skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I don't think this is accurate.

There are probably 1 billion people in the developed world enjoying a life of "consumerism, fossil-fuel burning and so on", plus a tiny minority composed of the elites of the global south. You may add roughly another billion people from the emerging economies (i.e. the BRIC countries), who have lesser, but rapidly growing, rates of per capita consumption.

We are already 1-2 billion people living what we'd consider a "normal life" by modern standards, maybe another 3-4 billion with tolerably low levels of resources, and 1 more billion in the most absolute poverty. Heck, I have not seen any study to confirm, but I suspect that the average pet in the US is better taken care off that the average child in a 3rd world shanty town (and probably have a longer expected lifespan too)!

So, yes, the population bomb is a problem, but it gets amplified by the per-capita expenditure, and the 80-96 percentile have a disproportionate weight on the overall effect.

(Contrary to OWS retoric, my opinion is that the "one percenters" are not the main part of the problem. They are not only too few, but subject to time and space limitations that prevent them to consume as much as their wealth would predict. At the end of day, they will use most of their money to make more money or gain political influence. What they use that influence for is yet another dimension of our predicament).
> "Imagine that you have to place a bet between two new companies as to which one is going to experience several years of very high growth, to one day become a billion dollar company. Now imagine that you know nothing – zero – about either company except that they were founded in the same year, and that one has raised $10 million in venture funding, and the other has raised $0."

Well, it's a great thing we're never, ever, ever in that situation!

> "After all, there are a lot of attributes that predict success in a startup. Highly talented founders, large market opportunity, a great idea, experienced advisors, etc. etc. We can debate this list as much as we want; the fact is none of these can be looked up in Crunchbase."

Well shit guys, it looks like Crunchbase is the only reasonable way for reporters (or even the general public) to find out about a startup, its team, its advisors, its board, and its market. Let's pack it up and go home.

This whole thing sounds like "VC dollars raised is not a bad metrics because it's easier than actual research".
‘Sealed with a kiss.’
Will Apple’s Tacky Software-Design Philosophy Cause A Revolt?
Thanks. You got me thinking in the right direction and I found a Wiki page that talked about image formats and if they are lossy or lossless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_file_formats

I found it interesting and wanted to share.
I'm a Popperian. Theories must be falsifiable. If any of the 9/11 Truther theories invalidate or improve on the NIST explanation for how WTC 7 fell, you let me know.

As for the politics, whatever. Bush/Cheney allowed 9/11 to happen. And then they capitalized on the aftermath. So what? There's no evidence that is actionable. You're outraged? Big deal. While you're refighting past battles, the bad guys are gleefully stealing your future.

Having said that, the 9/11 Truther groups are basically cults. No different than the La Rouchians, Scientologists, climate change deniers, Clinton Killed Vince Foster, etc. People addicted to anger busy disempowering themselves.
Hi. I think you're ignorant. I'm a guy who, for a number of years during my young childhood, was hungry in the US.

Meals at home consisted of some "creative" variants of government cheese (yeah, it actually existed. The blocks in the cardboard wrappers.), egg noodles, cheap and expired white bread and milk or milk powder.

We'd go to these stores, which you may not be aware of, but they sell expired food at steep discounts. It wasn't like a grocery store with stuff neatly displayed. Everything was dumped into giant bins and you dug through them. We felt like scavengers. For a long time, I knew how long after expiration each food time was good for.

My only saving grace was stealing food and the free school lunches which sometimes provided fruit and some variance to my meals. But that still wasn't enough and I wasn't hungry in the "boy, I could use a sandwich!" way you might be familiar with, I was hungry hungry.

I don't really want to blame anyone, but the fact of the matter is that there are kids in this country, who through no fault of their own, suffer.
The graph here doesn't prove causality (or even really a correlation).

On the one hand, PG argues that funding is not a good indicator of success, and on the other hand, the author here is saying look how successful all of these funded companies are! It's a false equivalency.

