skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Founders, what would you tell yourself at 15?
I've been invited to do a talk tomorrow to a group of 15 year olds about startups. This is something I want to commit a lot of time over the coming years to do, and tomorrow is my debut.

Scotland, where I live, has an incredible history of invention, but the days of Scottish engineers and inventors changing the world are in the increasingly distant past (even Dolly the Sheep has been dead for 10 years).

It has never, for example, produced a software company of note (other than maybe OWL for those who know their hypertext history). I'd like to see this change, and my hunch is that if you can plant some seeds in the minds of enough smart 15 year olds, then by the time these kids are 20-25 they are going to be way better placed to do great things.

In some places (i.e. SV) this can happen serendipitously through interactions with cousins, sisters, neighbours, etc. who are in the industry, but when the ecosystem is so well hidden (as it is here), most kids just don't know about this stuff until much later on (i.e during Uni).

Anyway, I've got quite a good bunch of slides pulled together and I speak fairly well at these sort of things (its no Steve Jobs commencement address, but it is ok).

However, I wanted to round the talk off with a bit of a discussion about ways to put themselves in the best position to do whatever it is they want to do, even if they don't know what it is yet.

Any thoughts on this would be most welcome...
How Cater2.me is quietly scaling without venture capital
Cuba claims Aust. tobacco packaging laws infringe their intellectual property
It's not about security; it's about conversion rates and customer comfort level. Blame the customers or the web browsers, not the websites.
Which distro? What sound hardware?
>Its also a classification system, not a theory (why it happens) or a treatment plan system.

This is the exact problem. It provides a means for categorizing what could be considered normal mental phenomena, and then calls it a disorder.

As far as your quote: '"clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" It boils down to if its not causing distress, leave them alone, which sounds like a reasonably libertarian outlook on life.'

There are plenty of kids who were diagnosed with ADHD and other disorders via the coercive force of their parents and teachers who would disagree with the above statement.
You make Computoser sound dry and boring. Tell a story!

You say "I think it's the first web-based, user-friendly interface to such an algorithm." That's not unique or notable. What makes your algorithm different? What challenges did you face while building it? What fun/interesting interactions have you had over it? What sort of feedback did you get about it?
You might find some old mailing list that says "oh, you need to grgab version 1.2.3 of package_thing"

But version 1.2.3 of package_thing was obsolete 3 years ago, and the latest version requires you to update your glibc.

I upgrade Linux buying a new system and copying what I want to the new hardware.
So you mean there isn't anything magical about Linux and it isn't the embodiment of "Freedom and Choice" and every piece of software that runs on it must be carefully designed to integrate with other software packages? I'm about to faint!
The new challenge in the embedded community is device tree apparently. Lots of gripes about arbitrarily changing something that worked. Printing continues to be painful, as does direct to framebuffer graphics.
Adobe Project Mighty smart stylus and Napoleon ruler
I also like Sketch -- it's a very powerful app and very polished, though I find I use it a lot less than I thought I would since it seems to occupy an uneasy place between OmniGraffle and Acorn in my workflow. I wouldn't be surprised if I use it a lot more after another few versions...
I think critical thinking is the opposite of what most schools want to teach. Take Khan Academy founder's book [1] which describes the mainstream "Prussian Model":

"The idea was not to produce independent thinkers, but to churn out loyal and tractable citzens who would learn the value of submitting to the authority of parents, teachers, church, and ultimately, king. The Prussian philosopher and political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key figure in the development of the system, was perfectly explicit about its aims. 'If you want to influence a person,' he wrote, 'you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.'"

Chomsky further discusses the important role of "stupidity" in the educational system (like stupid assignments), in teaching obedience: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFf6_0T2ZoI)

[1] Salman Khan, "The One World School House"
I think most people who talk about posture recommend an upright posture, not an "aggressive", leaned-forward posture. (Without being an expert, I've looked at The Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, standard physical therapy theories and some other theory).

While there's debate about the details, most ideas of "good posture" are based on the idea that when the spine is balanced and so upright, your muscles don't have to exert continuous effort to support you whereas in any "leaning" posture, either forward or backward, involves one's muscles do have be tensed into a rigid position as they part of your body's support system.
Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.
Both interesting and slightly depressing at the same time.
In addition to the public search index and support for data volumes, this release also includes an open-source version of the registry. So anyone can host their containers privately without depending on the central registry.
You don't think it's ever going to be possible to make a 3d-printed gun that looks like a gun?
Microsoft can't just copy Google and pretend that they're relevant. Playing second fiddle to Google is a pretty damning place for Microsoft to be.
Assuming they only ever compile to JS, yes. It's possible Microsoft could get buy-in from the IE team to run TypeScript natively. Dart already runs in a VM in a version of Chrome.
Steven Soderbergh’s State Of Cinema Address
DBX
Hence my phrasing. I said "many of those people were victims." Others may simply have been greedy.
He is a UX/Visual designer, of course the design is going to be more than skin deep. Skeumorphism impacts everything about UX. Think about the desktop model, from that we got folders, which had files in them.

