skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sort of does, by denying that "changing everyday life" is the relevant metric.

If we're going to measure progress, first we need to agree on a metric. Different metrics will produce different results. But a quick perusal of some alternative metrics:

* How much more do we understand about the world now than we did, and how much of this knowledge is used by engineers in technology?

* How many more bits (from an information theoretic standpoint) does it take to describe our technology? (Probably my favorite, as it most directly captures what I think most people are getting at. Not perfect, though, as it's not true that more bits > less bits... however, that's a decent first approximation given the scale involved.)

* How much do certain things cost in man-hours, then vs. now? (For instance, see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10cox.html?_r=1... )

Given the wide variety of other far more useful metrics, "how much has my everyday life changed" should be rather far down on the list of metrics you want to use. By most useful metrics, technology progress has indeed accelerated and continues to accelerate. That we have a bit of an intermediate area here where we're putting together the necessary bits to really open up the throttle again shouldn't be that surprising; robotics, nanotechnology, and biological technology are not easy things... but we're getting there, one bit at a time. And those things will further open up other secondary effects, like private space travel being both practical and useful (for resource extraction). I don't think it's unreasonable that we'll get at least one good energy breakthrough either, probably either an alternative fusion technology or practical satellite solar power of some sort (though that may be 15 or 20 years off, the technology necessary is a fairly simple extrapolation of existing trends, not requiring any magic).

Enjoy this moment of apparent quiet, where all the action is on the Internet. There's perhaps 10 more years of it, then things are going to be exciting again. (And it's not a hard transition, so you may still not notice it unless you look for it. But it's already happening, just slowly.)
A CD isn't just a CD, that there is some implied contract that limits use.

Well, no. You should be able to do anything you want with that CD. The music on it, however, is covered by copyright, which should be protected on some level.

As far as actual copyright law, I agree that duplicating a CD and selling it is bad. I feel that duplicating a CD and giving it to your friend to hear is good (and reasonable). Some place in the middle lies taking parts of the music and creating new music out of it, which is where I find rather murky. At what point does it become too much of a sample, or at what point should royalties be owed?
What would python add that Javascript doesn't already let you do? Granted it can make programming easier in my opinion, but think of the complexity it would add. Any major website would need to either have two versions of their code (one JS, one Python), or more likely just use Javascript (you can't turn away visitors because their browser doesn't support your favorite language)
Unfortunately, this doesn't work with cloudfront, so you have to put the uniq string as part of the file/key name
Generally around 11 am for a few hours and then again from maybe 6-10. I try to get to bed by 1:30 and wake up around 8:30.

If I don't eat and have coffee I'm like a monster.
Agile Project Management: Project Dashboards
"Living abroad challenges you in ways that are very hard to find at home."

Totally agree. Once you've done a job interview in another language, or worked with foreign colleagues, you'll have new insights into the way companies work in your home country and confidence to tackle things you wouldn't have dreamed of doing before.

One downside to living abroad: In some industries you lose some networking juice and connections that you would have otherwise built had you stayed at home. That's mainly a concern for people who work in industries which don't value overseas experience or connections.
Internet complicates doctor-patient relationships
Interesting perspective.. I'm looking forward to his talk at start-up school.
I didn't pretend it was new. I was wrapping more context around it, so that it was less "follow this magical recipe" and more "here's why you should do this" (and also "here's a bit on why so many people end up doing this wrong thing"), though a full accounting of HTTP caching would be much longer. I also pointed out similar other things in the comments made by other people.
I'm vertical (seems like the only commenter who is, at the moment). I like to keep my desk spare; a cluttered desk tends to clutter my thoughts.

But, in general, I despise any paper to keep track of anything.

My desk consists of laptop, 30" monitor, and a moleskine. I keep notes in Evernote, keep track of lists in Google tasks, and in general, try to digitize everything.

In a digital world, it's less relevant if you're vertical or horizontal. I keep all my thoughts a click away, which does away with the "out of sight out of mind" syndrome.
I guess my only question is: can I replace my cell phone with this? I'm not terribly voice-heavy on my phone (a 3G), but I don't want to have two devices. Can I leave skype running to receive calls in the background? Is there another/better way?
I get his point, and agree with it. In hindsight, I think I was responding more to the underlying theme of nearly every 37signal blog post.
Chinese carriers rip a page from the Apple playbook for mobile app stores
maybe you should go an read this thread ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795622
> The author fails to see that we know more about astronomy in the last 2 years than the previous 10.