The author is doing exactly what PG talked about, glossing back over history with 20/20 hindsight. As indicated, even the prestigious YC has ~75% of returns from 2 startups.

The article doesn't talk about how many companies failed, spectacularly, in order for those other organizations to succeed. Cuil flamed out $100M+, and there are countless other examples.

I'm not saying the author is wrong, only that this didn't prove causality to me; ergo funding=success.
There are a significant amount of logs for things like that. Screenshots are likely never accepted for that kind of request.
The Most Disruptive Startup Ever
Sounds plausible to me. I suppose it doesn't matter how fast the SSD is... it has to restore (up to) 16GB from disk to memory before it's ready.
Definitely, but if it's common knowledge, will it still have the same ability? I would imagine people would adapt and find an alternative method.
.ME Gives Away Free Domain to Everyone in Social Media Contest
The only problem here is that Blizzard didnt encrypt the information in the screenshots. I can understand why they would embed this info, and 9/10 of those cases are ethically sound, but I wouldnt want some random skiddies get this information.

So why wouldnt they encrypt it? Not enough space?
Remembering 9/11: Leadership Lessons From Akamai Founder
Adjusting for inflation, the average wage in the US has stagnated since the 80's. What does that say?
LOVE This! Entrepreneurship is rough.
Zap: Payments for the universe
Also, syncing things is not as much of a headache anymore - circa 2006/7/8, this is a great idea. In the time of Dropbox, GMail, Netflix, and Github, there is no pain pushing me away from just using 4-6 different devices. I have not run into the "I need a file but it is only on my laptop which is 50 miles away" issue in several years now.

Also, seeing what a MASSIVE flop the Moto Atrix was (which was this exact idea, to a T - at least it was in the demo at CES), I have little hope of seeing this work. If a top-5 phone company fails at it, why should I think a crowdfunded version should do any better?
That's already happening, and birth rates tend to go down as median income goes up.
Ten of the top iPhone parody videos
I'm just thinking out loud here. One approach is to replace the green Try It Now button with an image of the Prof, under which you say "Hi. I'm the Prof. What's your name?", following by text field and green button. Then experiment with what the green button says.

It would be interesting to see if a vague 'what's your name' approach, rather than a specific direction with a stated outcome, wins in a split-test.
Hysterical.

Behind every fad or movement, there's someone making a back.
I use my 2011 Air in clamshell all the time.
Not that I disagree, but X11 would be nice.
Damn I miss my N900/N9....
Why this is news to anybody? If you are surprised or disturbed by this news you have not been in touch with the life in 3rd world.
3. Motorola tried this EXACT play with the Atrix, and it was a disaster.
Also:

If a user emails support, and their email address is not directly traceable to their login(for example, if they use firstlast@gmail.com for battle.net instead of first.last@gmail.com as the sending email), it allows support to add that to the ticket.
It's not a strong convention but it's used fairly often. It makes the text more readable.
I'd be concerned for lots of random people that take screenshots and post them online, making public their account ids. Probably not a huge deal, but it's more information that they're giving out that they don't need to be.

The people under NDAs, hackers, and griefers are going to know about this now and just turn them off. Which means the only people negatively impacted by it are the innocents.
Talking one-on-one to 500 customers in one day to get feedback doesn't seem possible. If you only spend 5 minutes talking to each customer, and you have them lined up back to back so you don't waste time in between, it would still take 40+ hours.

I guess you could do 1 minute conversations and get it down to about 8 hours, although even assuming you can get 500 people to queue up for this, I'm curious what will come out of 500 x 1 min. back to back conversations.

