skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard it put before as the difference between telling a friend / stranger about a business idea and saying "would you buy it" which will often result in a non-committal "yeah" to, "great I have a load of them in the car, £5 each, how many would you like?"

Only the second is a real test of if the idea is valuable and viable. This way you end with with a 'hot' mailing list. You also can't worry about losing these early potential clients, if your client pool is really that small then this is not the way to test. There is a great section on this in the book 4 Hour Work Week.
That kind of thing only happens in New Zealand when the USA is threatening trade sanctions. In this case, not so much.
Maybe I could make a product like freckle, but as you famously constantly argue, I don't make money writing software, the money comes from selling it, and all "selling" entails.

From my perspective what selling entails is finding people who have the pain/need that your product alleviates/ fulfil - and letting them know that your product does that.

This is a bad thing? We should expect products to succeed without doing that?
That's odd. I recall several channel owners claiming million dollar revenues, eg. Jason Njorku from irokotv claimed 1m in annual revenue on this channel for Nigerian movies:

http://www.youtube.com/user/NollywoodLove

The TechCrunch article with the claim:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/14/you-think-hollywood-is-roug...

RWJ claims here that he earns over a million dollars a year purely on Adsense:

http://willvideoforfood.com/2011/04/01/ray-william-johnson-i...

So who's fooling who?
Last week I ordered a 3D printer (MakerBot's Replicator 2) for my home, to allow my daughters (6 and 8) to grow up being able to model and print out their own toys. Playing the game Minecraft has provided them the eye to see and create shapes in 3D. I'm eager to see what they will create when I provide them with the transition from virtual to physical. I want them to be pioneers of their generation.
This is old news, from January this year.
That's actually one way to get famous. And it works very well.
That not correct -- no new features are being added to ES6 now. Macros are possible for subsequent versions, though.
1080p of WHAT. Probably H264 but what profile? Baseline? Main? High?
Isn't the Oracle case more about the definition of an API (what I would consider to be the header files, for example), versus this, which is more of an implementation of an API, though?
First, it's using duckduckgo and second it only search a single term not a phrase, so instead of 'global warming', you get 'global' and 'warming'. But this is a great tool nonetheless.
Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net helped me sort out a bad sound track from some video before splicing it into a short film.
Since this item was posted in hackaday(January) a lot have been done. There is at least one[0] dedicated distro for running XBMC on the Pi.

When I tested it(about a month and a half ago, not with the latest version), it's wasn't a pleasant experience. Video did run smoothly, but menus where painfully slow.
(I've used a slow SD card which might caused some of the problems - I ought to try again with a better one)

[0] http://www.raspbmc.com/
The parent is correct, the claimed relationship being y ~ rank^a for some a<0. You would want to see a linear relationship on the log log plot. Another choice would be to examine the complmentary CDF P(X > x) and look for power law tails.
Remember that every iPhone/Android has an SSD drive in it and how many are DOA? Very, very few. We're talking about hundreds of millions of SSD drives sold per year that are used all day every day. So it's not early-adopter technology in any meaningful sense.

There's no reason at all to extrapolate from personal experience.
404 page that lets visitors express themselves
How would you like to be the guy that gets handed the boss' kid?
SSDs can go kaput too, you still need to backup.
Indeed. Even if there was such a contract, who fixed the price for it? In other words: who said that the right price/service in exchange for an incredibly precise audit trail of my behavior is targeted ads or some pretty lame free articles?

I paid my Navigon app, I pay for my Office 365 e-mail, I pay for the music I get, I pay for the local newspaper I read, I pay to access academia papers (i.e. ACM), I pay for a lot of tools many of which on a donor contract.

I don't even have a problem to pay a fee for a social site if I believe it gives me value in exchange.

Let's forge the contract in a different way: you want my data, you offer something in exchange, I decide if that's a good deal for me. If not, I may still decide to give you my data, but you pay.
"This experiment shows that the trustworthiness of the environment plays a significant role in determining how the children make their decision."

No, the experiment shows that the trustworthiness of the person establishing the immediate challenge plays a significant role in the outcome. It's a huge leap to go from that relatively mundane finding, to the conclusion that the randomly selected participants in the original study were biased in a systematic way toward mistrust of adults.

"This result support the hypothesis that the original marshmallow experiment was a proxy for the living environment of the children, not their impulse control."

