skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're glossing over something significant. Some subcultures (and demographics) suffer more from norms against intellectualism. It is more stigmatized as a woman, among the general population of other women in the US, to be into technical stuff, than to be a man into the same things. It is similar to how bookish black kids may be told to stop 'acting white'.
For starters, I'd love my support request to actually get responded to. To this day (one month later), the support request is still opened. The issue was fixed, however those who were affected received a canned respond. I'm sure thousands of paying customers would not have been aware they were over charged.

"We discovered that your February invoice # was not calculated correctly beacuse of an issue with our usage data system. We have not charged your credit card while we've been investigating and repairing the issue. We will run automatic transactions within the next two business days to collect on your February charges. You can see your corrected invoice on the dashboard:

https://dashboard.heroku.com/account

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."
That would be great if software were exactly analogous to building skyscrapers, and developers were idiot construction workers who do nothing but put the sheetrock and nails where they are asked.

(Note: I am not saying that construction workers are idiots, I am saying that programmers are not idiot-construction-workers.)

There is not just one way to organize a project.
I've heard from the CEO of a large company that partners with Amazon a very similar figure for the revenue of AWS.

From the same source, I've heard that some services Amazon.com relies on runs on competitors' infrastructure, even though AWS offers the same service, and no, not as a backup service but as the primary solution for that particular service.
Google wants more speed on the web
Sweet idea! Now where's the version for Vim?
> What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't interested in the field.

Which is exactly the problem. There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. Something in the way we socialize children is convincing half the potential talent pool that they shouldn't develop an interest in technology fields, almost certainly because they see few if any adult role models.

It's not really a failing of the industry, in the sense that we're probably not the ones who originally caused it. But it is a problem for the industry, and one that industry insiders are in a unique position to solve.
But what if it's a better heuristic for finding young men than engineers?
There seems to be a correlation between geek culture and liking engineering, but I'm not convinced there's correlation with being any good at it. I'd say there's negative correlation if any.
I had an idea for a similar product a while back which would be basically the same thing for group messaging on mobile phones.
Learning javascript in just 30 days
>It's a pretty big risk for them, I should think.

Yes, so all it takes is somebody to rob THEM, and get keys and addresses...
Limited use?

As someone who over the past decade regularly had to sell higher management on investing in infrastructure, I can tell you this will be extremely useful.

Seriously, even if it's just a random visualization of some normal peek traffic, it will go down easier than dozens of actual arguments, slideshows with bullet points or fat reports nobody reads. Show the video, do a bit of handwaving and there's your budget...

For any techie trying to convince their boss they need more servers, this is a very powerful tool. Use with caution.
They might not be trying to explore physical space, they might be trying to explore chemical space. Chemical space? http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/18/a_short_pept...

Consider the question of whether there is any alternative biochemical basis for life. It is quite likely that even an alien super-intelligence finds the question impossible. Sure, it can invent synthetic biologys that are variations on its own biochemistry, but is there anything genuinely different out there? Given the size of chemical space it is probably easier to travel ten thousand light years to the nearest planet with life on it and look to see if its basis is the same or different.
Seems like someone could still donate server time for charity pr.
Right I guess the point I'm making is that once Amazon is forced to raise margins, will they still be Amazon? If Amazon never raises margins, what's the investment thesis? Something has to give.

The main theory is that Amazon is building up such a wide economic moat that consumers are going to be willing to put up with higher prices or competitors will still never be able to beat them on margins even when they start to take profits. This is a pretty huge bet.
How can an accelerator get on Dashboard?
Looks more like a "claimer" to me.
> IMO Linux is simply the safest OS to rely on because it's open source.

Anyone who buys brand new hardware can attest to the contrary, because of the lack of drivers.

Windows is the safest OS to rely for business. It's also way overpriced, in part, because of business.

I know I will not buy an AMD HD 7000 series yet for my Ubuntu rig because some things don't work in the OS driver.

We both love OSS, but please be objective and look at the issue from all perspectives.
Hmm. There's already a desktop app called Divvy that's been around for quite awhile.

http://mizage.com/divvy/
‘Eat More Kale’ Company Is Losing Against Chick-Fil-A in Trademark Battle
Poll is a bit confusing. I'm always reading a book, e.g., I've always got a book open at home that I pick up and read at different points during the day - anywhere from 30 minutes to ~120 minutes total each day. How many different books I read in a day or week is driven primarily by how long it takes me to complete them - sometimes its 3-4 novels a week, sometimes it can take me a couple of weeks to finish a single novel.
Ok, cool! Nice work on this!
Amazing, totally rethinking the experience. Typically brilliant of Elon.

