skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Journalism is being disrupted (and has been for over 30 years) and the result is that reliable, just-the-facts is getting overrun by this nonsense.

Are you sure we ever actually had the paradise we lost?
Desktops like KDE can preview images in a directory. But BeOS was on another level with this stuff.

Imagine if (1) your filesystem was a high-performance nosql database; (2) your desktop was just a thin layer around this, optimised for navigating around and querying the stores. But NoSQL has never since been so smooth and beautiful to interact with.

The mail system: a daemon drops files in a directory and makes a ding sound. The user then just browses the directory containing the mail messages. (The file explorer detected the metadata and displays this as columns.) When you double-click on an icon, you get a special-case form that displays the contents of the data. http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bemail/bemail-sc...

If a unix were to do this stuff, it'd stop being unix: metadata on files is incompatible with the everything-is-a-stream-of-data philosophy. ryanweal writes below, "think everything is an icon instead of everything is a file". Brilliant. Haiku team should take "everything is an icon" as their motto.
> I play a server-based MMO that effectively ceased to exist over a decade ago.

Second Age, In Por Ylem or Forever? :P
The response to these news are surprisingly meek, but I guess we can attribute that to the game in question not having a large player base. I for one think this behaviour is unacceptable and it destroys gaming as an industry. In 20 years will the teenagers/kids of today have no way of playing the games they grew up with simply because the servers have been turned off?

Patching DRM out of the game and releasing server software to allow people to host their own servers should be industry standard in these cases. This is must surely be the result of politics at a much higher level than the studio, I don't think any studio likes to see their game just disappear of the surface of the earth just like that; after all that would be the equivalent of murdering ones child.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, go click around the SJW corners of the Internet a bit. There are tons of people who think this way. It's prevalent enough that I'd not blame anyone for not providing a bibliography.
I hope to write at least 300,000 words. Everything else kinda stems from that, or is contingent on that. (I'll need to sleep better, etc.)
Great post Nathan and congratulations about the baby!

Which kind of soccer do you play? With 11,7 or 5 players?
I bought it on sale months ago, booted it up and was told I had to sign up for this Rockstar account and haven't got passed that yet. I'm sure it's a wonderful game.
I associate these sounds with the act of sheltering from these elements, which prevents all kinds of physical activities and encourages passive, calm ones. A tendency towards hibernation and hot chocolate by a fireplace, a calm and pleasant association. Even if I focus on the negative aspects -- getting caught out in the rain and being cold and wet, I generally bundle up and conserve my energy rather than start jogging... not positive, but still calm.

Sufficiently strong weather and uncontrolled fires could put you at risk, but the extremely vast majority of my experience with these sounds has been with the safe varieties -- I don't think I'd find it as calming otherwise.
Got a link? That sounds interesting.
Hackerfbpro
I have 73k unread emails (most if not all automatic or group). But thanks to my setup not all the time in front of my face when i open my email inbox.
I have set just one goal for a new business venture (although I have others) which is to hit $50k/month by this time next year. I'm just working this new years eve on the steps required to achieve this.

Let me also wish everyone who reads this a prosperous 2014. Hope you achieve what you are aiming for
MoD tightens security at American spy bases linked to drone strikes
Use Mailbox - www.dropbox.com/mailbox
Hackerfbpro
hakerfbpro
Option 2 is hard. It means you're in the role of engineering manager. Most people on oDesk/elance are individual engineers and the consulting shops on there are generally just loose associations of friends or crappy outsourcing firms.

I'd suggest finding a small, local consulting shop and asking them to build it for you as a work-for-hire giving you full copyright ownership. Full-time consulting orgs will have no interest in stealing your idea as it's their lifeblood to build out other people's ideas. Meet with the owners, see their offices, evaluate their past work, get a free consultation, and only pay what you can afford.

Finding a co-founder is also hard. I think it's the same success rate of starting a rock band. And I think it's more likely to have a bitter end where you're trying to divide a baby.
Just pay $30 for a Chromecast. It's a much nicer experience than trying to wrangle a Windows machine, to boot.
awesome setup!

personally i can't really use desktop clients anymore. it's super weird if you need to "quickly" check your email somewhere else and all your setup is different.
Disagree completely but upvoted because it's an opinion that I think should be seen. Your comments effectively represent the 99.999% of the population that doesn't pay attention to any of this, except to what small amount they're fed via "paranoid" tech friends (and they all wear tinfoil hats, so whatever), nightly news and 60 minutes.
No, I'm pretty certain I won't see such a change, and since I'm not American, nor do I live in America, my interest in that is very limited.
Not really the same. Buying a subscription to a service carries a different expectation vis-a-vis the payment of a lump sum for the product.
Ask HN: Has anyone successfully applied for a Wechat Public Account?
I have been trying to apply for a public account for Tencent's Wechat platform. Unfortunately, they are not very responsive. Since I don't have a Chinese ID card, I cannot create an account by just filling out the respective form. Supposedly, I need to write to bd@wechat.com to request access. I did that twice, but no-one has responded so far. Did anyone else have success applying for a public account? Or does anyone here happen to work for Tencent and could forward my request to the responsible department? Thanks!
"@ericabiz is very open, transparent and direct about what she has seen and heard." Really? Sounds like she just sat around with some friends who all agreed with each other without any knowledge of anything.

