skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most meaningful lesson for me was the idea of not starting with an idea. Going to people first, and finding their pain, seems so straightforward, and yet America seems addicted to building businesses that come from ideas.
"About to explode" is obviously opinion, and that is coming from the inside. However, they have solid financial footing with years of history and cash on hand to weather some down times (I talked with the CEO about this).

It is technology that I am confident in for the future, so it would be exciting to put my eggs in that basket and go for it.

Thanks for sharing your experiences.
MS is not a newcomer to pushing their solutions to schools through government channels. It's their way to prevent people from learning about alternatives. Corruption is all around in these schemes.
I agree, though I think a "no porn" rule is just as likely to backfire on a parent by driving a child away from religion. When religion is just that thing that forbids doing things that you don't want to do anyway (murder, steal, build a cow out of gold in your backyard, etc) it is easy to never bother putting any thought into it one way or the other. But when you tell a teenage boy that his biologically hardwired desires are evil... there is a good chance that kid is going to start wondering what exactly the purpose of that rule is and how relevant it is to his own life.

It could go either way I think, but it is a very polarising thing to impose on a young adult.
My father had equally pragmatic rules about alcohol and drugs. He made sure I was educated about the effects of drugs. He made sure that I knew that my mind was pretty awesome and putting it at risk is stupid. (He also knew that kids do such things- but try to be smart about it.) He told me my grades had to stay up and I couldn't lose my job. And he said that if the police came to the house and knew my name- if I was somehow involved enough in something and didn't have sense enough to get away- I would lose all of my freedom. Guilty or not. And if he ever caught me driving under the influence- the same.

I had a lot of freedom, and I made some mistakes, but overall it worked out.
Alcohol evaporates proportional to surface area. When you blend you drastically increase the surface area.
I think that your best bet is to first understand who is using your project and why. Once there try to find the needs of companies - they are often more likely to pay for your time.
Relying on porn to teach kids about sex is about as reasonable as relying on the Twilight movies to teach them about how to have healthy relationships.
Porn is vast. You can find videos of pornstars exaggeratingly copulating, like you can find amateur videos of two 20-somethings having perfectly regular sex.

Both, if seeked out by the teenager, are a subset of a perfectly healthy sex-education (much more so than the very politically correct discourse that passes for sex-ed in the US these days).
FreeBSD blows through fundraising target, 1/4 million from anonymous donor
They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it.

==Theory of the leisure class
Starting The Web App Challenge: From Zero to $5,000/month In 6 Months
The Most Mind-Blowing 3-D Printed Objects Of 2012
Happy New Year Hacker News
2012 has been a pretty turbulent year, lots of great people have died and the fact that we notice is a testament to how young our profession is. Computing has split into two worlds, a closed world of gadgets and phones that the manufacturers have decided are not really ours and general computing. For 2013 I hope to see a truely hackable phone and an open tablet. (and world peace, and end to AIDS, hunger and a thousand other things but I assume those are common).

For want of a better wish, for 2013 I wish for you all to be healthy and excellent. (from Bill and Teds excellent adventure).
If you feel like digging, there should be a won't-fix bug under my handle. Includes sample data and everything.
The humorist in me wants to say "Now that is undeniable global warming!" but the real point here is that the existence of Earth as a habitable place to live is finite. It would be helpful if more people internalized that as it would put space exploration into a different perspective.
Let's make a map (in D3)
I wish you the best of luck. And I hope your employer is the next Facebook, I really do.

I'm just saying, many of us have been in that position and learned a valuable lesson. Don't be surprised.
did you ever embed Google analytics or adsense, etc into your webpages?

They collect and market user information in an almost identical way to Facebook.

