skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And why isn't a barber shop a startup? Great Clips and Super Cuts were once new, fledgling businesses.

Not charging money, taking VC investment, joining an incubator, and creating a stupid name that ends in "fy" or "ly" a startup does not make.

BTW, I've read the essay. I like most of what he writes, but I have a fundamental disagreement on this one and just because it comes from the hands of PG does not make it gospel.

What does this mean, "designed to grow fast?" Only technology businesses can achieve overnight billion dollar valuations, so are we saying that anything that is not in the field of tech is not a startup? If you are aiming to become the next Google, Facebook, or Twitter, good luck to you but you're going to fail. Most businesses that drive our economy were not overnight success stories. Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Macy's were once single store fronts whose founders were not aiming for "hocky-stick" growth out of the gate.

Ask John Paul DeJoria about what a startup is. The guy started by selling fucking shampoo to salons out of his car in Los Angeles when he was 36 and now owns Patron. Yes, the Tequila company. Watch this video for some perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hndfUwPpzyQ
So he remains in Russia, and he probably has problem getting to Ecuador.

Maybe no direct flights and other transit countries might arrest him?
Because if Microsoft is good at anything, it's creating new problems for their users. :)
Google report: malware highest rates in India, Central Europe
The next big data framework must be a programming language. Most languages make the assumption that the data it is processing, is available locally. This was true until the last few years for almost all situations. But not anymore.
Automatically encrypt your Gmail account
Constraint Logic Programming is extremely productive in logistics planning problems which are NP-Complete/Hard. Even SWI-Prolog, which is hardly the fastest implementation out there, is faster than the fastest IP solvers I have found (Gurobi and CPLEX).

Of course, if you want to coerce the word "productivity" to mean "making boring CRUD webapps quickly", you have a point.
Employees or contractors?
Looks like it has collision detection whereas for LÖVE you'd use Hardon Collider, has Tiled level loading whereas you'd need a plugin for LÖVE, etc. Basically, lots of stuff that you'd include in your games anyway.

Looks nice and has better documentation than LÖVE. Thanks for posting it, I didn't know about it before.
As someone whose mother was born and raised in Karachi and who visits the city with some frequency, my jaw dropped when I saw their reporting from there. The local media won't even go near half the people they managed to get interviews from. They were a bit jumpy but their brio more makes up for it. That and the Mexican Mormon drug war were the real kickers.
It's sort of irrelevant now in this particular case, because Snowden is traveling on refugee documents from Ecuador.
It is not really a crazy conspiracy theory to think that the NSA might be engaging in industrial espionage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy
this thought popped into mind - don't be a zombie startup http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/zombie-startups/
Following PCI is a contractual requirement, not a statutory requirement. If you want to do certain things with credit cards, such as accept payments using them, then you have to enter into a contract that says you'll follow PCI.

If you have no need of any service that requires entering into such a contract, than you can completely ignore PCI.
Cisco survey hints many IT leaders also don't understand 'Internet of Things'
Yes. We're rolling out a new update this week. Been a tough confluence of events for me personally - demo day for my TechStars startup is 2 days from now
Finally, someone other than Greenwald starts asking critical questions.
Didn't you just answer your own question?

Because many people consider him to be a whistle-blower. If he truly believes that he is exposing a large and direct illegal activity, he should be protected under law.
link bait.
Created a throwaway account because I'd like to stay anon.
I know for a fact he's been working a lot on it. I'll give him a heads up to come comment on it here. Stay tuned
> If he had released weapons designs instead of NSA documents, would you support his galavanting across HK and Russia?

I think you're missing the point. The fact is he didn't release weapons designs; he released information pointing to surveillance programs that violate the 4th amendment.

> The question, "Is the NSA program unconstitutional?" is a far different one than "Should those who release confidential documents be arrested?"

The two questions you ask are not mutually exclusive, because whistleblowers need protection when surfacing evidence of illegal behavior. You seem to be taking arguments to their absolute extremes rather than considering the fact that there are instances where there is a reasonable expectation that individuals should be protected. That doesn't mean there should be no state secrets, it means there should be protections for individuals who reveal state secrets that demonstrate the government is not acting in accordance with the law. Furthermore, I would argue that state secrets that hide evidence of wrongdoing from the public should most certainly be leaked.
App's user value doesn't necessarily bring business value
The author forgot a different model: a bunch of small/medium companies work together to build a larger project, with hundreds of other companies and individuals making smaller contributions.

Our business is completely based on OpenERP, which is an AGPLv3 licensed web ERP created by a Belgium company (OpenERP SA) and with modules built and contributed by dozens of partners.

