skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with @vibrunazo, we have to think in term of consumer benefit point of view. competition is good thing, improving existing product segment or competitive product is perfect business model. there were smart phone before iphone, tablet before ipad, pc before imac, settop_box before apple_tv etc,,, xwindows before macos,, Apple improved existing competitive products, as Samsung did. Android is improvement over SideKick, used linux which is already existing technology and Dalvik on Java etc... wheel to automoble to air plain to spaceship? :) you got the point. it's all about reusing or leveraging existing technology for benefit of consumer needs - incremental innovation!
You could also compare it to ck_fifo_spsc in the above link (look at include/ck_fifo.h).
Part of the mindset is that any Prime returns are dramatically easier than independent merchants, particularly new/relatively new sellers. If it's a trivial purchase, fine, but if I'm spending $100+, for me, it's usually worth a couple extra bucks knowing there will be zero friction if something's not right. Also, in my experience w/ electronics and physical books, the vast majority of independents take a day or two longer to ship than Amazon (both "regular" or as a fulfiller).
The stuff that can be looked up on Google constitutes a very small sub-set of the interesting things to know about the world, because a vast majority of knowledge doesn't exist yet (e.g. google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example). The Einstein quote is a perfect case-in-point. He didn't memorize the stuff in books, but he also didn't spend his life looking up stuff in books (modern translation : the internet). Make and invent people. It's much more fun than gooyouface.
If they 'copied', I would expect the earlier prototypes to look more like the iPhone, but the earlier prototypes look less like the iphone.

Can you explain why what the earlier prototypes look like is relevant to whether they copied Apple in the final product?
Wouldn't bother me.
> Again do we need all of those systems?

Yes. Like I've said above the explicit purpose of this mission is to gather advanced scientific data which requires comparatively bulky instruments and high power availability. Because it is so ridiculously expensive to get anything to Mars you want it to last as long as possible. "Disposable drones" make absolutely no sense when it costs so much to launch them into orbit, transport them 60 million km across the solar system, and then enter the Martian atmosphere and land in a coordinated place on the surface. Each gram you get to that point costs many thousand dollars. You don't just plan your strategy around losing a bunch of them - that would be many hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain.

Using a decaying nuclear isotope to power your probe you will get many multiples more bang for buck compared to solar powered probes which so far have maxed out at about 5 years. The solar concentration of a Martian winter is extremely low, and this problem is exasperated the smaller the probe and the resulting battery that it can carry.

Just like in computing and electronics, physical and mechanical distributed systems are inherently complex - more so than monolithic systems.
Why Trading Volume in the US Stock Market is Drying Up
It's also useful for exercising and perhaps improving ones ability to postulate based upon limited information. In a situation where you can subsequently check the result.

In the "real world", people end up doing a lot of such postulation. Or, they end up being pushed around by those who do or who have inside information.

P.S. Addressing the OP article itself, my version is/was "don't memorize what you can deduce in 30 seconds". For example, in physics, many of my classmates seemed to spend a lot of time memorizing all the formulae in the three chapters being tested. I would be familiar with them but also recall the few, um, "fundamental" formulae. Or, put another way, those formulae or expressions in which the relevant fields were usually summarized. During a test, it was trivial to start with these and manipulate to what I needed. But many of my classmate either had that variant memorized cold, or they got stuck.

The problem in the computer/tech world is that much of the detail we need to get things done, is partially or entirely arbitrary. What flag(s) did author/programmer X choose for their utility that I'm using? Maybe it was purely a personal choice. Or maybe they were influenced by environment/mentor/community Y. (In turn influenced by Z...)

Where you can track those influences, or simple memonics ("r" for "recurse" -- but wait, is it "r" or "R"...), there may be some rhyme and reason that builds up particularly over time and with increasing familiarity and breadth.

In other cases, though, X seemingly simply liked to use e.g. "s", and there may be no way to "deduce" or "infer" this.
"reacting with humor"

Well first this was a letter allegedly (Blank doesn't fully verify, he says, "he claimed was my response" which as I pointed out in my other post is a little strange) sent to Gates and the use of humor is somewhat patronizing. Not the mention the fact that if you are hoping for Gates to call off his legal dogs (and once again I don't know the relationship between Gates and Blank) using humor could very well not be the correct way to do it. Because it make someone (probably not Gates of course) feel stupid.

Let's say for example a well know internet industry person decides to write to PG about something going on at a company that he just picked for a YC class. PG thinks his organization is picking winners. And now you write him a letter essentially saying "the children you put in charge at Babbozify are ..." (and insert something you think shows they have no clue). How is PG going to feel? How would the average person feel about this? People don't want to be told people they put trust in are doing stupid things. And if you do this you have to be very careful to show concern and not be belittling.
This sounds a bit "No True Scotsman" to me. Most commercial projects that I've seen eventually grapple with the same sorts of issues that you mention. When they've faced diverse deployment environments, the results have often been worse than autoconfigure, from what I've seen. I guess that's because they aren't cathedrals, since the businesses behind them were focusing on market-demands instead of whatever it is that Cathedrals focus on?