(in aggregate via statistical models + advertising to identified segments)

You may feel there is some kind of moral difference between the two, but in terms of information gathered and analyzed, there really is not.
And only, it seems, if you re-arrange the relative positions of your "eyes".
I don't think he fully understands the form factor of Google Glass - from the way he describes it as his "generation one" it seems as if he's thinking of it as a vision replacement like his glasses. Actually they're a small screen in the top-right of your vision which you don't look through, so these negative effects wouldn't apply.
> Why Smart Glasses Might Not Make You Smarter: A Q&A with wearable-computer pioneer Steve Mann

80 character limit means you need to trim 14 (15?) characters.
I agree. Studying CS in college I never had an Aha! Moment or a specific moment where I knew I "learned to code", but the cumulative knowledge I gained from following the strict college computer science curriculum gave me that skill over time.
Presentation layer: Cool site, and good stuff, but it might serve the writing better if this content was presented in a template that is more akin to a true news site. There's something about that three-column layout that is cool to look at, but the presentation tips the hand that this is parody pretty quickly.
But how would an uninitiated teen know which ones are exaggerated and which are "regular"? It seems like watching porn would,not be,as stimulating as real sex, so people would seek out exaggerated videos which are not as, um, "educational".
> I have not pirated any video games for a long while, but installing a video game legally can be quite difficult. I recently bought the Final Fantasy 7 re-release, which forced me to create an account with square-enix, authenticate my copy online, install securerom, and log into my online account before I could boot it up.

Yes, it's also difficult to manually install legally purchased games. Another reason Steam has done so well.

> If someone were to make a Steam for TV program, that would be incredible.

It's not the interface that's hard, it's getting the content deals. Steve Jobs talked about it during an interview at a conference around a year before he died. They've got the engineering talent to make it happen. What they don't have is deals with the content providers. He called it a "go-to-market problem".

The reason Apple was able to force the record labels onto iTunes is because they were getting decimated by music piracy. Particularly after portable media players (PMP) became popular, it was so easy to pirate tons of music and put it on your PMP. Album sales were plummeting and Apple promised to be their savior. The labels didn't realize at that time the kind of control they were ceding to Apple. A decade later, the labels are making a lot less money than they did back in the late 90s.

The movie and TV industry isn't nearly as desperate. Not only do people continue to go to the theaters for the bigscreen experience, it's still relatively difficult for the average person to watch pirated content on their TV, because only an HTPC really gives you full access, and those have poor UIs. Also, live content has a special value (mainly news and sports, but also some other shows nowadays, because of real-time or post-show discussion online). Another factor is that movies and TV shows are much larger files than MP3s, and American broadband speeds have largely stagnated in recent years. It takes a lot longer to pirate an HD movie in 2012 than it did to pirate an MP3 in 2001.

Finally, the movie/TV industry has seen what easy digital distribution done to the music industry. It's destroyed profits for the bigwigs at the labels. Will the movie/TV studios follow through given that? Doubtful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5jTH89HjTA
Another thing I did was create glasses that allowed me
to see in different spectral bands. I could see where
people had recently walked because the ground was still warm.

Holy crap. Gimme.
It's important to remember how tiny the tech crowd really is vs. the size of California.
View From the Bottom of the Fiscal Cliff
E-waste recycling becomes techie's mission - SFGate
I'd like to dis-recommend Herman Miller for ergonomics. I bought an Embody chair a few years ago and the adjustments suck. The Aeron is not much better. They are both comfortable chairs, but they don't really conform to your body the way the marketing literature wants to convince you that they do. (The major problem with the Embody is that the arm rests tilt when you lean back, meaning that they need to be readjusted if you lean back. And the adjustments are in like 6 inch steps, so the adjustment is never very good. The lumbar support is also garbage. The rest of the chair is very durable and comfortable, however.)

Ultimately, you pay a lot of money for Herman Miller products that could be spent on better ergonomic features instead.

