skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fedora Linux

Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Konqueror, Links

Eclipse

GitHub

Rackspace Cloud / Linode (we'll be moving everything to Linode eventually... the Rackspace thing is a legacy of their Slicehost acquisition)

SugarCRM (self-hosted)

Mediawiki (self-hosted)

Bugzilla (self-hosted)

Hoovers.com

LinkedIn

Google Apps (mainly GMail)

Apache httpd

and some internal tools we developed ourselves, like our competitive intelligence tracker, codenamed FUCIT (Fogbeam Universal Competitive Intelligence Tool) and a product dashboard tool I'm working on now.

Groovy/Grails/JVM

Emacs

OpenOffice
Imho a good ad, and more broadly a good brand, both has a cultural imprint piece and a "emotional inception" piece.

Think of Chick Fil A. They've taken a strong stand on same sex marriage. They've made a cultural imprint on you in that you either support or don't support that lifestyle. So far so good right?

However, you also feel something about that. You're either happy or upset about their brand. So not only are you associating that brand with your lifestyle, you're also having a feeling about that brand.
There are aliases built-in and you can define your own. Drop is built-in. To borrow an example above:

1 drop 1 2 3 4 5 NB. this is how to comment
2 3 4 5 NB. drop is }. in J

Exactly how did it 'flop'? Popularity, or your understanding of it?

Math symbols are cryptic, and Math is not popular, but I would not want to write:

"The derivative of x with respect to t" everytime instead of, dx/dt everytime I needed to write a formula.

I am sure beginners find 'for' ambiguous unless they have experience with programming as in 'for i = 1 to 10'. It's syntax you are highlighting, not meaning. People extoll the brevity of Haskell, and other functional languages, because they take the time to understand its syntax. J has been around a lot longer, and was created by some very smart people. I didn't choose it for its job market or popularity, but to expand my mind, and further my mathematics studies.
Imagination Is Revolt: Dr. Seuss and John Lennon
I don't buy it. This advertisement, especially the unreleased version narated by Steve Jobs, gives me goosebumps every time I watch it: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzu6zeLSWq8

I had such a strong emotional response to it that I remember watching it for the first time vividly from when I was little.
As I understand it, you have described what Google does with words and pictures well.

Ng wants neural networks to identify things, maybe Ferraris.
Then he wants a search user to send a picture as their input for the search they want to do. So, then the user might be able to find more pictures of Ferraris. Maybe.

For what Ng is doing, I doubt that flowers would work because there are far too many too different cases of flowers.

Search by keywords/phrases by Google/Bing has worked very well for a huge collection of Internet content.

But I am guessing that in a sense Ng is correct about images and sounds -- there stands to be a lot more such content on the Internet in the future.

Generally I'm guessing that there is also a huge collection of Internet content, searches people want to do, and results they want to find where search via keywords/phrases such as via Google/Bing is from poor down to useless. Thus, my guess is that a new means of search is needed.

What do you think?
So, here's a story I heard recently.

The person involved wanted to create a local archive of records. An index of material was possible to obtain, but rapid sequential requests resulted in an IP block preventing further access.

Modest levels of restructuring the requests, in random sequence, with a significant (several minutes) delay between requests, and random delay, eventually succeeded in retrieving the material.

If that had failed, a distributed set of requests could have been attempted.

When I've faced issues of high (to the level of service-degrading) levels of traffic, I've found tools that allow me to aggregate requests by similar attributes, including requests coming from a defined network space (CIDR or ASN), which can be quite useful. Reading such patterns just from eyeball scans of logs is pretty bloody difficult, and tools to assist in this are ... poorly developed.
Smallpox hospital looks beautiful. They don't build like this anymore.
http://livestreamwatch.skyrock.com/3232117195-hh-Louis-Rams-...
TrueCrypt may live on after all as CipherShed
That really depends on the system, its provisioning, and how typical traffic patterns correspond to storage.

Some systems respond far better to random queries, hitting data in different places, often on separate spindles or storage devices.

Others prefer sequential requests, avoiding random seeks across heads.

And there are systems whose performance degrades spectacularly even under light load.
I think made a really wrong impression in that post. Somehow I can't really find the right words to express myself right now.

