skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're target market initially is those with cash / who can afford it upfront, though they do offer leasing.

Once they have the $30k version then it will be attractive to most everyone, including with leasing options.
So, let's exaggerate the bad of PM tools, ex. "Tasks hierarchy to the 5th level", and let's fly to the other extreme as some sort of saving grace.

I've been in three startups. We typically use Kanban boards in a simple way to, ironically, show purpose (think of Osterwalder's book but on Trello), communicate (distributed individuals across timezones), keep focus (tops board) and alignment (hey everyone, the tops all work together!). It doesn't directly help with hiring, except maybe to show we aren't mismanaging ourselves. Nothing scarier to someone taking a chance on a startup than to not see a cohesive picture...

Has nothing to do with micromanagement. But, I understand from experience that there isn't one magical unicorn to ride to success. This has worked for me with one successful exit so far, one imminent and a third going strong.
Are you looking for Freelance work? (Ruby on Rails)
Are you are a Ruby on Rails freelancer looking for work?

I'm looking for super talented rails developers to help me out with some projects.

I have a couple potentially large scale projects on the table and I simply cannot do them entirely by myself so I could use some extra help!

That said, If you are a talented/passionate rails developer and you're looking for freelance work feel free to send me an email at pblogsltd@gmail.com and let's chat!

Thanks!
Hugin – Panorama photo stitcher
It helps to sell drugs.
There's a world of difference between a web server handling each requests within ~1-30 ms and a game simulating the entire world made from thousands of entities under ~16ms.

It is very possible to write games in high-level languages, but you will lose at least half the compute power of the machine by doing so. Note that unless you're writing a Gears of Wars, you don't really need such performance and productivity wins once again.
Idris's types system is both more advanced and simpler than Haskell's. For example, "vanilla" Haskell's type system implements (amongst other things) functions, records, parametric polymorphism and typeclasses. Idris implements (amongst other things) dependent functions and dependent records.

Idris doesn't need to support (non-dependent) functions or parametric polymorphism, since they're just special-cases of dependent functions. Likewise, typeclasses are just special-cases of dependent records.

When we consider Haskell extensions, many of them are designed to introduce dependently-typed idioms (eg. DataKinds). This makes Idris automatically simpler, since it supports those idioms directly and doesn't have to offer all of the non-dependent parts of Haskell.

On the other hand, typical Haskell programs may use types in a simpler way than typical Idris programs, but that's a separate point. We can focus on simple programs while learning.
/r/AskReddit thread: What is the stupidest product that made it big?
Focusing on the Israeli market probably makes a lot of business sense, for the reasons you say. Parent commenter's point is that once you've made that (sensible) choice, there's no need, for that market, to focus on increasing the range between charges, because that market doesn't need increased range, that's not what will help you succeed in that market.
> Since the pre-Internet era, there hasn’t been much work in general-purpose tools for non-programmers, but from what I’ve seen that might change soon.

What startups might he be referring to?
You're so unreal.If you don't stop I might give you. give you.

you know.

pleasure.and you will like it,
This. Right here. This. The worst part about it is that even organizations started by the "scrappy" guys are only running after the "ib" types. And the transition seemed very quick.

This article made me wretch because the last thing I want to see is a bunch of silver spoon idiots calling themselves entrepreneurs. I was in a fraternity, which has a high chance of attracting entitled heirs, and it was the dumbest choice I'd ever made. Very very few of them had a shred of originality, ingenuity, or fire...and lacking these traits kept them out of entrepreneurship.

