skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2013 is the eye of the storm.

Mobile phones stagnated - Mobile phones now have desktop class processors in them. The line between phone, and laptop is becoming simply a matter of form factor. Something big might wiggle through, and 2013 is when the technology got there.

Wearables were a letdown - We finally have the technology, we're just looking for the right mix of form and application. There's a lot of potential there, we just haven't found it yet. However the roots have been planted.

Former giants let down - They're learning their place. IBM has no business making mobile phones, they cater to guys who need to do a lot of database stuff quickly. Microsoft has no business making consumer products, now that the line between producer and consumer is very clear. They're good at making a platform that enabled business customers to quickly develop apps. Apple is mobile. I have this theory, a company can only do one section of a market well, or everything poorly. Whatever the result, they have finally embraced open source tech like HTML 5, Angular JS, bootstrap etc. Microsoft is no longer holding back the web. With a "sane" platform, we got some more rope to hang ourselves with.

Social media became profitable - great, now the platform can pay for itself.

The rest is interesting, but not proof of a year of stagnation.
Puppet: Introducing Manifest-Ordered Resources
Is it really a surprise that The Information is bad journalism? Forgive me for linking to Valleywag, but they don't mince word in describing her concept of journalism--- I'm sorry, "reportrepreneurship": http://valleywag.gawker.com/jessica-lessin-throws-intimate-p....

It's just more of the same tech writing, wrapped in WSJ-like finance reporting.
Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
What people (entrepreneurs, other investors, the public market) respect about PG is his judgment and pattern recognition. This comes from starting a few companies, and more importantly having the best seat in the house for watching new companies sprout and grow. This gives him pattern recognition well beyond most people. And this is why people respect what he has to say about both starting companies, and the raw inputs (people, ideas and money) needed to create them.
For background, this is essentially the NetBSD test infrastructure ported to FreeBSD. But it needs a lot more tests to be fully useful. Getting decent test coverage for an OS (userspace and kernel) is pretty hard...
I'd have thought that the most famous words of anyone on the Scott expedition would have been the last words of Captain Lawrence Oates (at least according to Scott):

"I am just going outside and may be some time."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Oates
The article's author is stretching to be cranky. Does anyone think wearables have been figured out? They might someday disappoint, but the author doesn't understand, or is being deliberately obtuse about why Samsung would ship a bulky, half-baked watch.

Similarly, bitcoin seems hardly overhyped. Not since you had to install a third-party TCP stack in Windows in order to get on the Internet have I seen so many people be so motivated to overcome so much complexity to get something they want.
Thanks for kind words. I would like to point out the previous blog post (the one about immortality) that I am particularly proud of :)
Reminds me of Perl 6, which was designed not to meet a user need, but to keep the Perl developers engaged. It has succeeded in this.
Looks like it's pretty robust: http://www.geoalchemy.org/tutorial.html
This other article on the front page of HN today seems to contradict this [1].

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchip...
That's why I think Guaranteed Income schemes are inevitable politically, in the developed countries. Sooner or later, one is going to do it (Switzerland?), and within a couple of decades, all the rest will follow.

Hopefully, this will lead to a realignment of society's sense of "value" away from currency and things exchangeable for currency. Money-driven thinking is the curse of Marxists as much as capitalists.
Just imagine autonomous cars/drones/delivery-bots etc. millions of jobs lost overnight.
Society will change for good in the coming decade and if thinks go wrong we will have a dystopia coming for us.

And people with power/money usually aren`t interested in the greater good. Our current financial system is doomed to fail and the reset button will not come this time.
In the U.S., military espionage is heroic and economic espionage is a crime. In China, the line is not that clear.

Let me say this: BULLSHIT, a thousand times.

Who says this? Any of the companies who have been lying to their customers? Any of the government agencies which have not explained anything about the NSA activities (not that they would know what is going on)? Any of the officials caught lying, one and again?

The US will not perform economic espionage as long as the US has a technological edge (which is probably not anymore the case in lots of areas).

Which brings us to an important observation: OCDE rules forbidding economic espionage are designed to keep the current technological status quo; any country is well advised to sign them to be accepted to the club, and immediately throw the rules to the garbage bin. Because we can be sure that any country capable of doing economic espionage has been doing it, is doing it, and will continue to do it, no matter the rules, no matter if they get caught, no matter the hypocrital public posturing of their leaders.