He takes a typically irritating experience and makes it delightful.
What is with all the old news articles you're posting currently?
It causes early death too...
Yes, and this is in which way relevant to the point?
Markov chain algorithm in Go
This should be the top-voted comment. Well said!
MBA - good or bad for a tech start-up?
My point was that disparaging someone because they have different tastes from you is stupid. Okay, so you don't like fashion or gossip, and you like star wars. That fact alone doesn't make you better or more interesting than someone who likes fashion and gossip, but not star wars.
If poodles are at a zero, we are at a zero too. We can "theoretically" dump massive quantities of cash into building a giant craft but we are nowhere close to making a craft or society that will sustain itself for ~100,000 years until it gets to another star. We cannot even guarantee that we can sustain ourselves with all the earth's resources without wiping out our own society for 100 years.
>It is similar to how bookish black kids may be told to stop 'acting white'.

As someone who was an absurdly bookish black kid (pre-edit: from a segregated black neighborhood in Chicago, lower middle-class, never knew a white person until I was 13) in the 80's I never heard this once except as a declaration by white people about the pressure felt by black children not to achieve.

I agree with your overall point, though, just not the example.
Actually, there are increasing amount of evidence that implies we are related to the aliens on a genetic level. See Sirius the documentary.

We literally are who we seek.
Linode Fremont connectivity Issues
I had problems with the Windows updater apparently downloading version 2.0.6 and then not installing it. I ended up downloading and installing it manually instead. Could that be related somehow?
I agree that writing is helpful. It also brings original content, solutions to problems, and creates an audience for/to an online persona.

I've read about four to five of these 'start writing' or 'start mentoring' posts in the past two weeks. There is truth behind it.

The analytics, the keyword matching, and view counts drown my intention. I start off sharing thoughts, ideas, and drawings. Once the analytics start piling up, I obsess and it becomes a burden. I do not know how to step beyond addiction and write just to write. Monetization also creeps in at some point and usually places the nail in the coffin.
#ifihadglass I would jailbreak it and modify the software
Where do you get the 100,000 years number to get to another star?
There's an update at the bottom, but even that is not up to date. He was facing a second surgery.
What I witnessed during a regional housing boom where I live is exactly that: employees starting their own companies. So instead of paying a construction worker $25 an hour, you're suddenly paying his company $80 an hour for the same work. And you have little choice but to do so because part and parcel with the housing boom was a skilled labour shortage! And once the employee becomes a company, the companies hiring them were suddenly more limited in what they could demand and the workers were more inclined to set their own hours and do the work as they preferred because, as they saw it, they were now business owners who could do their own thing instead of an employee beholden to someone else's preferences on hours and work style.

From what I saw, some individuals regretted that decision because as it turns out, despite some added flexibility, they just wanted to work as a plumber or an electrician. They didn't want to have the added responsibility of being a business owner.
‘We’re no rock stars’: Meet Silicon Valley’s tech talent agents
I have a G+ account, 'branded' and everything. However, I also have other Gmail accounts I've created over the years, like a spam account I use to sign up for spammy websites, etc.

The problem is, Google wants me to unify all those, 'brand' them, and get them on G+ and Youtube, and keeps popping up annoy ware about it. One of them on Youtube recently tricked me, and I'm still not sure I selected the most appropriate option.

I appreciate Google is offering fairly granular choices, along with the choice to make no change at all. But this is just more noise and cognitive overhead I don't want to have to deal with.

I already use Google's full unified services they way they want me to with my primary account, I wish they'd just realize that and drop it with the rest.
two spaces after every period.
> nobody cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners

Just like nobody cares that there are very-few/no male prostitutes or strippers.

The underclass you speak of is split along gender lines too - unfortunately.
I used to have this attitude and then I realized that the vast majority of people cannot manage themselves.

If you have a small startup you can probably only hire people who can manage themselves. But as soon as you want to grow big, that becomes very very difficult.

Unless you're Valve, who apparently has been able to do it =)
Sooo, a lot more dangerous space trash in the future?
Perhaps a ~17% change is not significant on the scale that we inhabit (20C today depending where you are), but 1000C is a lot of degrees.
My chairman once said to me "You feel like you are driving along at 60mph, while everyone around you is going 90."

I've come to accept that is a perennial feeling if you start a company in the valley. If you aren't one of the bright shining stars like DropBox or Facebook, you can't help but wonder how you could be.

I think that feeling might still nag Zuckerberg a little bit too, and it's even that feeling that helps make decisions like "we need to buy Instagram right now for a cool bill."