But now...there's an organization that would look at these type of people (high grades, family connections that would count even though no one will admit it, pizaz appearance, etc) and fund them. Yeah this is no challenge to YC. I don't agree with all of their selection processes but at least they look for traction and authenticity.
Right now I sit through the second week of non-stop iOS crash logs of our Unity game, which are opaque, unclear and mysterious for the most part, and I can't agree more.
'Start Small' but what is Small?
Note that you'll need a language capable of AOT compilation if you want to target consoles which only run signed code (or use an interpreter, which will be rather slow). JIT is not an option on those systems.
Could you link me to the mailing list for the Roundabout? I've joined a Meetup or two, but haven't found this list.
This is not surprising given British history. Culturally there is an overhanging bias towards credentials and elitism, however I get the strong feeling (as an American Co-Founder living in London the past 2 years) that things are definitely moving in the right direction here. Whereas Silicon Valley with its general west-coast counter cultural history is much more accepting but probably moving in the wrong direction as "startups" are mainstreamed and investors are looking for some signal in the noise of all the wannabes.

As usual though, successful founders must find their own way, and if they are dependent on being given a shot by some gatekeeper they probably never had much chance to be a successful entrepreneur anyway.
I wouldn't say it failed spectacularly, quite the opposite.

OK, tools for the complete non-programmer maybe. Those are vaporware anyway. But tools for people with domain knowledge to do a little bit of programming were hugely successful. Visual Basic (pre .NET) is the best example. Click together a GUI, add a bit of Databinding, and write some business logic in BASIC. Spreadsheets are another, and they are a gateway drug to VBA. To a lesser extent the .NET ecosystem with XAML and so on falls into this category, too.

Another example was Flash. Artists could make little videos with the vector graphics tools (which are still pretty unique in how you can "paint" vector graphics). You could then animate them and make little movies, and add simple interactive features. Then you could add some ActionScript (~Javascript) to get more complex behavior and make litte games.

I'd say this kind of programming-language-light was hugely successful. Visual Basic, Access, and the likes, and the huge collection of commercial ActiveX controls was probably one of the most overlooked reasons for Microsoft's dominance in the late 90s. Millions of small businesses used MS products and small programs to generate reports, form letters, and so on. And the lasting legacy of Flash is probably the indy-gaming scene that is really successful nowadays (the other drive for that scene comes from mobile apps, which ironically was a main source of Flash's demise).

I don't know why this kind of programming tool slowly faded away. Maybe because people realized that it can cause huge maintenance headaches. Maybe because there is more supply of "proper" developers now. But I guess if someone built a decent IDE and allowed you to click together apps in a high-level fashion (and without boilerplate code!) and using Javascript or Python, it could be a success even today.
> Not for general purpose programming anyway.

> Spreadsheets and SQL.

Those aren't democratized. Other examples like Matlab or Mathematica come to mind, where you use a domain language to simplify the programming model drastically.
What can programming language research learn from the philosophy of science?
It pops out every once in awhile.

Two months ago I've used sockets. ...again! :D
Users won't get that. Hell I'm a layman (security wise) and I don't get that.

I do get a shiny icon that says sign-in and it pops a window that says I should login with given info.

EDIT: Thanks for downvotes, but I'm trying to demonstrate that those that use authentication won't really understand or value the complex background/guarantees of Persona.
Akamai admits its OpenSSL patch was faulty, reissues keys
Sure, yacht pretty much just means a fancy recreational boat, and has existed as a word since when most of them were wind-powered, some still are.
Innovation, Intellectual Property and Law
that's a great idea. get together a community who will each publish an update/demo on their project each week on the same thread. I'd certainly be up for joining in; it might shame me out of letting side-projects sit untouched for a month at a time.
GRUB2, and optionally tboot for "anti evil-maid" (http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/09/anti-evil-mai...).
STEM Education as a solution to Youth Unemployment in Africa
Sorry if I came across as arguing that Mozillans care more about money than about the great things you mentioned.

But one doesn't need to care a lot about money in order for money to become a major factor, perhaps unconsciously, in your long-term decision-making. I remember there being public anxiety whenever there was doubt about whether Google would renew the search deal. Over time, that kind of anxiety takes a toll. Perhaps it's less of a concern for ordinary employees, but top-level executives definitely think about money a lot. $300M/yr is a lot of money to take for granted.
http://builditwith.me/ has been around for a while but without much success
Powerbar Sports Nutrition Supplements
"Danny Dorling, professor of geography at Oxford University, says we have six times more "stuff" than the generation before us."

