skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We were once great at innovating in the physical world...But recently, software (and mostly Internet software) has been the focus of innovation, and its importance is probably still underestimated—there are compounding effects to how it’s changing the world that we’re only now beginning to see...But innovation in the physical world (besides phones and computers) over the same time period has been less impressive.

Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. Software hasn't really had any important innovations (using David Wheeler's definition, which is from a CS/EE perspective, and which is linked to every couple of months on HN[1]). The software required to run a smartphone isn't significantly different than the software needed to run a similar application on a desktop. On the other hand, the hardware on a smartphone now and a desktop from the 90s is different. We take hardware advances like reliable capacitive touchscreens and maybe this storage advance linked to on HN today [2], and Moore's "Law" for granted, but "putting more transistors in a circuit" and increased hardware capabilities were the bottleneck to producing today's technology, not new software techniques.

The reason that people associate software with innovation is because it has become the latest tech buzzword. When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. The granting of patents to trivial software ideas gives companies a claim to innovation that they do not deserve.

Rayiner's comment on this thread:

> The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.

will soon be true for computer hardware, and eventually "Moore's Law" will be broken. When software does not become significantly faster each release cycle, it will be more apparent that hardware is responsible for today's advances as opposed to software.

[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347
I hope selecting two options was ok. We use a combination of IRC and Google Hangouts.
I think the difference in LOC count is likely due to the much more complicated avionics in the F-35 than the technology stack, as compared with older aircraft.
change "words" to "content".
REPLY TO UPDATE SELF: Yes, the correct term was actually "blogspam," and I appreciate (and upvoted) the grandchild reply that pointed that out. I see that now the Hacker News curators have changed the link on the story submission from pointing to Quartz to pointing to the original New York Times article, which fits the Hacker News guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I mention this because many comments in this thread will be very confusing to newcomers if it is not made clear that the thread used to point to Quartz but now points to the New York Times.)
>what does the military have to do with socialism, anyway?

How, exactly do you pay for a military?

How, exactly do you pay for universal healthcare?

Why is the implementation of one okie-dokie and the other the "path to tyranny"?
Microsoft Explored Plans to Build Amazon Rival
One thing the NSA fiasco has done is made people aware of the security and privacy issues on the internet and it's a great time to launch a service like this. Hopefully we will have most of the internet users using VPN (and hopefully Tor).

I also love the fact that they have servers outside of the US, makes it a little bit harder for the US government to spy on you.
Have you tried instagram's video feature yet? It totally has that same thing. Only with this you can undo your last shot, instead of re-starting if you mess up. Undo is an improvement on the formula, not a corruption.
Microsoft Adds Office for iPhone. Yawn.
Anything from light trails, fading shadows, cross-frame colour effects to stuff I can't even imagine! The possibilities are greatly expanded, if you stop thinking of video as lots-of-images-one-after-another.
"Why does gov.uk, a site all about allowing the British public to interact with the British government, use google analytics?"

I'd like an answer to this too from the .gov.uk team.

Ironically enough, their service design manual (which is excelllent and a fantastic resource) has a very good section on analytics tools [1]. Some quotes:

"When deciding which analytics tool is most appropriate for your service, you should consider the following...who owns the data (it should be your organisation!)

Does the solution meet the EU privacy directive and the European Commission’s Directive on Data Protection?

- where is collected data held?

- do data centres meet EU/British data security standards?

- how long is data held for?

- what will happen to the data on termination of the contract- can you export it?

- what access your vendors employees have to your data"

Did they evaluate Google Analytics based on these guidelines?

[1]https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/making-software/analytics-...

The full list of topics in the service design manual
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/browse
USDA Inspectors Flag 45,000 Health Violations, Suspends Factories only 28 times
Well, sama, I'm glad to hear that you feel this way, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do about it.

I mean, I never used Loopt, so maybe I'm missing something but it sure looks like an example of what you're criticizing (though better than anything I've done). But that's okay, Zip2 wasn't that huge of a contribution to the world either. The impressive bit is what Musk did after Zip2.

So good luck! You're in a better position than most, to do more than talk!
The irony of this essay is that he went overboard with the bold and italic text. Otherwise I wish I could read more articles in a form like that.
That government is best which governs least. -- Often attributed to Thomas Jefferson

Years ago, I read a biography of a prostitute and political activist. She wanted prostitution decriminalized, not legalized. She felt legalizing it would create problems. She cited Nevada as an example, where there is a fair amount of regulatory burden on the women but the pimps and johns still essentially do as they please. She just wanted the right to charge for services without risk of arrest.

I will suggest that since there is already open source, incentives are probably not a good idea. But removing barriers of some sort might do a lot.