I'm only familiar with popular writing about astronomy, but really? What are the major developments in astronomy in the last two years?
Getting redirected to http://sdf.lonestar.org/
Where is this article/tool?
Really, we're not talking about being the gatekeepers to the iPhone, Apple is the gatekeeper to the App Store, nothing more. It doesn't seem that big of a deal for Apple to continue to review applications for the App Store, but allow another method (short of jailbreaking) to add non-reviewed apps to your phone too.
If you are going to have servers, backups and other items that are both mission critical and environmentally sensitive then you need space that is air conditioned, expandable, properly sized for power and lockable. Unless you are both a licensed electrician and a trained HVAC engineer I guarantee you that whatever assumptions you have about servers and their power loads, heat signatures and space requirements are wrong.

Unless you are planning on hiring full time IT staff, you probably don't want to build your own datacenter. If you think you are going to get much much bigger (server wise) then you might want to look into buying a small (but expandable) amount of rackspace in a datacenter. This will place all server infrastructure issues at somebody elses feet.

If you think that you'll buy three or four servers and not expand beyond that for the life of the business, it's probably a good idea to simply modify a large closet (> 150 sf) for AC, UPS, power, etc... But if you think you are ever going to have more servers then that you need to think about expansion now.

If the servers are critical to your business then you'll thank me later...
Tell HN: Am hosting a meetup for 40 journalists in Chicago. Hackers welcome
Why server guys like jQuery
Oh sweet! Now we just need emacs to render the ascii art when displaying it in a code comment, similar to what the AUCTeX latex-mode does for equations.
If they're looking for fame, and they get the fame they want - then they're a success - no?

But if their aim is money, but they use fame based metrics (number of page views, number of users, amount of publicity) - thats where the problem arises.
Sudoku solver in SQL
Money is overrated, it is pretty easy to survive in the world. Consider that coming from a western country, you have command over the English language, an education more than half the world doesn't have, and a passport.

60% of the people the world alone would kill just to have your passport.

That's awesome your friend is doing that, I traveled through India myself. Money is easy.
There are lots of journalists in Chicago working on different forward-thinking media projects. Several of them and I decided to rent out a bar and invite them all out for drinks this Thursday.

We'd love to get some technology people out there as well, especially if you're interested in news, transparency and journalism.
What, that successful technology entrepreneurship isn't a potion doled out in little bottles by the gatekeepers in Waltham and Sand Hill Road? That you can apply the same common sense that bike shop owners and building contractors do, reach Internet-scale success, and not live in a sleeping bag on your friend's floor while you do it?
I was just making a satirical joke. I know how he was treated by the government, and I'm sorry if I caused offense. What annoys me is what he could have accomplished in the field of robotics if he hadn't been wrongly treated.
At midnight when I go hunting the man eaters of Bengal Sunderbans
No. The fame is a delusion. If you're trying to get famous behind entrepreneurship, your businesses have to succeed, or you stop being famous --- or you wind up Scoble Famous, which may be even worse.

The subtext is good though. Fame of any sort is highly, highly overrated.
8 of the Most Dangerous Places (To Live) on the Planet
The Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act of 2009
Knight News Challenge offers up to $5 Million for community news innovation
Why didn't the routing servers come back online after they cleared their queue?
Twice now, I have deliberately gone cold turkey on caffeine for a few weeks. Both times, the results were the same: 3 days lost to caffeine withdrawal headaches, followed by no noticeable differences in anything.

Also, when I got back on caffeine, I noticed nothing. And I should've been my most caffeine sensitive then. If I did a seriously huge dosage, I'd have shaky hands, but otherwise nothing. I wasn't more alert or awake or hyper or anything.

Caffeine does supposedly have Ritalin-like effects on ADHD kids, so maybe I'm ADD and don't know it.
He left out my absolute favorite, Expandrive. Lets you map any Linux host as a drive letter via sftp. If your box has SSH, it is good to go:
http://www.expandrive.com/windows
I've been at jobs with small monitors and crappy chairs and I've been at jobs with small monitors and good chairs. I've also been at jobs with good large monitors and crappy chairs. If you offered me the choice of an Aeron Chair and a 30" cinema display, I'll take the chair. For software and network engineering related tasks, the single biggest enhancement of productivity is a good comfortable chair. The Aeron chair fits this bill.

But that doesn't, per se, mean that a good solid monitor isn't also a help. After 20 years in IT, I'd rate Apple in the top three for monitor quality.
How we built "How's my code" in 48 hours (time-lapse video)
By definition there is not a single business that is profitable from day one. A plumbing business isn't profitable until the tools and vehicles have been paid for.

