skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You do learn certain basics from a degree, and building fundamentals is important. That being said, a degree is neither the exclusive nor universally optimal way to grok logic and problem structuring. The most important piece of the puzzle is your willingness to turn over stones, ponder problems, and fill in blanks tirelessly. Software engineering is an immense field, and there are always more blanks to fill.

The fortunate thing about online education today (coursera/udacity to name a few) is that it strips away a lot of the tough/complex issues, offers you a bite-sized problem, and breaks it down into a manageable chunk that a non-tech person can solve. It's not unlike how a management consulting case interview might go - you can't possibly know everything about an industry/space, but you can (1) break out a facet of the problem, (2) ask some questions, and (3) distill the incoming data. You develop understanding incrementally.

I'm a big fan of incrementality (also in writing software). Everybody starts out writing "Hello World!"
I know, that's what I was implying :)
Haha I don't see one in yours, either. Fuck it, get at me on Skype: notduncansmith
Shipped is better than done.
The rebuttal is obvious from the graph (the central point in the article, which was hyperbolically disputed above): Music isn't dying - the industry around it is evolving.

That's what happens when new technology is introduced into an existing business model - the industry changes. Existing players may exit the market (some may even "die"), some struggle, some adapt to the change and thrive, and other new players enter.

> a dying art form
> music as we know it...is dying
> the music industry is dying

Music as an art form is largely unchanged, especially the more artistic, less "pop music"-focused forms.

The music industry is refocusing on live performance and the long tail, and less on retail sales of pre-recorded physical media.

Adapting, evolving, changing, transforming.

Maybe declining, shrinking, endangered, troubled.

Maybe broadening, renewing, refreshing.

"Dying" doesn't describe it well at all. I don't think it means what you think it means.
ITER is crazy expensive unlike the project linked above which has spent about $1 million total. Tokamak designs have been around for decades and still have not achieved commercial viability. I think ITER is a long shot at best. Lawrenceville Plasma Physics seems to be much farther along than some of the other well-funded projects.

Of course, who knows who will do it first and when. I sure don't. But we should be funding as many possible designs as we can not less.
> Where is the data around foiled terrorist plots?

Luckily some Senators have recognized that meme as bullshit:

“For example, we’ve heard over and over again that 54 terrorist plots have been thwarted by the use of (this program),” Leahy said.

“That’s plainly wrong,” the senator said. “These weren’t all plots and they weren’t all thwarted.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcHdAoSUz9g
The $1 Trillion coin thing was never a serious plan.

Ex-Treasury official: "As a straightforward matter the Federal Reserve wouldn’t give Treasury a trillion dollars for that coin."

That said, he's keeping with the party line that the US "always pays it's bills on time", so take it with a grain of salt (the US defaulted twice or more in the 20th century, depending on how you count)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/03/w...
> the US still has a fairly strong "fruit of the poison tree" doctrine: any information the government happened to obtain on other users would be invalid for prosecution because it wouldn't be covered by their search warrant.

After everything we've seen from the Snowden leaks until now, do you honestly still believe this? Parallel construction? Hello??
There is a big difference between the mechanisms of aging (how exactly it unfolds) and the state of aging (a measure of the damage). The research community knows exactly what the fundamental differences between old tissue and young tissue are, because they have listed them all in the process of investigating the molecular pathology of age-related disease. What they argue over is how the differences happen, which differences are more important than others, and how metabolism reacts or contributes to the differences. That's all massively complex and poorly understood, but the damage isn't and is well understood.

(For a layperson's list, see: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research )

The actual differences can be repaired or removed without resolving any of the outstanding questions as to what they do, what their mechanisms are, how they cause further pathology, where they came from.

If you've removed all differences in tissue and not produced rejuvenation, then congratulations, you've proved that aging is a genetic/epigenetic program - and at a tiny cost compared to present investigations. But I think it's much more plausible that we'd see rejuvenation.
[video] Rest API Design w/ Brian Sletten
Wow, Perl's seen better days but I think they're a good match for each other. Perl's fascinated by JavaScript's objectivity and popularity, and JavaScript's wearing Perl for retro effect like some kind of fashion item. The two of them are like darkness and light. No prize for guessing who brought the drugs...
[video]How To Make a Splash with Angela Ognev of Strikingly
That won't help. How would you feed the data to stdin of a command run in a different process?