I have thought a lot about such things over the years, not open source per se but, for example, how to make money from making information freely available. It is a challenge but can be done and has been for years (broadcast radio, broadcast tv, etc). So I would suggest you work on removing barriers rather than providing "incentives." Or at least balance the incentives piece with also removing barriers.

My 2¢.

Edit: Someone want to kindly explain the downvote? Is there some problem with suggesting a removal of barriers instead of providing incentives? Or this just a helping of lurv from one of my many anti-fans?
Thx.
Tile...a new way to find everything
The logo is nice, but the aliased angled lines really kill it for me. I think a vector (or better anti-aliased) logo would really make a positive difference in the feel of the site.
I don't think so. That isn't what the person said. Their entire post was built around stripping down web design to the words. In fact, the author was very precise in the usage of the term "words."

This for example: "But the most powerful tool on the web is still words."

That blatantly is not the case in my opinion. Photos are vastly more powerful than words on today's web. That's why 3/4 of all the posts on Reddit's home page are links to imgur. That's why a gazillion photos are uploaded to and shared on Facebook every day.

That's why you can read about protests in Brazil all day long, and until you see the photos, the sheer power of the protest will not ring anywhere near as loudly. This has been true so long as photography has existed. Whether we're talking about the Holocaust and WW2, an atomic bomb going off, or a photo of a kitten or puppy, you name it and photos win 9 times out of 10 over words.

What would walking on the moon be like without photos (and video) to go with it? Would reading the transcripts have amazed the world like the imagery did? I say not even remotely. Imagine reading about a man standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, versus seeing it.

Another side note to all of this: there are almost a billion illiterate people still, sadly. And another billion that are only partially literate. Nearly every one of them can understand imagery. Imagery also crosses languages, you don't have to understand Mandarin to grasp the Tiananmen Square protest.
These "issues" are critical in thwarting PRISM. More security snake oil.
If you time it right, you don't have to hit burnout. In my view, "timing it right" basically means completing the project before burnout. A successful completion followed by a little R&R goes an incredibly long way to combating burnout.
They should have not sold to Facebook, they had cracked social on mobile. The introduction of video just proves this point even more, as they built out their feature stack over the years, they would have slowly made facebook less relevant. Instagram is seen as cool on mobile as facebook was cool on the desktop. If Zuckerburg had started instagram, he would not have sold it.
He didn't say compare the costs of both, he said compare the cost of war with the benefits of spin-off technology. It's beyond ridiculous to suggest that the benefits of technology developed during war are best described as "cash".
Well, it's really because they had an independent and consistent source of income. That's a quality of monopolies, but you can get it other ways. For universities, it's an endowment. For governments, taxes.

I don't really know how much money it takes. The MIT Media Lab was pretty cheap to get started, relatively. Google makes less profit than Apple, but they're still able to run Google[x]. Larry+Sergey don't seem to use revenue as a primary signal for success, so I'm not that worried.

The constraint seems to be people who are bright, determined, imaginative, and rebellious enough to ditch the status quo.
It's not the whole solution, but the vast majority of NSA spying is passive "over the wire" stuff. We know they do that, pervasively, and even more, we know foreign countries do that (and filtering, and in some cases lots of fun tampering) on connections (e.g. Great Firewall of China). NSA has been doing passive intercept since inception in the 1940s.

PRISM is somewhat ambiguous -- maybe it's a huge secret program where they get blanket access to big sites directly, maybe it's just a UI layer for managing subpoena or warrant results.

Protecting your metadata is one thing where a VPN works pretty well. There are still some more advanced attacks (looking at the encrypted traffic flows on lightly loaded links, you can infer what site/activity one is doing, even without decrypting, unless you pad all communications).
Maybe you enjoy reading pointless, worthless rants about PHP's "language design" and other problems. However, I'd like to keep reposting garbage to a minimum.
Can you embed Instagram videos the same way you can with videos from Vine?
Oops, not anymore :)
Committing to Quality as a Team
Revealed: the top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant
It doesn't really make it that hard to cash in. See http://localbitcoins.com . You'll just get a slightly lower exchange rate. If they thought they didn't want people receiving traceable wire transfers from Mt. Gox, imagine how little they will like the alternative they are pushing people to - in-person cash trades.

>The effect of that is what Patrick experienced where regulators start effectively 'regex' banning types of activities that are associated with these activities.

What Patrick experienced is a symptom of the rules surrounding ACH transactions - namely that they can be charged back up to 6 months later (1 year in some cases). That makes banks squeamish about accounts receiving large numbers of them. I don't think ACH transactions in general are "associated" with criminal activity - most paychecks are delivered this way.
I hear this argument all the time and it's complete nonsense.

