skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This true up to a point. Intelligent people go to college, and in addition to technical education they are getting other stuff as well. I'd hope it's not too controversial to posit that (a) most university humanities cultures are more similar to Harvard than West Point, and (b) it is obvious that Harvard's math dept. teaches objective truth, and not so much for Harvard's history dept.

Many, perhaps most students care primarily about a job and won't read history on their own time. So in order to get a job they get that technical degree, and receive the humanities content alongside. They never feel the urge to uninstall that humanities content, or to check it against Google Books primary sources. It's just the default.

The default today is heavier on the Nazis than the Gulag, as one example, and this difference in emphasis has many downstream effects. Weimar is less likely to be studied than dependencia theory, for another example.

With MOOCs, this package deal of tech + humanities is going to end soon. People will take classes a la carte, and one might predict that new grads in 5 years time will start shifting to the right. (It is hard to see the smart shifting even further left!). Time will tell.
This interview is from my latest book, Designing Web Applications, which will be released on December 12th. More details are here: http://nathanbarry.com/webapps
Yes. My monitor can be astonishingly bright with other settings. I used to do black-on-white in the past, but that was on a different display which wasn't quite so powerful.
Having issues buying Nexus 4 on Play Store? Here's a tip.
I think it SHOULD be accepted as a fact of life. That way we can then learn to improve our designs of applications and processes to be more tolerant to network faults and unreliability, which is a good thing.
Isn't the major benefit of WebSockets that is actually has a fair chance to pass through all the crazy proxies and gateways installed in every office, home and coffe shop, that would otherwise filter any non-HTTP traffic?
It's not TCP over HTTP, that would require a TCP stack. It's the io bytestream from a specific TCP connection, shuttled over HTTP.

It's not entirely bogus, just mostly so. I really dislike this whole "the internet == the web" way of thinking, though.
since their released the website, I don't see what's the difference between 500px and Flickr except the latter is more mature and feature rich. in other words: what's their selling point and the reason they became popular?
The question is not whether it is worth it for an individual to get an MBA, but rather if MBAs are good for the economy.

I don't think anyone is arguing that for an individual, getting an MBA from a top tier university isn't worth it. There is enough MBA-run businesses with a heavy amount of nepotism to ensure it makes financial sense.
I wouldn't consider economics to be technical at all. Traditional Economics is the art of taking outdated physical models as analogies for sociological phenomena. There are modern branches of economics that are useful and arguably even technical, but I doubt you get into them as a typical undergraduate.
The shape of an obelisk has a narrow, constant width. The shape of a pyramid has a width that is wide at the bottom, and narrow at the top. The 'y axis' of the shape is how far along in the startup life cycle the company is. The width is how easy it is to get funding at that point in the cycle.

Here's how I interpret it:

It used to be that the ease of funding was relatively constant at all points on the life cycle. Now it's easier to get funding at an early stage, and harder to get funding at a later stage.
I didn't say they were equivalent, just equivalently victim-y. In both cases, when it's a small fraction of normal use, then there was no appreciable impact. You couldn't know that phone phreaking had zero impact, but given that the phone system was engineered around very peaky load, your odds were very good.

Casual phone phreakers weren't a serious problem. Commercial ones were, I'm sure. But then so are commercial pirates.
Hopefully more services start adding multi-factor authentication. So far, I have my Google Account, Dropbox, and now CloudFlare.

Hearing that Authy will soon support Google Authenticator tokens is great news! I have never encountered the "out of sync" problem with Google Authenticator described in the article, but the Authy app does feel more native on my iPhone.
Amazon's external-facing security seems robust, but most places I've worked have given a lot of trust to people on the inside. I've worked at places where all developers get read access to all databases - and managers who are former developers usually retain that access.

Amazon might have good internal security procedures - but this stuff can't be audited effectively, we can only take amazon's word for it. Taking their word for it, with the security of all your customers' data, is a big ask.
Google Fires a Rare Public Salvo Over Aggregators
I really liked point 2. It seems to be the default assumption that we as a species should seek to increase our chances of survival by looking to colonize other planets. However it is entirely possible that our mindset may change in the future and we come to the conclusion that, even with capable technology, it is better for us to live out our existence on this planet.
Bootstrap is great for quickly turning a mockup into functional app.

If i know my site needs some thumbnails a navbar, icons and a nice font, I'd rather avoid recreating the wheel.

it's almost the Rails of HTML/CSS UI design
I'd say give it another month or two. Many are still able to mine profitably if they have 4x cards per rig (dividing the "fixed (power) costs" of motherboard, psu, etc). Once ASIC mining hardware comes online, GPUs will be completely worthless for Bitcoin mining.

But if you see a deal, by all means grab it.

* Disclosure, I am the community manager for a GPU-centric Bitcoin mining pool
It uses Websockets, which are only HTTP for the handshake: the rest of the connection is just a TCP stream.

