skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason for not having 50 Silicon Valleys is in a recent post of Fred Wilson at his AVC.com: On average in the US over the past 10 years, venture capital has had returns lower than the S&P or index funds. So, basically the ROI of venture capital sucks. Silicon Valley has such a large fraction of US venture capital that basically the ROI of Silicon Valley has to suck. But the top tier venture firms are doing well, right? Well, recently KPCB got a 'reality check' about ROI from their limited partners and made some changes. So, well, maybe Sequoia or AH is doing well. Maybe. Has any venture firm made much money since Facebook or Google?

So, why should the world have 50 places that have ROI that sucks?

Actually, there's good reason to suspect that not all the blame for the financial suckage belongs on Silicon Valley or venture capital. Instead likely we have to look to constraints put on that 'asset class' by the limited partners. But to the limited partners, the venture capital asset class is usually at most small potatoes. So, the limited partners are reluctant to bend over backwards to give the venture partners, in a small asset class, relaxed constraints.

The good news is the ratio of price and performance for the 'raw material' for an information technology startup -- an 8 core, 64 bit, 4.0 GHz processor for about $180, ECC main memory at less than $9 per gigabyte, hard disks with 3 TB for about $135, Internet bandwidth enough for well over $500,000 a month in revenue for less than $100 a month, fantastic infrastructure software for free or nearly so -- Linux, open source, the Microsoft BizSpark program, etc. Can still be wet behind the ears and remember when such computing performance cost factors of 10 more.

So, the challenge is to find something valuable to do with such information technology raw materials. Maybe it is a challenge, but I have to believe that it is also one of the best business opportunities in the history of the planet.

Heck for what it costs to open a pizza shop, buy a truck for an electrician, get a mower, trailer, and truck for mowing grass, or equip an auto repair or auto body shop, can set up one heck of a server farm. Or just use the cloud.

But my take is also that more is needed than just a bright business 'idea' and programming language experience.

It does appear that the day of the 'organically' grown startup without equity funding is about to become more common or even dominant. E.g., there is the Romantic Matchmaking site Plenty of Fish in Canada, long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just from Google, and $10 million a year in revenue.

With enough programming experience, can bring up such a site and get nicely profitable in less time than it commonly takes for a venture capital firm even to respond with a no.
Would you like to sponsor me in return for advertising?
Hi there,
My name is Jacob and I am a 16 year old student at the Scottish high school Linlithgow Academy (Situated in Linlithgow) But in my spare time I am a budding web developer, coder and graphic designer working on a run down laptop from 2006/7 with no battery, no functioning track pad or keyboard and a screen with no backlight. So I have come up with the idea of seeking sponsorship from companies such as yourself in order to purchase a 15'' MacBook Pro in order to ease my studies and further myself in the world of coding and design. What I would offer in return is a space on the lid of the laptop for each company or organisation to have their respective logos or artwork engraved. This would provide advertisement as I would frequent in large cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Falkirk and Stirling and would have my laptop out in coffee shops and parks for the world to see. I eagerly await your reply.<p>Yours sincerely<p>Jacob Edgar Anderson
That's amusing, because I've started liquidprompt for this very specific reason: I was constantly missing the battery notification icon. Time seems to have trained my brain not to look at this screen area. Fortunately, with liquidprompt alerts are spoting just where I look at, and only when necessary.
Perspectives of Startup Hire
Yours is a dangerous attitude. You believe that the thing that you understand is easy to understand, and those who don't understand it are therefore morally wrong, for some definition of "morally". Thus, you ignore genuine problems because you've attached a deeper meaning to the very concept of complaint, and you also significantly underestimate the effort you yourself expended in overcoming your ignorance so you will generally underestimate it for other people too. Really, there's no good news here.
ApiDoc - Inline Documentation for RESTful web APIs
You're being intellectually dishonest, it's not cool. The vast majority of educational spending is at the local and state level, the vast majority of defense spending is at the federal level. If you look at the totals of spending across all levels (federal, state, local) you can see how close the spending levels for education and defense are. The numbers are even summed for you.
I don't even know if this matters that much within a corporate environment. Those dealing with the numbers are most of the time aware of the fact that these numbers have already inherent flaws and do only approx. the reality out there. As long as the results sound somewhat plausible chances are dim that anyone is going to ask questions. At the same time those requesting the numbers are happy "to have the facts on their side".
The physical analogy falls apart because generally envelopes are tamper-evident against most attackers (i.e. it's hard for a malicious postal worker to take your envelope, open it, read what's there, then repackage it without it being detectable that something fishy happened). With communication protocols over the Internet, the tamper-evidence falls apart. All packets look alike.