It seems to me that the only useful way to get feedback from 500 people in one day involves sending out some kind of survey. Then again this isn't really my area of expertise, so I'm curious, how would you go about gathering feedback from 500 people in one day?
It would be interesting to correlate the numbers in your post with numbers that measure a developer. For example, the ability to get 5,000 email list subscribers in a week could be equivalent to creating a project that gets 200 Github watchers in a week. Both parties in this arrangement are classifiable.
After-school programming from Codecademy
What is true agile for you?
The term agile is often misused, things and processes are labeled agile just for the sake of corporate politics/PR. What is your experience, what is your idea that creates agility? Please share your story and the the lessons learned.
yup... ohh the beauty of HN
In 2005, I worked support for a company with a mobile offering. At the time, app purchases were handled exclusively by the carrier and were completely opaque. A little while prior, we had partnered with a shady marketing company, netting us a bunch of unintentional signups that I had the displeasure of fixing.

Since we didn't handle billing, I had to call AT&T with the customer on the line and talk them both through the process of removing the charges(AT&T was feeding customers a line about not handling billing either, for some reason). After doing it a few times, I realized I could do it without the customer, all I needed was a name and a phone number.

It never came down to impersonating the customer, instead, I would just say I was calling on behalf of a customer. Once, a call got escalated to a higher support tier, with the miscommunication that I was a VP of a partner company, which made the agents more responsive, making the process easier, so I just kept reusing that line.

Eventually, I just asked, "what do I tell the next agent I have to deal with so we can just bypass all the lies?" (regarding their inability to modify billing charges). This was happily given to me, and I could now call AT&T support and say, "I'm calling for user X with number Y. I need you to go into the tool and click on Z and then remove the charge from such and such service." Again, when delivered with authority, the rep would do it, no questions asked.

It's hard to fault them, I probably would have done the same in their position. Still, it's scary knowing how little it takes to get customer service to reveal/modify things without hard verification.
wow i'm loving it
How this this work? Wouldn't the same site origin prevent it from reading cookies from other sites? I even have third party cookies disabled but it can still find a lot of cookies from other sites.
For us, the following talk was the closest to describe what we like to call agile: http://www.agilord.com/en/radar/2012/09/dan-north-embracing-...

This part is especially important: "A good methodology allows us to defer decisions, let them be about scope, tooling or technologies."
Looks like github is down
It looks like github just went down for emergency maintenance.
Building a Movie Rating System with jQuery Mobile and Mobiscroll
Something about this doesn't sound right to me. Or is this just the Greeks being paranoid/BI employees being stupid?

If you're working on a game based around military facilities and want to get reference material of these facilities, Why wouldn't you seek cooperation before hand?

Doubly so if you're basing it on a country who are touchy about such things and convicted a planespotters of espionage.
Honestly the suits don't need to code, but they do need to be comfortable discussing software and the limits/possibilities of technology.

Similarly, the geeks don't need to know all the aspects of selling, but they do need to know how to tell a customer that their product is awesome and all the advantages it has and why it's silly to not have use it.
A desktop open-source app for this could be Tomboy (should run on all major three platforms, with OS X lagging a bit behind occasionally).

http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/
I reacted to the "much" from the previous comment. Your statistics clearly show that is NOT one of the leading causes of death, it's actually a very minor one compared to all the others. You cannot qualify this as "much" in any way.
I don't think there is a strong case for either direction, therefore they are both fine.
Encryption algorithms exist and are being developed which are not based on prime factorization and for which no known quantum algorithm exists which can break them in polynomial time.

There will probably be significant warning before quantum computers exist which can break RSA. In that time it will probably become the norm to no longer use algorithms which are rendered obsolete by quantum computers.
Java inner classes haven't changed since the late 90's. There have been new features added to java over the last 12 years, but it still feels like the language I've used since the late 90's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history

language changes in java since 2000:

JDK 1.3 synthetic proxy classes (seldom used)

JDK 1.4 assert keyword (seldom used)

JDK 5 generics, enums, autoboxing, varargs, annotations

JDK 6 nothing

JDK 7 project coin (collection of minor language tweaks)

As for the stuff they "ripped off from C#" I'd like to see you name some examples that weren't already present in other languages. If anything it could be argued that some of the newer C# bits are just ripping off Scala features.
Can a New Computer Model Revolutionise Carbon Capture?
To be fair.. its sponsored by IE! :(
I think the author misunderstands the reason entrepreneurs are annoyed by the tech press' preoccupation with VC-funded startups.

