skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The attitude of needing to completely delete your facebook (or permanantly remove oneself from any frequently visited site) has always astounded me. It seems to come down to a problem of self-control and lack of other passionate things to fill one's day with.

Personally I find myself constantly loading facebook/reddit/HN when I'm bored and not interested in my current work. Simply deleting your presence seems to be treating the symptoms, not the cause.
Peter Thiel actually talked about this in one of his CS 183 lectures at Stanford. He categorized progress as vertical vs. horizontal. Vertical progress can be defined as a problem of going from 0 to 1: you manage to do something totally new. Whereas horizontal progress is a problem of going from 1 to n, as in replicating an idea that has already been proven to be successful.

Thiel said that most of our vertical progress comes from Silicon Valley, which I agree with. But I think SV also has a lot of horizontal progress, which is what Arrington is complaining about. Everyone and their mother is working on a social app, and every software company is going apeshit about mobile. Granted, tech news coverage is probably skewed in favor of horizontal progress, since vertical ideas by definition are so brand new and "out there" that most people would dismiss them as crazy. Still though, it would be great if someone came up with the next technology as innovative and groundbreaking as the iPhone or, to a slightly lesser extent, the iPad.
Right, I guess what I want to avoid is maintenance of some sort of reporting tool and make sure the role helps me learn about how a particular area of the industry works, to allow for some upward movement. I guess that's why I'm partial to data mining
Meh.

The Silicon Valley rich are famously stingy philanthropists and a defense I’ve heard more than once is that the tools they spend their time building are inherently good. “Why donate money when people can just download my app and instantly have a better life?”

Maybe I have a different view on the this from most on HA as I live in Africa, but products like cheaper cellphones have had a far more massive effect for the masses than a few philanthropists donating some money to charities. Charities in general have almost no effect on the ground.

Charity is not the way to make the world better. The only way to make the world better is by building methods for more people to take part directly in the global economy - and as Americans are now realizing, this isn't necessarily going to be a good thing for Americans who will only gain more competition.
* I'd bet teenagers are over-represented from a few years ago.*

Teenagers are a smaller portion of the moviegoing market than they were 10 years ago. Smartphones, videogames, and various other distractions have cut down on their numbers. [See Variety, L.A. Times, and any other entertainment-focused news source.]

And you'd have to assume any time someone goes to the theaters they pick the best movie for their tastes, not just the "safe bet" on a sequel or the one they've seen the most advertising for.

That has always been true of movies. But as it turns out, many people's tastes align with IP they are already familiar with: they know the characters, the plots, etc., and so it is easier for them to judge whether the movie in question will satisfy their interests.
Fay has to be compiled using a compiler that can't run in the browser, which is a disadvantage from my point of view.

Personally, I quite like roy http://roy.brianmckenna.org/.
InMail definitely makes life easier. I typically will engage (answer questions, be as helpful as possible) in conversation in a specific group, and then reach out to individuals who participated in the conversation.
Edit:

Illustrated C# 2012:
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-C-2012-Daniel-Solis/dp/143...

Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Object-Oriented-Design-Ruby-...
Out of all those things you listed, self-driving cars and maybe - just maybe - 3D printing are the only truly exciting things, at least in terms of their potential to be disruptive.
Most people, myself included, don't actually do the things they want to do most of the time.

Put another way, first order desires almost never really govern anyone's behavior, and second order desires are dictated almost exclusively by psychological baggage that has little to do with their adult lives.
Autopilot is still limited, and pilots still have to takeoff and land manually, and intervene in the event of turbulence, etc. As AI improves, we'll see a completely automated flight eventually.

One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.

The automated, unpiloted planes worked on their own, with no human guidance, no hand on any control.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-09-19/national/35273...
But Quora has also had a douchey attitude wtr to login and things like that. If you are logged out you almost get coerced to log back in. And it does not behave the same if you were never logged in.
Careerism breeds mediocrity
Is Year-Round Daylight Saving Time Feasible?
When they don't put the "Download Chrome" banner every time you go visit a Google property.
facebook APIs. Random breakages, incomprehensible changes, unanswered PRs etc. And AWS outages. And Heroku outages. And OAuth integrations.

Basically, everything not 100% under my control keeps going wrong. And so does everything under my control, but apparently causing smaller fires.
> And please none of this "Rent for $3.99 or rent for $4.99 in HD". Just give me one price and the best quality version that you can.

Why not? Are you happier if they instead say "Rent for $4.99" and nothing else?

Most products come in multiple price points, do you also dislike the fact that there are cheap/expensive models of computers, cars, TVs...
And this is why, everywhere I've ever worked, I've had to say RAID is NOT backup. There are varying degrees of receptiveness to this, because actual backups are a giant pain in the ass, and have a very annoying lifecycle.
Scaling. Oh god. Scaling.
Why bother using Postfix for mail forwarding? Why not to use Gmail MX directly?