So it's really more like a NAT bridge.
... and that large swaths of the Earth receive new weather patterns completely disrupting nearly every ecosystem, with cascading effects including no food for us
> a nice office makes workers happier

I agree, but there's always going to be a 'good enough' point somewhere between drab-gray-walls-office-park and million-dollar-renovation. When I see startups do this I see them pushing too far to the right end of the bell curve.

Some startups really come off like 'new money' people: buying lavish top-of-the-line-equipment with the same mindset as someone who buys $500 flip-flops because they saw Jennifer Aniston wearing them.

I'd much rather see experienced people that know when to invest in something and when something is 'good enough' over someone bragging about their 50+ retro arcade room.

> Providing free food means they are less likely to leave the office

This bothers me to a point that I am less likely to consider a company that offers free food. I look at these 'perks' as "Oh hey, we'd prefer if you would stay and work through lunch, also, why not just stay and work through dinner! We're having Pasta tonight! Breakfast anyone???" Nooooo Thankyou.
Republicans don't believe in evolution, Democrats don't believe in the danger of the NDAA.

Toss a coin.
It's not an idiom I've heard before but I think what PG means is that getting Series A has always been difficult and that's the top point of either an obelisk or pyramid. The lower rungs of funding (angel) just have a lot more activity than they used to, so the bottom is wider like a pyramid (as opposed to an obelisk which is narrow... as in the old days).
By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes (2002)
I agree with your statement. I should be more precise: the gap will appear in the layman's approach. For example,
A: "Hey remember that file you sent me a while ago? I can't access it anymore."
B: "Oh, I deleted it."
A: "But I thought it was an attachment?"
B: "Well..."
Very true, however I think the talent and ability of a technical team is just the tip of the iceberg here. The real coup that the Obama campaign pulled off was bringing a top-flight tech team in-house and somehow fitting them into the established campaign apparatus so their skills could really be leveraged.

The fact is it doesn't matter how good the engineers are, if they are mismanaged then you will not get good results. The main thing that Silicon Valley has really figured out is the necessity of letting engineers into the board room so to speak. You can't have a bunch of big-shot executives trying to dictate what to do from on high because the technical and operational challenges are just as significant as the political and strategic challenges. If the engineers are outsourced, or don't have autonomy, or aren't given a seat at the table for high-level decisions, then it will be impossible for them to deliver anything as groundbreaking as what the Obama campaign delivered.

What is conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley has been slow to make its way into the political sphere, but I think the cat's out of the bag now, and I'm sure you'll see a lot less hubris and a much more solid effort from the GOP in 2016.
There's a much wider base of companies that get initial funding, but not much more that get later stage funding.
More importantly (for intra-planetary travel) if you can get close to escape velocity then you spend most of the flight time in a near zero resistance environment which dramatically improves fuel efficiency as well as significantly reducing flight time.
FWIW, I applied to Hungry Academy and made it to the interview round, where they flew me to DC and put me up in a downtown hotel.

I was sort of boggled that they flew in and housed about a hundred applicants, some from as far away as China.

If you can afford to do that, great, I guess - but clearly they couldn't. In fact their first massive loss announcement (of almost $600MM) was about a week later.
You also can't know when someone between you and the other endpoint has configured something stupidly. :)

As a sysadmin, I do my best to make the network as damn near perfect as possible; but as a developer, I still generally assume the network is unreliable and plan accordingly.
Simulated Universe Nonsense
You're asking me to connect my stripe account to your site, and give you 2% of my money and you won't even give me your first name? All of your info is anonymized and your domain who.is don't have real contact info, nor your Quora or twitter accounts...

I immediately thought you were a scammer.

<rant>

You know what pisses me off the most about a site like this? Where is your contact info? Demo? Screenshots? Samples? Names? Email? About? Who the hell are you? You provide no names, no contact info, just an overly minimal site that links to another even less informative site with no names. And I see this so often that it infuriates me. It breaks the basic most fundamental rule of the web which is, Trust and Authenticity. AKA Credibility.

http://who.is/whois/freshplum.com Even your WHO.IS info for your domain is anonymous. The only idea I have that you're not a scammer is that your HN account nick007 is 1000+ days old. And your first name might be nick and you might be a part of Ycombinator's summer 2011 class. Your clients aren't going to play the clicking game like I just did to try to find out if you're a scammer or not.

https://twitter.com/freshplum: Here's your twitter, again no names.

http://www.quora.com/Freshplum: And your Quora, again no names. Just "a pricing company".

I know I'm comming off as an asshole critic (the kind HN needs less of) but, WTF man. I had to dig your names out from the bottom of your press release. The one document on all your sites that actually tells me something.

Who is spreading this philosophy of 1 page anonymous sites that ask you for credentials?

