skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
at the time there was still a school of artificial
intelligence that assumed that a big computer running a
really sophisticated program could be equivalent to a
human mind

We're talking theory, so imagine we have extremely powerful hardware, gobs of memory, understand the brain really well, and have some sort of extremely high-resolution scanning device. We could build an "emulator" that would simulate the brain's "hardware" and then load a scan of someone's brain onto it as "software". The system as a whole is just a big computer running a sophisticated program but it's equivalent to a human mind. This mind running on a computer would have the same strengths and
weaknesses as the mind had when running on a biological brain when it comes to determining the truth values of propositions in arithmetic (and everywhere else).
If you consider Kickstarter projects as startups, then a 10% success rate is ok. Is something like am 80% success rate for kickstarter projects desirable? They probably would have to implement much higher barriers for applicants then.
That would be more meaningful if they provided us the anatomy of entrepreneurs in general, successful and unsuccessful. Then we would be able to find out if there is a correlation (not causality) between being married with children and being a successful entrepreneur.
Eloquent Javascript seems to be pretty highly recommended. You can buy it from O'Reilly, but the author also offers it for free online[0].

0: http://eloquentjavascript.net/
It could be worse :) you reached your goal ! Now the goalposts have moved.

For comparison, I'm 31, and my net worth is about 10.000 dollars :P . I definitely made a lot of suboptimal decisions along the way, but I think I'm finally on my way up.

While I'm a nonbeliever (no afterlife for me), I think that the blog post misses the "experienced happiness vs remembered happiness" point that people like Kahnemann and others have talked about:

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-good-life/201010/exp...
The OP appears to equate "software for enterprises" to"software for developers in enterprises". In that case, B2D is a great strategy for getting a niche and building that out.

But I believe the real big money is in B2B solutions that aren't aimed at developers. It's a much bigger market, and it's easy to forget that most companies, large and small, aren't doing engineering all day. This does not mean that a successful B2B, non-B2D product can't be highly technological. I think Meraki has been an excellent example, for instance.
He ignores the fact that some of us aren't happy unless we are doing something that stands to make a double-digit percentage of humans on Earth happier, cleaner, safer, healthier, or more efficient.

Such people will almost never be happy, then.

Here's the rub: creating and capturing value are dramatically different categories of skill. Both are rare (at high levels) in their own right, and they seem to be negatively correlated. Most people who are great at one are terrible at the other.

So what most average people do is they find a veteran value-capturer (a boss, or a company) and get "a job" where they create value in small but stable amounts and leave the value-capture to someone else, who takes the glut of reward and then turns around and disburses just enough funds to keep most people (save the few the company wants to get rid of) afloat. Over time, such people lose the incentive to create value and become complacent so their value-creation skills fade, and they never get the know-how or connections that would help them capture value, because their bosses don't want to give that shit up.

If you want to have a real, lasting, visible effect on the world, you need both skill sets. Why? Because very few people listen to a person without money or power. If you want a say in this world, which you'll need if you intend to create value at scale, then you have no choice but to capture value, as dirty and nasty as that art can be, in order to get the right to speak.

Idealistic people tend to hate the morally gray, political stuff they have to do if they want to capture any value. You're competing against some of the worst that humanity has to offer, and you find out quickly some of the things people (often driven by pure narcissism, and not a desire to change the world) will do in order to win.
Which is often worse than them not getting something done.
Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload
Google and Facebook made real dents in the universe? Well, I see your Google and FB and will raise you a humble washing machine and the invention of the pill. Both changed the world for half the population :-)
> I mean, even if you had a picosecond accurate clock available for use inside a server farm, you would still need a way to query it with a known (not necessarily zero; just known) latency to synchronize several machines. Servers are not known latency machines (unless specialized hardware is involved).

I think it's just a case of traditional NTP (which is itself based on atomic clocks and/or GPS) done over 'the Internet' is subject to too much latency that it becomes unreliable for their needs (e.g. Spanner).

By putting the equivalent of their own NTP master servers (based on GPS and atomic clocks) in each of their major data centres they solve that part of the problem. The possible LAN latency is much more controllable and reliable, to within tolerances that makes Spanner workable.

The clever bit isn't putting their own NTP master servers in each data centre, it's how Spanner works when using this info. The article puts far too much emphasis on the former whilst glossing over the latter.
IPv6 Overall Deployment
I stand corrected (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingman).
describes how vastly more efficient the bottom-up Internet is compared to the old telco industry’s top-down model

Pricing disparities like that between telco services vs Internet services create pressure like differentials in air pressure on opposite sides of a membrane. The membrane represents forces that prevent efficiencies in that market from being realized and enjoyed by consumers in that market. When that membrane is able to prevent the equalization of a pressure differential that is five orders of magnitude, you know that membrane is extraordinarily strong.

