skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't mean to say that it sounded like a sales pitch. What I meant is that it's talking about relative strengths and weaknesses, where what I really need to understand what Serf is is more along the lines of how the API / model differs from ZKs notion of writing to or waiting on locations in the distributed space.
"Can you not see the idiotic flaw in your plan."

It's not my plan. It's the inevitable path of innovation and technology. What I described should be obvious.

Eventually, all cars will be driver-less, and the "old style" of car will be rare to see on the road. Like pre-1974 cars are extremely rare to see now. Everyone will want the newer, safer, cooler, energy efficient cars that drive you home safely, even when you're high.

"You're high. It's not going to happen."

Yes, I'm high. But it will happen. The bicycle situation you describe is one where the computer could still take action to minimize injury to the cyclist, and reduce the risk of causing a major accident with other vehicles. Most drivers would panic and "swerve into the next lane" as you describe, which is not the best action to take. It's about controlled evasive action, not "holy crap... slam on brakes...over-steer... enter skid... over-compensate over-steering... enter another skid... crash."

If the cyclist collides with your car because of cyclist error, then what you have firstly is an extremely unlikely situation, as cyclists are usually focused on what they are doing. They're not adjusting the air-con, or thinking about sex while riding through traffic - they are concentrating.

"You still have to account for cyclists, pedestrians, animals...".

Come on bolder88, get real. Driver training teaches us to avoid swerving into the path of oncoming vehicles to avoid impact with wildlife. The computer would not allow you to do so, and that's how it should be. However, the computer WOULD allow you to swerve into the other lane if there was no oncoming traffic. Otherwise, the safest option is to run over the animal.

With pedestrians, it's certainly a challenging scenario for the driver-less car, but I still think that the automatic hazard avoidance systems can save the day better than manual intervention. That's because it takes great skill to control a car in an emergency situation. Most drivers don't know how to control a skid, because most drivers don't get any practice with such driving.

Perhaps then, to meet you half way, some drivers can apply for a special license that gives them full control. For the rest of us, the computer is the safer option for controlling the vehicle during an evasive maneuver.
When you have to use the java applet of the Control Panel in your browser to manage your VPS. If your sshd is not on port 22, typically the applet won't find it and you're screwed.
Well sure. But they wouldn't have won the contract.
My reason of interest? Many things on the internet still rely on Flash, but Adobe has historically showed that they are not capable of delivering secure software, based on the number of exploits in Flash, Reader, etc.
My parents are both 50+. My Dad's a Sales guy and my mom is a high school teacher in a primarily non-English, government school. They use Ubuntu for all their tasks. Mostly includes Browsing(YouTube, Epapers), talking to my sister in the States (Hangouts), Media (music, photos and videos) and LibreOffice. The stuff they discover sometimes amazes me, all along I've been believing this would be too hard for them.
From its README:

> If your preferred package manager has a relatively
> recent version of Leiningen, try that first.
> Otherwise you can install by hand:

It's kept up to date: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula...
Interesting educational read, wise experience from a programmer, definitively to read for beginner programmers like me!
Google updates reCAPTCHA
Come on!

Even ignoring north of 96th street (which, check a map, is part of Manhattan) there are plenty of neighborhoods where you can find a two bedroom for $3k or less. Yorkville, Chinatown, far LES, parts of alphabet city, the far west 30s, and probably others I'm not familiar with.

That you could say such a thing says more about you than the rental market.
No, dividends are dollars that leave the company. Profits are an accounting measure of how much the value of the company increased. Since these accounting measures don't try to fully measure future income, heavy investment will appear unprofitable in accounting statements.
That's what drives me craziest about programming in windows, the freak'n console is awful
I would have to agree with this. As much as people tend to hate the technical interviews on here, it's not an excuse NOT to know the stuff, even in web development.

If you're only doing to do crud apps the the typical RoR project, you're going to be a lot better off with an algorithms background vs codecademy student 25013.

I think a practical approach to theory done right has immense potential though.
> for a reasonable price.

Either the license will be cheap, in which case nobody will get rich from it, or it will be expensive, in which case no product companies will buy the license and nobody will get rich from it. Basically, nobody will get rich from it.

In 20 years, however, when the patent expires, it will be old tech, so probably only a single company will dare to invest research into a new product using this now-old tech. This company will know what happened last time: If the license was expensive, they will try to be cheap to avoid the same mistake twice, and it will be good tech, sold cheaply, which will probably sell well and make them a lot of money. If the license was cheap, they will want to avoid the stigma of the glut of low-quality goods the cheap license allowed back in the day, so the new product will be high-end (probably renamed and re-purposed to another field), which means a high margin, which has a good chance of making them a lot of money.

Basically, some company will probably make a lot of money.

