skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Several OEM's do just that, but nobody is buying.

Who? Dell has one 11" Ubuntu laptop on their website, and you have to try really hard to find it. System 76 has no marketing budget whatsoever. Anybody else? Have you ever seen a Linux machine in stores? Ever?

And the Android UI is okay for a phone, but I greatly prefer Awesome on my laptop. Mint, in my experience, has been really great for newbies. I just don't buy the UI argument. Windows baffles all the newbies I know. The "UI" problems with Linux have to do with driver support, and lack of a few big name pieces of software, that's about it.

Well, that and way too much choice. There's no "Linux UI", unless you're talking about bash or something. There's Gnome, KDE, etc. But one or a few OEMs settling on a standard desktop environment would go a long way towards standardizing the user experience, while still allowing us nerds to geek out on different window managers.
Scalabilty is like sex. You can spend years thinking about it, reading about it, watching the videos and even practicing on your own...but nothing beats actually doing it. And the more you work at scale, the better you get at anticipating and troubleshooting the problems that come with increasing demands.
Pass Bake
Finally, an app to simplify password security. Rethink the way you do passwords online, and keep your accounts safe.
Rewardling: PayPal With Store Credit
Is your comment related to mine or was the reply link just conveniently placed?
One of my favorite from W12, best of luck!
It showed two things.

1. likes vary in price per area

2. click rate varies per area

Of course he's not claiming anything doesn't 'fit' in his data. That would require screwing up basic arithmetic about clicks. The author didn't claim to be tricked by facebook. He was surprised by the order of magnitude differences. Why don't you see that surprise as valid? And of course the article doesn't give the data to explain why, because the author doesn't know.
You're right that the current Linux market is quite different from the market as a whole. But a great killer app like Steam could bring a lot of "normals" over from other platforms and change that.

It's basically a chicken and egg problem that needs some established company to make a big bet on Linux to initiate change. That's why I think it could pay off big time. If Valve could draw even a tiny fraction of Windows gamers over to Linux it could kickstart a huge migration away from Microsoft over the next several years, with Valve at the center.
> You're making a guess based on what?

I didn't write that, but it's clear to me that they're basing it on the results.
Are you talking about the icon sets? They seem nice to me. There isn't anything cartoony about them and they are very clear and easy to understand. Honestly it's better than many icon sets I've seen in web applications. The site looks fine to me.

I'm not sure anyone thinks "I'm losing money and dammit this web app isn't reflecting my mood at this moment."
BackTrack 5 R3 Blackhat Edition Torrent Download
Download BackTrack 5 R3 Blackhat Edition
This is more than amazing [stream of conscious to follow]:

This could be the only tool in fighting against massive congloms like Monsanto PLEASE NEVER SELL TO THEM - THEY WILL TRY TO DEVOUR YOU

FarmLogs could be used to actually teach ANYONE how to farm efficiently.

You take the data that each farmer uses to track their crop and harvest and teach people how to do the same.

You will need to incorporate sensors into the system, such as the TWINE SENSOR [1] into your system -- track the weather and moisture for every location, as well as the crop.

You can build a DB of the yields over time for any given farm. Use this to inform people of the best times and conditions to plant various crops.

You can track man-power-hours to yields as well and be able to help people understand that if they want to grow X amount of Y crop, they need Z people and Z1 hours...

Finally, the most obvious, is cost - you can then say that for a property of X size, you need Y labor and Z dollars to produce Z1 crop!

Seriously - alongside fake meat - if you have an APP that can actually TRAIN a farmer, this is farking planet changing.

Use this info to build out a tutorial to train 3rd world people to micro-farm with HIGH yields.

There was this articla about big-data being the next billion dollar industry: big farm data will be the trillion dollar industry. NEVER SELL OUT TO MONSANTO. NEVER.

Ultimately:

Build an app that asks me what my resources and interests are, and help me build a farm that suits my capabilities: If i have an apartment in seatlle with a balcony of 200 square feet and $50 per month to apply to that square footage, what can I grow.

