skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It goes without saying those achieving breakthroughs have been building up to that moment basically all their adult (and most likely teenage) life.

As a soon to be 40 year old jack of many trades but master of none, I am still looking for someone achieving anything meaningful starting from scratch later in life.

What I mean by this is someone achieving a mastery of some skill, when one has not done deliberate practice previously.

I suspect the answer is that unless you have been building your inner pattern recognition for basics of your field of expertise since late teens/early twenties, you are unlikely to get very far starting at the later age.

For example Einstein already had fluid mastery of calculus at 15 (just like Feynman), which was a nice building block for later work. I am not even going to start on Von Neumann.
Unless your ideal customer is a tech-entrepreneur, this is all very misleading. It's going to amount to very little lasting growth.
You can take any tool that can process .gif.

The fun part is doing it yourself and learning something in the progress. I downloaded a .gif editor, but decided to not use it.
I think you're slightly misunderstanding me. I'll chalk that up to my not being as clear as I could have been.

I'm not talking about stealing from competition. What I'm saying is that every startup is solving a pain point or a need-state of some sort. That's the reason for the existence of the startup in the first place. You might have competitors attempting to solve the same pain point in the same way, and you might not. Either way, you're trying to solve a pain point.

How do you gauge the validity of your product and find your first 100 users? You do this by gauging the validity of the pain point you've identified. You do this because, in a sense, the value of your product is the delta between Your Solution and User Pain. Nine times out of ten, users have an existing solution (or behavior) they're doing to try to solve the pain -- but your product is going to be better, or at least you hope.

Let's look at your iPod example. There were some MP3 players in the market before the iPod launched, but for the sake of argument, we'll say that these players were insignificant at the time. So what was the pain point, and what was the existing solution, when Apple launched the iPod? The pain point was not being able to take your music library on the go -- most people had to make do with a single CD at a time. Their existing solutions? Walkmen, portable radios, MP3 collections on their computers, and so forth. What was Apple's solution? "1,000 songs in your pocket."

It's a common misconception that Apple "creates new markets" by bringing entirely-new-to-the-world products to everybody at once. Yes, they can do that now. They've got billions of dollars, a well-oiled marketing and distribution machine, their own highly successful sales channel, and distribution at every major retailer in the country. But that wasn't the case back in 2001. When Apple launched the iPod, it didn't launch to "everybody." It had to start with a segment of the market, which in 2001, was a relatively small set of Mac users and early tech adopters with big MP3 collections. It addressed and added more segments over the next few years, slowly building a snowball into critical mass, which it wouldn't achieve until roughly 2004-2006.

Most startups are like Apple in 2001, not Apple in 2014. They don't have a megaphone they can shout from. Their customer set isn't the set of basically all consumers. In the long run, sure, that's a fantastic place to be. But you have to start somewhere a lot more specific.

Which brings me back to the original topic: how do you get your first 100 users? The best way to get them is to assess which subset of users you believe will have the biggest delta between your value proposition and an existing need or pain. That's all I was trying to say. It's not about "stealing someone else's customers," per se. It's about solving needs. In the long run, maybe a billion people have this need, and you're indeed opening up a new market. Awesome. But you can't start there. You don't start with the set of all addressable users; you start with a subset of extremely addressable users.
OPSec – You Can Care All About Security But
I don't think it is just that. If you haven't read Ptolomy (and in particular all of Tetrabiblos, the Almagest, and his Geographia), you really should. Ptolomy was quite an incredibly observant individual and he worked through things with an attention to detail that is quite impressive.

He clearly understood he was in the Northern Hemisphere, but he placed Alexandria not in the southernmost part of the known world as the article suggests but in the center. A lot of this was pride and the sense that the center had everything good from the edges (see Tetrabiblos), but to some extent everywhere is the center, right?

He painstakingly discusses the proof that the earth is a sphere in Almagest. His geographia is worth reading and directly relevant to this.