In 20 years, when the patent expires.
try everpad(https://github.com/nvbn/everpad). It's not perfect but it works.
On a related note, does anyone know of any studies of monospace vs. proportional fonts on reading speed/comprehension? I can find a number of examples for reading on older, low-DPI computer screens, but not much for high DPI screens or high-resolution print.
Yes, they are called "traffic circles" here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_circle
I am a huge Ubuntu fanboy (I am even installing it on my old Vaio as I write this), but I would love to have it running on hardware that was designed from the ground up for Ubuntu instead of having to patch together various drivers and troll through forums looking trying to find out how to get the mic and camera working (etc...).
Would it be so terrible if Amazon just stayed as a break-even company forever?
How did cable companies run out of room to expand?
I think all noobs should still get lein. (Install it in 1 second with your package manager)

That way they can run `lein new <project-name>` to get the app skeleton created. Then open it with Lighttable.

In fact, anyone that wants to check out the Clojure version of Sinatra/Flask should run `lein new compojure <project-name>` and it'll create it from a template. Then run `lein ring server` from the project root to start the dev server.

Someone happened to tell me those incantations my first day with Clojure and I was instantly productive.
Woah you weren't kidding about "Comprehensive". Yet it really is short and seems to encapsulate every thing it talks about pretty well.

Thanks a lot for this!
Do you have plans for a two-seater in the future?
You mention measuring of education quality such as test scores. Interestingly Google recently found GPA and test scores to be uncorrelated to the success of their hires. (http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/20/google-executive-gpa-test-... ) The value of standardized tests as predictors of student prerformance in general is questionable just look at the critisim of No Child Left Behind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act#Critic...). Others have pointed South Korea's high suicide rate. If you eduction results in you making a lot of money but being unhappy with your life would call that success?
Saved.io (http://saved.io)

It's cool because it's solves a problem I was having in a really simple and elegant way.
I've been using Baretorrent for a while now. It's a great torrent client if you don't need a lot of features such as automatic RSS downloading, although technically there is a plugin system if one did want to implement that :). It's worth noting that there is a small bug regarding duplicate torrent entries in the current version that may or may not effect you[1]. It is easily avoidable and soon to be fixed. The author of the software is very responsive on his forums if you have feature requests or encounter any bugs.

[1] http://baretorrent.org/forum/thread.html?id=40
I am also one of those (few?) here, that are very partial to serif over Sans-serif. My browser uses Serif by default, and all my documents use Serif for body (and sans for headings if people want heading to look different)

I too find serif fonts more readable, without necessarily being able to give a "scientific", "why" it is so. As another commenter mentioned the "l" and uppercase "I" is one frequent area of confusion with sans. And maybe serifs with their kernings give a certain visual guidance as the eyes bounce off the words...

Having said that I've definitely given "Times New Roman" the boot. I've never found if aesthetically pleasing to the various other font names I used to see mentioned in all those books I read.. Now with proliferation of FOSS fonts like Linux Libertine, PT Serif and so many other more eminently readable fonts, Times New Roman is a distant memory to me :)

It is a shame that many new OReilly books are adopting Sans fonts for their paper version as well. I for one am very displeased with this as there are times when I would like to buy a paper version for my bookshelf. Fine, do it for the ebook version, but not for the paper one, please... :(
Yes; everyone investing it would be wasting their money.
This seems to be strangely devoid of the kind of concrete evidence that I'd personally look for before making these sorts of claims about my own computers.

Instead it provides a lot of weak correlations and handwaving. "Suspicious fonts on my system! Better drink my own^w^w^w assume I have malware from the plot of an AI-takeover-thriller."

I hope people are able to get real evidence on this, stuff like information from bus-analyzer or execution inside a in-circuit emulator.
Interesting objection.

To me it is rather obvious that a text-oriented language would treat any "string" as a) an atomic string and b) a sequence of the "next-lower" logical unit. I do just now realize that "An English sentence.".length could by this reasoning return 3 or 4 (3 words, one punctuation mark...).
Story also says that it happened a lot time ago.
is it because you got used to using Word or because you found Word better? I'm pretty dependent on Photoshop and Illustrator. Most likely because I've used them for so long. I get really frustrated using GIMP. I figure that's the frustration most people feel when they switch to Linux... that one program that you're so productive and "automatic" in is no longer the same.
Really cool! Have you thought of making it a phonegap style app so we can use it on our mobile devices too? I've been looking for a simple html note taking app that does client side encryption and works on all major desktop and mobile operating systems.
Gopher is awesome. It was my first real TCP/IP Internet experience in 1992. A high school friend and I discovered a terminal server at the local university that would allow telnet out w/o authenticating first. We would telnet to liberty.uc.wlu.edu, which ran public gopher WAIS clients that anyone could use. Having never seen anything like this before and not understanding hyperlinks, we assumed that navigating from one gopher server to another actually created connections between all of the servers. So, as we went from Texas to Virgina to California, Sweden, Japan, etc., we assumed that we were generating thousands of dollars in phone charges and that someone would eventually come looking for us.
You make an interesting point. Small observation: Traditionally, even the monospaced fonts from the 70s-90s on terminals and older machines, were of the kerned variety (serif-like appearance).
Hah, no, but I see I didn't provide enough context. I was referring to the subsections in "Personal Skills", "Team Skills" and "Serving Your Team". I also freely admit I am jaded by poor management in the past that has not responded to the kinds of advice given here.
it's a strategy that Ubuntu should use, i think... that "killer app" strategy.
Maybe something like the Canon Canobeam DT-130 Type SFP: http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/professional/products/free_spa...

