skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Truly inspired text should inspire the reader to obtain insights they'd have trouble reaching on their own. And yes, getting in touch with archetypes can actually be healing to the psyche.
A very nice video and story, but I would just like to highlight something. He says that he realized "there's no real know-how about how to work with cardboard beside making packages out of it".

I don't know if to say it's standard, but in industrial engineering there's certainly knowledge about it. For example: http://smarterware.org/890/the-office-made-entirely-of-cardb...
> I very much disagree with your stance on this. I have yet to see a cheap bike that will stand up to more than a few months of daily commuting without various bearings wearing out. Use of non-standard parts makes fixing them uneconomical, as you could quickly buy a decent bike for the replacement value required.

Agreed, but the article seemed to be arguing that there was demand for a cheap, essentially disposable, bike and that's what I think is a solved problem

It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.
I don't think the HN community ever intended to promote out-of-the-box thinking. When I read Paul Graham's essays (and I've read most of them), I get the sense that HN is an attempt to create a community of 'bright lights' i.e. smart people, and provide a supportive environment of other 'smart people' without all the dog-eat-dog, macho,take-no-prisoners, slash and burn nonsense that makes up a good deal of human behavior.

And that's a fine and noble pursuit, however, the market place is not delicate academic utopia, and so one has to wonder how these very bright, but often impractical people, whose genius has been nurtured, pampered and flattered are going to deal with the realities of the market place and the end consumers of their 'product'.

Enter the Y-combinator business model, where for a mere 51% of your company, the harsh realities of business will be taken care of by our team of take-no-prisoners business warriors, leaving you, delicate genius, to be nurtured and cultivated to your fullest potential.

And again, I have no problem with that, I just have a problem with undemocratic secret societies that wield power from the shadows. They are prone to corruption and calcification.
just add env to .gitignore
Goldman Sachs estimates Microsoft makes about 450M per year, or $3-6 per Android device sold.[1] There have been stories about them seeking royalties as high $15 per phone, but no evidence (that I know of) to support that they are getting anything close to that. It would be the highlight of their earnings if they were.

[1] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-09-29/tech/30216822...
I agree with that, though that's still a somewhat different idea of "risk" than companies have. It's perfectly possible to do "risky" research in academia in the sense of something that may not pan out into practical applications in the next 50 years... if a funding body has made it a priority. If the NSF has decided that Foo Research is a priority and will be funded at $100m/yr for the next 5 years, then it is not risky for the professor to research in that area, but it might be risky research in the sense that it may never pan out to be worth that $500m NSF investment. In industry, that kind of research may never have happened.

What's increasingly hard to do in academia is to take risks individually: if you decide something is under-researched and should be a priority, rather than waiting for a funding agency to decide it's a priority, you'll have tough going.
Absolutely. I have a mindset that puts one foot in both the technical and artistic worlds and reading his ideas made my skin crawl.

While I have a good understanding and appreciation of artistic expression, I know it's difficult to switch between coding and painting. Pick one and hire someone else to do the other.
> the rational, profit-maximizing thing for them to do is to stonewall, misdirect, bring out the lawyers, shoot the messenger, and generally continue to sell as many flawed locks as possible

While that may be "profit-maximizing", it's not necessarily "rational". I'd sooner call it "short-sighted", "single-minded" or "primitive".

It might be "rational" from the pov of such a corporation as a single organism but it's not from the view of the humans that make up its arms, legs and eyes. And they live in the same society as the hotel owners and hotel guests, unless they choose not to, but it's getting harder and harder to make that choice thanks to people like Daeken.

And about the corporate organism? In its own competitive environment, it's got a primitive predatory intelligence, roughly comparable to that of a big spider (its products may be clever and complex, but its behaviour is not). If that's "rationality", we should probably consider setting the bar a bit higher for ourselves.
Don't forget, it is fundamentally easier to coach someone than to act on advice. So the field for potential (good) coaches/mentors is relatively large.

The famous/successful/rich all got very lucky at some point (in addition to hard work), so many of them might not be the most valuable mentors. Especially if you're not already connected.

And of course, reading good authors will do a world of good. Writers like Peter Drucker, Zig Ziglar, and Jim Collins can be fantastic teachers.

Finally, there is a cottage industry of "pay me and I will give you advice." Which is sad faced panda to the max. Probably don't waste your time and money there.

:)
If anything I could see this being safer. Rather than just snapping (e.g. a carbon fibre front fork) this would just deform and take away the impact force - kind of like a crumple zone in cars.
You can have both, and you can do it in a consistent way. Not that you can make everybody happy, but it's close enough.

