skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of an interview I heard on the radio 6 or 7 years ago with someone involved in a project to design & build a small set of robots that can self-replicate using the materials they get from breaking down moon rocks. The plan was to leave them on the moon for a decade, and bring them all back to serve as agricultural helpers on Earth. A caller into the station complained that it would eat up the moon, to which the scientist speaking chuckled and said it would only take a hair off the surface of the moon given how massive it is.

I realize this is barely related, just an interesting memory :) I can't remember who or what company that was, but I'm pretty sure it was a private one. Does anyone recognize this? I don't think it ever saw any sort of fruition.
Venus has an over abundance of CO2.
"I would like the contents of /dev/sda" :)
WxPython by Example Repository
1. Care about the project.
2. Care about the users. Know what the user wants and what is in the best interest of the user.
3. Be able to defend yourself and our product in a battle royal (Accepted).
4. [Because there can be more] Help the technical co-founder anyway you can.
That sounds kind of slow, for air travel.
Forget fender benders. Your house is now in danger of drunk drivers.
Here's what I think Mozilla/Firefox should have done before starting the rapid release cycle:

1. Migrate all extensions to restartless/JetPack. Extensions for Firefox are very powerful but may sometimes break when new versions are released, which then the compatibility check feature is introduced to "solve" this. Before the rapid release cycle, I've already seen some users reluctant to update and would wait for extensions to be updated first before updating to new version of Firefox. So now with this cycle, it just annoys them further. If all extensions were done in a more standard (and simpler) extension API first, this would have reduce the impact on the upgrading process. Users don't have to worry so much if the extensions that they depend on, would break.

2. Remove 3rd-party themes and embrace the 'Personas' (simpler themes/skins). Or at least improve theme development into something more standardized like JetPack. Since the Mozilla days, theme development hasn't change much. Extensions have JetPack, but themes have nothing (Personas is entirely a different thing). The case with themes is exactly the same as extensions. I know some users wouldn't upgrade to Firefox because the theme is not updated yet. I'm not sure if anyone still install custom Firefox themes, but themes played a decent role in attracting users (from IE?) in the early days.

3. Implement Electrolysis (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). From my observation, the real problem with Firefox is not the memory usage but its slowness. When users notice that the browser is getting slower (slow startup, slow tab-switching, slow UI response), they probably look at the number of tabs, try to find out the problem and saw that huge GBs of memory used. Firefox is now better at memory management, but the problem is still there. I'm not 100% sure about the implementation details; I'm thinking that if Firefox has Chrome-like multi-process architecture, the interface would be more responsive and memory management would be even better.

So, after this, implement rapid release cycle, enabled by default for new users/installs and prompt existing users to optionally opt in. Make the update process unobtrusive and it would be a win-win situation for everyone.

(I created one of the first 3rd-party themes for Firefox, since the Phoenix days.)
If you're on OSX you can use Fluid.app to just make a little web-app out of it. I don't use GMail's web UI but it should work fine in Fluid.
Our translation files were messed up. The fix should enter production on Monday: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/1905 Thanks!
I propose that links to random wikipedia articles should be considered below the threshold of "interesting" for the front page of HN. Who's with me?
Ah, yes. Just long enough for the population of the colony to reach hundreds of thousands before they all face miserable death by slow suffocation or radiation poisoning.
Making Django ORM more DRY with prefixes and Q’s
Startup video and explainer video producers directory
A listing of all demo video, startup video and explainer video producers and free tools for creating your own video.
Though this is Bruce's personal blog, the equivalent post on AltDevBlogADay is at http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/07/06/when-even-crashing-... and has more discussion, etc (and is one of the best programming blogs to follow at the moment, IMHO).
>The reason large companies don't do this is they have sunk costs in Exchange and an admin who likes it -- why change?

The bigger reason that with locally hosted mail, you have accountability and control over your own data.

>UI, stability, security, documentation, user license agreement, required system resources, remote exploits that grant admin rights

I am sure Google Apps has none of those issues, except things like this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4198080

>It is more subtle when it comes to Outlook. For example, the only workstations Dell sells come with a MS operating system, that includes IE and Outlook (but you must pay for Outlook/office after 2 months or something). Or staples. Or Office Depot.

That sounds extremely roundabout. A 2 month trial of Outlook is not going to convince anyone to keep using it.

>Wow, ummm, no.

