skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which hobbyist invented the web? Blogs? It isn't at all obvious to me who he is citing, if these people are hobbyists.

Also, was "most" open source software a hobby, or a professional scratching an itch?

And the first pc? Is Chris trying to say that's woz, and he was a hobbyist?

The whole blog post is a little too pat.
I think this is, on the whole, probably false. There are a lot of things the smartest people do on the weekend which will never catch on, because there is not much of a business case behind them. Not everything interesting is monetizable.

One example: a lot of the smartest computer scientists of the 1960s were really into algorithmic art as a side-project hobby. Was algorithmic art mainstream in the 1970s? No. Hell, it isn't even mainstream today.
I thought of it always as "What technologists, teenagers, and rap artists do, we'll all be doing in 5 years."

I never thought I'd see news anchors do an exploding fist bump.
> Its just nice though, if you often find yourself working on raw tables using one of the many Admin tools. Sometimes you just need it to work like Excel to be productive.

Clearly this is a bug in the admin tool? I seem to recall MS SQL allows you to "drag columns around" -- obviously doing absolutely nothing to the database -- it's just a view. After all rows are just relational tuples -- they have no ordering.
I'm going to guess that MySQL can do this largely as a side-effect of swappable engines.

There is, however, a lot to be said for close coupling between query planning, on-disk format, indexing and so forth.

edit: as for patching, the PostgreSQL source is some of the best I've ever read. Carefully organised, fastidiously documented, immaculately consistent to coding standards. It's a delight.
I was planning to switch from verizon to tmobile value for a while now. Even with ETF on verizon it is worth it. Now the only concern I have is network quality, which as I've heard is not that great even in big cities (opinions welcome).

But I really want this model to win, so I think I will switch regardless.
You make a good point about it not fitting the international narrative, but then water can be sourced anywhere and they mention the word twice.
Really? You would throw out a helpful presentation for style points?
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing http://www.smh.com.au/news/Western-Australia/Pinjarra/2005/0... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_River_%28Western_Austral... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinjarra,_Western_Australia
Yes, see jailbreaking. iPhones were hacked before a native SDK was officially available.
>To give an example of the more scientific nature of CS, the study of quantum computing is almost solely in the domain of computer scientists and physicists.

This is still begging the question of if quantum computing is a science. Quantom physics is clearly an area of science, as it is based around understanded the physical mechanics of the universe. Quantom computing is based on applying our knowledge of Quantom mechanics to engineer a system whose results can be used to answer some computational question.

The only part of computer science that I can confidently say falls in the domain of science is P=NP (slightly generalized). It is my understanding that everytime we have found some physical phenomena that would allow us to solve NP-Hard problems in polynomial time, the laws of physics ended up working out to require some exponential input. This is a question that seems to speak to the nature of the universe, and has predictive power.
"Business people vote with their dollars, and are mostly trying to create near term financial returns. Engineers vote with their time, and are mostly trying to invent interesting new things."

I really like that.
Something strange happened here. Google displays `stackoverflow.com` content in `doioig.gov` description. For example I can see `careers 2.0` in the description of `doioig.gov` that really doesn't have.
Is usenet not the precursor to Reddit? And the first blogs were certainly hobbiests. look at BBS zines as one example.
Trusting whois data isn't a good idea. With most registrars you can write into those fields whatever you want. Just because a domain tells you it belongs to someone, doesn't actually mean that it belongs to this person.
What's interesting to one person may have value to just that person, or it might be applicable to wider audiences.

Things that have value (to people in general) are monetizable.

That would explain why not all interesting things are monetizable.
Day in and day out there are articles on here talking about how the smartest people "optimize" their time as if just relaxing and doing stuff with your friends/family is something only the unwashed masses do. Frankly I like my weekends a lot better when I'm not subjecting myself to "time optimization" or hobbies that take over my life.
Please someone say a name or citation already. Who the heck invented usenet?
It's more than just having value— the key element of monetization is being able to capture that value. Some kinds of value tend to diffuse in a difficult-to-capture way, while others are easier to turn into cash that goes into your own pocket. The most valuable things I've done myself are probably things where I've captured very little of the value. I've written hundreds of Wikipedia articles that have been read by millions of people, and done a lot of work on open-source projects, but I have captured no dollars from those activities. There might be some theoretical way of capturing the value those activities have produced, but I didn't avail myself of it, and on the whole I think it's difficult. But there are other things I've done, with lower value, which have put more cash in my pocket.
Well, yeah, it's generally a first step — last few cases were Kickstarter-related campaign stuff, so I could look for evidence that they actually sent it, and then hope it's actually that thing. But this just goes further to illustrate that this is a really bad idea — there is good way to validate such an email.
Interesting to note that only 3 out of the 8 $1B+ IPO-exit companies have current valuation that is greater than valuation at exit. Those three are LinkedIn, Kayak, and Yelp.

