skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coming back to Oz from London put into perspective how far behind we are. With HN London now attracting so many people they've had to start charging a fee to get in, and the community built around Silicon Roundabout, it is very sad to come back home and see the fragmented efforts to build a startup group in Australia.

With Silicon Beach on and off, Startup Grind, lots of small meetups, and Fishburners in Sydney, there are certainly groups to build this community around but I still think we are years behind the critical mass of something like HN London. And that's just to talk about forums for people to gather in - it says nothing about our skills shortage.

I agree with Matt's points regarding our reliance on the resources industry. So many people head off to the mines on a fly-in-fly-out basis, and make incredible coin - but it won't last long-term and then our skill base will be incompatible with value-adding services industries.

However, I think we need successes before a great weight of people will shift towards STEM disciplines, in the same way that the dot-com frenzy saw Web Development course demand explode.
All this is true, and the point is that "free market fundamentalism" is perfectly consistent with it. Free market fundamentalism doesn't assume people are "perfectly rational"; it assumes that people value things and will do things that they reasonably expect to lead to things they value. (I realize that you know this, but I'm not sure the parent poster to mine does.)
Thank you for this.

"Start... then continue."

It's something that I needed to read and really let it sink in to get my ass into gear. Really appreciate it.
Google Reader is dead, so we rebuilt it for you in Zite (in six hours)
Really impressed with the aesthetics, especially for such a quick turnaround. Had a peek under the covers and it appears to be well done there too.

Top marks in my book.
The Different Styles of Antique Wooden Chairs
How has this not received more attention?

One of the major barriers to malware installation on mobile devices has been the move to managing software with a repository. On Android, people don't expect to go to a website, download an application as a regular file, and then execute it (although this is certainly possible if you enable it and ignore several warnings). Normal users expect to get all of their software and updates via Google Play. They're used to this, and regard anything else as highly suspicious.

With this update, Facebook can unilaterally break this suspicion. Users will be confused and/or pissed off for the next week or so, but when it all blows over, it will be significantly easier for someone to publish an app on Google Play that then downloads and executes arbitrary code. "If Facebook is doing it," they'll think, "it must be the new cool thing to do, so it's probably fine."

No, it's not fine. Average users should not be doing this. Google should punish Facebook quickly and harshly if they have any desire to keep Android malware at a manageable level.
Samsung just shamelessly copied my iOS app tagCAM in Galaxy S4 :(
Destaffed projects: short term wins, long term losses
I've really been enjoying Rescale:

http://www.rescale.com

What they're doing is just fascinating. It's essentially on-demand
compute power with integration of well known/used tools, including
proprietary tools, and workflow organization/management. They relieve
multiple pain points for multiple industries.

I don't qualify as a "potential customer" for them, and I know compute
time is expensive, so I was reluctant to sign up for their free demo. I
contacted them anyhow, mainly to let the know about a possible market
segment for potential/eventual expansion, and in spite of me not being a
potential customer, they still encouraged me to give their demo a try.
Good People!

Since I know that free demo they gave me will cost them something, I've
done my best to return the favor by providing comprehensive feedback.
I think he meant that the launch show looked cheap; which is kind of ironic considering the fact that they booked out Radio City Music Hall...
Basic Lisp Techniques Can Improve Configurability, Maintainability, and Reuse
Because there are no Adsense ads on craigslist pages?
I like this proposal very much.

On the other hand, it reminds me of a quote by Sam Goldwyn... "A spoken contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."
I really hope that sanity will prevail there when they get in (but by Abbot and Turnbul's comments, it may not be likely)... I mean, a big part of their plan is to not do anything in areas that have HFC currently, even though that cable is so over-subscribed that you don't get decent speeds in peak hour, and many apartment blocks just don't have access to it. So under the Coalition's plan, most people won't get even slightly better internet. How is that OK?

Then, rolling out an inferior tech (compared to fibre) that is only marginally better to current ADSL to the rest which is going to run over an aging copper network that will require billions of dollars of maintenance over the years? All while maintaining the current telco monopoly...

Really, their only selling point is the cost, but I haven't actually been able to find any evidence that the plan is actually costed - every reference to it being cheap is just based on rollouts in other countries with very different geography, population density and existing infrastructure. If they actually costed it, and then took running costs into account, I doubt it would actually be cheaper. And the current, superior NBN isn't even a cost to the taxpayer - it's an investment that will eventually pay itself back with a small profit.

