skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it is surprising most billionaire do not pursue this kind of greatness. They just aren't different from other guys. There, the few who go and try to climb mount Everest "because it's there" or who try and row the pacific are rare, too.

Secondly, if half the billionaires were to do the same outlandish things, we wouldn't call them outlandish.

For example, there probably was a time when quite a few billionaires went elephant hunting. Then, that was not outlandish. Now, it would be.

Now, I think there are plenty of billionaires doing outlandish things, but just not in a highly visible technical direction. For example, Ted Turner started a world-wide news network, tried to start his own Olympic Games, and has a huge herd of bison. Others buy sports clubs, try to win the America's cup, or try to build a mechanical clock that will run for 10000 years (http://longnow.org/). Yet others see it as their goal to get higher on Forbes' list of billionaires (http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml)

Another thing I am curious about: who are the one or two billionaires at the other end of that curve?
Before they push Persona more, can someone walk over to the team that's running http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/ and either disconnect their servers or lock them to their chairs until they finish the migration?

I understand the pain of rebranding assets, I do. But if you're going to rebrand to a product your company is already using, it has to be fast. And Mozilla, the 2 year anniversary is in July...
Tracking "presence" makes sense when the program implementing it is running on a computer sitting on a desk, and then you sometimes walk away from that desk.

Presence makes almost no sense when the program implementing it resides on a phone, where any time someone sends you a message--even if the application isn't running--you'll know (because your pants just buzzed), and could very well react to it if you felt like it. You're always "present"; you're just sometimes purposefully non-responsive.

...now, on the other hand, "openness to being interrupted" status could be pretty useful. :)
I'm glad to see Erik Dahlström of Opera on the list of editors. He is really active in stackoverflow[1] often pointing out clarification on tough SVG questions. I'm sure he is aware of the difficulties us average web developers face when approaching SVG.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/109374/erik-dahlstrom
I am not sure if I am more upset at this not providing any native means of word wrap, or IE not supporting foreignObject. Seriously, a large use case for using SVG on the web is data visualization -- where you will often find yourself displaying labels which need to wrap to a given size in order to display cleanly. Add to this the necessity to move other text around based on the height of other text elements and you're looking at a mess of ugly alignment code.
What’s the best age to launch a startup? Founders young and old tell us
Actually, WhatsApp service that targets Android and iOS. And they made adding contacts super easy. No ICQ number, no XMPP handle, no username. iMessage is Apple-only, Google Talk has a slightly different concept and more complicated.

any messaging app included by default in Android will have users migrating in droves

Yeah, that's why Google+ replaced Facebook and everyone is using Google Talk. Nearly every browser comes with Google as search engine or homepage and it didn't worked.
We built it as a Firebase app, but we're releasing it as open source and are looking forward to seeing what the community does with it. :-) All of the OT work happens client-side, so it's certainly possible to adapt it to other backends.

Additionally, a lot of the OT code is based on ot.js[1], a fantastic open source OT implementation by Tim Baumann. He has a node.js backend as well as Haskell and Python. Of course then you have to run the server code somewhere and figure out how to persist the documents, etc. :-) Definitely worth checking out though.

1. https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js/
Nice idea and implementation.

Was it difficult building the plugin for photoshop ?

I ask because I have been toying with building a photoshop plugin for handling feedback on designs. i.e. the plugin allows you to upload a design to a website where customers can comment. The plugin would allow you to view the comments from within Photoshop.
I would hazard that it's partly because the rich don't get rich by throwing their money away.

The thing about "cool scifi sh!#" is that it stands a very good chance of not being profitable, and an even greater chance of not being profitable any time soon.

The author writes:

> As more entrepreneurs become self-made billionaires in the Internet age, I think we’ll see the Tony Stark Rating rise

I disagree. I think the only thing that will make that happen is inflation. When the value of a billion is halved, then we'll see it rise.

I would be surprised if there weren't plenty more Sub-Billionaire Elon Musks, who have reached a level of wealth that they consider sufficient for future-proof work-free financial independence, and decided to pursue their least profitable or most fanciful of dreams. The author himself points to various cool projects that don't have a single Tony Stark figure at the helm.

To become a Billionaire, whilst still being of a mind to do "cool scifi sh!#" requires at least one of these three things:

1) Suddenly becoming very rich (at least a near-billionaire).

2) Some of your "cool scifi sh!#" becoming profitable.

3) Persisting in moneymaking when you could be doing the cool stuff instead.

