skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to go against what you're claiming, but to play devils advocate for a moment if you take a look at Invision Power Board[0] (now called IP.Board), they were once a free and open source bulletin board / forum system. In fact, their slogan was:

Apache, PHP and mySQL are all free, why should you pay for a bulletin board?[1]

They've since completely reversed their stance on that and now require payment for IP.Board. I'm sure there are other examples of this happening too, that's just the one that I remember most clearly when it comes to companies taking once free software and then charging for it.

[0]http://www.invisionpower.com/apps/board/
[1]http://web.archive.org/web/20020912123518/http://www.invisio...?
I don't care about tablets. I can't use it on my laptop or desktop.
LSM is inspired by Toyota, the concepts are not new to business world, they're new to startups.
We've been using ghost for the startup, and I've been using it for my personal blog as well. I credit it with making writing more enjoyable, leading to more being written. By far my biggest issue was losing text, which should be fixed in 0.4. The joys of using alpha software. Best of luck to the Ghost team. I expect great things from them.
There is a typo on the home page. "Conurrency"
Earn a Comp Sci education for free - Open Source Curriculum
(If I'm a 'noted Bayesian', then Bayesianism is in big trouble. I use frequentist techniques because they're what I know, and I wanted to learn them before I learned Bayesianism so I'd know what both sides were like.)
Why using :

function doFoo(bar) {
bar = (bar !== undefined) ? bar : "default_value";
}

Over :

function doFoo(bar) {
bar = bar || "default_value";
}

Coercion avoidance ?
The MongoDB Trap
I Spent Two Hours Talking With NSA’s Big Wigs. Here’s What’s Got Them Mad
A bit like Star Trek films.
If you were correct, jetpacks and flying cars would be common. Kurzweil's main prediction is that human-level intelligence is essentially just a matter of having similar processing power to the human brain available, and then guessing when that will be based on current trends. It so happens that our current level of computing was possible with the amount of effort put in, but I don't think it was possible to predict that the amount of effort that could be devoted could produce the results we have, in the 1970s. In fact, I think the conventional wisdom of the time was that it was not possible to get to this level of computing power so quickly.
Bigger numbers means its better. It's science bro.
Messaging and Social app usage tripled in 2013 - Flurry
Not correct. The Philippines are essentially a US vassal state, and tends to care about freedom of navigation in this region. There are all sorts of legal issues around China's successful assertion of claims in this area.
Are you able to earn enough to cover your basic life expenses, even if nothing is left over at the end of the month? Is it a bare subsistence living? Would a single unexpected emergency that cost you even a tiny amount of money push you over the edge so you could no longer cover your basic expenses?

Or are you on a slow downward spiral or perpetual small shortfalls in nearly every basic expense area? To the point that you can't even cover a bare subsistence living?

I think that's probably how I'd notionally describe the difference between poor and poverty.
Wordpress.com now has Markdown [1]. Which has kept me there, so I'm guessing the timing cannot be coincidental, either.

[1] http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/markdown/
2060: All of English language is now filtered by profanity filter.

`A` is word depicting erection and `The` is missionary pose.
Inaccurate reporting in science articles
What does this even mean?

Is this a common/standard way of disagreeing with how something is phrased, is it derogatory, or are you really not able to parse the meaning of that sentence?

