skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if you're in technology, you shouldn't be investing in tech companies

Warren Buffett avoided investing in technology companies during the dot-com tech bubble because he didn't understand them. So according to the most legendary investor of all time, understanding what you invest in is crucial.

To exclude investing in tech companies because your income comes from tech companies might be a good strategy to diversify and mitigate against short-term market fluctuations. But it's an incredibly stupid strategy if you're shooting for growth and willing to accept some level of risk. Because your tech expertise gives you the best chance of actually investing intelligently in tech.
> The history is convoluted, but it boils down to a matter of

> copyright: For legal reasons, the standards organization,

> Ecma International, was unable to use the name “JavaScript”

> for its standard."

(from the sample chapter PDF)

He must mean "a matter of trademark" rather than "a matter of copyright".
There really is no point putting up a "fight". The content creators do not want to give their hardwork away. The content creators have to do whatever it takes to live. If the measures that they take legally bugs us, then we should create our own content and distribute it the way we want to or approach the courts. Talking about how a proprietary format is taking away our freedom will do nothing. And yes put your money where your mouth is. Support companies that do it the right way.
Couldn't they think of a more prejudicial title? The bill's substance is "plaintiffs to pay defendants". Plaintiffs are not trolls. Defendants are not innovators. Unsuccessful lawsuits are not frivolous (article's opening paragraph).

And TechCrunch is not journalism.
I'm not sure I understand what machine cost has to do with this since there are already quite a bit more OSX machines out there than Linux ones.

I'm actually surprised the OSX 'share' is that low, my guess is Mac gamers are happy buying their games off the Mac App store for now (most are available there).
I think employers will be interested in hiring you for such projects only if you have demonstrated knowledge and experience in the field. If your work experience primarily consists of RoR web development, most employers will pass. It's not that it's implied that if you do RoR, you won't know about algorithms and AI, but there is a high correlation, and sorting through a ton of RoR resumes to find a worthwhile candidate is too much work.

You can work on hard projects on your own. Once you have made substantial contributions, you will have credentials to interest the employers. Most of the open, hard projects have very few full time developers. PyPy has only 3 I believe. If you have something to contribute, people will be more than happy to have you on-board.
Im channeling Peter Thiel here: there is little connection between hard and valuable. The goal of most companies is to create value, and do it without expanding too much effort.

If you really want to challenge yourself give yourself a goal like:

1. Decode the genome
2. Find the correlation between all aspects of someones lifestyle, diet, and their health.
3. Solve poverty - maybe there is an economic solution.

The world is full of hard problems, but you have to take the lead if you want to work on them.
The difference is those are presented as being fiction and this is being presented as a true story.

If this blog post were presented honestly, as a work of fiction, it would never have made it to the top of HN. Nobody would care. Because as fiction it's not interesting.
IT's not even as good as the iPad, which unlike the pixel, can run more than just a web browser.

The iPad costs about 1/3 the price, and it does more and is better made.

Comparing this to the MBA is like comparing a feature phone to a netbook.
serverside templating
No, AFAIK.
"Tiered compilation, introduced in Java SE 7, brings client startup speeds to the server VM.
...
Tiered compilation is now the default mode for the server VM. "

Again, AFAIK, the server VM still has a significantly different set of tuning than the client VM. In particular, it runs some significantly more complex opts that the client VM does not.
> Besides, if you're in technology, you shouldn't be investing in tech companies.

I find that to be an odd maxim. Certainly one should limit exposure to acceptable risk tolerance… say 10-15% of portfolio; however, being in the industry we have significant insight into trends, viability, capital allocation, reputation, market forces, etc. Why wouldn't we leverage that knowledge for investment? When most CIOs were mocking AAPL, the stock was in the low $100s, it was a great time to invest for anyone who spotted the early trend.
I'm sure there's a couple hundred thousand other people like you.

That's not what taligent is talking about.

Apple ships tens of millions of devices in a quarter.

Google's never had a hardware hit, not even close.
They aren't bad, its just a question of where you put your focus. So while IRC could be used by businesses, its pretty rare (which surprised me, to be honest, but there you go).

For notifications, my point was the way of implementation. For open source projects, there tends to be a fairly low-traffic mailing list where all notifications are sent. For businesses, there tend to be way more commits, and developers care a lot less about what happens in branches they aren't working on. So we personalized our emails so only the right people get the right emails.

So its both a case of which features to prioritize, and the way the features are implemented, that make the difference for commercial web development teams :)
Try looking for bioinformatics jobs. It involves big data where the amount of data to be analyzed is growing exponentially every year, a lack of knowledge on what to research to provide meaningful results, and huge benefit when people come up with novel ways to interpret data successfully.