Bootstrapping today is much less likely to be a failure-to-raise-VC than a conscious choice. Capital efficiency has skyrocketed but the press clings to the idea that capital needs legitimize companies.

There are plenty of other publicly-accessible metrics to identify bootstrapped "companies that are relevant and interesting." Unfortunately, most reporters remain ignorant of them.

So here's a few:

- Traffic: Quantcast, Alexa Rank, Hitwise
- Traffic Value: SEMRush, AHrefs, Spyfu
- Authority Metrics (links): SEOMoz, Blekko host rank, PageRank
- Social Metrics: SharedCount
Agree that procedural knowledge is important. But I think the critical decisions that make a startup a success or failure don't have a specific procedure as they're unique problems that nobody has every faced before. I also believe that moving out of the box is the only way to truly take what you've built and make it much bigger than it is.
Yup... https://status.github.com/
They just tweeted the down time and appear to have been experiencing issues all morning.
http://www.whatismybrowser.com/ is nicer looking.
2 days in a row! Anyone else looking for other options?
I agree with everything except the ease of debugging- I've found it difficult to debug clojurescript code (though I still use it anyway because of the other benefits)
List of Interesting Memcached Tools
Inspectlet  - website heatmaps,screen capture and real-time analytics
I don't think its disabled, the finders just aren't able to retrieve it via the sharpening technique. There is some disassembly of the WOW binary several pages into the thread which I have no way to verify but if accurate is a strong indication that this is real.
This is a first message on this list, post-incident that was sent by a non-automated system:

2001-09-11 08:50:25 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA A plane crashed thru the twin towers. Real bad..BR

And another one right after:
2001-09-11 08:51:37 Arch [1274589] D ALPHA 94-THE WORLD TRADE CENTER HAS JUST BLOWN UP, WE SEEN THE EXPLOSION OUTSIDE OUR WINDOWS. TERESA...
To an extent though couldn't that also be an argument against an investor buying equity in a startup rather than picking up a bunch of contract programmers and building the idea themselves?
Major Service Outage on Github
If the contention that an international organisation has been deconstructed, or never existed, it barely matters where a subsequent attack actually takes place.
Github down (maybe because of GoDaddy?)
Github is experiencing a major service outage. GoDaddy was down yesterday, see a pattern?
Don’t buy. Not as long as they horrific image retention problem isn’t solved and acknowledged by Apple. (It isn’t.)
Others have opined that unencrypted radio broadcasts can't reasonably be considered private (they're certainly way less inherently private than words written on paper in my view), but I would add that the magnitude of the attack gives us a greater right to read them.

(The same way we typically don't feel guilty about reading Anne Frank's private diaries following the Nazi atrocities and her death in a concentration camp.)
I'm not sure if the title was changed, but it currently reads "Blizzard is secretly watermarking WOW screenshots", which seems accurate enough to me.
Nice idea - we would need to connect the headline explaining the programme with the Prof more clearly, but that's pretty easy. Will work it up, thanks!
I am not saying that it does NOT exist, I am saying it is very uncommon nowadays, and that saying "much hunger" is clearly an exaggeration at the same level as what tabloid are capable of. There is no way you can compare the situation in the US with the situation in many other countries in the world and say there is "much hunger" in the US. It's just being blatantly ignorant of the situation outside of your country.
That seems like a clever idea, but really each step you're describing would take about five minutes for someone who knows what they're doing.

If you can enumerate your requirements so precisely, I'm sure you can find someone decent for less than $60/hour to execute them.
The beginning of the instapaper copyright wars?
If you could classify the cookies and 3rd part requests into the different functionality groups, then you'd really have a tool.
That said, 3rd party cookies are usually evil.
People spend a lot of time and money on WOW.