I run a storage business and I can say that this is no longer the case with the younger generation. We used to store boxes of CDs, Videos, 14" Colour TVs, Desktop Computers, Hifis. Now all this is in a laptop and mobile phone, which people just take with them. We now insist on up-front payment as the items people store are worthless to sell.

90% of what we store is now boxes/suitcases of clothes and books.
"Software is eating software" is true, but not good. It's not good at all.

Take a look at the manner in which so many companies use project management software like Jira: to create a Big Brother system. Developer's velocity drops below 15 "story points" per week? There's your bad guy! Some companies use time-tracking software (designed to help an individual manage her own time better, and certainly not to abuse workers) to take micromanagement to a new level. Then there's LinkedIn, which may have been started with good intent but makes it astronomically more difficult for people to reinvent themselves (giving even more power to corporate management, which is thus empowered to fuck with peoples' careers long after they leave).

The real bad guys have been using us (programmers) for decades to wage their war on the workers. That's most of what they want us to do. Our effective purpose is not build flying cars or cure cancer, but to vaporize jobs for the poor and deliver the proceeds, efficiently, to the rich. Since we are also workers (we're the upper-working class) it's not surprising that we'd see our own weapons used on us.
It's easier than rolling your own, which is what most Windows developers do. It's strange that Windows still doesn't provide this for desktop applications.

Also, VS pro is something that a Windows developer could already have. I do not agree to pirating it, though - but MS do provide it for free/cheap if you jump through a few hoops.
The Model S is a great deal compared to similar cars, but this list is just silly. He is an economist that just goes through and picks the highest trim level of 9 different cars, and then decides to compare them based solely on cost to the Model S.

I contend that a $22,195 Subaru would win this contest hands down. If you want this comparison to be believable compare like vehicles. Don't just compare the car you want to theMostExpensiveHondaICouldSpecOut.
Time and State are first class constructs in UnrealScript, they are not in C++.

It's also possible to recompile UnrealScript files without recompiling the whole C++ program which took quite a while. (Unreal4 allows hot reloading C++ so this is no longer an issue.)
It's also a great example of the general principle that it's good business to try and figure out how to disproportionately leverage public resources.

Say police protection and property enforcement was privatized. Under such circumstances, the cost of security for a storage facility would be substantial. But in a society where the public pays for security, it's "free" to create a business that presents an outsized target for thieves.
The UK's GCHQ is just as interested in nabbing Snowden as the NSA.
Developers keep pushing the envelope to make tools easier to use and people keep coming up with increasingly complex requirements.

Neither side is ever content.
Although not a quick read, the go-to analysis of this is "Entrepreneurs Are the New Labor" [^1].

On this theory, the balance of power has shifted to investors, who prefer founders from an institution. And perhaps a certain generation of young adults welcomes this sort of structure more than others might.

Which isn't to say that incubators don't have great value for many people. They do. But they're not the only way to go about starting many businesses, you're correct.

[^1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...
> 1. By default, there is no need for an attacker to find a local exploit to get root--the user account has unrestricted password-less sudo authorization. This is one of the things I disagree with the developers about.

I've been using qubes for a little while myself. I agree that it should be harder to go from domU user to domU root. However I think having to manage passwords for every AppVM also negates a lot of the benefits of the template setup in qubes (I currently have about 30 AppVMs).

My ideal solution to this problem, which I might implement at some point, would be to implement a PAM module for domU that asks dom0 whether escalation to root is okay. That way, dom0 can prompt the user whether to allow it or not, and no per-AppVM passwords have to be remembered.
No, just pointing out that processed silicon does not cost Intel anything close to $1000.