The Control facility is for multiplexing the data streams, but that solves a different problem.
Good point, because money today is always better than money tomorrow....the whole time value of money concept[1].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money
The Startup Factory Showcase (Demo Day)
This is so, SO shamefully Gmail. :)
> and it would only take a decade and a billion dollars to demonstrate that in mice

I thought Aubrey de Grey had already demonstrated that they were able to make long-lived mice in labs?
Bitcoin is a decentralized system, so there is no reasonable place to put these IP restrictions.

If there is a single Bitcoin mining node (out of thousands[0]) that will accept your transaction, you can play.

[0] http://blockchain.info/connected-nodes
is money the key, or is money the chain that binds us? The only good that comes out of this is that you get to decide which of these worldviews you want to live in, then make the best of it.
Or they could, you know, stop spending more than they take in in taxes.
The local indie acts do fine where I live. They all rent a place together and work at coffee shops or, longshoremen some of them because they can take off whenever they want to.

I know plenty of bands like Hooded Fang, Gold & Youth, and Lightning Dust that do fine for themselves without major labels and are able to tour worldwide and still come back with money.

The big acts now are really, really big. Jay-Z, Timberlake, U2 they're all approaching billionaire status. Just there are less middle men siphoning it off to feed the 'industry'. The old music industry was a closed club you couldn't get into but now anybody can be in a band and get exposure or record cheaply. If the music biz is so dire, why is there an explosion in small recording studios. They are all booked solid too one of my friends had to go out of the city to record because the 23 studios (there used to be only 4) were booked including the night shift well into next year.

The punk bands def make more money now. They can actually afford to tour instead of stealing all their equipment like in the old days and pushing a broken down VW across the country and nearly starving to death in the middle of nowhere Arizona. Now they can fly to Brazil, or do shows in Iceland. That never happened a decade ago. These are local tiny acts without labels too.

There is also ~40 live venues where I live now. 15yrs ago there were only 2 legal venues for smaller acts, and everybody else had to illegally play in warehouses and hope the police didn't show up. Even worse, some music industry A&R parasite was in charge of one of the clubs and refused plenty of acts that went on to be successful here because he didn't like them, or thought they wouldn't be good for business.

I'm glad the industry is dead. Let it die. We've never had so much music
This is cool, do the universities digitally archive copies of the stuff themselves or just Internet Archive on behalf of them?
A picture for the records: https://twitter.com/awardio/status/387739827300343808/photo/...
The govt coerces somebody you trust (either directly or through the web of trust) to hand over their private keys and then begins impersonating them.
>Everyone gets cancer if they live long enough.

Not true. There are tons of people above 100 years old who die of causes unrelated to cancer. Obviously there are well known mechanisms that link cancer to aging but it does not mean there's a probability of 1 to get cancer as you get older.
A high school friend of mine left Australia for Boston circa 12 or 13. When he came back circa 19 he said he hadn't needed to do any homework, had already learned mathematics in Australia before leaving that they never even got up to teaching him in the US, and cruised through to ace every class. Now, he was smarter than the average and we were at a pretty reasonable school, but I don't doubt that he was telling the truth and kids are simply not challenged by a typical US high school syllabus.

The brain peaks around the very early 20s .. teenage years are a great time to invest in knowledge. If the whole country screws that up, it has to have an effect.
I had the same reservations. But you know what? Fuck it. I'm so tired of this bullshit that I'm more than willing to take the risk at this point. This angers me to no end.

Donation complete.
Collective: Game Pitch Platform
After reading the full text article I was surprised to find the protons from the aluminium foil/picosecond pulse interaction actually come from hydrocarbon impurities that were on the back surface of the foils.

If they don't guard that hydrocarbon film on the back of the aluminium from the Boron-ionizing nanosecond pulse then they don't get protons. So that is why the second thinner aluminium film is there; to shield the impurity layer on the thick aluminium film.
Well, this was circumvented here, right? The guy revoked his cert. That's what revocation is for.