Compare that to throwing out the desktop model. Now you have an image gallery, you select an image. You do not dig through folders of images, instead you look by context. Maybe that context is dates, maybe it is locations, or maybe it is whose faces that were auto detected in the images.

Things like auto-tagging location and faces are features that stem largely from the abandonment of skeumorphism, skeumorphism is a metaphor and as with all metaphors it is designed to make thinking about a new concept easier, but at the same time it is also limiting because all metaphors are limiting and imperfect.

Note that I have a very encompassing view of what UX designers do. The lead UX designer I work with oversees everything from physical hardware design to software, and indeed having integration between the two is very important. (Something Samsung could learn, if I had a dollar for every time my phone got put into Mute mode on the way into my pocket the phone would have long since paid for itself!)
Is this article for real? I am trying to decide if the author is being ironic, sarcastic, or doing some kind of double message.

Taken at face value, this is just link bait.
Do go on. Seems to me -- in this week where a 1080p video decoder written in JavaScript was demoed -- that .js is as capable as ever.
Hi IS,

(1) yes language proficiency is definitely one variable that inputs in our matching algorhitm
(2) you never know, we are now observing CoffeeStrappers signing up form VERY remote areas of the world. of course more dense of CS is your area, more accurate matches you will have, but I wouldn't say you are apriori condemned to a Japanless CS future if you keep on living in Amarillo! :-)
It is obvious that iOS needs an update. It is really behind the competition both in design and functionality.

Making someone the face of the brand and mentioning him a lot seems to me just some marketing trick.
Working full time on CodePen
Coinbase has really impressed me with what they've done and how they've managed growth. Its a tricky market, especially with the exploding popularity.
What does "just work" mean? I have a mythtv frontend that squirts its video out a HDMI and audio out of a optical fiber to the surround sound system. It would drive me crazy if sound came out of the horrible TV speakers instead of the surround sound system.

Two separate problems:

1) Default behavior where no change is the least surprising so at least that is OK.

2) Modify config where its obviously a fail if you can't figure out how to change the config.

For whatever its worth, if you use ALSA, mythtv is ALSA compatible, so I merely go into "config" "audio" and mess around with audio options to my hearts content.
How does one go about actually using a private registry? Is there a flag to push/pull?
What would it mean for Microsoft to "pull an Apple", given that they just reported record revenue in their last quarter? I mean, their relevance in some consumer markets is waning, and that must be a bit disquieting, but it's not like they're struggling to remain a going concern or anything...
Education pricing requires an annual commitment, which is a real shame. When I need an Adobe program there's often no substitute, but I only need it very rarely. If they did it month-to-month I'd be happy to buy it just for that month... Since they don't, I guess it's good for me they do 30-day product demos.
I agree on the whole although I don't understand why you call that quote asinine -- it seems to support your message.
Do you think that darwinian fight of everyone with everyone else is the best possible way to finding cost-effective solutions?
Persistent Data Structures for Node.js
I don't really follow this argument.

"... because there are so many kinds of cars you can buy that cars are about choice."

The "Choice" part of Linux doesn't come into play so much when you are "shopping for a distro", it's the fact that if there is something you don't like the spoiler on your distro, you can switch to another. Heck, you can even build the distro from the ground up and choose EVERYTHING in it.
GOD'S FUCKEN TEMPLE! DIVINE RIGHT!

God says...

69:9 For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches
of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me.

69:10 When I wept, and chastened my soul with fasting, that was to my
reproach.

69:11 I made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to
them.

69:12 They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song
of the drunkards.

69:13 But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O LORD, in an acceptable
time: O God, in the multitude of thy mercy hear me, in the truth of
thy salvation.

69:14 Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be
delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters.
The program must run on the Turing machine. The Turing machine has an infinite tape, so it is able to represent arbitraily large numbers on its tape. It is a different question that a real Turing machine cannot be built in the known physical universe which contains only a finite number of atoms.
Living On Bitcoin For A Week: Can't Pay The Rent
Are they being DDOSed?
what about Gimp and Inkscape for alternatives? Both are free software.

Gimp - Raster Graphics - http://www.gimp.org/
Inkscape - Vector Graphics - http://inkscape.org/
I actually find PulseAudio vs. JACK incredibly annoying. I like to play around with "professional" audio. I don't consider it professional, but more relevantly I like to play with certain apps that require JACK.