Also, how many billionaires (openly or anonymously) fund chairs or grants at universities? A billionaire of the sort that inherited multiple millions, then made a load more money through speculative finance whilst also working as a corporate barrister is not going to be a Tony Stark; but they may want to see robots with Genuine People Personalities become a reality. It would be far better for someone like that to fund existing university research than to set up their own version of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
> "My intuition is still that a much higher fraction of billionaires are business/management types"

It's both. Nobody becomes a billionaire doing engineering all day, but a great many become billionaires by doing business with an engineering background.

If you look at the major industrialists of our era (and before), many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have done their time in the trenches. When Ford hired the first all-management CEO (i.e., did not rise through the ranks in the auto industry) it was a Big Deal.
> First things first, web-based doesn't imply cloud-based.

True, but there are few applications that reside in a browser that don't use cloud-based storage for the results. One may safely refer to Web-based and cloud-based technologies in a single breath.

>> Why do you think the big players in cloud-based and Web-based storage and applications are having such a hard time getting people to adopt them?

> That is absolutely false.

No, it's true, and you need to do impartial research before making this sort of claim. The big players are having a hard time getting people to adopt cloud-based and Web-based technologies, and I already gave the reasons.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/its-cloud-resista...

A quote: "Accenture and the LSE surveyed more than 1,035 business and IT executives and conducted more than 35 interviews with cloud providers, system integrators, and cloud service users. The key finding: There's a gap between business and IT. Businesspeople see the excitement and business benefits of cloud computing, so they're pushing for it. However, IT people see cloud computing as causing issues with security and lock-in, so they're pushing back."

> And how are you immune to this when YOU are responsible for managing your backup strategy and maintain your servers.

This is a non-argument fort an obvious reason -- if infrastructure data loss is an issue, Web-based data loss is a bigger issue, because in the latter case, users won't necessarily know where the data are located, and the number of possible failure modes is higher.

> Do you know how many horror stories there are of data loss that occurred because of things like bad RAID setup.

I can't believe you even posted this argument. How does an unreliable cloud RAID array constitute an improvement over an unreliable infrastructure RAID array?

I haven't even mentioned the legal issues, where law enforcement has a much easier time subpoenaing evidence from the cloud, compared to legally acquiring from your local network.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/12/cloud-computing-enterprise-...

A quote: "Enterprises are moving their assets to the cloud to capture its many business benefits, including ease of deployment and reducing, if not eliminating, the need for IT infrastructure. However, cloud computing offers an array of pitfalls for the unwary. The unique legal risks and considerations presented by the cloud are especially important and often overlooked by nonlawyers."

The article goes on to list five very serious and often overlooked legal pitfalls of cloud computing.
Can I associate additional data to my profile? A lot of websites I use want to know my name, nickname, age, avatar-pic, timezone, etc. It would be nice if I could store it all with my Persona account and selectively allow access to sites that request it. I could even store my credit card info, and when the site wants me to fill in my address and such, I just click to allow access to that data, which can then autofill the forms.

I could even add things like have browsing preference data like "prefers-dark-on-light-theme", "no-video-or-audio-autoplay", or "no-nsfw-content". The site can add functionality for these preferences if it chooses to. Does Persona already have this?
Blue or grey may be better suited to you?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/persona/branding
One major difference is that if you log in to a site with Facebook then Facebook knows you logged in to the site.

Whereas if you log in to a site with Persona, that's between you, your browser, and the site. Mozilla is not pinged with any details about you in the process.

Furthermore, Persona is decentralized. Anyone can run an identity server (though sites don't have to trust all servers, obviously). So you do not in fact have to build an account with anyone new if your mail server deploys Persona and sites trust it to identify people. The article points out the Yahoo has rolled this out already, so anyone with an @yahoo.com mail doesn't have to do any new account-building.
New approach to making software
this appears to be a radically new approach, making "software like the web". does anyone have any experience with Resource Oriented Computing. They claim it's based on REST and UNIX:
NYC is a weird place to estimate in exactly this way. It has more of a lot of types of people who have pianos other than families. NYC has a disproportionate number of wealthy people, and also a disproportionate number of professional pianists, and I would expect both those categories get their pianos tuned rather more often than a typical family.

NYC also has lots of concert halls, and any decent concert hall will tune the piano to be used in a performance on the day of. A hall like Carnegie hall would have several pianos tuned every day.

I no do math, so maybe those things aren't enough to have a material effect on the number of piano tuners.
Open Source Cloud Service Provisioning Command Line Tools
Persona is ready for consumer sites.

Play Brave[1] is a game from the Born This Way Foundation, which uses Persona.

Mineshafter[2] is a free alternative to using the main Minecraft online services.

The Times[3] (UK) Crossword puzzle uses Persona to make switching between Desktop and Mobile easy.

[1] http://www.playbrave.org/gallery/
[2] http://mineshafter.info
[3] http://crossword.thetimes.co.uk/
Doesn't that lead to the problem of having to have multiple identities again?

