skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is someone who votes for Hamas, an organization that clearly sponsors terrorism, a civilian? What about someone who willingly turns a blind eye to terrorists firing rockets at civilians from their rooftops?

When "civilians" form such a powerful support structure for terrorism, I would say collateral damage is very hard to measure.
Steven Blank has founded 4 startups, participated in 8, sat on many advisory boards and otherwise actively participated in the startup process(es).

On meta note, to elevate the level of discussion here I suggest that you try addressing substance of the matter being presented, not attacking the personality of the presenter.
If you would rather watch video or listen to MP3, here's the link: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2056...
I'd submit that PHP is for this generation of programmers what BASIC was to a lot of the older generation (including me).

I started on BASIC on a Trash-80. Actually you can probably substitute some of the terms in this blog post for my journey from BASIC to now.
I'm a Jungle Drive user, and while I don't pretend to be an "average" user, it was very easy to install. I'm not sure if setting up an Amazon S3 account and then putting the key into Jungle Drive would be too technical for the average user, maybe it would. Overall I've been very happy with Jungle Drive so far, and the $20 one time charge is pretty nice, particularly since I can use that on as many machines as I want with one Amazon account.

How does that compare with ZumoDrive?

--Disclosure - not currently a user of ZumoDrive
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Is China the future of Intellectual Property?
Superior performance can be had by applying the right algorithm. Also, applying the wrong algorithm may not get you where you want no matter how many cycles you put in. Brute force is always a terrible way of doing things unless there literally is no better way (I'm looking at you NP-Hard).
This is based on Steve Blank's experience as a serial entrepreneur: he graduated from the school of hard knocks and is not given to academic gobbledygook.

This presentation is condensed from his book "Four Steps to the Epiphany" which is well worth reading. Eric Ries has written a good post that marries this methodology with agile at http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/customer-d...
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Ah! Gotcha.

I think Posterous is actually pretty good with adding features so far. Last I checked it was still dead simple. So's Tumblr, I guess, but now it FEELS more cluttered. Like it's doing more than it ought to. Even though it's still point-n-click, the page is more distracting.
I didn't attack his personality - I attacked 1) the content of the presentation 2) the presentation of the presentation and 3) cautioned against accepting this presentation as great because of the source. My argument wasn't very detailed, but it certainly wasn't an attack on the presenter.

You, on the other hand, did not defend the content of the presentation, but rather cited some qualifications of the author - ironically, just what I warned against accepting as proof of credibility.
I can see why this was downvoted. Advising someone to seek psychological advice from a psychologist, rather than a forum of programmers, was clearly wrong. A bunch of programmers who aren't qualified to give psychological advice doing so is clearly more valuable.
ZumoDrive is going to change everything
"This is academic gobbledy gook.I felt like I was hearing a bad tech sales pitch flipping through this with all of its markitecture diagrams."

Is there a reason why you thought so? Are you aware of a better way of doing this, according to you? We'd like to hear.
Your point: Author is theorizing without connection to reality, more literally "This is academic gobbledy gook."

My counterpoint: Steven Blank has vast first-hand experience in startups.

Any more questions?
Now imagine those visualizations coupled with something like Seadragon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ra5tp7K--I
California Institute of Technology
It's a very nice slogan that 'Israel has every right to defend themselves' from the rocket attacks, but they have no legal rights to take actions outside of the constraints of International Humanitarian Law.

Reprisals against civilians and indiscriminate attacks are clearly and explicitly prohibited by both the Fourth Geneva Convention and Protocol I. (Although, I believe Protocol I cannot be enforced against Israel since they have not ratified it).

Israel DOES NOT have the right to attack civilians as revenge or to deter or prevent future attacks. This is a war crime under international law (GC IV Art. 33, Art. 53).

Israel DOES NOT have the right to indiscriminately shell Gaza under the pretext of defending itself from terrorists no matter how carefully civilian casualties are minimized. Again, this is a war crime (Protocol I, Art. 51), you go to The Hague for this (Nuremburg Principle VI).
This is what I love about Hacker News... even a semi-trollish post generates two great replies that I am glad to have read.
> They didn't use a template engine.

PHP is a templating engine. Writing a templating language for PHP, like Smarty, is like writing a second templating language running on the first templating language.
$60/mo to put my whole "200gb" iTunes library "in the cloud", or the same amount of money to buy a much larger storage appliance for my home.
Customers = money, do they not?
Santa Clara University
Academic opinions are almost always formed from experiments, and this presentation is academic.