It works for us, since we get a free ERP we can build upon; it works for them, since they get contributions and support contracts from our larger clients. Win-win.
Except you have no idea of the relative probability of these events. Two of them have robots on them precisely because of the space-travelling, radio-communicating species on the third. But we have no firm data on the likelihood of a random planet in a star's habitable zone being rocky, having an active core, and a slow enough rotation for a stable atmosphere. Nor for that matter the expected percentage of time that such a planet should be expected to be populated with intelligent life over the span of its existence.

You're effectively saying, "Somebody else has discovered a swan. The only swan I've seen is white. Therefore, I expect that this new swan is white as well."
The PS1, CPS1/2/3 and Neo Geo emulators work well too.
I dont think they are killing ready because of the cost to maintain it. I think its more likely a strategic move to push people onto plus.
I was recently checking out Zotonic and asking questions on the #zotonic Freenode IRC channel. Very helpful people on the IRC (which seems to be bridged to some other channel thru a bot).

If you are coming from MVC frameworks in other languages, Erlang and Zotonic will take you by surprise. There's some learning to do though.

Some really good videos on Erlang for the curious - www.youtube.com/user/ErlangSolutions.
This one made me chuckle: "So, essentially, the NSA is deeply compromising our privacy so that it can do an extremely shitty job of looking for terrorists. Nice."

Would be so funny, if it wasn't so sad...
> I'm grateful that he shed some light on a very troubling program, but that doesn't just grant him immunity from prosecution.

This doesn't seem like a rational position. Either Snowden performed a service or he committed a crime. He can't have done both. The fact that it's really a subjective call speaks to its political nature. As such, there is no dishonor in absconding to a country with more favorable politics.
You're right, there are no direct flights.

The originally announced path was: HK -> Russia -> Havana -> Venezuela (probably: -> Ecuador).

I am wondering if the US pressed hard on Cuba and if Snowden can reach Ecuador on a private plane.
I was quite enthusiastic about Clojure at first, I rally enjoyed experimenting with it but when the novelty fade off I lost interest because of:

1. The minimal syntax makes it harder to read than more traditional languages.

2. It's uncomfortable to do imperative or object-oriented programming in Clojure. (Yes, many problems are easier to express in other than the functional paradigm.)

3. Using state is not a priori wrong but it's difficult in Clojure.

4. The parentheses are sometimes annoying, especially when I want to quickly test something in the REPL.

Some lispers (like Paul Graham) believe in something like "macros make lisp the most productive language on Earth, at least for the top x % programmers". From my experince, this is just wishful thinking. It makes them feel special and better than others.
With the CIA, FBI, and other organizations I've worked for, you'd probably be right. The NSA is the only meritocracy that I've encountered in government work, although I only have a total of 10 years of experience so I haven't "seen it all" per se.

When you work for the NSA, you can take a managerial route or a technical route for promotion. This means that you can achieve the highest rank (GS/GG-15) being either a manager or just being good at your job.

I once wrote a report which countered reports that other people had written, resulting in some angry phone calls demanding me to redact my correct report so as to not make them look bad. I responded with a no to all of them, and when circumstances proved the validity of my analysis, I was rewarded for standing my ground and not punished.

All in all, the people working there on the whole cared about doing what is right, is what I found. In that light, NSA stood in stark contrast to the FBI culture of major bureaucracy and lazy/inefficient practices.

As an example of the culture, I learned to program at NSA because when I said I was interested they said, "Here's a book and some servers.".
Thanks for writing up. What stack/libraries is Feeder built on?
You see, I can get behind the usage of the word 'Disrupt' - to interrupt the normal course or unity of - Because that's often what happens when a startup enters a market to take market share from entrenched competitors who have been sailing along with a legacy for years.

But I can't get behind changing the meaning of the word 'startup' based on geographic location. The meaning is literally in the word. To start up a new venture. Nothing about 5% weekly growth. Nothing about seeking a business model - because when the word was coined nobody had to 'seek' a business model, people just paid money for goods and services. There's your business model. Of course that part has become a little lost in Silicon Valley recently.
It's been a personal goal of mine to get to the point where I never say something online that I wouldn't say in person, and so far I've made a lot of progress, but it looks like the next step is to never use obscenities.

So, you're right, thank you, and that is helpful.

I strongly disagree that I was more actively insulting. I think a detailed reading of the conversation speaks for itself on this.
I think the point was more about a one-way trip for a single person.

I'd agree that it's not a one-way trip for humanity, though. Once some of us get there (e.g., progeny of the original crew), eventually some of us could get back to Earth too (at some later date). Assuming Earth isn't destroyed by that point...
Doesn't matter, you should still encrypt anything. If they manage to break it, cool. If they use it against you it will become public knowledge what ciphers have been broken by the 404-Agency. Then just switch to a different cipher or up the bits.
What I see of this, is similar to my experience in be part of the "startup"-machine business. I won a award in my country (for my business idea), and participate in several contest where I land in the finalist.

What tremendous waste of time.

