skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, fair and good points, but I differ.

1) Offensiveness: Yes, this is a open letter to Michael Arrington, and it was blunt and harsh, but I think that his style is the same and more, and his post was a good example on how he can be offensive to a whole community and industry. And my philosophy is that you should treat people the way they treat others.

Btw, I went to the first MA tech events at his house, and he was great then. However, as he got notoriety and became public figure he started lecturing industries over and over, became very aggressive, often disrespectful, and sometime extremely violent. When it was about the blogging and PR industries, I did not have enough context to answer, but as his post targeted my backyard which is the entrepreneur and tech community, I took it to heart to respond an harsh but respectful open letter.

So, yes, it was harsh and blunt and directed at Michael Arrington, but I do not think this post was was rude, disrespectful, or say anything wrong about him.

2) Tech thriving arguments: Ok, apparently we agree on the where, but not the why. My point was that now, since technology has been fully popularized from an interface (e.g, touch) and distribution (e.g. app stores in addition to web), the opportunities are endless. Back in the days, we always had to worry if the user was tech savvy enough to use or install the product, and how to get the product to the users. Over the last few years, this has been virtually illuminated, for consumer and for enterprise users. Touch interface are so natural that virtually anybody can use a computing device nowadays. For me, and the impact that this can have on how further we can absorb computing in our all aspect of our life is just mind blowing. If you add the popularization of 3D printing, which will bring the digital world to the real one, this is even more mind blowing. Anyway, those are really my points, but if you think I missed the bigger picture, let me know, I am genuinely curious.

3) On Michael Arrington giving opinions: I love opinions, I am opinionated, and I also love to be proven wrong, as I learn when I am wrong and don’t when I am right. So, I have nothing about someone giving opinions, I am against people blaming a industry or community about being slow, un-innovative, or unethical, especially when you have a huge voice (which Michael Arrington definitely earned). And this is what Michael Arrington has been doing over and over for the last 5 to 7 years.

We, the older crowd have a responsibility to enable our younger siblings to thrive where we have not, and for this blaming and lecturing ourselves can only be divert people to the wrong direction.

Now, obviously, freedom of speech first and foremost, Michael Arrington had the right to wrote what he wrote, I had the right to disagree with him and his style, and people has the right to disagree with one or the other or both.

Best, thanks for this good points. Curious to hear more about #2.
Though to be fair, there is also a long, more obscure tradition of practice where you dive straight into the shadows, trauma, and these horrible things that we humans can do to each other and to the world. These illnesses comes from attempting to integrate some of this deep stuff ... and then rejecting it ... and you're too far along in your practice to fool yourself for long.

But yeah, practice on the cushion is nice. It is also about integrating the insights you've attained with your life when you're not on the cushion. And to have the courage to change your career if you've decided this is no longer the life you want to live.
Switching would be done in a lazy manner. I can't see how the cost would be prohibitive, plenty of other countries have managed it so surely America can too.
GM and Ford use metric for the last 20 years - but on a lot of their 'easily accessible' bolts, the heads are sized just enough to work with standard hobby imperial sockets. If I remember - That M10 will fit a 3/8" socket too, and M13 is used all over the place and will work with 1/2" socket.

On my wife's Suzuki their M10 will not work with a 3/8" socket, and if you get into anywhere serious on a GM or Ford - those bolt heads will be exact metric with no room for imperial.
You should build a tool that is the inverse of this. Let people build regular expressions by creating the visual diagram (some sort of click and drag GUI).
I've tried both, for the Sweden<->Germany route. I've usually been disappointed that the train was more expensive than a flight. The train has much fewer luggage restrictions, but lugging lots of luggage around when changing trains is also a hassle, while with flights they do that for you. With 4 hours of travel, you don't need to worry about food. With 15, you do. Though you can bring a full meal, including drinks and a knife, on the train. Plus, there's AC power for the laptop.