Also I doubt R&D cost for an electric motor is high because the technology is mature.
OpenSignal Creates Crowdsourced Sensor Network
For those in machine learning and programming languages, what would be the major hurdles in achieving voice programming (or at least scripting). A way to interact with a computer so that one could ask things like:

"Computer, search google's rss news for arduino articles. Sort them by lenght, in the top 100 results search for the world circuit. Copy paste the paragraphs containing those results into a text file. Send it to Jane".

Is it really that far? Wouldn't such a program enable some kind of programming for non-coders (of course assuming one would need to learn some rules, and have a clear idea of what one was looking for).
This idea has a /lot/ of use cases. I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a business out of it -- maybe you allow public collaborations free, and charge to take it private.

It'd sink or swim on the details of the UI, though, and I have frankly no idea how to get those right. Lots of painstaking user testing, presumably.
Use JavaScript to convert Markdown files to RSS feed
In the content driven website (like a blog for example), the writing should be easy and fluent. Markdown language gives us the simplicity that we need. However, sometimes converting .md files to .html files is not enough. Techy is an instrument that uses Markdown as a base, but also makes your pages programmable
> yes electric motors need oil changes too

"Oil change" for an electric motor is fundamentally nothing like the oil change you do for an internal combustion engine. A piston engine operates at much higher temperatures, and cannot fully isolate leakage from oil compartment, causing a tiny amount of oil to get burned with fuel as it operates.

"Oil change" in an electric motor is much more like lubricating other moving parts of the car or other machinery, not the engine of a gasoline car.

In addition to that, an electric car (at least the Model S), is much much simpler in design. The motor is basically connected directly to the wheels, removing a ton of parts in the process. It's simpler to start and simpler to cool. Yes, it can still break, but it's much more similar to your hard drive failing than your traditional car.
> do we see the same trends in that there is a high-level in Mathematics where new theories are being created but a lower level where a large amount of people use tools to apply these new theories?

Definitely.

If you allow more longer-running examples, this is exactly the situation of calculus. The Calc I-III that many use regularly is the application; Real Analysis is the theory. Ditto for any "applied" sort of math you can think of (stats, crypto, machine learning, etc. -- all basically just use theorems which are the "abstract interfaces" to pure mathematics.)

> we never fully mastered teaching how to come up with abstractions and new models

And we never will, as long as the human race continues progressing :-)
Passwords are Obsolete
Typeclasses in Scala
A central hub for home improvement. I just bought a house and I don't know a damn thing about maintaining it. I can't find a good central resource on the internet. I'm stuck with random YouTube videos and Google searches.

I want a sort of wiki with examples for different home maintenance jobs. It must have good, reputable information and high-quality videos. I would pay a monthly sub for this kind of service.
Personally I would rather just use "ssh -R", the built in remote port forwarding. You either need to flip a setting on the server to allow listening on an interface besides localhost, or configure Nginx/etc as a reverse proxy.

For example:

ssh -f -N -q -R 2222:localhost:22 my_name@remote.example.com

Decent writeup here:

http://www.noah.org/wiki/SSH_tunnel
One of the developers posted about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582316
+1, I am a huge fan of ngrok. :)
If you are on a *nix machine you can run:

wget -rkp -l3 -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 http://www.blurofinsanity.com/mit/lockpick.html

If on mac os you'll need to brew install wget or follow this tutorial to use curl http://psung.blogspot.com/2008/06/using-wget-or-curl-to-down...

After you've downloaded the website you can run a simple server in a terminal by navigating to where you downloaded the website and running

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Then navigate to http://0.0.0.0:8000/lockpicking.html in your web browser.

LPT: I do this with coding tutorial sites before getting on planes so I don't waste money buying internet and time browsing other content.
A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5
New Commission study identifies Europe's top ICT hubs
Rebooting India
The Art of ‘Something From Nothing’
At least we have one thing going for us. If you fail a Goldman Sachs interview, you don't get to work at Goldman Sachs. If YC or some other accelerator rejects you, you can still go and start your startup and succeed anyway. In fact YC specifically says that if you make acceptance a deciding factor in deciding whether to do a startup, you'll probably fail.