But, you know, more than one... or something.
There are some issues with this explanation. The main issue is that the rules of accounting have a very good provision to take into account investing into the future. It is called capitalization.

Thus, if a company spends money to build or acquire a new asset, it is called capital spending and it is not subtracted from the profits. Thus, for example, if a company had a million dollars of profit and decided to spend these million dollars on a new fulfillment center, they could spend the money for their fulfillment center and still report a million dollars in profit.

So it is not quite clear-cut to say that Amazon's desire to build fulfillment centers around the world is costing them their profits. Those things should be capitalized and once they are capitalized they should not affect the profits. Amazon did in fact report significant capital spending (as one can see on their cash flow statement).

However, things are not that simple. Sometimes some expenses which are about building for the future and investing into new growth are not capitalized. This is the case because for some expenses the benefits are so uncertain and difficult to quantify that the SEC requires that they are reported as ordinary expenses instead of capital spending. These types of expenses tend to involve R&D and may include certain administrative expenses associated with growth initiatives.

Therefore, many companies that are trying to grow do report lower profits because they have those expenses that are associated with investment into future growth but are not capitalized. This may be the case for amazon. But it is a question to what extent it is the case for amazon. For example, they do capitalize software and website development for new products and websites. So one cannot simply say that they are showing losses because they are spending all the money on making great new products. But then again, they expense software development for existing products. So perhaps the losses are associated with new growth features that are built into existing software.

So all in all it is a big muddle and it is not at all clear whether amazon is an inherently highly profitable company that happens to be investing in the future, or they are wasting money, or their business model is just not that profitable.
As an interesting aside, the company that makes Suboxone attempted to prevent generic companies from entering the market.

Apparently there have been a number of poisoning caused by children taking Suboxone tablets. What Reckitt (the maker of Suboxone) did was create a new dose in the form of a film that dissolves in your mouth. Each film came in a seal packet that was difficult for children to open.

Once the patent for Suboxone was nearing expiration, Reckitt introduced the new film dose form and pulled the tablets off the market. Once the patent expired, Reckitt asked the FDA to deny approval of any new generic forms of the tablets in the interest of public safety (in essence giving them an additional patent life as the film was a new patent).

The FDA didn't believe the risk was enough to stop generic versions of Suboxone and two new generic forms were approved earlier this year [1].

[1] http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/government/fda-approve...
The Secret Digital Ocean: The Data We Aren't Addressing
My Grandma couldn't understand the concept when I showed here how to browse the internet. She kept wanting to have what she was seeing be on paper.
It's worth noting that Yglesias actually knows this[1]. His point is that public companies generally aren't allowed by their shareholders to be this ambitious.

Which 100% vindicates Eugenewei's point about tech companies being wary of capital markets.

[1]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/10/22/amazon_profit...
Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013
Why is this getting votes here when the same person posts things like this:

https://plus.google.com/103470457057356043365/posts/3reWRqDM...

"So it turns out that annoying high frequency whine in my soundsystem isn't crappy electrical noise that has been plaguing my wiring for years. It is actually high frequency ultrasonic transmissions that malware has been using to communicate to airgapped computers [...]"

This person is either mentally unbalanced or they're intentionally trying to troll the paranoid.

Case in point regarding this specific post:

"The tell is still that #badBIOS systems refuse to boot CDs (this is across all oses, including my Macs)"

Macs don't have BIOS - they have a BIOS emulation / compatibility layer. They run on EFI. Additionally, there's evidence that Macs contain a hardware Boot ROM which pre-boots before EFI and verifies the firmware cryptographic signature is valid. About the best attack that's been done so far is a malicious dongle that needs to stay connected to the machine during boot. If you'd like more information about how difficult it is to re-program Mac EFI without Apple's secret signing keys, by all means read here: http://ho.ax/De_Mysteriis_Dom_Jobsivs_Black_Hat_Paper.pdf

The only value in reading this submission is science fiction entertainment or research into the possible mental problems of the author.
Glad you're starting early! Keep going!
It looks like a picnic!
Office Hours at Startup School 2013
Everything I've ever heard about Gumroad has been amazing.
I'm trying to design an alternative to the investment economy. I would like to digitize cost information and use computers to determine fair prices. I want do it by keeping metadata about bitcoin transactions.