The important consideration is the size of the deficit (in time or money or ownership) a company accepts and what they gain in exchange. And the bigger the deficit, the higher the stakes.
Maybe it's not important "always", but it's important most of the time. People forget that there were thousands of other web startups who tried to "get big fast" at the same time that Amazon did. They're dead now.

If you're the one in a billion for whom "get big fast" works, it's a great outcome. But for everyone else, the other model works a lot more reliably.
But why the fuck would you want to blow down a windmill? Apart from the visuals and the twanging as the blades hit the ground.
There's a reason for this phenomenon. It might be misguided in this particular case, but there is a reason that it exists. It's the same reason that everyone here loves businesses based on technology. It's the same reason that VCs are willing to invest millions of dollars in nascent companies which will, in all likelihood, fail in the near future. It's the same reason I spend my evenings working on my own startup.

The reason is scalability.

My dad was always shocked that investors valued the last startup I worked for in the tens of millions of dollars while we were losing money. He's worked in construction his whole life for firms that do on the order of $100MM in revenue per year. Like all construction firms, however, their margins are razor thin. Their revenue doesn't grow much faster than their costs (employees and materials, primarily).

A construction company that loses money is not going to be worth $50MM any time soon. A tech company with similar financials might be. A tech company might take a while to get their technology right. But when they do, they can leverage it. Their revenues can grow far faster than their costs. Software as a product scales better than just about anything I can think of. Software businesses often go from slightly in the red to huge annual profits in very little time.

Everyone in tech is trying to find the Next Big Thing. This includes us (entrepreneurs), the media, and investors. In the case of the media, they're just trying to be the first ones to break the next big story, as usual. Just like investors, if they want to succeed, they have to be willing to take risks. They have to bet on companies that look like they have potential. Sometimes they're wrong. But in those rare cases where it pays off, it usually pays off big.

Other industries lack this quality. In other industries 1 success is not going to make up for 10 failures. In technology you make money by picking winners before everyone else. It's somewhat of a crap shoot. But the bar is low because the potential reward is high.
If the government funded Wikipedia, nobody would trust its neutrality.
Giant Hello Kitty robots which shoot heart-shaped laser beams from their eyes.

And yes, in Japan that is considered a practical spinoff.
What the author misses is phones present dangers and costs that PCs don't. So his philosophy of "we've gotten by in the past and our PCs never had a review process" doesn't hold up.

In fact, it ignores the fact that a large percentage of the computers out there are part of one botnet or another. On the desktop it isn't that big a hindrance since high speed connections are cheap and unlimited. But if we open cell phones up to the same risk you're going to see serious consequences.

Forget bots pushing spam, forget monstrous phone bills, imagine a cell phone trojan that actually launches calls. It's a lot easier to create an effective DoS attack against phone lines.

There's a reason why even open leaning Google has a review process for their app store.
I bootstrapped a consulting business, and didn't have any savings at all to do it. I had to be profitable from day one.

I did not even have a laptop at the time (for network diagnostics and the like) -- I just had my experience.

I've had to learn an awful lot about resource management as a result of doing it this way, and I'm grateful for that.
No, that it's easy and obvious and a certain amount of luck has nothing to do with it.

EDIT: Or maybe it's just the "We know the best way to do everything" attitude.

I admire their success, but not the condescension. I might be the only one here, but not the only one.
Since the article doesn't actually address that question, I'll just point out that the weather may be intractable, but it's not incentivized to change your predictions as soon as they're made.
Especially diffable version control! Better than adding an image for code documentation. Although SVGs are also decent in this regard, they'd be slightly overkill.
That's a question many people would like the answer to.

It's related to a funny story that goes like this:

What if Bach had died before writing the WTK, then that music would not exist today, but all of us would be totally free to come up with it. Since Bach did live to write the WTK we don't have to wonder what it would be like if it did not exist.

Now what other stuff would he have done if he had lived even longer...

The problem with such thought experiments is that even though in theory we can come up with all the music that a composer would have written had they lived several hundred years longer in practice we probably will never do that because we are not that composer.

For art this is easy enough because we readily admit to an artist bringing something unique to the table, why else would an 'original' be worth a load of money (it's uniqueness being the direct consequence of the hand of the master). For scientific things that is a lot less clear.

I'm sure plenty of stuff will be invented anyway, no matter who comes up with it the first time. But that may not be true for all scientific ideas.
I never found that buying forgotten toiletries and crap was a very stressful experience.
If the satellite is geosynchronous, the shadow is moving at over a thousand km/h.
Ugh, we've been through this before. Significant technological innovations take 30 years to recognize as significant so there's always a bias when looking at the recent past. It's a measurement artifact, not reality.
Yes, you can replace your cell phone with this, especially if you're not a heavy user. Maemo multitasks apps as well as runs services in the background, just like any computer. As the article points out, Skype specifically is fully integrated: Cellural calls, Skype calls, Google Talk calls, SIP calls all use the same phone user interface.
I would argue that prostitution is profitable from day one..
FireCrystal - "rewinds" web page interactions & shows code
I'm having a hard time up modding you for this comment on this site.
Not really.