I guess the next step is a secret law that makes this illegal?
@locksley: Couldn't the operator of blockchain.info game this by manipulating the output of their API?
Also, honestly, the govt could coerce you into being a mole for that matter, right?
Not at all, you still need to manage state across processes /dynos. Either you reinvent that yourself and use something like Redis to do it yourself or you outsource it to something like Pusher and relieve the load on your own web service in doing so.
I don't disagree with you re:investors (or pg's numbers) who seek to obtain as much evidence as possible so as to maximize their ROI. But priors do matter.

For example, if the prior on "making a successful company" (defined however you want) were a vastly higher 40%, then I'd imagine a lot more laypeople would take the plunge. Reading sites like TechCrunch makes it seem to the layperson that building a successful company is much easier than it really is. So yes, knowing that "mega success" is a massive outlier (to the tune of 1:1,000,000) is indeed actionable information to a layperson thinking about starting a company without any additional evidence.

As the source article notes: The goal of the entrepreneur is to learn as much as they can, thereby increasing their own odds of success (or minimizing their odds of failure). Obviously, getting into YC massively improves your odds and would probably be a good decision! As a YC alum, my advise would jive with this observation. ;)
When your understanding of the national economy is reduced down to comparing it to a simple household budget, you know you're hopeless.
best of luck, loren...

-bowerbird
Oh god, LTCM. Beware of investors that have no demonstrable controls against automated/HFT pouring of more of my money into a black hole trying to "win" back their losses.

The Trillion Dollar Bet is also a good, high-level documentary.
The OP was talking about shorting so I mentioned Calls because of the buy back at the end.

There's not a lot of historical BTC price data and the volatility is all over the place, so using mathematical option value models would be pretty crazy, but they might give an idea of your baseline price before using a major premium risk factor multiplier as well. 'Greater fools' and all...I'm sure somebody would buy them if they were being sold.
How the feds busted a top Silk Road seller
Implied here are the feelings of obligation and the guilt that can come with it that are often incredibly influential and stressful factors in the decisions we make, whether it's obligation felt to an investor whose money you're living off of or to a friend who stood up for you.
"Do you really want to run one process for every client to connected to your WebSocket server? The answer is no. Even one (OS) thread per connection can get unwieldy."

Yes, no kidding. But people will still try to do this with frameworks that don't support anything else (like Rails), because that's the shortest path to a working product.

"And I think lots of people would disagree that async stacks are still "exotic" or "not written very well"."

Well, those "lots of people" can disagree all they want, but they're wrong. The problem isn't that the frameworks are badly written, necessarily -- it's all the stuff in the stack, including the app-specific logic. Virtually no one knows how to write asynchronous web apps of any complexity. It's a very hard problem.
Fuck them, if we have to be worried about being on this list the whole thing is a complete loss. We can't be afraid of letting them know just how many of us are against them.
The 15 Best Startups To Work For In America
"Suicidal"? Realistically what would happen, do you think? They shut down Google Reader, which is probably used by 1000+ times as many people. The average user of Google Apps Engine apps probably has no idea where the service is hosted and will never understand why they should blame downtime on Google.
Is his lawyer also in danger?
The cold emails that got me meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub
Congress fails to make the debt payments happen (unconstitutional), President just prints more money and makes the payments (pretty sure this is also unconstitutional), everyone goes home happy.
sign me up for one of dem trillion dollar coins
SenseFly releases swarm technology for mapping
How do I get added to the list / where are you pulling the data from? Can you add me? @borski
Unnamed sources at the company said that Anand Chandrasekher would be receiving a well-deserved spanking.
I have some anecdotal evidence against selling "level packs": most people that I talk to hate them. There's a difference between buying things that enhance the game experience (powerups, character skins, etc) and paying to unlock the full game experience. When an app is free except for the first level, people feel deceived (unless you put "Lite" in the title or something).

Disclaimer: I have no studies or objective data to support this, this is based purely off of what I've heard from other iOS devs and regular humans.
That's better odds than winning most CA lotto jackpots...
Or they detain you so you can't revoke it
This video is coming up on 3 weeks old. The person who made the video (likely not the poster to HN) is just scamming people for 5% of their exchanges. I have serious doubts this is real.
Would the severity of a default effect the value of currency very inelastically because any weakness signals a tip of an iceberg?
PayPal Unveils Yet Another Way to Pay in Stores. Now to Get People to Use It.
Or how about an even more intelligent approach. Let's only spend money on people who are paying taxes.