Combine money and time and intense interest and huge number of users gives you the situation where people will find exploits.

People in real life have (very rarely) been murdered over video game items. It's probably a good idea to make sure any hidden information is carefully encrypted.
Um, this is done client-side, no? How would they protect the encryption key?
That's a little unfair. The "Type getX(); setX(Type t);" convention to define a "property" dates from 1997, long before anyone was autogenerating Java code. And frankly at the time it was a revelation. People who were used to writing junk like CORBA IDL suddenly saw this "beans" API using "reflection" to detect this stuff automatically, with no assistance from the programmer except adhering to a simple convention. Really, this looked amazing at the time.

But obviously it's been improved. Managed runtimes (and especially more dynamic ones like Python or Ruby or Javascript) have become the norm. The idea of inspecting the metadata of an objectat runtime is no longer so strange. So when C# or Ruby decided to implement the same kind of property interface they felt comfortable taking a few more risks.

Also, the zeitgeist has moved and values different things than it did in the 90's. At the time, clarity seemed like a valuable goal (especially in comparison to C++), so Java preferred a write-it-out-longhand style where types lived in com.domain.subdomain.module.submodule.MyClass namespaces and all the APIs were multiWordCamelCase() things. And this was intentional, and believe it or not people liked it this way. The advent of Rails and DRY (re-)popularized the idea of a "terse" API, so Java's more verbose stuff looks clunky and "bad" to modern eyes in a way that it didn't.

Basically, don't hate on Java. It was good in its day. And it sits in a more important place in history than I think you give it credit for.
I think the main problem is

Based on _what_? Have you actually crunched any numbers, however casually? Have you looked at population trajectories? Have you considered that most people don't live at, or even anywhere close to, your elite level?

While far from definitive, I do play with world population numbers on occasion. My guestimate of world carrying capacity is around 33B people. Sure, it's not what you're used to, but it's sufficient (albeit mundane) food and shelter.

Population replacement rates are falling worldwide. World population is set to peak mid-century. Many first-world countries are facing population reduction at crisis rates, with a few having birth rates so low the country/culture is set to disappear entirely. Insofar as some think there should be fewer people, seems the species is pretty good at handling that without wanton interference.

"Too many people" is easy to say when you're very comfortable, assume everyone else lives as you do, and don't like the idea of having to give way to a few more. Don't forget that half the world's population functions under 1/20th of the official American "poverty line". Funny thing is, if "we could all afford to live like we do today" we'd be complaining about how bad off most people are and arguing for a population reduction to 0.5-0.9 billion so the survivors could live like the top 10%.

In the past (exemplified by _The_Population_Bomb_) similar predictions were made lamenting the world's inability to support X billion people; we're well beyond those feared limits now and doing quite well. Technology (notice which discussion board we're on here) is very good at working out ways of drastically improving resource providence. The problem with food isn't lack thereof - thanks to technology we have more than enough for everyone; the problem with food is politicization of distribution. Insofar as some resources really are limited (and there are valid arguments that fossil fuels et al are not nearly as limited as naysayers claim), high tech enables better/cheaper/sustainable solutions. Problems can be resolved with solutions, some of which are unimaginable now but will be normal in the not-far future.

So the question remains: on what objective grounds can you claim "there is simply too many people in the world"? Why can't Y-Combinator types view the "too many" problem as a challenge for making 7-10B people sustainable & comfortable? 1-2B is a heck of a reduction, presumably beyond mere curbing of procreation; as others ask - are you willing to sacrifice yourself and/or [potential] offspring to get there? and how far are you willing to go to enforce the view on those of us who disagree?
You assume that people doing startups want to be "cool" in the way that Jay-Z is cool, and think that startups are a path to partying with supermodels in Las Vegas nightclubs.

My experience is that most San Francisco tech entrepreneurs, (the type accurately parodied here), do not have such self-delusions.