Another difference: The Internet as a whole routes packets mostly concerned with reliability, not trustworthiness of the ISPs in the middle, so a trusted Postal Service doesn't work on the Internet either.
I see your point - the principal is repaid but the interest stays in circulation.

Agree mortgages didn't pop due to being paid back.
This makes me feel so sad.

I think the biggest lesson to learn from this case is that there has to be a independent entity in double-blind studies which knows the relation between test subject and the substance and has the power to interrupt or terminate a study when people's lifes are at risk.

Again, another fine example of how capitalism does not take unforeseen issues into account - to refuse to drop out Dan of the study program is "manslaughter by neglicence" for me (not by malice, as the responsible actors could not have definite knowledge that Dan would kill himself).
To be honest, just because I've tried to pass this link in hackernews several times without success, with different combination of keywords/users.

I was a little bit shameful at the beginning, but the overwhelming success (from the perspective of this very little software: github stars * 2) is interesting.

It seems that some keywords are more efficient than others. Let's consider this practice as social engineering.
Woah thanks for that link, there could be some assembly worth salvaging there.

Currently working on an ARM forth-idea with some scheme-ideas. There's this nagging intuition I have that there's a symbiosis between Lisp atom/Forth word and S-expression/Forth dictionary.

I have to get something going pretty quickly so I can't get too pure about the idea, as I don't want to get bogged down in the necessary GC yet.

Thanks for your reply, it already made me more interested in Factor from an implementation standpoint, even if I wouldn't use it on x86.
What’s new in Asp.Net MVC 4?
Agree BTC is way too unstable but being the the best nag in the glue factory doesn't mean much.

USD collapse would certainly be a far reaching global event but that doesn't mean it will not happen. I'm sure all prior entities with reserve status also thought their position unasailable.

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...

Global support for it is waning. China is doing direct currency swap deals and is no longer supporting USD by stacking treasuries at the rate it was. Russia is dishoarding treasuries too. The current trade deficit is propped up by the Fed buying USG bonds and suppressing interest rates. USD is not long for this world in its current form.
> The idea the USD is going to collapse is farcical. It would be a global catastrophe of a scale not yet seen, but also not threatened.

In the short term you are probably right. In the long term you are almost certainly wrong.
Actually 39 years. The USD was a token for gold until Nixon shock.
Being an "exec" at a 2 or 3 persons startup is not far off being a grunt. In fact it is the same thing. Putting "CEO" on your resume is not impressive if your company failed.
https://code.google.com/p/renjin/
You're right,
for the first part (waking up), dreaming and programming are the opposite, but
for the second part "let them know you are there but say nothing until they are ready", "If someone wakes you out of bed and starts shouting a long list of things at you to remember, you’ll almost certainly forget what you were dreaming", both are similar (you need time to transfer your dream/task from short term memory to longer term memory, otherwise, you get a short term memory overflow ^^)
The problem is the privatization of critical infrastructure, a cancer spreading all over the world.

To quote the last sentence of the article: "Many academic physicians are required by their universities to generate a substantial portion of their salaries by obtaining research grants."

Healthcare, basic transportation, energy and water distribution as well as basic telecommunication infrastructure must be in the hands of the state. The free market has massively failed in each of these areas, everywhere in the world. Just look at the US electricity grid, the Berlin water privatization disaster (less service, more expensive), the US (and partially, German too) broadband Internet service, the Berlin S-Bahn problems, the (recently HN frontpaged) problems in the US healthcare system...

Why can't we learn from the countless mistakes made all over the world?!
The $60 were meant with the inexpensive verification step. Then the number of wildcard certificates is not limited.
Nice Responsive MultiLevelMenu
This article has left me speechless.. It reminds me of what my stats prof said about this kind of research..Researchers doing this kind of research have to believe that they will find the results the pharmaceutical company wants before they conduct the study. In other words, they are not testing if the drug works; they are just showing that the drug works.
I think the general theme that we understood from the early feedback is facebook connect isn't really the preferred option. Our stats show the same. We saw 7% of visitors in the last couple days actually click facebook connect. Although the experience in the end is better since it's easier to connect with friends I think it's up to us to show a real use case as to why a user should connect.

The link/guest type signup is something we'll probably do quickly, invite via email or url.
Was dennis ritchie more important than steve jobs
Yeah but that I define as "monetary metal for Central Bank settlements" gold, not "day-to-day normal-people transactional currency". Was it still "money" / monetary after 33? Certainly, until '71 (42 years ago, not 39). But "currency" (circulating to facilitate/lubricate individual micro rather than macro exchange&trade)? Hardly ;) Also not "legal tender" -- as in, for courts enforcing contract liabilities or tax payments.

