skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I too have had this impression.

For a long time I've been very curious about how this kind of king-making occurs and what the underlying political machinery looks like. I don't buy that it's random or organic.

Being a middle class hick from the American Midwest and having attended a regular-tier non-coastal school, it's a bit outside my domain... though I did live in Boston for a while and work a lot around the MIT/Harvard orbit. That gave me a definite sense that there's a caste system at work but not exactly how it works or how one goes about gaining entry (or is tapped for entry). Being admitted to the Right School seems to usually be a prerequisite, though there are exceptions.

I'm not saying Taleb is a fool. He's certainly very interesting, but he's not the only thinker in this field by any stretch of the imagination. People have been talking about this stuff since back in the 60s when it was called cybernetics. Then they called it complexity, dynamical systems, evolvable systems, and so forth. Taleb might have added some things, but he did not found the field any more than Stephen Wolfram founded the study of cellular automata.

I'm not comparing Wolfram and Taleb. Actually I think they're opposites. Wolfram has a lot of money and a big ego (probably bigger than Taleb's), and he certainly is very smart, but his work doesn't seem to have received the nod of the establishment while Taleb's obviously has. Wolfram is more like a tycoon trying to buy his way into a circle that... well... <sniff sniff>... those who are truly in the club would never stoop that low.

Who makes these decisions?

If you look at Taleb's background, he certainly has gone through or at least been affiliated with all the right schools. The top-tier (Ivy League if you're in the USA) academic network is (in my opinion) the most powerful aristocratic network in the modern world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb#Academic_...

I think what fascinates me the most about the aristocratic networks that run through the top-tier universities and their corporate and governmental orbits is how silent they are. You can make kings with millions in paid PR too, but that's noisy and conveys at least some impression that the PR is indeed being "driven." The real power networks of society seem able to make kings with a wink and a nod and it looks completely organic, often giving the impression that these individuals rose to prominence on pure merit and hard work.

Again not saying these individuals don't have merit or that they don't work hard-- I'm sure they do both. But so do millions and millions of other people, and they never get the kind of success the "tapped" or "knighted" see.

P. S. You'd probably find Peter Thiel interesting. He's known for being a skeptic of the whole "fooled by randomness" line of thinking. Search for his name on YouTube and select ">20 minutes" length and you can find many interesting talks. I'm looking forward to his book:

http://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804...

I don't always agree with Thiel, but even when I don't he's one of those people who always makes me think.
you serious?
XKCD responds to this better than I can: http://xkcd.com/397/

That aside, I've yet to see a conclusion on that show that wasn't reasonable.
I don't think it's neo-Luddism. I just think that certain outlets, like Ars, dislike US telecom companies and will seize on most opportunities to criticize them.

Now, US telecom companies aren't very likeable, sure. I'm with them there, as I imagine most people are. But it's not good journalism.
Berdict – Micro movie reviews of 400 characters
A better analogy would be: you shared a web server with 99 other users, splitting the cost 100 ways. Then the provider installed a new, faster server (with marginally smaller uptime -- easily worked around by buying a backup battery), to which all 99 of your fellow customers migrated. You refuse to migrate and want to stay on the old server.

In a free market, the provider would say something like "that's fine, we'll keep maintaining the old server as long as you're willing to pay the costs", where said costs are now 100x of what they previously were, since you're no longer sharing the upkeep. You could then decide yourself if this were really the best use of your resources.

In Verizon's case, though, prices on copper POTS service are regulated and can't be raised to reflect upkeep costs. So when most customers switch to fiber, the money coming in from the few remaining copper customers doesn't actually cover maintenance costs. That means maintenance of the copper network is being subsidized by FiOS customers. Whatever Verizon's other evils (and I agree with you that there are many), a government-mandated transfer of wealth from fiber adopters to copper-clinging Luddites is not good policy.
Etsy practices continuous deployment with whole swaths of code that weren't built using TDD. Using automated monitoring of measurements[1] affords some of the same confidence as automated tests. It's worth saying that having tests and automated monitoring builds even more confidence.

[1] http://codeascraft.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-e...
The timespan between the original Reichskonkordat and this letter was six years. It appeared the Nazi regime did not respect the Vatican, and it became apparent soon that their agreement wasn't going to be upheld as expected by the Nazis. In addition, the differences between Nazism and contemporary fascism (which the Church was mostly supportive of) became more apparent over time and drew some criticism as well.
What does it matter? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Maybe it's cool to hate on this article for being about 100-year-old tech, but the real problem is that Verizon--a piece of the old AT&T monopoly--is right back up to the old AT&T tricks.

Verizon stopped rolling out fiber.

Verizon isn't investing in their old copper network.

Are they losing customers? Not really. For many customers, Verizon is one of maybe two choices. If the other choice is worse, what do you do?