For example we implemented our API with both XML-RPC and REST + JSON interfaces (http://www.memset.com/apidocs/intro.html). All the methods are available and work the same way in both interfaces. There's some extra work to deal with some of the types (ie. dates in JSON), but it's not too difficult.

So we have one implementation/docs, but two interfaces to access to it.
BPTP New Project
If you want to use fabric (or a shell script) to run puppet, go ahead. I'm just suggesting that you really want to use a deploy system with proper dependency management.

The issue I ran into with fabric is that I often got stuck in dependency hell. The following is fabric's simplest method of dependency management:

def install_foo():
install_foo_dependency()
...

Unfortunately, you don't want to do this every time you deploy because install_foo_dependency() might take a while to run. You can work around it by checking inside install_foo_dependency whether it's already there. In practice, you probably won't always do this. Puppet usually has recipes which already do this for you.

So you typically have functions like:

def full_deploy():
install_foo_dependency()
install_foo_without_dependency()

In theory, you can do things right with fabric. In practice, you have to do a lot of work to replicate what puppet (together with assorted easy to find recipes) gives you out of the box.
I don't remember the lectures I gave, or the students who fell asleep in my first few tutorials... but I do remember the students who asked me about concepts they didn't fully understand and how great it felt when I could see the idea click in their head.

More of that kind of teaching could be a great thing.
12 desk office space / 12 man office suite becoming available at Chiswick500
So do you use virtualenv in production? Is there a good tutorial on this for my developers?
Ixnay on the disposable.

Even if it's cardboard you have to consider how efficiently it can all be recycled and how much energy it takes to create it in the first place, and what happens with any parts that can't be recycled.

As an example, many North American cities are sending their recycling materials overseas, using up a ridiculous amount of fuel.

I guarantee you're doing a lot more for the environment buying used or renting / borrowing. Is it really so inconvenient?
While I agree with the virtualenvwrapper suggestion, the idea that a single directory is going to 'clutter' your project folder is pushing the definition of 'clutter' to me.
It is absurd to generalise like this and tell people not to try without knowing their background and goals.

While I personally don't see the point in spending my time learning design skills, this is because my current goal is to move away from doing the work myself to managing others doing the work.

Assuming your statement that only some people have artistic skills is correct, and even assuming the proportion is very low for the statement to be interesting, you're still making an assumption that people with artistic skills and sensibilities are always aware of them. What does e.g. a 22 year old "programmer" have to lose trying their hand at a new skill? They may discover a passion or talent they never realised they had and your advice would see them miss this opportunity.
> Why do you pick meaning #3?

Surely we should be allowed to take whichever definition best matches the intended meaning. The fact that there are other definitions that do not suit our purposes should have no bearing on the "correctness" of our language.

An example. If someone takes issue with me saying that a soldier was "pinned down", I might defend my use of the idiom by saying that they were unable to move because of enemy fire. The question, "Why do you pick that particular definition, when the term can also mean 'fixed in place with literal pins'?" seems a little silly.
A Unit Testing Framework In 44 Lines Of Ruby
Reread what I said. Fabric is easier to set up, puppet/chef works better after it's no longer a small project.
After reading any parts of the Bible I tend to feel as inspired as Randolph Churchill who, as described by Evelyn Waugh:

"In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy & I have bet Randolph 20[pounds sterling] that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. It would have been worth it at the price. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud `I say I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible "bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave'" or merely slapping his side & chortling `God, isn't God a shit!' "

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mosley-letters.html
Hmmm. I read that book a few years ago, and the only thing that sticks in my mind is the bizarre use of mock-biblical language.
It's an interesting model that I do hope catches on. My impression is that it's not currently widespread, but maybe I'm missing all the interesting action. Afaict, in the game industry (which I'm pretty familiar with, being an AI researcher in academia focusing on game design / game mechanics), the more common model is a very highly managed EA-style one. And among smaller firms, creative freedom in design is more common, but technical research isn't that common, because they don't have the resources/budget/interest. The only smallish game company I've seen produce actual published research is LittleTextPeople (some years ago, there was also Zoesis, but it's now defunct).

Perhaps it's better in other fields?
Having a website is useful but essential - all of my freelance contracts I have gotten were via contacts (friends, family, acquintances).

Recently gotten one from a friend who I consulted a couple of months ago and told them (he's a part owner of the company) that they don't need a website (yet - unless they never plan to make money off it). Now they're back with a budget and a plan ready to get things rolling - and I've managed to get 10% share in profits generated by the website.