Triying to chase the "investor money" was the most damaging thing I do. I waste months on that. Building investor plans, do meetings, and work on CANVAS and other methodologies where some company, that get the real $$$ to "create startups", guided each of us to the path of silicon valley..yes, rigthhh....

At the end, I understand that we was part of a masterplan, where the money was on the big players sucking from the gov funds on build startups, with pre-pakaked advice and zero of the real value that we need.

I think that YCombinator is the only that truly make sense, and the rest copy-cats are more a waste of time than not (even with good intentions).
That's the term I was looking for! Thanks.
Why do you like having a giant house. I've never had this feeling and would like to understand. (I currently live in what I would consider a reasonably sized apartment in SF.)
Well, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Russia couldn't detain him for questioning, let him out of the car, now he's touched the native soil and can be arrested on immigration charges and nicely deported to the U.S. embassy. Really seems like one of things where "if there's a will, there's a way".
Heatmap based on Moves data
I keep hearing this over and over. I like the idea of just changing 'map' to 'pmap' everything just working over multiple cores.

While cool,but really, Is there such a great clamoring for scaling programs over multiple cores ? I never hear anyone asking about it job postings.
May be I am working in the wrong part of the industry than those mentioned in the blog post. But I rarely hear game programmers talking about clojure/ functional programming.
Most popular clojure projects on github are web frameworks. I am puzzled why clojure is so popular among web developers if concurrency over multiple cores is its 'killer' application.

From what I remember this paper never mentions 'concurrency' as to 'why functional programming matters'

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs345/whyfp.pdf

Neither does this( the only one?? ) poster child for lisp's success in wild talk about concurrency
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

I think the whole multiple core thing is over blown in association with functional programming. I think it would be pretty misguided for someone to adopt a functional programming with multiple cores in mind.
Meet The 17-Year-Old Who Blew The Lid Off Racial Profiling With His iPod
Integration Testing with Django and Lettuce: Getting Started
Wow that looks great. Are there any benchmarks as to how much faster it is compared to a vanilla Rails app?
I think mineral-rich asteroids would be a likelier first destination for interstellar colonists than an Earth-like planet. The Earth's gravity well is an enormous impediment to space travel. And in micro gravity, we can fly! A large enough asteroid with a hollowed out core with a stable star nearby to provide energy would be the kind of place I'd expect to see colonized first. Planetary scale terraforming can come later.

Having said that, this is an exciting discovery. Kudos to the team that discovered these planets.
This is great! I will run it before I close my gmail account just for fun.
Note that the host never asks the general if anyone was fired. Perhaps someone was fired, and it didn't come up.

After all, if somebody asks why this couldn't happen again, you don't say, "We fired the guy who designed this system." You say, "We changed this, this, and this."

He talks about implementing a two-man rule, which is an excellent idea. I'm not sure how that's going to work in practice, though. Is there a way to make the linux root password composed of two passwords?
Nick Merrill tried to crowdfund an ISP way back that automatically encrypts all traffic, making surveillance impossible. Of course it ended underfunded.
Since Math.random() is seeded using the current time, I'm pretty sure there will be many collisions.
Author here. It took nearly two years to get that rewrite done. A lot of things changed in Rails 3 right at the end of our production cycle so admittedly it was a challenge to get it all to the finish line in the best possible way. That won't be the case with the new edition. I have a stellar team helping me get this done properly and we're using the excellent Leanpub system to release the book incrementally and ensure the finished product is of the highest quality. Much different situation.
The above message on Kickstarter's website: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-...

I received the "Your OUYA is on the move" email (with a tracking number) 20 days ago, but here's the thing: my shipping address is in Singapore. Things arrive from Hong Kong via regular airmail within days, not weeks.
I wonder what he's hiding? /s
I thought it was brilliant myself. Yeah, the comments have been very frustrating, but comments on HN obviously are. No different than Slashdot used to be back in the day, or anywhere else cool on the 'net.

Here's my favorite quote from the post:
No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people. “Stuff” can be a lot of different things—open source projects outside of class, a startup, a new sales process at a company you work at—but, obviously, sitting around talking with your friends about how you guys really should build a website together does not count.

Doing real work with smart people (preferably smarter than you, preferably much smarter than you) is what matters. It's what makes you a better person. Doesn't matter if it pays well, or if it's secure.

Ambition isn't a purely financial thing. It's "I want to be a better person, and I'm willing to work for it", and a clear concept of what "better" is. Better can be rich, or powerful, or creative, or famous, or happy. It could just be creating a family. But wandering aimlessly and letting fear drive you to the nearest safe-looking hole... that's not ambition.
No Right to Remain Silent
I updated the book for RC2 the day it came out (announced on Twitter at https://twitter.com/railstutorial/status/344981158825689088; it just didn't merit a post on the news feed), and I've just updated it for 4.0 final.
> You mean the promises to arrest him for releasing confidential information? I'm honestly confused why people don't think he should be arrested.