Knowing what the cost per squarefoot to yield is for massive famrs will allow such an engine to be built.

Every single person on the planet should be able to access this app - enter their capabilities and determine how much they could produce to either sustain themselves or sell to the local market.

This is revolutionary. If you can build this into an app that is stand alone, it should be married to the open-source civ kit [2]

Look at big data as the future - this is the biggest (most important) data.. [3]

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...

[2] http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Civilization_Starter_Kit_D...

[3] http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/doug-hornig/is-bi...
You don't need github to make pull requests:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-request-...
Clickable http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toddler-trainer-hd/id49632353...
Git is far from perfect. But, there's roughly half bullshit, half "yes but is it really an issue?" things here to me.

Things like detailing the github process and blaming git just does not work for example.

Blaming additional git features that svn simply does not have.. is also nonsense to me.

Finally, you CAN rewrite history in svn, its just extremely painful. In git it's not and.. its a good thing. I prefer USEABLE history than trashy commits. And don't tell me its about having proper devs making commits. As pointed out, you get external commits in git. You can't control them without refusing them and then what? In svn you don't even have the possibility to refuse them.

Don't get me started on how svn is way more about the maintainer due to this...
Sure they are, and full cross-module inlining too
Who is to blame for failed IPO's?

Sarbanes and Oxley.

Startups don't want to deal with all the red tape of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act [1] and are putting off going public until either they're big enough that the cost of compliance is small compared to the total size of their business, or they're legally required to do so because the number of shareholders exceeds some threshold. (Facebook falls in the latter category.)

If your company's large already, it kills growth prospects. It's a lot easier to turn a $40 million company into a $400 million company than it is to turn a $40 billion company like Facebook into a $400 billion company.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbox
If you sell stock to yourself... why even bother to go through the exchange? Why would the exchange even allow such trades?
No, you go look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12#Foods.

What's the top source of B12 on that list? Now, given that you're not eating beef liver, which liver do you think is providing all that B12?

Stupid. Dangerous.

Edit: Thinking about it, I'd put fasting for 3 weeks in the same class as running a marathon: if you can do it, you're probably healthy. Actually doing it though, is not healthy at all.
It is perfectly acceptible to use global variables in a 1000 line user game. It would take you bureaucrats a week to verify that.

I am CEO of my company with a vision, not some nigger Indian. Some nigger Indian would sleepwalk while remaking Unix complete with all it's flaws. What use is another Unix? No use. If it's not different it's worthless.
Haha "come up with the list" meaning agregating the list; I'm not taking credit for first thinking of them all! The problem domains where I've thought of / sometimes written about original solutions are just these ones:

- camera drones to provide a "real-time Google Earth"

- genetically engineered supercrops for the developing world that provide protein, fiber, and every vitamin

- AR / VR glasses (shameless plug: http://vergencelabs.com)

- myostatin inhibitor gene therapy as an OTC cosmetic procedure -- would solve obesity

- VR telepresence to eliminate the massive petroleum waste of the workday commute

- "brain backup" using high-res MRI + in-depth biographical interview + DNA sample

- "bio lab on a chip" using microfluidics, flourescence-assisted cell sorting, nanopore sequencing, and phage-assisted directed evolution
Kinda off topic, but if you are from USA, you are a United States citizen, american is anybody who is born on the continental america (north, central and south).
I just started a new job two weeks ago, meaning that I've put in approx 80 hours in. I would guess that I was unable to perform my required functions for about 30 of those, due to setup inefficiencies. This has also delayed the onboard learning curve, because I have to stop and figure out who to talk to to get permissions, or wait for a machine, or an image, or whatnot BEFORE I could start figuring out how to do whatever it was I was trying to do.
Thanks, edited and fixed!
While this is true, current hardware is several orders of magnitude away from the Landauer limit, so there's still quite a bit of room for building computers more cleverly before we confront it.