TL;DR: only outside the US, only to Central Banks.
C++ Concepts in C++14: Constraining templates with predicates
Awesome, got a good one
The full trip report by Herb Sutter covers other interesting new features:
http://isocpp.org/blog/2013/04/trip-report-iso-c-spring-2013...
Reverse polish notation means you have to start reading from the end of the expression:

"hello world" print

This is also why ternary expressions in C like languages is hard to read.
Police, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probe
Dennis Ritchie eventually became the head of Lucent Technologies’ Software System Research Department before retiring in 2007; he never led a multi billion-dollar corporation, sought the public eye, or had his every utterance scrutinized and re-scrutinized. Ritchie was by all accounts a quiet, modest man with a strong work ethic and dry sense of humor. But the legacy of his work played a key role in spawning the technological revolution of the last forty years — including technology on which Apple went on to build its fortune.

Conversely, Steve Jobs was never an engineer. Instead, his legacy lies in democratizing technology, bringing it out of the realm of engineers and programmers and into people’s classrooms, living rooms, pockets, and lives. Jobs literally created technology for the rest of us.

Who wins? We all do. And now, it’s too late to personally thank either of them
There is a similar article published in a notable bioinformatics journal explaining how errors were introduced when Excel was used and altered gene names irreversibly.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80
https://twitter.com/UberSoc/

10 million followers. Not verified.

Pretty sure they win. They're in the to 50 on the followers list, and the rest are basically singers or really famous.
Hardly. What long term destabilizing factors would make people abandon the USD - the currency of the current global military hegemon, if nothing else?
Don't worry, only 90% of the prior million good names are parked. I'm sure it'll never happen. ;)
PowerInbox launches a massive API, letting anyone add apps to their emails
Plenty of currencies exist without being de facto global currencies and survive just fine. The question is what makes the USD likely to collapse as a currency altogether - rather then simply behave more like the normal internal currency of a sovereign nation?

People don't go around predicting the decline and fall of the Australian dollar for example.
Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right.

I think you nailed it.

Most executives in most companies get to bike-shed and do little else. Jobs actually made bike-shedding the worst job in the company.

Steve Jobs lived in the spotlight more than almost anyone else in this business, so every assholish thing he did got magnified. What I've heard is that he was very polarized: sometimes very nice, sometimes very mean. (I'm that way, so I can relate.) Apparently he was nice to engineers for the most part; it was the VPs and Directors that he tore to shreds.

Jobs had this whole theory about the VP level being the threshold of responsibility that is a direct affront on the Effort Thermocline (in that VPs get more direct scrutiny, rather than, as is more typical, more power that gives them the ability to hide losses and make themselves invincible).
You're right, I have inform them and it's already fixed.
Obviously it should have been Webzai.
I did this about 4 times so far but then the last time it now up in my face by adding 1 hour to my screening time and while I philosophically wasn't too keep opting out I have to wonder if I can keep justifying it pragmatically.
Ah. Andrew Gelman just complaint about this few days ago on his blog:

In response to the latest controversy, a statistics professor writes:

It’s somewhat surprising to see Very Serious Researchers (apologies to Paul Krugman) using Excel. Some years ago, I was consulting on a trademark infringement case and was trying (unsuccessfully) to replicate another expert’s regression analysis. It wasn’t until I had the brainstorm to use Excel that I was able to reproduce his results – it may be better now, but at the time, Excel could propagate round-off error and catastrophically cancel like no other software!

Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. But still, it’s such a joke. Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its desirable features. The disaster that is Excel seems like more of a mystery.
You got it. =)

I am embarrassed to say that I got caught up in the "reddit is internet detectives" on Thursday and Friday. It was only after a lot of thought Friday evening that I realized where my own head was and how far away from where I wanted to be I was.
Looks handy indeed, I wasn't aware perl had such potential.

Can you explain what's happening there?
I find the ternary expressions very easy to read and understand and never understood why others find it difficult at all.

I see no semantical difference between

if(expr1) expr2 else expr3;

and

expr1 ? expr2 : expr3;

Okay you need to learn the syntax, but it should be second nature after a few times. I also think the question mark is very intuitive.
Name cheap has them. http://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/comodo/positivessl...

