumented parameters, the "comments" being seen as replacement for coherent examples ... I'm not sure if the author is joking or did actually never look at the documentation of other languages like Python's.
https://www.desktimeapp.com/

Didn't see any in your price range, but I didn't click on them all. There may be some free space.

Good luck!
ah I was using it in the technical (political) sense to mean that the balance is slightly more towards the servant than the master.

More conservative employment laws would mean less employment rights for workers.

Less liberal in the UK would be the fringe torys who want to get rid of all employment protection.
Shopify employee/original author of unicorn here.

This bonus/props thing is really just for fun and recognition more than anything else. Performance reviews and salary adjustments have their own separate process.
The article ends by saying our belief of water on the moon has improved from "one part per billion" in 2006, to "one part per million" today, like it's a huge revolutionary improvement. I know it's 1000x, but its still just one part per million. So it takes a million gallons of moon rocks to extract one gallon of water?

If we believe the Russian data then they found one part per thousand. By mass. So a gallon of water would only require you to process three hundred gallons of rock. And the "processing" isn't that difficult: heat it up and collect the vapor.

Besides, even if it is parts per million, that ain't bad. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-pit_mining gold can be economically mined at a couple of ppm, while copper and nickel are mined at parts per thousand.
Thanks for the post Eric. I enjoyed it on a lot of levels. I'm the founder of a new startup (http://cojourneo.com) where we're hoping to a help entrepreneurs deal with many of the issues you raised.

I really appreciated you prioritizing the "Inner Life." Our startup is actually funded by a former top VC, now life coach, Jerry Colonna who helps founders discover and develop their "inner life." You think you don't need an inner life until you are a founder of Etsy, General Assembly, etc. (his clients!) and you discover your resources aren't cutting it anymore during hypergrowth and you're at your co-founder's throat.

I think you would appreciate Jerry's blog:
http://www.themonsterinyourhead.com

And, here's my blog post that also addresses how not to be "consumed" by your work. Perhaps some would argue that the answer is better "work-life balance," but I guess I subscribe to a totally different approach & paradigm altogether. As Jerry would say, "work-life balance is bullshit."

http://blog.cojourneo.com/post/23620551683/be-the-masterpiec...

This might sound crazy to some people... but, it's life to me. :-) Oh, and I'm a Christian too. We should touch base.
+1 for black mirror and well anything by Charlie brooker. Definitely worth watching!
We use MongoDB for some data, but we also use MySQL and Redis. Really it's a question of using the right tool for the job.
From wikipedia, "A hash function is any algorithm or subroutine that maps large data sets of variable length, called keys, to smaller data sets of a fixed length."

Given the pigeonhole principle, and the observation that there are fewer strings of length K than strings of any length, you have that you cannot map every string into a unique hash. That's what I meant by "a straightforward application of the pigeonhole principle".

If you're dealing with an infinite set of hashes (I'm not sure what that would look like, but hey), then of course you need to take into account the limitations of the pigeonhole principle when dealing with infinite sets - specifically, that it only applies if you have a set of pigeons of a larger cardinality than your set of holes. [0,1] and [0,10] have the same cardinality.
You do know that companies like Amazon and Google rely primarily on NoSQL databases.

If they aren't "prime time" I don't know what is.
You might want to look at botlzman/softmax if you want to weight the prob of selection as a function of the current estimated value. One tricky bit is figuring out a good setting for the temperature parameter. Another poster alluded to softmax. In my experience it dosn't really perform better than a simple e-greedy approach, but maybe it has worked well for others?
The cost economics for this model for a CRUD application like everything 37 Signals builds seems favorable for a capped pricing model. Having a business where all of the data is entered by a live human being on a keyboard slows down the pace of consumption to a point where COGS are negligible (in my limited experience.) In an organization with 30,000 people using BaseCamp you're still not likely to get > $150 worth of COGS in data storage, compute, or bandwidth since all of that data still has to be intentionally, manually created by a person. And the pareto principle still applies: only a small portion of those users in an enterprise organization are going to be the ones who actually use it with regularity and frequency.

I don't know if a flat / capped price model like Jason's will work for a more service-oriented product that integrates deeper into the organization and touches parts of a company's automation, like a payment processing gateway or a web analytics system. What type of COGS would a web analytics service incur for a website with millions of uniques a month?
I went through FounderFuel as part of their first cohort and couldn't speak more highly about the team there and the program.

Feel free to reach out if you want to chat. Email is in profile.

Btw, Hi Ben!
I don't think Google Glass is about taking photos (or videos) of your life. If anything, it makes the most sense to think of it as the next step to Google Goggles, and halfway to a Google Goggles HUD.
I thought you were talking about your Facebook feed.

reddit is frontpage of the internet? for who?
This could be two decades away. NVM will first be introduced with limiting amounts of storage so there will still be other hardware.

Hopefully current OSs will be re-imagined anyway just due to the vast time difference.
Fair enough, but having been through the boom and bust of the late 90s, exposure to startups can also be overrated.

Yes, the upside potential can be huge, and you get to play with some bleeding edge technology, but you're also dealing with a lot of inexperienced owners/managers, VC's with their own agendas, overworked employees, and an unhealthy amount of greed.