Sincere question. I saw this same phrase used a while ago by someone else, and while the sentence it referred to was as poorly worded as the one you refer to, parsing the meaning is easy. Isn't it?
Didn't find anything quite like this article in the more "mainstream" Chinese news sites, so I checked out the source qianzhan.com. Well it's definitely not something I would call a reliable news source
I was thinking more about a time when universities were really a place you went to learn, not to kill time while you figured out what to do with your life. I was thinking 500 years ago not 50 years ago. Not everyone is cut out for it, but today everything thinks they are. Because they're told (sold the idea) that they can do/have whatever we want. Nobody looks at the price tag.
Eye Cells Made with Ink-Jet Printer
It's also not exactly a great choice marketing-wise as far as good sounding scotches that would impress a scotch drinker...
The USA might get into a war over this with China. It hopefully would end in a quick backdown and sanity on both sides. However the USA not standing up to China on this will lead to WW3 as Japan, S. Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, et.al. all make a run for a nuclear deterrent because the USA could no longer be resided on. The USA standing up to China is less of a risk then not doing so.
Yes the point of Twitter is to shout out stuff, but if NSA wanted to, it could shut you up permanently, that's why Twister is fighting against censorship, not for your privacy.
It's not different from SHA-256 or scrypt in that regard. However there appears to be some interest in these primechains from the scientific community. I never claimed it is solving important "problems" but I like the CPU only property. The Bitcoin GPU/ASIC race favored a few wealthy individuals. 40% of all BTC is in the hands of a few people. I don't see this happen with Primecoin at the moment. GHash.io looks more like a problem for Bitcoin as e.g. botnets for Primecoin.

I'm more interested in better and faster miners for Primecoin as this is a pretty interesting problem to solve. Getting rich with either of these coins is pretty much impossible if you are not already wealthy and able to invest a good amount of money and energy - especially in the BTC ecosystem.
To add to your "mindset for freelancing" and to address the OP's question of "how do I get clients," I think one of the big assets for a freelancer is insider knowledge of how businesses work, and how business processes work.

You don't have to actually be an insider to get this knowledge, but you're going to have a hard time solving business problems if you a) don't know what they are, b) don't know the current state of solutions, and c) have practical ideas on how you can fix this using magic computer sauce.

For this reason, I'd +1 the suggestion to look for a job as a webdev. Could be great work experience, but more importantly, good experience interacting with businesses in a B2B setting, seeing how they tick, and learning about the overall process of selling to a business.
Does anyone know who you need to speak to if you want to do a talk in the future?
Hadn't seen that, thanks for the share.
I was distracted by blurriness and compression artifacts. Homework for Sony web designers: try the site on a rotated 1920 x 1200 screen. Then you'll also notice that it's cut off left and right. Apple has the same problem on their Mac Pro site, which uses a very similar mechanic.
If someone wants to make predications, it would be more helpful if someone went to the effort to predict where to best put our resources now so that it will have the most impact in 50 years.

For example, consider that the CERN Supercollider could have been built 20 years ago but the US canceled the project because it only wanted to fund one big science project and the Hubble won.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

Of course, maybe it's better to put more time and money into all research. Picking winners isn't always a good idea either.
If a company snubs you because you dropped out, you probably don't want to work for them anyway.

Depends on why he dropped out. Could he not get a long with his peers and refused to do what was asked? Not someone I would want to work with.

Remember, work is called work for a reason. A lot of my job is fun, but work (and often grunt work) is what carries side projects from toys to releasable software.
> I think Kurzweil is a total blow-hard, along with the Mathematica guy. All these great 'predictions' don't take a lot of intellectual depth to make, to be fair .. all you had to do was read a bit of sci-fi in the 60's and 70's, and try to understand that your fellow engineers were reading the same (mostly Vernor Vinge) stories, on the basis of a few top-10 lists .. and oila: you can see what is going to happen.

>Big Sci-Fi has been driving technology - and thus, our modern culture - for decades now. There's not a single advance in our modern lives that wasn't speculated first, by some sci-fi author.

Oh wow. If I judge by the stuff my generation grew up with, my children and grandchildren are going to see their parents trying to invent some really cool/weird stuff.

I mean, sure, string-theoretic worldgates for interstellar transport will never actually work, but apparently by 2040 we should have futurists predicting them for 2065, and by then God only knows. I mean, giant mecha are already in the works, so things'll be pretty cool then.
Makes sense, I love the Branch product but seems they never really got enough traction to make it a buzzing place of conversation & interaction. Will be interesting to see what happens with the product within FB.. will it be largely a talent acquisition or does FB really believe in what Josh and the team were building.
I see that they mention Google Gla##. Huh. The rise of strap-on computing.
Use ImageAlpha as a GUI for OSX. Very nice results!

http://pngmini.com/
Not repelled by the sun, but propelled by the prevailing local source of charged particles as long as the sail is deployed.