Erica: "I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house"

"Genuine question: Did you reach out to any female founders who went through YC to ask about their experience?"

Erica: "The straight answer is no. Here's a slightly longer version of the story..." goes on to ramble about unrelated bs.
In theory, if the reseller adopts a 'that will never happen' attitude, then they should be happy to commit to giving you a full refund if the developer does go out of business. After all, if they think it won't happen, what have they got to fear about it?

In practice, good luck getting any guarantee, promise or actual refund!
I agree, except for the fact that the django community has been attacking the libuv community for not using gender neutral pronouns and YC for not having more women founders.
That chart compares median income with total student debt. Also the scale for median income is not zero-based. The point is still valid, but this widespread use of misleading charts is awful.
Never had access to those that could give an informed answer. As cliffban says, probably not much of a need. But if I had to pick a reason, and it would be a reason based on no inside knowledge, it's that the 8086 was a stop-gap design until the Intel iAPX 432 came out. The 432 had a lot of capabilities that mainframes took for granted, including segregation between data and executable code. Problem was that the 432 was so over-designed (which made it slow, for one problem) that it never saw production. So everyone just kind of settled on x86 and close to forty years later we're stuck with the 8086 legacy.
That graph is a bit of a lie. Student debt is summed over all students, so it grows if the student population grows (which it has; 2013 saw a decline, but that will not factor much in this data yet). It also integrates over many years. That makes the total debt look more threatening.

It would be more reasonable to show a per-year, per student debt (people graduating in year X had an average debt of $Y; people leaving without graduating had an average debt of $Z)

Such a graph probably still looks bad (median income has dropped, after all), but it will be more informative.
Read https://twitter.com/jacobian for the latest stuff against PG. (Hes creator of django)

Also, https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 (Created by a core contributor to django)
Aren't you allowed to circumvent DRM for certain fair use cases? Certainly disabling DRM on the single-player parts would fall under that, wouldn't it? Valve would earn respect back by releasing a crack/replacement DRM that uses Steam.
Party Russian Roulette :)
Have fun in NYE:

$ while :;do clear;echo -e 'beer\nwine\nwhiskey\nvinegar' | sort -R | head -1 | figlet -tc; read -t .01 -n 1 && read -n 1; done
uni is a binary [0,1] with several tiered exceptions. value to the degree is primarily as a sorting / funnel. as a result, its not really going to be linear. The problem with the current pricing is that what was once a "hack" (using the degree as a legal iq proxy) is now so far out of wack with the information content of the degree itself. After all, the distribution of iq doesn;t really change. so nobody is in aggregate all that better off by paying more for an iq test. there is sureley some productivity gains by "better" educaton over time (and these accrue to both students and to economies), but again...the rents are extracted from this production by people in structural positions of power (ie, not "productivty" in the normal sense; these are people who have the ability to get paid for not destroying value), long before they accrue to the more productive economic agents.

This disconnect between marginal productivity and actual wages for marginal work is evident in other data, eg

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/opinion/america-in-2013-as...
I was born and brought up in Oman. I don't think its especially cheap to live there, and the internet connectivity isn't great. You do have 3G, but it is quite pricey.
Did Einstein say something profound about social issues or people interactions when he was younger than 40? I don't say I agree that younger people have nothing of value to say in these areas, but I think you are mixing a bit different things there, experience in some field and life experience. And while age has some correlation with life experience it does not mean that someone older will be wiser at all.
SQLAlchemy 0.9.0 Released
All Your iPhones Are Belong To Us.
Surrender to your iNSA overlords, while you're still alive.
" iCloud allows Apple to install and run code directly on your device remotely."

I dont understand this? so far as I am aware, apple has always been able to install and run code directly on your device remotely.

what am I missing?
The Cubli: A Gravity-Defying Cube that Can Jump, Balance, and Walk
I agree; maybe this graph is a little better:

http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2011/05/gr-avg-student-debt...

(from http://www.npr.org/2011/05/16/136214779/college-student-debt... )

EDIT: Or this maybe: http://www.worldwidehippies.com/2011/08/29/tax-breaks-for-ri...

(just doing an image search for student debt history)
"one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? "

I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not.