Here's a link about Comcast but it applies: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140602/05510527434/john-...
Imgur was profitable from day 1.

What they are doing now is called greed.
Coining a neologism is an act of linguistic imperialism that helps to link your identity and body of work -- as originator of the neologism -- to a field.

It's worse in some scientific fields than others. I spent a lot of time studying emergence, oh wait I mean complexity, oh wait I mean dissipative structures, self-organizing systems, class IV cellular automata, dynamical systems, chaordic systems, oh screw it. It's really bad in that field.

Things whose parts give rise to second-order behaviors that are not obvious from the structure of the parts themselves.

Yeah that.
My first try was 39556. I actually thought it was too slow to get started, but then it picked up quite a bit near the end.
This is pretty great. Playing it for 30 seconds stressed me out as much as Tetris does, so I immediately closed it. Definitely caught the heady essence of the original.
"Carbohydrates" are not the problem, highly processed industrial food, especially refined sugar, is. Eat some "carbohydrates" (rice, pasta, bread that was not made in a factory), but skip on the sugar.
Ask HN: How to get workers for my crowdsourcing site?
I am thinking of launching a crowdsourcing site that requires workers to install a chrome extension, so far none of the existing crowdsourcing networks allows this, as it goes against their TOS.

So my plan is to build my own crowdsource using PyBossa, an open source platform.

I immediately stumble upon some big problems.

- Where do I get workers? Like 100 to start with.
great game!, please make it multi-user (matches!)
This is correct. We didn't have a word for it before. Robust is not the same thing as antifragile.

Those criticism the term should first say either:

1. What existing word means the same as antifragile, or
2. Why they think robust is equivalent to antifragile
I was a mostly MS guy, but once I moved to the startup/entrepreneurial world moved to multiple non-MS stacks and I'm very happy I did. Yes, the MS tools are really very nice and C# is a wonderful language, but the costs just can't be justified. Moreover, I just don't really miss C#/VS, since I'm having so much fun with Clojure and Haskell. There is certainly something nice about becoming an expert in one ecosystem, but there's also something very fun about constantly trying new ones out and learning from each one. I have become a much, much better developer for having the exposure to multiple ecosystems.
IMO you should lean towards whatever makes you feel productive. There is nothing more self-motivating than being able to build something even if it's just for yourself. No matter what technology you use, you will come up against hurdles, so how does the documentation and community help out? These are much more important than licensing.

As for licensing MS technology, I highly recommend the Bizspark program. You can register a company for $50 at Registres des Entreprises and that's all you need. You will get free licenses for 3 years that you get to keep plus a whole bunch of Azure discounts. BTW, the licensing of Windows and VS are pretty much negligible in any business. SQL server on the other hand is cost prohibitive, but that is where you can use PostgreSQL.

MS is slowly changing, adopting more and more open source, github, mono. I think they are transforming their business from selling licenses to subscriptions (like Office).
Our experience has been that the two things you're asking for---a shallow learning curve for learning to use a game's UI and a UI customized for each game---aren't compatible in practice. We arguably have the latter, a UI customized for each game, right now and it generates no end of confusion because users expect the UI not to change completely between game X and game Y. If you give the module designer broad freedom to alter the UI, then what you get are differences in game UI between games which are down to the designers being different people more than differences between the games themselves.
Imagine if those negative words were coming from someone else.

Imagine how hard you would fight to prove them all wrong.
"I'm not sure how to put it mildly, but I think you might have been scooped on this some 1-2 decades ago..."

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/Jun/136
This couldn't be further from the truth.
It's true. While many think they need to run to Microsoft to get a job, nix applicants have become more scarce and command a higher salary. Now that the world is moving to mobile, where Windows is almost non-existant for devices and far behind world-wide server usage, nix/BSD people will be in more demand.
Maybe depends on the hardware. On a new-ish MacBook pro, it gets too fast to play after 2 minutes or so. A game programming best practice is to hang your game logic and drawing off a timer that runs the same speed regardless of hardware, so it's not too fast on new computers and too slow on old ones.
Ask HN: Ways to get early adopters in US for an iPhone app for movie lovers?
You should probably do some research and find out what language(s) you like (note: there are many languages and stacks outside the MS ecosystem, some of them might be far more fulfilling than what you have experienced so far). In particular, take a look at functional languages and see if you like them. Look at some dynamic languages and see if you get happy with one. Also play with some properly typed languages (ML family and Haskell, for instance) to see how those fair. Then also consider C++ (the widely used, but frankenstein-style language) as it is not as horrible as it used to be. Some new languages might be fun too (I'd suggest looking at Rust, Go, and Clojure). Once you've done that, you can probably have a better picture; without looking at all these, you might be or feel missing out.

That all said, and as you might have already heard, the MS ecosystem is not as wide as many of these, but it is far more unified than most other frameworks.