Hypothetically, if that source is on the opposite side of the vehicle to the sun, then it could be propelled towards the sun until such point as the sun became the prevailing source, at which point, the sails could be stowed and the vehicle could coast until such time as it needs to decelerate. Then it could deploy the sails to slow down.

Certainly, travelling towards a major source of charged particles will take longer than going towards a weak one, as you would only be able to accelerate as long as your nearer source is stronger.
Better: http://jimidisu.com/?p=6013
I think a high casualty count and domestic food shortages would finish the USA as a world power even in victory. The American people have only ever weakly supported the global policeman imperial project. Americans would gladly go right back to being a continental power if the going got tough.
I've never quite understood how its possible to create better encoders without needing a new decoder on the other end. Can anyone explain how this works? When you're writing a png decoder, why wouldn't there just be one optimal png encoder to go along with it?
I think the Chinese military is somewhat autonomous and pursues a different agenda than the civilian government. It's a source of concern.
another "Google's Schemer" has been set up!
The time has come for Schemer users to save their data to http://www.huing.com
You sound (rightly) incredulous, but don't forget that dBASE II launched at version 2 because 2 is better than 1.
Right, but that's not really a problem, is it? My understanding is that committing dependencies is strongly discouraged -- if you're writing libraries or modules intended for distribution and others' use. On the other hand if you're deploying a standalone app, locking down any specific dependencies' versions and committing them is actually considered a best practice, as it's the only way to be sure it won't unexpectedly change. Right? I'm genuinely interested in others' thoughts and experiences here.
There were some pretty upbeat predictions for the future of computing in the 1970s - here is a quote from a contemporary review of The Mighty Micro from 1979:

"Some of his guesses seem based on other popular books: he thought 'ultra intelligent machines could prolong life to age 1000' - ie things which might measure blood or neoplasms, and even repair them."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Mighty-Micro-Microchip-Revolutio...

[The Mighty Micro was definitely one of the things that motivated me to get into computing and AI research]
So, if I were to say, "what does this mean?" I am usually asking either a question or posing a question I immediately intend to answer.

The addition of the "even" intensifier usually signals exasperation or annoyed bewilderment.
There is no question infinite scrolling is a horribly stupid, resource intensive, and confusing ui. It's just dumb feature copying that made it so popular.
Skyhook’s Open-Source Bitcoin ATM Will Cost Under $1,000
(new Func<int>(() => 2))();
Strong AI is not a matter of "processing power". These pop-compu-sci guys are selling the 50s AI project which was already dead in the water upon invention (cf. Hubert Dreyfus' critique) but has since been realised by the compu/cog-sci people to be irrevocably flawed.

Today the thesis that Strong AI is a function of processing power is snake oil or a result of a serious lack of knowledge of this area. The latter is OK for a layman, not for this kind of "expert".
Salmon is a monitoring/alerting system built on Django.

https://github.com/lincolnloop/salmon
Works in iTerm too.
2000 wasn't server only, it was an iteration of the NT brand that got merged with the Chicago (9X) line since XP. Windows 2008 was in fact a server only version.

I wonder if MS would have less trouble if they were doing the integration of windows brands in the same way that they did with NT and 9X.
Just today I was thinking to myself how educated I have become within the WordPress development, I can now remove every single tab from the "New Post" dashboard and leave myself only with the editor.

It's a wonderful thing.
The problem here is the "click" part of it.
The ImageOptim/ImageAlpha OS X apps are fantastic for compressing all kinds of images for the web.

http://imageoptim.com/
http://pngmini.com/
Two more tips:

* Ctrl-a to go to beginning of line

* Ctrl-e to go to end of line
I would like to take this opportunity to air my grievances regarding fail2ban.