At work I have a Teknion Contessa and I love it. It is infinitely adjustable and very comfortable. I hardly ever think about my chair while at work. The only problem is that the fabric is not very durable; mine is a year old and it looks just awful. My Embody is much older and looks almost brand new.
One of my most memorable New Year's eves was in Edinburgh (Scotland), where huge crowds gather around the Tron Church on the high street (with bands playing up and down the street, etc, a general festival atmosphere) ... and when midnight comes ... people start kissing complete strangers!

I didn't actually realize this until some woman I didn't know came up and kissed me on the lips! A friend noticed my confusion and told me "oh yeah, that's what people do"... :]

Maybe it sounds kinda freaky but the atmosphere was very jovial and innocent. Very surprising for the unprepared, but it was a fun night.

[This is was in 1993 or so, and a bit of googling suggests that maybe Edinburgh New-Years practice has changed since then though...]
Sweet! :) I love your responsiveness here on HN, pretty impressive.
It will teach the son how to live outside a set of rules while representing himself as abiding by them, though. And that is an essential part of life in any civilized society.
Come up with something new and simple that is profitable, then cross promote it to your huge following.
Uhh, fuck off?

Huh, I guess being an asshole isn't so appealing after all.
What features are open source ZFS implementations (ZFS v28) lacking to that on Solaris aside from encryption? I run a 6-drive raidz2 array on my FreeBSD workstation, and I put it through its paces, and it's pretty awesome. Rock solid stable, in my experience.

I hear TRIM support for ZFS is now in the HEAD branch and in the works for FreeBSD 10.
Its not an investment, its a public good. By definition, that is how they work. You're using a very flawed anology.

Parkland is common public good, and most of the west is publicly accessible. And where it is not, it is most often military in use. Or, it has been set aside for rich people to benefit from.

Think about who really gets the value of Central Park in NYC vs Who can afford a home closeby.
No, I didn't imply that at all. My other comment[1] suggests that I think the opposite.

> Which is not what Brennan is doing or has done, as the previous commenter so clearly explained out.

If we fill in the blanks in that line: he wrote a book telling you "how to make more money freelancing" and then a few months later wrote a blog post saying "I made $33,024 selling a book on how to make more money freelancing". It seems to me that he did exactly what I stated.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4986263
Chaos Monkey fights back :-) I wonder if there is a way for the CM team to do ELB outages. At some point you entertain the idea that Amazon goes offline but probabilistically is that similar to a 9.0 magnitude quake and a 30M tsunami on the same day?
How about 28 hour day?

http://www.limedaring.com/hacking-your-week-the-28-hour-day/
That a side project of mine, something that would take most here a weekend, has taken me over a year now (and it still isn't finished).

To be fair I've been learning a lot of things. redoing my work. Trying different options. Taking month-long breaks here and there.

A lot of the time it feels like I'm just running in place. A lot of things feel like progress, but really aren't.

And then I worry, maybe I won't ever be cut out for all this stuff here on hacker news. The culture, goals, start-up life. Maybe it it won't be any more than a dream.
Just for fun here are the URLs posted by Eliseann; and the users posting the ieee.org URL.

(http://imgur.com/a/FRtJR)
EFnet, one of the world’s largest IRC networks, goes full retard
Christmas Online Sales Grew Much Faster than Traditional Retail Channels
Wow, stay classy, Jacques.
False, you want a book plus its applications; if you buy a book about woodworking you probably want to see some examples of furniture creation and other practical challenges to apply your new found knowledge.

That is why this book deals with DOM and BOM from chapter 11 to 15 even if those are not purely JavaScript.
Good luck Nathan.

If you need any help feel free to email me james@gathercontent.com.
I've used it off and on since it came out. Would be something I'd pay $30 for if I could run my app on my phone and have it show through the browser interface.
Good catch; changed to shorten the subtitle.

>>> len("Why Smart Glasses Might Not Make You Smarter: A Q&A with Steve Mann")
67
The west coast was populated by the taxpayers of the east coast in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of another power. Those "favorable terms" weren't charity; they were an investment that has paid off.