I suspect that Ptolomy put the north at the top simply because he was in the Northern Hemisphere and knew it. He displays no great knowledge of navigation, though he does explain how the stars shift as you move north and south (again see Tetrabiblos and Almagest), and he even seemed to be aware that Mercury and Venus revolved around the sun (or so he seemed to say in Tetrabiblos).

All in all he's one of those authors one really has to read if one is interested in history, even the seemingly weird works he wrote (Tetrabiblos is an astrology manual but includes a lot of information about Ptolomy's understanding of geography not found in Geographia, and astronomy not found in Almagest).
U.S. intelligence agencies can’t justify why they use so many contractors
To a right-handed person it does ...I imagine to a left-handed person it must feel like the cursor/pointer is pointing the "wrong" way. I am wrong on this lefto weirdies? Bonus upvotes for casual slur surely.
Using DOM Mutation Events for node stack traces
Roman North Africa? ;-)
I have had success with StumbleUpon https://www.stumbleupon.com
Contracts can be terminated and/or changed. That is pretty normal …
Posting political stuff on HN isn't appreciated either.

This whole thread/article should not be here.
Its pretty clear that the only reason this post is on HN is the political connotations.
Bill Clinton Confirms CIA Drug Trafficking in Mena Arkasnas was a “Good Thing”
Interestingly they didn't get to a real explanation. It ended with the idea that for reasons lost to history, Ptolomy appears perhaps to have originated the practice.

The thing is, I don't think that is lost to history. Ptolomy was amazingly meticulous and while he didn't spell out why, he was very clear about enough details I think this could be pieced together further.
Uh...

http://pypi.python.org/ - 40,037 packages

http://rubygems.org/ - 70,678 packages

http://www.cpan.org/ - 129,447 packages

http://packagist.org - 24,244 packages

There's a lot of open source code out there for all major languages. And, based on the canonical package indexes, a lot less for PHP than the other main contenders in the OSS web-ready scripting space (although, obviously, PHP is very domain-specific compared to the others I've listed, so the comparison is not completely fair - even with that caveat, however, I would expect Perl and Ruby to have PHP licked).

There are compelling reasons to use PHP - omnipresence, ease of deployment - but this isn't one of them.
Nice progress! I do note that you are under 30, which means you can still make progress. There is a famous forum post of someone starting some very basic drawings and progressing onto higher skill level a few years later. He started at 23 or 24.

What I am hoping to see is someone starting at a later age.
Well keep in mind that the inputs to the algorithm can vary. Randomization can help avoid a bad input from throwing your algorithm off. A simple example of how randomization helps is quicksort:

if we pick the pivot to always be the first element, then any sorted array will cause worst-case running time. But by randomizing the pivot, we can do well (in expectation) for any input.
Good idea. I think that is intelligence solution.
we are going to launch in three weeks.
I've had enough of your surprises, Microsoft.
Zirt – Collect and export places and location
Too bad EU is playing that card since it's obviously a lose/lose situation.

"Switzerland's contribution to the total budget of Horizon 2020 of about EUR 81.6 billion sums up to around CHF 4.4 billion, over a seven-year period. The corresponding budget appropriation was approved by the Federal Assembly on 10 September 2013."

http://www.sbfi.admin.ch/themen/01370/01683/index.html?lang=...
No customs?

Switzerland is NOT part of the European Union Customs Union. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Customs_Union for further information.

Etc.

And there is not the whole package up for renegotiation, only 7 of 100+ bilateral agreements between the EU and Switzerland.
if you like drawing living things (and you care about proportion, realistic renditions) studying the underlying musculoskeletal structure helps.

i just try to capture something fleeting. i identify the most salient element and try to communicate that in my drawing. the most useful exercise in that book imo was the technique of trying to draw something once, then turning it upside down and trying again. ("disorienting" the object trains your mind to better identify spatial relationships.)
Interesting, what do you mean he "understood he was in the Northern Hemisphere"? There are an infinite number of possible ways to divide a sphere into hemispheres, so how did he define the hemispheres and how did he describe the one he was in?