It's certainly an RTFM thing, but last time I didn't know how to get PulseAudio to go away. I wrote a shell script to keep killing it in a loop (since it restarts itself) long enough to get JACK to take over. I know there must be better ways...

Then inevitably once I've got JACK setup, I'll want to play some background music or watch some Flash video online without tearing down my JACK setup. Oops, does that audio player support JACK natively? Do I have that plugin installed? Can I run Pulse and have it direct output into JACK? None of this has worked smoothly in my experience.

> users of JACK generally buy high-end hardware specifically for that purpose and know what they're doing

This has not been my experience. I love to dabble, but apparently don't know what I'm doing.
Chrome's web font rendering on Windows is terrible (as is its high-DPI support and text color accuracy). It does this to virtually every custom font without super thick weight. I've opened bug reports since early 2012 that keep getting pushed back to the next milestone indefinitely. There's not much that can be done about it except use default fonts or accept that things will look kinda crappy on the largest browser/OS combination.
Linux is already winning the OS wars, it's called Android ;-) Just being snarky, I get your point. I've said this before, and I think it is important to keep in mind when discussing GNU/Linux: things work quite well... on supported hardware.

The vast majority of tales of woe related to GNU/Linux and hardware end up coming down to incompatible hardware. This is a communication problem, not a technical problem. No one gets upset that OS X won't run on a random Acer netbook from 4 years ago because Apple has made clear that their OS is only supposed to work on their hardware.

GNU/Linux evangelists, on the other hand, have, in the past especially, had a tendency to sell their operating system as magical software that works on every machine always. This is, of course, totally false. When I buy a laptop I check several sources (including the Ubuntu Certified list) to make sure the machine I end up with will be fully supported, preferably with open drivers.
> Over the last couple of years, there has been an increasing amount of overlap in the functionality between Fireworks and both existing and new programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Edge Reflow.

Because we'd all much rather have to work in and pay for all three of those applications than to have the one tool that does it right?
I completely agree. I have always hated the phrase "big data". It is a meaningless marketing phrase. As the article points out, very few IT companies have single data sets which are in terabyte or larger scale. Although the total size of their data may be in terabytes or higher, the size of an analyzed data set is usually in megabytes or gigabytes.

You know who actually does "big data"? Physicists. There are some telescopes that generate terabytes of data per second. There are other scientific fields which generate very large, single data sets such as genomics, proteomics, climate, etc.
Sound setup bad? Not compared to 5 or 10 years ago, no. During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences. Swim 10 yards, gain a foot bad. Make music for 5 minutes, debug the system for 2 hours bad.

Hmmph. Kids nowadays.
> Because they don't come to us to see how (or not) our system works but to get their problems fixed in time, and by a top quality expert.

I notice the word "price" is not present in that testimonial.
Whoops, somehow caching got disabled. Reenabled now. Thanks for pointing that out.
Docker will support arbitrary URLs as argument to push/pull, in addition, eg.

$ docker pull containers.mycompany.tld/postgres

This still requires some tweaking, but I expect it to get polished rapidly, now that organizations can play with the registry.
> the conflation of "understanding math" and "being able to do simple arithmetic" is something of a pet peeve

Agreed. I'm horrible at simple arithmetic -- I've just never gotten the knack for it, despite clear life benefits to being good at it. But I'm decent at math-with-letters.

If I'm in a social setting and someone wants me to do the arithmetic on something, I'll happily say "I can't do math" because it makes more sense than saying the above. I bet there are others like me out there.
My Not-So-Hyper Loop
I think this would be amazing if it were solar-powered. In Florida when we have hurricanes, we are without power sometimes for weeks. This could easily be sold en mass to disaster-relief workers, or even for consumers who want that kind of backup for during and after disasters.
Funding your startup with a "one week on, three weeks off" consulting setup
Very cool, but I bailed on the signup: your Facebook login asks for my email, friends list, and public profile. Why is all of this necessary simply as authentication?
Libraries like jQuery abstract the DOM more than anything else, no? The DOM is what people paper over. They want a better API for traversal, filtering, events, manipulation (incl. CSS), and so on. In that light, you might actually want a language where higher-order functions are possible.

Also, it's a bit contradictory to argue that you could replace JS with any programming language and simultaneously argue that JS is garbage. In fact, if you simply swapped in Ruby, your argument would be largely the same; you'd still be stuck with the DOM and CSS.

JS isn't a perfect language. The latest disappointment for me is the lack of any well-defined module or namespace system; it forces people into ad-hoc solutions when Python, Ruby, or other dynamic languages have pretty good systems.