I run my own servers with postfix, dovecot and roundcube. Therefore I don't need Gmail for anything. (It's also huge privacy issue.)
Until you need to login from a different machine, forget the -p flag and get yourself blacklisted. :)
Great Android apps that are also open source
I preordered it and am supposed to receive it wednesday. I'm excited to go through it. Note that you can get the ebook through the publisher if you buy the print version on Amazon.
Everyone dies. :'(
It matters when comparing to cinema tickets. Let's say a ticket is normally $10 for the sake of a nice round number, and they charge $30 to get the film at home. If you want to watch on your own it's expensive, on the other hand if you have 3 friends over to watch with you then they have lost $10.

Obviously it's not quite that simple, as some of those 3 friends might not have gone to the cinema - but maybe they all would have.
My biggest pain in the ass this year was as simple as disk space constantly running out on our VPS servers. That, and automating postgres backups.
thanks for the interest everyone! This is my project that I just launched, thought I'd say hello!

I'll start answering questions as quickly as I can, it's the only thanks I can offer now for everyone melting my servers!

Very quickly some technical specs (going to write a post on this in more depth soon):

It's a ruby on rails application hosted on heroku. Unit testing with rspec, webmock, vcr, machinist, and capybara. Authentication is with devise obviously, with omniauth-github, and cancan and rolfy for authorization. Unicorn since it's awesome, and asynchronous jobs are taken care of by sidekiq. fragment caching is done with dalli/memcached. database is postgres, redis, and memcached, with monitoring by newrelic and logging by loggly and papertrail. Let me know if you have any questions!
Google Analytics stats that have me stumped.
The Sad Life of the Innovation Junkie
I decided to enable port knocking. So SSH is not available on any port, without right kind of packets being sent beforehand.
Spoken like a brat spoiled by an embarrassment of riches. Even if one grants that not much innovative has happened since the iphone was released in 2007, and other comments have already falsified this claim, 2007 really isn't that long ago. We're talking about an event that completely changed the way people interact with mobile devices and consume content. A seismic shift that resulted in the rise (Apple) and fall (Nokia/RIM/Sony) of empires. How often do we expect that to happen? When did it last happen before 2007?

As anyone here can attest, innovation is hard -- really hard. I'm a nobody and I see this firsthand in my daily life. I've been working on a side-project for years that I hope will change the world and planned on building a proof of concept prototype last weekend. I expected to be done with the prototype in 2 days. It took over a week. A quarter of the way through construction, the code for the prototype just kept getting more and more complicated and kludegy, even though I thought I had designed it well enough to be straightforward. Although, I eventually had to redesign the whole thing, the final design ended up being much better and more reusable than the original POC I had planned. I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could spend time to rethink the design. There were plenty of stories in 2012 to blog about where products were released half-baked because they were released too early.

I suspect we will see many interesting things in 2013, much of which has been incubated and polished during the time that Michael thought nothing was happening.
By an large, candles. Candles and long hair are a bad combination.

On a serious note, a piece piece of software called Player/Stage which I am working with is driving me up the wall. Learning how three.js and the collada spec work to try and get the two playing nicely. Cross-browser CSS3/HTML5. Weirdness troubleshooting a flash app running with a PHP backend on a hundred android 1.6 tablets you don't have code access to.
I think any discussion of copyright period reform needs data behind it. Specifically, there needs to be a chart showing annual revenue produced by 1 year old works, two year old works, all the way out to works beyond the current limits.

I presume this would show a dramatic drop off which varies by market. It will probably also show that long copyrights only benefit a vanishingly small fraction of content creators.[1]

The problem will be that this data is unavailable to the public or government for most works.

Therefore, the first legislative step needs to be a "Copyright Beneficiary Reporting Act". Any copyright holder which receives more than X ($1000?) in revenue from a work in a calendar year must report the revenue for that work.

We can let that collect data for a few years and then make some informed decisions.

␄

[1] I think by and large these long term popular sellers, particularly in entertainment, should be thought of as lottery winners. The public, for whatever complicated reasons, fell in love with the work. Entertainment content creators are mostly just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. It is the public that chooses what is popular. If, as a content creator you hit the lottery and make a ton of money, great! That is what fuels the industry and provides the content, but you should recognize that the public is a huge part of that success and you aren't entitled to win the lottery continuously forever.
Forget "Organic PageRank benefits", if Google can't link to it, then they can't show it on search results. This would kill any and all organic searches.
I had mentioned a wide background in security on my resume. Someone I came to respect a great deal was interviewing me. It was pretty obvious he was dealing with a problem in real time (like maybe right before the interview) with SSL. We had a conversation about how SSL works and why he was seeing the problem (a basic MitM issue). It was technical but conversational and dealt with a real, actual problem. I have a lot of experience explaining security related technical issues to people with no background in security so it went really well.

