skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A big part of the problem is that it is not just about price. New York to London is 5-6 hours. But back when I did business travel regularly (SFO<->LHR), the door to door time for me on an 11 hour flight was 16 hours after a lot of practice. So on a 5-6 hour flight, half would likely be spent on either end (and this is without checked luggage). At that point saving 2-3 hours in-air is not making enough of a dent in the travel time for it to be attractive to pay all that much more.

Much less saving 10% of the time.
On eBooks vs pBooks
> Why should universities spend the student's very expensive class time to learn about this?

To turn this around, why should businesses pay former students to learn about this on the job instead of paying them to be productive?

From my experience, there's a large number of developers (both young and old) out there who are very capable programmers, but seem to not spend any of their spare time learning things on their own after leaving school. It's insanely frustrating having to teach new junior developers how to properly use a tool like git when they've never even been exposed to version control, all while they're supposed to be productive. It really can become a waste of company resources.

Are they capable of learning version control on the job? In most cases, absolutely, given enough time and buffer for mistakes. However, I believe, as part of professional development in the field they chose, it should be something they learn outside of work and preferably before getting the job. University seems like a very valid place to at least introduce and encourage use of version control systems early on, if not at the very least in a higher level course.
If you have to ask you are not an engineer
Who knows how fast Emscripten+asm.js-compiled DartVM would be compared to Dart2JS in 2013? I don't know yet, and apparently neither do you. JITs can be tricky, but @azakai is having good results with Emscripten+asm.js'ed LuaJIT2.

What I wrote 593+ days ago was about the Dash memo's Microsoft-like strategy. My point then was not that it couldn't ever be defeated by something like our work on asm.js and Emscripten. Never say never. My point rather was that the Dash strategy intentionally used Google's big resources to push a gratuitously non-standards-based agenda at the expense of its Web-standards-based efforts.

Indeed, since then it has become clear that Google miscalculated. Dart even gave up bignums (the int type) to support Dart2JS/DartVM equivalence, which I think is a mistake. Bignums are actually on the JS standards-based agenda:

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:bignums

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:value_object...

See also

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=749786

Given all the time that has passed since 2010, Google champions in Ecma TC39 could easily have worked bignums into ES7 if not ES6.

At a higher level, by over-investing in Dart and under-investing in JS (the V8 team was moved from Aarhus to Munich and with the no-remoties rule had to be rebuilt), Google has missed opportunities such as game-industry work we announced at GDC with Epic. This is "ok", it's their choice, but I still say that it is inherently much more fragmenting than any optimization of the asm.js kind, and that it under-serves the standards-based Web.

Maybe in a few years we can evolve JS to incorporate whatever helps DartVM beat Dart2JS, if there's any gap left. However, the idea that mutable global objects in JS necessarily mean VM-snapshotting is impossible is simply false. On the other hand, do we really need VM snapshots to speed up gmail startup? LOL!

/be
Why not port Linux kernel to Common Lisp
WTF???

Note the year before, it was 606, which is where it's been for a while. It wasn't as high as 851 in the early 80s, when the population was nearly 1/3 lower as well as the number of guns owned.

Something is wrong with one of these two statistics. Besides the discontinuity, I seriously doubt we in the gun community wouldn't have noticed a 30% increase in the number of accidental gun fatalities.

Note, I'm not saying this preliminary 2011 number is wrong, just that I suspect something other than the real rate of accidents changed. Hmmm, there's not even any external event that would account for a 2010 to 2011 increase (i.e. the major spikes in purchasing were after Obama was first elected and after Newtown, things were back to something like "normal" in 2011 although sales just kept going up and up year to year each month).

ADDED: As those major increases in population and guns owned occurred, we worked really hard to get the accident rate down. Mandatory hunter safety courses, a general emphasis on safety in the now larger self-defense area, etc. etc. etc. The rate is still down due to the population increase, but....
He's also recovering from surgery [1], so take the tweet for what its worth.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/338129661307531264
The guy on the other end says, "Is this Professor Feynman, of Cornell University?"

"That's right."

"This is Mr. So-and-so from the Such-and-such Aircraft Company." It was one of the big airplane companies in California, but unfortunately I can't remember which one. The guy continues: "We're planning to start a laboratory on nuclear-propelled rocket airplanes. It will have an annual budget of so-and-so many million dollars . . ." Big numbers.

I said, "Just a moment, sir; I don't know why you're telling me all this."

"Just let me speak to you," he says; "just let me explain everything. Please let me do it my way." So he goes on a little more, and says how many people are going to be in the laboratory, so-and-so-many people at this level, and so -and-somany Ph.D's at that level . . .

