skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unsung and infamous: Fritz Haber inventor of the nitrogen-fixation process (later industrialized by Carl Bosch, which is why it is known as the Haber-Bosch process.)

At a minimum, 3 billion people are alive today because the proteins in their bodies contain nitrogen that had been fixed by fertilizers created in factories using this process. Without artificial fertilizers produced with this process it would be impossible to support a human population of more than 4 billion people even if every bit of arable land were being farmed to maximum capacity.

The Haber-Bosch process broke through the hard limit of how much plant protein could be produced through agriculture and led directly to the population explosion started in the 19th century.

Paraphrasing Vaclav Smil's arguments:

Naturally-produced fertilizers can provide approximately 200 kg. of nitrogen per hectare annually; this allows for the production of between 200 and 250 kg. of plant proteins. This places a theoretical limit on the number of people that each hectare of land could sustain. Under ideal conditions this would amount to around 15 people per hectare; in practice, the historical limit has been about 5 people per hectare.

Note: he also invented chlorine gas for use during World War I
I wish we could get more tech-related startup stories out of Phoenix and AZ in general. The place has whole lot of capital and some pretty big tech resources in local big-name firms and educational opportunities, but so far has yet to leverage any of that into a great startup culture. Mostly what comes out are business initiatives like this, where tech is sort of a secondary concern. A great resource for AZ-related tech/biz stories is AZ Tech Beat (http://aztechbeat.com/)
Edward Snowden Endorses D.C. Protest Against NSA in Rare Public Statement
West meets East!
EU has now made common cookie guidelines - here they are
That's why it's listed as irony. Even great minds have "Whoops" moments.
Doesn't PG use a pretty conservative mechanism for valuing companies? If I remember correctly, he has said that there a significant number of YC companies that he simply doesn't include in the value since there is no reliable mechanism for valuing them.

Relevant quote: "either because they died, got acquired, or sold stock at a specific valuation."
>>That said, I do like the fact that when she asked for a car, her parents not only told her to buy it herself, they suggested she start a business. Too bad about the... um... less intelligent decision(s).

The origin story may well be made up, like the eBay eps dispenser legend and many others.
Research Help Request: How do you teach yourself new things? (5-minute survey)
9 Tips To Business Success By Anticipating Problems
I think there is a website out there where you can roughly total liquidity events up.
So you're saying that the 100 people who most changed the world were the mothers of the 100 people who most changed the world?
Change the world with your design skills (Bay Area or anywhere in the US)
MobileWorks is looking for a talented UI designer to help visualize the future of virtual work. We are building an online, massively distributed workplace -- a fantastic opportunity for someone to tackle super interesting design challenges while having a big influence over how the MobileWorks platform looks, feels, and operates. We offer significant autonomy, responsibility and ownership. We’re going to throw you into the fire and it’ll be great.

About You:

You have a passion for clean, modern visual design and creating engaging customer experiences through. You should be well-versed in UX principles and should be able to write clean HTML/CSS and even some Javascript. You are ready to be the steward of the company’s visual identity. You love the idea of being a part of a business that does good in the world.

It might be a match if you have:

* Experience designing real products for the Web
* Experience creating production-ready html and css
* A strong, clean, innovative, visual design sense and a vigilant attention to detail.
* Excellent knowledge of Adobe CS
* The ability to turn wireframes and mockups into high quality, workable front-end designs
* Information design skills

Bonus points if you have:

* Fluency with javascript
* Experience with Icon or illustration work
* Experience designing for mobile devices
* Previous startup experience
* Experience working with front-end MVC frameworks

To apply:

Please send an email to jobs@mobileworks.com with a link to your portfolio, your resume, and why you’d like to join us.
I guess our startup fit into this subgenre..

http://blog.coffeestrap.com/2013/05/06/something-meaningful/

Didn't know was something that common. Would love to hear from somebody else with similar experience.

ps> almost 1 year into CS, 10/10 wouldn't go back! :-)
$1.15M (plus my opinion) says that IPython is the bee's knees: http://ipython.org/sloan-grant.html
It sounds like you're finding faults with things I'm not saying.

First, I wasn't questioning the architectural soundness of Knockout. I think it's very sound, and I like it.

Second, I also agree with you that the DOM is available to the developer - however, if you go about blowing away and re-creating DOM elements that should have bindings on them (for example), you're going to have a bad time. This was something counterintuitive to our Frontend developers. In situations where you want to create or remove DOM elements with Knockout bindings, you really should be using Knockout's bindings (or your own custom Knockout bindings) itself to do it, otherwise you're working pretty hard against the grain. I don't personally see a problem with that - so I agree with you that the DOM is available for change - but that was hard to sell to others. :shrug: maybe I'm just a bad salesman.