ATM, I have a FB account that I can use to log in to some sites, a Twitter account, a Google account, a Yahoo account, etc.

With potentially everyone being able to be an Identity Provider, what happens if a site recognizes some providers, but not others? Does Persona ensure that, regardless of Provider, I can use one login on all sites?

Furthermore, how does it protect me from the site gathering and aggregating all kinds of information about me (which, admittedly, they probably already have)? There's usually one overarching, way-behind-the-scenes entity handling the data aggregation for many sites (ie., Facebook) which leads us right back to where we are now.

Or is that part not addressed by this solution?
It's confusing to have three lights for a single stop line, especially the light on the left is odd. You don't know which of the traffic lights apply to you and it makes you look for another stop line.
Well Wikipedia disagrees with you since it states that SVG is a "vector image format" (not that wikipedia could not be wrong anyway).

I would consider printing to be another story though. It is possible to have a page size that spans to several pages when printing, but still it represents just one page.

PDF is not the best analogy because it was designed to be a document format from the beginning.
Sweet! My guess was 6. I proceeded by estimating the number of pianos per person (my guess was 7000 in NYC), then by estimating the frequency of tuning. I came up with ~20 pianos/day needing tuning and guessing the average tuner could handle 3 pianos / day (when I was a kid I recall the tuner taking a couple of hours.) some edge cases like Carnegie Hall (where the piano is probably tuned quite frequently) probably skew the numbers somewhat. Also, I would guess that a city with mostly single family homes, say, Houston, has more pianos/capita than NY or Chicago, based on the pain in the assedness of moving a piano into an apartment, though that may be offset by the number of music schools and cultural institutions.
Austrians are fine with price deflation, but not monetary deflation:

"If a man has been hurt by being run over by an automobile, it is no remedy to let the car go back over him in the opposition direction." -- Ludwig von Mises (http://mises.org/mmmp/mmmp5.asp)
Here is my feedback.

Perhaps the marketing of "persona" to consumers should take a backseat. When I signed in to http://123done.org/ the pop up* showing "sign in with persona" confused me for a moment. For a moment, I thought.. "but I do not have a persona account"

If there is a way for users to just sign in with their email without telling them how it is done, I am sure there will be even less friction.

Of course, the persona architecture could still be marketed to developers for integration purposes. But for users, let it just be like magic.

PS: I did not see the Firebase implementation they spoke of. I am still told to make sure my password has 8 characters. https://www.firebase.com/signup/

*https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ay0qp434rqd0dm/persona.png
Knowing the correct order of magnitude is seldom trivial. Getting the correct order of magnitude quickly will make you a better decision maker (not to mention impress people whose opinion matters).

An imbalance of supply can increase/decrease the population by maybe as much as 2x (or .5x). An order of magnitude can be the difference between a market that's worth considering and one that's too small to currently be serviceable.

This is important because in business getting a right(ish) answer quickly is often more important than getting a precisely correct answer slowly. While you're measuring precise supply and demand, FermiCo has already concluded that the market is too small and moved on.

p.s. irregardless is a great word.
http://scratchpad.io might be what you're looking for.
I have to say that I'm really loving Mozilla/Mozilla Research these days. Their heart is in the right place, and their research projects like Asm.js, Persona, Rust, and Firefox OS are very cool. They are what Google was in 2005.
That's because he's wrong on so many levels.
If you're looking under the hood, the mechanic's blog at http://lloyd.io/how-browserid-works offers a great explanation. The Mozilla blog covered the OpenID comparison at http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7669886219/how-browserid-di..., but it doesn't embrace the level of geekery you're likely seeking.
How it works under the hood: http://lloyd.io/how-browserid-works

Comparison to OpenID: http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7669886219/how-browserid-di...
No, we don't currently provide any profile information.

We'd love to see more experiments in this space. Get involved
https://github.com/mozilla/browserid
What do you mean by "real wage"? I think you're still taking the wage relative to a dolar in this case. The point is that if you get paid in X, you get paid in X. If X has any traction, your employer also has income in X, so relation of X to other currencies is not that much relevant to your salary or debts if they're both in X.

Sure - 100x change over a year is going to be a problem for other reasons, but have a look at GBP/EUR exchange rate. It changed between 1,28 and 1,16 over the last couple of months. Nobody corrected my salary by 10% just because of this.
There are coins with much lower mining costs, like PPC coins. It uses a "proof of stake" algorithm instead of a "proof of work".