It provides only extremely weak support for that hypothesis. A reasonable prior expectation is that it is unlikely for a randomly selected group of young children to share a mistrust of adults that would carry on throughout their lives.
Try OpenELEC and XBian. They're much much smoother at the menu (over 60fps at 1080p when you disable the RSS ticker on OpenELEC). It helps if you overclock the already overclocked Xbian too. I have mine set on around 920MHz (no change in voltage though) and have it running all day for about half a month now. Seems to be working fine.
In terms of material implication, the only way that proposition can be false is if there was a copyright license but there was no copyright.
Red Bull Stratos Skydive Rescheduled for today
Maybe we'd just have "feed lines" of raw molecules to our homes like in The Diamond Age. Also, if this technology interests you and you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it. It is my favorite Neal Stephenson book.
I'd say currencies. It's highly profitable to control your own currency, just ask the Rothschilds.

But, PG and YC seem to have already touched that...at least tangentially with Coinbase.
nice movie
http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/man-on-a-ledge-2012-720p-...
The SSD controllers are more complicated than the controllers you get in the cheap (and very slow - 10-20MB/s vs 4-500MB/s) storage you get in the phones. The controllers are the ones that usually fail.
Typical use of a "firewall" to guard what people think of as the external entry points and then leave nothing once you get in. Plus no auditing of permissions. Alas all too common.
JavaScript and YAML Notation Coding
from the science prospective: after LAPACK and friends are rewritten into functional languages, maybe some people will be willing to switch from FORTRAN... but i doubt it.
I have purchased 3 crucial M4 drives and have been satisfied with all of them. It's a strong choice.
Is it better for someone to spend months coding something only to discover that nobody wants it? What do you really lose if you find out that a service you like isn't ready yet?
Great point Stavros, I believe this is the biggest source of failure for startups.
I think any economic system should reward getting wealthy

Huh? Wealth IS the reward. I don't understand why you would reward someone for getting rewarded. Normally, one is rewarded for doing things that lead to desired outcomes.

A rational society would reward people for contributions to the environment, public safety, education, whatever society happens to need.

No rational society would reward spivs for being wealthy, especially if in the process of gaining said wealth the spivs damage society with undesired outcomes. Which is standard operating procedure.

Examples of this abound, including blowing up the housing market then asking for bailouts, corrupting politics through lobbying, polluting the environment or deceiving the public through misleading advertising and public relations, etc etc etc
I'd be grateful if you could drop me a quick email to discuss? questions@quicklytest.it. Thanks again.
One thing hard drives still have that SSDs don't is that they very rarely loose your data once it is written. Use SSDs for speed, but know that your backups have become far more important than before.
Actually iOS 6's Maps app behaves exactly like that. The threshold is even larger than Android's (at least that's how it behaves on iPad, I haven't upgraded my iPhone 4 yet).
I can vouch for OpenELEC. What do you mean by "already overclocked"? Does XBian overclock your pi?
It's a good list for cherry-picking a couple reading ideas, but the amateur comments about philosophy weren't well-received by this individual.

> I find that it’s thoroughly undervalued by philosophers

Doing okay so far...

>though, who see it as an arcane and eccentric work of little value

Not so sure about that...the timing for Wittgenstein's work might've been unfortunate, given that people were starting to become infatuated with existentialism around the same time. That was as more of a pop-culture phenomenon than an academic fad though.

>it’s a difficult thing to read

Okay again...

>Ironically for a book ignored by most philosophers, it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them.

Hrm, no. A lot of the questions concerning philosophy and the method for answering all of them?

I sincerely doubt any work that could described in such terms would be as obscure as he proposes. This borders on the illogic of conspiracy theorists believing they've found some secret truth.

A bizarre flash of irrationality in an otherwise great post.
We had a similar thing in my home town in Australia at some point too: the big selling point for me, at least, was that when you were hanging out at a friend's place and you decided that you just wanted to order in, you no longer had to agree on what to get :)

Another business that used to operate, at least, was a liquor delivery service, but only to restaurants. Back there, at least, a restaurant can be licensed to serve liquor, or licensed for BYO (which I presume was cheaper). So what would happen would be a restaurant would be licensed for BYO, but still have a wine menu: when you ordered off the menu, you were technically ordering through the delivery service and they would drop the wine off (they were driving around all the time). So you may have waited a little longer, but it was cheaper for everyone...
Well, there are sound technical reasons as to why 3rd party apps aren't allowed to use Nitro. The same cant be said about a Maps engine.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buying 30 year mortgages for decades and decades almost certainly contributed some momentum to housing prices.

I haven't looked seriously for an analysis of it, but it would be interesting to see how quickly the greater affordability of homes (the lower monthly payment from the 30 year) started driving the prices.
Thanks.

