skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that mechanical computers are dismissed too quickly. Babbage was a perfectionist, and his machines were crippled by the reliance on decimal numbers. Konrad Zuse constructed his Z1[1] singlehandedly over a period of several years, based on a binary design. While the Z1 was only Turing Complete by technicality (it had the same instruction set as the relay-based Z3[2]) and it was fairly unreliable, it could have been built with more primitive technology and paved the way for significant improvements.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
[2] http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Kommentare/Html/0684/universal2.html
I wonder if the posthaven founders have decided to make this into an open source like "foundation" (garrytan had mentioned interest in an earlier comment [1])

I think a lot of people could get behind the idea of a permanent entity that wasn't a for profit corporation. There is a strong case for building something that endures, something that can be counted on to last for decades if not centuries. Fiduciary responsibility means that corporations must sell their assets or shut down service if it's the most profitable thing to do. Not to mention that companies can wind up selling all kinds of data and usage information to whoever in a fire sale scenario.

The world needs more services with incentives aligned to long term investment and global benefit as opposed to quarterly earnings numbers. Plus posthaven founders are a rare type of people with a record of making cool things. They have the ability to put together something that will be as useful in 2065 as it is today.

A sort of "Posthaven Permanence Foundation" would be interesting. The key insight is that it might be valuable/profitable immediately, or even in the next 10 or 20 years. But if my back-of-the-envelopes are correct, posthaven could run for a very long time on a relatively small amount of capital. Organizations that are built around long term value have a way of winning in the end.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229862
Did anyone else notice that most of the organizations that are facilitating these treatments seem to be Watsi clones, or at least very similar in spirit?

http://amhf.us/,
https://secure.cure.org/curekids/donate,
http://rickhodes.org/ricks-patients/,
http://www.csc.org/donate.php,
http://www.nyayahealth.org/donate/

This makes me worry that this is not direct donation, but through one or more layers of brokering.

[Links taken from the transparency document,
https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah...]
The problem really is in defining a computer. The first mechanical computer was not designed by Charles Babbage. Some thing like a clock/wrist watch is a mechanical computer. A marine chronometer like this(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer) is an advanced mechanical computer. The marine chronometer of the 17th century in our terms was basically a GPS device of that era.

Think of it that way. How do you think future generations hundreds of years now will look at our server farms. I bet our server farms won't even fall in their definition of a computer(or whatever term used to define a computer at their time).
Good point, but the question the article addresses is if they could have physically built one, not designed one.
This would be fun inserted into Rome, Sweet Rome:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome
I use something similar already. I've a domain that is used purely for my email. Normal addresses like webmaster@ are rejected. A script on the server takes the domain I am registering for a service on (eg "google.com"), generates an random-looking but deterministic address, and creates an alias for that address to my real inbox.

End result is that everyone gets a unique email that can't be guessed, I can nuke an address as soon as it starts sending me spam (often) and my true inbox is typically completely clean.

I initially made the mistake of trusting my bank and utility billing systems with my real address. Turns out my power company had their database compromised, and when I called to inform them they refused to believe me (like Dropbox).
Especially agreed on the drinks part.

The organizers of last 2 hackathon I participated seems to think that there is no meaning in providing plain water when they have soft drinks for the event. Not to mention the event was held in a pretty remote event. I had to drive 20 minutes to get a drink that don't make my mouth feels like ant feeds.
I upvoted you for talking about historical accident, but regretted it when you started in on Javascript and Objective-C. Yes they have some questionable decisions but they are by no means objectively awful.
Eh, yeah and that's the correct one. In the interests of brevity I guess I left some ambiguity there in what I meant.
> Run operations on the non-existent file system?

Actually the iPad does have a file system. You just don't have access to it.

> That statement is almost like saying "TV manufacturers are forgetting about the power users! My new Sony flatscreen doesn't even come with a terminal so I could... uhh...

Consequently, one of the reasons TV is dying is because it's just a dumb consumption device. I use my laptop, my Android and my iPad for 10 to 12 hours per day. I use my enormous flat-screen that's sitting in my room only for streaming movies from my laptop and yes, while connected to it sometimes I open the terminal.

> it's actually your carrier that's stopping you, not Apple

BULLSHIT. This is a device-level configuration setting that the career can remotely send to you. The device wasn't even bought from that career. It wasn't on a contract or anything like that.

It's my device and I find it unacceptable that the career can tell it what it can and cannot do. It's Apple's fault for giving them the option.