Was he aware that the seasons were the result of the Earth's tilt and that they would be swapped in the other hemisphere as defined by that tilt? (I presume he didn't know that he was in the northern hemisphere because he thought he was closer to the northern magnetic pole.)
Those are not the traffic sources you would usually want to get actual paying users.

However, patio11 will tell you that some of those might be good for SEO though, which helps in the long run..
Basis In Acquisition Talks With Everyone
Regardless of the east vs. north distinction, I find it very unnatural to have an increasing vertical coordinate correspond to a movement towards the earth, if for no other reason that calling sea level zero and using mainly positive numbers above seems very convenient (for any vehicle except submarines).
The right of free movement of United States persons within the states of the union (US states are roughly comparably in size and population to EU member states) is protected by Article IV of the constitution, therefore, EU-style "unregulated mass immigration" does, in fact, exist in the United States.
Never mind the fact that you are forced to move every day from a location you likely can easily afford to a new location not knowing whether you can afford it or not. How can you plan for the future when you move from $200 rent to $2000 rent in a single day with no new income?

What strange shenanigans is going on that compels me to move so much? Especially moving into hotels when I previously lived in a house.

For that matter, if a property doesn't have a house nor hotel what am I paying rent for? The street?

Also, why can't I build a house on my property unless I own the two or three properties in the same area?

I also fail to see how one is supposed to learn anything about economics from the game other than just the basics that takes five minutes to explain.
What the hell is this doing on HN? I'm disappointed it's survived on the front page as long as it has.
What we mean, when we say 'Hello'
While responses have well addressed the deadlock bit of this, and someone else addressed the side effect free bit, I wantedI wanted to actually make sure you saw why actors necessarily involve side effects.

%Here is a function that rather idiotically takes a process
%id, a message, and just sends the message to the process,
%in Erlang, and then returns the atom 'ok'.

send_message(Pid, Message) ->
Pid ! Message,
ok.

If this was side effect free, that first line of the function, Pid ! Message, could safely be removed by the compiler, because it either returns nothing, or we are doing nothing with the return; either way, if it has no side effects it is not doing anything. Much like if I were to replace it with something that obviously does not cause side effects, such as 5 + 7; we're not doing anything with the 12 that that returns, so why bother calculate it?

But obviously that is not the case; we are expecting the process that Pid corresponds to to receive that message, and to do something with it.

The very act of sending a message is a side effect.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Metric measures have genuine practical advantages in terms of unit conversions. Switching to East-oriented maps would just be change for the sake of change. (Also a map projection distorts at the poles, so it's best if the poles are in uninhabited areas that ships don't sail through)
Agreed. Flagged it.
JavaScript Promise Anti-patterns
It is amazing. I have had exactly same problem but I could not came up with innovative idea such as you did.
I am looking forward to hearing about it.
I find the A chord is more interesting - beginners always start playing it with three fingers, pros always use one.

Similarly, the minor barre chord is one of those chords that - to me, as a mediocre beginner - always seemed tough to do unless you'd progressed beyond the basics to a semi-intuitive level of understanding re: guitar ergonomics.
"You are seeing this page because website has reached CPU usage limit of the server, and it was temporarily disabled." Welcome to HN!
It starts with the Second Lebanon War so I had to go look up the first [1]. As usual the numbers tell a quite different story:

* Israeli civilian casualties from cross-border shelling numbered 9-10 killed and at least 248 wounded between June 1982 and 1999.

* American military analyst Richard Gabriel estimated that between 5,000 and 8,000 (Palestinian / Libanese) civilians died during the war (i.e. 1982 - 1985).

I guess it just goes to prove that however superior one side of an armed conflict is they will always identify with David and feel they are facing a Goliath.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War#Casualties
Thanks for the pointers. Looks like asm.js and C are on par as portable assembly targets. The one difference is that asm.js is ready to use by half a billion users, the other is that no sane human should code asm.js directly, whereas some people swear by C as a language for humans. Allow me to clarify the initial statement:

> For 99.9% of the end users, asm.js it's even closer to "portable native code" than C, as C is usually delivered to end users as a precompiled binary via a separate compilation step, therefore no longer portable.
That's an excellent question (and an idea for a follow-up blog post). In most cases I'd go with Django+Gunicorn+Nginx setup (as described here http://goodcode.io/blog/django-nginx-gunicorn/), with Nginx (or Apache) just being the reverse proxies and serving the static assets.