It will involve acquiring some domain specific knowledge to be truly successful (what hard problem doesn't?), but you will be able to dive in straight away and make huge contributions just by making current analysis more efficient!
When advertising becomes content, who wins— advertisers? publishers? both?
The example I linked in another comment (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-stonehenge.html) is blocked in Europe, despite your pricing data showing that it would cost PBS the same to deliver there as in the US. So I'm not convinced it's about delivery cost.

For clarity, let's not talk about Downton Abbey--that's a more complicated topic because it's not PBS-produced content as far as I know.
Apple Versus Salmonella
One non-obvious landmine with the heroku console, it attaches to a running web process. One day I had a typo in one of my console commands:

Post = Post.count
# instead of "post = Post.count"

Which re-assigned the Post class to a number. Then we started getting production airbrake errors where the Post class was now a FixNum, /facepalm.

It was an easy fix, just restart all of the servers, but I was very surprised to say the least.

Note: I believe this was with the Bamboo stack. I'm not sure if this is still true with the Cedar stack.
As a long-time Steam user on OSX (I have the TF2 earbuds to prove it,) the games available on OSX and Linux are a paltry offering (one of the top selling games right now on OSX is "Left 4 Dead 2" released in 2009.)

There are few top-tier games. Borderlands 2 is the only recent game that comes to mind. It became so discouraging that I built a PC gaming machine. I hope for a day where I can buy new games on an OSX or Linux machine, but I do not plan on holding my breath.
Innovation is not just about being different, its about being different successfully.

I give credit to MSFT for ... finally, after 2 decades... trying to innovate. I don't think they will be successful with these products, but possibly they can iterate on them until they are successful.

This is a lot more than google has done, and you're right, people should make the comparison to 1990s Microsoft which used FUD to kill innovation in the industry.

Fortunately, Balmer seems to have killed that ability in 2007 when he said there was no chance the iPhone would be successful.

Maybe MSFT has turned a corner. And unlike google and everyone else, they actually have a license from Apple to use multi-touch, etc, so they're actually legitimate competitors.
I found it hilarious that the author of this piece feels that calling a non-black person a "thug" is racist.

Um, the word thug is actually of Indian origin. It's borrowed into English. So based on this logic the original thugs who were Indian are now racist.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=thug
Apologies, but most of my feedback is from your website & sales. I'm not in the Bay area quite yet.. soon, and have never had a "Satay" (rural midwestern guy). They sound pretty good though.

Just one suggestion on the website that would take maybe an hour to fix. Your menu is a giant, low-quality PNG. I can barely read it, and zooming in just makes it worse. You either need to make it real HTML so I can zoom in and read it, or make it a PDF. Make sure your menu and website are VERY accessible via mobile -- if its hard to read on a nice desktop display, it's going to be next to impossible to read on Firefox mobile.

Also, your "Catering Menu" link goes nowhere. There is at least one image in your gallery that says "this is a test".

The pictures look fantastic!

Sales-wise, have you tried cold-calling start ups that are near you? Or have you attended any of the start up groups / meetings / events? Or outright asked to cater them? Spend a few hours on Monday cold-calling some local government offices, they don't cater often but something like satays might be unique enough to prompt them to try it out. For tech companies, reach out to their main account on Twitter. When they book you, tweet about it to help them get cross-promotion.

At this point, it sounds like you need clients more than branding -- reach out and grab some clients!

Do not annoy them. Make sure you keep track of who you call & when, who you reached (if anyone). Even if you only reach a support member or an engineer, if it sounds good they might mention it to feed their next hackathon. Don't expect that every call nets you an order or large catering deal.
Lets consider Maths, as an example to answer that.
Well, up till college, we are taught to solve problems that are already solved, towards our PhD, we come across problems that haven't been solved, they are hard, but they are not the end of it, beyond that lies a sanctum, where you must find a problem and fix it. Thats what entrepreneurs do, it may sound easy, but do not be fooled by it, because being an entrepreneur it seems easy when you have found a problem and its solution, or as Steve Jobs said " looking back, the dots connect but 20 years ago, looking forward, they did not"

Billions of people around the globe haven't even noticed many a problems, yet a handful of entrepreneurs did, wasn't that the first part of problem solving, and if you haven't probably noticed, you are here after all, so you might unconsciously know the answer lays somewhere around here.

So from my eyes, whether its programming or maths, the hardest problems that exist are the problems no one has noticed yet.

For your case, you might want to find a problem of programming, if you have programmed for that many years, you will surely run into one, that no one has noticed. If you haven't, as Steve Jobs also said "Keep Looking"
This is, believe it or not, not even the dumbest part about DMCA. However the legalese is worded, it seems mostly focused towards trying to prevent mass copyright infringement in a digital age.

