skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, yeah, I think you're slightly misunderstanding this proposal.

First, and the biggie, the BBC would be responsible for including Cue Dots/Marks/Frames which signal the program's TTL not that "more power is needed in UK". That'd be irrational and dangerous. It's up to the power guys to interrogate the cue information and then react to it. That's just basic separation of responsibilities.

Second, you'd still want a centralized component to interrogate the cue information and then tell power utilities to turn on/off, just like the current model. Of course, they will still need people in the loop - the computer would be there to propose which assets to activate and to provide a countdown to when a decision will need to be made - a guided decision making system. (Computers can do this sort of cost optimization faster then people.)

Third, their man in the power HQ is already relying on a TV set to predict when the spike is about to occur, so any sort of system has to be at least that reliable (i.e. not very).

Fourth, what if the power boffins lose the signal to the BBC? Calling "mum" is a terrible idea, but having automatic failover and/or redundant reporting stations are the type of precautions a basic safety review should uncover.

TLDR: Not suggesting that the BBC tell the Power Co that they should add more power to the grid. Just suggesting a system to augment decision making based on Program TTL.
He's conflating an industry with a geographic location. In the 1960s, "Silicon Valley" was dominated by big companies. Now it's overrun with dipshit social media concerns that won't last 10 years. It was a different thing altogether in 1975 and in 1999. In 2030, two questions are:

* What will be the geographic center of innovation?

* What industry will the innovation be in?

These are orthogonal. I can't answer either of these. I honestly have no clue. I'll make one solid prediction, though:

I don't know what the Big Thing of 2030 will be, but it will involve computation. It'll be far outside of traditional IT (the use of computers to implement 20th-century business ideas) and social media (same, but for 21st-century cultural experiments) but whatever is Big during 2030 will require a lot of skill when it comes to computation.

Of course, I have no idea whether this will happen in Northern California or some other corner of the world.

What I think is clear is that VC-istan innovation is over. The problem is that the VCs talk to each other and collectively decide who's hot and who's not. So, instead of getting true risk-taking, you have selection by committee in the funding process. That is starting to fail.
FYI I've been a member of the Pirate Party since the start so I believe we're on the same "side" but that doesn't mean I agree with your conspiracy nonsense.
And you have no idea what it would be like to go through day-to-day life as a black woman. If your response to "You have privilege" is "I had it hard" you've already failed to even understand what the conversation is about.
That seems like a lot of UUIDs to be passing via GET. If you send your UUIDs in base 64, you can fit 125 into 1KB.
The short version is that anything you could do with Tropo (e.g. inbound and outbound calls and sms, text-to-speech, speech recognition) you can now do at AT&T in conjunction with AT&T's other APIs (e.g. Payment, MMS, and Location).

We have a presentation up about what you can do with the API at http://www.crunched.com/access/dc387b73d0aa876e67a173e7b1fdf...

You can find tutorials, sample applications, and documentation at http://developer.att.com/developer/forward.jsp?passedItemId=...
No single word about privacy?
Has a use been found for this visualization, or is it simply info-porn? What lessons can be drawn from this data? I must admit, I'm having trouble not classifying this as a waste of time--the result of the evolution-bred desire for tool-making, misapplied.
Teen drugs her parents with milkshakes to stay online longer
20 years ago in Australia, there used to be a comedy show on the government TV channel (no ads) called the Big Gig. It was a live show, but people claimed it was pre-recorded. So one of the hosts had a TV to show what was on the commercial channels to prove that they were live. Didn't quite work as planned - each of the other channels had advertisments running at the time :)
What position papers? What information are they going to use? You are very likely in a state senate district with very stable party identification. How do you know who to support in a primary? It costs money to get this information out to people, and blogs are not doing it very effectively.

Do you really believe that but for an internet connection, Syrian bloggers would be outdoing Marie Colvin, who died to bring the story back for the Sunday Times? Based on what evidence?
You can live off a laptop, but that's not what mobile first is about.

