skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely not true. You can learn all of that and more with C. You might not like C and that is a different issue.

Let's take it down even further: Every language you care to suggest ultimately ends-up in machine language. You can implement ANY algorithm or data structure management you care to mention in assembler. So, assembler isn't any less capable in that regard than any language anyone might care to propose.

Now, of course there's the practical matter of the very real fact that doing object oriented programming --as an example-- in assembler would be extremely painful, so yeah, this would not be the first choice.

Nobody who has done a reasonable amount of programming across tools and platforms would, for a minute, suggest that C is the be-all and end-all of programming languages. That I have never said anywhere. In fact, in a recent post I believe I suggested a progression involving assembler, Forth, C, Lisp, C++, Java (or other OO options). Even less popular languages like APL have huge lessons to teach.

As the level of abstraction increases one can focus on more complex problems, algorithms and data structures. That is true.

One of the problems with a lot of programmers I run into these days is that a lot of what happens behind the code they write is absolute magic to them. They have almost zero clue as to what happens behind the scenes. That's why I tend to like the idea of starting out with something like C. It is very raw and it can get as complex as you care to make it.

One can use C to write everything from device drivers, operating systems, mission critical embedded systems, database managers, boot loaders, image processors, file managers, genetic solvers, complex state machines and more. There's virtually nothing that cannot be done with C.

Is it ideal? No such language exists. However, I'll go out on a limb and say that if I have two programmers in front of me and one only learned, say, Objective-C and nothing more while the other started out with C and then moved to Objective-C, the second programmer will be far better and write better code than the first.

All of that said, there is no magic bullet here. Start with whatever you want. No two paths are the same. Just different opinions.
$80k is peanuts. Apparently these folks haven't learned the lesson that you get what you get what you pay for!

Maybe $80k is enough for some ridiuclous $2 iPhone game or some startup for making a website for adding a single puny feature to an existing social network and having 15 minutes of fame.

But $80k is nowhere near enough money to create an Enterprise solutions startup. I laugh at your $80k and the hubdreds of flight-by-night, gimmicky, bullshit, small businesses that you will burn your money on.

It takes at least $5 million over 5 years to startup a serious business that has any chance in hell of becoming a real billion dollar company. That is the future.

$80k ... it's insulting to people with real ezperience, real ideas, real businesses and real explosive growth potential. You will never fund the next Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, NVIDIA, etc ... You're just going to fund a whole lot of infantile business projects and a whole lot of fail.
Valve's economist talks about game economies, Valve hardware, virtual reality
I would recommend LastPass Entreprise (https://lastpass.com/enterprise_overview.php)
It's how everything I've ever used for ACH transfers does account linking, from Paypal to other banks. They assume, and mostly rightfully so, that if you can view an account's recent transactions, you control the account.
Didn't Adobe partner with Conde Nast to leverage AIR for magazines? (I believe this was quickly scuttled after Jobs's missive on Flash.)
Okay, just curious, as I wasn't sure if it was an attack on the article or in agreement with that. (It's been my experience that quite a few people just read the title and make snide comments, it's one of the things I dislike most about HN.)
How Wikipedia & search engine culture are killing future start ups
GrowthH4CKR - a bullshit site for losers
One of the most valuable things about YC is the pressure it puts on a startup: focus or perish, excellence or death. I've really seen this bring out the best in people, including myself. I think that reducing the "free" c-note from $150k to $80k will increase the pressure a little bit, that entrepreneurs will rise to the challenge, and that the overall outcomes will actually be better. Accountability closes the feedback loop and results in faster learning.

As for (2), potential investors say a lot of things that just make you feel terrible. The best response is to dig into them and try to figure out if there is any truth in the criticism, make any adjustments you can, and keep pushing ahead.
Thanks! I'd been waiting on this for 1-2 years, figured it was about time ;)
Counterfeiting has always been part of ICE's mission and the "homeland security" dig is a cheap shot, since ICE got absorbed into DHS; it wasn't an effort spun up by homeland security.
I just got a 17" MBP and I'm amazed at how small the default text size is in Safari. Can't find a way to change that so I have to keep zooming in on most pages.
Relevant, from Arduino's FAQ: "Note that while we don't attempt to restrict uses of the "duino" suffix, its use causes the Italians on the team to cringe (apparently it sounds terrible); you might want to avoid it."

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ
The $400 Million Google Buyout Hoax
Upgrading to Rails 4 eBook (Beta) Available
Does Hive+HDFS count? I know it's ugly, but we use it.
Learn awk from the grymoire
Hi all. Creator of this thing here. I'm about to head out to catch a train home from work but before I do I just want to pop in here and say any feedback is appreciated. I've been working on this for about 6 months now and I've torn it apart and rewritten/redesigned large chunks of this more times than you can imagine. So though I know it's quite simple and still has many flaws, this is a labor of love for me. I hope others find it as useful as I do. The whole idea is to have a place to store your writing that's not meant for the public the majority of the time while not being all skeuomorphic (as in "It's just like a paper journal... except online and cheesy!") and just generally being a place for self-expression.

