skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With respect, the article's point is not that tech can't improve, but that those improvements aren't needed. His expression "good enough" means "good enough for a particular purpose". Sure it can be improved; but it doesn't matter because it's good enough. Consider his example of netbooks: less powerful but more demand.

You're taking improvement in technology; he's talking demand for that improvement. Sure, you can make a car that will do 200mph - and what's the market for that? How about a car that uses less fuel, has crumple zones and airbags, easier to park, looks cool, feels great to drive, accelerates well and has seats that smell like leather?

You can buy an 8 inch hard disk drive with a hugely larger capacity than a 3.5 inch one you have, and that is also cheaper per GB. But you don't buy the 8 inch one, because the smaller drives have enough capacity for your needs: they are "good enough". Because of lower fixed costs, they are also cheaper (for that capacity). And they'll fit in your laptop.

I concede that the expression "good enough" is misleading. He's using it in the sense of "The Innovators Dilemma". It's the basis of each disruptive revolution in computers, and it takes almost everyone by surprise. We keep on improving aspect X, and everyone loves it! Until one day, they stop buying it. How come? I don't know, let's just make X even better!

The idea is that people buy something based on a mix of benefits, things like features, performance, reliability, convenience, and price. Saying that one of these attributes is not "good enough", is a way of saying that "there is demand for more of it". The vendor who can supply the best improvement, in terms of the current mix of demand, wins. It's usually seen as one key benefit, and the rest are secondary. That's where the competition is focussed. And this keeps on going for years, decades. Everybody works at improving that aspect, because people demand more of it. But if it eventually saturates the demand for it, people can't use a faster car, they can't absorb more capacity: it finally is "good enough". This is another way of saying that there is now demand for more of some other attribute instead of that one. And competition shifts to that attribute.

This plays out all the time in technology markets: e.g. once it's fast enough for their needs, people prefer to buy something cheaper instead of faster. Sure, it can be faster, but that's irrelevant if no one wants it.

Fortunately, the demand doesn't usually disappear, but switches to somewhere else, so there is still demand for tech improvements - just different ones.
Also being from Oz yet perhaps closer to the 'younger self' you described, I feel compelled to reply. Although it is fun to romanticise about alternate paths you are quite correct: had you not taken the path you did, you would not have come to the realisation you now have.

I graduated from my CS degree with strong results in 2007 and bucked the trend of my peers to live the entrepreneurial dream while freelancing on the side to sustain me. I was rather naive. While freelancing I had no idea how to quote, bill, manage scope, protect myself from being taken advantage of, etc. You pick these things up along the way, but the experience can be painful. My entrepreneurship endeavour fared even worse as I quickly fell into the trap of trying to produce perfection in a vacuum. The saving grace of this period results from my dabbling in the share market which has proven to be rather profitable.

I made the stark decision to give the 9 to 5 a shot and quickly landed a job in one of the large IT consulting firms. It has been the best decision I've made so far, if only to give me exposure to the significant problems that exist in enterprise software. If there's one industry that deserves to be innovated to the hilt, this is it. I feel invigorated and more motivated than I ever have been to break out on my own. I also am the most capable I've ever been, having stripped away some of my nativity (although hopefully some remains - I suspect it can be valuable).
In school or universities, generally they teach only the thoerical part. The real world scenario is another important part, that everyone discover it himself. It's later called "Experience" and "Career".

If you want just to be an ordinary guy, just take a job. Most luckily, you won't need to know much about finance, business... you'll just do what they want you to do.

However if you want to build your startup yourself or start a company and be the leader, then you need knowledge. You don't really need deep knowledge on Marketing, but just small ideas to get you started.
nolo.com has some books on that sort of subject. Since they have a lot of them, the best thing to do is go to your library, look through a bunch, and see which one is best for you, and then consider buying it.
Easy: if an act does not impose force, threat, or fraud, it is moral.
Better than AdSense for some? Hosted job boards.
I ran into this in the process of posting a job on a particularly targeted site. Seems like a good idea for some people, and I think they're right that ads in general are often viewed negatively, but job ads maybe a positive.

It looks like they handle everything including payment processing and take a 50% cut for their effort. Seems more than fair for their apparent target audience.
I ran into this in the process of posting a job on a particularly targeted site. Seems like a good idea for some people, and I think they're right that ads in general are often viewed negatively, but job ads maybe a positive.