Might be thinking of that.
I've been using (a slightly modified version of) https://github.com/dotcode/multi-shell-repo-prompt for a while now. Conveys what I consider to be relevant, anyway.
My solution http://i.imgur.com/S2L9pht.jpg
why not use something like incanter?
Put Away The Eulogy, The PC Is Alive And Well
zsh has RPROMPT, which displays on the right of your prompt and gets overwritten if you write a long command. I use it to show the last command's exit status and my current git branch, effectively without taking up space.
A Fast and Minimal JSON Parser for Java
Show HN: jsdares – learning programming visually
A fine story. I've read it before, but it was good to read it again. If I were a school maths teacher, I'd love to give it to a class for a discussion.
CISPA vote break down by name
appreciate the thorough burn-in test
Solution to that: multi-line prompts. First line with lots of info, second line just '$ '. Or RPROMPT if you are using zsh ([...] RPROMPT parameter. If this is set, the shell puts a prompt on the right side of the screen.)
Arch Linux has it in AUR, I'm currently in process of updating it to 0.96.
Never underestimate the Portia[1] trick.

[1] http://www.rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethle...
Why does it have to be free?

Domains are not free. Servers are not free. Bandwidth is not free. Time spent confirming a domain's ownership is not free. Would you rather get free certificates from a CA whose website is littered with gaudy ads?
a science
Thats bad enough, but they essentially forced him (at the threat of imprisonment) to participate in a trial.
So you eat on camera? Seems pointless, why not just have a chat after you both eat separately?
My suggestion is that learning to write programs in a concatenative language will teach you to think in combinatorial logic, a fundamental basis for computation. I outlined this idea a while back and mentioned Factor in "Finding Joy in Combinators:"

https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-11-...
On maybe 2-5% of my trips it ends up being 20-30 minute wait at the same airports that normally take 3-5 minutes to find a screener.

As a result I still need to show up 20-30 minutes earlier then I would otherwise.
Snoring Makes Medical News
QR codes never became popular here in Turkey. I'm pretty tech savvy guy but I asked all the questions when I first tried a QR code. There was an android appstore that I can't find a download link, just a QR code, I didn't know how to download them and gave up.

When I figured out that it holds information that must be interpreted by an app, I was amazed and fooled around to see how amazingly accurate it is at reading it.

But still, I see why it never caught-on here. We are a nation used to transfer pirated audio/video files, crack games and just don't expect things to work like "take a photo and a website opens". There is a poster about a concert with a QR code? Just google the artists name with the city name and the first result is the website selling the tickets. Why bother to find out what is that funny barcode, download an app for that? Just google it, you will find what's going on...
Thanks for the response.

Not that I'm going to start AV company at the moment, but I'm genuinely interested.
> Okay, so the entirety of silicon valley is a toxic waste dump?

Yes, notoriously so. Think about where the name Silicon Valley comes from. HP, Shockley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, AMD... Chipmakers. A lot of dangerous chemicals go into silicon chip fabrication, and a lot of them, especially in the bad old days, weren't disposed of (or contained) properly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabricati...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_hazards_in_semiconducto...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870411170457535...

http://www.epa.gov/region9/cleanup/california.html
For Sale: hacki.ng
I have a domain (www.hacki.ng) I have no use of and wish to get rid of it. Kindly make me an offer at aitoehigie @ gmail dot com. Thanks
Is this only for JavaScript source? I miss the interactivity e.g. available in https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/
>> I guess, a damn good tutorial is in order.

Firing up the Factor GUI environment you can access help via F1 where two options are the cookbook and the "Your First Program" tutorial.

This same documentation available in the environment is also available online[1].

[1] http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-first-program.htm...
It requires infinite time in addition to infinite energy. It's also not a "just", since it needs an engine which can always overpower the breaking effect of the occasional particles of intergalactic space. Even in pure vacuum, there's still an interaction with the 3K background background radiation. (For cosmic particles this is the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit.) Beyond that, there may be vacuum Cherenkov radiation to overcome.

Infinite energy doesn't help if your engine produces waste heat, unless you can also cool infinitely fast.
I agree with the premise of the article and it draws some nice analogies, but there are so many of these "don't interrupt a developer when they're programming" posts now that it's starting to encourage conceit among developers. I'm a developer myself and get the point, but there's a bit of give and take when you work with other people.

I used to do 'the zone' thing a lot, particularly when I didn't know what I was doing and wasn't designing things properly first. It's only later on I learnt to think first and pick up a pen - it's much easier to handle interruptions when you can turn back to a diagram or flowchart. Coding's really the last thing, and it's pretty much incidental to solving the problem itself.

So do try to minimise your distractions, but don't expect everyone should fit in around your schedule all the time.
Yes, besides aqcuiring existing virus database, I'm as well interested how updating of this database happens. Discovering new viruses, malware, etc.. creating signatures from it.
You seem to have taken this awfully personally. Is there a reason?
Steve Jobs said that he regretted his behavior during that time. He also later gave her daughter and her mother enough money to live on and became closer to her daughter.
SSL Certificate Authorities – How They Are Used (and Abused)
I always opt out.