I'm not a security researcher, but fail2ban appears to be a log prettifier instead of an actual security apparatus, as it doesn't actually prevent anyone from logging into your box. Unless you've configured fail2ban to ban IPs after 1 failed attempt, if you don't have a secure password or any other such basic security measures, you are still at risk of getting pwned.

Instead of taking the time with fail2ban, I personally just make sure everyone uses passphrased ssh keys, or use a strong password in conjunction with a yubikey or 2 factor authentication and call it a day.
0 is falsy in javascript; with the second method, default_value will get used instead.
> generally I missed out on 90% of the life that people in
> their early 20s tend to live (not a huge deal to me as I'm
> not the partying type anyway)

OP - before you decide to take this route, make damn sure that you want to. Fun > work
This says a lot about how programmers see the world (in jest :)
I'm really excited about sweet.js and JS macros in general, but I haven't had a chance to dive into anything yet. The major disadvantage for me though is it adds a pre-processing step.
YOUR FACE IS STUPID!!!
Ask HN: I quit my minimum wage job to be a freelance designer/developer. Advice?
I saved up enough money to last me a 3-4 months, quit my crappy minimum wage food service job, and am ready to kick ass and be a successful web designer/developer.

I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, with a minor in studio art. My portfolio is at http://www.kcovia.com. I'm pretty good with HTML, CSS, and customizing WordPress sites, decent at JavaScript. Most of the sites on my portfolio are customized themes, but I did build MinimalGifts.com and ClubHillman.com from the ground up. Both are fully responsive.

Any advice? I'm trying to tap into friends' networks and get work that way, as well as go to local web meetups. I also just created an account on Elance but I can't really compete with $2/hour people in foreign countries.

--------

Also: I've been posting on HN for about 3 years now under the username 'keiferski':

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=keiferski

But I'm changing my first/last name soon for personal professional reasons, and so I'm trying to use this account now.
Hoe zorg je voor een gezonde darmflora? | Leef Nu Gezonder
In lossy encoding you throw away data to get smaller file, and the art is in deciding which data you throw away.

In this case you need to do vector quantization — choose 256 colors (decoder's hard limit) that best represent thousands of different colors in the source image, e.g. you have to decide whether to use a palette entry for just a single red pixel, or maybe sacrifice that pixel and use the palette entry to improve smoothness of a more visible blue gradient.
Here are some links:

http://kcovia.com/

http://pitchremix.com/

http://dormtown.com/

http://minimalgifts.com/
Could you define parallax? Because I see it, as I know it, in several places throughout the page.
Most useful thing I've seen all day - thanks!
After my mother died in early 2013, this "technology will solve death" fantasy lost all appeal to me. I finally accepted that there are losses in this world that can never be reversed. If there's something on the other side, then I look forward to seeing it. Joining the 120 billion people who have already died can't be the worst thing. If there's nothing on the other side, and death is the end of existence, then there's nothing to fear in it. I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but a total end seems unlikely. I don't believe in religion or gods in the anthropomorphic sense of "god" but whatever causes brought me to exist in a world can occur again.

As with religion, this idea of a perfect future (heaven?) in the Singularity can become a dangerous distraction from the real problem. It's not death that is a hard problem. It's life. Economic scarcity is the real enemy. That is what we should be fighting with all our force. We should fight first to make life better, and second to prolong it.

If we "solve death" and still have to live with scarcity and inequality, then we've just failed in a way that lasts much longer.

(On practical grounds, of course, I'm all for life-saving medical advances and research that reduces or eliminates costly illnesses. In fact, if rejuvenation were an option, I'd probably take it. I'm OK with death, but I hate getting sick. My point is that the real purpose of technology should be to kill scarcity first, and then aim for immortality second.)