Those rules, and the whole "Intellectual Property" apparatus, is there for the suckers to respect them. The US, in particular, has never respected those rules.
NSIS is light years ahead of InstallShield. But all sucks compared to APT or other Linux installation systems.
Tips on finding a Marketer for your Startup
It seems like startups struggle to attract the right type of marketing hire. In this article I discuss the major difference product-market fit can have on marketing roles, and distinct differences between "search mode" and "growth mode."
أرق وأجمل كلمات تهنئة لرأس السنة 2014
>It's been my worry for a while that we will achieve the marxist workers utopia technically

This is actually my mid-term goal with the food service industry, driving labor costs to insignificant (not that it would realistically get to zero). How I anticipate addressing the problems you describe are several fold:

1) Job training and direct hiring for technologically displaced workers in the industry
2) Free food for low/no income people
3) Political advocacy for the basic income

These aren't magic bullets but I think they would go the furthest to bring everyone up while moving technology forward.
This piece from 2011 is still, to me, the definitive discussion of the end of Moore's "law" as we know it: http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle/
If I had to venture to guess, the project most likely started with 0.x notation because the first few releases didn't have major planned features such as the declarative ORM. After that there were never any truly backwards incompatible versions to merit a full number increment.

Really, it's a credit to just how much Mike got right on the first go.
How can I verify whether my new laptop has been tampered?
According to the news, the US government has intercepted laptops during delivery and installed surveillance kits or trojans. For example: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful-toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html

My online activities may have attracted attention from USG (eg. looking at Al Jazeera, presstv and technical forums), and my new laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad, was delayed a long time in customs. What should I look for to verify it has not been tampered?

Immediately upon receiving it, I replaced the default commercial-ware with Linux, so I am not concerned about the OS or applications. However, I'm wondering:

* how to tell whether it's been opened after the factory

* what parts can be opened "safely" meaning without breaking anything

* what to look for on the inside

* how to verify the BIOS is untampered
My 2 cents on vaccines... Scientists are sometimes wrong. (Perhaps too frequently in medical science) Scientists sometimes fabricate evidence. (And when they do, they should go to jail, but that's another story) Usually the system self corrects over time.

Bottom line - if I have to decide on vaccinating my kids based on the advice of the general body of accepted scientific evidence, or a porn star, I'll go with the scientists.
It's an Outrage
Very fair point, I do see what you're saying. I had a conversation just recently about some software that a third party had developed for us, which in one use case would basically present the users with a question saying, in effect, "Do you want to reflect the change you've just made in all places where it matters, or leave it wrong in some of them?" - complete with option buttons Yes, No (!), or "Always No" (!!!)

As I said at the time, "that's a stupid option and a user should never be given that choice". So, I see where you're coming from, your point is well made. :)
I find it sort of ironic, in a deeply tragic way, that a totalitarian state such as China finds itself incapable of enacting the sort of sweeping environmental regulations which were the linchpin for bringing about vastly cleaner air, water, and soil in the liberal democracies during the mid-20th century. Indeed, it wasn't so very long ago when a great many pundits were crushing on the ruthless efficacy of China's absolutist government.

China is more than advanced enough and more than wealthy enough to solve these problems. But perhaps the government is too corrupt and too disconnected from the value of human life to do what needs to be done.
in a discussion about the surveillance state it just seems wrong to suggest web apps. :)
(Not that anyone cares, but:) I'm a 23 year-old without social media or smartphone. I consider myself a science experiment. The world is looking more alien to me every single day.

For example: last night I was watching the Vergecast [1]. The last episode is literally 90 minutes of four adult men bitching about social media smartphone apps! It's insane.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/12/5204758/the-vergecast-105...
He actually addresses this question. His advice is: start with any idea, even a bad one, and write about it. You're ideas will develop (and new ones will emerge) as you go. (Thoughtful) writing is the discovery mechanism.
Final Dergisi Dershaneleri - Sınav Giriş Kartı
Most people expect other people to behave as they do, so a person's expectation of others often says a lot about the individual.
I've been on a recent email organization kick. I spent last week setting up aliases and filters to keep junk out of my inbox.

Basically I set up an alias for each newsletter I subscribe to then went and either change my email for those accounts or unsubscribed then resubscribed with the new alias.

Then I created a label for each newsletter/whatever I was expecting and set it to "Show if unread". Next I created the filter, I put in the "to" email address of the alias, then set the filter to auto archive and apply the label for that newsletter.

That way it doesn't pop up in my inbox but if there's an unread message it does appear in my left hand label list.