I think the biggest thing though is that even if it were double the price and didn't pay itself back, the economic benefits of having fibre generally available to businesses and homes, as well as having a network which provides open access to suppliers (instead of having to go through the Telstra monopoly) would make it worthwhile.
There is some hope: http://blackbird.vc/
I just read the section of your guide about finding suppliers. So you recommend supplier marketplaces like Doba? I've heard alot of strong opinions either way on them. Is the pricing you can get there really competitive? Most of their clients appear to be really small mom-and-pop online stores.
As stated, your amendment isn't going very far; for example, it's hard to operate a taxi without consuming gas.
Agreed, which is the unfortunate effect of the vast, vast majority of people being unwilling to pay more for better service when flying, thus leading to airlines being badly understaffed. In the Kayak/Orbitz/Hipmunk/Adioso era, people buy tickets based on price/number of connections, almost entirely without regard to the airline. The only folks who get better treatment from the airlines are those who have status (and are thus loyal customers worth the expense to retain) or who pay extra (first class or a lounge pass).
I'd rather more of my potential customers get NBN. Startups hubs tend to already have the broadband required. 'wealth' will be created by capturing a larger user base for new broadband/low latency applications.
Do you think that EFF vs AT&T would have been easier to dismiss, post-CISPA?
Anything public on social networks including social graphs.
I like Gargoyle firmware, which is based on OpenWrt. It has a simpler interface with QoS ready to go. The experimental version 1.5.9 has CoDel built in. So far the router seems to be handling VoIP better than the Asus RT-N16 running Shibby's TomatoUSB firmware.

https://www.gargoyle-router.com
This essay always resonated with me. Incidentally, John Perry won an Ig Nobel for this essay! [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_(philosopher)
The Startup Executioners Develop A Startup Of Their Own
I agree - great looking docs!
By which logic timesharing and batch computing are the same.

What matters is the player experience, not the implementation.
The singular of "dice" is not "dice". Sigh.

Otherwise -- cool subject. I know about non-transitive voting (it was fairly relevant to what I did in academia for a while). But I hadn't heard much before about the dice. ;)
I think that people in Burnie in the middle of Tasmania would probably receive the greatest benefits from having fast and reliable internet access. With online education and MOOCs opening up education to those who want it, giving isolated and rural communities access increases the opportunities available to them at a far greater rate than giving the innner city the same benefit.
Reflection in C++11
I have no idea how many unaccompanied minors fly in a given day, but I suspect that it is relatively few. As a result, no one has ownership of the minor. Training for these situations is low priority.

You're right, a phone call goes a long way in these situations. It's simple, but I'm guessing that training is limited so people just don't know the protocol.
1. Close all chrome windows, open a cmd prompt, then cd to c:\users\user\appdata\local\google\chrome\application

2. run chrome.exe --record-mode ( /record-mode also works)

3. navigate in a predetermined way, then close chrome

4. run chrome.exe --playback-mode ( /playback-mode also works)

5. navigate in the same predetermined way. Those clicks will all work. Any other clicks will not work and result in 'cache miss' errors.
Find customers, take orders, provide customer service.
I think there are people with the "sales gene" who are passionate about selling, period - to them, the product/service doesn't matter. They just want to sell. . .or be their own boss in any business.
Then there's the rest of us. . .
You would still get ads there.
Browser extension provides a fresh perspective on "the cloud"
Apple ships fix for file URL crash bug
Wasn't this shown to be a hoax a while back?
I have a machine learning startup that is using deep learning neural networks, so I'm probably biased here. I really think there is something that is worth the hype here, this is the first time we can solve significant problems without lots of feature engineering to make the neural network be able to solve the problem. While I'm sure there are going to be tons of things that deep belief neural networks can not do well even with these new capabilities and breakthroughs, there is a crapload of data out there that is begging to be analysed. Being able to get reasonable performance without a ton of feature engineering and years for a black arts team to build something that can get the data into a state where problems can be answered is SUPER exciting. The Neural Networks we are using are more specialized and more like Yann Lecun's, and we aren't using dropout like Hinton but we already have something that gets very good accuracy in our problem domain. There are some new techniques that are just coming out of Montreal, one in particular I'm very excited about called Maxout that looks like it will be another significant advance. One of the problems networks like this usually have is that the activation functions saturate above a certain level and once a neuron is in the saturated state the gradient training process will not move it anymore. Maxout is different in that it doesn't have this property, and it seems to maximize the benefit of the random selection process of dropout.

While I don't have the math credentials to match Hinton I think as more 'normal' folks like me get into the game there will also be some interesting things going on. We are trying some interesting things that seem very promising, and I'm sure there are lots of other folks beginning to play with these things that will have some interesting ideas and approaches as well.

So I personally think this is super exciting, and while it might not be applicable for every problem Deep Learning will definitely have a big impact.
Well… at least now I wont think as bad of IEM (gaming tournament) and their "entertainment" anymore.
To expand on one of the points in the article, let's expand venture capital raised per capita[1]...
Israel: $170 per capita, USA: $75 per capita, Australia: $4.09 per capita.