Ok, done ranting.
I was thinking people that donated money would have a heavier weighted ranking then people that don't. That way the people that put money in the pool would ultimately determine who the top 10(or x) are.
Lessons for IT from Windows 8/Metro
Saw the tweets this morning, a bit terrifying. Humanity always somehow surprises me in its capacity for meaningless violence.
Works even when you are ssh-ed into a remote machine! Nice.
Stretchtext.js: Easily Communicate to Different Audiences in a Single Page
I think 20% is a good general-case job-hopping goal number. You'd expect a 5% raise in a good company every year, maybe 10% on a promotion. You want more than that to change domains/workplaces. Plus you want to cover the small chance that the new place will end up having a bad work environment, commute, culture, etc, so you aim higher.

But if you were lowballed at your current job, aim for the top of the range! Look up your position on glassdoor.com and see what you're really worth. Information is ammunition!
It has been a lot of hours, so I doubt very many people will see this, but I'll try.

Wikipedia also has an entry on cryptozoology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptozoology

That doesn't make it any less of a made up word used by pseudo-scientists to self describe nor does it mean I should give much credence to anything a cryptozoologist says. The key difference is that I know cryptozoology is largely pseudoscience whereas I merely suspect it in the case of anthrozoology. At least the word, "cryptozoology," is a reasonable description of what they are trying to do: the study of hidden animals. Anthrozoologoy translates roughly as man animal study, a term pregnant with meaninglessness. So, let's see what Wikipedia has to say about anthrozoology:

"Anthrozoology . . . is the study of interaction between living things."

Hey, I have friends who work in that field. They call themselves . . . "ecologists." Or, if you want to limit it to the types of interactions in the article, "animal behaviourists." They might even say that they work on "inter-species communication." So, I apologise for being dismissive of a term I have never heard before used in a context where there are other widely used terms that would seemingly be appropriate.

And to any genuine scientists out there studying human animal interactions, I genuinely apologise for my snark. It is unfortunate that my first encounter with the field of "anthrozoology" has been tainted by the inane nonsense in this article. That said, I don't think human-animal interactions have been nearly as neglected as the wikipedia article implies.
Consultant on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo embarassed by code mockups
"Obviously... everything... without question"?
Um, hyperbole much?

There's a lot wrong with PHP, and that'd be the case if even a quarter of the points in the article I linked to were valid.

PS Feel free to get the last word in after this, I don't plan to reply again since it's not very constructive. Have a nice day.
Reading optimistic future predictions is a lot of fun. And it's also fun to read those from the past because they help to point out eternal human motivations as well as trends of the time. Here are a series of postcards created by some artists at the end of the 19th century that imagined the year 2000 in France: https://www.google.com/search?q=Jean-Marc+Côté&source=lnms&t...

For context, the industrial revolutions, both the first and second, were by this point old news, so the notion of creating a machine to accomplish a task was familiar. There isn't much in these postcards to delight cynics and pessimists, though, since World War I, when people turned these machines on each other, had not yet happened.
I was unaware of the strict mode problem. I never use it myself, probably because I'm not developing for the web, but a browser embedded in a desktop app.

I will have a look at providing a version that works in strict mode.
Read more about the details of implementing something like this in C#:

http://www.mattwrock.com/post/2011/09/05/Convert-32-bit-PNGs...
Post a dogecoin adress and I'll donate Ð5,000.
This is a lossy encoder, which means that the image that comes out the other end doesn't contain exactly the same information as the image that goes in.

You can use all kinds of cleverness that is mostly unrelated to the actual image format itself to shrink the size of an image.

Here's one example: if an image uses millions of colours, you could drop it down to just using a few hundred colours (picking the nearest colour from your pallette to each of the pixels) and hence shrink the filesize a whole bunch. There are lots of different approaches to picking that initial pallette though - you might do it based on averaging out the pixel colours, or maybe you know something about human visual colour perception and can hence behave differently for colours that you don't think people will notice as easily.
Thanks for all of your hard work, Adrian & Jacob.
Convert 32 bit PNGs to high quality 8 bit PNGs with C#
My point is JS tools work with JS as intended, and work with CS to varying degrees of success and with a variety of ways they handle CS. I was a C# developer for many years, so I know what I'm missing.