Unfortunately, membranes like that exist everywhere you turn in society. They do an enormous amount of damage, and the only reason why we see it so starkly in this case is that the Internet grew faster than membrane-supporting-forces could get their boots on its neck.
That depends on whether kickstarter can continue to generate sufficient revenue once people get "disillusioned". Otherwise someone else will come along with a similar concept but stricter rules and a higher potential success rate etc etc
I think it's charming that you think old people want to die, it must comfort you to imagine that by that age you'll welcome death like an old friend.
Honest questions: what percentage of Paypal's revenue comes from eBay? Is Stripe's pricing model unsustainable at the lower tiers? In other words, what's stopping them from serving millions of small merchants instead of a few giant ones?
Spanner is also a kind of butterfly in German: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(Schmetterling) ;)
ST2 is out. Your ST1 licence should work with ST2 which is nice of them.

Not guarantees that's the case for ST3.

Oh and you could have been using the development builds for ST2 for quite some time, it worked quite nicely for me.
My Favorite Project: The Internet of Things in Real Life
Reading through that guide makes it seem like my employer's company might be full of CIA operatives. Very uncanny.
Samsung audit finds 'inadequate practices' at China suppliers
What does this have to do with the Arab spring?
Tutorial: Node.js and Express.js - Part I - Getting started
Ubuntu 12.04 how to install Rails, Nginx & Unicorn
Integration, ecosystem, exit strategy.

Integration so that you can easily integrate new Smalltalk code (in this case) with existing JVM code that your organisation/product might have.

Ecosystem because you don't need to kickstart a massive community of developers, open source libraries, a standard library, and so on, to have a useful language. Basically, by making a language that targets an existing platform (such as the JVM, CLR or JavaScript), you're "batteries included" from the very start. Better yet, the batteries will be familiar to shares of developers. This is major. Ever wondered why Lisp was only used by a couple of men with beards (and pg) until Clojure? I can promise you, it wasn't the square brackets.

Exit strategy because you want to be able to get out as easily as you got in. If you build non-hobby software with Redline Smalltalk, and for whatever reason the whole thing blows up in your face (e.g. big performance or security problems, project ends up unmaintained with large nuisances, and so on), you can migrate code to another JVM language bit by bit.
Walmart Workers Killed a Man on Sunday
Jacques, I don't see what relevant my track record has on the argument [1]. I have nothing but admiration for the two brothers. They have done impressive things for their age. My comment was directed at the spin doctoring of Silicon Valley which is likely the aggregate results of marketing effort by Ycombinator (great exit story), their other investors (same), the brothers themselves (CV building) and the general SV media frenzy ("teen millionaire" sells). The problem is that such craziness only fuels silly perceptions. Look at this post. Much of it is devoted to finding some magic process in their parenting! The story real story here is likely along the lines of: be born with good intellectual capacity (genetics), have educated parents of reasonable means in an advanced country who can provide good schooling (lottery), don't have too many social strains during upbringing (divorces, violence, drugs, etc.), enroll in an elite program (Ycombinator), and rely on the efforts of a whole ecosystem to enable PR wins. Much of the above is luck and not some kind of easily repeatable process for creating successful people. Note that this doesn't take anything way from the brothers. They still needed to follow the path, work hard and make good decisions. That's impressive but there is no magic here.

Regarding the Auctomatic exit, keep in mind that they were not bought by some gigantic company whose stock price was subject to many outside factors (like ebay - spin doctor much?). Their buyer, Live Current Media, was specifically created as a new public company for their acquisition. The stock price of the company at $2/share is almost entirely an imaginary number (no meaningful capital was raised during the founding "IPO" so there is no external validation - the first real material share transaction a few months later pegs the price below $0.2 already). Cash payment during the transaction appears to have been around $800k which was later converted to convertible notes when Live Current Media couldn't pay and had to restructure the deal in 2009. The remaining stock portion of ~$4M converts to ~2M shares (at $2/share) which then dropped to about $100k. Allocation to the four (or three) founders seemed to have been ~400k shares, so $20k on liquidity (for all of them together) [2].

During that period (new entity in 2008, restructuring in 2009), it appears that one or both of the brothers were part of the management team of the new entity (I am not saying that they caused the stock drop, just that this is different from selling a company to Google and then have Google's stock drop later).

Again, their accomplishment relative to their age is impressive. Building and selling anything is hard. But Live Current Media basically bought a domain name and paid domain name dollars for it (in real dollars).

[1] Ironically, I did sell a company for mid 7 digits (all cash), though I was a few years older than the brothers. Doesn't matter to the argument though.