My own opinion is that you will miss out on new price and competition that is happening outside the MS world, so I recommend having some hands-on experience there if you are serious about starting your own business.
I think if you have the ability to create new files on a remote host, you are already compromised. No need to wait for an Admin mistake.
Miranda rights go well beyond just being able to be silent. You aren't even allowed to be questioned in the interim after you ask for an attorney. You do always have the right to remain silent.

If you aren't in custody, they don't have to provide an attorney and they can keep asking questions.

And custody can be fairly broad, for example a traffic stop doesn't count.
Could you explain it anyway, for those of us that are interested?

I've noticed that I enjoy watching youtube videos of other people coding, and I like where you're going by tying watching sports with watching unboxing videos.

I've always thought I liked watching coding videos because I secretly wish I could just think about programs and make them happen, instead of having to sit up, type, switch between contexts, etc. Coding videos go straight to the point and quench a specific thirst I have when I don't feel like coding anymore but would still like the high I get from seeing the coding process unfold.
"...he only has one ecosystem to work with and it works well."

Unix is one ecosystem that works well, too.

In my case, we started a web dev company using Microsoft tools I got from my brother-in-law who managed a large Microsoft shop. After a year, Microsoft made changes which totally crashed the most important parts of our project (long story) to where my brother-in-law told us we should switch to Linux. We actually wound up with FreeBSD but now use it exclusively for 10 years.
Do you mean making a screen with hexagonal pixels? That would be really cool, and I think it would just be a matter of changing the shape of the electrodes and crystals (for an LCD).
Sounds like a job for Amazon Mechanical Turk. If it's more complex work, try odesk.com for freelancers.
MoMA Has Mistaken Video Games for Art (2013)
Why did you get downvoted for this question? I don't get it. So I upvoted just to counter.
Often they are on a probationary hire arrangement.

When I was in college, I knew of only one person who was competent in our mathematics classes whose aim was to be a HS teacher.

For many, teaching is a career they fall into. When a couple starts a family, for instance, one of the spouses will seek a job in teaching so that his or her hours will eventually be aligned with their children's.

I know very few successful engineers or journalists (etc.) who switch to a career in teaching. Those folks teach night school at the local college.

Maybe if we made teachers, full-time, year-round professionals? I know administrators are, but I'm talking about the people who are actually in the classroom. Summers can be spent improving instruction, maybe in a collaborative session with other teachers.

The problem is, again, money.

(Edit: spelling and clarity)
Snowden wird zum Geburtshelfer für Start-ups
I think if there was profit to be had in this, Google, MS, or Amazon would have already bought or started an image hoster.

My personal favorite was omploader, which I used quite a bit to share screenshots.
Sysdig   Logs: Advanced Log Analysis Made Easy
Indexing with hex pixels gets... fun.

You can represent it as row / columns with every second row or column offset, but then straight vertical / horizontal lines turn jagged.
Your 50 year old friend will be like the COBOL programmers of the last generation. Highly productive, satisfied at work, until the job market moves elsewhere.

Incidentally I had the opposite experience, and found Microsoft tech and tools to be rigid and stifling. Perhaps related, I felt the same way about COBOL, which is what I used in my first job out of school.

Other than sticking with emacs as an editor, I have not ever "specialized" in any one technology. I've never found one to be so clearly superior as to make it worth the risk of lock-in. No stack dominates forever.
Many, many games published these days have a VASSAL module available before they go to press because game designers are using VASSAL for playtesting. In the wargaming world, there are publishers which actively promote the existence of VASSAL modules for their games (GMT and MMP are the two big ones which come to mind, though there are others as well), some which are indifferent, and a few which are opposed. The impression I get is that the availability of VASSAL modules increases sales for publishers which aren't in opposition to it.
For a small Django app you can also use a free heroku account, free is cheaper than 5$ !
Quite related, this article about Imposter Syndrome has been passing around the past couple days: http://valbonneconsulting.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/the-impos...
I couldn't disagree more. My kids are only 2 and 3, but what they've learned has been entirely driven by their own interests. They learned to talk because not being able to communicate well is frustrating. They learned to walk because crawling everywhere is frustrating, etc. Not because I sat them down and said "OK, now it's time for our talking lesson".

Why would this suddenly change? As a parent I think it's still your job to evaluate the things that are positive and negative and try to limit the negative influences, like TV or intentionally addictive video games (farmville, wow, etc.), but I don't see how this is at all related to school. School shouldn't be exempt from being scrutinized for it's positive or negative effects.

When I finished school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. School classes bored the crap out of me for the most part, and not because I'm too smart (which I'm not), but because it just wasn't interesting. I had no practical or immediate use of the material being taught. I use to think I was deficient and had an attention deficit disorder. Occasionally a lesson would interest me and I would excel at it, but soon we'd move on to some other boring topic.