That, in contrast to the ridiculous questions interviewers ask about non-problems, was very refreshing and sticks in my mind.
I think most of us realize it. But we also realize that the reward is so large that it counters the small probability to make a pretty high expectancy, above a regular programmer salary.

Let's say one startup out of the, say, ten thousand of serious startups founded every year will make it. For simplicity's sake, let's say that its founder will be a billionaire and the others will ALL gain their money back and then declare bankruptcy. Then 10^9/10^4=100000, which is better than most programmers' payout for that year.

TL;DR: It's improbable but it's worth it.
Your Marketing is the Secret to Your Sustainable Success
Why do you see that has a disadvantage? From a production perspective, I don't think it would matter much, since you'd most likely compile your app to JS ahead of time no matter what, for performance reasons. From a development perspective, I guess it could be annoying from the compile-debug-refresh cycle. But I could also imagine a tool to watch your app for any changes, recompiling on demand.

Anyway, if you really wanted to run Fay in the browser, you could probably get it to work using UHC (http://uu-computerscience.github.com/uhc-js/) pretty easily.
Silicon Valley != San Francisco. In fact, the idea of San Francisco being a part of Silicon Valley is a very recent one. The article makes some good points. But if you're going to write about Silicon Valley, the first thing you must do is understand what it is.
Unfortunately, I can't say that I have a success story, but I can confirm that this is typical advice, in line with what a very good physiotherapist would give you. I read this and it corroborates everything I am supposed to be doing (and describes my symptoms exactly). Here's hoping it is actually successful advice too.
I think hiring programmers should really involve the developers they'll be working with. No trick questions or silly problems. Just have them sit with people from the team and talk about the stuff they'll be working on. If they get fired up and start spouting solutions to the types of problems offered, you very quickly see what kind of developer they are. If they're suggesting something you've already tried, that's a good sign. If they already know the pit falls you've encountered before you mention them, that's also a good sign.

What it comes down to is that the engineers are better suited to evaluate engineers. Obviously, you've got to have final say as leader of the company, but the engineers are your best asset here. This is why good VC's always have a luminarie in their back pocket to send out to evaluate tech before an investment. Even technically competent VC's would rather send an experienced database developer to look over a new DB company rather than rely on their now 15 year-old experience.
You can use DNS NOTIFY rather than sending an email. When the primary is updated, DNS NOTIFY will tell each secondary about the change.

DNS NOTIFY is standardised in: https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1996.txt

BIND 8+ supports it by default, according to http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/networking_2ndEd/dns/ch10_03.h...

There is a perl script to achieve the same thing in djbdns, according to http://www.fefe.de/djbdns/#notify (which joe_bleau alluded to).
1) Exactly! The FCC requires that unintentional RF emissions must be below a certain point. That's kind of my point.

2) And you're neglecting that cell phones transmit at 0.3 watts, versus (for example) an FM radio tower that transmits at 1000 watts, or a cell tower transmitting at (around) 500 watts per channel. The point is that the radiation from cell phones is small to begin with. Ground based transmitters are far, far stronger, and planes fly nearest to them at the most critical times.

3) I don't see the significance of the distinction between the PED being 15 ft from the avionics inside the plane versus outside, but I'm open to explanations why it's significant.
State-funded? Not really at all? Regulated, not very.
I can highly accurately imitate a person in real-time as they speak.

It's "empathic"; as I understand it, it really is just reading body movements and reading the person. However, I can also maintain focus on a multitude of sound stimuli such that when doing this, I can specifically focus on the person. If I focus, my mind wanders or becomes more autonomous. It's like parallel processing. As I said, I don't really even have the language for this particular ability. It becomes "mind reading" once I realize that I am maintaining the conversation while tracking their words spoken and future words. It's like a thief leaving _too much_ evidence at the scene of the crime; in this case, it is emotional and non-verbal evidence. Parroting the person, then, becomes something that I do incidentally on top of being able to hypermentalize about that person, or really any number of other things.
The solution to the SV problem is not to lobby the government or to try to set up some libertarian outpost in the desert.

Just move out of SV. The air is different outside of SV. People don't care about apps, or financing rounds, or VCs.