However, reversible algorithms are not in fact particularly impractical. They require a somewhat different way of thinking about things, but they're dramatically easier than e.g. quantum computing speedup.

Similarly, cryogenic computation is entirely reasonable, especially in space.
Good points (except I think premature automation is not always or even usually wise; and, see "Knight Capital Group").

I guess I was responding to the post itself (or its need/decision to highlight "American TV's" neglect. And also a good many responders taking an opportunity to bash NBC.
I have never heard anybody, anywhere, ever, refer to somebody from the North or South American continents, who is not a US citizen as an "American". "The Americas" commonly refers to both continents, but I've never heard anybody call a non US-citizen "American". Where is this a common usage?
Try asking about it in a better Chinese university. 5000+ startups listed on 17startup.com and growing everyday.

Besides, http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/sme/facts-figures-an...

Entrepreneurial attitudes in Europe compared to the US and Asia //
Chinese people have the strongest preference for self-employment (71%), Japanese people the weakest (39%). Similarly, Chinese think it is quite possible to become one’s own boss (49%). In Japan only 12% consider this career option possible. //
A higher ratio of Chinese (40%) than Americans (38%) declare that they have first-hand experiences in starting a business. In Europe and Japan these figures are rather low (22% and 20%), even lower than in South Korea (31%).
In the US, entrepreneurs enjoy a good reputation. 73% of US citizens questioned in this survey said that they have a favourable image of entrepreneurs. In Europe, at least about half of the population (49%) has a favourable image of entrepreneurs. In China the ratio is only 40%, in Japan (32%) and Korea (30%) even lower.

The richest person in China did get sent to prison: 14 years for stock market manipulation (cant imagine how many hedge fund PMs will be there if people enforce this in every country. personally I think the punishment is severe). Nothing to brag about, but he went there himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Guangyu
The "body double"-stuff is rare and can likely happen in those poor undeveloped regions in China, where money can buy you anything. In better developed regions, the officers won't risk it, unless you are exceptionally "connected" I guess. Medias and Internet are quite good at revealing such scandals in China nowadays, which is why the Chinese government is so afraid of them.
after NSA embedding into defcon - I seriously do not trust any versions of backtrack at this time...
I'd rather see a link to the demo itself instead of a YouTube video.
Download here:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59600
I am embarrassed by US sales tax treatment of tourists
Just had a couple of friends come visit from abroad. They bought a bunch of stuff. Probably spent a few thousand dollars retails. Having been to Europe many times we all assumed that they could file a form at the airport and get a refund of the CA sales tax they paid. Well, it turns out this is not the case. We don't do that in the US. Yes, as a visitor in the EU you can get VAT back, but not here. We either are not smart enough to handle this or just don't give a shit about charging foreigners taxes they should not be paying. To me this is embarrassing.

What happened to "No taxation without representation"?
What I Learned From My Internship at a YC Startup
Spurred on by a down vote, let me clarify: Carmack did some big loud exercise about not developing on Android right as the Android ecosystem exploded. He rallied around Direct right as OpenGL exploded in the mobile space. He rallies against WebGL... Carmack is a developer hero of mine I have no respect for his vision positions.
Technically correct, but I guess it depends on context, both cultural and conversational. In the UK for example, "America" and "American" always refer to US not the continent, unless there's specific context surrounding it to suggest otherwise. I believe that's generally the case in the US as well, and I suspect (but could be wrong) in most countries?
Double-tap fits this description perfectly.

Excuse me, what on earth is non-obvious about that?

When enumerating the alternatives to the pinch-gesture (the awkwardness of which becomes obvious within the first few days of use) then you end up with a rather short list of 10-12 items - and that's counting rather esoteric ones like a physical jog-dial.

Apple chose double-tap, just like anyone else in their right mind (other than Sony) would.

