skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bureaucracy's strength is in getting repeatable results out of large numbers of unreliable human beings. There are places where that's the best strategy.

But as soon as you're trying to do something unique or one-off or under-specified, bureaucracy impedes more than it helps. Which is probably why large bureaucratic organizations often get out-innovated by small organizations with far less resources at their disposal.

Bureaucracy is a solution to a coordination problem that I would argue doesn't really exist anymore. Software is, in one sense, bureaucracy codified in mechanical form. It replaces and obsoletes human bureaucracy. The classic bureaucrat essentially applies a rulebook to his input information and passes output information to someone else. He is a human computer.

Even the evolution of war leaves open the question whether bureaucracy is an asset or a liability going forward. War is getting faster and more targeted.
No, you're not. That headline was abusing that time-honored tradition.
I think that may be the shitty economy more than the BS in Physics. When all the on-campus recruiters were visiting my senior year in 2004, I'd go to these info sessions for investment banks or consulting firms and they'd ask my major, and then when I said "Physics", they were like, "Oh, you should have no problem. I was just worried you were an English major or something."

I ended up switching to CS my last semester, so nobody knows I was a physics major for most of my college career and that basically all of my programming knowledge is self-taught, but I've never felt at a disadvantage to all the folks who bulked up on CS courses in undergrad.
This is exactly how I feel.

And it's not just about email either. I also use my Google Drive account. I also have a couple of purchases on Google Play. I had photos in Picasa at some point too.

Google blocking your account means you lose access to all of this. Which is why using Blogger or Google+ is a liability.
Personally, I would imagine that it would take more time to set up and maintain than saving $50 would be worth to me.

Free is only really free if you don't value your time.
> So in your opinion everybody who drinks in public always makes a mess? I go to the lake with friends and drink often, but we clean up and put it in one of the public bins.

I was a bit harsh on drinkers. It is more smokers whom I have a beef with. What I should have said is that I feel as though a consistent approach to regulation of where glassware can and cannot be used is required.

> Also one could argue that if the park is publicly owned it should be publicly cleaned.

Perhaps that might be possible where you live, but it would never happen in my city. Most people here (including myself, I admit) simply don't have the necessary motivation to pick up broken glass unless it's in a place where they can't afford to ignore it (a playground, for example). I cycle-commute each day, and there has been a broken bottle sitting on one of the roads I use for the better part of a few months. The road in question has relatively little vehicle traffic, but is next to a small University and is part of a major bicycle corridor used by hundreds of cyclists each day. It would be trivially easy for just about any of the people who pass it to try and dispose of it properly, but nobody ever does. Annoyances like broken glass, buckled footpaths, etc. tend to just be ignored until somebody gets hurt. I'm not convinced that it would be possible (at least, not in the short term) to get a large number of residents to voluntarily take responsibility for fixing problems which they did not cause.
How to Sign-up for Google Apps for Free
That's correct, except most of the companies that have not exited never will (many have already failed,) and it would take quite a few 100M+ exits to significantly skew that average.

Those assumptions could be wrong, but I don't think more than, say $1B in exits, can be expected from the existing YC companies, bringing the average YC exit to $4.5M - not much difference. Even an additional $5B in exits would only bring the average to $11.1M. Most of that would probably come from a few startups (think AirBNB), unfairly skewing the average further - we really should be talking about the much lower median.

Getting into YC brings the average from pitiful to poor. Note there is not a single 100M+ exit that has occurred from any other accelerator listed.

We also have to factor in founder dilution, which is usually massively higher in these big exits, and also that exits are split among the founders. The expected exit for an individual even going through YC is likely sub $1M taking those factors into account.

My point is not that startups are a bad choice. I am even an occasional angel investor. This does reinforce the frequently made observation that startups are not a guaranteed, or even likely, road to riches. Startups are for people who like startups.
Nope, tried with Chrome latest and Firefox latest. I wondered the same.
Ping-Pong Game with HTML5 Canvas
After reading comments from Gates lately, I'd say he's as clueless as Ballmer is about how to break into the tablet/phone market.
Mostly because government is truly not accountable. Oh I mean we all read about how they have all this accountability built in but in the end it doesn't save us from what they do. The mentality of many in government is scary.

The add in all the purchasing rules, inclusion of minority group requirements, cronyism, and more, and its no wonder why many projects are bound to cost more and have so much waste.

An example of all that is wrong in US projects at least can be summarized by looking that the rail project in California. They are so hell bent on doing something that anything will do which in the end means nothing gets done except a lot of money is expended.

Government has a spending problem in nearly all nations of this world. Politicians do not fear accountability because they know how to play groups off each other and how to buy off one group or another to keep themselves in place.
Do you really think that we know everything about the moon that there's to learn? That, if we researched the moon with new scientific methods developed since the 70's it would not tell us anything new?