EDIT: Ah, I think I can see why you feel this way. I should put the counterpoints I put above in quotes, as they don't actually reflect how I feel. I can see how someone skimming would think I actually believe them to be true. I personally have a very favorable opinion of Knockout. I can, however, see why it's a hard sell for some frontend developers. I can't blame them for feeling that way given their points above, though I would like to believe that I can win them over with my counterpoints to it over time. Whether that actually happens... we'll see.

I could also use some more ammunition in that fight, so if you have good alternatives or approaches that I'm ignorant of, I'd be extremely glad to hear them!
well, the AC thing, your building would have big open windows and lots of fans. Not too different...
> This just sounds like a glorified Tupperware party, no?

Well, maybe I'm confused. With a tupperware party someone invites me round to their house, and asks me to buy tupperware. I know what's going on.

With Origami Owl there's a "designer", who gets someone to host a party. The host invites me round, and then sells me stuff. (So far it's just tupperware) but is the designer there? Is it the "designer" showcasing and selling the product? So the host organises the party and gets a cut, but the designer sells the product and gets another cut.

The problem here is that the designer is just selling mass produced (made in China but assembled in US) stuff.
As I am writing this your comment is the top comment. The comment below it reads:

> And Sequoia backed startups now have a combined valuation of almost a trillion. These statistics are a bit meaningless. I'll wager that the median YC company has a negative opportunity cost for the founders.

When reading your comment first I agreed and thought, Wow! YC is killing it. Then I read the next comment and thought, Hmm, perhaps not? Now I don't know what to believe.
Yes, I also read it as the other responders to you read it. Losing your staff, probably spending more on talent (you usually, not always, have to pay more to replace somebody), losing tons of institutional knowledge, basically having to rewrite everything from scratch (I find it interesting how on HN we simultaneously laud moving to CoolTech2000 and quote Joel on never rewriting existing software) switching development to something new that no one has experience with - well, those all have huge and long lasting costs.

Against that, we weren't given a reason for the change. Maybe he was being nice and not exposing how things were. I'm certainly aware of dysfunctional teams that really need everything fixed, and there is little to do but wield the ax and get it done. But it is a heck of a gamble. These "old timers" - perhaps they were cranking out pretty good code at a good rate, on a stable system they understood, on time and budget, and so on, and had somebody come in, tell them they aren't buzz word compliant, and enforce things on them that neither solve problems that they have nor really offers much of an advantage. Or, perhaps they were dinosaurs that took 3 months of arguments between 5 committees to decide whether to label a button "reply" or "send". I dunno.

I've seen it both ways. I had a programmer react to my use of python as "oh, that silly little language". Everything must be written in C and reinvented by him. Not a very useful attitude. OTOH, if I was to storm around and argue that our existing, well working c code should be converted to Scala for no particular reason, I'm being the unhelpful one.

tl;dr: I didn't see anything in the article that made me think the existing team was doing it 'wrong' to incur such risk and costs. I don't much care if they are successful - the risk stands out like a sore thumb. We eviscerate the bankers that bet the company for their quarterly bonus by pursuing high risk, high reward strategies, and say "cool" when somebody throws out their team, source code, and institutional knowledge in favor of a cool new language and buzzwordy development process.
I think it's your opinion that is really the deciding factor there ;)
They have removed the ability to import styles. I went back to the old version right away.
It's really hard to say that. The Red Army ripped the guts out of the German's striking forces, but if they'd taken the U.K. and Ireland they wouldn't have had to pour all that much treasure in Festung Europa not to mention keep all those troops there.

It's also an open question if the Soviets could have held the line without all the supplies we sent them, which again depended a great deal on the U.K. still being in the war.
Why can't this be a good thing with strong privacy protections? What privacy problems are exactly holding it back?

I imagine such a tool that collects such information to make things easier as possibly a wonderful thing. I also imagine such a tool that shares all that information with a third party as possibly a horrible thing.

I would be willing to go along with your thought, as long as I knew that the information being collected was heavily encrypted and that the only person who would ever get to see it is me. Even then, recent events have shown us that encrypted data on someone else's server is not exactly safe from prying eyes.

Don't be so willing to casually toss away your privacy. Once it's gone you may miss it and be unable to get it back.
When your business is secure email, I think we can fault the creator for designing the system in such an insecure way.

If it wasn't a warrant, a single leak of the key would expose everyone's data.
One of my professors told us that UBS mirrors its whole data center to another one located in a mountain. Does anybody know if it's this particular thing? Or are there more than one of this?
Outlaw Screws - Reinventing the Screw
This is not only a 14y-old's idea it is also an idea that is more than 14 years old.

The selling of costume jewellery via hosting aka tupperware parties was kind of popular with high-income families about 15+ years ago - at that time products sold were the Bulgari / high price style of objects redone with false stones as costume jewellery.