"Excuse me, sir," I say, "but I think you have the wrong fella."

"Am I talking to Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_Youre_Joking,_Mr._Feynma...
ObNukeRef: Project Pluto[1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

[2] http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html
I am old enough to remember the days the only way to learn how to program was to go through, sometimes very dry, books and manuals. There was no Internet on those days.

Join the club. We're getting T-shirts made. :-)

The thing is, in those days we really could learn all the commands of an operating system shell by reading the manual cover to cover in an afternoon, or play with graphics demos or write low-level system utilities after reading the Pink Shirt Book.

Today's systems are so vast and complicated that anything offering similar coverage in book form would be the size of an encyclopaedia, so the way we were able to learn doesn't scale to modern needs.

The trend over the years has definitely been towards writing glue code and joining up ready-made components for a lot of professional work rather than reinventing things from scratch, and in some ways that's no bad thing. However, I think it only works if you know what you've got available in your toolbox, and so does being the person who understands and creates new components. Either way, it comes back to needing a way to navigate the vast amounts of information now available and pick out the bits you need to achieve whatever it is that you're trying to do.
Star Trek's transporters would be excellent. We could recover all that land that's covered in paving, no longer care about location, eliminate the pollution of today's internal combustion engines...

The sad thing is that if this could happen in the next decade, I fear it would quickly become a target of the entire transportation industry as they scramble to lobby for laws to prevent its use. And the same thing would happen for Trek's matter replicators.

But if I've learned anything comparing science fiction and the real world, it's that our scientific understanding of the universe comes slowly enough that society adapts. The only notable exception is the near-instant communication provided by the internet and its effects on "intellectual property" hoarders.

</ramble>
I think this is extremely applicable in inefficient third world economies, but I can think of a few reasons it might not be as applicable in a first world country like the United States.

- Most basic skilled services already have many providers.
- The startup costs for these services are significantly higher in first world countries.
- The expectations of consumers are also (probably) much higher.

So, I want to believe, but I'd like to see some evidence of broader applicability before we leap to conclusions. That brings up another problem, though: this is so much harder to do in a developed country because it is prohibitively expensive.
Ah yes, ad hominem attacks. Thanks! I look forward to more intelligent discussions with you sir.
5x or 10x seems ridiculous, they have revenue not an exit, you have to ask yourself if they would have accepted that when you made the deal. Loan sharks give better terms than that.

Since you didn't do it under any terms I'd suggest using either one of the 'standard' convertible debt termsheets floating around that YC etc use, or picking the highest reasonable interest rate they might have gotten if they went to a regular lender.
I generally agree with you. While I think college is drastically over priced (both in terms of time and money spent) it's the best option for the majority of people.

There are exceptions though. And even for those exceptions it's not as if going to college hinders them. At most it delays what they would have done had they not gone to college.

Truth is most people out of high school don't know what they want to do. Most probably don't have any marketable skills, aren't self driven enough to succeed without the safety net of a degree and don't have anything productive they'd do otherwise. College is the best option.

However, if you're out of high school, driven and have acquired valuable skills and want to turn that into a business then you better think twice about jumping right into college.

You're right, things do get complicated when you're 30 and with kids. It's 10x harder to go back to college OR start a company OR do the peace corps.

This isn't a debate about what the value of college is (skills, connections, experience, etc.).
I don't know, but you might be able to parse the answer out of this:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html
That's gotta be a helluva kick.
This is both an amazingly well-done infographic and full of fascinating information.
Golang developers follow the suckless/plan9 (cf. Uriel) aesthetic which isn't concerned with immutability, referential transparency, or anything else from the FP world.

Fairly practical people though.

I used to write Go but found it intensely tedious, so I went back to Clojure. Been happily clojuring since '08.
very well put together - great piece. As op expects, there will be flack as 'dear dump startup' etc but we all know that as its the norm and VC's have an aura as if being on the other side of the fence they are playing a different ball game. Nope !
My Slides Workflow
Why you do not control your server by Powershell then?
Nice that you were able to retool while being able to pay your bills with a mediocre job but that's hardly the worst case scenario. Many young people come out of university and grad school and can't get much of any job. I can't spend 3-4 years retooling because I can't focus on anything that isn't going to help me pay my rent this month. When I was much younger (teen/college student), I didn't have this pressure; I could just sit and commit huge chunks of time to anything I wanted without worry; I could experiment with little risk, and that's why I at least had some side businesses that made a bit of money.
Presumably you would seek other income opportunities before you're so destitute as to be homeless. And that doesn't always mean quitting your startup, either. Many people or startups take on consulting projects while they're getting off the ground to make ends meet. There are many opportunities out there for people who have a demonstrable history of making real things happen.