My last redesign of it took ("Stole" maybe?) a lot of ideas from the Ghost Wordpress fork idea that was posted here a few weeks ago.

Anyway, I'm off to catch my train but I'll be back to see if anyone comments or cares. If you find bugs, please let me know (either here or my email is in my profile). If you find a security hole, do me a favor and email it to me privately so I can get a chance to fix it. I don't want to be that guy who gets called out on a security issue in public. But there shouldn't be anything major if anything at all.

Thanks.
Credit cards are a vastly different scenario than bank accounts. To a first approximation, unauthorized credit card access poses zero risk to the cardholder. Bank accounts are vastly different in that respect. Can you access your checking/savings account like this, not just your credit cards?
Great article. I think critical thinking is the differentiator for the US compared to the rest of the world. I don't think we can afford to lose that edge.
For my latest project I've did all that. Here are somethings I've learned:

I've discovered that chrome has a problem with zoom levels (Nexus 4), while my older Desire's browser worked well.

Overlaying text over images is a royal pain in the ass for all mobile browsers. (Your standard position:fixed and position: relative thing won't work well unless you write media queries for every single goddamn fucking resolution)

Chrome lags with JQuery animation and that's an issue I'm looking to fix (since I am using Bootstrap's carousel)

Media queries are fucking amazing. Javascript support on most mobile browsers are quite terrible, and even lags (I'm using an iPod touch to test my webapp)
Intrade shutting down for U.S. residents, being sued by CFTC
> OTOH, I don't really know what would be better. Smaller "committees", more like expert groups, can give better results if the right people are selected. Which is unlikely, given the present state of governments. At the moment it seems as if the best strategy is oversizing and over-bureaucratizing to slow down the process and limit the amount of damage done in that way. Meh. :-/

Most utopian schemes end up being conditioned on a lot of very difficult, if not outright impossible, presumptions. I am not claiming that the current system is perfect; it can, without reservation, be improved significantly. The question is how, why that how, and at what cost.

It's worth pointing out, btw, that the SCOTUS is a committee. Congressional committees are weak because their members are elected and, at least superficially, represent real people in a direct manner; their job is to be biased, and this bias makes them vulnerable to non-committee actions like lobbying and popularity contests. That is why you don't get to elect the SCOTUS: precisely to protect them from that weakness. (And also why you don't get to elect any other Presidential appointee; most of them also end up on committees.)
Why is those kind of spammy article are on HN? Even the content is shit. Pushing messages like this Is the best way to get your app deleted from the user phone
It vaguely reminds me of this idiocy- http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen

It never works, but people do make a (likely not comfortable) living selling others on the dream.
Too bad all the commit history got squashed into one single commit. `git blame` can make it entertaining to see the history of where these types of lines come from :-)
UPDATE: The original author has posted a Part 2. Looks like he's already started writing code and hitting milestones. http://gusc.lv/2012/11/im-writing-my-own-os-p2/
They're being sued by the CFTC:

http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr6423-12

http://www.cftc.gov/ucm/groups/public/@lrenforcementactions/...
this is along the lines of what http://www.inkling.com is trying to solve (for books, not magazines)
I'm afraid I don't understand the point of your comment.
I investigated RTalk with interest and exchanged a few emails with Mark Roos. RTalk is nice but has a different goal.

Redline wants to support you and your existing tool chains, editors and environments that exist around the JVM. We want the best of Smalltalk in that environment (Redline), not a Smalltalk environment (RTalk) on the JVM. A subtle but important difference.

- James.
One thing that held me back from Smalltalk is something I heard once that the 'system image' (or whatever its proper name is) had become something of a binary blob, no longer bootstrappable from the original sources. This sounded like a version control nightmare to me.

I assume this is no longer the case with this project?
T.I. Live In Memphis
I think there's a significant scope difference in performing a MiTM attack (via hacking a provider or installing a tap) and forcing a port through.

After all, it's implicit in telephone banking when you authenticate via voice that you trust the connection. The argument you're making is that telephony is insecure, which is arguably true, but sorta irrelevant within the scope of telephone banking.
Ask HN: Advice from Hardware hackers
Hey! So I have not worked much with hardware - I have an Arduino but have not done too much with it, yet. But that is my extent :p

However, over the weekend I thought of a project that I would like to work on that would involve hardware and software. I think it could be an interesting project for Kickstarter (I am Canadian so that wouldn't work though). I think it might be something others would be interested in as well, and I don't think overly complicated to make.

