skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It reads like science fiction partly because there are things this makes possible that seem to go against everything the 'bedroom scientist' would think. Some of the things this mentions I had no idea about, but the core EM-cloaking seems to be described quite reasonably.

Just don't believe the timeframes. They are very optimistic from all I've read of this technology, especially if you're interested in doing much more than cloaking a coin from most visual frequencies in the next decade or two.

Long term promise in this field seems quite great, but I'd say we're way too early to be able to even guess what the drawbacks and limitations of any practical use will be.
Major agreement. Urban housing is effectively a cartel, in that the owners spend a lot of time corrupting city councils and zoning boards to prevent new supply so the absentee mega-owners can charge exorbitant prices. It's rent-seeking (literally) parasitism at its worst.
I agree that Ben's response is excellent, but I want to focus on the other half of the interaction for a second. Ben needed to send that email because Paul wrote something ridiculous. As Ben gently pointed out, Paul did not actually know what MailChimp (and, presumably, ExactTarget) are doing lately. From the post, it sounds like he fielded a pitch call and basically published what he heard. Sadly that does not seem unusual on tech blogs these days, although I'm surprised Paul fell prey to it.
A/B testing is a great thing to do with email. On the point of Mailchimp, they also allow you edit the little preview text box - this is what shows as the preview snippet in many email programs and is a good place to remind the recipient what's going on (very briefly, though).
When the existing code base is at least functional, then of course, a big rewrite is not warranted.

However, some of us are not as lucky. The situation is often such that the existing code base is full of bugs that it can cause a ton of support requests from the users, or even crash and bring down the production server.

In such situation, you can choose to firefight all days and have no time left to implement new stuffs, or choose to rewrite.

Not using the latest hippiest libraries is really the least of my problem.
Xiang Zhang from NSEC at Berkeley has been working on super lenses for bio sensing purposes.
The empirical evidence presented by OP's blog post is far heavier than your objections to it. You have some valid points, but so does he. All other things equal, he has cited scientific studies and you haven't.

I am biased, because my reading has predisposed me to agree with OP that multitasking is the antithesis of productivity, but that's just my .02.
Despite new policies, rural phone calls often dropped
Thanks Javert. Corrected. Can you ping me if you see any other mistakes via email?
Google Music vs Dropbox vs iTunes Match
Flash Helicopter like game in HTML5
Being first, or otherwise an interesting group means that FTP administrators want you to fill their servers with your releases. As a return, the group gets a bunch of unlimited use "leech accounts" to these FTP servers.

A lot of money enters the scene via people who directly or indirectly buy "leech accounts" from these groups. These unlimited use FTP accounts give the buyer a very convenient way to acquire everything that has ever been released by anyone.

Also, interestingly enough, while release groups selling FTP access is a common practice and done by basically everyone, FTP administrators can't sell accounts directly, as it is extremely taboo for people other than the members of groups to profit from the scene.
Yeah, that's the caveat I was trying to add with "connected to a profit motive in some other way". If an SaaS startup writes a technical blog, they're probably doing it in part because they hope it'll help bring in some more paying customers. But they aren't typically hoping to monetize the blog itself as their revenue-generating product, through AdSense or BlogAds or similar.
I'm all for vision and ambition but there's a difference between aspiring to be the best and claiming to be it already! One is a laudable goal; the other comes across as wishful thinking.

Imagine if you opened a new restaurant and on day one your sign proclaimed it as offering the best food in the world. Or a tiny little brand new startup furniture shop, "X furniture is the best furniture for your home or office in the whole world". Can you imagine the utter ridicule such a claim would invite? Why is a software startup any different?

Claim to be the easiest to use, most elegant, most cost effective, fine. There's nothing wrong with selling your strong points. But just going for broke and all-out claiming to be "the best"? Maybe I'm just a cynic but I imagine some little kid putting on a superman costume and claiming they're the strongest man in the world. Sure you are kiddo!
Yes, I think they certainly don't write bad emails because they don't care. They might write bad emails because they care too much. They may think about their product constantly, so stating the obvious about it doesn't even come to mind (and I generalize horribly here).

Good slides btw, worth checking out for anyone. Many startup email writers may be even too conscious of following the AIDA guideline and thinking that in order to grab the reader's attention, they have to open with the feature or the announcement, instead of reminding what it is that they do. Happy you address the 'noreply', too.
I think if you can find a good affiliate to work out at it can be beneficial because they have some really good coaches that can hammer good form in the Olympic lifts. But if your just starting out there are plenty of beginner programs like Starting Strength. It don't think that it is a fad at all. They do like to push the carb backloading and paleo diet a little much. But if you clean up your diet and eat healthy you can achieve your goals crossfit or no crossfit.
Asperger's syndrome dropped from psychiatrists' handbook (guardian.co.uk)
I don't get what cloaking to the naked eye means. Does it mean someone would be invisible or rather that I'd see a big black blob where they are?
San Francisco is completely, utterly corrupt when it comes to housing. In 2011 there were a total of 418 new housing units built [1]. Really? One of the hottest areas with the highest demand in the entire country and only 418 new units were added in a full year? That's an absolute outrage.