Your remarks are essentially Ad Hominem regardless of whether you single out 1 man or 100 individual men.
Generally the changes are good, but I'm seeing one side effect. Some workers in that group feel so entitled that they feel like they can just come in and work on what they want when they want. If you say "here is a goal for the company" they say "eh, not interested" and feel like you owe it to them to let them keep their job.
I also only get squares. But if you hold down the space key you get endless amount of points :)
I would be far more interested in reading the original Microsoft legal letter to E.piphany and the detail of the claim.

I highly doubt it was over just a letter...
Depending on what you do, this could be not ideal:

sudo('curl -O http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pip/pip-1.0.tar.gz')

What happens when pypi is down? It may be rare, but it does happen.

There are many ways to approach this problem. Explicit deployment is one, others may be creating new hosts from a prepared snapshot, registering to puppet-master/chef-server/..., auto-configuration from init script, etc. The described way works though and it's a pretty good description.
But now it's followed by an awesome reply by the author where I actually learned something!
Kids tend to take to tablets brilliantly in my experience. My son turned two a couple of months ago and he can unlock my iPad, swipe across to the next page, select his folder containing his apps (mostly educational, one or two fun apps) choose an app, play with it for a bit, close the app and open a new one. He recently learned how to work the camera which is pretty awesome.

Interesting side effect: He now thinks all smooth surfaces are interactive. We were on the train recently and he was swiping the window in order to close the train doors. Blew my mind at the time.
Kinderen: veilig met de fietskar naar school
Procedural Characters and the Coming Animation Technology Revolution
There are trolls on Twitter who make it their mission to make big media fall for big-ass lies, like the death of heads of state, etc.
This man is a member of US House Committee on Science
The Facebook-Instagram deal is now worth just $738 million
Vagrant author here.

Files in lib/ (core): 71

Files in plugin/: 142

Total: 213.

Still a lot of files but not 380, just wanted to point that out. Each individual file is actually rather small. There are only a few larger files in there (Vagrant::Environment actually perhaps being the only one).

"Why the codebase is at this size." Well, Vagrant started very small, but in the 3 years of its existence, it has gained a lot of what I've previously heard called as "code wisdom:"

* Generic host support since some tasks are host-specific. For example, setting up NFS on Mac OS X differs from Ubuntu which differs from FreeBSD. Vagrant knows this.

* Generic guest support. Setting up a variety of things is guest OS specific, so again, Vagrant knows how to configure networks, mount folders, etc. on a variety of different guest operating systems.

* VirtualBox bugs. Vagrant has quite a bit of code to work around VirtualBox bugs.

* Networking is hard. Vagrant does quite a lot with networking to ensure your networking works as expected. It also does things like port collision detection to verify that any ports you choose won't collide with any other VMs as well as making a best effort to check if that port is open, and erroring in that case as well.

* Plugin interface. Almost every part of Vagrant at this point in git master is customizable. This isn't overkill, this was built out of seeing actual human need for this. This lowers the number of features I need in core and actually fights being overkill, because more things can be built with plugins.

* Communication abstraction. Linux and POSIX-like guests with SSH is great, but what happens when you want to run Windows guests? SSH CAN work but isn't ideal. For this reason, Vagrant is started to abstract out communication so that Windows can use things like WinRM, completely transparently. Also, if you use something like VMWare, it uses the VMWare guest communication API, which is blazingly faster than SSH. Again, this is all transparent to plugin developers, provisioners, etc. It "just works."

It does much more, but I think you get the idea.

Building something that "just works" comes at a cost. And that cost is usually complexity. Can you build a very basic tool to control VirtualBox virtual machines in a small shell script? You betcha! Vagrant started this way. Can you make that reusable? Yeah, but prepare to add some complexity. Then make it run on every major OS and support some nifty features and you got yourself a big project.

I hope that helps!
The design looks great.

I really think the best way to get this service off the ground is to expose a large amount of the data for free in the form of articles or other linkable content. Get lots of backlinks and visitors, then upsell a package with more information. Make it easy for the tech press to use your charts and backlink to your site.

Freemium won't work because that requires a login, and the idea is to generate interest in the product through public and google indexed content.
Or option 3: "we know we should've known a guy had made it onto the Tarmac before he made it all the way to the terminals. There's obviously something wrong there. But there's no need to worry about ze terrorists storming airport beach fronts, so heavily armed response is probably overkill. It'd be a little difficult to miss something like that."
The other place to look for books is Pragmatic Programmers ( http://pragprog.com/titles ) who do the Agile Web Development with Rails book which is usually fairly up to date, along with some other in depth titles.