My point was not that the author is theorizing without connection to reality. My point was I've heard the same thing said in half a sentence that he took dozens of slides to say.

But it's got that nice academic sheen!
Look, I really don't want to argue about this on a forum, because we're not resolving anything and mostly people just make themselves angry. But you are so confident in your misconceptions that I feel obligated to say something. You are severely misunderstanding Israel's military strategy? Do you seriously think they're going around targeting civilians for revenge?
Emory University
One's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Hamas won an election because they were seen as less corrupt than the other party.

Like in the USA, there are more issues in the Palestinian elections than terrorism. Stuff like roads, water, schools, social security, etc.
A detailed article on rescuing a hosed system with Knoppix:

How Knoppix saved the day

http://www.dancingbison.com/writings/knopresc.txt
So basically the world is worse than 8 years ago, what a surprise. Seriously, do you know of any period of history were the world goes well?
man I knew Apple was doing good, but such a huge improvement in just 8 years is pretty damn good.

online spending is actually less than I expected

Newspaper circulation is actually more than I expected...all this bitching and moaning about how newspapers are dying, and they only lost 10%
There is no possible legal justification so it doesn't matter what their motives are.
You could have all the money in the world and still make a product that nobody wants. Looks like a guaranteed path to failure.
IBM's history has shown they are not afraid to use their patent library offensively.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21509.wss

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-5527642.html

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE3DF133CF...

http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/06/ibm-tries-to-stop-asus-im...

And that was just from a 2 minute Google search.

Notice settlements are called "cross licensing" but only have money going in one direction - towards IBM.
I interned at Facebook, and let me tell you, there weren't many people enthusiastic about being stuck in PHP.

A lot of modern sites are in PHP, because that's what the best choice was when they started (as far as they could tell), and now are stuck with that decision.
Agreed. As someone who sells online backups by the byte, I should be trying to get people to back up all the data they have -- but as I routinely point out to people, some stuff really doesn't need offsite backup. If your house burns down, there are lots of things you're going to be upset about losing; a collection of downloaded MP3s probably isn't one of them.
Runs in your browser: no installation

But you have to sign up before you can even really see what it does. That's worse than a small install.
Stanford University

(or rather, I went there until I graduated a few weeks ago)
Why the hell would I want some random shmucks game on my website?

Why would someone want to PLAY someone's random game on my website, instead of say.. on a gaming website?

And where's all the fun social stuff I have come to associate with flash gaming on the web these days (Thanks to places such as Kongregate)
Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza
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Funny. My advisor always wants a simulation to back up anything I do. Then again, any sort of scientific method isn't used until you do research. It's not taught as a way of operations in classes directly.
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drexel
Perhaps if you're in a connectivity rich part of the world this cloud storage and computing stuff is alluring but for those of us with imperfect connectivity it represents more inconvenience not less.
I agree somewhat but there are other factors. You can't tell me that every web host worth their salt didn't (or doesn't) offer up a cgi-bin directory.

I would characterize it as this: PHP is a Perl-like language that is entirely web oriented.

Because Rasmus built PHP to make web sites it was oriented towards the web from day 1. Since it's similar to Perl (dynamic typing, just-in-time, etc) it's easy to learn and flexible.

However, unlike Perl there was no existing community with a non web focus. This made it very easy for the PHP community to rally around web projects and achieve all the things that made it good for the web and hence extremely adoptable.
If there was one single belief in the software world that I could change, this would be it.

Changing the database is only hard if you are afraid of changing the database. The belief that change is difficult leads people to expect that the database will never change. Which leads to programming practices that aren't flexible enough to change large sections of code rapidly. Which leads to software that is difficult to maintain in the face of schema changes.

Start from the assumption that the database will change often, however, and you'll build refactorability in from the start. If Junior dev Jimmy drops a NOT NULL constraing on a column someplace, then suddenly the continuous build will break on seven unrelated projects, and those teams will spend 5 minutes each patching the code, testing and getting the build fixed.

It's really not hard. You just have to stop being afraid!
University of California, San Diego (recently graduated though)
Ahh, that's a bit of a problem. That was something I was intending on using. But I'll still check it out and hope for msysgit to improve in the future.
Bard College at Simon's Rock (currently, will be transferring after this semester)
I think your point can be summarized most plainly by saying PHP is cheap to host. I don't doubt that is a large part of its continuing popularity. But it is begging the question: Hosting providers didn't force PHP on the world, they met a demand. Where did that demand come from?