Most authors go after fame. Not money. A New York Times bestseller status is 100 times more meaningful than the low royalty fees they may earn.

Most non-profits and social movements (eg: http://blogactionday.org/) aim for fame and/or making a difference too.

R. Buckminster Fuller never chased money. He went for making a difference. And (I think) he achieved that.

J.P. Morgan was one more guy who aimed for fame more than money. He made a shit load of money too. But people were surprised after his death that he wasn't the richest person of his generation (everyone thought he was...)

Different folks have different wants and measure success differently.
technically, I don't think that's quite true; a company can book profits even as it's paying off a loan which is bigger than the profits or even than total turnover as long as (operational cash flow) - (interest payments) > 0.

I think it's perfectly possible for, say, a company funded by VCs to be profitable from the start of operations, since the money that bought the equity isn't expected to be paid back.
Correction: Welsh mathematician William Jones first used "pi" to refer to this particular number in 1706, not Euler. Before then it was called the Ludolphian number.
I think this article is wrong for three reasons. Products can be successful without businesses being successful. Success is determined by meeting your own goals. Acquiring paying customers is a business success.

A piece of software can be very popular and successful, even if there is no direct business correlation.

Not everything can be easily correlated. Even 37signals own rails isn't being charged for in many situations. How much extra value has giving away rails done for 37signals? Giving some things away for free can be considered a marketing expense... an expense where you get to do what you like best - making software.

If a painting doesn't sell for a lot of money, is it a successful painting?

Seriously... there's lots of software bringing joy, and helping people do stuff - not all of it has to be making money.

If the business plan is to make something cool, then eventually pay off the investment... then that's a success. Success is merely meeting of goals.

So this company, has made something people like and use, and also give them money for. They are also on their path to paying back their investment, and gotten a lot of cred, press, and customers in the meantime.

Software companies almost always make multiple products. So gaining a lot of customers with early products is a great way to bootstrap things. Then the software company can more easily sell stuff to their existing customers.

They've met their own criteria for success and other peoples.

So this article misses out on how a product can be a popular success without the business being a financial success. It also misses out on how, if they are meeting their goals they are a success. Finally it misses the business goal of acquiring customers who like what they do and pay them money... in their first product.

In this case the New York Times has more of a leg to stand on than 37signals.
Would you be surprised if I told you the author of this article was willing to sell you the answer?
How to donate your PC's spare processing power
"beaming the electricity from space through the ionosphere"

What could possibly go wrong?
Also, for those of you that don't know, Brad (brandnewlow) founded the excellent Chicago news site, Windy Citizen:

http://www.windycitizen.com
Also, if you're not permanently ensconced in your present office space, having space in a data center means a move without moving your servers (except, of course, for the network portion) It is as close to painless move as you can get...
If anyone here has any thoughts on something else to tune or play with, let me know. Overall, the experience of buying an Ad on Facebook was far better than my very limited experience with Adsense.
I'm also a crank.

So is Rails core member Yehuda Katz.

So is Rails core member Josh Peek.

So is Rails core member Jeremy Kemper.

Calling Ryan "the extreme odd one out" is a) untrue and b) unfair.
With all respect to 37Signals, havent they said it n-number of times, and we have had the same discussion on HN n+m-number of times
Yes, there are limits to what we can do with any copyrighted material we purchase, but the argument is that those limits should be enshrined in copyright law and nowhere else. There does not need to be any licensing beyond that at all nor as the argument goes any limits beyond it.
The blog entry cited in the submitted article:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/us-news-college...

There is a freely readable version of the article discussed in the blog post here:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bastedo/papers/BowmanBastedo....

"Using admissions data for top-tier institutions from fall 1998 to fall 2005, we found that moving onto the front page of the U.S. News rankings provides a substantial boost in the following year’s admissions indicators for all institutions. In addition, the effect of moving up or down within the top tier has a strong impact on institutions ranked in the top 25, especially among national universities. In contrast, the admissions outcomes of liberal arts colleges--particularly those in the lower half of the top tier--were more strongly influenced by institutional prices."

So high list price serves as a signal to some families that a second-rank college may be a better college than some other college with a similar rank, putting pressure on all colleges in that echelon to raise their list prices.