A subscription to Railscasts pro ( http://railscasts.com/ ) is also well worth the cost.
Review: Pagani Huayra
Well I'm sure the ipad has plenty of educational games like the app that teaches algebra without math but you could always look at a netbook and something like http://www.qimo4kids.com/

An ipad may be easier for a child to get started with as everything is just there on the screen.
Architecting Scalable Infrastructures: CPS versus DPS
I think you could do it with Lulu as well.
I don't mean Nginx or Varnish are more hackish themselves than Apache. I could have said Apache instead of Nginx, but I think

Back in the day, a "serious" application usually involved a large amount of quite homogeneous source code in a single language (or 2 or 3 different languages for different tasks: C/C++ for the main code/engine/logic, assembly for performance-sensitive code, and maybe some custom high-level script for high-level application logic). This was built usually on a single machine with a single build script, and resulted in some binary which could be deployed.

Even early web apps were more akin to this model - Java apps, or even Perl apps.

Nowadays, an "app" lives distributed among dozens of servers and client types. People describe what they have: "12 memcaches, 5 varnishes, 8 nginxes, 5 app servers with Ruby, 4 static content servers, and a MySQL master server with a fallback master and 5 slaves for reads. Separately, an Android app, an iPhone app and an HTML5 front-end."

These systems started as a single app in a single box, and have "grown" for scalability, reliability and security, being patched up with different pieces of technology put together with often unreliable methods but fallback mechanisms that make it more resilient that if reliable methods were used but no fallback. It's not so important nowadays that the application code be clean, elegant, or failproof, but that measures are put in place so that the service will keep chugging along most of the time.

And setting up the whole system from scratch involves a manual with probably hundreds of steps putting together haphazard technologies, installing different types of Linuxes and packages for each piece. And may even involve difficult-to-replicate steps, such as using an AMI to launch EC2 instances, where the engineer that created the original AMI doesn't even work here any more and recreating it from scratch would involve 20 packages, Googling for 5 of them as they're not available in normal repositories, 5 manual patches, two secret incantations and a tribal dance around the chair while singing and praying to arcane gods of long-forgotten package managers.

{{Side-note: although it's not the main point, I'd definitely say Objective C is more hackish than C++. C++ has its own amount of weird stuff due to being built on top of C and its evolution with templates, etc... but the evolution of Objective C is done much more in the form of "patches". Even the original syntax takes advantage of awkward gaps in the syntax of C (@interface, @implementation, #import, [object msg:param]?). But it's even worse how new features are piled on top of old ones: properties, ARC 2.0, etc... it's distinctly noticeable when you just wouldn't feel comfortable teaching programmers new to Objective C how to use ARC, without learning the underlying memory management model first. In C++, people can learn "new" and "delete", and never hear about malloc()/free(), and there's no problem at all.

Anyway, my point about hackishness was not referred to ObjC, but to how whole systems are engineered nowadays.}}
Profig (YC S12) Launches An Affordable, Feature-Rich Instant Phone System
The expression "a complete OS" is not what it used to mean. Are you implying FreeBSD has an X server, a dozen compilers and interpreters, a GUI and other components equally "designed and built" as a cohesive thing?
Shape Type - a letter shaping game
There is an awesome one at Tokyo Station (Chuo line?) Up about two stories, then horizontal for 10 meters, then up another two stories. Ya, I could spend hours on that one....
So this means that we can run Pfsense in the Raspberry Pi ?
Thanks. This is a lot of valuable feedback!

By "technology category" I mean: Programming languages, Version control systems, PaaS providers, NoSQL databases, Relational databases, IDEs, etc. - basically different categories of tools/technologies that software developers use to get their job done. I agree this should be explained more somewhere on the website.
We even work 59 hours more than the stereotypically nose-to-the-grindstone Japanese.

Statistically true, but not supportive of the point being made, largely due to the difference in employment by gender in the two countries. (Japan: supporting a 55 hour work week by the simple expedient of not letting the wife work more than 10 and not letting the husband work less than 100.)
Because the parent I was responding to talks about how much Samsung is innovating. The important thing is that their process is geared towards doing their own work and innovating on their own.

How much the end result looks like another product has no relevance in my mind because results and similarities could've been achieved independently, and the most important elements of the look and feel were, eg F700.
Cute, but that wasn't the bet. They were referring to seven bash commands, i.e. "lines". So you lose by 242 commands.
There is regulation against theft( though does any legal authority investigate bitcoin thefts?) . I meant regulations dealing what bitcoin exchanges can do with your money or what steps they have to take to protect it. For example, although I don't think any bitcoin exchanges loan out money yet, if they did, there is no amount they are required to keep as a minimum balance to cover withdrawals (unless the government legally deems them a bank, in which case my entire post is irrelevant)
You seem to be saying that an ad hominem is no longer an ad hominem when you substitute "a lot of you" for "you". The Latin may be singular, but I don't think you can expect English speakers to treat it as strictly singular.
I care. I care that if a company can copy another's innovation and (1) kill the innovative company (2) make innovative companies not willing to invest resources - time, money and talent - because these resources turn into free R&D for other companies.