Also, in big cities where startups usually are, it's not usually that hard to get by without a car.
Actually trip duration is an option, and one which I regularly prioritize.
I don't think they've made that public. But such systems do exist. Check out Figure 1 right above this link:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9742/products_tech_not...

There's probably a third-party vendor that can take that interface and integrate it with your Exchange / LDAP directory services to update physical location. Given the rather unique structure of Valve, however, I'd be more inclined to think they rolled their own.

And if such a business product doesn't exist, hey, opportunity for you (or someone else).

And RE: using MAC - that's one reason I mentioned 802.1X. If you do EAP you can have client certificates for proof of identity / identity mapping. Then it doesn't matter what the MAC is (which can be spoofed anyways, so it's not trustworthy) / which network interface the machine uses.
There was a very similar article here a few weeks (months?) ago about a startup Give Directly (or something like that) ... Perhaps they referenced this research.

it may seem like a tautology to say this but this only works where the root cause of poverty is lack of capital.

In cases where the root cause of poverty is deeply entrenched social disadvantage, mental illness, substance abuse or corruption then handing out cash will do little to solve poverty.
A mindless musing on twitter is a news submission to HN now. Got it.
The operation in question: "Was beat up pretty badly as a kid & left me w jagged septum. Harder to breathe as I got older, so time to fix."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/338135523765919745
Pattern is super useful, but not for type=email, which guarantees syntax check already. Use it with type=text for special fields like serial numbers, SKUs, credit card numbers (for which type=number is not appropriate).

dns-prefetch and prerender are not "HTML5". They're experimental/proposals from couple of browser vendors.
>Probably more difficult than going to college.

>You do it alone.

I actually consider both of these to be pros rather than cons.

I also don't really sweat the lack of credentials, but I can't argue that it's a pro with a straight face. It could certainly be used to weed out certain types of companies who place too much emphasis on a degree.
i could bother to read what nadim has written, but then i would fall in the "successfully trolled" bucket. i consider daeken very kind for reading and systematically disassembling nadim's post. instead, i will make a few rude blanket statements.

- having a misleading wired article (or several) written about you in no way qualifies you as an expert on cryptography. anyone who has any level of knowledge in the subject knows this guy is a total hack.

- everything that is somewhat correct about his products is due to people who _actually_ know stuff about cryptography telling him "no, no, no, you need to do X". the entirety of the architecture is effectively crowd-sourced. people telling you how to be a good carpenter is no substitute for being a skilled woodworker.

- nadim should stop making crypto products because bad crypto _puts people at risk_. if you make one bad product, i can see chalking it up to "well, at least he's trying". instead, nadim has routinely and repeatedly demonstrated his lack of real domain knowledge.

i suggest nadim make some turd-like web 2.0/3.0 driven product where security doesn't matter. he clearly has the tenacity to code but lacks the intelligence and domain knowledge to make security-related software.
Seems pretty straightforward: If you trust the server, then HTTPS is sufficient. If you don't trust the server, then you shouldn't be doing anything sensitive in the browser. If you ever see the decrypted data, then obviously it's there in plain text on the page, and the server can just snap it out with one line of jQuery.
That last sentence was so full of businessy-speak....I have no idea what you meant to say....and I am an MBA!
"popular kids" use rails. maybe "most popular among kids".
THE NEW COST-EFFECTIVE "GATEKEEPER" MODEL FOR CONTAINING HEALTHCARE COSTS
That's a really great point. After 9/11, it takes so damn long to get to your flight that cutting out an hour of travel time isn't as impactful as before.
Oops. Perhaps I should dug deeper before posting. Either way, a nice thought; I couldn't imagine better execution and direction from Musk. His narrative of ambition in regards to progressive philanthropic efforts would be unparalleled in film.

The groundwork has already been set with a couple of his most recent interviews. The vision is there.

http://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spa...
http://foundation.bz/20/
Dude, proof read your blog posts. Risk taking and career power plays must be all about comma splices, dangling modifiers, and incomplete sentences, if your writing is any indication.
Haswell chip primer: How Intel pinches power
Inspiring, but a prime example of Survivorship bias

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
> but really people who think dynamic typing is suitable for large scale software development are just nuts

I would argue that ITAs software (http://www.itasoftware.com/solutions/travelers/flightsearch....) is larger than most software efforts, and it is written in LISP. Not statically typed.
It works resoundingly well in developed countries, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5769233
I love this post but I don't wholly agree with the null-purity system. I think that the existence of the 'null pointer exception' is a sign that global, total, error handling in anything but trivial applications is really hard.