The desktop is not at all dead if the alternative is only reaching pad and smartphone users. Not even close to mortally wounded for business or home. My kid's school switched them to iPads and they immediately identified the problem--they hate typing on the things. My son takes paper notes. They're fine for consuming, but that's it.

Then there is the problem of app discovery, not to mention the pricing and business models that exists in the mobile world. They pretty much limit success to the few at the top with a lot of sharecroppers scratching out a living down below. It's even bad enough that Fred Wilson backed off a tad from the mobile first mantra.

More here: http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/mobile-first-for-...
I read that. It's one of the worse Wikipedia pages I've come across. Did you see that it cites the same paper twice, with different style for each one?

Anyway, I read the paper. It concludes "we suggest that sugar, as common as it is, nonetheless meets the criteria for a substance of abuse and may be “addictive” for some individuals when consumed in a “binge-like” manner. This conclusion is reinforced by the changes in limbic system neurochemistry that are similar for the drugs and for sugar. The effects we observe are smaller in magnitude than those produced by drug of abuse such as cocaine or morphine; however, the fact that these behaviors and neurochemical changes can be elicited with a natural reinforcer is interesting. _It is not clear from this animal model if intermittent sugar access can result in neglect of social activities as required by the definition of dependency in the DSM-IV-TR_ (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Nor is it known whether rats will continue to self-administer sugar despite physical obstacles, such as enduring pain to obtain sugar, as some rats do for cocaine (Deroche-Gamonet et al., 2004). Nonetheless, the extensive series of experiments revealing similarities between sugar-induced and drug-induced behavior and neurochemistry, as chronicled in Sections 4 and 5, lends credence to the concept of “sugar addiction”, gives precision to its definition, and provides a testable model."

As you can see (assuming my HN markup-foo is strong), sugar has not been shown to (or shown not to) lead to the definition of "dependency" for humans, which is a neglect of social activities. So this remains a conjecture with some supporting evidence, but not enough to make the statement that sugar is or even can be an addictive substance.
> Of course, in this case, we're better not knowing than paying that kind of cost.

How could the entire population ever be better off 'not knowing'? If there was a button to exchange a few babies or animals lives for the possible outcomes presented at the end of the article, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Wait, between 1869 and 1950 there was no innovation in steam? Between 1960 and today there has been no innovation in automobiles? What?
It seems like all the current hi res solutions are somewhat hacky. I recently did a project with foresight.js (https://github.com/adamdbradley/foresight.js) I like how it tries to estimate the connection speed before serving up a 2x image.
I'm curious how seamless that implementation was. I've seen a few hacks that load-then-scroll which is, of course, just about the worst of all worlds.
Bitcoin will be at $20 by the end of 2013. Great move on the part of all the principals involved in this deal.
Double-speed USB 3.0 to arrive next year
I guess it depends on who your market is. Perhaps if you're github or something you might want to care.

If you're "Your Local Newspaper" where local is not in California or some other American tech mecca? I don't think you need to care yet...
The author seems to be mixing two concerns into one - the innovation in infrastructure and the innovation in products.
While a breakthrough in infrastructure seems less likely( the hardware and the infrastructure of the information systems have stabilized at this point) there are more products and niches where addition of information processing capacity will lead to innovative results. In that sense the comparison of silicon valley to auto industry does not seem to be justified. Auto industry is producing a well defined product, while modern SV allows application of a commodity across all industries, just like electricity. Current generation of electric cars are as innovative as steam engines during industrial revolution.
There's a bunch of people in this thread making the case that developers shouldn't bother supporting retina devices because they represent such a small section of the market. Ordinarily I'd agree with that sentiment. I don't spend a whole lot of time making sure my work renders well in Internet Explorer 6, because IE6 represents less than a half of one percent of the traffic I receive.