[1] http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2012/05/san_franciscos_to...
I had the first ~100 issues of Nintendo Power, starting when I was 6 or so. At the time I found it really interesting. As I grew older, I couldn't tell if the magazines were simply getting worse or I was just getting older and realizing they were worse. Then I realized they were always bad in a special way, because it was essentially a huge advertisement for Nintendo.

One thing I do remember rather enjoying (and being of high quality) were their special edition game-specific guides. The one for Link To the Past was great if I remember right.

Anyway, I think its fun that they used essentially the same covers for their first and last issues. Fitting and well done.
A cool two-paragraph back story, but otherwise generally worthless. Also, it appears the protagonist of this story is the founder of a successful MLM company - good for him but he'll never knowingly get a dime from me.
Culture, yes. Provincialism versus modernism and pragmatism.
Janrain in Portland, OR, US.
On site. We take interns and are actively hiring.

http://janrain.com/about/careers/

Devops, Developers, QA and related.

The company is still young, just getting out of start up mode. Lots of different technologies and problems to work on. Multiple teams to move between to find your place.
Black blob in the case of the EM "black hole". Invisible in the case of the standard cloak.
I fully buy into the value of apprenticing and have been trying to get into a program since moving to SF this summer. You'll be seeing my application shortly. Any suggestions on the video that would maximize my chances of acceptance?
Really cool website and idea. I'm a programmer and film maker. It took me a few glances to find the "What is Filmbreak" button because the center of attention isn't at the top of the page.
It is not a scam. I don't do it personally, simply because the workouts they do are not in line with my goals. I have been working out regularly for a few years now. Starting my 11th month of jim wendler 5/3/1. Give crossfit a shot you might like it.
I don't see how that's so.

The problem in SF is self-inflicted by the city with its double shot of rent control (which I benfit from) and its labyrinthine permit process coupled with the weight of neighborhood groups who oppose grand projects --their mindset reminds me of the stuff I hear out in the Peninsula, the suburbs.

In addition, the argument above is mostly about rental properties and discounts condominiums which are also very necessary to remediate the housing issue in SF.

If SF were more like Miami, then we would have seen many more developments coming in and driving prices down --for both housing and rent. But I think it's the home owners rather than absentee mega landlords and landladies who are being self-interested and who want to keep the prices inflated. These are the people who want to keep out the new housing developments. People want to maintain their property values.

Anyhow, I agree with the author. SF is a city which likes to pretend its progressive, but actually, in its heart, would like to remain the quaint 19th century Victorian relic city. It's only progressive in a partial social sense, but not in any larger sense.
Taleb is a Soup Nazi. He (volubly) suffers for his soup. He treats customers with disdain. And yet people line up for the soup, because it's pretty good, actually.

I find Taleb's opinionated eccentricity very useful, especially when it consists of a mixture of ideas, some of which you totally agree with and some which you totally disagree. Keeps you alert and thinking, instead of blindly swallowing or blindly rejecting everything depending on religious preferences (e.g. iOS vs Android)

Antifragility is perhaps the most important perception-refactoring concept since the selfish gene, and the book deserves to be read purely for that reason.

The book is pretty laudatory of engineers and the tinkering mentality, crediting them for most of the inventions of the past age, rather than top-down science.

Erudition is great. But it is far easier for the engineer to become erudite than for a liberal arts major to become an engineer.

Where Taleb is wrong is that (good) science fiction is not about predicting the future. It is really speculative economics fiction - how would a mix of this kind of intelligent agents and this kind of resource environment work out? The science, futurism and the aliens are merely literary tools to help you get out of a human/today-centric point of view. They are thought experiments which can be sold to the public (at least, the engineering public).

And God, I hate longhand as the primary mode of input. Connecting the iPad to ancient tablets is the kind of wankery one gets from the erudite, I guess :)

(I'm picking very small nits here; "Antifragile" is overall very thought provoking. Highly recommended.)
"If you cannot make spending $99 dollars more appealing to your target audience than going to the pirate bay and messing around with sketchy-ass cracks, then frankly you just suck at selling software and really have little business doing it."

So..I should be forced to compete with someone making an exact copy of my software and giving it out for free? Does this make any sense to you?

Should hackernews.com be forced to compete with hackernews2.com, which is an exact duplicate?

"The people who pirate it are jobless students"

Do you have any evidence to back this up? Adobe has a student edition that can be purchased for almost nothing from many sites and it's all legitimate. Microsoft has these programs and also things like the bizspark/webspark programs. You can get free Microsoft software and all you need is an LLC (costs very little to create).