So let's remove null pointer exceptions and lets require that anything that could return failure be wrapped in an option type. That way you can determine if there is Some x or None inside of the possibly-None value. Well, then you need to deal with how to fail in the case of possibly-None.

Even the best functional programmers I've seen fall back to some kind of exit-or-exception semantic in the None case. So we've kind of re-invented the null pointer exception, by having cases where the easiest thing to do in our program in response to some failure is to just abort the program.

I think that this is fine from a memory safety perspective. The terrible thing about the 'NULL' pointer is that it is a sentinel that is overlaid into the domain of valid addresses to the machine. When we add a layer that checks if the address is valid without relying on its literal value, then we gain a lot of safety in terms of not generating a hardware exception (that is difficult to reason about) or scribbling on some other object (which could be impossible to reason about). Terminating the program, to me, is a fine tradeoff to avoid corrupting and modifying the program in an unknowable way...
Flinto doesn't actually provide any mock up tools. I wrote a blog post about that here: http://blog.flinto.com/post/48225271974/what-is-flinto

If you have mockups created in another tool, even photos of sketches, Flinto is the fastest way to turn those into an on-device prototype.
What is the most important thing and what the article pointed out greatly is the need for the green card, without it, your life becomes incredibly dependent on your employer (unless you remain flexible).

I'm going to college in the US, but am from Germany, and what makes me reluctant to plan a future in the US, is the requirement for me to bind myself to a company for in worst case 10+ years to have the certainty that I can stay in the US, should I chose not wanting to be employed.

Aiming to be a freelancer or entrepreneur becomes next to impossible if you want to stay in the US without a green card. At least to my knowledge, I'd be happy to be wrong in this case.
Right, I'd just be afraid the other income opportunities might not come along, but apparently that fear isn't too rationally founded and programmers are in a pretty decent demand, according to what I've seen.

>There are many opportunities out there for people who have a demonstrable history of making real things happen.

Even if it was a failure?

>Also, in big cities where startups usually are, it's not usually that hard to get by without a car.

I used to get a bit tired just walking around my high school. I've never lived in a city, though. I'd probably adjust well enough eventually.
There is a big difference between being broke in the first world and poverty stricken in the 3rd world. Even in developed nations this article isn't talking about breaking the cycle of minimum wage retail, it's talking about breaking the cycle of poverty. Your friends aren't poverty stricken. They might be having a tough time and feeling regrets about over capitalising on an education they can't use but I sorely doubt that giving them an average year's wage would solve their problems because they already have all the opportunities that the years' wage buys the ugandan farmers.
Context: At this point in history, the USA and USSR had aircraft fleets on constant patrol with tanker resupply. The concept was to simultaneously shorten the response time of strategic nuclear forces by having them "idle" nearer the target zones than their home bases and more importantly to reduce the potential losses of such strategic strike forces to a "bolt from the blue" preemptive & disarming attack. In a world where the President and SAC command would have to wait hours for B-36 & predicessor aircraft to make their way to their targets in Russia.

There were three real issues with this project: shielding weight, landing weight and politics.
1. Shot down or crashing, one of these aircraft would be a "dirty bomb" and could generate a nuclear contamination disaster. This alone made the project risky. Remeber, during the heyday of strategic nuclear bombing shootdowns were expected & ariplane to target assignments were made on the basis of the expected (and dismal) survival rate of inbound bombers. Also a single crash on US soil would have been... politically unpopular.
2. The lead, graphite and cement used to shield static nuclear facilities doesn't exactly work when trying to build an airplane, which made crew shielding dubious and reduced the loiter time of such a vehicle to the radiation tolerance of the crew.
3. A mich more minor issue was that of building landing gear that could hold the weight of the reactor on landing let alone a crash.

All that asside, a flying nuke plant is a great idea and I for one would not be surprised to see this idea resurrected for extreme loiter duration robotic aircraft :/
That's certainly not the ONLY idea. There are a seemingly infinite number of reasons why people want to avoid just giving poor people money, and many of them are well-intentioned.

The problem is that people don't even attempt an objective assessment of the impact of doing things one way versus the impact of doing things another way. It's more common to assess a plan based on "how does this jive with the ideology I've taken on for myself?" or to use a simple judgment based on aesthetics.
do you ever see the company being sold or ipo? if so, why not see abou converting to equity?
Let's assume the poster made the submission sarcastically, as a critic of - some may say* - perhaps observable bias from HN readers to post fanatically about a few specific hyped-out topics.

Today, 'Elon Musk tweets about trivia'.
Tomorrow, 'a Go dev submits a code-review'.

* I don't hold such beliefs, as I'm a Musk-fan and Go-fan.