If that's not textbook example for a trivial "invention" then I don't know what is.
I dislike auto-versioning as I have no control over the process or even an understanding of the space used

In this era of cheap terabyte-scale storage, concern about the space used for versions of a document is NOT something that should occupy your mind.
> +1 for the moral high horse. Everytime something gets hacked the hacker community blames the victim for using less-than-optimal security. Well guess what? There is no foolproof system. The same reactions are seen when sites go down. 'Oh, but they should have used a distributed, redundant buzzword compliant system in a multitude of nuclear bunkers and this would never have happened'. Every system has weaknesses.

In this case, the guy had ALL his shit wiped. Not a clumsy move at work causing months of extra work, or some dickhead hacker having some fun with your account credentials, no they actually thoroughly deleted a huge chunk of his personal data.

See it's like, if a pyromaniac burns down someone's home, maybe there were ways to prevent that, but you don't go blaming the victim then either. Some times the first thing is sympathy. There's times to be heartless and times to be not.

Remote-wiping all his personal stuff was so unnecessarily malicious, sympathy comes first. And besides, in this case, not having any non-remote-wipeable backups, the only thing you could possibly maybe blame him for is putting all his stuff in the cloud. Yeah no not smart, maybe, but it simply doesn't weigh up to the fact that someone actually went through the trouble of meticulously deleting all of it. Not stealing, or defacing, but deleting.
Don't businesses use the corporate versions of browsers? EDIT: never mind, it would be useless in this case, Google does not keep the old versions. Crap.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/ http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1...

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html
Ask HN: How should I evaluate a startup as I job hunt?
I've been a lurker at HN for a while and it has greatly motivated me to seriously consider joining a startup. I have been at one of the large software companies for almost a year now (first job after college, good CS school) and I've decided to change jobs before I get too comfortable here.

Given the large number of interesting startups, what kind of questions should I be asking, not only the engineers / founders of the startup, but also myself? What are the signs of a healthy startup (funding, background of the founders)? How do I gauge the core principles and culture of a startup?

I apologize in advance if some of these questions don't make sense or may even be irrelevant in the pursuit of finding a job at a startup. I also realize different people will have differing opinions about how to evaluate a startup. That would be particularly helpful.

Most of the links I came across while searching on google were about investors evaluating startups. I didn't find many opinions on how to evaluate a startup from a job-seeker's perspective.

Thanks in advance
You dont need github for anything, period. So its very strange that it is mentioned at all when comparing it to other version control systems.
Their design looks gorgeous and serious to me. Maybe what I think does not count because I'm not a farmer. They could A/B test this with a more enterprise-y looking site, who knows.

I like their site because it looks so simple to use and shows it could be very valuable very quickly, kind of like an iPhone. I'd be surprised if they don't see some considerable adoption, esp among the newer generation of farmers.
Yeah, but next you'll tell us at your standups you actually stood up. No one gave me an answer when I asked why they called our meeting standup meetings.
I wonder if this is because we are early adopters of automation and ecommerce, which don't require us to spend as much of our wealth locally. Or do we save more than average, due to the volatility of our young industry?
You can get University Physics 11th edition, which mhartl suggested for about $35 used.

This will be about 1500 pages and 40 chapters. If you do a chapter per week with problems, you will know basic physics in 3/4 of a year. However, you're going to need to learn calculus as well, so pick up a used calculus book.

This is by far the cheapest route. A couple of books, some paper and pencils. My problem with online video courses are that they are SLOW. They take a tiny bit of subject matter that would fill a single page and stretch it out to a 45 minute video. It's far worse if the teacher is a slow speaker. A good solid book is open road, fast as you want to go learning.
He mentions three ways to irrevocably lose data. Is that really accurate? I would think old refs are still present in the repo and accessible from .git/logs, but I don't have any experience actually collaborating with git.
'Underscore.m' seems a lot nicer to me: http://underscorem.org/

I mean, what?

N* value = (N*) hash.getOrAdd(l, ^{ return N.I(0); });

I'll take a minor increase in verbosity for a massive increase in readability in the future.