Yes, there are startups that manage to avoid this, but like in any industry, good companies are the exception rather than the rule.
That is simply untrue. You can have fragmentation of your data with SQL databases as well.
->"How do you make wearing a headpiece cool?"
Beautiful women wearing your product?
> The metadata is more important than the file location.

The web is a great example of a system where there's no particular need to store things like you do in a filesystem. The data for most sites is stored in various SQL and NOSQL databases... yet we still predominately see hierarchical paths used for resource identification. I wonder why?
I'm not sure who this post is aimed at. I hope it wasn't developers, for his sake. He's basically saying that a) he's only interested in hiring dim people and b) smart people moody and easily bored. Good luck recruiting people with that pitch. Eesh.
Nest thermostat to be sold in Apple retail stores
More often than not, the comments sections are just lists of various reimplimentations of the function for versions of PHP that don't have it, or have a bugged version.
Next Generation of E-Commerce
I dare say that the stream metaphor is a better fit for more types of data than Redis is. To first approximation, all data in the modern world is video files. You really want to store those in a raw memory space?
I agree with you that hypocritically judging a form of entertainment is wrong. But I don't see Reddit as just a low-energy activity to pass the time. I see it as something that shapes the minds, personalities and interactions of people in ways which can become a negative if started at a young age or continued for a long period of time. The content being less than inspiring is only a small part of the problem.

The big problem is that this incredibly popular site basically breeds a time-sink ethic, much like Facebook or MySpace, where you can waste hours and hours and have less to show for it than if you were watching porn. Heck, even video games at least develop quick hand-eye reflex and possibly strategy. It's like the TV generation, where kids sat for hours and hours on end staring at the "boob tube" turning their minds slowly to mush and influencing them in perhaps imperceptible ways. Except now they have peers to encourage their Reddit-inspired thoughts and actions.

And finally, as just a general representation of the Internet, it looks like a big pile of useless shit and maybe one or two nuggets of titillating but otherwise unenlightening news clips. Culturally bankrupt and moronic with a kind of perpetual recycling machine for lame content. If this was what I saw when I first got to the internet, i'd unplug the modem and go back to trying to find something good on TV.
Reddit can give incorrect impressions on a great many things. Christian + hacker here as well.
XKCD on PHP's goto Docs
I'm in the same boat. He basically made Slashdot for web 2.0. Digg can't be the sole reason why he is considered so valuable and is so highly sought after.
With Google you see research (which is of course commendable), but so far they haven’t been able to produce profit from anything else than ads, so I would call that research awesome, useful, beautiful, but not (yet) future proof for the company.
1. Pretty sure Facebook is the only one hitting Facebook levels. Facebook is an outlier, don't use this as an example to invalidate his entire point.

2. There are great PHP programmers...just because you're writing something in PHP doesn't mean your code sucks. There is a ton of crap PHP code, but not all. Ruby and python also have their fair share of terrible developers and shitty code.
Couldn't the same be said of any interpreted language.
when he talks of sharing vision he nailed what google glasses is going to be. example:

https://plus.google.com/111626127367496192147/posts/CGR7sCzm...

Post of a video from a person jumping on a trampoline wearing the glasses.
Belief in a higher power is not completely illogical. I build/design things, and take apart and analyze other people's designs. Looking at the universe, from the smallest particles to the largest galaxies, I see a beautifully complex system of interdependent cogs that mesh together perfectly to enable life to exist.

I have yet to come across an intricate system that did not have a designer, and it would be illogical for me to believe the universe just exists.
Of course, of the environment is truely stationary, then the easiest simpest hack method for exploration is just seed the initial values for each option (A/B../Z) with a an optimistic guess (so something you know is higher than the true value. Then just make decisions based on the current best estimate. The estimates will be driven down over time to their true values. Not claiming you should do this or that is optimal or anything but keep it in mind as a quick hack to solve the problem.
I do not expect software pricing to match the marginal cost to the supplier per se. And you're right that pricing in general is done in relation to what's the customers perceived value.

However, I disagree with your first statement. Lets take Highrise pricing plan as an example. For the 6 user plan you pay $24/month - which comes down to $4 per user. For the 15 user plan you pay $49 - about $3.26 per user. So my total cost of course goes up with usage, but not in a linear fashion.

You could also make that happen with the $x/user/month scenario, but that gets probably rather complex without ending up with tiers again.
Naked man killed by Police near MacArthur Causeway was ‘eating’ face off victim
> 1. Until you hit facebook levels and have to write your own interpreter.

Facebook levels of load would be a great problem to have. Until then, who cares?

> 2. Sure, but your code will also suck and be hard to maintain.

Doubtful, but this isn't even a good point. Working software is the important deliverable.

> 3. Nonsense. You might as well say that everyone should use C because it was the first language with a TCP socket API.

You missed the point. Writing a web app with a language that's basically tied to the web makes sense. It's not the most important point, but it isn't 'nonsense'.

> 4. Nonsense. You can fuck up royally in any language.

He said as much in that point. Did you bother reading and thinking about the article, or just trip over your own drool racing to the comments section? I'm just going to stop here.

Color me unimpressed.
One of my least favorite things is the behavior of undefined constants.

Use an undefined constant:

Get an exception? Nope.
Get an empty string? Nope.

PHP will put the name of the constant in the rendered HTML. Arg.
You already have kids wearing fake glasses for style. I think the trick here is just to make the fancy glasses look like normal ones.