Here's a one page website I made. http://www.timeforzen.com. All it does is stream free creative commons songs. I'm not even selling anything and I still have an about page and contact info.

</rant>

(Also for those of you who are saying 5% is too high, don't forget ebay and amazon fees add up to 11%-20%. Amazon is so expensive that I can't afford to sell my calendars on its site. And Gumroad allows you to sell links to digital content by charging 5% as well. So it's normal.)
I would completely agree that there are projects that are on time and on budget.

The argument i should have made in a less pejorative way is, Defense contractors are in the business of selling consulting services.

Fundamentally, government contractors economic incentives are more closely aligned with billable hours than shipping good software. When you sell the artifact itself, it has to be good. when you sell time, customers just have to feel good about how the time was spent.
> FB's mistake was to even propose this voting scheme

I have to wonder if Facebook did this on purpose, knowing they would drop it when it not longer served a purpose.

When Facebook was new, they gained critical mass by working the "exclusivity" angle. Originally, they were only going to allow ivy-leaguers to join, which tricked them all into joining because there is nothing they like more than an elitist society. Once the purpose was served, Facebook dropped that whole idea in the interest of a bigger user base.

When privacy was a big topic, Facebook came up with the whole voting scheme to ease everyone's mind. Now that has served it's purpose, Facebook are dropping it and moving on.

You have to wonder if going back on their word has actually been a good thing for Facebook.
An aside: As of this comment, that wikipedia article on scientific management needs some serious work.
> Wrong. This is not an investor's problem.

Because investors never worry when 80% of their companies go up in smoke.
Being funny I think.

I'd think it's actually a valid point though, if the question is put in the form: Does zero (or its reciprocal) have any existence beyond being a useful theoretical construct? Can the physical world actually reach zero, or only asymptotically approach it?

Is the universe infinitely big? Can infinitely small things exist? Can a thing be said not to exist (ie. we have zero of it), or is there always a miniscule probability of it spontaneously appearing due to quantum effects? Is a vacuum really empty? If we have zero, how do we measure it in the face of quantum uncertainty? And so on...

---

Edit: grammar
I'm not the OP, but this definitely happened several times at Dartmouth (BlitzMail) when I was there 2006-08.
Well, then Curiosity is worthless in that aspect.
Why does nontechnical users' inability to use crypto impact a business's decision on whether or not they should use externally hosted backend services?
REST is far more appropriate for databases.

Pub/sub is well catered for by socket.io (websockets).

This glue belongs on the server.

If I did need arbitrary TCP connections my first thought would be a websocket proxy...
When working on a packet analysis system for a VoIP company, I found that around 1% of incoming UDP traffic was fragmented, the size being around 576 bytes.

I don't know how representative that was (10s of thousands of users, but large users generating more traffic than smaller ones), but < 0.01% is probably on the low side.
>I have studied linguistics, German, and Norwegian. [...] I don't buy this press release.

Apparently this theory's authors have also studied linguistics and multiple languages [1]. So how do you counter their arguments regarding syntax and core vocabulary?

[1] Here's the Amazon publications list for one of them: http://www.amazon.com/Jan-Terje-Faarlund/e/B001HOTQ08
Ask HN: Best software tool to make an animated video?
I'm looking for a tool to make an animated video like Hipmunks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6teBPUgz4Y8#!

Any software you guys' used?
You're ascribing things to the whole GOP that are just examples of its outlier (and loser) candidates. While they each have followings, both Akin and Santorum are far from the average or median GOP candidate/officeholder. And using Akin's ignorance as an example of anything that "Republicans spew" is especially unfair: not only did his party widely condemn him afterward, but even beforehand I doubt you'd find any prominent GOPers believing that 'rape pregnancy immunity' theory – it was an Akin peculiarity, not a representative belief.

However, the current GOP may be doomed by such fuzzy perceptions and slurs. Most media is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Dem party, and so even when consciously trying to be fair, they're prone to oversimplifying the GOP based on caricatures and headline-grabbing outliers. Actual strongly-partisan Dem campaigners are happy to assist this process.

Among other things, this is an example of "Out-group homogeneity bias" – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity – the idea that among 'us' there's variety but 'they' tend to be all alike. Highlighting outliers in key negative dimensions (like Akin and Santorum) as if they were representative, central examples of the whole category is part of that biased process.
Bear in mind that most people's GPU mining rigs use cards that are a lot less efficient than the 7970, especially any remaining large-scale GPU miners.
So make a websocket proxy...
I don't think it helps the Republicans that many of the young, tech-savvy people today came of age in the Bush years. I still remember from when I was 13/14 wondering why we were pushing to go to war with Iraq when it had nothing to do with 9/11 etc. Hear the narrative change over the years - WMDs, then terrorism, then freedom - caused me to develop a strong dislike of what struck me as a party of liars.