My break-even point is at about 6-8 hours by train, vs. a plane. That gets me to Hamburg.
They were entirely viable for upstart/rising PC manufacturers like Acer, the form-factor and "just good enough" utility was a startling break from the 15-19" laptop form factors that were the rage back in 2006/2007 when netbooks

Netbooks, if you remember, are the commercial response to OLPC, I saw one - it was a pretty sweet toy. So Intel wanted to not only kill the OLPC (and thus created Netbooks as a response), but then Microsoft saw that Linux was acutally taking hold, and decided to get in on the hit-job and whack the Netbook category before it cannibalized their bigger vendors' profits (and their own licensing profits).

And yes, the iPad (and later the 11" MB Air) put a final stake in heart of the netbook - both more stylish and usable for real non-power users for "consumption" than either a netbook or standard laptop.
Incidentally, there was a metric calendar, invented alongside the metric system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

It never gained much hold, probably for two reasons

- its units were too far off the customary units, hard to convert, and didn't fit into the neat 10^3 system. The other units (metres, kilograms) were close or easily convertible into what they replaced (ell and pound, both at approximately 0.5 metres/kilograms).

- the number of days in a year is set, so you never end up at a neatly decimal system with e.g. 10^3 days in a year (and even worse, it's a weird fraction leading to leap years and seconds)
> While Apple as a company pre-dates Nokia by I suspect something like a decade

Actually Nokia date back to 1865 but they originally a wood pulp mill then rubber manufacturer. They got into electronics in the 1960s and focussed on phones from the 1990s.
Well, I guess that's why nobody likes lawyers.
New Ubuntu for phones
Want to learn about Bioinformatics? Check this out.
Steve Jobs is definitely an outlier on this, but worth pointing out that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't drop out of "a college", they dropped out of Harvard, an institution with some of the toughest entrance requirements.

I'm far from being a fanboy (and went to a no-name state school), but admittance to Harvard is a high signal of intellect and self-discipline. Paired with lax return policy (you can extend a personal leave pretty much indefinitely) it makes sense when highly disciplined and hyper-productive young students decide to pursue a project they consider a chance of a lifetime.

Moreover, both billg and zuck used their Harvard connections to their advantage, by bringing in Steve Ballmer and Dustin Moskovitz respectively. Dropping out of Podunk State College and HVAC Repair Clinic just doesn't bring those advantages.
Code, Beats, and Pixels
I don't disagree with your points about SparrowOS.

But I don't agree in practice that HN is the best place to find discussion of things like a hobbyist OS written in ASM, because it is so strongly oriented toward the business end of the startup scene. It is very typical to see posts about how engineers are arrogant and socially inept, or how annoying it is that there is so much technical stuff on HN, or how RMS is dangerous and revolting, etc. So frequently the yardstick for judging things is popularity and money and ability to manipulate perceptions, rather than knowledge or playfulness or building things which are really high quality for its own sake.

So while (say) Zuckerberg's "Hacker" concept might go down well here, I don't think that old school "Hacker" values really have much place here.
Open source developers do, almost by definition (this is just a listserv, but explained in terms the target audience would understand).
Sorry, turns out House was the kernel and Habit was the language.

http://hasp.cs.pdx.edu/

And keep it up on Deca. We need it. ;)

If you know a type theorist who could check over my paper without any obligations to the ECOOP programming committee so I could finally have someone confirm that this algorithm isn't Doomed To Failure, that would be incredibly helpful.

Also, if you could come up with any neat ideas on the following matter, that would be great.

http://marmoach.blogspot.co.il/2011/10/multi-method-type-cla...
You know, I've been thinking about this kind of thing lately. All of this mixin, traits, monkey patching hoopla is completely nonexistent in functional programming languages. To add a new method to an object you just..write a function that takes that piece of data.