If you're someone who just wants to use your legally-acquired media then IMO (and IANAL!) you should fall into the "Reverse Engineering/Interoperability" exception of 1201(f) http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap12.html

They word it as the exception being granted for "programs exchanging information with programs" but I see no reason why that would not mean, in practice, libdvdcss <=> foo_player.

Going back to what I said at first, a far dumber part of DMCA is that they actually ban the manufacture and import of analog video playback equipment (VHS, Beta, etc.) that doesn't obey "automatic gain control" copy control features. How many electrical engineering students might have run afoul of that in the course of their studies? (Edit: 1201(k) for those who want the reference)
>The important question here is, are you likely to be prosecuted for such a dumb thing.

That is not the important question. The important question is whether people engaged in legitimate activity will modify their behavior in order to avoid the possibility of being prosecuted for such a dumb thing. Which has already happened. Ubuntu doesn't include DVD playback support. Nobody makes a DVD jukebox like what Real wanted to make when the courts shut them down. The amount of innovation that hasn't happened because nobody can sell it in Walmart without risking a lawsuit or criminal prosecution is unthinkable and we are all poorer for it.

The point of articles like this is to get more people behind doing something about it. There is no legitimate reason that circumventing DRM when there is no underlying act of infringement should be illegal. The entire concept of criminalizing circumvention is a failure and a farce, but criminalizing circumvention without infringement is (as you rightly point out) just plain ludicrous. So let's fix that at the very least.
Justice is rarely found in courts.

That said, individuals with little financial means may qualify for financial aid for court proceedings (sometimes combined with a reduced court fee).

Also, many standard family insurances and standard business insurances have coverage for legal costs.

Finally, many European countries have a wide range of complaint boards, which have speedy and informal proceedings (sometimes their decisions have binding effect).
It sounds like going to a Disney Land and complaining that all rides are easy. If you want tough and challenging rides go to SixFlags.

If you want to tackle tough challenges may be ruby/rails is not the ideal place. Perhaps learn C,C++ and implement faster ruby or javascript interpreter or implement a distributed filesystem in ruby or java. You can also contribute to the rails framework.
Steve Smith On Optimizing For Happiness
It's not the only way but a PhD will certainly open a lot more doors at the "high end" research end of things. That said, even Microsoft Research will hire "Research Software Development Engineers" who work with researchers to implement cutting edge stuff as well as migrate it into regular Microsoft products, and only a bachelor's is required: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/jobs/fulltime/technical.... .. these sort of roles can blossom into more challenging and more research oriented work over long periods of time.

This is a rather crude generalization, but PhDs are often demanded at high end research positions not to prove you know your stuff, but to guarantee you have the mettle to do research and bounce back from failure after failure.. a must if you're working on someone else's dime. Of course, if you can find another way to support yourself, you can do (almost) any research you like in your own time without strings attached ;-)
Google glass is just a bluetooth headset with a display and camera, combined with a SIRI like service.

People seem to think it's a competitor to the iPhone, but it's an ACCESSORY that needs and iPhone to connect to the network.

Worse, it has no technology (other than miniturization) that hasn't been done many times before-- I first saw a "glass" type system in the 1980s.... and that one actually had a computer on board!
I would think by trends a gamer is more likely to a more technical person. I love linux but frankly I know many people who can barely use a mac, and linux is beyond their technical capabilities without much learning. So I'd currently guess that linux will end up with a higher percentage on steam stats than other stats. Also, many people once choose windows solely to play games. Linux platforms offer lots of potential once the kinks get worked out and the critical tipping point is passed, which steam may just have crossed with a single step.
I explained in another comment why BBC is different: when British citizens leave the country, they stop paying for the BBC (via taxes and via TV license). When US citizens live abroad, they keep paying, but stop receiving.

I have no idea what republican talking points you're referring to. Let's just stipulate that if the republicans say the same thing I say, it's a coincidence. I don't even live in the US.
Follow the advice in http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for-programmers... and learn math. Once you have the skills to do the interesting stuff, you start to see opportunities to do it in the oddest of places. For instance I've been paid to do things like statistics and machine learning on "simple CRUD apps".

Maybe you won't be that lucky. But if you don't have the required skills, then you definitely won't be that lucky.

Incidentally a fun place to test the intersection between math and programming is http://projecteuler.net/. Besides, it is fun.
Steam's support on OS X is the suck. I don't know what the experience is like on Linux, but given there is less competition from better stores on Linux I wouldn't be surprised to see Steam be a big hit on Linux.

As for me, after being a steam user for years, but given the fact that I haven't been able to play team fortress for 5 months now despite playing it for years, in the future, I'll use the Mac App Store.
Writing a distributed database is pretty challenging. That's part of the reason I started a NoSQL company some time ago. Unfortunately it failed due to lack of funding, but if you're interested, here's a technical write-up:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.3860
Yes, 99% agree. But a word for the BBC and its iPlayer. Well ahead of the game. I remember years ago chatting with some Americans who were literally gob smacked that we has such a thing, not only that, the bandwidth to make it generally usable. TV wise, the UK has been brilliant. So good that its almost not worth downloading UK TV shows at all. OK, if you want shows from pay channels you have to be paying, but I suppose that counts as fair enough. Not perfect, but, um, industry defensible, ish.