I don't think its technical merits (such as they are), community, documentation, or appeal to hosting providers is to blame. I think the answer is rather simpler: PHP was the only language that tied itself to the "build a website" niche in both its implementation and its marketing. Sun's contemporary efforts with Java were scattered and, even in the web domain, more focused on applets. PHP had "build a website" written all over it.

In short, I think it comes down to the old adage: location, location, location. PHP was perfectly positioned. The web boomed, and PHP rode its coattails. Anything with even the slimmest virtues could have succeeded with such good placement. In fact, it did.
Even though cloud storage is getting cheaper, it's still not as cheap as off of the shelf hard drives (yet). But then again, you can't access your hard drive from anywhere, and it's not stored at geographically different locations.

Then when it comes to your mobile devices, sometimes it's not possible to add additional capacity. You are paying for something different than a hard drive. Cloud storage will get cheaper, just as the harddrives have
Stanford undergrad, although I am taking 2 years off to work on startups/travel the world in south america, asia, europe, etc.
Beware the "Analysis Paralysis" tarpit ...

Ever notice how every simple (simplistic) piece of advice that's obviously true has an equally simple (simplistic) piece of advice that's obviously true, and exactly opposite.

"He who hesitates is lost" vs "Look before you leap"

Yes, code should be simple, but sometimes it can only get that way after you've written the wrong version. Sometimes it's only then that you really understand the problem.
As a complete aside from the article, someone I follow twittered the following yesterday:

watching Topless Pillow Fight on Boxee. check it out at http://www.hulu.com/watch/2... 5:48 PM Jan 15th from boxee

This isn't meant as a criticism of Boxee, but it does highlight an interesting aspect of life streaming. At what point don't I want my friends to know what I am doing, let alone the public? It's probably possible to activate a "porn mode" in Boxee but who's going to remember to do that for a single impulsive click on Hulu?

This is where data privacy needs to be thought about. If it's too much trouble for a user to filter, how do you filter for them?
University of Queensland
PHP is a crappy template engine. Inlining code into an HTML document requires a lot of discipline, a lot of code to write, and is error prone. Why not let software handle that task for you? You want to create more work for yourself?
The "legalease" is a kind of programming language. Its not human readable. All that garbage is inherited from a parent class.

Patent->technology->computers->text.lets_patent_chomp_and_see_what_happens.
Perhaps I'm more cynical than most, but I don't think that having a CTO is increasing the size of government. Rather, they'd continue to make technology decisions (remember Ted "The Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens? Or Joe "Impetus for PGP" Biden?) yet be even more incompetent at it. Lack of expertise has never been a government roadblock before. I don't really like Obama's picks, but at least they have some technology background. I tend to believe that the government will try to legislate technology anyway; might as well focus on harm mitigation.
Building a Mini-ITX Web Content Filter with Ubuntu
"How can any passionate individual swing their strong opinions in hours"

Umm, most smart, passionate people can swing their strong opinions within minutes, when presented with the appropriate data. George Soros is legendary for this; he's been known to back out of billion dollar investments the next day. Most good managers are like this too.

The crucial part is data, and how they evaluate that data. And not having read the blog post, I can't say whether Warrior's thought process makes sense. But I really hate the idea that "Passionate people cling to their ideas at all costs" - that's responsible for most of the failures and wasted effort in the world today.
>Newspaper circulation is actually more than I expected...all this bitching and moaning about how newspapers are dying, and they only lost 10%.

That is enough, though. Businesses don't just care about sales, they also care about net profit. The ratio of the latter to the former is profit margin, and indicates how what percent revenue needs to fall in order for a company to go into the red. A small change in sales can result in a large change in profit margin, depending on the costs involved in running the business. The NYT ran a 3.4% profit margin in 2007, on revenues of $3.1bn. A small change in that revenue is all it takes to put them in the red. If they have lost 10% of their circulation, assuming advertisers become disinterested at a similar rate, that is more than a sufficient amount of pain.

FWIW, this has borne out in Q3 2008. Profit margins at NYT are at -16.72% for Q3. Revenue was at $687.04, which is a 10% drop from the same quarter a year ago. Annualized revenue from Q3 is at $2.748bn, or a 14% drop from the prior year. Not counting the $160m "unusual" expense they took -- whatever that was from, that still around 10% drop in revenue, and a profit margin of right around 0%. I can't imagine Q4 will be any more rosy given the trajectory of their revenue.