But what I am wondering is, what is the best way to get into hardware and get funding for it (or find partners). And the process from going from prototype to completed product, what kind of tools / advice etc are useful. I don't know a lot of people in my city (fairly small) that would be able to help, but I could probably track down some electronics engineers. But how do you even start to make hardware projects that look as good as ones like: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/martinkallstrom/memoto-lifelogging-camera?ref=category.

I have no doubt that I could hack something together that does something like I want but I would not know how to produce something that looks good, nor do I have the connections right now to find people that could.

So if you have any advice I would like to hear from you. If you are more familiar than me and have made some cool hardware projects in the past and have some free time and want to discuss and maybe team up I would love to talk! It involves a rotating camera, internet, some recognition, and fun times.

Please feel free to message me at me@jonovono.com or tweet: @Jonovono
On the other hand, the awk script handles streaming quite nicely; If you have a few hundred machines and you want to just get a sense of log messages on all of them (in real time; say you're about to change something and want to just eyeball whether the mix of error messages changes), you could do something very quick and dirty with that awk script.
Next question- what amount of money constitutes a digital aware subscription price? What range? And how are you determining this price?

Second (though related), what is the place of advertising in this theoretical subcompact publication?
The link in the first sentence of your blog post points to http://akkartik.name/libraries when (I think) it ought to be pointing to http://akkartik.name/blog/libraries
The usability issues that T-hawk mentions are more of a reason.

And anyways, inbound on a toll-free number is often pretty close to your outbound rate, for the US.
Alquiler de Coches Portugal
Alquilerdecochesportugal.es es un comparador de precios de alquiler de coches en Portugal. Tenemos los precios más bajos del mercado y los precios incluyen el seguro necesario, kilometraje ilimitado, Asistencia en ruta, tasas de aeropuerto e impuestos. Hacer las reservas para su coche en nuestro motor de búsqueda. Es rápido y seguro.
No http 418 "I'm a teapot"? (RFC 2324) http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324
Have these disputes changed YC views regarding single founders?[0]
I think YC has always favored founding teams with a dominant leader[1], but I wonder if these break-up experiences have pushed it a bit further towards single founders with strong teams.

I guess there is no change, since the advantage YC sees in multi founders is probably only for the time interval before these disputes, at which point they are already doomed. But what I may be missing: could amicable breakup ever help a company avoid the dead pool?

Another thing I find missing from the discussion: is this move also meant to push new founders to profitability faster? PG seems to be mentioning it more lately ([2], [3] etc.).

[0] Honest question- I hope it does not spark another single vs. multi founder debate.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK3sVFs6_rs

[2] The best solution is not to need money. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4067297

[3] The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
>>I assume this is no longer the case with this project?
Correct. Redline Smalltalk does not require an image file. Your source is kept in files just like you would Python or Ruby source.
- James.
Some of my favorite work has come from me saying "How hard can it be? Screw it… I'm building this myself." Even from the failures I learned a thing or two, and I had a ton of fun at the same time.

I for one love being in way over my head. Keeps things interesting!
$80k is guaranteed, but it's not stopping other investors to make million dollar investments if it's recognised as being the next Microsoft.
Too bad Apple artificially limits the performance of the embedded browser.
As someone who once implemented a prototype distributed OS (about 10% of an inch-thick spec) that the designers said was a total impossibility given the 6 month time constraint, I say he's biting off a big chunk, but more power to him for trying.
There's a term for that, it's entrepreneurship. It was never limited to startups. Many massive corporations are quite entrepreneurial.
Yes I zoom all the time for reading webpages. Ctrl++++ 4 times.
1) I logged out, then logged back in. It loaded https://writeapp.me/login/validate, a blank page and did nothing else.

2) In my browser (Chrome), when I try to create a new notebook, nothing happens if I click " New Notebook" - it only works when I click the "+" button itself.

3) When, I click on the "Options" icon on the bottom of the writing page, it doesn't indicate that anything happened - I just saw a flash of text. I only realized that an "Options" pane had opened when I tried scrolling even further down the writing page. Perhaps have it slide up, or to the side from the left?
UK Economy: UK Could Face Austerity Up To 2018, Independent Think Tank Warns
> So, assembler isn't any less capable in that regard than any language anyone might care to propose.

You're arguing against a strawman here.

> Nobody who has done a reasonable amount of programming across tools and platforms would, for a minute, suggest that C is the be-all and end-all of programming languages.

And I never used that strawman.

> As the level of abstraction increases one can focus on more complex problems, algorithms and data structures.

And this is my point. You can focus on what you're learning without having to waste time on anything else.

Why don't you advocate a return to punch cards?

> One of the problems with a lot of programmers I run into these days is that a lot of what happens behind the code they write is absolute magic to them.