Austrlaia literally spend more on a single day of gambling (Melbourne Cup: $7.27 per capita) than we do in our entire venture capital industry.

The government have also decided we're betraying the country by "abusing" a visa program to get more skilled programmers here. Of our 12,000 IT graduates, 8,000 of them are from overseas. 4,000 graduates doesn't go very far... Many of the 457 visas would also likely be programmers from international companies staying in Sydney: Atlassian and Google have numerous offices abroad and commonly allow programmers to travel around. The Australian government have no clue what's going on.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, founder of Atlassian, just tweeted "How can you say IT is the future of the country, then complain when we import skilled labour to help us?!"[2]

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

[2]: https://twitter.com/mcannonbrookes/status/312033343988449280
Totally valid reason. I use cards for the sake of ease of tracking and protections offered by cards. I wish there were an optimal situation wherein you had privacy and protection both.
So much for not being evil.
Edit working tree files during `git difftool` comparison
This is seriously neat. For all that C++ has everything and the kitchen sink in terms of features, lack of reflection is a major drag sometimes.
You can't make a rocket scientist just by giving them carte blanche to play with rockets. I definitely appreciate the empowering aspects of open commit policies, but I'm less concerned with getting contributions than I am with getting good contributions. We've even added some committers prematurely over the years...and those came after months of patches and PRs.

The primary bottom line for a larger or more established project is maintaining code quality, stability, predictability of behavior...all while still moving forward with new features. When you endeavor to achieve those goals in every commit, giving any PR-sender the keys to the castle doesn't seem like such a great idea.

As I mentioned elsewhere (and to you in discussions about open commit policies), I also don't feel like there's a good reason when Github makes it so easy to fork projects. We've worked with some folks for years off forks. I'm also not thrilled with the idea that you're going to get good developers if your developers only "really" started contributing once they got a commit bit. Just because someone's excited to drive a race car doesn't mean they're qualified.
i can tell you that after going through only a few chapters of SICP, it radically changed the way i wrote code. i took the MITx 6.00X programming course after and was incredibly uncomfortable at using destructive methods (to give an exmaple), even though i used to write and think code in that way.
What's even sadder is that many if not most HN users are contributing to the surveillance apparatus by building web apps and infrastructure, promoting it, and not taking a stand against it.

How many of you Googlers and Facebookers (and the legions of you working for Facebook/Google wannabes) have really thought hard about what you're doing? How many of you care? How many of you honestly want to do something to stop the pissing away of privacy to corporations and the government?

I would venture to guess that it's a vanishingly small percentage. Most just want to make money, and let others worry about the consequences. Or they delude themselves in to thinking they're "changing the world" with some monumental cow-tipping app.
This is an awesome petition. Thanks for bringing it to our attention; I've signed it.

That being said, I don't view the cellphone response as particularly progressive. The way it parses for me is "we think your phone should be unlocked if you don't have a contract." It didn't address the criminalization of unlocking cellphones while under a contract. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'd love to hear if I am, but I've read it a few times and I can't find another way to read the response.
10/10, not least because MIDI export has been added to the editor sine the last time I looked. Now if only there were some way to redirect the MIDI under Windows 7 to something other than the Microsoft Wavetable synth, like an external MIDI port so I don't have to hear everything on that bad piano...

One minor thing is that there could be a better way to browse by songs than just the top 10 and 10 most recent. Most of my searches come up empty, so I'd like some way to browse the list of songs for something I do like rather than to keep drawing blanks.
I want that, and I want it in oldest-first order. So many of the alternatives I've tried only offer newest first!
I believe you still can - works on HN and reddit.
I wonder how this will effect advertising billboards as well. Could you put your advertisement on the 3d model (taken from Maps) of the building you're looking at? Who owns that space? :)
I think you could do something really interesting simply by connecting feed usage data and content data, which (I believe) was zarify's idea of 'Pandora for newsfeeds'.

There are companies along this line[1], but I'd prefer a solution with just rss usage/content data, and not the social streams as well.

[1] Prismatic and Percolate come to mind
I read a book in 2006 called Mindset, by Carol Dweck, a Stanford Psychologist. I could see how having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset might help in this case of life-long procrastination. Just a thought. I'm curious if others on HN have read the book and think it would be helpful. There is a website associated with the book that might also have some useful information: http://mindsetonline.com/
Given that messages without guaranteed delivery will tend to be used for step 4, isn't this protocol susceptible to the Two-Generals problem?
I think it would be possible with a freenet/bittorrent like architecture, given enough users.
While this is interesting I thought a while ago we agreed on three rules:

1. No posting Wikipedia articles directly. Write a post about it.

2. No linking to individual essays by pg. (http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html)

3. No racing to post who is hiring posts. There is a helpful bot for that.
I think the title is a reference to the comment he didn't like, not an admonition to all HN posters.
This is perfectly timed for me, having spent the last two days procrastinating (yesterday, by staring at someone else's code but not really reading it and today by running errands). It feels like the opportunity to be brilliant can so easily slip away until my deadlines have passed and I'm out of time.