As for the rest:

FB -$35B

Groupon -$14B

Zynga -$5.8B

Pandora -$1.8B

HomeAway -$500M
I wonder how feasible it would be to add a plugin to the Evernote application to tie in with GnuPG through gpgme.
Yeah, I've signed up for about a dozen Coursera, Udacity and CalTech courses over the past year, and finished 3 with enough work for certificate of completion, and put in enough work on a few more to get something out of them.
I'm not very familiar with it, but the big Free SQL Server that everyone seems to keep forgetting, Firebird, appears to have at least some of these:

http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/sql-conformance/

Whenever I think of Firebird, i get a little bit of a bad conscience because I've never really played with it :-)
The Disruptive Technology That Will Replace Facebook
Information finds people instead of people have to search for it.
"Hasn't stopped me from writing poems in my spare time and engaging in my other pursuits."

This is the epitome of the lack of concern for creative practices that gnosis is referring to. It's a "spare time" thing. Anyone can do it. It's not a real job. It doesn't deserve the effort or respect that STEM gets. (I'm not saying this is what you believe, but this is a trope I've noticed.)

The idea that there is widespread respect for creative types of all breeds is hogwash. I work as both a front-end web developer and a web designer. I can provide the exact same quote for the exact same amount of work for those two fields, but I have to fight tooth and nail to get anywhere close to my estimate if it's a design project.
What was the earn out? What was the due diligence before that was inked? I question that valuation whenever it comes up. Seems awful convenient to turn down $6B from the world's most analytical company, just before a public offering.
Tom Truscott[1] and Jim Ellis[2] invented Usenet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_(computing)
Here is a video documentary by Nat Geo on Tesla, Model S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvPosSzUGVI

Elon explains the master plan himself.
Well actually, "stack overflow" should ideally refer to the programming error. The site being talked about is "StackOverflow", and if that term is queried in any search engine, it should, and will provide the correct result.
Mark, it would be helpful if you would disclose if you are a paying customer or not, and if not if having additional security options would convert you into a paying customer.

The reasoning is pretty simple, people want security but they don't want to pay for it. And while we can debate the argument as to whether or not security is part of a MVP or not, I would not be offended if there were additional security capabilities to paid users but not free users.
This sounds something like an astroturf for a brown chemical drink which sure as eggs is eggs will rot your teeth and kill you sooner than if you drink clean water (or moderate amounts of wine for that matter).
We can make the globalisation and connectedness point a lot more clearly and ideologically neutrally without promoting useless Lowest Common Denominator products that merely waste our resources and do not add to the total sum of human happiness.
Every Software Engineer Needs Rules To Code By
I don't mean to be condescending, but the only "telling" thing about that is your inexperience. If you already know it's a place you couldn't stand to live, it's an extremely bad idea to move there. Do not second-guess yourself like this! You will end up regretting it.

Telecommuting is not for everyone, but being new to the industry, your perspective is likely to change over the next few years if you stick around. I'm not saying it'll reverse -- you may find that your first impression was right -- but your point of view will be altered by your experiences, and without those experiences to draw on, you cannot expect to have a well-formed impression of this arrangement.

Not liking working at home is not a good reason to move to a place where you won't like going outside.
> Engineers vote with their time

This is a good description. We really do. It's pretty much our currency for getting what we really want.
I see where Chris is getting at, but he's not generalizing it well.

I think a better rule of thumb would be:
Look at what new and upcoming technologies people with large domain expertise are excited about. Those technologies will probably be included in business practices within that domain in the near future.

Edit: It's also a rather self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously industry leaders will pave the way for their pet interests to gain more mainstream acceptance, and at the same time those who look up to said leaders often outsource the mental overhead of investigating the newest technologies to leaders who's purpose is to guide the community. This cycle is rather exacerbated when a leader creates a new technology that he/she is now interested in distributing.
I think Amazon does a pretty good job vetting merchants. While they aren't as good as Amazon at sending me things, they generally do a pretty good job. The only thing I dislike is how often the spam me with things like "Is everything ok? If there are problems please contact us immediately!" I know why they do this (unhappy customers = no longer able to accept Amazon payments), but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Nothing a mail filter can't solve, however :)
and you? You castigate a poster for doing exatly what you are doing yourself. Ironically recursive.