But here's the thing - IE6 market share is shrinking, and retina display market share is growing. It seems inevitable that given enough time all Apple devices (and potentially many devices from other manufacturers) will come with retina displays. Which is why it makes sense to get out ahead of this trend before retina displays become popular.
I believe there was, is, and always will be a sub group of technology users that are 'computer hobbyists'. The percent of total computer users who are NOT in this group has gone way, way up. But I believe there is still this core group of tinkerers.

This used to be a required demographic to have endorse ones computer product, but no longer. Most users just want to do stuff and don't care about technology.
Seems to be working well for them, and they've got a lot of happy customers. You could hardly call 37signals a "bait-and-switch" company.
Facebook Will Fight German Anonymity Law And $26K Fine To Keep Real Name Policy
China Is Investing More Than It's Growing
"Custom 404 pages of often quite confusing as they will try to be clever and redirect you to other content that may be interesting."

I agree, however I also believe that is the intent of filing it under "usability". It isn't usability as you would commonly define it, a good UX, but rather keeping the UX of the site consistent across all states, even failure, and giving the user an entry point back in to the rest of the site. A default Apache 404 does not do this, it's just a flat white page, with your only option being to go back from whence you came. If that wasn't your site, then the perception is you've lost a potential visitor, and that potentially could've been avoided with a custom 404 page.
> Curious: apart from methodical patience, what super power do you believe Patrick was "very good at"?

In a word: marketing. Finding the right ways to efficiently reach his target market. I've tried marketing before — it's hard! Many BigCos seem to have the same problem. I can write whatever software I want, and I can study people for hours on end, but that doesn't mean the study will actually teach me the things I need to know to get the people to use the software.
Overlapr - Twitter User Comparisons
I've got other projects filling my time, but I think there's a great opportunity for someone who isn't opposed to working on an adult-themed idea using bitcoin. Selling sex toys for bitcoin, specifically. I think the anonymity of it is a huge selling point. Yes, there is still shipping to be concerned with, but in exchange for no worries about line items on credit card statements or your neighbors seeing your car at the sex shop; it might be the lesser of all evils.

If you do this and get rich, please email me to tell me it worked!
Are the apps subject to individual review and approval by AT&T (as opposed to direct through Tropo or Twilio where you can launch on your own)?

We developed a location service that met all of AT&T's and CTIA's consent guidelines yet they were the one carrier to reject the app - and without good reason.
This would be useful actually. I wrote "if !hasClass addClass, else removeClass" countless times until I figured, hey, maybe jQuery has a toggleClass function, I should look it up. These situations could be avoided if a "related functions" section was there.
There's an obvious cause for that: blogger hipsters using only closed down iDevices , thus unable to see beyond the Apple walled garden and hipster geeks using only closed down iDevices only to get the rug swept from under their feet by Apple when they innovate too much.

As if nobody ever saw the numerous "Apple kicked me out of their store" sob stories on HN.

Switch to PC and Android, there's much to do.
I sort of agree but I think the danger with your exercise as it pertains to this article is that it takes into account everything - not just tech. My washing machine is way better, car runs longer, better medications, etc.

I think in terms of traditional Silicon Valley tech (as it is today) his point is largely correct and natural. While software is increasingly ubiquitous, the pace/rate at which its able to be a driver of new innovation/change is increasingly less in my opinion - computing and the internet has been maturing over the last 50 years and we should expect to see less life altering changes as a whole. It doesn't mean the gig is up - it just means computing progress is now eating away at the fringes and that the delta in how much computing drives innovation will be somewhat less through 2010-2020 than it was from 2000-2010.
"Mobile first" is a design strategy, which ensures that you identify the primary content/features when making responsive designs.

It has nothing to do with which device is more important or more common.
Time for HTML 6 already?
I think yours is the best explanation I've seen in this thread.