Movies and music are still a mess though.

Also, not so sure the technology is entirely responsible for the difficulties these businesses are having. I think it partly an excuse. One of the big things they have against them, is that our money now has more places for us to chose for it to go. There is a lot more to spend our money one, and many chose not to spend money on TV, movies and music. Especially when a huge opinion is that the quality had lowered to a lowest common denominator.

In the past they (TV, music, movies) had a monopoly over our spare cash. They could dictate. I think history will see the last 50 years as a weird anomaly where the media had a disproportionate amount of control over the market. Look at the 70's, no competition from out side the industry. Total control. Cartel like pricing. The whole period was a joke in favour of these industries. It work and they liked it.

Now, not only as you say the technology has over taken them, but there are now other things to spend money on. If they were to completely secure their medium, and we had no way round it, many would just do with out, still spending money on other things. Worse now in a recession as spare cash tightens up. Might even hurt them because the free advertising of illegal down loading would cease. For example, I might down load a movie, and tell others how great it was. I might never buy it, but some of my friends might. Well, I know that is true. Several movies I've torrented have been since bought on DVD or watch on a legit online paid for service as a result of me illegally seeing it and raving on about it to others. Heh, right now my son is paying to watch 24 online because I went on about how good it was.

What is appalling about the whole thing is the governments colluding with the dying dinosaurs to use the instrument of law to keep the rotting failed businesses in business. If the US, etc, were really capitalists they would let capitalism work, supply and demand, and allow these businesses if necessary to go bust. Then people would have to innovate and create something new to move on. But this is strangled while the deluded government and businesses struggle on by criminalising and terrorising people with heavy handed laws that ruin lives. Its a complete abuse of power and democracy, leaving capitalism limp and useless.

Oh. Too much. Sorry.... Hope no one has lapsed in to a coma. :)
I got lucky and transitioned (in the same company) to a search project from CRUD - which I find vastly more interesting.

But my advice is to pick hard problems yourself and try to solve them. You need to start somewhere! Sure its expensive to get your hands on driving car hardware, but there are plenty of hard problems out there that need solving and can be done using opensource and your personal computer.

If you are able to get yourself through a really tough problem, you will come out better on the other side - even if it takes you years to solve.
They say crash, I'd say correction. AAPL has shot up by over 6,000% in the past ten years. And this recent move hasn't even dropped it below the price it commanded prior to Steve Jobs' passing.
Office relations guide: how to avoid being a sex pest in the workplace
relevant HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968452
Your argument is that if we disagree with a preposterous law, we should have to opt out of the law by opting out of popular culture. Why shouldn't we just fix the law?
One word: paparazzi. They've rented helicopters to get pictures of weddings. Cheap and easy drones? They'll be hovering over every starlet's swimming pool attempting to get bikini pics. Private graveyard service? No worries, 10 drones hovering 10 feet above to capture the video of the grieving widow. What's to keep people from using drones to hover outside Donald Trump's windows 24/7 streaming views of his living room?

Sure, your average joe nobody is not likely to be targeted, but as the cost to acquire aerial video goes from $x,xxx an hour for a helicopter, to $x/hr for a drone, it will be used far more widely. In the past, it was prohibitively expensive and time consuming to do surveillance work. Now a smart phone with 4G tied to a balloon can stream HD feeds.

In the past, you had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the curtilage of your home. If drones can take high resolution photos (and video) from the air, this becomes null and void. I personally would prefer we have laws to protect privacy instead being forced to completely enclose all outdoor pools or risk showing up on poolperv.com's drone feeds. (Per my reading, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act of 2004 would not ban bathing suit video)
Sorry, I dont know. I always bought my books since I am a student (spending lot of money into them btw). Unfortunatly, books that worth the money, and my time reading them are not so numerous.

Anyway, I guess internet is still a good place to find publicly available information not yet copyrighted by some doomed organisation.
He meant inequity.
If that were true, there would be no point in incorporating! Businesses are very distinct from groups of private citizens.
Game engines are hard. Working on CryEngine, UnrealEngine, idTech7, or something equivalent sounds very challenging. Games involve AI, physics simulation, concurrency, high performance, and more. The salaries is not that great in the game industry though.
Lightning is much, much, much more sophisticated than the brain-damage that is USB [1].

[1] http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/
It's funny, because you put the words "Mac" and "gamers" together.

Most Mac gamers will have a bootcamp partition running windows and Steam.