> By definition, if you're a power user, these things they're doing should be a minor annoyance

Actually it's a big annoyance because I'm the customer that pays money and why in the world would I pay for devices that are defective by design when I could be supporting companies that respect me and my needs? My current retina-enabled and shiny iPad is the last Apple product I'll ever buy.
>enforce your own constraints to avoid your abstractions becoming...too abstract (maybe).

Too abstract isn't necessarily the problem. When I've stepped too far away from standard OO structure, the problem typically becomes organization. In OO you know where just about everything SHOULD be, at least. If you're writing your own rules, it's harder to be certain where new variables get set, or what members you should find in what structures.

It takes a certain level of discipline to not shoot yourself in the foot. Or at least to clean things up before they get too messy.
Collection of time-saving apps, tools, and widgets
Errrr... I'm not really getting the tenor of many of the comments here.

For one, look at what he isn't saying. But start with what we know.

He is being fired. That means he isn't leaving by choice, and most likely doesn't want to be leaving at all.

He is the CEO, and the CEO takes responsibility for the company's failures. Them's the rules of the game, for any leadership role. He is saying no more than that.

In particular, he never says he was wrong. He says he failed to continue being the successful CEO of this particular company. In fact, he somewhat obscurely implied that his intuition was right when what the company did turned out to be wrong. Why do you think the company did those things then? Did he tell it to, or did he lose the battle?

This letter was not written to us. It was written to the people at his company. People who are important to him. Which means it probably wasn't written for us either. The speculation that this is wholly a calculated move seem BS to me.

All that is just pointing out the known facts and suggesting likely deductions. More speculatively, I'd like to share my interpretation of the tone of the letter:

He's pissed. He's pissed but doesn't want to show it. He is staying well in control, writing a decent letter that puts something of himself into it but not too much, not enough to lose face or stir up conflict that could only harm the ones left behind. He's trying to bow out gracefully without capitulating, and I think he did a decent job of it. But this is no "wow, this guy is awesome, I bet he's learned some great lessons and I'd be stoked at the chance to work with him" letter. It's adequate, mainly admirable for hitting just the right level of adequacy when you know the guy probably wants to scream and rip someone or something's head off. He just got fired, dammit!
You might like Flux. It adjusts your display's color temperature depending on the time of day. No more blinding screens when you open your MacBook at night. :)

http://stereopsis.com/flux/
Some people refuse to adopt interracially for exactly that reason, though.
Do you truly own your e-books?
I'm going to do my usual OT hijacking and mention the upcoming novel of a friend. Her premise was: how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism?

It's an alternate history; the point of departure being that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, taken to Rome and then funded (because the Romans were nothing if not practical). In her setting, the Romans are well into an industrial revolution.

The blurb she wrote for an agent:

Pontius Pilate is a successful corporate lawyer
headhunted by the Roman Senate to run a difficult
province in need of a gentler, civilian touch. He’s
been in the job five years — and is starting to get
the hang of it — when the Yeshua Ben Yusuf file
lands on his desk. This is not ideal right now.
Judaea is in the midst of a major terrorism crisis,
his wife keeps threatening to go back to Caesarea (
she can’t stand Jerusalem), his son is becoming far
too friendly with the High Priest’s son, and his
boss keeps forgetting that he isn’t actually in the
army. Even worse, his closest friend and greatest
rival from law school is Ben Yusuf’s lawyer. A
Jerusalem courtroom is the setting for the first
clash of civilisations, where people from a
fundamentally different tradition are forced to
engage with religious ideas that in many respects
they do not want to understand.

What is most distinctive about the book is my
imagining of what a technologically advanced pagan
civilisation would look like. That is, what if the
Romans won much of their empire under conditions
that we associate with the Industrial Revolution?
What if — with their distinctive, non-Christian
moral values — they were gifted with all that
immense fire-power and confronted with monotheistic
terrorists?

I do not think the Romans were secular in the
modern sense, and I haven’t portrayed them as such.
They were, however, very different from the
monotheistic peoples they confronted in Judaea. My
Roman characters are still religious, but
differently religious. Unlike many authors of a
skeptical bent, I do not seek to score cheap shots
by denigrating religion per se. Rather, Bring Laws
& Gods recognises the persistent vitality of
religious traditions, especially when their
practitioners are confronted with overwhelming
military power and physical occupation by non-
believers.

It should be published this year and I am very much looking forward to reading it, based on the introduction and samples she's dropped:

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/22/the-past-is-a-foreign...

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/24/the-angel-bring-laws-... (NSFW)

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/15/the-visit-bring-laws-...