Imagine a language where a call looked like this:

user.doSomething(1, 2, 3)

But it's just syntax sugar for this function application:

doSomething(user, 1, 2, 3)

("user" would be just the data..like a struct type thing)

That way you get the flexibility of loose functions but you get the (imo) superior aesthetics of oop languages.
A coworker who reserved the car 3.5 years ago is finally receiving the cars today. Likely many others are getting theirs as well.
Isn't it sad, that there is still no giant database filled with numbers to solve all arguments?

One column would be university. Another column would be course. Third column would be price. Fourth column would be field of working. Fifth column would be median salary (monthly earnings for entrepreneurs). Ideally that would be lifetime earnings instead, but it's really hard to do.

There probably should be a column for employment ratio or one extra entry per (university, course).

Then we can easily query such database to measure impact university has on financial success. And stop muttering. There still would be people who don't act rational, but at least we can mark it as such — irrational, instead of wrong. What I'm afraid of is that people will still act irrationally while thinking they are acting rationally (e.g. "of course they never succeeded, they were not as talented as me!")

I think someone would even pay to have access to such database, so there is probably a business opportunity here. Although, even more probably most university will disagree to disclose/outright falsify income numbers, because they are not interested to tell the truth.
They should also have mentioned that the telegraph "can eliminate the need to travel at all if you exploit it well." :)
if you drop out to start a startup just be sure its really what you want as you will most probably fail!
Except train technology has improved with high speed rail so there is a possibility of an increase in speed.
Plus if these patents are so valuable, then it would be nice if their sale from one shell company to another had tax implications. Once a licensing campaign has been initiated for one shell company, that should put some idea of a value on the patent(s).

If you can be assessed taxes for options in a company that isn't public that you have no way to exercise, selling assets from one shell company to another should have tax implications as well.

Maybe that would limit the creation of mazes of ownership of these patent portfolios.
Now I know what I will be getting when my N900 finally laid to rest.
It's not just Ubuntu, but the whole variety of Linux flavours for phone that will surely arise once hardware is here.
128 / 3 = 48

Come again? This doesn't quite look like sarcasm, or did you want to prove the OP's point?

Or maybe this is just an explanation for the taste of British food...
You are correct that government currencies exist by government fiat. Who said that those had to be the only currencies? Of course government does mandate that its currencies are recognized as legal tender, but that's something that governments get away with across the board.

Corporations are indeed creatures of government. Are they required to conduct business? No, but they are awfully convenient, and allow for a lot of rotten things to occur.

Private property? If it requires government's nod, it isn't private. And, of course, we see this all the time, when government decides that it wants someone's property, and takes it. It might be your land, your automobile, or something else. It is all up for grabs.

Not sure why you're name-dropping Rothbard, but it doesn't help you here. No business is going to exist without participating in the existing society. Trade and commerce require cooperation. The alternative is what brings a society closer to subsistence farming (and it tends to leave people starving).
My thoughts exactly.

Instead of using misleading correlations, the article could have just said:

"If you come from a rich family, you can do pretty much whatever you want."

That'd be more fun to read.
Why C# is the best language for mobile development
32mm is used all over in GM world - 32 just happens to be barely smaller that 1 1/4" inches so it keeps people that only have SAE sockets happy. 1
How I Learned to Code in 8 Months
Actually, Nokia has been around since 1865.
Engineer Gives Google Glass Details
Sounds more like the day job than a side project.
Fair point about a single number not painting the whole picture. Any thoughts on what stats might show a better correlation?

Another datapoint was an informal one-year follow-up to the first wave of Thiel's 20 under 20 (http://qr.ae/14o5S). Of the select few that were chosen based on their skills/ideas/potential and given access to Thiel's network, quite a few ended up actually going back to school.
Qt 5 QtQuick based SDK for Ubuntu Phone app development
I got a trek desk for Xmas. It's a cheap but decent desk that mates to a treadmill. I use it for email reading and breaks from heads down coding.