It's not all bad to want a bit more. Greed is good as they say.
Not to mention that the actual machines behind those instance types have probably fully depreciated and paid for themselves by now -- if they're replacing them, it's to save on power.
A lot of the author's reasons have to do with lack of a spec. This topic was brought up by Jeff Atwood (creator of StackOverflow) last year -- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markd...

I had to build some markdown functionality into a project the other day, and so I googled around to see if there has been any update on this. Didn't find anything official, but a few random comments and blog posts here and there seem to indicate that StackOverflow, Github, and Reddit are working together to come up with a spec.

(Apparently John Gruber has disavowed any responsibility for leading the community in this regard, so now it's up to the big users of markdown to figure something out on their own).
In a housing boom do construction people start making their own construction companies instead of working for others?

Yeah, see the rise of the rich tradesperson in Australia for an example.
Talk to your customers. Make sure they can export their data. Free customers too. Consider talking to the archive team if appropriate.

Wipe any hashed passwords.

Sell the code, or open source if you can't find a buyer in two months.

Write up what happened.
Try it:

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/dingus
I was with him until he recommended one based on Wiki markup. Wiki markup is pretty universally reviled for good reasons.

He right complained about the heavyweight notation required for a simple link in Markdown, but everything is that bad or worse in most Wiki markup.

Really, the complexity of the markup you need depends on your application and any attempt to make a "one size fits all" markup is going to fail. The needs of a simple commenting system are vastly different from a user-editable CMS that doesn't want to give access to full HTML, but wants robust formatting options.
I'm reading for about one hour per day, every day (rarely I skip a day), for the last 2 years. First year I completed 52, second year I completed 60 books.
> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet

Which is a human characteristic shared by hardly any (if any) other species on Earth. So why do you suppose that fundamentally different life will have that human characteristic?

> if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us.

More advanced than ourselves, presumably, in the mode of what it means for humans to be more advanced. And you are again presupposing that said beings have human-like interests and will be excited about sending us prime numbers on the radio. This isn't a 'certainty'. This is no better than an article of faith on your part.
good luck getting 'color' to work out of sample
Wow, I wonder how this will fare for the company 1 year later. This car is very tempting with each day that passes...
They are trying to get customers to upgrade. It's a common tactic among car dealers.
I Listened to Users and Accidentally Built a Blogging Platform
We just tested it. Here's what it looks like:

{ "results": [{
"photoId": 0,
"useLocation": true,
"username": "Kdhddv",
"createdAt": "2012-05-08T22:41:13.187Z",
"updatedAt": "2012-05-08T22:41:36.454Z",
"objectId": "zeAsRRxu61",
"sessionToken": "y67zp3emfcpto44v4qp0mvqyf",
"bcryptPassword": "$2a$10$6XZsksIvrUW5vW9j86pbK.spXCdJFDyhiQlqg/yFNhD8FkwEslwHu"
}
] }
Progressive rock and conceptual albums would probably not exist if today's iTunes model existed in the 60s and 70s.

I can't imagine a Thick as a Brick or The Wall in an iTunes pay-by-the-song world.
Meh - there's a lot of people out there scratching itches that are nothing more than minor inconveniences.
Only if you gave them your address and the keys to it. If you gave them a different address or different keys, could be harder...
true - now think if WOW was a trillion times more immersive.
Stack Overflow supports an alternative syntax for
this use case:

Our primary landing page is <http://www.example.com>

Again, this is not knowledge that the user can take
with them to other Markdown based sites.

Actually, that is part of the markdown spec. See: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#autolink
Does this writing requires that you publish it somewhere or can it be really private?
That's what I was getting at though, the "immediate" effect could be non-existent because you already have adapted a tolerance (early as 10 days by some studies). If not, you should be able to test easily just by judging your mood about 45 minutes after your coffee.
You're obviously generalizing quite a bit. When you say "Homeland Security" do you mean ALL of these components:
http://www.dhs.gov/department-components

That's quite a lot to "eliminate". Granted there seems to be quite some overlap there. Where and what programs would we want to specifically cut? Doesn't congress appropriate a budget for DHS? They should be able to make changes long term, right?
So I installed the project and ran it with my log files and I'd like to retract my previous claim of it not being useful. You're right, I can definitely see the use here, it puts stuff into perpective quite well.

It's easy to write off shiny visualizations as silly (which is what I did above) but they definitely offer a perpective that you can't get any other way.
What can a startup do to get their customers to pay on time?
Indeed. It seems this new estimate puts it into "surface of the sun" territory (5700-8800K).
Where do you get any number? It's a back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude thing. We don't have anything close to faster-than-light spacecraft and there's no reason to think we will in the near future, except for pure religious hope.
The only unambiguous answer I can give is that the last three are each false.