It looks like they handle everything including payment processing and take a 50% cut for their effort. Seems more than fair for their apparent target audience.
I also vote for Wikidot, it's simpler than other Wikis
However, you are confusing 'what will become available' with 'what consumers will buy when it becomes available'. The author doesn't say nothing 'better' will become available. He is claiming that consumers may not buy it, because the advantage of the new product over the old one is minimal. He is, in effect, claiming that many more current R&D efforts will, in the near future, turn out to be bad investments.

When purchasing a new product, the perceived advantage is always weighed against its additional cost, having to let go of something one 'is familiar with', backward compatability with other possessions that are retained, etc. If the manufacturer does not succeed in convincing consumers that there is something to be gained by 'upgrading', they will not upgrade.

Now I concede that, at the moment, you are probably right: lots of new and improved technologies that will hit the markets the next ten years will be perceived as having sufficient advantage (to replace currently owned products) and they will be purchased.

However, in the long run, I think there must come a point when the author's argument will turn out to be valid. That's when new technologies just do not offer enough advantage to be profitable in the consumer market. Of course, every technology faces this problem at some point: it reaches a stable end-of-life fase and manufacturers deal with it in various ways. Some old types of CPU, radio's and the lightbulb are interesting case studies. The main question is whether there will come a point when this holds for the majority of technological innovations, in such a way that the consumer market for 'new' products vanishes all across the 'technological' consumer product market.
Natural Magic saw 50 editions about geology, demonology, magnetism, and invisible writing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_della_Porta

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Magic
Any why are we totally, 100% sure that it was the bankers who wrecked the economy? Did they not work within the system? Who broke the law and isn't going to jail?

This is just blind, bullshit populism where people want to target a group and spout their righteous anger.
Recreating Yesteryear Photographically
In a matrix-related vein powered exoskeleton technology is becoming good/cheap. A reasonable way to prevent brain injuries from getting rattled around by an IED is to make yourself REALLY heavy and then power it so you don't get really tired walking around on patrol (i.e. powered armored exoskeleton)

Speaking of horrendous there's also those supposedly non-lethal ray guns they are testing on journalists holding mattresses.
One less open source licence to worry about
The author of the article is confusing technology advancement with "consumer product demand" under an economic recession.

Aside from slowing of initial productivity gains in the broad application of commoditized digital mathematics (i.e. computers) to human endeavors, technology growth is actually accelerating in many areas including: biology, materials science, pure mathematics (algorithms are actually a technology), metrology (think 'Large Hadron Collider'), and tribology (lubrication, and friction).

The wrongly attributed "640k is all anyone will ever need" quote comes to mind. What a horrid piece of "jurinalism".
The end of the PC? (2000)
She was speaking metaphorically.
The thing that strikes me about all this craziness over Google Book Search is that Google did an extraordinary thing: they made significant progress toward scanning every book ever printed. With great effort (and risk) comes great reward. It would be a huge cost, but I don't see why another company doesn't try to do the same thing.

The monopoly doesn't exist because Google is trying to force other people out; it exists because no other company is willing to take the expense/risk to do it themselves.
The cookie will be sent even with a form submit. JavaScript from another domain can't see it directly, however.
The death of the PC was claimed in a video presentation from 2000 or 2001. I can't find it online - anyone know the one I mean?

I found the argument fascinating: he claimed that the dramatic growth of the computing industry was fueled by more people having access to computers. Beginning with mainframes, through to minicomputers, workstations and PCs, each wave was cheaper and was affordable to a much larger number of people. This increasingly larger audience is what fueled the growth. But such growth can't continue forever; eventually everyone has one. At that point, they still buy upgrades and replacements, but the dramatic rate of sales must drop back.

I think that's where the first world is today, and developing nations aren't that far behind. Of course, we'll still have new devices (iPhones, kindles, and others-yet-to-be-invented), but the computing industry as such won't grow at the unsustainably dramatic rates of previous decades.
While I agreed with a lot of their positions, in retrospect the anti-Bush movement was bad for the level of discourse in this country. People became accustomed to dismissing their opponents as evil idiots, and this phenomenon is especially noticeable among my generation.

While I agreed with a lot of their positions, in retrospect the pro-Bush movement was bad for the level of discourse in this country. People became accustomed to dismissing their opponents as evil idiots, and this phenomenon is especially noticeable among my generation.
No, it isn't, as the cookie is sent with any request to your domain, regardless of the source. The hashing uses the fact that the cookie is inaccessible to JavaScript running in other domain contexts.
re: "you wouldn't steal a car"

I can't believe I'm quoting Reddit comments, but:

"you wouldn't steal a car" - "I would if I could download a car!"
The article is mostly about rendering terrain, not generating it, and it also has nothing to do with reddit.