I still haven't quite wrapped my head around the math. Here is the paper: http://www.ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdf
Would be nice if each user had their own cursor/state and different users could modify different parts of the doc at the same time without causing crazy to happen.
Not sure why you got downvoted for that. I can see how a reasonable person could disagree, but your position is certainly not outlandish. In fact, I - by and large - agree with you. Especially this bit:

If you want to start a business making $500k a year. You don't have to grind. But if you want a chance at millions or billions then yes, you do have to grind. You are competing at the highest level.

Yeah, if your ambitions are that grand, you can't really expect anything to come easily... personally I feel like you have to be willing to scrape, kick, scratch, claw, bleed, hustle and basically battle your ass off if you're going to get there.
Cellphones are tracking devices. Plain and simple. The fact that the trackees/victims are paying 70 to 100 bucks each month to build and support the tracking infrastructure is the amazing part.
How We Got 31k Pageviews in a Day by Pretending to be Obama
> chose to forward this complaint

> ...

> the email also contained sensitive information about who this operator was

> ...

> This is a fundamental breach of that mutual trust

> ...

>Hetzner.de has broken one of the most fundamental aspects of any report of criminal activity or suspicion thereof; source protection.

Excuse me? How is this in any way Hetzner's problem? The only "fundamental breach" of trust I can see here is the one that occurred when efnet gave "sensitive information" on its own operators to a third party at all. It sounds to me like efnet is the one in need of a lesson on "source protection." This reads more like a "we screwed up bad and are about to divert blame as hard as we can" letter than anything else. But I'm more than ready to listen to any further context that can be given to this.
The fact that someone can in all seriousness talk about the "hype" of personal life as "grasping at straws to mask their own insecurities" is a very sad indication of some aspects of modern life.

What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?

I would trade any amount of billions for that, in fact I probably have, because I decided long ago that family and my personal happiness are more important than millions in the bank.
> They've build an app in an afternoon, just for their group, to keep track of what tracks they finished and how they liked it. I think this is fascinating. I wonder what would happen if students would learn to build simple apps like that in school, instead of Excel

To be pedantic, Excel would be the perfect tool for writing an app like this. A few columns, a quick and dirty VBA GUI... Bob's your uncle
An Overview of REST Metadata Formats
You can choose any email address you control. Persona doesn't force you to use one identity.

Sites that use Facebook connect on the other hand...
It's still pretty new (as the link states, it's still in beta). I'd say that is probably a big part of it.

That, and the whole federated/shared/social login space is confusing! First there was OpenID, but then everyone jumped to OAuth. But wait, OAuth isn't really about authentication?! Throw in xAuth and all of Eran Hammer's rants, and you quickly realize that anything resembling consensus is pretty tenuous, at best.

Persona looks solid, though -- here's hoping browser developers jump on board quickly. I'm concerned that OAuth's delegated authentication mechanism might remain king for a lot of free web apps, though. The ability to require permissions to post (spam) to your users timeline/wall (even if it's not actually needed by your application) is probably pretty tempting for someone trying to work every angle possible to make money from their application. Every angle other than actually charging for their service, that is.
I think, respectfully, you should get over it. This fight was lost decades ago.
>> he era when a man or a woman is defined by his relationships and family is over, and good riddance.

> No it's not. Those things help to define a person.

When you try to refute someone's position, it's expected that you will offer a counterargument, not a different topic. Yes, relationships help define a person. No, that doesn't mean the era hasn't ended in which one's relationships are central to one's identity.
Coincidentally, you'll find that it is impossible to spend more than ~6 hours of focused time on a single type of task. If you have different types you might be able to stretch your total focus to about 8 or maybe 9 hours.

So if your main job is coding, you can probably spend about 6 real work hours on that. This leaves you with another 3 hours to spend on stuff like email, or writing or whatever. Certain types of hobbies do count into this as well.
Google Street View Hyperlapse
Because most parents have much better taste in baby names.
Google Fiber’s Next Stop: Austin, Texas
Why Facebook Home is a Great Move
I think that tactic will help quite a bit no matter where you might apply, not just Google (though I can confirm it almost always helps to be an active open source developer. It's consistently help us decide positively on a number of candidates.)
I saw that after the fact. I have no experience with indiegogo and only kickstarter which has the all or nothing funding rules.
It's ironic that the tool that has replaced Hypercard is in fact Excel. Excel makes it amazingly easy for non-programmers to develop simple applications
But if you've already got SQL Server for the SSAS, would you go through the bother of installing Postgres?

I think that's Microsoft's advantage in the database market: their system has all the tools out-of-the-box.

And the licensing's really not that expensive - especially compared to the heart-attack inducing prices coming out of Oracle, IBM, SAS, Teradata, Kx etc etc etc
Hyperlapse: Open Source Tool for Creating Timelapses from Google Street View
Use of Hybrid PaaS Now and In the Future
It does have text-overflow processing: http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-SVG2-20130409/text.html#TextOve...