(edited; unwrapping is needed in both libraries)
This is pretty neat! But I have to say, my biggest pet peeve is a library or chunk of code that doesn't have a demo on the same page. It would be nice to see that "terminal" on your plugin site.
Yeah, written records were probably the greatest advance of all time, simply because they aren't made of meat.
From what I've found its really only from predominantly Spanish speaking university students in South America.

It also ignores most colloquial usage of the terms America and American in English. While technically correct, it is unlikely to occur. Americans are citizens of the United States of America. Just as Mexicans are citizens of Estados Unidos Mexicanos. But we shorten them to Mexicans as well.

Its more useful in either case to just list your nationality in either case. Unless people seem to want to identify with an Italian name for both continents I don't see where getting all up in arms over Americans referring to a citizen of the US. USian is an alternative, but lets be honest, it rolls off the tongue horridly and is unlikely to catch on.
> This could be the only tool in fighting against massive congloms like Monsanto PLEASE NEVER SELL TO THEM - THEY WILL TRY TO DEVOUR YOU

This being a site for entrepreneurs, I'm going to give a different piece of advice: if the likes of Monsanto come to you and attempt to buy you out for a price and other terms that you find acceptable, do it. Do it in a heartbeat. You can do far more good with a bunch of money than without it; you can always circle back and make another attempt to change farming for the better, and be in a better position to do it.

But at the end of the day, you need to do what's right for you; not me, not the parent, not the world. I wish you all the best of luck.
They got the "scale of the organization" from the results. No kidding.
Amen! I've felt like this for so long.

Ignoring the unnecessary parts about GitHub, he hits the nail right on the head with:

> Git doesn’t so much have a leaky abstraction as no abstraction. There is essentially no distinction between implementation detail and user interface. ...Its weakness is the complexity of simple tasks.

I swear, someone needs to invent a Git-wizard program. Interactive with a wizard-like interface, it will walk you through all the common kinds of tasks, even if they're fairly advanced, explaining all the ramifications along the way.

I haven't seen any programs like this -- all the GUI interfaces to git basically just translate to command-line commands, instead of trying to help you intelligently manage your workflow.

I don't think it would be easy to write a wizard interface like this -- it's a UI designer's worst nightmare -- but it would certainly help.
A daily 30 minute standup with 10 programmers (three minutes each) is 5 hours of development time lost. That's 25 hours a week, over half a full-time developer. It's probably more. Let's say stand-up is at 0900. Nobody getting in early is going to really get in the zone because they know standup is coming. Then after standup there's another 15 - 30 minutes getting into the flow. Then it's nearly lunchtime. In other words, standup pretty much kill half the day.

Can you really say they are worth it?
I keep pulling even though my repo is up to date. These facts are addicting.
What's your point?

The same spread of naysayers as well as unbounded optimists can be found touting their opinion of every thing on earth - tech companies, nations, sports team, fashion, whatever.
MATE 1.4 released
29er Mountain Bike Wheels
Yep. SVN having a culture where history is expected to be full of junk commits is not a feature.

Pretty much all of the points here are things I love about git.

I'd personally hate working in this author's ideal repository: too many people with direct commit access, no tracking of feature branches, messy merges, noisy history.
So, if developers ship on time are they overstaffed? Projects should never ship on time.
This generally sums up why I prefer Mercurial. It provides all the benefits of a distributed VCS, but with less of the complexity, at the expense of some (usually unneeded, at least for me) flexibility.
This suggestion is actually pretty good! Don't be too afraid of loosing customers that way. Most who are looking for this special kind of solutions are most likeley interested in other products as well. And things like these let your site come across as community friendly, i.e. let visitors bond with your site and less likely to run away when something new comes along. The site is a great idea, but try to get more products on board, i.e. troll robotics sites, offer successful kickstarter campaigns a place to sell their "overproduction" units, etc.