Love it.
Yes Apple used the iPhone to sell more Macs after all, it is possible.
DD/MM/YYYY doesn't make any sense either unless you write numbers with the most significant digit on the right. Only YYYY/MM/DD actually makes sense (which is why lexicographic sorting automatically works when you use it).
I wish I'd done a startup before going to college. I would've had a better sense of what to focus on.
Very cool. I'm looking forward to this phone, and it's (hopefully) hacking potential. I'd love to write my own scripts in $LANGUAGE to interact with the phone sensors. If it's built on Ubuntu, it should all be open to us, right?

I see that this page (http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/app-ecosystem) states that the apps are created with HTML5 or QML, but I'm hoping other languages are just an apt-get away. If so, they can have my money now.
Mandelbulber: open source, 3D fractal explorer
Awesome, now bring it to market. Until then, as a consumer, I could care less about Microsoft.

All their amazing R&D didn't make W8, their phones, or their tablets any more enjoyable or purchasable.
> Berlin to Paris by train is about 12 hours. By car it's about 10, because there's no need to stop and change.

Actually, Berlin to Paris by train is 12h if you take direct night trains. During the day, the best trips are ~8h15 with 1 train change (Paris Nord through Köln [Thalys + ICE] or Paris Est through Mannheim [TGV + ICE])
Couldn't someone end this by gettingt a business process patent on patent trolling?
Very interesting advice re the car analogies. Thank you.

It seems that you are the character in Office Space* that had to madly defend his job to the two Bobs. In my real world development experience, I find that you are right about the rarity of your skill, and am always thankful when someone around me has it.

* http://www.llakomy.com/Projects/flashvideo/office-space/tom-...
LayerVault: A Hacker News for Designers
As a med student, never in my life have I had the slightest provocation to consider dropping out of school to pursue a startup. I know that I am extremely unfamiliar with the complexity of the choices involved, but having read this piece I'd be shocked if any prospective entrepreneurs were not strongly persuaded to take this man's advice. This is wisdom without the ostentatiousness of a NYT opinion.
I agree with you on what their defense would likely be. But with something like this, there is no real way of knowing for sure if companies are infringing on their patents without knowledge of their network and what devices they have. It is entirely possible that they sent this to companies who haven't used these features. The problem is that I can't see prosecutors taking these companies on. I would imagine that a Federal prosecutor would be the one taking them on, which to me, makes it even less likely that it will happen.
"I have to wonder what it is that Apple hopes to gain by using this system. "

I'd guess a reaction to fly-by-night developers with scammy and copycat apps that generated far more bad press for the App Store than DUNS-gate.
Until you find a substantial group of talented students whom you randomize to college vs non-college, the question of whether or not to complete college will remain open.
YES! This was exactly what I was looking for while writing the post. A decent portion of this information is even available publicly for certain demographic slices (like the education for the 30 Under 30s).

Startup idea? One that you could drop out of school for? wink wink
I hope in the future every person will have a personal A4 sized device capable of displaying text and pictures of every format from any source.
Ubuntu Phone Live Q+A
That perfectly matches my Ford experience.
In practice, we've been using DCI (with object.extend) in a production Rails app and have seen no worse performance degradation than in other apps with comparable complexity (at least subjectively--of course it's very difficult to measure objectively). Typically plenty of production apps suffer more from simple things like missing an index on a db column, N+1 queries, iterating over objects in Ruby, or poorly-thought out design. DCI in Rails is a pretty good trade off for when you need to use it.
Screen sizes are actually always in mm height and width. The diagonal size is just an approximate size.
https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/