You have not provided one shred of reason to counter my point that, if there was a Exchange alternative that integrated well with Thunderbird, it might have been a success.
> It takes about an hour of use to get there, honestly

I assume you have a great deal of previous drawing experience? In my experience, people without tens of thousands of hours of drawing experience find it extremely difficult to adapt to using a wacom tablet to control the mouse. I’m sure it can be done, but an hour is an incredibly optimistic time estimate.
Netflix Shares Up 13% After CEO's Facebook Status Update
The Sources of The Next American Boom
The delta V requirements to go from the outer solar system to Mars are far less than those required to go from Earth to Mars. Plus, an ammonia iceteroid can be moved around virtually for free (with significant mass lost upon arrival) since ammonia can serve as rocket fuel, and thus the iceteroid can act as a giant fuel tank.
A pyrrhic victory. Not very many customers in there.
Actually, a problem with Social Contract theory is that it can't deal with free-riders. If you never agreed to the contract then you can't be obligated to its terms. So you can infringe on the rights of people who did ascent to the terms of the contract without being obligated to submit to any punishment.
The USA Constitution was way ahead - by some 225 years - with its "1st Amendment" protection of freedom of speech, of press (publishing), and of association. Gorvernmental interference of what someone says, how someone says it, and who they work with to say it, has long been prohibited. Nice to see the UN catch up. Notice, however, the difference between not interfering vs. forcing others to facilitate : negative vs. positive rights.
In interim, would it be fair to say that there will be a lost generation of people while this transition happens?
The usefulness of the Architect role may also depend on the size and topology of the organization. I work in a Very Large Enterprise Company, and our group's architecture team has to make sure not only that our group's systems/projects are well-designed, consistent, maintainable, scalable, etc, but also that they interact nicely with the MANY other geographically-, pyramidally-, and budgetrarily-distrubuted groups, that we aren't duplicating effort, that the lines of responsibility for a given system integration make sense, that we have the same vision for the trajectory of the overall enterprise strategy, etc.

This means our Architects have to collaborate/negotiate/politick with many other groups' architects (and the occasional program manager), while having both the 100,000' perspective on the entire company's organizational structure and systems, as well as the fine-detail nuts-and-bolts of the workings of our own group's systems so we know what complications may arise in interactions with other systems.

NB Our group director has a far-higher-than-normal grasp on these details (others are not so lucky!) but the level of cross-enterprise collaboration is more than he has time for.

Some of this sounds like it'd be the work of a Systems Analyst (which is what we use the SA abbreviation to mean), and that's true, but there are plenty of actual architectural and technological considerations as well: infrastructure issues, build/release coordination, enterprise schema maintenance, shared libraries/technologies (example: which of the four ESB technologies should we use for this project? Oh, really, you want to give us a flat file from the mainframe but wrap it in <xml></xml>? Argh.)

We also must keep a close ear to the product management/BA group and the stakeholders so we make sure our vision is in sync with the business's needs.

So you could say our architecture group is a mix of internal technical leadership, R&D, development of key moving parts (in our case, integration code), mentorship, systems analysis, negotiator, integrator, etc.
A space railway from Earth to Mars is dreaming. 100 million miles is not a trivial task.

Terraforming mars is a waste of time and this is all nonsense from Robert Zubrin.

There are more profitable and, more importantly, more worthwhile endeavors outside of our solar system seeking other worlds.

You can't fix Mars' 30% gravity and you can't fix the lack of a magnetosphere (unless you make the atmosphere so incredibly thick that it is impossible to live there).
I use thunderbird but you can do what you asked in gmail.

The steps I believe are:

1. Forward All Email to 1 email address (you can use a filter to even forward the spam if you don't want false positives getting stuck in an email account you don't log in with often.

2. Set up the ability to send mail as all the email accounts on your main account (this is done in settings, i think it was under identities or something)

3. Select the option to (on reply) send email from the address it was sent to

With this you will also be able to send from any email account from your main one.
Excellent idea. However since mars is right next to the asteroid belt one might easily just use those rather than the "outer" solar system.
I'd pay $200/mo for a global data roaming plan which didn't suck, with VoIP ideally also handled by the carrier, with great support. You can do this with blackberry (for the data roaming part) now, but I'd want Android or iPhone (or WP8 I guess).
There is a difference between the right of not being prevented from doing something, vs. the right to force others to facilitate someone doing something. The right to acquire and use something at your own cost as you see fit is one thing, forcing others via state police powers to pay for and provide those things to you is another.

Know the difference, lest people argue about different things.
> still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve

It leaks a lot when it's using a tiny amount of memory, and it leaks hardly at all when it's using a large amount of memory?
I don't know about that. Let's say the router is running a GPL'd light-weight web server. Just because you can't lock the person out doesn't mean that the component may be effectively replaceable.

Otherwise you could never effectively use any GPL v3 software in embedded devices unless you add additional update paths.
BSD contribution is based on a quid quo pro regarding future contributions. It is just more flexible in this than the GPL is.