Django is still needed here if you want to have form processing (unless you use 3rd party service), and useful if you want to have templating (unless you want to use Jekyll, Hyde, or similar static-generator tools).

So, while Nginx/Apache would definitely speed up things, they're not enough. On the other hand, you can build a reasonably[0] fast "almost" static site with Django, and have it deployed on either your Linux server, or Heroku, or another PaaS.

[0] What's "reasonably fast"? my hunch tells me that the simple setup outlined here could take quite a beating (unless intentionally attacked with slowloris or similar attacks, or serving heavy static assets). It'll be fun to test it.
Is Firespotting on the list because it's related to the author or what? It doesn't appear to actually have any traffic (a strong per-requisite to being able to promote other sites).
I hated sitting down to a machine with custom mouse cursors, mostly because the actual hit detection point was always in a weird spot.
someone should try a huge list of domains to see if it ends in a ban.
The QuickCheck style of testing is my favorite (see paper [1]). Using a simple embedded DSL, you write specifications that declare the desired properties of your code. The computer then checks that the properties hold by randomly sampling the space of possible test cases, using one of several sampling strategies. Even though the checks are not proofs, they are very effective in practice.

For example, here's a quick Haskell session in which I claim that the function f has the property of returning its smaller argument:

Prelude> import Test.QuickCheck
Prelude> let prop_minWins x y = if x < y then f x y == x else f x y == y
Prelude> quickCheck prop_minWins
+++ OK, passed 100 tests.

The best part is that the property specifications are not only machine testable but human readable. They allow you to tell other humans what you code should do, using a clear, formal language that the machine can check to make sure you didn't tell any lies. For example, the second line in the code sample above says, "For all x and y (which are values of some type on which there is a less-than relation), if x < y then f(x, y) = x; otherwise,
f(x, y) = y. See [2] for another great example.

[1] http://www.eecs.northwestern.edu/~robby/courses/395-495-2009...

[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.6.0.1/docs/Text-Pa...
Just a summary of http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/15/apple-google-begin-rejectin...
There are definitely methods for solving the discrete log problem. Start by looking up "index calculus".
I'm not clear on why is it flagged
donquichotte, you are correct. i wasn't that aware of those numbers. although i'm guessing a big bunch of those immigrants are western europeans, not "croatians". am i correct on that assumption?
$ history -w /dev/stdout | grep -o "^git [a-Z]*\( -\{1,2\}\([a-Z]\)*\)*" | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg
39 git status
26 git checkout
24 git diff
23 git log -
11 git stash
10 git add
9 git cherry
7 git reset
7 git merge
7 git commit
6 git commit -m
4 git help
4 git grep
3 git show
3 git reset --hard
3 git remote
3 git rebase -i
3 git diff --cached
3 git checkout -b
2 git log
2 git checkout --
2 git branch
2 git add -p
1 git stash --list
1 git rebase -p --onto
1 git rebase --continue
1 git rebase --abort
1 git rebase
1 git push
1 git diff --sta
1 git diff -p -n
1 git diff -p -l -n
1 git diff -p -l -e
1 git diff -ple
1 git commit --amend
1 git commit -am
1 git clone --recursive
1 git clone
1 git blame
1 git add --interactive

Some of this is quite amusing to me ("git help", "git rebase --abort", me trying to get a readable diff near the bottom) -- I'm a git novice. Btw, "git log -" near the top means git log -2, -3, -8, for example.
Why not? I'm assuming you consider it negative propaganda, at least I do... But still, at least we could discuss it, discuss the way governments use technology as negative propaganda, etc... Seems quite common, and thus important in this day-and-age.
A Grand Unified Theory of Metadata
The South Korean congress seems to have a throwdown every month or so.
"(outside the width of your shoulders)"

Strictly speaking (after observing myself pointing) it's "outside your elbow", right? Which coincides roughly with "width of your shoulders" when your elbow is at your side or your elbow is straight, but can differ by up to the length of your upper arm...
Well, he may have been working on it, but he released the Bitcoin implementation several months after he released the whitepaper. He released the white paper to the public on Oct 31/Nov. 1 2008, and the actual Windows client (the initial client) on Jan 3, 2009.