I'd suggest you approach it differently - consider your freelance team a business. One of the reasons I dislike Freelancer/ODesk is because they tend to treat website/software developers as commodities.

That generally works out bad for everyone. Build me a facebook for 50 dollars? Heck no.

Convert an entire website to Joomla and replace "Live Chat" functionality for a fixed price of 5 dollars? Haha.

As a business doing 'freelance' work you shouln't opt to work for less than 40-50 dollars an HOUR. Looking over those requests you can easily judge ones that are worth it.

Avoid the el cheapos - it's usually the people that can't make up their minds, always extends deadlines to 'add in last minute features' or refuse to pay you (only offering 10% payment for work done).

Find out their budgets beforehand and guestimate them if their specs are within their budget. Don't work for charity, unless it's for your mother or for charity - which then you should be looking at http://www.hackersforcharity.org/ not on ODesk or Freelancer.

Also, aim for local freelance projects. Your clients will be much quicker to react if you can make time to sit with them to discuss their strategy and goal. (Agile over e-mail doesn't work)

Be sensible and be honest with your prospective clients. They just might be sending more work your way (that's how freelancers get 'set' with a steady flow of work).
Indeed, been using php.js for quite a while here now. Will give this other one a shot later on though, see how they compare to one another.
There are plenty of situations where most of RESTful idea has no meaning.

Zemanta's API is one of them. We're not dealing with resources, we're dealing with analysis of text (natural language processing, information retrieval, etc...), so except of the basic url scheme, there's not much that you can take from the RESTful idea.
Robohydra: a new testing tool for client-server interactions
Salesforce seems to do a good job of offering a "enterprisey" SOAP API and nice and simple RESTful API.

Edit: One of the interesting things about their RESTful API is that different versions of the API are explicitly in there as resources.
Sure, the original thesis (by Roy Fielding) mentions some disadvantages of the constraints that are the basis of REST:

Stateless:

The disadvantage is that it may decrease network performance by increasing
the repetitive data (per-interaction overhead) sent in a series of requests,
since that data cannot be left on the server in a shared context. In addition,
placing the application state on the client-side reduces the server's
control over consistent application behavior, since the application becomes
dependent on the correct implementation of semantics across multiple
client versions.

Cache:

The trade-off, however, is that a cache can decrease reliability if stale
data within the cache differs significantly from the data that would
have been obtained had the request been sent directly to the server.

Uniform Interface:

The trade-off, though, is that a uniform interface degrades efficiency,
since information is transferred in a standardized form rather than one which
is specific to an application's needs. The REST interface is designed
to be efficient for large-grain hypermedia data transfer, optimizing
for the common case of the Web, but resulting in an interface that is not
optimal for other forms of architectural interaction.

Layered System:

The primary disadvantage of layered systems is that they add overhead
and latency to the processing of data, reducing user-perceived performance.

I fully recommend reading the thesis instead of relying on the vox populi that often times misrepresents what these concepts really mean and what advantages they bring to the architecture of the system: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch...
Actually, the difference between XMP-RPC and REST is not just in the format of the response, the difference is the whole approach. The way you have described (didn't go into the docs) you don't have REST at all, just XML-RPC that returns JSON. Sorry if I misunderstood.
Please, please don't help to persist the convention of putting the API version number in the URL. There are far better ways of doing it.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/975394/62871
It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.

Good point, I think you and I probably agree here, but I was presuming this bike would be a lot easier to recycle. The fact that there's no direct mention of this in the article is a bit suspicious, so you may well be right and there's no real advantage here.
I'm a bit skeptic but after trying it I must say that I love it.

I'd like to be able to do server-side compilation (PHP source file to JS file) and include the phpjs min library to run that PHP-to-JS code. With additional libraries and integration we could write client-side code in PHP as well…
With book search, you need to put exact titles before more popular matches. Amazon used to get this wrong, they don't any more. A telling example is "We" by Zamyatin - a classic, but there are many more recent big sellers with that word in the title, so if exact match is not prioritised, you plain can't find it if you can't remember the guys name.
I can't tell if you've got this right - maybe your database isn't big enough for it to matter yet.
Agree, it must not. But anyway, i'd like to see figures for women' salaries before they have their first child. I really doubt they are lower than guys'. Lower pay after maternity leave is a certain fact, but not necessarily a discrimination.
Is it right to expect this bike to be pretty lightweight compared to the normally quite hefty cheap bikes that are for sale at present? If so, that's quite a nice innovation in itself.
What Digg Teaches MBAs About Entrepreneurship | The Disruptive MBA
When people call copyright/patent infringement "stealing" or "theft" they usually don't mean to invoke the legal definitions of those words. The fact that this conversation occurs so often should make it clear that there are a number of people whose personal idiomatic definitions of those words include "illegal getting-of-things".