Yes, America has a large population, but that means it also has a very large number of taxpayers, therefore an enormous budget. If anything, economies of scale mean America can provide health care at a lower per capita cost than smaller countries.

Your argument is such nonsense it suggests that merely dividing America up into 10 countries each of 30 million would mean it could provide healthcare at a more affordable rate. Nonsensical at best.
If you don't know what you are talking about please stop. What does PSR-x have to do with core? Besides the fact that PSR-0 is broken it doesn't really make sense to expect anything of it in core. PSR-x are some "rules" made up by some creators of frameworks / projects to aid in userland CS / directory structure decisions and please note that not everybody agrees on what they think people should do.
My ZIP is 98104. That should be able to get you my home address, if the noted PII is not sufficient for you.
SneakerNet and XMPP
I'll second this. We have a team in New York and a team in Paris, and flowdock has absolutely been the best hub for seeing what's happening across teams, and communicating with each other
What happened to innovation? At least in the States, it's been sued out of existence.
I just updated this with a small set of predefined fitness functions that can be selected via a dropdown list in the "edit" view. I'm particularly fond of the "Growing Culture" function, as by simulating reducing fitness over the age of the gene, it makes the genes much more volatile, yet patterns still emerge!
You know, that might be a cool idea for an investment company. Fund only ideas that might overturn the world, no future Facebooks need apply. Have a bunch of scientists examine the ideas to filter out the free-energy types and other crazies, though the filter should not be too conservative. Maybe also set up some cash prizes for "craziest plausible idea", prizes are known to create way more motivation than they cost.
A billion dollars is a fuckload of money.
We just implemented an internal composer repository for sharing code between our different services. I am surprised composer isn't more popular. I have been developing for a long time and have only recently heard of it.
If you're washing a sink full of bottles, you're probably doing it in water that's around 45° (which you had to heat up from, say, 20°) and you're probably using more like a cup of water (250ml) per bottle, not a liter. I mean, my sink won't even hold 20 liters of water. Even if that water isn't usefully warming up your house, we're still talking about (45°-20°)×250ml/bottle×1 calorie/ml/° for more like 26 kJ per bottle.

As for the steam, you only need enough steam to fill the bottle — perhaps one gram of steam per bottle, or a bit less. That costs you on the order of 600 calories, or about 2.5 kJ. Actually heating the bottle itself at 0.84 J/g/° will cost more than that; say that instead of heating to 73°, the minimum standard for food sterilization, you heat it to 150° with high-pressure steam. That's (150°-20°) × 200 g × 0.84 J/g/° = 22 kJ.

So, assuming batch autoclaves like you said, with much higher temperatures than needed, with people washing their bottles at home in the sink, we have an energy cost of 26kJ + 2.5 kJ + 22kJ = 50kJ per bottle, compared to the 200kJ you calculated to recycle it. And that's why glass bottle reuse is widespread, even if perhaps not in your neighborhood: it saves energy. In my neighborhood, it's basically universal. Beer is always bought in returnable bottles here, and soft drink glass bottles are usually returnable.

Why might it not be widespread in your neighborhood? Aside from the water-heating externality you suggest, I suspect that it's because you guys are spending extra energy to reduce labor costs, because labor is expensive where you are, especially when doing the labor means you have to deal with dirty, stinky bottles — even if occasionally.

On the other hand, basically anything you do with a plastic bottle — whether you return it for reuse or throw it away, both of which are common in my neighborhood — is going to cost a great deal less energy.

By the way, I'm really delighted to have a conversation here on HN that involves actual facts and calculation, along with careful consideration of the possibilities. Thank you for that.
What's wrong with medium vs any other blogging platform?
Yes, but someone who is paralyzed by fear of doing the wrong thing is never going to invent the wheel, forget about whether or not it has actually been invented yet.
It might be from this 2004 study of UK government sites [http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticl...]. A 2007 study found 'less than half' but doesn't try and give a specific number [http://staff.washington.edu/tft/research/international/]. That study also refers to a UN snapshot study in 2006 that found <10% of a small group of sites were accessible, and I also found this 2006 analysis of British commercial sites saying that 75% of them had accessability problems [http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nomensa+claims+75%25+of+UK%27s...]
To me, as a European, your summary of the US-perspective on health care explains a lot. Over here, universal health care is supported by public opinion, mostly because it is seen as a question of ethics (with a healthy dose of "it could happen to me" hedging).

