skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember being the guy on the other side of the counter at a small mom and pop computer store in the mid nineties that catered to local small and mid-sized businesses. We always had fresh coffee and pastries, huge leather bound chairs to hang out and the owner always kept a decent selection of wine, scotch, and cigars on hand.

We had regular customers who came by every week for a cup of coffee and to chat about what was new, and on Saturdays we came in and opened the store just to hang out with people and play games on the LAN.

Every machine was custom built for the customer. People who didn't know much about computers got an education and our recommendation for the best parts (we knew what manufacturers parts we had to send back). People who knew what they wanted got exactly what they wanted. We would even take your old machine and copy/reconstruct all the software, settings and data to the new machine.

Then the race to the bottom happened in the late 90's and there was no more margin for that sort of service. The company is still around, but they got bought out years ago by a services business and the owner left and started a business selling things made from reclaimed wood.

I miss the craftsmanship, attention to detail and customer service.
You can read up presentations by Jeff Dean and also look at what those companies are doing. Listen to Craig Mundie from microsoft for example. See what's happening in competitions like kaggle or what are state of the art on difficult computer vision challenges like imagenet. Machine learning as used in android speech recognition and microsoft speech recognition has already decimated speech recognition researchers and computer vision researchers are next (in the sense that automated machine learning takes over feature engineering). Read all the big data hoopla. There's your citations. It's not all that difficult to figure this all out if you look into it.
MIT Gangnam Style
How did you get involved with SET? The people who ran that back when I was a student/study participant (20 years ago!) were amazing. I got a free college CS class when I was 12-13 out of the deal, which got me my first reliable dialup access to the Internet and UNIX/VMS shells for the next few years. It's hard to thank them enough.
A synology box with a slave unit would do 96T uncompressed with some room for redundancy in there based on 24 4T drives.
India’s Plague, Trash, Drowns Its Garden City During Strike
"unlike oil, which can be stored"
Oh glorious oil! This article reads like an anti-environmental hit piece (even if it is an important issue).
Agreed, and it helps to have 2 backups of all your data using different techniques/products. I run a local backup to cheap disk, network backup to remote location, and I suppose my remotely hosted svn is my third backup of most assets I really care about.

Most of us here are developers. How many of our products are perfect? Always assume something will fail in a new and interesting way in the future. I'm not letting Dropbox off the hook - their product shouldn't do this - but you'll be happier if you treat backups with the same level of redundancy and planning as the rest of your infrastructure.
Yeah, but the two-year-old scales to huge datasets and doesn't cry a lot.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C. Clarke.

I think many people without much insight into electronics or computers would consider smartphones quite magical already.
"Oppa Chomsky Style" at 3:21 -- that's awesome!
The existence of this website http://cdecl.org/ confirms that even English speakers find it hard to read C-style declarations :-)

Plus, types can be seen as nouns instead of adjectives:

int x
variable x is an integer
var x int
I think most people are interested in practically solving problems. If the black box can solve it, there's no reason to care about "meaning". Once the machines have taken over all jobs, you can sit around and understand the meaning of things to your satisfaction at your own leisure surrounded by the luxury the machines have created for you.
> I'll wait until the kickstarter video comes out

Hopefully they have a working prototype and not just a rendering!
Theres gunna be big money to the company that can figure out how to store huge masses of energy for months, but no doubt thats decades away.

However, is there a more simple solution to this problem, like approaching an industry that already uses masses of energy and seeing if they can encourage them to use the energy when there is overloading? I'm unsure what that industry would be.

Surely using an overabundance of energy is a solvable problem? It seems bizarre to me that it wouldnt be.
Mostly off topic, but do USA schoolschildren get taught to use things like "number of degrees of arc", "measures in degrees" and "inverse logarithm" instead of just "degrees" and "exponentiation"/"exponential" (and the use of the last one is the geometric mean, which is a much pithier explanation and concept).

And, a correlation of .52 isn't the same as a coin toss: that would be a correlation of 0.
It's like the writer doesn't know that windmills can be stopped. In fact, they have builtin brakes which autoengage and stops the mill when the wind becomes too powerful.
no ,off course , not , but these are just facts. In my company , Accountency has been out-sourced to eastern europe, and my job may be next , no matter how good i am at my task. It is not something i want of course , but it is something that might happen in the future.
Gruber happily posted Wired's positive review of surface, commenting "Interesting review of an interesting device."
Exactly. So the question is, when facing the risk of a black-out, why don't they just stop the windmills?

And in the long term, why is Europe not building more Pumped-storage hydroelectric power plants, which would solve the issue? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...)
I think in many cases it is more likely that said companies that you worked for would have zero developers without open source software. Open source has enabled companies, who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford to enter the software game, to take on programmers themselves.