Then I can get to it when I want and process it at that time. That helps keeps important items in my inbox that I can process more quickly.
> It's like getting upset that there are no 5'2 guys playing in the NBA.

This is why I try to avoid reasoning by analogy. Every analogy is flawed, but some end up making the wrong point entirely.

Height is a physical attribute that cannot be influenced (without questionably unethical means) from any age. A better analogy would be someone picking up a basketball for the first time at 25 and expecting to play at an NBA level.

I agree with everything else you said though.
Books look more like a marketing tool for a consulting activity to me than a dependable source of revenue. And good books are a labor of love more than anything else.
Cryptocat Considered Harmful: The Root Cause
Cross-Platform Tool Trends – Freemium & Flexible
"Interactive Data Visualization" is available online for free http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345
Nice, how secure is it though?
Using the popular caching plugins...W3 Total Cache (http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/) or Super Cache (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/) seem to be well liked and I've used both of them without too many issues (I have some weirdness in my WP upgrade path). My blog has been on HN and reddit a few times and has never crashed, even though I'm on the cheapest Dreamhost hosting plan with what seems like 5 to 10 second response times for non-cached pages.
Continuously stock piling exploits cannot lead to any desired end game. It's probably beneficial there's some deflating of all this stuff.
The article's central point at least partially hinges on the continuation of Moore's Law. However, if the exponential rise in computing power at stead cost does not continue, the coming 'rise of robots' might be substantially slower.

There is some evidence that Moore's Law might come to an end:
http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchip...

Our knowledge of AI suggests that performing basic human tasks like perception and navigation in the physical world is extremely computationally expensive. Even though improvements in algorithms would speed things up somewhat. The required computing resources would still be fairly expensive for complicated tasks many workers routinely perform.

On the bright side, this might give us time to adjust our institutions to the new reality.

Thoughts?
I like the story of the graph a lot more than the graph itself.

The two things I would like to see are:

- Per capita debt per person who attended college. (Or perhaps who graduated college) This would answer an implied question of "What if we're just getting more people going to college?"

- The salary legend should start at 0. This would put the relative movement of salary in a more accurate context.

I don't think fixing these changes the story of "The long term cost of college is going up, while the short term benefits are going down." but when I see tricks out of "How to lie with Statistics"[1] my BS detector goes up.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...
> Thanks to drones and "big dogs"

What are "big dogs" in this context? (Bit of a challenge for the Goog!)
Sorry, just saw your comment. Had no idea it was behind a paywall because I use the Self-deatruct Cookies plugin on nytimes.com which ensures I rarely ever face the paywall.
As a West European I presume. Because as a East European you would have ended up in the claws of Soviet tyranny for 50+ years and they made the nazis look like amateurs when it came to abuses and persecution.
If you look at the 'Frequency of social media site use' graph though Twitter is far more popular on a daily basis than Pinterest. This seems a more significant statistic.

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/screen-s...
The “placebo effect” does not mean what you think it means. All those things you describe are real actual things and are not necessarily examples of the placebo effect.
The ORM is mediocre compared to SQLAlchemy, the template system is weak compared to Jinja2.

If you swap Django's ORM with SQLAlchemy and replace Django Templates with Jinja2, you end up with something like Flask.

The killer feature for me is Django's "admin" app. When I'm not using the "admin", the rest of Django kind of gets in the way. Nowadays I prefer a less opinionated framework like Flask if I'm not using the "admin".

Also, Django lacks any concept of multi-tenancy and does not support composite primary keys nor schemas, which makes it a poor choice for SaaS projects. That said, Django REST Framework is awesome for API-first development and makes it a whole different game (in a positive way).
I disagree because most "tech business" are empowered by tech, they are not ABOUT tech. My business was about team management/leadership, we just used tech as a means to an end. We could have done the same thing with consulting, but decided to get scale using the web.

It is like saying a given business which sells through the phone is about phones. Phones are just a way of doing it.
>> "SEO and social media bullshit"

This stuff does seem like bullshit when you're working on it, but it's unfortunately crucial these days. It takes so long to build up the brand and visibility that I don't believe you have the option to just do it once you've got the product right. Unless you've got the investment, firepower or notoriety to get chins wagging then you've got a long road ahead of you. Good SEO actually sounds like one of the things you got right to me. But maybe you spent too long on it
As long as the lifetime earnings are substantially higher, you should be willing to put up the NPV of your annuity (income). As long as you make even one dollar more than you would, you are better off.

If you compare the entire education investment to the return during year one in the workforce, it isn't going to look good.