Giving total control to Stalin meant hundred of millions of Russians got murdered in terror, giving total power to Hitler or Mussolini from democracies meant the total destruction of Germany and Italy with millions dead.
That's a false comparison.

Cellular phones do not constitute an invasive act perpetrated on others. Unless you start having loud conversation in the presence of others, in which case you're still an asshole.
i'd argue this is not boilerplate, more like a shortcut for your particular use case:

import codecs
enc = lambda x: codecs.encode(x, 'hex')

i have a program in python 2 that uses this approach, because i have a lot of decoding from utf and encoding to a different charset to do. python 3 is absolutely the same for me.
One does not usually go out of business with enough cash reserves to refund your customers. That being said, they should offer some sort of self-hosted open-source promise: if we go out of business, we will release the code for our former customers to maintain.
Apparently, performance: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/19/unisys_libra_460_mai...:

"Unisys has two different families of mainframes in the ClearPath line. From its Burroughs heritage comes the Libra family with their Master Control Program (MCP) operating system, and from the Sperry-Univac side comes the Dorado family with their OS 2200 operating system.

At the high-end and upper midrange of the Unisys product line are custom CMOS processors designed by Unisys and manufactured by IBM Microelectronics that have the high single-threaded performance on batch jobs that mainframe customers need.

In the midrange, there are smaller CMOS-based mainframes that bear the Dorado or Libra labels as well as a mix of machines that have ports of the MCP and OS 2200 operating systems and special virtualization and emulation sauce that lets CMOS binaries run atop x86 processors. The entry Libra and Dorado products are all based on Xeon machinery."
Note also that income is not shown on a zero-indexed scale, exaggerating its decline.
That they let spies run arbitrary code on your phone too.
Or say any other type of crypto-ledger that is not participating in the currently fadish pump-n-dump bitcoin schemes. And I post this comment knowing I will suffer the down-vote rage of bitcoiners.
The cost which bothers me the most about the current university landscape is the amount of potential we as a society waste.

So much of our population goes straight from high school to a 4 year college program. That's while they're between the ages of 18 and 22.

Unless you're studying to be a doctor, lawyer, nurse, engineer, etc. then that's 4 years of lost productivity.

I think most professions could be trained for in under a year + on the job training.

Even if the argument is that college is largely social growth for the student it's insanely expensive if we need 4 years to do it.
Creative Mural Art by Curiot
Curiot (Favio Martinez) is a Mexican artist with amazing skills. Famous for his mural paintings Curiot has a tendency to create some unusual and weird looking of organism that somone might think of a human and animal hybrid.
While that might be worth experimenting, there's a high cost to it. Having high selection standards makes the network (YC's or any other) exponentially more valuable to those already in it. If you add a few not-so-good apples by mistake, there's no going back.

Also, you have to consider how much quantitative and qualitative experience YC has accumulated, the partners are pretty good at telling in a couple minutes conversation if you're a strong founder. This advantage would be lost with blind interviews.
Give: the only thing you should be doing
Well, because it's better. Same reason people keep running "obsolete" VMS and AS/400 systems - they do things that "modern" operating systems can't. It seems to me for every advance in hardware, software takes a step backwards.
The NPR chart may also be misleading; it's unclear from the notes. There was ~60% inflation between 1992 and 2011.
Be interested to know what kind of range it has...
3 degrees & human evolution: changing the world?
Year in review vs the Future
Some of us are wired to bring that little red number to 0. Latent OCD, perhaps? It just makes me itch inside when it looks like someone might be waiting for a response. I need to learn to live with it.
You are right, and that's the whole reason the word profit exists.

What troubles me is that it's hard to interpret an answer to 'are you profitable?' because it's:

- Somewhat subjective: Internal accounting policies (e.g. amortisation of R&D) affect the answer, and you are unlikely to know much about these accounting policies (unless the company has published audited accounts).
- Poorly understood: The person who answers the question may unwittingly answer a different questions from the one asked. They may do this unintentionally, of course, because they don't understand that EBITDA != profit.

Of course, one question on the financial state of the business is not enough.
This is OK in journalism - but there is very specific protocol around it that makes it OK.

If you remove text, you indicate that you've done so, like so:

"No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23" should have become "No, the problem is ... women are not by the time get to 23" Thus indicating to the readers that some information had been removed. It's still a bit of an ugly trick, but it's acceptable because it tells the reader that this isn't the full, in-context quote.

As I've said in previous comments, this is what can happen when people without journalistic training present themselves as journalists. They publish unaware of these rules. Particularly the subtle, nuanced rules - like inserting an ellipsis when removing text from a quote, or using brackets to indicate inserting text for clarity that the source didn't provide.

And so "the problem is women are not by the time they get to 23" blows up into a big firestorm -- first because the public trusted and assumed that these rules were followed, then later when we discovered that they were not.