Sure, an economic benefits analysis may show out that we don't expect any (direct) breakthroughs coming from moon research that will be worth the money. Fair enough. But saying that it doesn't make sense is overly negative.

In the worst case it'd be an exercise in (applied) human space travel and closed life support, which is also far from a solved problem... I suspect visiting the moon needs to be "easy routine" before we can even start seriously thinking about human settlements on Mars.

(and maybe we could try growing vegetables on the moon before the Chinese do it :-)
>Microsoft's overall profit numbers still look pretty strong to me, and their product portfolio is as diverse as ever.

RIM was singing the same song. Profits/etc. are basically the waves behind the ship. By the time those start going down you're not dying, your decomposing.
Asp.Net MVC 4

C# / VB.Net

Entity Framework with Code-First

SQL Server 2010

IIS 7.5

Twitter Bootstrap
Robot Travels 9,000 Miles Across the Pacific Ocean
Not quite EEVL-Class missions in a sense that they don't launch Class 1 payloads - like DSP, AEHF, SBIRS, GPS, spysats... These are in the same class as Minotaur launches, mostly tacsats/targets/experimental/high-risk payloads. They are not trusting SpaceX with $2 billion payloads... yet.
Can you provide examples of "startups born and brought up and marketed in India" that have terrible usability?
To your list of key things, I'd add what you described in the first half of your comment: find where you want to be in your professional life. Not where you work or anything alike, but which role (in the chain of command) you want to fulfil.

I know for myself that filling the boss role wouldn't suit me, yet I cannot let things get decided without being involved. The role I'd like to fulfil is not the boss but more like the second in command: still a good impact without as much stress (theoretically). I believe it also depends on the size of things. I wouldn't mind being my own boss, but not being someone else boss. That's a reason why I wouldn't dare to start up something from myself.

Also, I found the same thing about myself concerning the fact that after doing the same thing for several weeks, changes are needed. The time span before needing change and the size of the change required differs, but I believe every one feels this need at some point. Personally, just staying curious and learning news things all the time helps me with that. It's enough to keep me going on the same job for almost two years.

Concerning the key things, most of them could be generalized and should be followed by most people. As for the 16th rule, if it was about destination, we would all be using shortcuts and be there in five minutes.
Washington Post 'probably' to add paywall in 2013
Let's make GitHub better, together
I've got several domains, I just forward them to my gmail account and set up the reply-to addresses if I want to be consistent - no need to get an Apps account for that.

We also run an email system at work, though it's a lot more work than other services - mostly due to spam / deliveriabilty - so even if you do pay $50/yr still seems a bargain. IMHO you need 100+ users to even think about justifying the time cost for running a mail server yourself.

Also, I get access to all the new Google stuff without having to wait for Google to make it 'business-ready'.
I think the gist of it is that the things you're being "protected" against with Bitcoin are, effectively, drastic measures.

Of course, there are people who believe that the existence of legal-tender laws is equivalent to jackbooted thugs breaking down their doors and holding guns to their heads. But those people probably aren't worth paying much attention to.
Haha, brilliant!
Best Linux distro of 2012
Linux format pick their favorite distro from 2012
Plus, the only ads that seem to work for advertisers on Facebook are scams.

All the other revenue is coming from companies who aren't measuring. But soon, they'll realize what a waste it is, and once they pull out CPC is going to dive. And if Facebook decides to artificially inflate CPC, fewer people who aren't running scams won't pay.
From XaaS to Java EE – Which damn cloud is right for me in 2012?
Two reasons: one, it's still a drug, not as bad as tobacco or alcohol but still worth controlling. Two: it's a tempting tax base.
Using Groovy and Camel for Scripting
This confused me for a minute. Such a weird thing to do for a landing page!
Pretty cool. From first glance, this is a jQuery plugin that actually deserves its spot on the front page.
Misinterpretation is creativity’s best friend
That is a good explanation except for the fact that at that point the phone industry was tough to deal with. If the iPad was more or less ready a wifi only iPad would have been the easier choice?
The only way I think you can check that is
Login to your cpanel ( admin ) > Setup > Users and Group > Yes, I have users - Next > It would tell you when you need an upgrade for me it says
To add more than 10 users you'll need a Google Apps for Business or Education account,..

OR (if this works)
https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/DOMAIN.COM/CPanelHome#SetupW...

change DOMAIN.COM to your domain
The towncar thing would be the killer app. Best way to distribute the capital expense.
The front page of new Dance Music. Don't be shy, join the party
This article produced a visceral response I don't fully understand. Throughout I was nodding and going "yeah yeah, that would be great" as each new feature was explained. By the end of the article I found myself craving a car with manual transmission, no power steering, analog dials, and about 400 horsepower. Weird?
Perhaps allowing public drinking, in the long run, might actually foster a 'healthier' drinking culture though.