Now this is basically the same concept with similar products catering for a different population group (lower income - less market knowledge).

The companies, like with many others selling products via such a scheme, after the pyramid has grown to a certain size, become stagnant or disappear (after those in at the beginning have cashed out).

Have a look at the people and particularly their previous companies mentioned in the article to know what this model is about. First buy low and find many that sell / buy high for you - after a while it quickly becomes a seemingly today very popular model - FABI (find a bigger idiot)
I have yet to see a scholarly article showing that productivity caused deflation (currency held constant while increases in population or productivity cause prices to drop) has caused economic problems. There is much evidence of currency removal caused deflation (when a large amount of currency or credit is quickly removed from the system causing prices to drop) wreaking havoc on the economy.

I am interested if you have seen any documented evidence of the former?

Also, in the US under the gold standard (1776-1910), we saw history's greatest increase in individual wealth ever recorded (measured by per capita GDP). Yes it was more volatile than under a fiat currency, but it's hard to argue that a constant or slow growing currency dampens economic growth with that data point.
It seems strange to me that they piggybacked on the Fort Knox 'brand'. Now if something untoward happens at Fort Knox, their brand is impacted too.

Seems like a missed opportunity to make the most of the aura of quality that 'Swiss' has (I like 'Swiss Fort' better).
Very interesting read ! Thanks a lot.

Right now, I'm trying to learn a few things about webdesign, and I have spent some time on typography yet. However, I know a few basics now, a few things about typography history, but I have never been able to find tutorials about the "why should I use this typeface or this other one there". It's like everybody is able to speak about typography theory but not about practice and thinking.

Someone knows where I can find other articles about practice ? Thanks !
Just tried it in Thunderbird with a gmail account, it doesn't render the contents of the iframe unless you click the "Show remote content" button.

Interestingly, will then display images if that is in the src attribute but still doesn't render https://google.com.
Just commented on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6611521. Looks similar?
Our "strong enemies in the Muslim world" are upset at the 1942 Reconquista, which kicked the Moors out of what they still held of Spain. The end of your above history is highly revisionist and completely ignores, say, the Muslim division of the world into two parts (what they are is left as an exercise to the reader).
Not to upset any fans, but how did The Beatles shift the culture? I have the impression that culture was shifting by itself and The Beatles only lucked into being at right place at the right time.
Yes very good point. Particularly with tablets, the use-case they are frequently replacing is that of an old-fashioned print magazine.

I did just test turning off webfonts on Medium and I still honestly can't see any huge problem with my default system typeface. This could possibly be because I have nice defaults, but at the same time, I think the good readability of Medium is far more about the overall style/layout of the page (particularly the decent large font-size), than about any particular typeface.

Example 1 - normal Medium:
http://i.imgur.com/D4hYBPy.png

Example 2 - default system fonts:
http://i.imgur.com/Jvnuhkm.png

Whilst I can see the difference in typeface, I can't honestly say that I'm experiencing any huge readability changes. Perhaps if I were to switch to a Sans of some sort, but that's not exactly a huge decision that needs to take a lot of time and fuss. By far and away the most important thing that makes this page readable and nice is the font size, closely followed by the line-width.
No, I think the puck is already at two of the three platforms they targeted with the new release: web and desktop. I think mobile/tablets isn't there yet, but that is changing, too. Microsoft isn't getting much traction yet, but they're moving there, too.
Depends on whether they actually do research in the private sector, though. Historically most fundamental science advances have come either from academia, or from big academia-like research organizations in industry (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Microsoft Research), or from government research labs (Sandia, Livermore, CERN, etc.). Most industry R&D tends towards different kinds of problems, applied research with 1-5 years commercialization horizons, sometimes pushing 10. That's a valuable segment of research, but not all of it, and it depends on a pipeline of less-applied research to keep it fed.

But due to the difficulty of monetizing indirect future advances that basic science enables, it's difficult to do it profitably in industry. A scientific discovery that at some point in the future turns out to be useful in developing technology is valuable for humanity, but you cannot easily capture that value, as it simply diffuses to the general benefit. Knowledge advances, but anyone can use it, and you don't get to own it; you can get some kind of satisfaction in old age in looking at how this physics discovery you came up with in your 30s is being used to improve chip fabrication processes 40 years later, but you don't get royalties on the chips. Patents try to change that within a 20-year timespan, but they are not supposed to apply to scientific or mathematical discoveries, 20 years is too short for some advances, and they have a whole host of problems anyway.
One thing I love about knockout is how focused it is at doing one thing really well without forcing a full blown single page application. It makes it easier to sprinkle in the data-bound rich interactive UI to the pieces of your page that need it and leave the rest as normal server side rendered content.