I've never used it but if I understand correctly GNU Stow allows you to manage the programs you build from source. You will obviously install them in different directories than the one's installed using apt-get, either in you home directory or in .../local/. This can be used with whatever distro you like.
Senate-Passed Deal Means Higher Tax on 77% of Households
VMware vFabric tc Server to Continue Support of Java 6
I'll play along. What "recurring cost"?
Tree Receivers
What should you do every day to improve your life?
The FSM is the model, the Railroad Diagram is the view, to borrow terms.
I have no experience with DUNS so I can't say whether or not I agree it's a scam, but I can say that this article didn't make the case for me that it is. The article mentioned the process for requesting a DUNS number being annoying, and taking a while, but made no compelling argument that there's anything scammy about it.
This video was really useful in introducing me to Mr. Davis' achievements, that I wasn't aware of. Very cool.
The tech industry has to take the lead by renaming their products: MacBook Pro 33cm, Nexus 18. Using inch for display is a worldwide standard, not just US. It would be strange to look for a 35.5cm notebook or a 100cm HDTV.
I really love how the Nexus phones have become a fixture in concept shots for alternative OSes. They showed up in Mozilla's OS announcements as well.
I've long had the opinion that situations like this (as well as Intellectual Ventures) are the lawyerly version of hacking. They're just trying to find free lunches in the system the same way that MIT computer heads 50 years ago were trying to disable timeshare accounting for their usage.
Agreed, and then any accusations of infringement that the patent holder makes must also be registered with the patent office, so that defendants can see who else is being extorted.
Yes, maybe we can finally reach 2005!

/disgruntled Nokia fan
Rammstein - mainly because my German is bad.

It is improving and I start to understand some of their lyrics what engages parts of the brain used for programming.

Time to look for something else to listen.
I went to UW for my undergrad. I know people who work in MSR and talk to them on a regular basis. You're definitely right about them being high quality people and being very properly compensated, but wrong about everything else you said. Language research, for example, constitutes a tiny minority of MSR's total budget. Most of it goes to graphics and multimedia, hardware and devices, and human-computer interaction, with smaller portions going to software development and security/anti-piracy research. Everything else is breadcrumbs.

>>If they're only publishing 1%, the research would be superhuman.

Well yes, they spend over $10 billion on research. Of course it is superhuman. Perhaps you are lacking this context, which is why you find it hard to believe my suspicion that they publish a tiny percentage of all research findings.
While a bit of an aside, personally I find LINQ to have been a horrendous misstep in the evolution of the language. While the argument that it makes code more concise and easy to maintain holds in the small, once a project grows it becomes a terrible cancer -- everything becomes an amorphous blob of stuff, unintuitive, performance-disaster LINQ filters applied everywhere to bend it into shape.
Joel Just mailed you. Let's see what comes up.

P.s: I am not an intern :)
IANAL but wouldn't it be easier to convict on mail fraud first. Corporate "accounts receivable" type scams have been convicted before of mail fraud. The scammers send an invoice to a corporation, and if it looks routine, it gets paid without a second thought.

Sooner or later, some patent troll is going to be dumb enough to send out "Unpaid License Fee" letters and set a precedence on the extortion charge.
At long last, a smartphone OS that isn't iOS and doesn't look like shit.
Most important to keep in mind is that this activity is targeted toward businesses (and for that matter not exactly "mom" and "pop" types either). It's more difficult getting someone to prosecute this type of borderline activity against business then the same thing against individuals. Especially if they have a leg to stand on and are being operated by attorneys who know how to word things to avoid potential problems.
I've actually worried about this one a lot after reading about the solar storm of 1859. For those of you who haven't read about it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859) I highly recommend reading up on it. The TL;DR version is that one of the largest solar flares ever recorded was produced on the surface of the sun and the ensuing geomagnetic storm that passed by earth was so strong it was able to power telegraph machines that were not plugged in.

My laymen speculation is that this would be much worse than just transformers, given how computers are penetrating every aspect of our lives. Imagine the impact to our society if transportation and electricity failed simultaneously.
Stitcher's plan to outshine terrestrial radio
I think Ubuntu is quite successful in the desktop market.

Whenever I see GNU/Linux installation on some desktop or notebook, it's almost always Ubuntu. If people want to switch to some GNU/Linux distribution from Windows or OS X, it's almost always Ubuntu.

So in this respect, I would say they are quite successful.