Maybe in the very long run but I doubt it. And in the long run we're all dead. Personally I doubt drinking culture is really that malleable. In Europe the further north you go the more people drink, on average. Whether it's cultural or genetic drinking culture seems quite stable.

As to the Dutch I am not terribly surprised. If they legalise cocaine it will also generally be used more sensibly than in most countries.
While we are on that subject, a V10 is not a Lamborghini no matter what the bull on the hood and the price tag are trying to tell you... that is an Audi aluminum engine, not an "Italian passion" V12 monster.
I wouldn't say a terrible waste of bandwidth given the novelty trade off it provides to people like us.

Besides, there's more wasted bandwidth from dubious user generated content per second floating around the internet at any second.

If you have 100 million requests per day, then you definitely have bigger problems such as your monthly CDN bill. :)
I've always found the reading-in-the-car/motionsickness thing to be very interesting...

I was affected by it for a long time, then suddenly I decided to simply try to 'will' myself out of it, psyching myself into believing that it was all in my head anyway.

The surprising thing is I believe it's worked for me. Telling myself I won't get sick allows me to get caught up on books during long car rides. If I think I will, I'll be horribly nauseous.
Bureaucracy is a solution to a very difficult scaling problem. Dunbar's number is around the limit to the largest group that can naturally work together. Above that you need something else to scale, and bureaucracy is one of these things.
Possibly true for the interstates (Eisenhower's nostalgia for his WWI era cross-country army convoy trip), at least as they now exist. Maybe we'd have more private toll-roads, or semi-private (such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the prototype for the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System) toll roads; or maybe not. In any case our current landscape would undoubtedly have been differently formed, and there'd be a lot fewer state bureaucracies related to transportation.

Many railroads (in the US of A) may have been state chartered and sanctioned, but generally were built and operated by profit-seeking enterprises (such as the Pennsylvania Railroad), negotiating land-sale or lease for right-of-way. The most notable exception is the Transcontinental Railroad, which took an act of Congress to get it started, and another one to end its construction phase. The government didn't build the railroads, they just regulated many of them to death. The (US Federal) government only runs Amtrak, whose primary purpose is intercity passenger, and that's only seen a surge in recent times because air-travel has gotten a bit more onerous.

The early internet protocols may have started as a DARPA project, but the Internet you connect to isn't a single thing, it is a private provider with private packet passing agreements with other private providers. The name resolution system is probably the biggest most visible remnant of government "creation", and one that arguably shouldn't be left with it.
ZPER: ZeroMQ persistence broker
Oops. I mean Earnings.
if it doesn't work, try googling: ip address (search for "ip" doesn't return my public ip but search for "ip address" does)
> I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6.

Newspapers and newsmagazines have always been very mercenary/cavalier about this sort of thing. Especially pre-web but even today, newspapers routinely rewrite stories from competing papers without even the slightest mention of where they got that information, radio shows discuss today's print headlines and read excerpts, readers' digests (e.g. The Week) pay no license fees for the stories they summarize and it's an old lament in newsrooms that local TV news just copies whatever's in the paper that day.

By comparison, an aggregator that pulls headlines from news sites and links them back to the original content seems rather innocuous.

(Of course, I don't intend to argue that because journalists steal, aggregators shouldn't feel bad about stealing either. But it puts things into perspective. And if headlines and links aren't fair use I don't know what is.)
It's not that hard to check and it seems they don't. But they have this other X-nc header:

$ curl -I wordpress.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:15:43 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: close
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-nc: HIT luv 139
Developing a cooperative game-making platform with C# along with those libraries:

* XNA + MonoGame (multiplatform OSS rewrite of XNA - https://github.com/mono/monogame)

* Lidgren.Network (Reliable UDP networking library - https://code.google.com/p/lidgren-network-gen3/)

* NuclearWinter (my own UI library - https://bitbucket.org/sparklinlabs/nuclearwinter)

* MonoBoxedLua (my own variant of MonoLuaInterface - https://bitbucket.org/sparklinlabs/monoboxedlua)
Most of this is 'classic' FP, which existed long before Rich Hickey ever talked about it. There is nothing "Hickeysian" (to use a word from this very lightweight article) about distinctions between values and identity.

"Identity is a putative entity we associate with a series of causally related values (states) over time. It's a label, a construct we use to collect a time series."

True enough, but this is extensively covered in SICP Chapter 3 (for example). It is great that Rich Hickey believes this and speaks about it, but he didn't invent the idea, as some Clojure hipsters seem to think.

Not to bash the immensely talented, and balanced Rich Hickey (who doesn't make any grandiose claims, and is a brilliant engineer if the quality of the Clojure implementation is any kind of signifier), but this kind of cult behaviour by some of his followers is annoying.
You make a good point. We might not have learned everything that we could. My point is we've learned enough. That was phrased poorly. That being said, going to the moon would require huge investments. Allocating resources doesn't happen in a vacuum, there is so much we can do with money that would be a smarter & more productive allocation of capital than going back the moon.