It's not that innovation has stopped, but rather that it has been focused in a very narrow niche as of late: the advertising niche. Everyone seems to be doing something in advertising, whether it's brokering ads or harvesting eyeballs. Most of these seem to be in the perennially doomed space of "we will invent something unrelated to advertising and try to shoehorn an ad-based business model into it".

This is also why when a not-ad-related web business starts up we fall all over ourselves - AirBnb, Square, etc.
The article is talking about Silicon Valley specifically. So play with the parameters of your hypothetical a little bit: would you be willing to give up everything Silicon Valley has come up with in the last 10 years?

High speed internet, 4G, etc, isn't Silicon Valley. It's Japan (DoCoMo), San Diego (Qualcomm), Dallas (AT&T), New Jersey (Verizon), etc. No need to give up your Ivy Bridge CPU's (Portland/Haifa). Google was in place before 2002, and basically peaked at that time.

What would I be giving up? Facebook? Flash ads? Done! Go back to Photoshop 7.x? Even if you assert that Microsoft is more culturally associated with the Valley, despite being in Redmond, then you might be running Windows 2000 on your new Ivy Bridge processor. Sounds great! The hardest thing to give up would be my iPhone (Cupertino) and I guess Hacker News. Although Apple is arguably the last vestige of the "old" Silicon Valley. Think about it: they're basically making their money these days selling cool-looking RISC machines running UNIX...
> Indeed, some implementations have already forked with an explicit intention of going on their own paths (Racket).

Racket takes an interesting approach with its scoped dialects. This allows the semblance (and some of the semantics) of separate implementations, while still preserving the interoperability[1].

[1] I have one project which uses libraries written in the base, typed, and lazy dialects all together, without any issue.
So they're talking about all of the AT&T APIs with respect to the 1 Million API calls which includes things like Watson translation and other such niceties.

Does that help explain?
One thing the Internet taught me is to never pass judgement on a one sided story. I'd love to hear the other side from the horse's mouth
Project Longhorn
I have this in my .bashrc:

function lc() { if [[ "$#" -gt 1 ]]; then for DIR in "$@"; do echo -n "$DIR - " ; ls -AU1 $DIR | wc -l ; done ; else ls -AU1 "$@" | wc -l ; fi; }

So, "lc /dir" will count the number of files in /dir and "lc /dir/*" will count the files in subdirectories of /dir. This is useful if you're working in an environment where you may have thousands of files in a directory, and a regular "ls -l" will lock your terminal while it eats your entire scrollback buffer.
From the article:

> A second study [23] found that high exposure to lead during childhood was linked to a permanent loss of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain associated with aggression control as well as what psychologists call "executive functions": emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility.
"VC-istan innovation is over"

Maybe. Much as I'd like to believe it, there are some things that can't be bootstrapped. Actually there are many things. We just don't do them because the VC's aren't funding them either. Perhaps they'll go back to it.

OTOH, VC access is one big reason innovation gets centralized to places like Silicon Valley. Reduce that friction and it can spread out more. Still doesn't fix the issue of networking for talent which is another network effect that clumps innovation.

I did my first startup in Houston, Texas. It was great. Extremely cheap. Built a product and got to profitability on about $600K of capital. Moved the company to Silicon Valley before ultimately selling it to Borland (it became Quattro Pro).

Houston worked for development because I could get talent out of Rice University and Univ. of Houston. Infrastructure was cheap because they were having a real estate crunch at the time. You could get free rent for 2 years in exchange for signing a 5 year lease.

What was hard was the marketing and networking. After riding planes to go to the East and West Coasts to get the product reviewed, I decided we had to move the company.

In the Internet age, that may be a lot less true. No particular advantage to doing my current bootstrap (CNCCookbook) in Silicon Valley other than that's where I live. Houston would be a lot cheaper.
Ctrl+l is my most used command. I need a clean terminal
Just wanted to say that I also always use your site. Super fast too!
Why would you prefer Chibi Scheme to Guile for embedding as a scripting language?
That's irrelevant if you ever want to go to the EU/UK.
There is a lot of money out there for hackers who want to make stuff for non-hackers; but I think a lot of HN'ers have problems figuring out what those things are.