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/11/25/patria-patria/ (NSFW)
Large-scale Hackathons are the best thing that's ever happened. I've learned new languages/frameworks, tools, platforms, and even learned nearly everything I know about programming at hackathons.

Its hard to find a better environment for learning than one in which you are building something you are passionate about and overcoming obstacles like nobodys business with a hard external deadline and plenty of incentive without having to even worry about getting food/drinks/anything at all.
Metadata for pictures is solved (mostly) aka IPTC. Now videos, OTOH, not so much. It's still pretty much a wild, wild west out there for that.
Ask HN: The Ethics of Working with Someone Else's research
I live and work in India. I have some experience of research and development in a certain field. Recently I decided to start up on my own and developed certain algorithms based on available research, which do borrow somewhat from current algorithms.
I have an ethics question: I am not American. Most of this current public research is paid for by the US taxpayer (although I did pay a minuscule amount of US tax since I lived there for 2 years). The university that did the research behind the algorithms that I have partaken of (remember I did the coding myself, only looked at papers publicly available; I can't stress this enough) has never responded to my requests for licensing parts of their algorithm (the reason why I try to license is that they have applied for a US patent). They haven't come into the Indian market and I don't have any plans of trying to go outside India (and besides, who's to know if I'll succeed or not at this point).
All these preliminaries lead to the question: Do I use the papers in the public domain together with my modifications for a commercial enterprise? Or do I drop it?
They'll take-off as soon as one gets slipped into a Bilderberg convention.

:-)
Depends on your "governing values" (Covey), You are a cog, but your values lie with Family, then cog is a means to end not an end in itself?
>>One exceptionally good resource is the Guy Steel’s keynote from OOPSLA’98 conference about Growing a Language.

If you want to know one practical language today that embodies this philosophy and is yet main stream today, its Perl.

Perl 6 takes it further. Infact Perl 6 by design is supposed to be such. Here is comment Larry Wall himself(http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=836573). Thought the whole thread was a troll thread. The first time I encountered this was like 6 months back while searching something related to Perl 6 on the internet. And it stuck me that how amazing this concept was.

I then went back and watched some of his keynotes. I will recommend everybody to have a look at it.

Perl 6 is definitely going to be a big game changer in this place. And unlike Lisp its a very practical language for your everyday programmer.
I think the article is missing the process of technological development. What kind of culture, funding, ideas needed to be in place to drive the innovation needed?
The author of that rfc should be shoot. Of course nobody obeys a standard which requires you to handle comments in email addresses.
Google will actually hire people right out of school if they are good enough. One Googler I talked to phrased it as, they have enough money to hire someone who will only hit their stride several years later. Most companies don't have this ability, they need to hire someone with maximum experience for their dollar immediately.

It probably helps Google in another way in that their culture is kind of cut off and different. Most of my experience is in enterprise Java and it's always weird talking to Googlers who were never really a part of the rise of Dependency Injection with Spring, unchecked exceptions with Hibernate, etc., etc.. Sort of like how they don't use C++ exceptions if you are a C++ guy. So growing their own talent has advantages in that the talent won't expect the more common public practices that Google missed out on.
Sorry but this argument comes up somebody suggests that unpopular tool is merely unpopular and not flawed.

Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages in existence, it's still taught in Universities and has been for over 40 years. Age and exposure and still not popular.

I'm not sure why you keep mentioning new technologies when the article is about old technologies and your examples (Emacs, Vim, Linux) are old technologies! The only example of a new technology, git, has seen an absolute rapid rise and completely changed the version control landscape in just a few years.

A new language is not going to have a long list of advantages -- it's going to a have different list of trade-offs. Because any language feature that is objectively good with no downside or trade-off has already been implemented in some popular language somewhere.

And if you can prove that you're doing something really different and really better but there's a strong learning curve people will learn it. Git is the perfect example.
I did read the article, although it was very difficult to follow due to the way it was written. The point of my comment relates to the discussion of "tweakpoints' the article refers to at the end actually. Only tweaking particular parts to get it to work as opposed to rethinking how something works.

I can almost guarantee you can't build a site that won't require the use of; 768px (sometimes), 480px and 320px media query rules to help tweak your layout, these are the problem widths hence the need to use media queries.

There are two types of "responsive design" one is adaptive where the site only changes at particular breakpoints but can look horrible inbetween and "fluid responsive" where the site will continually scale down and you set a few breakpoints to make things look nicely.
Given that Javascript was designed in 1994, not 1974, I think it rises past "questionable design decision" not to just use Scheme's lexical scoping rules (i.e. the only sensible lexical scoping rules). Although to be fair, scripting language designers keep getting this wrong for some reason.
Attended one sometime back. What hit me was that they didn't even bother to bring water and they remembered when I needed some. Needless to say there was pizza(and the way it was spread around was "yuck"), there was soft drink and beer and there was no water; neither any fruit or even trace of some healthy food or just food.