Your reasons don't really make sense anymore.

"with draconian DRM, or by not offering it on Steam, or whatever)"

Wow, we sure are in an entitlement generation. If you can't get exactly what you want, you take it upon yourself to just take it. I also can't really take anyone that uses the word "draconian" seriously.

The problem with your logic is that it never ends.

Look at the music industry: At first, it was because CDs were too expensive. The record companies responded by having 99 cent singles and very cheap music. Next, it was because the artists weren't being treated fairly. With the Internet, you can now release your music without any label.

Hell, even the infamous louis CK $5 comedy special was pirated like hell the day after it was released. It's very cheap, DRM free, and people still pirated the hell out of it. How do you explain this? The "Draconian" DRM? Too expensive? The bits weren't in the right order for the pirates' specification?

Piracy came first, not "Draconian DRM", so this is not a valid excuse as to why people are pirating, sorry.

"Gamers who are in the market for games buy games."

Your mindset isn't new and as a software developer (and business owner), I just need to change my business plan. Now, you will need to pay a monthly fee for my service instead of owning it outright. It stops piracy dead. I hope you enjoy paying a monthly fee for all of your software, because it's a world piracy helped create.

I'm sick of people like you that just can't be honest: you want free stuff and you aren't willing to use you hard earned money to get it.
That's pretty incredible. So for the standard cloak does transmit the light from behind the object to the observer somehow?
Here's what a bunch of smart people think:

http://www.c-span.org/Events/Law-and-Economics-Experts-Discu...

synposis: the antitrust case is at this point ridiculous.

As a formerly poor person who could only afford a G1 and not an iphone, allowing me to rise out of poverty, I'm not angry. The only angry people I know are Apple execs. Consumers are pretty happy about this. Which means the antitrust case is going nowhere.

The Microsoft case was different, Microsoft was found guilty for EOM shenanigans, and Bork, who authored modern antitrust law and thought microsoft was guilty, now thinks there is no antitrust case against Google.

When the FTC is done, they'll be a laughing stock.

If you want to really find a problem, you'll have to look at amazon who is not only selling at cost, they make no profit and have a high P/E since investors think they'll eliminate competition then raise prices.
I'll look at this later, but I used Consolibyte's open source QuickBooks PHP DevKit[1] for a recent client project.

This is not a trivial process, but I didn't have to write my own SOAP server.

[1] http://consolibyte.com/quickbooks-open-source/
That was incredibly interesting! The blog is mine, by the way. I'm incredibly flattered that you made such an in depth analysis; frankly I wrote it as nothing more than a happy rant and wanted to share with some fellow hackers and entrepreneurs.

I agree with the sentiment that the Myth of the Valley is interesting and frustrating. Mainly though, I think it gives many smart people a strong sense of purpose (not unlike the prophets and religion in general), and I definitely think that's a good thing.
I find it slightly disturbing that I was able to picture in my mind the exact cover image before clicking the link.

I certainly hope that if I had been alive back then I would have had the front page of the paper the day after the moon landing similarly etched into my brain.

Here's to wasted youth!
Eh, they say they have a particular type of collection in mind:

>Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.
Columbia’s Gang Scholar Lives on the Edge
Facebook changed their platform right underneath them.
I'm genuinely curious why someone might want a dedicated mobile app for this service.
1) I don't care about most people. My comment was directed at a developer who wouldn't have any troubles learning if he decides to switch back.

2) I find it hard to imagine an interface that's simpler than opening a terminal and typing 'apt-get install gnome-panel'. Sure, there's a chance you'll have to type 'Y' and confirm that you really wanted to install that many packages, but I think the fact that it asks instead of blindly downloading and applying a ton of packages actually a data point /for/ the 'user friendly apt-get' case.
This is why I'm hoping that Bloomberg's efforts to create a Silicon Alley are a success. Maybe SF will realize that it needs to appreciate the tech industry more when people start leaving for NYC. It would be great for tech to be based in a city where (a) it's not the biggest industry (so you don't get mental inbreeding), (b) there's proper public transportation that doesn't require hazmat cleanup because of people shitting and pissing all over it[0], (c) you don't have homeless people and drug addicts everywhere on the streets, and (d) you don't have rampant NIMBYism blocking the development of more efficient housing because they're afraid of "Manhattanization" destroying their "Bay view".

0: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down...
I come from a marketing background, so I guess I'm both numb to and guilty of that kind of text. But I don't see how "most elegant" or other superlatives are different from "best for X" though. Both are equally difficult to prove, both may be completely subjective and contingent.