Many years later, looking at my own day to day life, I am constantly learning. The things I learn have either a practical and immediate use, or they simply interest me. Many of the lessons in school I thought were boring would have interested me at some point in my life when they were more relevant.

I wish I had started self-learning earlier.
Web of connections you have, any day.
Show HN: A startup idea generator
You could argue that the regression in quality is efficient. If Item X is comically flimsy yet 99% of consumers never use it more than once or twice, it could be seen as an economic win to avoid wasting the resources to make the good high-quality.

How do you get scratched DVDs from Amazon? I didn't think it was possible to scratch a DVD inside its case, without literally crushing it to splinters.
Generate tons of mostly dumb ideas for

* recreational programming

* getting filthy rich

If it gives you a good idea let me know! (:
Could someone ELI5 this "ASMR community" thing for me? I don't understand anything from reading that Wikipedia article :(.
allegedly anyways
Is Summer Different Now?
> Verizon stopped rolling out fiber.

The article is about those to whom they are trying to roll out fiber, but insist they want copper instead. People who have fiber in their buildings, who just need to have it run upstairs to their apartment, who instead want the copper repaired.
In the US, think of how different these services would be if we had both a guaranteed income to give these people a baseline of safety, plus a real universal healthcare system to sidestep that entire issue. It would turn this class of people from a 'precariat' into a fluid, task-oriented labor force with few/none of the current negative implications (around both the jobs and the companies supplying them.)
I wonder if the attitude towards these services in countries with UHC systems or more generous safety nets is less negative and stigma-ridden.
Like others have said. Do more research. Microsoft is the total package... for a price. Check out HTML5/XAML/TypeScript/Entity Framework/MVC if you're interested in Microsoft's mobile stack. Yes, you need to run an MS backend, but this is a good thing. I have personally found the open language ecosystem a little convoluted to navigate where MS has always seemed straightforward to me. These decisions are all very personal...
Just because a supreme court case made a decision about video games in a legal context as not being "art," doesn't make the opinion more valid than, say, a number of experienced artists.
I just open sourced my Bitcoin wallet for iOS :)
Just as last time this happened, when unions were created, government did not push back of its own accord- the workers had enough and lit a fire under their government's a.
There are hosts with multiple users on them, who have some level of write access to somewhere on the filesystem. After all, Unix is a multi-user system, so it is not heard of to have multiple users on it. That being said, this article is just stating to be careful of wildcards when you are sitting in a user-owned (or user-writable, such as /tmp) directory.
Look for oscilloscope unboxing videos. I've watched a few and haven't pulled the trigger yet. (edit: trigger is a bad pun wrt oscopes, sorry)

I bought a camping tent after watching about 10 unboxing videos. I got a table saw about a year ago the same way, watch a couple videos first.

I am well aware probably 1/2 the video are astroturf. If I tune out the speech the video speaks for itself. Oh, OK, with my own eyes I see thats how you adjust the height of the blade. I like/dislike that particular saw's blade lifting design.

The problem is narrow focus by marketing making at least some purchasers prefer homemade commercials over their hyper focused "professional" commercials which unfortunately suck. Lets say someone is trying to sell a "pro-grade" digital multimeter and I'm trying to buy one. Unfortunately the market "user interface" will be a little too "stylized" and probably rely on sexual objectification of women and business cliche speak.

Some beautiful very young woman who has no idea what the product does reads a script explaining "Our ISO9000 manufactured meter will synergistically energize your resources to proactively meet their key performance indicators". Unfortunately as a mere user of the device instead of being a CEO, that kind of marketing is useless to me as a purchaser, I have no idea how painful the device makes it to switch between ammeter and voltmeter probe wiring topology and how useful is the continuity feature anyway? The official PR materials suck so much I'll just watch an unboxing video. That may be the only way I'll be permitted to get a straight answer WRT the connectors being too tight to easily swap.

I have plenty of experience where the quality of PR has little correlation with the quality of the product, so I'm not overly concerned. I can see why pro content creators are terrified. This is equivalent to when print journalists first noticed some people prefer bloggers to their "professional" productions, following which about 50% of them lost their professional jobs.

From my kids, they like to study stuff they like. In the unlikely event we ever get a Wii-U my son is already an expert on how to connect it to the TV and configure it. I admit I've been window shopping new oscilloscopes, including ones I'll never be able to afford... The article makes fun of a $2 plastic egg, but I don't waste money on that for my kids on a regular basis, so I can see the kid appeal.
I had my doc try to prescribe me statins at 27 and I weighed close to 150lbs at 5'11" at the time. This was because my cholesterol was high.
He recently posted this as well:

http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering-...

(…darn, I just noticed the comment by taoquay).