It's important that the elites of this world understand what harm they and their tribes are doing, intentionally or not, because awareness comes before action!
> Except that in order to become healthier, you don't have to take someone else's health away.

Yes an in order to become wealthier you do not have to take someone else's wealth away. A brief look at history will show this to be true
While I don't disagree with the principle of this logic,

The logic seems to involve defining "smartest" as "did stuff on the weekend as a hobby that they later were able to turn into a successful business, product or tool."

There seems to be a serious selection bias going on.

Do we have any data on the stuff smart people have done on the weekend that never became anything notable?
I don't think they'll like the idea of dealing with Apple after they left Oracle. They have better things to do.
"It’s also clear that Amazon doesn’t care about what it sells; it just cares about the selling."

On the contrary. It's clear that Bezos cares very much about books. Yes, he sells lots of other stuff, and yes, he's in business to make a profit, but no one who's followed his career could seriously deny that books are very special to him.
> Nobody actually confuses my grandmother happily exclaiming, "Oh, the decorations in this room are so gay!" (true story)

Notice how you had to qualify your hypothetical statement with "grandmother", re-read your own statement without your qualifier: "the decorations in this room are so gay!"? Still think "nobody" would confuse that?

Honestly, if you change your qualifier it only becomes more confusing what that statement means or which definition is intended:

1. What about your hypothetical seventh grader what would it mean if the seventh grader said, "the decorations in this room are so gay!"? Does it automatically become offensive unlike your grandmother saying it? What if the seventh grader was LGBT?

2. Finally, please tell me what an algorithm means when it automates the same statement, "the decorations in this room are so gay!"? Is the algorithm your grandmother or the seventh-grader?
I had asked about both PUBLIC UNDERGRAD and PUBLIC MEDICAL SCHOOL.

State University of New York Undergrad including all expenses is about $22K per year (just checked) or about $90K

The NY State Med School Tuition is about $30K per year or $120K + living expenses.

So for around $250K one can get both Undergrad and Medical Education.

A number of people graduating from medical school have large debt precisely because they do not choose to go to both public undergrad AND public medical school.

4 years undergrad private school can be about $250 K for tuition and living costs. Thus, by choosing to attend public undergrad and medical school can cost the same as private undergrad alone.
Until you get into the cloud stuff... AWS, EBS and all that... I'm sure you start losing people at that point.
I'm really surprised that the people teaching at Harvard don't seem to be putting forth any effort to make assignments that are at least somewhat difficult to cheat on. I'm only a grad student at a Big Ten school but I always try to make my assignments require something that they can't just copy down from someone else even if it is just randomized questions. Obviously this is easier in some disciplines than others but even when I was an undergrad back in the early 90s I took an intro-level Physics course where every student's test was randomly generated from a bank of questions (admittedly it wasn't very good. One test I remember getting the same question 3 times!).
Certainly there were multiple factors involved, but from what I've read, both stopping the Soviet advance (by ending the war earlier), and "sending a message" to the Soviets, were very much part of the decision to drop the bombs.
Hashes are mathematically proven to be irreversible except through rainbow tables (easily beaten with salting) or brute force. There's no faith needed (well, I suppose that non-mathematicians like myself have to put faith in the math, but I trust the hundreds of independent studies of these algorithms quite well), and it's not anything close to "security through obscurity".

That said, you are right. You should always change passwords that are leaked. This, however, is due to the poor security practices of most companies, not some bizarre distrust of hashes.
It is totally worth it when a side projects gets serious, our hackathon project made more impact than our main product

However a growth hack for 3Crumbs evolved into http://Justmigrate.com We treated it as a hackathon project, had full freedom to ideate & execute. We build this after hours for a month & it was a great success. Lot of users loved it & this bought tears in our eyes :).

Weekend hackathons are important, it lets you think out of the box. Now our original product is seeing lot of evolution for better growth.
You can go a long way in life by reducing your not-fucking-up rate. And most businesses fail because they make a mistake that has been made before.

All the high-leverage decisions about business are easy to adjust before you launch it. For example: "should I pursue this business idea?"

These days I weigh my interest in the topic, my knowledge of the topic, a rough estimate of the market size, a guess at what kind of value the product would bring and a gut feel for how hard it would be to develop the product to a marketable state.

I've discarded dozens of ideas this way. Hundreds. It seems cool, but then I think about it ... and nope my way out of there. I'll leave it to the passionate artists.
Even stranger my second link makes it a 'sample' ebook which is why only the copyright page shows up. It is a short story like 16 pages, and I hoped to develop it into a full novel eventually. I wanted feedback from readers before writing more of it. Yet the first link is the original first edition before I made any changes to it, and you can read it formatting errors, etc and all.