Consider PostgreSQL for example. Several of the main contributors also release proprietary versions. But they contribute to lower the costs of code maintenance.
He calls out my post so I'm obliged to respond. First I know my first post there was kind of arrogant and comes off sounding like an armchair expert. But I have scaled similar code, by having extremely efficient barebones code. And I stand 100% behind that approach as valid, and something many websites do. Look at instagrams architecture for an example of simple infrastructure doing massive workloads. I gave my thoughts as a way to get discussion over what the challenges of scaling a site like 4chan would be, not because I meant to be arrogant about it.

4chan sounds like its based off some php/perl scripts +databases, and I think that approach is fundamentally bad for high performance sites with very well defined usage patterns. You wouldn't cut a steak with a plastic knife, therefore you shouldn't be writing a website that's meant to scale in php or perl. Sure you can do it with a lot of effort, but it's ass backwards.

The advantage of databases and scripting languages is flexibility with how you can add features and do queries on the data. Once you have a well-defined usage model and queries, it makes complete sense to change to the customized highly optimized approach with java servlets or something for the queries that need to be fast.

Also if you have a small enough data set that can live in memory like 4chan does (text), it makes complete sense to have it all in memory ready to serve up on demand super quickly.

I didn't mean to trivialize the efforts to scale such a website, but on a conceptual level, if you can fit all your data in memory, and you don't need to customize pages per user as 4chan doesn't, it really isn't that complex to scale.
Rapid release cicle: Good.

Changing extention APIs or UI: Bad.
Yeah, we wanted to support the Nexus One, and the hardware meets the minimum requirements but we encountered weird performance issues likely related to the graphics driver.
I'm not sure what services you are referring to, and I recall that being the case in the past, but I can't think of any Google product that doesn't work with Google Apps accounts.
The moon creates our waves and wind of Earth. I don't really know how much pulling resources from the moon could affect the moon itself, or the moon's effect on Earth - though I'd rather not try and find out.
To counter your anecdote with another, different anecdote with more numbers in it, back in the days of Firefox 4 and subsequent versions, it would not be unusual for my Firefox to hit 500MB to 1GB of RAM usage after a day of browsing. Right now, my Firefox 15 has been running for a day, and about:memory says the total is 363.26MB. Firefox has slimmed down a lot in the past year.
I'm not sure most users would move to the new product. Most people stick to the software they use. That might be because they don't want to learn a different interface. But I think, fundamentally, many people don't even want to deal with the existence of alternatives, they're blissfully ignorant of choice and of weighing up- and downsides[1]). I'm the same way with laundry detergent. That's a fickle kind of loyalty, though.

So, if that's true and people stuck with Firefox, you'd have to maintain Firefox between the snapshot releases of Frequentfox. You'd have to push an update at least every time you fix a security issue, which can be pretty often. So you'd still need to figure out a good user experience for dealing with frequent updates. Fortunately, that's a solved problem, and the user doesn't even need to notice you've updated their software.

Of course as you add features and modify/improve the user interface in Frequentfox, your Firefox snapshots will be different enough that you'd still end up alienating users, so you can't go crazy developing Frequentfox, either.

I'm voting for frequent push updates, transparent if they don't change anything significant, and with a gentle introduction to the changes if they do. Big changes should be rare, maybe explain the motivation behind them to the user, and ideally make them option. Despite all the rage, I think the user interface changes from Firefox 3 to trunk weren't all that jarring; significant tweaks more than fundamental reworkings of the UI, the awesome bar is a great example.

[1] Edit: I think this is what you call a "second-order decision", a term I just learned, e.g. http://thinking-marketing.blogspot.de/2009/11/second-order-d...
The FBI says the modern bank robber walks in, gives the teller a note, takes the money and leaves within 90 seconds. He never carries a weapon and gets less than $2k, but if he's reasonably smart he can rob 30-40 banks before being caught.

That's terrible pay, when you think about it. You're always on the road, and you spend a couple days on each bank. You might as well sell insurance for a living.
We considered publishing a list of minimum requirements but we encountered phones that for whatever reason wouldn't work even though the hardware met the minimum requirements. For example, the Nexus One and HTC Evo both had low frame rates despite adequate hardware.
Well I agree with all that you're saying. But this is still a car. If you want it to make "the last mile", which can take you from your home door to work. Then you'll need it to drive on ground and deal with traffic with other cars. And then only fly if there's a good enough spot for both take off and landing. Just like the hybrid on the video.

I think can of a few dirty workarounds. But for this to be optimal, I still think we'd have to master fully automated both air and ground driving first.
I'm projecting. As an extrovert, I'd go nuts. So clearly I'm not making the trip.

I'm more worried about the time in transit.

For sanity, my assumption is that humans will need the ability to easily increase / decrease metabolism. So that 6 month, year, century trip would seem like a few days.