Am sure the world would be better with less students, seniors, veterans etc.
"Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you're always afraid

You step out of line, the man come and take you away"

Buffalo Springfield, "for What it's Worth" 1966.

Timeless tune, not written about internet surveillance obviously. Recently that I find that song, and that line in particular coming to mind

linkage if you want a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCrSXkJY
Who would make future secure communications with Lavabit at this point? Certainly not Edward Snowden.
Exactly. Unlike lightning, success doesn't just happen to you. So, all these "stats" are meaningless.
A prospective band that caught their attention and was willing to sign the contract received:
- an advance
- studio time, advertising, packaging, etc. at whatever rate the label charged them
- maybe help with touring, while paying whatever rates the label charged them

If they were really lucky/good/smart, they weren't in debt to the label when it came time to negotiate a new contract. Then they could hire a decent contract lawyer and get something more than 2 cents an album (before paying back that advance), build their own studio, etc.

Most of those "rock star persona"s have stories of what their lives were like before they signed those contracts. Some of them have some pretty interesting stories of what their lives were like after they signed them, too. Very few of them would believe that major record labels were taking a lot of risks with their money.

If the money has dried up at all, it's simply because the industry has become less predictable/more fragmented. Minor labels have become bigger than ever, and the majors are letting them take the risks (or leverage market expertise to gain a profit where the majors could not).

On the up-side, the costs of making a decent demo (or even album) and distributing it to an international audience are lower than ever, making it much easier for bands to do all of the things rock bands always had to do if they wanted a label rep to show up with a contract and an advance.
This is awesome! I was literally working on a project today that needed websockets and I was so bummed out that I had to use Socket.IO and fallback into long polling.

If you Heroku guys are still listening... I'm so fucking impressed that you already updated the docs I was using earlier. I was going to suggest you update them... but then I went to grab the link and it was updated. Well done.
> Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.

The system does not allow you to wave away what it considers life-threatening alarms. Nor does it allow you to wave away a worsening situation.

http://support.nest.com/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-s...

Note that alarms can only be silenced in the room that triggered the alarm if the detector determines the alarm type to be a warning (and not as threatening).

Your angry comment makes it sound like the creators didn't consider safety at all — while in all likelihood they paid a great deal of attention to safety, also noticing there is a lot of room for convenience to be added in a modern smoke alarm.

> In the time it takes to download and install a smartphone app, one can probably replace all their smoke detector batteries

Are you suggesting that getting on a ladder in each room and then removing and replacing the batteries for each smoke alarm is faster than downloading a single app on a smartphone?
Please Use Technology
long live php!
Actually, the policy is:

"Google will announce if we intend to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to this API or Service. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate that Service without these changes until the later of: (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20, 2015"

So you have a year, at a minimum.
F.A.A. Finally Ready to Allow Electronic Devices On During Take-Off and Landings
Agreed, every time I've used a named pipe in a shellscript it's caused me nothing but pain.

IIRC, they're guaranteed not to interleave write()s less than PIPE_BUF (4k?) but if your program is buffering internally it might not end writes on a newline.
why was this not posted as a torrent?
Note that VIX--market predictions of volatility in the S&P 500--has remained largely unaffected by the shutdown[0], suggesting that Wall St is putting its money where its mouth is--the market either "believes" that a prolonged shutdown is unlikely, or that a prolonged shutdown would be unlikely to plunge us back into a recession.

[0] http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EVIX+Interactive#symbol...
CLJ-183, CLJ-186, and CLJ-77 are fixed. I'll check CLJ-165. CLJ-129 is coming very soon. ClojureScript support is definitely on the list but will take a while - we do recognise .cljs files, at least.
I'm confused with priceonomics. They seem to be in the business of blogging now? The link to their product is a tiny thing at the bottom.
That sounds similar to the projective space used in computer vision.
Git-scribe tool: a simple GIT command line toolset to write e-books
I really do believe this kind of fear is justified.

I posted this comment because:

1) I believe my analysis is sound

2) As I have posted previously, I am a US citizen and therefore cannot be denied entry to the US

I have already donated, and though my speech (through both keyboard and wallet) might bring additional attention from the alphabet-soup agencies, I believe it's important to speak up rather than give in to fear.
Never have I seen so much speculation over 14 bps.

Wake me when it gets back over 1%... I might buy some.