Also the first edition did not have hyperlinks but the second edition did.

Oddly enough it does work somewhat. I wonder what other ebooks are sample only and which ones are the full version?

Anyway I just uploaded a new edition of the ebook, in 24 hours Amazon will approve or reject it. I wanted to give it away for free, but Amazon limits that, not only that but the lowest I can charge is $0.99USD and they won't let me self publish it to other ebook stores.

If anyone wants a free copy, email me at orionblastar@gmail.com if interested.
> And the first pc?

The nearly-forgotten pre-microprocessor Kenbak-1:

> The Kenbak-1 is considered by the Computer History Museum and the American Computer Museum[1] to be the world's first "personal computer".[2]

> It was designed and invented by John Blankenbaker of Kenbak Corporation in 1970, and was first sold in early 1971.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1

The Apple 1 was many things, but there were personal computers before it; it was not the first in that field.
Aaaaaaand, looks like it's back to normal. :)

http://googl.com/#q=stack+overflow
Can either of you read? He was placed in protective custody because they feared he was a suicide risk.
Huh??? What are you talking?
It really doesn't take that long to figure out if you are the corporate type or not. I spent 10 months at a large tech consulting firm and knew that wasn't the work life I wanted.
Mmm... maybe. Most people could probably understand "they'll rent you a computer to run your website".
> Is usenet not the precursor to Reddit?

Debatable. Usenet is decentralized as opposed to being dependent on a single bank of computers and beholden to a single group of owners.
This. The energy output of the Sun is legit ridonculous.

Something along the lines of 1 or 2 all the energy ever consumed by humans since forevers per second.
They're also good at vetting buyers. As a merchant, I appreciate the fact that even when the most skeezy-feeling buyers are legitimate. You can get screwed by the customer service requirements, but at least you see fewer customers with fake credit cards and the like.

The spam you'd describing is an attempt to get you to rate them. I've sold many things, and the rating rate is less than 10%, so you need to sell a lot to get out of the new vendor ghetto.
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It's been a few decades since I have read the paper, so it seems my memory is a bit fuzzy on that regard.

On the other hand, given that C always had issues to beat even unoptimized Fortran, due to the optimization restrictions before C99, it is quite commendable that Lisp achieves such results.
The sentiment is that tomorrow's markets and innovations comes from people that are on the edges, fringes, and seemingly wasting their time. Everyone loves and applauds the idea of innovation in abstract, but few people recognize it while it's happening, even those in tech.

Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends that do that", etc.

Search was considered non-monetizable at first. That's why internet giants of the 90's, like Yahoo, were focused on being portals.

PCs were considered too much of a toy to actually do any type of work. Back then, you did serious work on shared on on mainframes.

Radios, when shown to initial investors had one quip, "Why would I want to send messages to nobody in particular?"

When TV was shown to the same innovators in radio, they didn't think it would ever catch on.

Whether large numbers are divisible by primes seems like a useless branch of mathematics called number theory, but we found it useful for encryption. Without it, we wouldn't have online commerce, for math started 2 or 3 centuries ago, when there was no online commerce.

Point is, innovation happens when people try new and different things, even if they're weird. Even if they seem useless. Even if no one else is doing them. Even if people think it's stupid. Even if it doesn't make you money. Because there's something else that's motivating you to explore.

You don't have to be smart to try new weird things, but smart people tend to not worry about what other people think and go ahead and try new things.

Perhaps your quibble is the order of the statement. It's defn true that not all things that smart people do in their free time become something mainstream. But it's defn true that everything that we do nowadays, it was, at one time, something some smart person was already doing years ago.

So if you ever spot someone doing something seemingly weird, strange, useless, non-montetizable, but defn new, then stop yourself from being a cynic because it might be something you end up doing yourself in 10 years, as improbable as that seems now.
Awesome. But hardly the main point for the OP.
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Yes I got bitten by their lack of customer support a couple of weeks ago. I did a release and the rails asset pipeline stopped precompiling the resources. I'd tested in staging so this came as a bit of a surprise. I promptly rolled back to the previous release(had been working fine for days) only to find that that now was broken as well. With my production app now broken I fired off a request for support. At this time we were running 8 dynos and 3 workers(not to mention a bunch of addons). This was also Saturday afternoon, which turned out to be a bit of a problem, I received an auto-response saying that support was only available Monday to Friday! Paying the premium rates for heroku and not receiving support for a production failure really was a bitter pill to swallow. We're running fast at the moment and don't have time to switch off but when we do will certainly be looking at the options.