The last 2.5 months for me have been nothing but struggling to figure out something that I barely understand. Something that seems to come pretty easily to a number of people I associate with, so it's difficult to retain perspective. To wit, that they've been doing this stuff a lot longer than I have, and that at least I can get some of it (and will someday probably get more of it).

So this rings pretty true for me, as I had just gotten a thing I'd been working on for what seemed like forever to (mostly) function, now it has to be expanded to handle this other thing that I know pretty much nothing about. It seems like either there are far better people who could be doing this than me, or maybe my belief that if I keep smashing my forehead against the spec, it will gain entry to my brain.

So far, starting out on my own with the idea that I could make a product has been lonely and isolating. This work is damned hard. If I fail, I won't be in a bad place, but it's still overwhelming me. My respect for certain people who have the temerity to do this (and I think you all know who I mean) has grown considerably. But don't tell him I said that, because I still need him to take the garbage out from time to time.
Online access would make it much more accessible, especially for those who are introverted and have social anxiety like me.
Samsung is baffling. No surprise here.
"As a result, no one has ownership of the minor." Maybe no one by name has ownership, but someone by role has ownership. So whoever is filling the role for the airline/airport at that time/on that flight/for that airline at that airport (however the process is defined) has ownership. So there is an individual with ownership at all times. I agree though, that training may be sorely lacking for those situations that are exceptions to the normal process. None of that changes the fact that ultimately, the airline has ownership.
Why cold showers?
> MRIs are very popular in Japan: Some people get them every year even if they aren't sick.

I originally thought it would be a great idea to get MRIs and tests done every year. Then I heard about the risks of overdiagnosis:

e.g: http://theconversation.edu.au/ending-over-diagnosis-how-to-h...
If you're doing a new RSS reader...
Though a bit more on the "actual implementation" side of things, there's
an Australian group called "Axis Of Awesome" who did an interesting song
called "Four Chords". It shows the use of a set of four common chords in
a lot of different songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
This is massively bad news if both CalDAV & EAS support will be ixnayed by google before end of year.

I have been a long time android user and had every intention of continuing down that path, but recently my job has required me to use Exchange ActiveSync to access my corporate mail & calendar data on my device, its a bit of a hassle but at least it's supported.

Does this mean that future versions of android will not have support for such a (common business related) setup?

If this is true I foresee it alienating a large portion of their user base.
Looks like it's probably a bug: http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/websearch/p6VbIaBkbWA/...
On a smaller scale, I often observe a general feeling of uneasiness without knowing why, and can usually trace it back to something I was thinking about in the most recent 10-20 minutes.
Getting started with UX, where to begin?
I want to develop amazing looking sites, I love the work of Dustin Curtis, and the sheer beauty of things with dribbble, and so on and so forth.

I understand that a majority of things done for/with UX are done for/with Photoshop.

Where on Earth do I begin to become as great as these guys at designing websites, and interfaces?

I'd appreciate it if I got some feedback, seeing as I never really do out here.
Gonna burn karma here but... I read the title as "The Ultimate Guide to Dropshitting" and realized I have a great new name for 2HWW-inspired fly-by-night fulfillment companies :)
Also, newer builds of openwrt and cero have CoDel built in which should help address bufferbloat.
I just bought a house and never signed one piece of paper in the process (up to the closing, of course. Then I signed several hundred pieces of paper.)

All of the contractual agreements until then were signed digitally through DocuSign and they even have a nifty little iphone app. Of course they were all contracts written by my lawyers, but that counts as data. The concept of a written signature is far less relevant than it used to be. As people have mentioned actually signing a piece of paper digitally or otherwise isn't required for many legally binding contracts. (For example, my previous lease on my apartment was an email exchange between me and my landlord agreeing on the terms. Had he or I broken the terms of it, it would have been enforceable in court (in IL at least; anywhere else I couldn't say.))
I heard Mike on radio yesterday, here's his interview with Radio National Drive - http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drive/it-indust...
The day the iPhone died
it's frustrating that there are a number of inconsistencies with his description of his early year on the Product People podcast last week. It makes me feel like in both he's selling himself 'at' me rather than givin me real info. Oh well
Any chance we would get a scala/java client? Would love to use firebase for mobile clients.