I'm not against sending robotic probes a la Curiosity or pathfinder. But I'd have a hard time advocating for a new Apollo program or a moon base unless & until some clear benefit is established.

Regardless, the point of the article was the inefficiencies of government. What I was arguing for is the pointlessness of bringing up this argument in light of the questionable returns of a moon enterprise.
There are many other ways in which you could compare the efficiency of government investment vs private capital (cancer research, infrastructure building, education, healthcare )
The Most Controlling Smartphone Ever Made
Ten free Apps to boost your profile online
Unabridged audiobooks from Audible solved this problem for me.
Hmm, says 10 on both. I'm only half-sure that it was 50 when I first signed up with my personal domain... not that anyone but me uses either of them!
Have there really always been bars that didn't allow smoking? I never saw any in Ireland before the smoking ban. It's not a viable business model.

The rationale behind a ban is approximately thus: Smoking is unpleasant for non-smokers who are a majority. Due to co-ordination problems non smoker disutility from being exposed to cigarette smoke outweighs smoker utility from smoking and this is stable and bad. The government, in an attempt to increase total utility bans smoking in workplaces and total utility goes up.

Forced is perhaps the wrong word but I'm just hoping they bring in a smoking ban here in Shanghai. Going outside to smoke just isn't that much of a hardship and it makes things more pleasant for non smokers and many smokers.
No, they're not.

1) Your mac address is available to even passive sniffers without the key to an encrypted network. In some circumstances you don't even need to be connected to a network to grab someone's mac address (iPhones in particular love looking for networks loudly).

2) FTP and AIM passwords can be changed. Yes, a passive sniffer on the same network can still get them, but this is a significantly harder task than getting someone's mac address, and there's no way to change the goal.

3) Brute force attacks become within the realm of possibility. Have someone you know has an iPhone 5 and uses WhatsApp? The first chunk of the mac address is assigned by vendor, so you've already narrowed the search space down drastically by half to needing to guess 6 hex digits.
Also seems as if the White House is strongly considering some moves, either to stymie the state measures in court, or to start prosecuting possessions at the federal level.

It's highly disheartening that the federal government believes this is a good use of their resources and time right now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/us/marijuana-initiatives-i...
Zabawa z konikiem.avi
Shocker: Adobe's Flash Updater Is Bloated, Confusing & Shady
These government inefficiency arguments seem to ignore the fact that NASA relied significantly on the small handful of large Aerospace companies, yet those companies seem not to be involved in the private ventures that require expanding capabilities.

I would look at the traditional space industry as similar to any unmotivated ~duopoly that is working in an industry with a pretty fixed income. Suddenly they look more like other problem sectors (say US cable internet? US cell? English Trains?)

In those industries the only possible improvements are from government interference or public shaming with comparisons to efficient markets abroad.

The monster in the room is that traditional government outsourcing is a model for constructing monopolies and trusts. The government avoids the complexity of proportionally paying a dozen companies for the same task and few companies can handle the complexity of working for the government.

Once created these trusts/monopolies that can't compete for rational customers must still expand at 9% a year and are "too big to fail" and so based on lobbying that the question of failure could never come up.

Outsourcing the government is like packaging up "government inefficiency" with sector destroyers and some legal skimming off the top.

I would predict that as soon as one of these new companies is successful they will be sued for all the IP the big aerospaces refuse to use, then acquired, and then shelved.
Show HN: An app for grading tests with an iPhone's camera
If I don't lock my house, that doesn't give you the right to break in. You're absolutely right that publishers could make more use of the tools at their disposal to protect their content in whatever way they wish, but they have rights regardless of whether they do.
I wasn't kicked out. I wasn't fired. However, it's true that Google will make your life more difficult if you speak up about something that actually matters. People have been placed on PIPs for Real Names advocacy.
Just wanted to say thanks so much for sharing this; kind of a big deal!

Now to figure out which email should be 'real' for Google App Engine - maybe the 1 user will be 'noreply'!
On the other hand, the potential damage of one mistaken "Reply to all" can be enormous, compared to a mistaken "Reply" which just adds some extra work.
Agree. I really think it's a bad idea to be tied to an ecosystem for all your needs.

I, for one, would sure want to Keep all my chat contacts to some other service than Google/Gmail, Calendar with an independent provider. Unfortunately, unlike Calendar and some other services services like SNS and Chat are dependent upon what and where your other friends are.
I would love it if I can have my own chat setup and I can chat with my friends on GTalk and Facebook (no, I don't personally know anyone who uses Yahoo any more or used other services like AIM ever at all).