I don't have time to dig up links at the moment, but you can check the cryptography list archives for confirmation.
Is "Ameritrash" supposed to be a positive or negative labeling?
This is an extremely US-centric article. ARIN was never in as dire straits as the other RIRs. In Europe and Asia the situation is much worse. For example, lack of IPv4 addresses delayed DigitalOcean's growth in Amsterdam, and carrier-grade NAT is already being used by some consumer ISPs in Europe and Asia.
Unsure were you are writing from and I can only guess the pro Israel bias is stronger in US.

Around here it is quite the opposite: "everyone" is aware of everything Israel has taken, nobody is aware that they have given back land to the only nation that ever took back their declaration of war against them (Egypt). (The rest of the surrounding countries still is in war with them. )
The same thing is true of Python, though. Use PHP if you want, but not because Python doesn't have open source stuff out there
You seem to see "insightful" and "rant" as mutually exclusive. I don't agree, but that's merely a quibble; to address the meat of your response, I say that, while of course you're right that no language is ideal in all cases, PHP exists in a unique local pessimum compounded of its attractiveness to novice programmers and its unmatched ability to hamper them from learning lessons they will find useful in becoming familiar with languages other than PHP -- indeed, it is far more successful at making it harder, not easier, for novices to gain a grasp of any other language, and it is precisely this trap which incurs my loathing.

Small web development projects, as you say, do not require strong typing, first-class functions, &c. But they certainly can in many cases be improved by these capabilities, and, in any case, few languages which offer them outright require their use; meanwhile, a language which either fails entirely to offer them, or worse offers a broken, awful version of such functionality to newbies who are not equipped to recognize such enormities and are thus vulnerable to the fallacy that that's how such things are and should be done everywhere, is one which can inflict enormous harm on people who frankly don't know enough yet to look out for themselves -- precisely the sort of people, in other words, which PHP so successfully attracts, through its presentation as the right tool for every web-facing job.

Perhaps you mistook my colorful phrase, "that syphilitic temptress of innocents", for mere hyperbole, and failed to recognize it as the precise, if metaphorical, description which it is. If you have so mistaken me, then I hope this comment helps to clear up the matter somewhat.
That's a lot of babies. And a disconcerting number of deaths as well. I'm also surprised the number of mocking birds getting killed by cats isn't that far from the number of humans dying.
You get used to it, just like you do with doors and all the other things designed with righty's in mind.
When I saw HN in the list, I was afraid to enter an infinite loop if I clicked the link
The Coming Problem With Electric Cars--How to Charge Them All
https://telegram.org/

You have the option to use a second layer of encryption (via OTR), even without OTR it's encrypted... but it offers OTR for the more paranoid of folk.

It even advertises as a WhatsApp private alternative.
What trouble? I haven't had any issues so far, maybe if you want to play games at that resolution it would be a problem.
JIRA vs GitHub
I have to say that i really dislike JIRA. It's overblown in features and the UX is a total disaster. I am currently in the process of recommending to my Boss to switch to GitHub Enterprise, because it feels streamlined, light and focused.

Now i wonder why these 5 points are mentioned on the Atlassian page. Are these known issues/weak points of Github? Or is this just marketing blah-blah?
There's this idea that tests can be written by non-programmers (QA, business SMEs, etc.) which may be the motivator for this. Just a guess.

I used a framework called FitNesse which was awful but which was built around this idea that tests could all be specified in spreadsheets and managed by non-technical folks.