This is a dumb argument. I'm done.
HTML5 multiplayer Minecraft-like tech demo
Self-Charging Lithium Ion Battery – The ace up the electric cars sleeve?
We put all our databases on a mapped /data drive that is larger and allocated in the san for this reason. I'm not the sysadmin and the policy isn't mine, but it seems to work....
> You have to know what to look for. Torrent tracker sites are full of advertising that look like download buttons. My girlfriend still gets lost after a decade of web browsing.

This is a completely separate issue that can be easily solved with Adblock. Everyone I know uses it, even those who don't know much about tech.

I just searched for the most pirated movie of 2012, Project X, on Google. I typed in "project x torrent". The first link took me to a Pirate Bay page for a DVD rip[0], while the second link was for a HD version. You would have to be a real idiot not to know how to download from a page that clearly says "GET THIS TORRENT" in red letters. I cannot think of anyone I know who cannot do this, and there are plenty of people I know who have very little computer experience.

In fact, I find Netflix's UI quite a bit more confusing.

> You also have to choose the correct quality, or decide between filesize/quality.

Oh yes, it is so difficult to understand the difference between DVD rip and 720p Bluray rip. Come on, you deal with this same problem if you go to the store to buy a movie on disc! People are not that stupid.

> Check that audio is good.

This is 100% FUD. I have no other response. If you are downloading a DVD or Bluray rip, there is no reason to worry about audio quality.

> If you're watching with non-native english speakers, go hunting for a subtitle track that syncs with your chosen file... not straightforward at all.

Have you used a DVD or Bluray disc or Netflix lately? Is it easy to enable subtitles? Are they even included in all discs/videos?

> For most people it's easier to download a .exe and click next/ok blindly than do all those steps. I believe the Steam model would fare quite well with the movie/music industry, though netflix or amazon instant might win.

It's not a matter of whether it's easier, it's a matter of how much easier it is. It's a tradeoff between price and convenience. My point is that the tradeoff tilts in favor of the paid option for PC video gaming, but tilts in favor of piracy for movies and TV shows (for a la carte purchases).

0: http://i.imgur.com/IHu9b.png
You should check binpress http://www.binpress.com (I'm one of the founders), it is a marketplace for source code. While 50% of the projects are not necessarily open source, the other half are open source projects where the developer also charge for a support license.

Many customers will prefer to purchase a support license in order to ask the developer a question. Some will create a feature suggestion and since they have paid, the developer is more likely to implement them.
Maybe for the enterprise. What about home use?

About a month ago, I had 4 drives scattered around the house, each in its own enclosure, and I wanted to consolidate them into one unit. Money was an issue, so I wanted to recycle as many of them as possible instead of buying new ones. A Synology NAS along with a single extra drive allowed me near-optimal use of space with 1-drive redundancy. Of course, I have weekly backups to an external drive, so even if the array fails during a drive swap, I'll still have all my important files.

Any other solution would either require me to buy more drives (a significant expense at $100+ a pop), sacrifice redundancy, or build my own NAS with ZFS (which would have significant administration overhead, cost more, and be larger than my Synology unit).
I found the original story quite fascinating.

Do you have a link for updated info about their current practices and market position?
I'm hellbanned, so you almost certainly won't see this, but YES, I have personally corrected forward head syndrome and addressed a herniated disc in my neck.

Primarily, I recommend stretching the pecs and shoulders, and strengthening the back. I do the wall lean shown in the PDF, but I do it in a doorway to hit both sides simultaneously. I recently started doing shoulder dislocations with a broomstick and the results have been fantastic.

For strengthening, deadlift and overhead press do an amazing job with the upper back (the latter, OHP, being rather surprising in this regard). Also, I do dumbbell rows as well as cable rows. Face pulls are another often-recommended exercise for forward-shoulder rotation.
That sounds reasonable then. If you know they have history as a company and cash then your risk is clearly diminished.