[2] I know nothing about the transaction but I can read financial reports like this one: http://www.faqs.org/sec-filings/100329/Live-Current-Media-In...
And the British use "spanner" where the Americans use "wrench." lucian1900 has it right. And because of that, you're either going to spend ages finding (or creating) words to market by, or you're going to just name the thing, get over it, and get back to work.
The other option is just to capture exclusively then hire the creators with your piles of money.

The end result is the same, and one doesn't need both skills.
Sure there are always workarounds and in the end spouse can always look for someone to sponsor application for working visa, but good luck with getting it if you had no or little experience. Going back to school doesn't really solve the problem of spouse being attached to the main visa holder (AFAIK education in US can be quite expensive).

What I dislike the most about H1B visa is that it is almost the only way to start working in the US which as you said aimed to temporarily fill a need for highly skilled labor. So what are the alternatives? I would be totally OK with H1B if it was limited to say 2 years with absolutely no possibility to extend it, people would not be lured to the USA with false promises of future improvement of their conditions. Last time I checked it was possible to lose H1B simply because of quota no matter how many years you've spend in the US, it's wrong.

I would like to compare it to Swiss B permit. It is very hard to get one especially because of quotas on the first time applicants, but once you have it you don't have to worry anymore. To extend it all you need is to be gainfully employed (you're not tied to your original employer). Process is rather streamlined and after 6 years you receive C permit which is similar to the green card. (disclaimer: some cantons are better some are worse, in Geneva and Zurich for example they can issue L permit instead of B which is limited to 2 years without notifying the applicant, basically you learn that you have L when it's too late...)

I understand that you were playing devils advocate in the original comment and I guess we agree on many points but there are many people that have never experienced it and cannot understand all the hardships of living in a foreign country with limited rights.
It's way off. If not wanting kids was the norm, we'd die out pretty quickly (feel free to disagree if you have stats, author!).

The author (editor?) of the headline is mistaking "normal" for "acceptable".
Viewport Resizer - Responsive Design Testing Tool
I have an app on my phone and a different one on my ipad. Checking to see if the one on my phone is yours- how can I tell?
The biggest challenge in marriage is managing the external expectations. The shape of a marriage is strongly defined by social pressures and there is little room for personal problem solving within that framework.

Business, on the other hand, is all about unique problem solving. Eccentric ideas that lead to success are celebrated and considered genius. It would be quite easy to believe someone could thrive in this environment while failing in marriage.
Eric Drexler: Nanotechnology - A Changing Landscape
In the ISP space, that's pretty common. In fact, with things like the DMCA, that's codified into law.

Really, you don't want some private company acting like a judge here. We don't have the legal knowledge or interest.

Your choice here, essentially is "Shut down everyone who gets a complaint" or "try to be the judge" (e.g. only shut them down if the complaint isn't obviously bogus) or 'forward the complaint on and let them deal with it'

There are a lot of reasons why you, the customer, would want #3.
Cosmo: A free Metro-inspired theme for Bootstrap
I've read about an experiment somewhere where they found that doing this lead to Democrats trying to save more energy, but for Republicans it lead to them using more energy. They figured "hey, my neighbors use a lot, so I should be allowed to use more, too - otherwise I miss out" (I suppose that was for cases where people saw that they use below average).

Sorry I am too lazy to Google for the paper. The point is: careful with such experiments, the outcome might not always be what is desired.
When It Comes to Security, We’re Back to Feudalism
Ya I've heard that before, often right after listening to them complain that they can't do things they would like to or after they tell me I should grow up and have kids instead of spending time doing things I want to.

Not everything is for everyone. Not everyone is going to think having kids is awesome.
The entire underpinnings of GPS relies on the speed of light to calculate positions as the GPS satellites send their position, velocity and a current time stamp. These can be used to generate a distance from the satellite based on the velocity of the light. Through multiple distance readings of multiple satellites a position can be determined. Relativity does in fact play a role since the satellites are not geosynchronous they are moving in comparison to Earths reference frame. This creates non negligible errors in GPS which have been accounted for in the GPS equations. If they hadn't been we would have much more error in GPS
If you have to "market" it, especially with a lot of ad hominem namecalling...maybe it's not science.