In the end, startups only succeed only if enough people like their product enough to pay for it. So what if there are now accelerators targeting "non-scrappy" guys?
If you have any questions regarding Google's activity in DC don't hesitate to send an e-mail to these addresses:

rachelw@google.com
lawyercat@google.com
I think all of the complications with your proposal can be eliminated if you change "float y;" to "float<positive> y;". If you tell the compiler what type you actually want to use, it will check all of the constraint propagation for you. This is exactly what Haskell, ML, Idris and friends will do. In fact, in Haskell and ML you would be better off leaving out the declarations altogether; the compiler would spot that you've used "fabs", so it will infer "float<positive>", and unify this with the "float<positive>" argument of "sqrt". In Idris, you could declare that the fabs function converts "float" to "float<positive>" and it would automatically insert calls to fabs when you try passing floats to sqrt.

No need for runtime checks/errors, no need to solve the halting problem, etc.
900 social insurance numbers stolen from Revenue Canada via Heartbleed
The 'select' statement does more than just multiplex (and it doesn't really multiplex since you can't do it over a slice of channels). It allows blocking on any one of a set of send or receive operations. This is similar to the select(2) system call in BSD

Spec: http://golang.org/ref/spec#Select_statements
Samsung's YOUM flexible display uses graphene, I believe, but I don't think they've used that in a product yet.
I agree, people should think of an electric motor oil change more like changing transmission fluid or gear oil than a 3k mile oil change.
Windows Phone 8.1 review: a magnificent smartphone platform
I think of PM tools like I think of guns. Guns aren't bad things, innately. Police need them, in many places, for self-defense. Thousands of lives are saved annually by avalanche shootdowns using very large guns. On the other hand, I wouldn't want a gun to be in my place of work... especially not if it's pointed at me by someone just waiting for my "velocity" to drop so he can shoot me in the head.

I don't know that PM tools are inherently bad or even useless. I do know, from observation, that most uses of them are negative. You don't hear talented programmers jumping for joy when they hear that their jobs will depend on their ability to haggle for story points. This stuff might turn 0.5x developers into marginally employable 1.0x, but it brings the 10x way down.

Finally, this Tweet from @SwearengenCD: https://twitter.com/SwearengenCD/status/56070701622374400

"If God made the earth with a PM, we'd have 100 small piles of dirt, each completed in a 4-hour coding increment, but no fucking planet."
If you folks have used this technique for years as I believe it has been stated, any particular reason why it wasn't contributed back to OpenSSL earlier?
This seems so… retarded. "YC 'zigs', so we're going to 'out-zig' them?" Seriously?

Someone should try 'zagging' and seek older people with this kind of enthusiasm to develop startups. With their real-world experience and domain knowledge, I bet the kinds of companies experienced people create would be a lot more interesting. And, in aggregate, more successful.

-old(er) and cranky entrepreneur.
The LuaJIT interpreter is surprisingly fast. Still not as fast as the JIT or an AOT compiled language though...
Show HN: The Average Cost of a Like on Facebook
Right, because people aren't building real systems with Python and Ruby. We're just building toy systems, duh! Scripting language is a pejorative.
+1 for using Node to provision Node apps. I have messed with flightplan and think it is awesome. It inspired me to make something that is a bit more like puppet (plugin based packaging, with helpers for common provisioning tasks) but in node (https://github.com/wesleytodd/wombat).

This is after two tries to get my company over to a Vagrant based setup, once using puppet and a second using bash scripts. Unfortunately neither got us off the ground fast enough to make it viable.
You had to post that right when Huginn is on the front page too, right? ;-)
I had a 10x20' storage unit for years -- it was full of all the stuff you mentioned - CDs, stereo, furniture, an astoundingly heavy 34" tube TV... All the media went digital (with multiple backups!) and everything else was either sold on Craigslist, donated, or hauled away to the landfill. Now I can move by just renting a small trailer.