For radiation, I think space faring humans will need to be radiation hardened somehow.
Greater availability of car-sharing services like Zipcar at general aviation airports would eliminate much of the need for roadable airplanes.
How to excel at bash scripting
> not a factor of ten

This is why I'm calling it sensationalist. Think about what it would mean for someone to claim 100x faster - if they got it done in a week (and that's pretty damn fast for any decent piece of software, regardless of the environment or scope), they're claiming that they initially budgeted nearly two years. I'm saying that there is no way that ever happened.

Again, I said that there are benefits (and also trade-offs), but that this isn't game-changing. I'm not clear on where we disagree.
I guess I'm in the minority in that I liked the updates: it was like getting a suprise gift ... but the incompatibility w/ the latest version of flash has forced me, unfortunately, to move on.

It's not even necessarily Mozilla's fault, but my other browers don't have this issue. I'm trying out Opera for the umpteenth time ... it always eventually disappoints, but I'm going to give it another go.
Sometimes the hardware meets the minimum specs but other issues like buggy drivers lead us to have to blacklist a device.
> it has no tray icon

I've got a tray icon in Gnome Shell (and I had one when I was using Gnome 2), using the FireTray extension, and there is also a Gnome Integration extension that provides a tray icon, in theory, but it doesn't work for me.
"For that price why not buy a new Cessna and just drive a clunker to the airport?"

Because when you get to the other end, you're stuck with the "$100 burger" at some out-of-the-way rural airstrip, instead of being able to drive into town and go to the nice pub.

You'd have to be quite special for that to be worth $300k on a "toy" though…
I'm normally very liberal about submissions-- I figure whatever we upvote belongs here. But this... I don't understand why this even got submitted.
Great post. I wish you kept the same order in the summary, but using the numbering at the end, re #1, the raw speed of CPUs means the difference between O(n) and O(n^2) may not be measurable for reasonable test cases, so it looks fast enough. re #3, #2 also contributes to this. when every function you call goes off and calls ten thousand other functions, you lose control of what blocks and what doesn't. Sometimes GUI event loops don't integrate well with other event loops, such as for networking.
Surprised The Economist published this misguided puff piece. And even more surprised these researchers haven't seemed to grasp the idea of correlation not equaling causation.

"If one investor of a pair has a degree from a leading university, this adds 9% to the possibility of their selected firms reaching an IPO; if the second does too, that adds a further 11%." Really?

Generally, the article seems to imply that VCs are the sole drivers of success/failure of a company.

There is a great deal of opacity around VC and Pvt Equity performance so data-driven research and insights would be great, but unfortunately, the research fails to deliver any meaningful insight to push the conversation forward.

Shameless plug - our firm has been studying co-investment relationships between firms as part of some new tools we're developing and recently looked at Sequoia, Accel and Kleiner Perkins co-investment relationships. Might be of interest to those who read this article.

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/investment-sy...
He never said valid, just acceptable ;-)
Maybe it is on their todo lists.. Perhaps they do serve that Catalan group, though you mentioned they do in fact get shoe-horned? You'd think someone would have solved this by now if it was valuable enough to?
We would have to mine the moon for billions of years to even make a measurable change in its mass. There is very little risk we'll even get near that.

And you don't know, but other people do. You have no say on what they will try. Believe it when we tell you (and people less kind than me will eventually do so) your lack of knowledge and unwillingness to learn is far more dangerous than reducing the mass of the moon.
While I understand your argument, that same logic would say riding a motorcycle is "suicidal". A point of view I hear a fair bit being an avid motorcycle rider, but one that indicates to me that the person holding it _really_ hasn't understood the risks (or rewards).
Thanks for the information, unfortunately one is a Gmail account (personal) and the other 2 are Google apps accounts (startup and side project) and I don't think you can send mail looking like a user at a Google Apps address.

Also I don't really want all my email from these 3 services mashed together into the one inbox as it'd be almost impossible to undo and it'll get messy really quick.

All I really want is a side pane in Gmail similar to Thunderbird / outlook which shows the 3 accounts and their folders with how much mail is in each folder, then I can easily click on any folder to navigate to it straight away.
1. Connections 2. Money 3. Macgyver-like business skills
Except that Chrome has never really changed it's UI. The presentation at the end of Google's 2012 IO Day 2 keynote actually timelapses through the UI. The only change is the removal of the home button outside of general micro-tweaks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPtJd6AzU8c&feature=playe...
Your assertion is entirely false. Just because something keeps getting larger/faster/smaller doesn't mean it will eventually be arbitrarily large/fast/small. e.g. the sequence 1, 1 + 1/2, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8,... keeps getting bigger and bigger, but it never goes past 2.

(Futhermore, in my personal experience, Firefox has been using less and less memory.)
I presume this is a follow on to the recent top story regarding colonization of Mars come reality show next decade.
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