You question whether it's really seen as that eccentric: I've actually corresponded with a bunch of UK philosophers about Wittgenstein, all of whom regard his earlier work as vaguely interesting if subsequently outmoded (a more or less accurate assessment) and his later work as eccentric and mostly irrelevant to serious philosophy (a totally wrong-headed assessment). I'm happy to send you email extracts if you still doubt that.

I should note that I studied philosophy here in the UK (at Oxford), so perhaps I'm biased towards the UK. But I think this applies to the US too: Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty and Kripke, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Kripke got him totally wrong anyway, and Wittgenstein's only a piece of Rorty's outlook.

As to your last comment - what you seem to be saying is that this is highly improbable based on 'well if it's that good why doesn't everyone believe that' considerations. To which I'd respond: (a) it's not a totally obscure work. In fact, it's regarded as the main late Wittgenstein work. But (b) late Wittgenstein is totally undervalued by the mainstream of academic philosophy, mostly because (I think) he renders it irrelevant; and (c) you're better off actually reading the thing and deciding for yourself. Otherwise you become a sort of 'efficient market theorist' w.r.t. academia/books. Not a position I'd want to hold, personally.
What do you mean? $23k is the average for the top 1,000. The top 10 (and maybe even 100) (which includes RWJ) are making millions, this article doesn't dispute that.
VisageFX Application using Sublime and Gradle
"Those who are eligible to enter include:

(a) Individuals or sole proprietors who have reached the older of 18 years old"

huh????
An accurate (but incredibly biased by hindsight) analysis. If this were a matter of ML, I'd say you way over-fitted to the working data.

It would've required forseeing the sea-change in the smartphone/mobile market produced by the iPhone in order to predict that it would explode the market for high performance ARM chips so wildly. This wasn't in the cards at the time. At the time, everything but the Blackberry was a joke.

Anybody in a position to direct capital, with the faculty for this kind of prescience, would then know the real best use of capital in that circumstance is to direct it at Apple, not for AMD to make ARM chips. It likely would've been more profitable for AMD to sell off the entirety of its assets and buy Apple stock in 2005 than for them to try to jump on the AMD bandwagon.

More to the point, AMDs brief reign as the gamer/hacker/tinkerer chip maker of choice was a byproduct of the Pentium 4 architecture, especially the Prescott gen, being such an unmitigated disaster. The moment Intel rolled back to the Core Solo/Duo series based on the Pentium III architecture, it was clear they were going to retake the lead and probably keep it.

All AMD did to "succeed" was not fail as hard at chasing the megahertz demon. In particular, by choosing not to sacrifice pipeline efficiency for higher clock rate, AMDs chips were significantly more performant for virtually every use-case except SSE-heavy vector operations.
Raspbmc stuttered every few seconds when playing 1080p video when I last tried it (a month or two ago). OpenELEC, however, has performed fantastically; occasionally lags a touch on some menus and with some recent builds the cover art appears to be.. erm.. blocky, but for actual playback it's great.
It is true in the sense that there are conceivable ways to use FOSS without accepting the licence. There are common ways like dual-licensing (if the license is GPL and the company has all the copyrights they can still sell me a different license) or even fair use (someone could create a parody of FOSS and publish it).
It seems like bootstrap with less features
I don't say anybody ought to buy my products or Brennan's, but the unfounded accusations flying around are hilarious

They're not amusing - because the silent majority might take them seriously. And I already have enough problems with developers and founders thinking that they just need to build it and people will come ;-)
>As far as I know, Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy.

Ahhh, you're coming from the perspective of an analytic philosopher. The part about the UK I can't really incorporate except to take your word for it. I've assumed they were independent of the "continental" zeitgeist.

I don't come from the analytic family of philosophy. I could never really get past Frege. OTOH, I don't care for the hippies on the other side of the fence either.

I'd be happy to peruse material/readings if you have any. I'll add my email address to my profile now.

Thank you for replying!
Valid point. When I first looked at the code I knew the initialize code was fairly common, but then I noticed the unnecessary require. I started to explore a bit more and noticed that the style changes from the copied code[1]. They also place their require statements immediately after module declaration[1]. Not to mention the use of single quotes vs double quotes.

1 - https://github.com/donnen/TaxCloud/blob/b036594969f045660a79...
There's a few ways to look at this:

In the long term (30-50 years), "replicator" technologies could appear, and then game over there's some major disruption coming.

However, for the type of machines today, better democratization means easier prototyping, which combines with hackerspaces / TechShop, open hardware, etc. are already allowing hardware startups to emerge - a movement that's gaining steam rapidly.

For the mid-term, cheaper prints comparable cost/materials-wise with injection molding, this could still do some pretty amazing stuff with flexible production, but we'll still need assembly lines with chips, etc.