I like the kid in the superman costume analogy for startups and big ambitions. I'd cheer him on. If he believes it he'll try to act the part, so the more I'll be inclined to believe him, too (though I might stop him from trying to halt a truck).
Instead of a JMP, imagine that the serial key is used to calculate some variable in the program. The code runs with both a valid and an invalid serial, but some core algorithm of the program uses this variable, that was derived from the serial. If the serial was invalid, the core algorithm would not produce the desired result.
I agree with nearly everything this article says, with one important caveat: this won't last.

The Great Nerd Influx of 2012 is just one of many boom/bust cycles that San Francisco has experienced, and it's far from the most robust -- there are a lot of good reasons to believe that this sudden surge in activity will fade in a few years as thousands of doomed startups hit the series-A wall. Rents have shot up dramatically in a year, but it's almost entirely a side-effect of the funding bubble. It's hard to fault government for reacting slowly to short-term phenomena.

I moved here at the tail end of the last funding boom, and watched rents fall after Sequoia sent out the "Good Times, RIP" slide deck. Think it can't happen again? It will. It doesn't make a lot of sense to run out and rip down the victorians to make room for market-rate condos simply because SOMA is a trendy place for startups at this particular moment.
Interesting guy, and that BW article is an okay read but doesn't do that great of a job telling his story.

But then I looked him up and came across this HuffPo article on him and absolutely loved reading it, it's a must-read for founders: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/02/ryan-blair-visalus-...

I love collecting stories like this. They're real-world case studies of PG's "Anatomy of Determination" - http://paulgraham.com/determination.html
OpenJPEG 2.0.0 released
This is actually been posted by the founder of Politify. He's impersonating me, Patrick Riley. Grow up, dude. Impersonation in the state of California is illegal.
depends on what you're looking for. If it will get you into the gym and nothing else will, go for it. If you don't have the interest or discipline to go on your own, go for it.

If you'd like to see maximal strength/muscle gains, go see a powerlifting/olympic lifting coach for a few sessions (or join their likely weekly program for not very much $$) and do a linear progression program like Greyskull, Starting Strength, etc.

"but what about my core?" Guess what? After years of squatting on medicine balls packed to the ceiling, I can't say I had a strong core. Squat 2+x your body weight and you'll be surprised how magically strong your core gets :-)
Top 5 Venture Capital Firms Target Africa
"And BTW, you should probably never fly in an airplane if you believe this BS since pilots constantly listen and talk on the radio while flying planes and navigating in the same time."

To be fair, airplanes are not comparable to automobiles. Flying an airplane does not actually require nearly the amount of attention driving a car does. The sky is mostly empty, and planes will generally continue to fly straight ahead even if you let go of the control yoke. If you look away from the sky while flying, you're highly unlikely to swerve out of your air lane into another plane, rear-end a plane in front of you that braked suddenly, T-bone another plane at an intersection, or fly into a pedestrian using a crosswalk.
I actually did something similar for the National Weather Service API. Not as bad as Quickbooks though.
That's a good comment. I am personally most amused at the amount of bureaucracy involved.
I was thinking about making almost exactly this several months ago. I'm glad to see it made. I completely believe this to be the path towards killing the evil that has become hollywood.
This is so essential article.
Thanks to the creator of the website.
Thanks
by
Tutorial Hut.
Lot's of peeps use the IOS/Android apps and get notifications on their phones instead of emails.
webby +1. never had any problems with it.
This is the founder of WellFrankly (formerly Politify), who went so far as to impersonate me and make fake accounts:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patriley
>People tend to compare the experiences of average people now against those of an elite in the past and conclude that things were better.

This, I think, is key. I mean, notice all the old guys whining about how the '60s and '70s were so much better... notice how it's mostly white men saying that? that's 'cause, well, yeah, it was better for white men back then. I am not trying to say that 'white privilege' doesn't exist or anything, but it's no longer absolute. I've probably worked for as many asians as white folks, and I've even worked for a few women.

Hell, half the studies on stagnating wages since the '70s talk about 'wages for working men[1]' and then go on to complain that unemployment levels for men are also way higher; and they are right, but they are missing the point, that men now have to compete with people we didn't have to compete with before. So yeah, we've got to try a little harder than we did then.

I mean, the point is that things have gotten dramatically better for people that are not white and male; I'd say things have probably gotten better overall (though, that's pretty subjective; I might feel different if I was one of those now unemployable white men.)

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/the-uncomfortab...
This is so essential article.
Thanks to the creator of the website.
Thanks
by
<a href="tutorialhutbd.blogspot.com">Tutorial</a>
"and running over motorcyclists ("I just didn't see him there!")"

I'd call you sexist, but my sample size of one smashed femur by a female left turner who didn't see me fails to disprove your theory.
I think you miss understood me. I used the word "truthiness" to mean it sounds like it is true. For someone not fammilar with the issue, saying pirating is a form of theft sounds valid.
Yeah. Compare clicks on a WYSIWYG and LOC. Makes perfect sense.