The consensus here is that society has to take care of the sick, independently of the circumstances of their life. It is important to note that I wrote society, not state. The state is seen as the agent through which society effects this, not the principal actor. The fact that it is seen as a question of ethics and a part of "we the society" probably also explains the rather vitriolic contributions that some of my European compatriots provide in discussions on the US health care situation (even though it is probably none of our business).
I think the likelihood of of abuse of intercepted material by individual agents is probably worth emphasizing more than the remote possibility of America electing (and supporting) the Presidential candidate that wants to build death camps

Frankly, if you think that in 10-15 years America is remotely likely to be introducing gulags and death camps, then NSA surveillance is the last thing you should be worrying about; Hitler nor Stalin neither had nor needed an effective way of monitoring most private communications to eliminate all resistance and millions of people. If I was worried prospective presidential candidates were secretly plotting to lock me in camps I'd probably support the government going all Richard Nixon and wiretapping the opposition.
How To Use Math To Crush Your Friends At Monopoly
Well, we don't control iOS, so to support better quality VPN on iOS, you need to have a custom client, which we don't yet have. I was optimistic iOS 7 would have some SSL VPN standard built in, but it doesn't.

You can use OpenVPN, which is pretty robust (SSL-based) on any platform where it's supported. We're working on an SSL VPN option for mobile.

The PPTP and L2TP vulnerabilities aren't purely passive attacks, so they're not likely to be used by NSA for general users. They are a risk for individual targeted users.
We use a combination of Socialcast and Google Hangouts.
I would still settle for taking a company public. Also it was much less than a billion, but there was stock issued as well.
To gauge the likelihood of minimum viable products being accessible, I think these are some of the most important questions:

1. How common is it for web application developers to directly make part of a page clickable without using an appropriate semantic tag or ARIA role?

2. How common is it for web application developers to roll their own widgets, e.g. buttons, menus, or sliders? One has to assume that most such widgets implemented directly by the application developer won't have proper ARIA support.

3. Which reusable UI components and toolkits are most common among web application developers, particularly those working on a minimum viable product? How accessible are these?
I've also used http://glyde.com/ to do the same.
The F-35 has multiple variants, one of which is a STOVL (Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing) aircraft with a vertical flight system. The amount of code necessary to deal with that is likely a large part of the difference in LOC, not to mention the more complicated systems for weapons, radar, communications, etc...

In other words, the fact that it is written in C++ tells you little more than the fact that it is written in C++ and not Ada, but that alone will tell you that they probably expanded their pool of potential programmers by a large margin.
> I think a lot of Silicon Valley startups now have the worst of both worlds. They feel pressure to monetize and sell for millions, so their creativity is limited and they just barely innovate.

The problem in Silicon Valley is that it has no money. This seems like an absurd thing to say, but consider that the yearly R&D spending of the top 50 tech companies is about $50 billion, most of which is "development" and not "research." In comparison, the federal government spends about $140 billion/year on R&D, and that is skewed heavily towards "research."
There's an official OpenVPN client on iOS now in the App Store that will accept a standard .ovpn profile.
Plus when you see the stars like that, you can't help but dream about them.
It's the opposite for me at least when aggregated. Makes me think I should stop wasting so much time.

Given this comment, it's apparently not working, though.
This article really embodies what I love about the net and why I became a web dev first then a software engineer.

A Webpage is designed to be reached by anyone, anywhere, and now...can be read (at least the words) in different languages. I love text just for the global demographic that it can reach thanks to online translators like Google and Bing!
My options are without question controlled by my employer.

Eh? Google search "Private Insurance Canada" and tell me how your healthcare is "controlled" by your employer. This is like suggesting your employer "controls" how you can use your car because they offer you free parking.

>If the care provided by my taxes was sufficient

How is Canada's healthcare not sufficient, exactly?

>You've been tricked into thinking group plans are cheaper..

Erm, remember that part where I said I was in the industry? Yeah, I know they are on the average cheaper. Plans vary though, of course, but pooling is a significant part of insurance. In 99% of cases, a pool of white collar office workers performs better than a pool of everyone.

>Why do health benefits need to be offered to employees?

They don't. That's why they call them benefits.

>Why only offer them to a subset of the population

We don't. Canada has universal health care and extended insurance is available for everyone that wants to pay for it.

>Surely it's better to offer them to everyone.

They are.

The idea that every possible health problem and treatment that one can conceive of should be offered to everyone for free is about as dumb as saying someone should pay for everything themselves. Extended benefits are for services that we've already determined are "extras" to basic, guaranteed health care.

I'm not sure you have a strong understanding of the purpose of our system to be honest.
I'm OK with a military being strictly limited by laws to prevent abuse. Not so much with healthcare.
Apple are signed up for PRISM.
The gulags are already there: Guantánamo bay...
And while plain text sites have hopefully improved in six-eight years, I suspect that the rise of rich web apps (as mentioned in other comments) would mean that overall percentages of accessible sites could have remained the same or even fallen since then.