One key area of performance where js rendered UI helps a lot is in customizing an otherwise uniformly served (and cached) page. 95% of the page is uniform to everybody, so render that server side and cache the heck out of it (varnish or whatever). Then, bind the pieces of the UI after page load and customize them based on the user - their login status, their location, etc. We use this approach at food52.com and food52.com/provisions.
In Belgium , there are some tax rules that subsidize companies that give employees company cars. So its very common for a white collar worker to have a company car.

I wonder if thats why Belgium is the only country where this isnt true ( well besides luxembourg )
How Rails reloads your code in development environment?
That was probably the worst explanation i have ever heard, except for the last sentence.
Not just cars, but also locomotives and even boats! It is just pity that socks outsell the bikes.
lol, don't just take my word for it: http://blog.fperez.org/2012/09/blogging-with-ipython-noteboo...
Removing the battery risks slicing the trackpad I/O cable because they designed it this way without any apparent reason, and they glued the battery to the case. I do understand that there are engineering tradeoffs sometimes between ease of maintenance and form factor or safety, but it's certainly not the case in all of the cases mentioned in the article.

It's Orwellian or perhaps Huxley-an to me that people buy into the rhetoric that they close up every single thing they make in a closed ecosystem just because of this oh so great care about the customer. Apple is a company, they might not have evil plans to conquer the world, but the most important thing for them is to make profit - one shouldn't fall in love with a company, no matter how good their products.
True, it could be bearable. But, in the summer here it tends to get up to 100 degrees with high humidity, fans don't help too much. It would definitely change the way the buildings were built, at the least I'd think. Then there's the question of its effect on computing, which requires much cooling as well.
When the warrant requests data, it says you can't burn it all down and delete it. Well, you can't without breaking the law.

Yes a warrant imposes certain restrictions on your business.
I'm not sure I would specifically "blame" uTorrent for this, it's the shame shady practice that a lot of software uses now to install other crapware. You need to be very careful when installing anything free so uncheck all those toolbar installers and things.

But, there are a lot of other torrent clients listed here, I will be trying some of these out :)
Deutsche Telekom is complicit in this spying. It is because of DT's policies on peering that Internet companies in Germany send traffice destined to another German company, via other countries. Germany could fix this by requiring all German ISPs to supply free bilateral peering to any other German ISP with more than X Mbps of traffic.

This is not actually free, but it means that no ISP can use peering as a profit centre. In fact, both parties to the bilateral peering have to pay for their own routers for the interconnect, and pay half the cost of the interconnect circuit if it is not done in the same building.

This would be an improvement in speed too because within the borders of Germany you should be able to get 10 ms round trip times to any other point. In fact, companies who want their VPN traffic to stay in Germany will often specify 10 ms RTT in their RFPs as a euphemism for "keep our traffic in Germany". I used to work for GTS, a competitor of DT and we had an extensive enough presence in Germany to meet that RTT which rather surprised DT because I think they invented the requirement hoping that it would mean "only DT can win this bid".

It would be better if all countries had laws/regulations about exchanging local traffic locally, because this would improve Internet performance for everyone.
Startechconf: really cool chilean tech event streaming right now
I would think if you were a professional writer of a technical stripe, DocBook or some TeX variant would be the appropriate choice.
Yes that's what algorithms like RePair and Sequitur do: they build the tree bottom-up by replacing frequent subtrees with a new rule at each iteration.

I think that this is also the basic idea behind the usage-based model in linguistics, a theory on how we learn languages:

The usage-based model is based on inductive learning,
meaning that linguistic knowledge is acquired in a
bottom-up manner through use. It allows for redundancy
and generalizations, because the language user generalizes
over recurring experiences of use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar#Grammar_as...
>a pyramid scheme generally doesn't have a physical product

Pyramid schemes frequently have physical products.

>and crucially requires a number of tiers recruiting new members.

Bingo. If there's no way to make money recruiting, it's not a pyramid scheme.

>I think we should be celebrating this young woman's initiative in seeing a market, finding a product that fits and building out the business.

As far as I can tell from the article, this business was created, grown, and is run by the girl's family. Her entire contribution may have been simply inspiring the creation of a business by setting up a stand selling charm bracelets in a single mall that did surprisingly well during a single Christmas season, and in giving a cute origin story to the company.
Seems that type of analysis is not really helpful in the long run. It should be catering to me, not what it thinks I need based on other people's habits. If my habits are completely different than everybody else's, then the results it provides are almost always off. Then it has to figure things out again solely using me, which it should have done in the first place.
Currently hosting 20-30 client sites on a single Linode VPS. Mixture of Wordpress and static websites. Nice to have the full control, and the ability to SSH in and work out any problems instantly.

Any overhead is reduced by some good bash aliases, for creating apache domain confs, and things like that.

edit: gist of my commands here - https://gist.github.com/omgmog/7155850