However, the rendered results do look relatively nice, and the article (even as awfully paginated as it is) gives a pretty good idea on how to get there from zero.
You're right; I meant werewolves. I'd edit but the edit period has expired.
10 Great Hidden Things Google Can Do That You Should Know
17 simple but useful Gmail tools and tips
Yes CS programs teach more theoretical stuff, but it's the fundamentals you're less likely to learn (correctly) on the job, but which will make you much better at your job.
I can't wait for when we start mining land fills looking for all the stuff we've thrown away.

I've heard of plans for robots or even bacteria to be engineered to gather the materials together.

I've even heard the argument that it will be more environmentally friendly to NOT recycle directly but to landfill and use 'agents' to gather the elements we need.. time will tell.
Let's face it: Building web sites is hard.

For some reason every new generation of developers comes out expecting that to change, but it's not going to. There will always be browsers going out of life that you need to support. That's just the way it works.

And yes, there will always be people like this author whining about it and blaming his users for the his problem. That's the wrong way to go.

If you build web applications, you need to suck it up and support all the browsers out there. Yes, it's harder and yes, you need to use a common subset of all the available tools.

It's been this way since 1995. It's not going to change. Please stop complaining about it.
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I thought the title meant the Reddit team was working on procedural terrain generation. There's usually no need to cite where a submission was found.
Yeah, hawala evolved into giros (or postal transfers) in most of the western world.
"* No presentations. Find the best presenter you possibly could, and at most 60% of your regulars are really interested. "

I really like to learn new stuff, and I like teaching others what I've learnt too. Learning online is cool, but you don't get to ask as many questions.

What about, say, 15 minute talks, always with demo code, always task based, no API-walkthrough talks ever? I've been thinking about a London Python group along those lines...
All you need to know is get a lawyer.
Robot cars.

Car accidents cost over a million lives worldwide every year - 45,000 in the USA - and injure about 40 times that number. They are the leading cause of death for people aged 18-34. In the USA, the total cost of accidents is about $230 billion (1.7% of American GDP according to my calculations).

Robot cars will reduce car accidents, probably by a lot (human errors make up 93% of the causes of car accidents; 80% of accidents are due to human inattention). They'll make parking vastly more efficient (the car can drop you off and go and park in some optimal place). 50 billion person-hours are spent driving every year. In productive hours, that's worth a trillion dollars. Even if the hours aren't productive (watching TV or whatever), it's still worth a lot. Congestion would be reduced because robot cars don't need the follow space between cars that human reflexes require. It's like quadrupling the capacity of existing roads for free. Since the crash rate might be so low, cars might be ultralight rather than made of armor, so they'll use less energy and less metal.

I first became excited about robot cars from reading this essay:
http://ideas.4brad.com/robocars-are-future
Flame-bite? The title is the equivalent of saying 'the Netscape web browser is a failure' (which is only ridiculous to point out because it's so obvious).

How frequently do you see Atom feeds published?
In those cases do you ever Atom published without an accompanying RSS feed?
Easy: if an act does not impose force, threat, or fraud, it is moral.

Well then by your "easy" definition, theft (within the context of piracy) is not a threatening force, is not fraudulent nor does it require force.

So you have just defined Piracy as a moral thing to do.

You just lost your own original argument by your own definition. Nice job.
UK startup icons launch fund to bridge Europe’s ‘Equity gap’
Definitely in favour of that!

Also, it would be nice if it got linked from the front page, like the green icon and "Search HN".
If you're going to stick with this model you should definitely add an auto-recharge feature.

I might do that at some point, but right now that would kill one of the key benefits of the prepaid billing model -- right now, I don't need to store credit card numbers.
Well, in some ways we already have robot cars. Audi and VW and others already have a lot of driver assistance features like blind spot checking, rear camera, etc. Some cars even steer autonomously to assist with parallel parking. However, if you're hoping to see fully autonomous driving in consumer casr you're going to be waiting a while. There are a lot of regulatory and comfort/psychological issues with such systems.

Disclaimer: I spent last quarter working on a driver assistance system on Junior for changing lanes on the highway.
I really like the simplicity and chosen featureset of Hatta - it is version control based (Mercurial) and works really well. The author is very responsive.

http://hatta.sheep.art.pl/

"Snazzy" is quite subjective - I like the default design not to scream "I am a wiki with a gazillion fancy features you'll never use", but your milage may vary :-)
I'm really surprised more people aren't with us on this one. BCI isn't that far off, and it's pretty much the holy grail of future tech/sci-fi.
Maybe because low-carb promises an easy fix to the problem? Just guessing, but certainly low-carb books being on top of the bestsellers lists doesn't validate the theory in my opinion.
Here is a simple reason why these type of graphs are flawed: they ignore economics. If you've taken Econ 101, you'll know that the demand is sensitive to price and scarcity drives up prices. Present demand is meaningless while making forecasts, since future demand is a function of future prices. Plus, increasing demand would also enlargen reserve base, since operating certain low-yield mines would become profitable.
Cel-shading
Oh is it easy? And downloading a movie falls into which of those categories?