The first six all have some truth value over some range of definitions for "book."

I don't always read several books every day. And sometimes, when I do, one or more of the books is online and in HTML or PDF, etc.

Among the books I might or might not read on any given day, are some that I have been reading for most of the year.

Generally, but for availability, I prefer dead tree books.
Your assertion that "our current age limit is becoming more obviously arbitrary every year" is lacking in evidence — it's been somewhere between 120 and 130 years for as long as we can tell, and we have not managed to surpass that even once. That's not arbitrary; it's a scientific fact.

But let's forget that. Let's grant that in the future we'll be able to quadruple the human lifespan to 480 years. For the sake of argument, I'll even grant that manned interstellar flight at 0.1c is achievable. At this rate, it will still take most of our very long lifespans to reach the three nearest systems that are candidates for habitable exoplants. You'll still need a generation ship unless you want a colony of geriatrics. (Also, once you do get there, you're very likely to find that the potentially habitable exoplanets turn out not live up to that potential in much the same way the potentially habitable Venus turned out not to, so you'll spend the rest of your extended lifespan moving on to the next system.)
Use SVG to Handle Retina Image Serving
Interesting how the press just calls these things "smartphones" but if they were iPhones, we'd see endless articles about Steve Jobs' vision, iPhone in the headline, etc.

There's something shameful about how little attention the excellent Android project gets. Those are Nexus One phones, a phone from Jan 2010. I feel Android being open and mallable for NASA is pretty noteworthy, but the press just sells this as a "smartphone" instead of really discussing the technical platform that makes stuff like this possible so quickly and so cheaply.
Here’s a way to attract developers: Give away puppies
Actually, tornado's test uses Mongo, which makes the test quite uncomparable to others using MySQL!
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...
I refused to watch Star Wars as a kid, because people kept telling me that if I was a nerd I had to watch it. I considered it a protest against their definition of "nerd".

I did finally watch the original trilogy after I was married. It's OK I guess...
I had similar thoughts seven years ago when Ruby on Rails was being sold as 10x faster to develop in....I wondered why no one would build my website for 1/10th the price.
There Is No Shortage of Tech Workers
Impossible to enforce - companies are free to shift things around internally to produce any numbers they want, as long as the totals are correct.
Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor
#django is super awesome. Those guys helped me go from a banker who sorta knew about for loops to a web app owner with paying customers. You'll find a handful of dedicated people in there that have been around for years and are very helpful.
Where Dell Admits It Doesn't Know Anything About The Post-PC era
2011 story. Can somebody downvote this? Gah.
labels do serve a real purpose and are a valuable player in the space

I have no disagreement with that. The problem is that the RIAA, and by extension the labels, make it really hard to sympathize. I have a long list of things that aren't much individually, but it boils down to not treating customers with contempt. Logically, I know that labels offer value in the market. Emotionally, I view them as greedy bastards looking to screw everyone from artists to end-customers, as long as they get theirs. Emotion overwhelms logic, and the manifestation of that is when I see a chart such as the one in the article, I just can't bring myself to care much.
Why do musicians keep churning out albums where listeners don't care about most of tracks? Even when that clearly doesn't work?

That's stupid. Most music I care about comes in albums where most of tracks fit my tastes and touch my soul.

I wonder how the album:single chart will look like if we subtract "whatever plays on radio" from it.
7 tips for successful consumer app bootstrapping according to Fat Spiderman
I have always admired this personage in Plaza Mayor (Madrid). Imagine how many millions of people recognize his face after years of hard work?

Do you want your app to be used and seen by tens of millions of people? Follow his strategies!

This will only work if you are developing and focusing on only one high quality app. No average quality apps will succeed with his chops.
I agree completely. For a bank ATM I'm sure that they have a lot to lose from skimmers, as it affects their customers' accounts. But for a gas station, a generic ATM do they really stand to lose much from the skimmer? They still get your money. And in many cases I'm suspicious that its shifty gas station employees, store clerks that are installing these things in the first place. Who else has the time to go and study the layout of the card reader, maintain it and retrieve the data etc without getting caught? The only way there is going to be a real change is with legislation in my opinion
Jeesh,

Article: Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers.

Zeteo: There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc).

Me: The article said "fully understand" and "humans". Some scientists may indeed easily work with aspects of large number. Many people are lost. I'd say you're wrong but it's a disagreement on arguable, hardly settled points. Calling your disagreement with the author a "misconception" on the author's part is implying a hard factual accuracy on your side - and here you are both wrong and disingenuous.

The rest of your post is about like this.