You were perhaps able to do the work of 4 developers, but if 10 new positioned opened across multiple companies like yours due to the same effects it is still a significant net gain that has only helped contribute to shortages and rising incomes.
Inside the Osama Bin Laden assassination
Not exactly. I personally suffer from how the AppStore iOS application is made. Then the maps. The quality of many details is lost. After such obvious defects, it is hard to be in position to be extravagant and rude. The love is gone.
It only showed me a "submit response" button and no questions. So I clicked it and now I can't redo it.
Original, full article:
http://www.marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe
Developer of Jekyllhub here: our SSL cert is trusted by every other browser; only Mozilla seems to have a problem with them. I'm working it out with my provider, and if nothing else I'll get a new cert this weekend.

Thanks for your feedback!
It's not about "sucks," it's about the difference between being a market leader and someone trying to emulate a market leader with no understanding of why things are popular.

Touch? Sure, let's do touch, but we won't consider human aspects like the size of on screen elements.

Gestures? Sure, let's make things swipe and tap and zoom. Why? Why not? The other people do it.

Animations? Sure, they are pretty. Let's animate some things. They are optional and meaningless anyway, so we can be sparse and nobody will care. They should be happy we added animations anyway!

Wooden tables with see through table toppers with t-shirted employees? It's just the natural order of things. We aren't copying anybody.
It just makes sense that eventually we will create systems that do the work that is currently manual. That has been human history (printing press, manufacturing, etc). The good thing is that we are crafty buggers and will always find a new job to do even when we've just replaced the manual labor that was oh so painful to perform before.
"I have tried the Surface, and been using Windows 8 and Windows Phone for over a year. On the other hand Marco tried it for a couple of minutes, and arrived at a hasty conclusion without even giving it a fair try."

Yes but he us upfront about that. He isn't pretending it is a well researched review. He is writing about his experience.

ALSO - the UX issues he found are quite apparent on casual inspection.
I would like to be able to click and go into the prototype definition of the object it is displaying , would be a great thing. And also be able to use that live while an application is running , so i can see the object graph, when instance are created ,etc ... anyway that idea is just awesome !
I think the working theory is heating molten salt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
Reading on, the problem seems to be not really specific to the windmills themselves, but to the fact that Germany is transmitting a lot of power from the North (where the windmills are) to the South (where the industry is). There is also a lot of transfer between Austria and Germany going on (with Austria's hydroelectric pumped-storage power stations essentially serving as batteries), and the Czech's are unhappy that their grid is used for this transmission for free.
Coder's Asceticism
I wonder if the late 1990s to roughly now will be seen as a audio, video, still picture dark ages of sorts.

The average consumer was astounded by low quality mp3 audio over a record, cassette tape or later on compact disc. Sort of like fast food, convenience over quality.

It's also the same for photography I remember the first digital cameras and they had horrible resolution and colour depth but it was amazing to have a film-less camera. Video being a close cousin to pictures got worse in quality too but more affordable and convenient no more giant saddle bag and shoulder-crushing camera.

Looking back years from now family pictures and audio will be great up to roughly the mid 1990s then from then on until the early 2000s the bottom fell out.
This really should be 'How long will 'some' Programmers Be So Well-Paid'?

C'mon lets be frank not all programmers are well paid, You really have to be working at Google or other big place or make it big in the start up area. None, of that is any different than any other profession I know of. In fact even the author seems to be talking of 'Google and Facebook' employees, the number of people working at Google and Facebook are small enough to consider them a clear exception.

What you really must be talking about is of a time around a decade and a half back when programmers seem to be paid well. And even they were paid well not because they were programming, its just that the IT sector grew so rapidly there was a immense demand in the middle level management areas that caused a impression of rapid career progress in the software industry. That is what made people to 'come in the game for the money'.

The only distinction that I see programming has compared to other professions is programmers tend to think of themselves as people 'who solve problems' and not just people who write code. No other profession, I know of carries that tag line.
Nonsense! Sheer nonsense! If Postgres didn't exist, I'm sure the <20 person company I work for would be happy to pay me to spend the next decade recreating it rather than building their application.

Not to mention Linux, Apache, Ruby on Rails, Java, Git, Vim etc. ;-)
I don't know: it might be a very nice cake.
I read this yesterday thinking it was from pg, strange feeling.
This is not about the singularity. This is about data vs programming.

And your attacks on the singularity are misguided. You think singularity people are retarded and your anti-singularity possie are holier, yet you don't have a coherent anti-singularity argument.

Any fool can tear down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.
Imagine how many more problems we could solve with meaning. Every secretary in the world could be fired. Software could actually know you. It would be a huge psychological problem for people.