I suspect we'll see more cost cutting there in the coming month, which will likely result in a reduction of reporters and other staff. It would seem to follow that either a smaller paper, or less expensive (read: more fluffy) articles will result, which runs the risk of further reducing sales. Not a happy cycle.

So yeah, it's enough.

Source for figures: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYT
Looks like a movement from waterfall to iterative development in the customer devel side.

That much I got. How to do that with a startup idea, without developing enough to make a showable prototype, I donno. pclark's mechanical turk idea sounds pretty awesome.
Mathematics and CS are formal sciences, which observe and study theoretical ideas to discover new truths.

Biology and physics are natural sciences, which observe and study the natural world to discover models of it.
Walla Walla University -small denominational school with under 2k students. Graduates about 25 engineers a year.
Even paying for the software and additional technology this looks expensive to me. Amazon S3 price for this would be $20/month for the storage (plus transfer costs of $0.15/gb) so I think it could be cheaper
So this straw man driver swerves for unexpected road markings but not for unexpected cyclists? Not only is he drowsy but insane too?
I'm hearing that the 20% time at Google is being de-emphasized because of the focus on the projects that DO work/make money. Add to that their recent laying off of recruiters and hiring freeze, maybe they'll open source more and more. Yay! Dodgeball for everyone!
I no longer attend school, but when I did it was at the University of California at Irvine.

Just down the street from Blizzard, for all you WOW players.
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Excellent point. In many ways I think the networks get a bit too much credit for Hulu.

I thought a bit about it think and I think the accolades are largely because people didn't expect much after the fiascos of the RIAA and the MPAA. How many of us here expected the networks to be able to embrace, adapt, and deliver like they did with Hulu? I know I sure didn't.

Sure many readers here could've built something equivalent or better given rights to the content and half the capital injection but IMO the networks still deserve recognition for Hulu.
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That's a good point, but I'm just in a time in my life where my major goals revolve around school, and since engineering is pretty regimented at my school, it might set me back nearly a year. Although sharks and scuba diving both sound really tempting... Oh well, I would probably have better odds winning some lotteries than getting this job.
This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this "Hacker News" or not.

[edit]: If you disagree, reply.
I don't think it is. The bleeding edge of Web 1.0 or even Web 2.0 development required a LAMP stack.

The author says that compared to programming desktop applications (all of the languages he mentioned), the web based stack of MySQL, PHP, and Linux better allowed him to create apps that users wanted.

Developers who started with PHP and moved up to Ruby and Python may not realize that older developers who started with Assembler, Basic, and C++ find any kind of web development a huge improvement for them. And, a productive single person would by definition try to extend and improve their app instead of learning new languages unnecessarily every 6 months.
There are lots of important stories in the world, and each has its place depending on the news stream.
Don't want to inline code? Well don't inline code. No second templating engine can reduce complexting any more than using PHP directly as a templating language. PHP was built as a templating engine from day 1.

There is a reason why php scripts start with <? --- ?>
"A woman described how on Tuesday Israeli forces "started to fire phosphorus bombs against the people"

Please. Since when is a civilian woman a reliable source of information on weaponry? Gimme a break! Bad journalism. What else could one expect from the Guardian?
from Georgia Tech
There were a few figures on there I found interesting.

The average person spends 1704 hours in front of the TV every year? On average thats 20% of your life in front of a TV... I spend maybe 5 hours per week, so I'd hate to see what some others do.

I suppose thats a big contributor to the other statistic, states with obesity rate below 20%... down from 28/50 to 1/50.
Twitter + BOSS = Real Time Search on the Google App Engine
Actually, 20% time is still available to google engineers. That's good too, a bunch of folks use 20% to release code into open source. But, yeah, I'd like to see more code released :-)
Quite. WP weapons are very distinctive; the explosion they make doesn't look like anything else and they leave chemical traces. It would be easy for any investigator to bring back conclusive evidence if there were any.

Incidentally we used WP (grenades) during GW1.
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Strong candidate for worst infographic ever. Can't imagine how a simple text list wouldn't be better in almost every way, except in terms of providing a graphic designer several hours of work.

Even the reasoning for the map device itself is tenuous at best, since the outline of America is barely recognizable and the graphics bear no relation to their locations on the map, except perhaps for the "inmates in custody" square, which is in the general vicinity of Texas.