People are entitled to their personal definitions, and the fact that the legal definition is different is immaterial. When a reckless driver crashes their car into a kid, the kid's mum calls the driver a "murderer", and we don't consider them "wrong" (because the guy's crime is actually called "vehicular manslaughter".)

Now, it's fair to argue that using these defintions of "theft" is prejudicial, and that it's also fair to argue that people should refrain from that usage to minimise ambiguity, but it's not fair to argue that they should stop using a word because it doesn't agree with some "authoritative" definition (except in legal contexts, of course.)
Nope. This won't get any more traction than the first time it made the rounds. Learn JavaScript! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taaEzHI9xyY&feature=play...
Static structures VS Dynamic Ones I guess. That said the video doesn't show details about transmissions, gears, etc..
Another approach is to ignore problem people. Tell everyone else to ignore their problems and focus on their strengths.

Read this: http://strengths.gallup.com/110242/About-Book.aspx

You're there to get things done, not make each other feel happy and have neat lunches. If you're more interested in going to fun parties and having fun lunches, go work at Google or Facebook or another dying company.

If you want to get things done, focus on the strengths needed to get things done.
How do you find a good spouse? By dating several people.

With mentorship-ask several people for advice. You can basically use cold calls here, many people love advising others. I've used LinkedIn to find experts on a problem I'm facing and ask them for advice, with great results.

Then, more importantly, apply their advice and tell them how it helped. This can be as simple as sending an email afterwards saying "Hey X, your advice on Y helped us in Z way." This is important because 90% of people don't actually act on the advice they receive. By acting on the advice, you make it clear that you actually value what your potential mentor has to say.
It's probably a case of an anti-spam algorithm gone wrong. At least, that's what I remember hearing about a previous incident.
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The usual counter-argument is meant to go that companies full of smart people should be able to think up clever inventions all day and sell them to people who know how to build and market them. I'm not sure it really pans out in reality, though.
I'll tell you a story. Ten years ago I was thinking about trying to create a startup, and a friend of mine was interested in trying with me - but he just couldn't make a decision to leave his full time job.

I had just read a book about starting your own business - how to create a BP, basic accounting etc. - and the book opened with a story; the story of two cats. One cat lived at his owner's home, an easy, comfortable, boring life. The other one lived on the street, was never sure about what he could have eaten for dinner, had some scars and bad memories. But he was really living.

I lent this book to my friend, and he decided to go on with our plan. As he told me, it wasn't all the rational arguments, the data, the real world examples that did the trick, but that little fable at the start of the book.

So we left our jobs, used up all our little saved money and some from our families, failed to find the funding we needed, and our adventure didn't finish in glory. All thanks to that little piece of business fiction.
Just noticed the AD BLOCK on the McDonalds advert on the road!
Why you won't see hard augmented reality any time soon
There are two different interfaces for the same implementation. Let me stress the different part. The RESTful API uses JSON to encode the responses, but that's all.

Sorry if I didn't explain it very well, the docs are clearer though.
Working for free on Thursdays - week 3
Plus normal national holidays in the US (I think there are 11 of them).
I only noticed it after your mentioned it. Yes, it is true, maybe a pixel or so.

But that doesn't negate the content of the article, it just shows that the author is still a programmer learning to design.
First you use SOAP and it's nice, but after a while it's not good enough and you implement WSDL. Corporate overlords see it and suddenly everything has to be WS-YouNameIt (especially in banks and big telco). You end up in the deepest valleys of XML hell, colloquially known as WS-DeathStar.
All three of his points seem reasonable to me. If people can take online courses in place of traditional university courses, it's no great leap of imagination that a handful of professors will teach many thousands of students. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the students, but many universities would be left with no teaching role - which could be a reason not to stay in academia.

The personal connection in education is more complicated. It is certainly important, and I don't think the Khan academy is a good counterexample (they apparently have plans for personal mentoring, but the focus seems to be the videos). I could imagine a model where an online course by a distinguished professor is combined with face time with a local mentor, but it would still be a narrower experience than going to a bricks-and-mortar university.

None of that is to say that online education is a bad idea - I think the advantages outweigh the downsides, and it looks like the author does too. But we shouldn't ignore the downsides, and the time to think about mitigating them is now.