Want a truly different perspective? Move to Detroit, a struggling city with a half-abandoned core, or to Akron, a former industrial megapower that hasn't been relevant in decades. In both cities, new manufacturing technologies and/or processes are needed to vitalize their local industries. In the Central Valley cities of Fresno and Merced, water and air quality concerns impact both the quality of life and the strength of one of California's primary industries. In the southwest, access to water will be the ultimate arbiter of growth in the decades to come. These are all real problems, but they're not problems that you'd ever come across in SV.
The newspapers listed in the article are nowhere near as big as the NYT.
May I ask why your desire to learn C?, I'd just like to know what are you targeting specifically.
Incompetent people will often take politically expedient decisions that cause more harm than good but protect their positions.
Telescope: a real-time, open-source social news app built on meteor
I wrote similar thoughts a couple weeks ago: http://bckmn.com/pay-for-your-life-online/

I think the biggest catharsis that needs to happen this coming year is for people to realize how free services actually work.
Publisher's website for the book: http://www.manning.com/resig/

You can order it through them rather than Amazon to get the eBook directly.
Chef Scripts. But now that I have Vagrant the fire is out. Seriously. Vagrant is amazing to the point of being nearly a silver bullet like Rails was. Funny thing was, when I first looked at it, I couldn't even figure out why I would want to use it, but now I can't live without it.
I understand that for some people it's simply not possible to go to college without taking on debt. I don't think this is the case for the vast majority of people.

Then why do 2/3 of all college students graduate with debt? Why have the largest tuition rises, by percentage, been seen in newly-defunded state universities?
Well, took be fair, RSI isn't mentioned at all, although most of the HN comments are more concerned with this issue. For hip/back/neck stuff, this is the advice you want.
creator here!

tl;dr: yes, it is a little aspirational as of now, but will change.

The first search you can do, since I equate "star count" to popularity, and by default all results are sorted by star count/popularity.

The second search will be entirely implemented soon. You can find repos similar to other repos according to their tags, but can't sort by created or updated date yet. The information is there in the data, I just need to finish that functionality in the search and sorting.

I wanted to try to get something out the door before I finished every feature to see what people would use and what requests/issues people would have, and prioritize accordingly. Otherwise I know I would spend weeks fleshing out every feature I thought I wanted, including many that most would find useless =(.

In retrospect, you are correct in that it is a little misleading since you assume you can do that yet. It will hopefully be corrected shortly (busy trying to keep things running smoothly!).

Thanks for the input troutwine! I'll finish this functionality hopefully this week (if not sooner).
Does Kickstarter work as a platform for books?
I have a few old contacts in the industry working for some of Europe's largest O&G firms. I'll drop them an email to see if there are any blog posts floating about that elaborate on the topic a bit further.
This is a problem even if you don't buy pre-built. You're going to be buying similarly specced drives at similar times and you're probably buying from vendors from the same rough geographical area so chances are you're buying drives from the same batch anyway.

It used to be worse: all the drives in a RAID setup had to have the exact same specifications or the thing wouldn't work, which pretty much guaranteed near simultaneous failure of multiple drives, but even today, with somewhat more flexible software raid setups, it's still a problem.

At a place I used to work we used to joke that a drive failure warning from a RAID controller was nothing more than a signal to get out the backup tapes and start building a new server.
Summary of the December 24, 2012 Amazon ELB Service Event
The widespread evidence of the existence of extra-terrestrials.
‘Inkaar’ makers spends Rs. 2 crore on survey
Prepaid Visa/Mastercard cards work and they're pretty much the equivalent of a debit card. You put money on them and use them to buy stuff online.
This is such a good idea, I've added it to my goals, under my "Invest in Knowledge Portfolio" category. One thing that scares me a bit though is that some man pages are enormous, possibly more than can be digested in one sitting.
This isn't the 1983 or the BBC, it's 2013 and a niche news aggregator powered by its readers.

If you just want stories that are big enough to be picked up by the BBC, read that instead.
Don't laugh.

My ultimate goal in life is to write software for satellites, space probes or planetary rovers. I want my code in space. It's a pretty advantageous goal, but with hard work I can do it.

There is a Canadian company that is currently hiring for my dream position: http://www.mscinc.ca/about/MS-engineer.html

I'd like to help further Canada's contribution to space science.

I'm currently taking my first year of Computer Science. Getting really good at C is something I feel like I should start now. Then I'll need to get good at embedded C and eventually start looking at the VxWorks operating system since it seems like that's what most probes or satellites use. But that's for the future.
Too many people are peasants, and would rather have a king to petition or blame than actually solve their own problems.
Realizing that the US Government is getting very close to fundamentally destroying freedom on the Internet (domestically, with ramifications globally; and to the extent it still exists). It's not five or ten years away, it's now a daily battle with all the legislation they're throwing at the wall to see what they can get to stick. It was understood in the 1990s that they'd eventually seriously harm the Internet, given their unlimited thirst for power, but some part of my brain always hoped it was further out. It's clear they're never going to stop coming after it, and they have a nearly unlimited budget and apparently nothing better to do with their time.
Sellmer is a toolset for selling digital goods.