It's certainly not force or threat, so it must be fraud. In which case:

Can you explain how one determines, in an objective way, whether or not an act is fraudulent?
Experimenting with the YouTube audio fingerprinting system
Just make sure you also twitter about the events, because I am not going to check out another web site on a regular basis.
I don't agree with your statement that, "There are just too many ways that we know exist for it not to happen. It's inevitable." There are a lot of ways we think might work. That is no guarantee that we'll get any of them to actually work. I'm still waiting for the predictions of the last generation to become reality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)

The spectrum of landlords, and tenants, takes in the whole human spectrum. There are always going to be landlords who do the bare minimum. If the market is there for added extras then I don't see why a landlord wouldn't make the extra investment. Personally I'm in a property now for which all utilities are included in the price. I'm happy to pay for the convenience of that arrangement. If my landlord could purchase a private power supply to more economically meet my needs over the long term I think he would do so before most home owners got around to it.

Finally what sorts of power systems do you envision for an apartment? With a house I can see some options, nuclear as previously mentioned, wind, solar, geothermal. For an apartment you don't generally speaking have access to the roof so options for solar and wind are limited and similarly you don't have access to the ground the building is on so geothermal is limited.
Novell Offers Commercial Support for Mono 2.4
"The yen doesn't physically get shipped to America, either."

yeah I don't get the "without moving it" part either. With minor exceptions money doesn't physically move in the mainstream financial system either. There are many things that define hawala but "transfering money without moving it" isn't one.
I think it's a quite informative set of graphs that provides interesting information about which resources, and hence which technologies, can be expected to increase in price, relative to other technologies, within the next decennia.

The fact that you consider something meaningless does not make it flawed. The legend clearly states these predictions are based on current demand, so the only flaw is in the person that thinks these graphs indicate when we will actually run out of these resources. You are perfectly right about that: that requires economical considerations.
technologies for construction , and technologies for energy.
while the cost of most other things is going down (at least in the long term), the cost(and technology of) housing and energy are basicly the same.
also housing and energy are probably the biggest expenses per family , so any technological improvement there would have huge effects.
It was also likely to result in illegal actions, which cannot be said for the bankers.

Now, it's possible to argue about whether or not either should be illegal, but such is not the territory of courts, it is the territory of politicians.
I guess we are in a mirror image at the moment :) i worked at a big consultancy company then worked overseas for 3 years then came back here again. When i was overseas i worked in asia and it was there that i really met with some great business people. I then decided to do business myself and at the moment its working out ok. But i was only able to come to this realisation after the work i did in the various companies be it crappy work unfulfilling work or not.

When i look back at it, i feel that it is unfulfilling but i cant deny the great skills that i learnt from the various companies. Anyway, best of luck with your endevours :)
Original wiki http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UseModWiki/Download
You'll get more out of having a lawyer, and know more about what you're being advised to do if you get informed first.
I like DokuWiki and MoinMoin.
And here you make one of the same lame moral relativist fallacies to back up your point.

Parent: "morals are absolute"

You: "no, because lots of people argue about it"

So, if lots of people argued about whether 1+1=2, does that make it false? Reality isn't consensus based.

Plus, disagreeing that morality is objective is incoherent. If it isn't objective, then what's wrong with stating that it is objective?
Xen: How to Convert An Image-Based Guest To An LVM-Based Guest
It may well happen that some day, technological development stalls and no one needs anything anymore from technology.

However, that day will be the day when no one on Earth has any problems anymore, because technology is used to solve problems. That may happen if we destroy ourselves, or if we reach a peak of technological achievement such that we are effectively gods.

I hope the former won't happen in my lifetime, and I suspect we'll have to wait a while for the latter.
Better for SimplyHired, that's all.
"The fact that you consider something meaningless does not make it flawed."

True, but the fact that this issue is covered clearly by larger thinkers in Econ 101 does make it meaningless in terms of "conservation" or "planning for the future".

This hole idea is so common they gave it a name: Malthusian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe)

And there have been empirically proven answers to this question. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon)

If this chart means anything, it really only applies to commodities brokers, not to end consumers.
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