Maybe if we can get conductive inks to be responsive enough for digital electronics, we could print circuit board inside and just pick-n-place the ICs. Also, by this time we may have a more modular approach to hardware where only a few thousand components are needed to make 99% of devices - then Kinkos-scale production would be possible. Timeframe: 10-20 years?

What do you guys think?
Not to confuse with "Sliding Doors of CSS" [1] - Had me confused for a moment there.

[1] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slidingdoors/
Ah interesting - are you a philosopher? What family of philosophy do you tend to focus on?
The author (or his company) always has the copyrights (if it is not sold) and thus can license it any way(s) wanted, for example und open source licenses.
Authors in certain countries can also release their code into the public domain -- that would be the only situation where there is no copyright involved anymore.
My impression was that SSDs would eventually become unwritable, but that they never become unreadable.

Part of that understanding comes from an anecdote related by a contractor I knew that did government work. Supposedly some departments will use solid-state disks for the "cannot lose" data for which availability is less important because the disks will eventually become unwritable and at that point just become archives.
Ah, gotcha thanks!
Same experience, with two separate OCZ drives. Total irrecoverable data loss. Yay backups. I switched to Intel too in the end.
Kodak made plenty from popular photography in the twentieth century. Popular photography is a major part of most people's lives in the industrial west. I can understand why these apps/services make money.

The question for me from this article is why assemble the development team and then not integrate it into the rest of the company. The idea of programmers being left with nothing to do and no direction strikes me, as an outsider, as daft.
Interesting CV
The Evolution of Windows OS From Beginning to Present
Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to Get Out Vote
If hurry means more than 8 months. I edited the post to include the date I contacted them (August 24, 2011). The writing style for the copied code vs additional code they wrote is inconsistent.

https://github.com/donnen/TaxCloud/blob/b036594969f045660a79...
vs
https://github.com/donnen/TaxCloud/blob/b036594969f045660a79...
Current politics in New Zealand are unlikely to see this a terror or hacking issue. This is the agency responsible for the jobless, and they are a very low priority mainly used for political diversion.
Malaysia is probably the best success story, but you can easily make a case that India was better off under colonial rule than before or immediately after.
Wow, Active Directory Much? There's so many ways to do this correctly using simple groups in AD. Or hell, why do these public kiosks even need to be on the same network?
I let philosophy consume my life for a few years to the detriment of everything else.

I'm a values/ethics/aesthetic/desert/metaphysics nihilist with a keen interest in epistemology. Most recent relevant read I've enjoyed of late has been Popper and his work on falsifiability.

I've been trying to work through Marx recently too, but I find reading him to be a lot like reading Ayn Rand.

Insufferable and they expect you to swallow the bitter pill of their ridiculous foundations they use to prop up the philosophy they work backwards from their personal preferences to justify. I'm going to continue for the sake of trying to extract some sense of analysis with respect to Capitalism, but it's slow-going.
I have read Impro and found it quite good yet can't remember anything related to newtonian mechanics... but I wanted to read it again anyway :)
Getting Started with Phinx (A PHP Database Migration Tool)
Pipi is weewee in German. You pick what the project does :) (OT)
Happily read your blog post but the assertions about Wittgenstein rang alarm bells. It may be that his works are ignored in the UK right now, but paraphrasing Brian Magee: "Philosophy is subject to fashion". So it may just be a question of trend in philosophy.

> it contains the answers to a lot of their questions, and the method for answering all of them.

For me that sounds like "Node.js contains the method to solving all programming problems.".
Netanyahu: Israel subject to increasing number of cyber attacks
Redditive: Reddit for mobile, tablet, and desktop devices
Just launched Redditive (http://www.redditive.com) a few minutes ago.<p>It is a Responsive Design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design) version of Reddit, and it is comfortably readable on mobile, tablet, and desktop browsers.<p>This is an MVP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product) and new features will be added continuously.<p>I would be very happy to hear your opinions.
But wouldn't the ratio of these two matter? It could be that density of stars in space is very low and you'd get shade of almost-black?
You’re missing almost everything while you’re offline, but that’s ok
Liberty produces far more equality than the pursuit of equality could ever achieve

Nonsense!

I know this code:

"pursuit of equality" = giving medicine, schooling to the poor

"liberty" = medieval scale deregulation + tax cuts for billionaires

And where people's freedom is actually destroyed, down the rathole of militarism and corporatism, well that's just "patriotism".

Tell you what buddy, why don't you first roll back the Pentagon budget, Homeland Security, asset securitisation and corporate personhood.

After that, we can talk about trading off equality or freedom.
One of the examples shows the responsive features: http://imperavi.com/kube/demo/
"I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG

Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.