You think MMOs kill brains in south east asia now? Wait until software acts like a boyfriend. Every site (read: website/app/software) could be unique, well designed, and work cross platform by telling the system what you want (remember: in this delusional scenario the system understands meaning to avoid the unintentional vengeful djinn problem).

You think multivariate testing is omgballz amazing? Imagine if ad networks share a sophisticated personality model (instead of: likes cats, doesn't like monster trucks) of you. Every site you visit could be rearranged to appeal to your individual design sense, buying patterns, and social expectations. A/B testing basically tries to suss out your average user so you can appeal to them. You leave your non-average users in the dirt by optimizing for the common moron.

It's possible and I think the incumbent giants will miss it whenever it happens (5-10-50 years out).
They have to shut down coal fired power plants when the windmills produce excess power. Oh, the humanity!
Was it really that bad? I did not have the opportunity to go to university, but I did come out of high school right after the burst and while I wasn't making $100K for just knowing HTML, I was able to do alright. And by the time the market started to recover, I had some amazing experience under my belt allowing me to leverage the upswing in ways someone just graduating wouldn't be able to do.
A utility in Texas offers free power between 10 PM and 6 AM: http://cleantechnica.com/2012/05/18/txu-is-first-to-offer-fr...

Makes for some very interesting arbitrage opportunities, even if it is residential only (I assume).
I have made a start on graphing the instantiated objects, but my brain started to hurt :)
Or people just don't care. Or they know that it is Ubuntu only. Or they do not use Linux. Or they do not use Steam. ;-)
How Food Replaced Art as High Culture
It's probably deliberate, to annoy the very vocal Marco-haters.
That's a bit frustrating to read a post like this one. There's lot of good developers and very few good coding jobs. Why does everybody still claim it's hard to find good developers?, we're everywhere.. Maybe i'm missing the point or i don't know how to find a coding job..
Firstly, you would need one hell of a system set up, we aren't just talking mainframe servers in a building, we are talking entire city blocks dedicated to this. The challenge is computing everything, you need to be able to work out the physics, smells, lighting, feel, taste, etc of everything the people would be interacting with, it's not as simple as virtual reality, where you are just wearing a headset, because in virtual reality, you know it isn't real.

Then you would need some kind of advanced sedative, something capable of keeping the person relaxed, calm, but also allowing their brain to function at a primitive level, enough for them to be able to enjoy the dream, but not enough for them to come to their senses and realise that their world isn't real.

After that, you would need a method of feeding the people, which would most likely involve intravenous tubes or some kind of stomach tubing system. Aside from this you would need dedicated medical units, to monitor the people but also to keep them healthy and save from risks such as deep vain thrombosis and sores.

Then you would need synaptic plug in devices of some kind, to interface with nerves in the persons body, you need to find the process by which their brain gets input from parts of the body and receives output and put yourself in the middle of this process, taking the output, processing it on your machine to simulate whatever it is you require and then feeding that directly back in to the persons body as they would normally receive the input back to their brain.

You would have to do this so efficiently that you would never fail, bare in mind that not only are you responsible for keeping them in this static state, you are responsible for keeping them alive, their lungs would likely be faulty from years of being driven by the machine, so if your oxygen delivery system has a wide spread failure you could lose your entire stock.

These are just some of the challenges you would face. In short, yes, you could create that world and you could also populate it correctly, but it would likely be the single most difficult technological endeavour humans have so far faced (as a whole, instead of broken in to the individual requirements.)
And still there's no Github IFTTT channel.
Gaming is just time spent not hacking ;) I myself do need a break once in a while, but some people seem to never stop and/or just don't like games (anymore).
I don't know. That's the problem with bias. I haven't seen a surface in person or visited a Microsoft store, but from the entire tone of the article, I know I can't trust his account. He may be a veritable prophet with regards to Microsoft and the Surface, but if I can't trust him (and I don't), I'll have to figure that out on my own.
Also, I couldn't list both my desktop and my laptop, even though I'd install Steam on both.
婚活イベント高知口コミランキング
I wouldn't call that a good thing. You generally can't turn off/on a coal plant in a hurry. What they're probably doing is just braking the turbines and still burning some fuel.

(Edited, realised it sounded confrontational to begin with.)
A new social embedded chat service
A few weeks ago we launched this brand new social embedded chat service. If you want your website to become social give us a try ;-). As we are in closed beta you can install it totally for FREE.
Did she burn to death enough? 
Divine Racial Karma translator has reportedly received a new message about the spectacular fire that took eighteen year old reparations offender Amber Deloach's life from the unfaultering and unwavering cosmic principle that determines punishment or reward according to a race's generational collective deeds.
Well, the most successful people in any profession are "the people who solve problems". That isn't something inherently unique to programmers.
Cool. Any reason why you requested access to all sites and not just the ones you currently support?