By making the system of production computer accessible we can run businesses at cost.

I'd like to start with the information systems for the One Acre Cafe. They are a pay-how-you-can restaurant opening in Johnson City, TN. (I wish it was pay-what-you-can rather than volunteer for food, but that's something to worry about later.)

http://www.oneacrecafe.org

Their initial need is for a volunteer management system. Apart from three people, the entire staff is volunteer. I've not done any coding on it yet, but it will almost certainly be a rails app.

https://github.com/wholcomb/volunteer_schedule

Eventually I'd like to integrate this with an inventory and pos system, so you get a bill that tells you what the meal cost the cafe to provide based on the accumulated cost information associated with the business.

You get a receipt that includes a QR linking to a profile for your server. You are able to give feedback by entering adjectives and ranking them -1–1.

There is also the ability to give a tip in bitcoins. I'd like to have a service where the money can be conditionally given. I'm interested particularly in housing.

I want people to be able to give specifically for shelter and they get it back if it isn't used.

Phase two would involve mortgaging a house and then renting the space at cost and payable in bitcoins. What I'm trying to work toward is the ability to sustainably travel. A chain of restaurants that accepted each others' electronic work reputations combined with easily accessible housing could allow a new sort of nomadic life.
I'm not exactly an expert, but this reads like creepypasta.
I am surprised no one has mentioned the elephant in the room. If they deliberately went back and aimed for feature parity then what does that mean for the iOS and OSX APIs ?

Is a future convergence on the horizon or perhaps a layer above that allows for common behaviour and has Apple built it already ? And what does that mean for future iOS hardware that could run OSX apps and vice versa.
Yes, it is a side effect of empathy and compassion, I guess.
Tara Shears - Antimatter: Why the anti-world matters
Twitter may not have much in terms of technical innovation, but I believe that isn't Twitter's goal. Their true value lies in the news-making ability (you hear about many news events first reported on twitter and relatively few first reported on facebook or google+ or other social networks). And in that sense, they have much to offer.
Maybe render it so you can do a nice photo. Wouldn't be anything wrong if you put up a video of the prototype and you telling your story...
Yeah, that's actually a lot more difficult than you make it sound. See, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Standard_Mean_Ocean_Wate....
> Probably not going to happen though, older eyes are not the 'fashionable' eyes.

Especially since Apple is pushing for developers to support the text zooming feature which should help usability for older and sight impaired users.
Innovations that might cover their ad avenues all falls as a business processes. Patents on those i think are hard to get.
If a newbie knows what a package manager is and has it set up on their system, then they're probably not the level of noob this article is going for.
Take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater: fixing the problem can be easier than finding the perfect pink elephant and praying it stays that way.

Of course, do take care to throw out the bathwater.
I am not aware of any ones he has released source for sadly. For a general idea though see http://weitz.de/eclm2013/abcl.pdf

It includes some code snippets and screen shots of hybrid Java/Lisp programs. He is also a maintainer of Armed Bear Common Lisp.
Discovering LastPass shared passwords
It's just a small motivational line with no agenda behind it. You have to pick your words perfectly on the internet because everyone is gonna feel compelled to have an opinion about it.
Relevant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

See the parts about backwards compatibility. I'll grant that Microsoft isn't as fanatical about backwards compatibility as they used to be.
There was a report earlier about stress and drone pilots, that spurred some coverage, like:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-08/psychologic...

partial quote: "The dazzling clarity of the drone's optics does have a downside. As a B-1 pilot, Dan wouldn't learn details about the effects of his weapons until a post-mission briefing. But flying a drone, he sees the carnage close-up, in real time—the blood and severed body parts, the arrival of emergency responders, the anguish of friends and family. Often he's been watching the people he kills for a long time before pulling the trigger. Drone pilots become familiar with their victims. They see them in the ordinary rhythms of their lives—with their wives and friends, with their children. War by remote control turns out to be intimate and disturbing. Pilots are sometimes shaken."

In other words: similar:yes, same:no.
If a cryptographic algorithm is fundamentally secure, a small (128 - 256 byte) key will be all it needs to be secure. If an algorithm can't be secure with a key that size, giving it a bigger key is likely to only make it marginally better.
The last section on organizational chaos and the magic power is key.
I am working on my private pilot license. I like ICONA5 http://www.iconaircraft.com/
Layer CSS - Build your look on the web, not Twitter's