It's unclear to me why they didn't just say "Oops, we did selectively quote and it appears we didn't handle it well. Our bad." It does appear to be an honest mistake made in ignorance.
I thought the largest take away from all these leaks was that various branches of government, even within the military and intelligence communities, routinely deploy solutions that are known to be insecure?
Good for you man, I'm way behind. I'm 24 and haven't accomplished much. I'm just working my way to seeing what I want to use as my career. Just a note, though: "I've done much more when I was in 6-7th grade yet I don't brag about it." That's called bragging.
Umm, not if you would be blind as a bat without your prescription glasses! Like many glasses wearers I do have contact lenses too, but glasses are much more comfortable to wear all day.
Editing a quote is fine.

Editing improperly is very bad form indeed - particularly, editing without telling the reader that you've done so, in the form of "..." for omitted text, and "[ ]" for inserted text .
I wrote a blog post on a similar topic, after mentoring several would-be engineers that were curious about finding a good fit after graduating:
http://blog.pamelafox.org/2013/07/what-to-look-for-in-softwa...
That post also turned into a slide deck:
https://speakerdeck.com/pamelafox/engineering-culture

I think we cover very similar areas. One of the big red flags for me, personally, is code review (lack thereof). If a company doesn't believe in its value, that reflects on its whole perception of coding as a collaborative process, and I just can't get on board with them.
Features - iCloud is just an extension of the stuff that was on iOS already. Previously you had preinstalled apps as part of the rom that could run in the background etc, and you had apps that you could download that ran sandboxed and had to have an icon, etc. iCloud allows direct access to the filesystem remotely. iCloud also now has routing support to assign you to different Apple servers, etc. All of these features would make it trivial for the NSA to put their own special server in at the iCloud data centers and redirect specific people onto it without them knowing.

So while it would have been theoretically possible for the NSA to do it before iCloud, iCloud makes it actually practical to do it without subverting the whole iOS team.
The graph is misleading.

The implication is that a bachelor's degree is costing more and generates less income, but what the graph shows is "total student loan debt" not the "cost of a bachelor's degree".

Technically this graph could be a good thing if we could graduating significantly more people who make more than someone without a degree (but 10% less someone who earned a degree 5 years ago), since more people would be better off.

Other things to note:
The time period is arbitrary and mostly shows the impact of the recession over the past 5 years.
The graph shows total student load debt which includes everything from vocational programs to PHD students in public and private institutions.
The graph has two independent scales so the slopes are arbitrary.
Well based on the fact that you posted this question you've already figured out one of the most important things about working for yourself and that is.....

Everyone needs to be managed. It's now simply up to you to manage yourself given that you have nobody to answer to anymore (at least in theory).

The next thing is then realizing that there is no one correct way of dealing with these issues commonly faced by entrepreneurs. Everyone is different and therefore everyone will have different strategies or techniques that work for them as an individual. You really just need to read up, get feedback from others (like you're currently doing), and try a bunch of things to see what works for you.

With that said, here are some general rules that I feel apply regardless of many of the variables that exist.

1) Have a dedicated workspace. I lock the door to ensure that my wife and daughter don't interrupt me. I took crap for this early on but as I explained to my wife....when I was still working at my old job she didn't have the luxury of walking into my office and interrupting me whenever she wanted so there is no need for her to have that luxury now.

2) Keep your work space clean. I struggle with this one and it's easy to let things get out of control. I find that when my office is a mess I want to spend less time in there and I'm more likely to plop my ass on the couch and get sucked into non-productive activity. Taking 5 mins to do regular cleanups prevents your desk from building up and getting overwhelming.

3) Create habits. Humans are habitual by nature. Take notes on how you are spending your time for a week and you will notice patterns. Make a schedule every morning and allocate a certain amount of time for the things you regularly focus on every day and that will help you avoid getting lost in something (like reading HN or TC) for hours before realizing what happened. Also, if you have multiple clients/projects that you have to give daily attention to then work on them in blocks of hours to help make the limited time you have to focus un them more efficient. It will also make tracking your time a hell of a lot easier.

4) Remember that things change. Regardless of what it is...it is bound to change. You just need to be cognizant of that fact and be able and willing to adapt. When I started working from home I was single and could work however long I wanted to, sleep whenever, etc. Now I'm married with a daughter and life just doesn't work like that anymore. My schedule obviously had to change in order to effectively incorporate the new changes into my life. I just had to adapt and go through a new period of trial and error to see what worked best.

Good luck working through it all and just remember to regularly schedule some time to review where you are spending your time and how you can improve.
Mulled frog, obviously.
Well, the iBook "price fixing" thing was a total BS.

There was no iBook price fixing -- if anything the deals they made made ebooks cheaper.
[Show NH] Set of bash scripts with human readable names for Git