Also if the company is small enough that you are talking with the CEO you will likely be in a position to make a noticeable difference in the future success of the company. Making a difference and working on tech you like can be a great combo.
Unnecessary classes
NextGuide app cracks the code on mashing up live TV with web video
They're both outside the norm enough. I remember the first time en passant was used on me (4th or 5th grade?), I thought it was made up.

If you want to start an argument, stop someone from castling through check.
Like so many others, back in 2008 when I bought the MEAP all I really knew was alert("Hello!"); and associating onclicks inline to DOM elements.

It's a good read though, and now that it's finally released, I'll take a look at it again.

The JS ecosystem has changed a lot though, but this book, if I remember it correctly, explains a lot of the rationale of why it's good to program JS a certain way.
Very cool. I just might be inspired enough to give this a shot as well.
Yup. The NYT paywall is quite "leaky" in general, and it seems that the paper is not particularly bothered by this; you can easily play simple URL or cookie games to avoid the paywall, and this hasn't changed in ages. Their web team is very good, and it's pretty certain they're aware of all this.

In other words, it appears that the paywall is intended not so much to prevent people from reading the paper free, as it is to remind people "hey this is a great world-class paper, if you read it a lot, how about a subscription?" I routinely go around the paywall, but I always end up seeing the "hey subscribe" reminder first...

It's a subtle and risky game to be sure, but they appear to be playing it better than most.
Or you could wake up at the same time and not answer emails in the morning to achieve the same effect (since it's context switching that you're trying to avoid).

Also, I fail to see how this makes it a 26-Hour Day.
Thanks for explaining that, very instructive. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to invest that kind of time into the transition, but it's something to keep in mind for sure. It arguably looks a lot less straightforward than development on Apple hardware, but perhaps I'm looking at it the wrong way.
> asides from ES5 and promises [...] CommonJS what the hell is that ?

Perhaps you should learn what you're criticizing before you criticize it; CommonJS has put forth a lot of effort to try and standardize API's across platforms (browser, server). API's for things like...promises[1]. And modules, plus many more[2]. Ironically, several of these could very well end up in ES Harmony, and so to discuss them now wouldn't be too much of a risk because the problems they solve exist today.

1. http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Promises

2. http://www.commonjs.org/specs/

> NodeJS is not javascript [...]nobody cares about that stuff , HTML5 is a set of apis , nothing to do with javascript

Yes, but if you work with JS in any capacity today, then there's a good chance you'll be working with either or both of those technologies.

> not on canvas , webgl, requireJS or Express or Backbone

I didn't mention any of those...
Wintersmith — Node.js static site generator | Web App Log
I think that's a really good model for educating the kid, because it's actually a representation of how society at large works. We have lots of freedom, but if we abuse that freedom then we lose it. Driving licenses can be suspended or revoked for breaking traffic rules, hefty fines can be charged for misdemeanors, the individual can be imprisoned for more serious crimes, etc. Props to your dad.
The author is wrong that "enterprise quality disks just plain last longer". CMU did a study on this topic on a population of 100 thousand drives, and found that enterprise-grade drives do not seem to be more reliable than consumer-grade drives. See the conclusion in: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/fast07.pdf This legend must die.

The author is also wrong when saying "a non-recoverable read error [is] a function of disk electronics not a bad block". An NRE can happen for different reasons, one of them is when (data and error-correction) bits in the block get corrupted in a way that prevent the error-correction logic from detecting this error. So the block is technically bad, just not bad enough to cause the drive logic to declare it as a read failure.
Yeah, I'd considered that, and there are some serious advantages to flat files. To be honest, relying on MySQL for production anything makes me nervous. But: SQL queries occasionally save my butt when needing to make lots of changes all at once, instead of having to figure out sed again or edit lots of files; and, I wanted something that would sync automatically, since I'm an idiot and sometimes forget to do something like an rsync command after a change.
Suggestion: stop making it for iOs as well and make the site work properly in any browser.