If the government believes that he still has valuable intelligence potentially damaging to national security that may not have already been released, and if the government's primary concern with his actions is addressing the national security impact (which all public statements point to), the primary goal of the government should be preventing foreign powers, potentially hostile ones, from getting access to the secrets he possesses.

Publicly threatening to arrest and try him for serious and potentially capital offenses like espionage while he is in territory not subject to the US or any close ally that would be likely inclined to cooperate given the circumstances is, from that perspective, quite foolish.
Is there something in Rails 4 that you desperately need? If not, wait. This looks like it will be a smother release than 2.x to 3.x was, but I wouldn't add this variable to the whole process this late in the game.

In the meantime you can watch bug / experience reports and get some info to make an educated decision.
It's not just you. Our sales are very strong and growing year on year. I'm very happy with the perfoance of the series. Sandy Metz's new book is getting rave reviews everywhere.
OK, you need to watch some more Star Trek and get some optimism going ;)
I don't think he's arguing about semantics of startup vs. small business. I believe he's trying to explain that new businesses fall into a path where they think they are a "startup" thus must take VC funding. He's trying to explain that there's also the "small business" route where you just bootstrap and fund your business from customer revenue.
Invi - pretty cool IM app
Caustik’s “Scaling Node.js to 100k Concurrent Connections”
I'd be interested in a website where snippets of code from open source projects are posted and then dissected. Basically, it would let us crowdsource the discovery and cataloging of idioms and tricks (like the C function decorator trick he discovered).

On occasion I've seen Stackoverflow questions which led to this, and they usually led to some very insightful information.
Building Effective Color Scales
Are you going to be releasing a print version?
Yes, my family and myself had our passports stolen in Tenerife (now known as Tenergrief in my family, wasn't the best of holidays) and we flew back to the UK on a police report (which was in Spanish).

The UK customs officer said we shouldn't have really flown back on that, but he let us in regardless. Not even an interview in a room.
The title should of read:

Creator of Rapid Application Development, Dr James Martin, dies at 79
That sounds more like the definition of a franchise business. Which may or may not be a startup as well, depending on how you go after growth
Ask HN: Is Facebook secretly keeping accounts open?
I scheduled my account for permanent deletion five weeks ago. The process is supposed to take only two weeks. Yet my data is still there, and I was able to reactive the account.

Has anyone else experienced this issue?
> "And in micro gravity, we can fly"

And our bodies rapidly fail...
Any colony for contemporary humans will need earth-like gravity, artificial or otherwise.
I just pushed the update.
One point I have to disagree with is the complexity of transmission. We are not talking about a cousin that is not expecting to hear from me for another decade. Likely, there are in person communications and some pre-agreed upon methods. One immediate "throw-away" method could be just doing a point-to-point WebRTC chat. Google prototyped a super simplistic method using AppEngine and some public STUN servers to get the link going. Security by obscurity, but that's what the article is claiming.

Also, there are a bunch of other services that offer communications. Even something like Twilio/Tropo/Plivo can be leveraged using their WebRTC clients and calling inside their own networks (as opposed to hitting PSTN). A FreeSWITCH server will get you similar capabilities between extensions and you can spin one up in minutes on a VPS and then just as quickly throw it away.
Marathon Everyman
> They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles

But they haven't... They've made it clear that they are a potent force that fights the evil terrorists. No part of the NSA response has been smiles and cakes. They're calling for Snowden's blood and telling America that this is serious stuff.
Network Security 101
A pretty good article on the response of the NSA.

"We've changed the passwords." Excellent job boys, you deserve a raise. And two-person requirements to access the data? Yeah, that will take 5 years to develop, cost $2 billion, and never really work.

There must be thousands of people who knew this system existed. You can't keep that secret forever, Top Secret clearance or not.

What if the next "national traitor" uses his Top Secret clearance to use that data stream to his own financial benefit? Blackmailing senators on their affairs, or exacting revenge on targets given to him by outside crime bosses.

Maybe I watch too many movies... But for every good guy like Snowden, is a bad guy.
to further the above, he was also an NSA employee prior to working for Booz Allen. And a CIA employee before that, I think....
Yes, my formula is easily transformed for 32-bit integers with sign. Not that difficult.

I leave that as an exercise to the reader. :-)
New Canadian Stock Exchange to combat High Frequency Trading
It's hard to get an Android phone for $100 though.
I actually thought that was really clever, I often highlight the current section of what I'm reading to help me keep track of my progress, and this certainly helps do that.

Seems like this guy's site is designed more like a portfolio and less like a blog.
Creator of Raspbery pi Silver Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering.
I watched the last two ST movies and it just makes me want to see shit explode.