But there's nothing egregiously bad about the language, at least IMHO. What the author really seems to hate is web development, including CSS and the DOM, and probably the fact that they hardly have any choice. (Not coincidentally, I suspect this is why many people have problems with JS. I am sympathetic.) I suppose something nuanced like that makes for a less linkbait-y headline, however.
Thats a huge failure of abstraction. File a bug. A window manager should manage windows not sound. Someone outside the linux community would have no idea that the thing that controls title bars also happens to control sound.

On Debian with ratpoison / awesome / KDE / probably others it "just works" and you don't control your sound with your window or whatever.

It would be like configuring your mouse by modifying your network settings or configuring your video card by modifying your joystick/gamepad settings.
Interestingly enough, Peter Hamilton, in "Great North Road", envisions and interesting future in which they had an expedition, which for the most part relied on their 3D Printers and base printing material. Tents, Vehicle Repairs, components - they just kept churning them out.

So, while I agree that 3D Printing of guns is likely, for the near future to be a "First world problem" - I don't think I would make that prediction 30 years out, and certainly would never be so bold to say "Forever". I can certainly see a future in which Refugee Camps don't have Water, Food, or Sanitation, but do have a broad array of 3D Printers and base printing material.
It's great when adults who do not usually say "I don't know" can admit to not knowing something. Other than that, I cannot agree with anything else you say.
> Is sound still a problem on Linux?

Yes. My desktop has mostly just worked for a few upgrades now, but new versions on my HTPC running XBMCbuntu have been hit and miss and taken some screwing around with the sound.

This article from less than a year ago addresses some basic screw-ups that people on linux do trying to fix their sound troubles: http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2012/07/13/top...
That rings true to me.
Here is some tutorial about how to run Tor's Onion hidden service inside Linux VPS: http://torforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=18268

Both you and your visitors will always stay anonymous. Not your hoster nor their ISP's will never have a chance to reveal someones identity.
The most interesting subtext to this entire story to me is that Jony Ive, under Jobs, was a hardware designer.

In Job's biography we see that Ive's "design studio has foam cutting and printing machines, and the windows are tinted." (1) - hardware is what he's done, that's what he's won awards for

His aesthetic is unimpeachable w/hardware IMO, but I am so curious to see how his talents translate to software and usability.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive
The message is just that JavaScript is doomed because too much cruft has been built on top of it, and the real value isn't JavaScript anymore, but the libraries built on it.
Something will come along and make it all easier, without having to build 50 libraries.
Very cool. Did you guys consider achieving the same functionality with Lua scripting that Redis 2.6 supports? I wonder what are the tradeoffs and if that was much slower.
Hitchens was a columnist, not its EIC.
Yes, also problems with wireless/wired network card drivers and DVD playback are common. These are the kinds of things where you've just gotten them working, then you upgrade your distro and they stop working again. In theory they all probably work, even for your hardware, but getting the right versions of all the software necessary running at once on your machine is a pain.

It doesn't have anything to do with paying the people who work on Linux, it's that the manufacturers of these devices don't have a commercial interest in making their hardware work in 30 different Linux distributions. They do have an interest in their products working flawlessly on all versions of OS X and Windows, and so they do what it takes to make it happen.

Linux-based systems are great, but not when it comes to desktops where productivity is the point. They are good for desktops where tinkering and copyleft are the point. They are obviously a superior choice for anything that isn't a desktop.
You can switch away from it, you just can't do it with "apt-get install <new window manager>". Try a distro that is designed for the WM you want to use.

I agree that in an ideal world installing a new WM would "Just Work", but we don't live in that world. Try installing a new WM on OS X or Windows and see how well things go. Not trashing those operating systems, just pointing out that GNU/Linux does, indeed, offer more choice. The fact that the choices are not ideally convenient to switch between is really a fairly minor issue.
Agreed that some new ground is being broken - it would just be nice if the automated CNC machines got some recognition. It's kind of amazing what they can do.
Why Twitch Needs A Competitor
I just got bit by this recently...there used to be an excellent article on frisson in WP. Full of great information and a nice collection of external resources. It was 2 or 3 pages long and was up for several years if I recall. It was probably one of the best summaries of the topic on the Internet at one time.

It's gone, redirects to "cold chills" [1] which is not only incorrect, it's a far inferior article to begin with.

Having given up on contributing or editing things in WP due to the rampant and frustrating deletionism I have no idea how to even begin the labyrinthine process of getting the old article returned. The only thing I can find of it is a history where sometime in 2007 it was marked for redirection...but I know that it worked at least through 2010 and into 2011 (my own comment history has a link to it back then).

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson
But, Marc Andreessen has actually done things before. Siegler hasn't (so far as I can tell) actually produced something of value other than his writing (which is, based on this discussion alone, of questionable value).

If Siegler had built something like Mosaic, or Netscape, or really, anything, it would be a different discussion.
After Boston: Terrorism and the Technology Gap - CTOvision