Lots of hackers like to build things relevant to their own hobbies, but the problem is that if you make (say) a WoW character builder, some other hacker will build another one for free. (I don't play WoW so I don't know if my example made any sense, but you can fill in the blank for one that does.) They need to find something non-hackers want.

I don't think there is any list you or 'patio11 has of these things, or else the niche would already be filled. But I think that's what HN'ers want: "tell me what to build!" And they don't know what to build.
CasinoRPG, a real-time multiplayer HTML5 game
First, thanks for the honesty. We're far from where we want to be and I appreciate the criticism. I'll address your criticisms in another comment, but first I'd like to ask- what could we do to improve your academic search? Where are you coming from, and what do you need fixed?
No clean URLs?

How about setting up automated backups?
Couldn't agree more about needing to be the "default" solution. Pricing is a big challenge... we would ultimately like to offer a free tier that is completely subsidised by business users (and possibly paid consumer plans as well) but getting there is the hard part. We're thinking about fundraising, which would help, but we would still want to have a clear monetisation strategy so that our users know what they're getting into.

We've thought a lot about selling to businesses first (and have discussed similar projects with some clients) and may still choose to go that route but:

- Businesses already have access to a multitude of solutions for
secure *internal* communications.
- External communications face the same network problem as consumers,
but are compounded by the fact that businesses are far less likely
to send an invite or buy a "gift" subscription for their
clients/suppliers/etc.
- Businesses are far more resistant to changes in process/UX. We think
UX is going to be a big part of the solution.
- This may be more emblematic of my own ignorance than anything else,
but it is easier for me to think of consumer companies that have moved
"up" to enterprise sales than the other way around. I realise how naive
this sounds, but the purpose of this project really is to make encrypted
email/IM usable for *everyone*--it requires a consumer focus at some point.

As always, thanks so much for your thoughts on this. It's likely that our own ideas will be tempered by reality before too long ;)
"...customer's existing mobile numbers are no longer tied to a single device..."

Does this mean if the customer has an AT&T iPhone (for example) you can receive copies of SMS sent to their handset via the API, or is it still the case that you need a new virtual/tropo number or port your number away from the device?
I think the marketing you're thinking of when you think about Kalzumeus --- blog posts, year-end summaries, podcasts, email newsletters, video courses --- is stuff that did not matter when he was bootstrapping. There you'd be confusing cause with effect: the adept marketing you see today is a product of his nuts-and-bolts execution selling a product as a microISV and paying close attention to what was working.

There is a super power at play here, but it doesn't take a radioactive spider to get it. People who can simultaneously speak "customer service" and "technology" are rare. Many of the world's most successful software businesses have noticed that and achieved billions just by arbitraging a trivially corrected ineptitude common to programmers.
I presume "I want to make 80k" means USD80k, no choice of what currency I would like to earn.
Why I would pay for Twitter
I'm not sure if you responded to the wrong comment, or ... ?

I'm not talking about blatant dishonesty (bait and switch).

I have no idea what 37signals does.
The problem is that they keep expanding the list of emails and auto-subscribing everyone to each new one. So LinkedIn really is behaving like a bad-faith spammer. And when I click the "unsubscribe" link in the email, I don't get one-click unsubscribed, but instead it just dumps me on the "user preferences" page, then I have to hunt for the email settings and the specific box to uncheck.

The thing that infuriates me the most is when they send me a "reminder" email about an invitation I've already ignored. It's like they expect me to immediately log in and immediately respond to every piece of recruiter spam and "connection request" from people I don't know.

Dear LinkedIn: If I'm ignoring an "invitation", it's because I don't care about it, and I'll just click the "decline" button the next time I happen to log in. I don't want the "invitation reminder" emails, and there is no setting that I can find to unsubscribe from the "reminders".