Maybe it's propaganda.
Same as with any platform:

1) You account is regular user, not one with elevated permissions

2) Keep system up to date

3) Use the most secure browser for the platform

4) Don't use Java or Flash on such browser (or plugins/extensions, as a matter of fact)

5) Know what you visit and use common sense

Never had a virus/spyware on Linux, OS X or Windows.
Quick fix – Increase the size of your EC2 volume
Joking aside, 'Crack' is a questionable name for a programming language.
Wait, Chrome DevTools could do THAT?
Terrible article. It lumps together all the following scenarios and more:

1. A woman forced into motherhood by a partner who refuses to allow her to terminate the pregnancy

2. A forced mother (rape, abandonment) who was unable to opt for termination for whatever reason

3. A stay at home mother who thinks its too much hard work (as compared to...? We never find out what their expectations are)

4. A resentful mother with the wrong or unsupportive partner and whose anger and resentment towards said partner may now be directed at everything related to them (e.g. children)

5. Women who had children "too early" and feel resentful missing out on youthful freedom

6. Women who miss their youthful freedom

Etc. Some of these are quite understandable, some appear to be naivete, and some appear to be pure laziness or a lack of responsibility (i.e. deficiencies in moral character).
That's ridiculous because you are not responsible for your kid for 30 years. If you don't like them, you can get rid of them sooner. You could also send them to boarding school at a very early age. Just saying.
Beyond Talent and Smarts: Why Even Geniuses Struggle
Clearly there are two things going on here that you seem to object to:

1) People actually find this link useful.

2) People don't want you to be the judge of what is appropriate on hacker news.

Look there are always going to be links like this because people here like them.

Whether it's book coupons or links to getting a free Chrome book from Google or free phones from Microsoft or Blackberry for developing apps, these links people find valuable.

If it bothers you, then just skip it and move on.
>He ignores the fact that some of us aren't happy unless we are doing something that stands to make a double-digit percentage of humans on Earth happier, cleaner, safer, healthier, or more efficient.

That's precisely what I'm arguing is not a healthy attitude. If you're unhappy now, I don't think you will be satisfied with what you have done and would be able to die peacefully _once_ you get featured on Time magazine proclaiming how you reduced poverty in Bangladesh. By then, your goals would have moved to something even bigger. By all means, improving state of humanity is a noble goal but being unhappy because you haven't been able to make sufficient progress towards it is an unhealthy attitude.
Great! a half dozen new languages for backbone.js tutorials to be written in.
If you ask a mother what her greatest achievement in life is, she will likely say her children.

This article is pure nonsense. In fact it even goes as far as to say it's "unhealthy" to want children. This sounds more like a desperate attempt to justify her own decisions. What is disgusting is the fact she tries to push this idea on others. We live in twisted times indeed...
You are joking aren't you? There's not a line of documentation on the Flua webpage. The Windows download doesn't open on my Windows machine and I need a GUI to run it on Linux (which my linux box doesn't support). It also claims to be as fast as C, but a cursory examination of the source suggests it is entirely written in Python and Flua!
You're assuming that people do what they want. This is a similar argument to the idea that homosexuality can't be genetic as if it were then the gene would have died out.

That's not true because basically for as long as culture has existed there has been pressure to conform to a societal norm which generally involves male / female relationships and children. As a result of that many (though not all) people instead of doing what they want have done what society expects of them.

As it goes I think you're right that it's the norm in as much as I think there is a biological imperative there (anecdotally having kids I can vouch for this), but I think your logic supporting the argument is off.
does kickstarter actually do #3, or are they just in a different shade of #2?
I believe I am not allowed to put up a kickstarter to manifacture a portable meth lab I imagine.

(Also, I wonder, could they have a "warning, this project legitimacy has been challenged, read here" message for stuff like the one in TFA?)
there are at least two relativistic effects involved in gps timings - http://www.aapt.org/doorway/tgru/articles/ashbyarticle.pdf - but they would not be solved if the satellites were in geosynchronous orbit as the earth itself does not have a single non-accelerating reference frame.
Maybe the notion of "total motherhood" is the problem? If those mums wouldn't feel the need to "hover" above their kids every second, perhaps they would be less stressed out?

Where I live there is some pressure to give your kid to kindergarden at age one (three used to be normal). We ended up giving our kid to kindergarden at age two, because we somehow convinced ourselves it would be good for his social development.

But the overall feeling is: he is disappearing from our lives way too fast. Now he is in kindergarden most of the time (except afternoons and weekends). Then it will be school, and today's kids seem to be pretty stressed out with that. After school kids tend to move out, we are lucky if he even stays in the same city or country.

I think if you don't enjoy your kids, there tend to be options. Giving them up for adoption would be the most radical, before that there is kindergarden and boarding schools (admittedly they cost money).

I get that not everybody enjoys their kids, but I still feel sorry for those people. For me it is the best thing that ever happened to me. It makes me angry that society takes it for granted that as a normal dad I would not even see my kid much during the week, because I would be working in an office.

Also for all those mums longing to work, I wonder what jobs do they have? In my personal biased opinion, most jobs suck. Perhaps they just imagine work life to be much more glorious than it really is?

If what this article said is true and many people are so eager to give up their kids, I actually think the state should make that possible. Must be hell to grow up with parents who hate you.
How Mixcloud competes with Spotify: Chrome Apps and Extensions