Also, where do you get the data?
Win8 upgrades failing - payment processor to blame?
Windows RT review [AnandTech]
Give HN: 4x 8 hours of my UX work for free
TL;DR: I want a new job and I need to have better demonstrable portfolio. I'll work 8 hours for free for each of 4 HN'ers to solve your UX problems. Please upvote if you find it valuable to the community.

Details:

I've been building web for 10+ years in many different roles (growing up from software development to product design). My current job is at a small but ridiculously disorganized and lacking resources company where I do all different kind of roles including product owner, UX designer, but also project & team manager, software architect/CTO and more. This is obviously more than one person can handle and I'm tired of the fact that I cannot do any of these things really great - I only have time to do all of them acceptably-well which is not what I want to do.

I want to break out of this mess and focus on product design and/or UX. I want to build better demonstrable portfolio in the UX area, so I would like to solve your small UX problems for free. I will do 4 mini-projects worth ~8h each.

I can't design a brand new product for you within 8h, but I can solve a single problem or design/redesign a feature. If that works for you, please email me at ux4you@gmail.com.
Please don't spend too much time for detailed specification at this stage - I can only commit to 4 HN'ers and I will have to choose 4 most interesting submissions. Describe it briefly so that I could tell wether it can be completed in 8 hours and if I will able to be useful for you. You will send details of your problem later, when I commit to you. Please remember that I don't do graphics design - only UX/interface design - and you will get wireframes and flowcharts, not graphics design.

I will give you my work for free and in return I want to be able to use it as a case study/portfolio.

Thank you HN. Please forgive my English as it's not my native language.
Oh, I certainly don't have an anti argument. We'll end up destroying ourselves, be obliterated by cosmic events, or eventually run civilization from computer simulations.

People have just been saying "real soon now" for 60 years. Obviously we are more "real soon now" than back then, but it's still unclear how soon we can be.

My favorite knock down is the "when computers get fast enough, we'll magically have AGI/hard AI." If that were the case, we could have really really slow versions now.

Theoretical vs. practical architectures matter. Nobody can imagine an iPad's software ecosystem if your model is vacuum tubes and single tape turing machines. But when you hit CPUs, shrinking processes, and GPUs with 6 teraflops on a card, you see how impossible your goals were with a 0.2 MHz room-sized computer with 500k of memory.

If you immediately know the candle light is fire, then the meal was cooked a long time ago.
They solve problems in their professions. But we programmers poke our nose in everything we see around.
Well, at least there's CandyFab [1] which literally 3D-prints sugar. In its current incarnation even edibly so.

[1] http://www.candyfab.org/
There's a great sci-fi novel, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a post-oil world where tightly wound springs are used to store energy, as we do now with clocks. One of the subplots deals with a character trying to develop a material that can be wound tighter and more compactly without breaking. Or explosively unwinding. I'm not an engineer or physicist, so I've wondered, what is the theoretical limit for storing energy in a spring. Sci-fi stories usually do a bit of handwaving with nano/bio/quantum-tech to make magic materials, but what is the real science? Cars and laptops powered by springs sounds plausible (and awesomely steam punk) to me.
https://github.com/kilim/kilim
If your company treats you as a cost and wants to unload you, then you are probably in trouble. Maybe try to find a place that sees you as an asset? In SF, the fancy programmers are entire products and personality cults by themselves.

Saying everything can be outsourced would lead to all American actors being replaced by Bollywood or Korean or Chinese actors. There are forces other than price of labor acting in the market.
I just went to upgrade to Windows 8 and was met with "initializing checkout failed".

http://gyazo.com/71da564b10515155cd2b1136d0ab6464

The thread above indicates that people can't call in either - MS and/or their payment processors seemed to be overwhelmed by volume. No doubt this may be spun as a "good thing", but 'selling out' would be a better headline than "no one could buy".

I'm flummoxed as to why one of the mega companies on the planet, with billions in revenue, and more than a year to prepare for a company-changing product rollout, can't accept payments for something on this scale.
There are a bunch of competing technologies: flywheels, water pumps, electric arcs, etc. It's a really interesting space.
Not sure if it's just me, but it sure seems like a massive case of entitlement.

"You shouldn’t have to prep Sunday to Sunday, to get into a good high school... That's extreme."
Actually that's how it largely is for competitive colleges, and if people are arguing for a merit-based admission system that is _exactly_ what people should have to do if other people are willing to.

Tough to tell where the author is landing on this point in his article.
I wanted a raspberry pi with more ooomph... This may do the trick, but it'd need to be about $99 for me to buy it.
First 3 months of a startup: 20 things I’ve learned