And most programmers don't know enough physics to understand how a transistor works, either. You can learn stuff like that as and when you need it. The actual core needs to come first.

> There's virtually nothing that cannot be done with C.

Ditto machine language, as you just said. So why didn't you say everyone needs to start with machine language?
But mondragon worked so well for situational and cultural reasons Basque culture is very cooperative.
That is only true in some cases. I know people who have been turned down. It's very hit-and-miss.
I can't speak to all Smalltalks, but I know that isn't the case with Pharo. GNU Smalltalk can construct an image from source. Redline doesn't yet have an image, we are still working out how that would work with our play nice in the jvm ecosystem ideals.

What it means to have 'original sources' though is a rather long and complicated historical answer. There have been a couple of good Smalltalk version control systems ( Envy & Monticello come to mind ).

I don't want to go into a long explanation of what the image is and the various ways different people use it, so I'll just leave it at.

All smalltalks support some form of version control ( some svn like, some dvcs like, some git, etc etc ). Redline isn't tied to an image and we don't intend to make it a requirement to use.
I'm wondering how it accomplishes this as a practical matter. Does it compile a file twice? Once to create the interface info, and a second time to compile the implementation? Can they even parse enough of a C++ file to generate the interface in all cases?

That they chose not to mention the issue makes me nervous that they think they can just ignore the problem. Many previous languages have ignored the problem and said "don't do that." I hope this proposal does not go in that direction.
>>there's not enough detail here to make me think he can actually pull off a 6 month development cycle of a new JVM based Smalltalk language

Redline Smalltalk runs today and compiles Smalltalk source into bytecode in Java Class format. The funding is to flesh out the runtime classes and tooling.

>>he's done a very poor job of convincing me to give him money
I appreciate this feedback. Could you elaborate on what sort of things would convince you?

- James.
Interesting. I found I had the exact same experience as you did for my latest projects. In fact you helped solved a problem I have with JQuery Mobile (i.e. it laaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....gs)

Guess I'll be picking up XUIJS.
Ack, thanks for pointing that out!
What does Google Fiber have to do with anything? Are any of these startups really hosting anything in their work space? I doubt it, and either way, hosting a server on Google Fiber is currently prohibited and they don't offer business service. Beyond that, I don't think working on a 1gb connection is going to make the founders any more productive than regular 30mbit connections.
I agree with basically everything in this article... except the paid subscription model, which to me seems another instance of pointlessly aping the print publishing world.

In the print world, you have to charge each reader because there's an actual cost associated with producing each physical copy, but this is not the case for digital products, where distribution is effectively free. And since free crowds out paid, it's extremely difficult for a paid digital magazine to build up a following. (Thought experiment: if this article itself had been published behind a paywall, how many would have read it, and would it have ended up on HN?)

Now, of course there is still a cost associated with actually creating quality content. The key to success will be finding a way to pay for it without charging readers and thus kneecapping distribution.

Too short, read more: http://gyrovague.com/2012/06/28/why-the-web-will-gut-paid-e-...
In place editing of files
If someone has the money, he/she can buy a few properties for cheap and rent them out (probably make more in rent than the mortgage, if they take out a loan), no?
S-expressions are a nice representation for ASTs in general. At work we needed a query language for an API, so we used the data structures we had (JSON-ish) to express a little Lisp and then wrote a parser from an SQL-ish language to this Lisp.
An overpaid libertarian doctor doesn't like the rates he gets for Medicare patients and shits on the entirety of healthcare reform because of it. What a unique and interesting perspective on this topic.

Who cares if people avoid urgent care to save money? The freeloading ingrates that do hobble into my emergency room are expecting that I actually honor my Hippocratic oath instead of being as money-grubbing as I possibly can! That won't stand.

All this demonstrates to me is that it should have been a proper single-payer solution instead of this additional band-aid so doctors more interested in lining their coffers over helping patients don't have this argument.
Even the statement

true become: false

is valid in Smalltalk, although executing it is not recommended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
All I mean that I can point to several specific ways in which my life is improved ("materially more convenient", if you prefer) because of the actions of these companies.

I'm not sure what specifically you mean by "small and widely distributed negatives", but the balance of convenience against cost is something that each customer decides. If being a customer of Apple, Amazon (or whoever) is perceived as a net benefit, people become a customer. If not, then they don't.
Agreed - me too!
In reality for the vast majority of apps you'll never notice the limit. By far the most effective thing to use for (hardware accelerated) smooth animation are CSS transitions which run at normal speed like safari.

The only circumstance where missing JIT support for the webview would come into play would be with games, and even here there is plenty of room for performance (check out impactJS)
There are very, very easy ways around this.
I would look at the Design of Unix. That's what Linus used to make Linux. Individually study everything you don't understand...

Also, prepare for about 6 months of hard yet rewarding, given that you put in about 50 hours a week ;)