I haven't given deep thought into my stance on patents in general, but to me, design - industrial design, visual design, software interaction design - takes a lot of effort and talent to get right. Implementing is easier. You can often throw bodies, hardware, money and fix implementation.

Most of the time, it is very easy to copy great design. That doesn't look right.

And I speak this as a developer.

Edit: added a line.
I'll add to this by saying that 99/100 purchases I make on Amazon must be Amazon Prime available-- simply because I've been burned by 3rd party merchants.

Amazon Prime is certainly best for consumers-- but for merchants it is very difficult to turn a profit.
Thanks for the article. It's very helpful.

Have you ever checked artTemplate other than eco? https://github.com/aui/artTemplate

It's very fast: http://aui.github.com/artTemplate/test/test-speed.html
If you're in a conversation where you will get pushed around by people who have inside information, and that matters, I hope that you're prepared with your own inside information and game theory predictions before you enter into the conversation.
Gen X created the need to ask the question.

-Everyone
And you can buy them where, exactly? :)
I have friends that don't even type URLs anymore, they just type 'youtube' into google every time and click the first result.
The article also casually throws out the iPod as an example where copying didn't hurt, when Apple was actually intensely protective of the main interface element, the click-wheel. Successfully defending that made also-ran mp3 players seem somewhat alien/weird. If anything, the success of the iPod emboldened them to continue this strategy.
Okay, I'll name one: the F-35 flight control software. Take of that what you will.

Now, I've not been working in the software industry since before 1990, so I'm obviously not qualified to comment, but I'll say this: I can understand why a cathedral model might be warranted. Even using something like CMMI might be a good idea in some cases.

But for a lot of things, especially exploratory/experimental things, the bazaar model is really nice and can reap significant benefits. And the nice thing about the bazaar model is that if you want to follow a cathedral model, no one is stopping you! Go off and be your own little dictator with a "grand unifying vision". Come to think of it, that seems to be what many of the most successful open source projects are: one (or a few) people have a vision of an itch they want to scratch, and they pursue it with a bloody-minded persistence. The bazaar only comes in when someone forks or in the fact that anyone can compete or (try to) contribute.

And BTW, I do know who you are, and have a lot of respect for you, but in some ways this article (and your comments here) could be read as reactionary against the success of Linux and other more open OSS; the BSDs have always been more insular (or discriminating depending on your POV) and developed like cathedral models than Linux; oddly enough this has resulted in three distinct BSDs while there is still only one Linux kernel. I will agree that reading Brooks (and other computer history) is almost always a good idea; just MMM was enough to open my eyes to how little the industry has progressed (VirtualBox/VMWare? That's nice; IBM was designing full system emulators for hardware that didn't yet exist in the sixties).
There's no difference between a good rubyist and a good programmer. By definition, a good rubyist will have a solid understanding of algorithms, OO, design patterns and anything else that makes one a good programmer.
> google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example

... and then you switch to google scholar ;)
My son (and daughter) now walk up to the TV if I have paused the movie and press the big (||) button on screen. That blew me away too - its much better interface.

(Actually they both used to, now they grab the remote. Ollie can work it fine now.)
Nice and clean design. The wait for processing is a little long.

A similar service is currently selling on flippa: https://flippa.com/2793470-htm2pdf-co-uk
Maybe you can steal some ideas from them. Considering they're PR6 and seeing only low 3 digit monthly revenue, you probably shouldn't expect great wealth to come of it.

To be honest, I don't really understand the benefit over just hitting ctrl-p.
100% Conversion Rate Cold Calling Early Customers
Thanks for your reply. I have started to think that following your passion leads to never making a profit.

I have made & shipped some very popular things - they were my passions but not built to make money. Perhaps I should look at ways to monetize these things.

I'm pleased with their success as they have helped a lot of people, however it was all set up out of my own pocket and I'm still paying to keep them running.

I'm just worried that if I follow my passions again, it'll just be another expense that I pay for.

I'm at a point where my next idea really does need to at least sustain itself. If I built something that could be my full time income - if it's providing value, no matter the industry it's in, that would become my passion.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOold! Is there a new release to this one?
"The idea that "only the latest edition will work for this course" is another of the textbook publisher's little schemes. I'm sure they try to get faculty to use only the latest editions."

When I took thermal physics waaay back in the 80s, my professor hated the newest edition of the text, and gave us all photocopies of the first edition.

The funny thing is that I was annoyed by this, falling firmly into the "undergradate mentality" you mention.