I think the moment that epitomized the problems with the Republicans was on election night a few weeks ago, when Fox's own statisticians and analysts were ready to call Ohio for Obama, and Rove refused to accept it. That's them in a nutshell - a refusal to deal with reality. Such an attitude doesn't mesh too well with a scientific/technological approach to things.
>But the decision "with my current fixed plant, do I mine this hour, or not?" is unaffected by anticipation. Either the expected-reward is enough to pay incremental costs, or not.

Some people use mining as a way to privately purchase Bitcoins, and/or are speculating that the value will rise long term. Some would rather pay $105 of power and not have a banking paper trail connecting them to their coin purchases (usually because they are kind of paranoid or doing something legally questionable) than pay $100 to purchase the coins on an exchange.

Also, if you've never mined, there is something kind of geek-magical about creating money with your computer.
Dianne Hackborn actually has a pretty good description of process memory usage (particularly about Android, but it applies to Linux in general): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2298208/how-to-discover-m...
This is definitely a cool hack, but please be mindful of the security considerations of deploying something like this on the internet. Running an open proxy that allows any client to perform arbitrary TCP connections bouncing through your servers is a bad idea.

First, you need to worry about the security implications of each internal server that you expose intentionally. Just how much damage can someone with direct access to your Redis instance cause? Better read http://redis.io/topics/security, and repeat this for every other service you want to expose.

Second, you are going to effectively need a whitelist of allowed connections, either in the proxy, or at the firewall level (which most people are going to forget to configure, if they even know how). Without that you are going to allow arbitrary bypass of your firewall for internal services, as well as effectively running an open proxy for anyone looking to bounce their malicious traffic through your server.
Seems a little dubious to claim that the increase in donations was a direct result of increased speed. The nature of the election cycle seems like more donations would take place as campaigning ramped up and the election date drew nearer. Were those kind of external factors accounted for in your analysis?

Still, very interesting writeup and congrats!
Their response was generally along the lines of "yes, that's something we really ought to fix some day...".

One person commented that "public blog posts tend to hurry things along". I imagine that getting to the top of HN might help too...
>Too much space (why all those meeting rooms?) and too many employees, probably, but it's hardly Ion Storm.

Keep in mind that space in DC is anything but cheap [1][2] and LS has some prime locations.

1: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2855-most-expensive-commerc...

2: http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2010/10/washington-dc-rents...
They never took my SSN.
Weren't units already in Mathematica 8? http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/Units/guide/UnitsPa...

A lot of the new features fall short for me, e.g. face detection. Sure, it's nice to have over not having it at all, but when alternatives like OpenCV offer so much more functionality, why bother? I was trying to find an easy way to do facial landmark detection recently. If Mathematica included that by default, now that'd be a selling point.

Also misleading is their new "audio spectrogram" feature. Wasn't this already available with their FFT functions? An actual useful feature would be, e.g., automatic formant detection from voice files.

Often times, their new features list are just more nicely-packaged versions of existing features that in practice just save a line or two of code, rather than an feature that didn't exist at all before.
We use twilio(first), then bulksms then clickatell and finally nexmo.
Sometimes we send 2 SMS's because the carrier takes too long to confirm if the SMS arrived.
just because people don't understand doesn't give them latitude to break the RFCs.
Code that is organized so that it minimizes context switches is ofen faster and more efficient than code that doesn't.

E.g. sometimes this code:

foreach (x in xs)
F(x);

foreach (x in xs)
G(x);

foreach (x in xs)
H(x);

is faster/more efficient than this:

foreach (x in xs)
{
F(x);
G(x);
H(x);
}
Where's the problem? Anyone care to name high-growth successful seed companies that can't raise an A? Sounds like a great opportunity. I'd love to hear about that.

Oddly, nobody has named any specific great companies that can't raise an A. Wonder why that is.
yeah, that would work, a bunch of virtualbox VMs running linux. Gotcha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
While the similarities between Danish and English no doubt helped you, I think the fact that Denmark is a small country and so has less in the way of domestic media is equally important. You were exposed to English at an early age because it doesn't make economic sense to dub cartoons into a language with as few native speakers as Danish.
Agreed. Wouldn't it be lovely if it were pre-installed on Macs, so more people had access to it? I'm sure Apple could afford it, and they share a lot of history (wasn't Mathematica pre-installed on Next machines? I know Jobs came up with the name at least).
"Oh hey, we'd prefer if you would stay and work through lunch"

While some offices might be like that, not all are. I have a cafeteria in my office and I'm very glad for it- it saves me having to go out in the rain to get lunch. It has a separate seating area so it's not like you're expected to be typing while you eat.
Well, if you are mining as a hobby, you get to write off all of your expenses before having pay taxes on any profits.

Want a new top-of-the-line graphics card? Until it pays for itself, you don't owe any taxes. (In the us, from my understanding. IANAL, IANACPA)