Nothing new or innovative came out other than sore backs, necks and a guy puking. Yes, there were some 'nice' hacks like "this guy build this using that hooking into that that API and showing this again".

Midway, I felt like sleeping - there wasn't any space and I was sort of looked down upon with scorn - as in "he doesn't belong here". Well, I didn't. I had built a little web app that did some basic(very) search with Tw/Fb. Nth I would like to see or ponder over again. I slept in a corner anyway(had my sleeping bag).

Bad thing it wasn't fun either.

Moral of the story - it's good for sort of a meet-up, not for 'breaking the ground' with your ideas :-)

And if you have to organize one - make sure there's food, water and some place to rest. Proper lighting which can be adjusted in different corners/parts of the hall(or the large room).

PS. And yes, keep it spacious and airy. Man is a messy animal :-\
Nulla/nihil.
Mind-Blowing Tobii Rex Controls Laptop with Your Eyes
1 Billion Locations: Quantifying Showrooming
> I think if you traveled back in time to the Roman Empire and told them how to manufacture this stuff, you could plausibly create a very modest computer.

Then finally there'd be a use for the Pope's tweets in Latin.
From an ethical standpoint I don't believe for the most part in software patents period, let alone patenting something of a much purer form like a mathematical formula or an algorithm. Many will disagree but in general free information is a classical tenant of hackers. If you've looked into the legal circumstances and it seems OK, I say make hay while the sun shines.
It's very sad that Europe has many times the number of exit nodes as the US has.
Sort of reminds me of India (the polytheistic "industrialized" society).
The problem with writing a DSL for every problem (and every programmer writing different DSLs) is that you end up with all these different languages with different vocabularies and different semantics. It's like a million different variations of Esperanto.

Using a programming language is like speaking in common tongue to every other programmer who knows that language. And most languages are so similar that most programmers can communicate even between languages.

Having code that looks the same, regardless of what it's actually doing, allows everybody to be able to read it.
He mentions the point when the abstractions in the language are no longer sufficient. It seemed to me that this was more an argument in favor of using languages that are easily extended rather than languages full of abstraction with few options for extension. If you use a language like the latter, you'll still eventually reach a point where the abstractions aren't sufficient, but if you use a language like the former, though you'll reach that point sooner, you'll be better equipped to handle it.

edit: word use
Startup predictors of success...
I like 3) fluid intelligence, something like work arounds to get there...
Eh not really. They are community volunteers. The best part is that they can give free support in the forums without pay, and then when something esclates and they've done something wrong an actual employee can wash their hands of the situation (as they've done here) by stating they aren't actually employed by the company.

So it's a win win for Dropbox. Free forum support for low level day to day forum chatter and easily absolvable of any wrongdoing if they screw up.
Health isn't everyone's first priority. It certainly shouldn't be viewed as a first priority in every context.
For what it's worth, I signed up for a Dropbox account in late December, and have not received spam at the unique address I provided.
overall great article, particularly this exceptionally elegant turn of phrase -

'It is known since the early ages of programming, most elegant programs are built as layers of "languages" or "dictionaries". These are represented by abstractions in a program in order to facilitate expressing the ideas in a way that is more related to the domain.'

Overall, I like to draw a line between canonical/ontological representations of models and representations of models designed for calculation. The ontological representation often times exists in a relational database or in an explicit OWL/RDF ontology, but may also exist only ideally, where the storage and calculation representations of the model are each customized for their particular use, especially at large scale.

the following concept, I almost agree with...

'it is our job to express the abstractions of the domain for the best economy of the expression'

As programmers (vs ontologists) I would say that our job is first to express the abstractions such that they enable efficient, maintainable computation that hopefully is expressing those abstractions economically. I feel like programming languages don't lack power, they just make it quite complicated to express complex abstractions.
Can you guys write up about your exit nodes, like how they are setup and whatnot? Maybe even post images of the software setup on the machines. This would make it easier for others to run an exit node, since they wouldn't have to worry about setting anything up.
Before I opened this post I was expecting you to be very old. Get started today. Honestly, it's never too late.
An Australian language that sees the world in one awesome way
For anyone who doesn't want to park inactive domains, you can just remove a domain's nameservers, and users will just get a DNS error. (NXDOMAIN)