If you compare the entire education investment to the impact it has on that person's lifetime, e.g. lower unemployment, easier time getting into grad school if the economy goes sour, easier time retraining, and just general high earnings, then the investment makes a bit more sense. I assume if this were a business, Thiel would wonder why education is underpriced.
This article might be helpful for what you are looking for...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/better-data-securit...
That's not "reform", that's "keep everything the same except the numbers".
If one does something and he does if often and with passion he definitely has something to write about.

I started writing and finished https://leanpub.com/Privacy_in_Digital-Era still waiting editor to finish and after repairs it goes online.
Published are http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HFGSB3K and https://leanpub.com/opensourceencryption

Digital editions for now, print is planed and should be available in month or so.

For writing i would recommend https://leanpub.com, great platform you write in markup and it creates .mobi, .epub and .pdf formats.

After that there is publishing and marketing.
Main one's are amazon and apple, smashwords, lulu, nook, kobo etc.
Marketing is something i still work on ;o)

Established writers get more revenue which is pure logic by itself, one book is not enough.
Extra comes with time, good luck.
I agree. I am always sickened by the US politicians pointing to Chinese "regulations" (or lack-thereof) on labor or the environment as competitive advantages to be emulated.

Then I remind myself these are the same sorts of people that have never left the borders of the US and don't understand exactly how wonderfully _clean_ the US is in comparison to those sorts of places.

I hope for the sake of the Chinese people and the rest of the world that they figure it out. We are starting to have similar problems with "unresponsive" governments in the West and it will unfortunately be to everyone's peril eventually.
Yes, limiting the options is a great way to get good, consistent results. The problem crops up when that one user or client wants something different, then want to start making everything unique, then it's back to the same problem. Content management to me should be about editing the content with styling and layout done automatically, but in the real world I guess people want to be creative even when they are not designers.
Heaven forbid we should start basing our scientific judgement on the severe numeric biases of Thompson Reuters.
buffer -> http://bufferapp.com/. nothing to fix, just someone deciding that, since someone has done X, no one else should do X.

congrats on making something! happy new year.
> I think to your average person markdown looks like a step down from WYSiWYG

I agree. When I worked for a company that mostly sold custom websites to smallish companies, our sales guy would show his marks the TinyMCE interface and they loved it. I reckon we sold a lot of websites to people who believed we were giving them the ability to manage their own content easily.

Even better, we were able to generate more revenue when those people invariably messed up their content and needed us to fix it. So really it's win-win.
They're referring to http://bufferapp.com/
You're still missing the point that Steam is "reaching into people's systems" and removing programs.

That said, it's done all the time via apt-get or windows update or other program updates. People think that this rises to a new level though, and given the fact that Steam users are younger, tech-saavy, and more vocal it's no wonder that it's raising a stink.
rich text editor for geeks
The entire economy looks bad, for all workers.

Median income has dropped for everybody. Household debt has increased for everybody.
Hey guys The guys. A Java guy?
Though it might not be as helpful in your case.
I wonder how can he be violating any law with respect to distribution of copyrighted content when he is not distributing anything. He is just pointing to other sources doing the actual distribution (which may be legal). He is just providing links, although with a nice interface.
Android Hacker? Come reshape agriculture with FarmLogs
FarmLogs is on a mission to invent the future of farming, and we are looking for someone to join our mobile team to lead Android. Agriculture employs over 36% of the global workforce and we want you to help build the app that will revolutionize it.

The average farm has vast amounts of underutilized data because they don't have the software tools to help them analyze it. We help farmers unify their data, and then extract meaning from it. We are giving farmers the technology they deserve.

If you want to work on real solving real problems for the industry that feeds the world and want to get in early at a YCombinator and VC backed startup, then this job is for you. Transforming the way farming works isn't going to be easy, but we think you will love the challenge. You will be joining our team of 9 located primarily in Ann Arbor, MI, and as an early employee, you will be rewarded with equity on top of salary. If you aren't already in Ann Arbor, we are willing to cover relocation costs.

Requirements:

-An in-depth knowledge of Android development

-Personal or professional work published in the play store

-A strong desire to constantly challenge yourself and learn

-Demonstrated ability to create clean, and, testable code.

-The experience to know when to throw that out the window and just hack ;)

Bonuses:

-Experience with offline caching and synchronization

-Familiar with basic AI and CV techniques

-Grew up on or have a connection to the farm

-Significant contributions to open source projects

-Proficiency with using git in a team environment

Email Jobs@FarmLogs.com to get the conversation started.