While I understand the appeal of passive income, I think I would rather work 24/7 on something really meaningful.

Your motives don't seem like mine.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. There are many types of entrepreneurs.
>"then you're probably not cut out to be an entrepreneur."

I don't know why, but comments like this rub me the wrong way. Not that I don't agree that entrepreneurship is extremely difficult, it is!... just that I think people have a way of surviving and developing coping mechanisms for whatever life throws at them.

The fact that you have sleepness nights and puke from the stress tells me that you are not cut out for it.. yet, you are doing it...and without regrets.

Humans have a way of being resilliant.There is only one measure that determines if you are cut out for it or not...and that's if you try and it ends up ruining your life.

This idea that entrepreneurs tell others - that they are not cut out for doing a startup is really just a classic case of putting others down to prop yourself up.

If you want to do a startup, DO IT! Don't let others talk you out of it by convincing you that you aren't cut out for it. Short of a therapist encouraging you to avoid it, I would discount that advice as an insecure founder trying to make himself feel better about coping so poorly.
Guessing that someone arguing from an obvious position of privilege is a white guy is only a racist stereotype if you believe reverse racism exists.
SwiftStub: Online Swift Compiler
We suffer from strong survivor bias. Each day CrunchBase sends me a list of companies, most that I've never heard of and many that I can't understand how they're being backed, and it reinforces the idea that you can go out and build a great product and VCs will rain money down on you on your path to success. However these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Some advice from someone in the trenches.

First, assume that you will never raise a dollar of outside Angel or VC money. Smart, great board, great product, it won't matter. An investor's null hypothesis is that you will fail and it is incredibly difficult to convince them otherwise. If you're the CEO and you don't have Brad Pitt like charisma and you're not a sociopath then it will be very very hard to raise capital.

Second, be prepared for the dreads. The worst part about it is that once these wounds are opened they will be there for life. You're going to wake up at 4:00 and won't be able to sleep because your mind is churning, trying to find some solution to your problem. This usually boils down to insipid growth rates and lack of capital to properly execute.

Third, there will always be 100 things to do and you get to pick 3. What you have will be imperfect. You won't have the metrics you need, and you'll be apologizing for everyhing. It also makes it that much harder to get others to see your vision.

Fourth, the longer it takes you to raise capital the more your team will doubt your competence.

Fifth, you will be rejected every day. VCs, customers, partners, potential employees. This takes a massive psychological toll even as you're get back up to put on that brave face. Unless you are a sociopath it is bound to chip away at your confidence and it may be that split second of doubt that hurts you in your next meeting.
How Jen Selter is saving the economy
http://stylebot.me/styles/2945
> they can end up feeling extremely violated

That is their own personal issue if being proven wrong makes someone feel 'violated'.
As a mediocrity, I think you are making a big fuss about it.

Yes. Lifetimes are hard. Yes, it requires lots of compiler wrestling. However Rust compiler gives pretty good hints what lifetimes should be added and deduces lifetimes in few simple cases. Additionally you can opt out if if you are willing to allocate more memory.
This comment is a joke, right? I find it hard to believe that any programmer would say "the compiler prevents me from writing broken code? That's too complex!"

Yes, a proper typing system involves more visible moving parts than a broken typing system. But a proper typing system is vastly more powerful. C++ may not have lifetimes, but every time I touch C++ I have to be really careful that I don't accidentally introduce memory or threading bugs, because they're both really easy to do. Someone who's programmed C++ for a long time might not even realize it, but then again, the vast majority of C++ code in this world almost certainly contains numerous memory and threading bugs.

And why the comparison to Go? Go doesn't live in the same world as Rust. It's not a systems programming language. At this point it's mostly a glorified web server application language. And if you're going to pick Go because of the lack of memory lifetime issues, you may as well pick any other garbage-collected language out there.
I also love his enthusiasm for whatever he's talking about. Every time I listen to him I suddenly feel motivated to go and write a bunch of code.
...you're ignoring what I said. Ignore the word racism. It's objectively a racial stereotype to call someone's race based on the way they're talking.

Arguments about the term 'racism' don't matter. He meant 'racial'.
i think what he's trying to say is that becoming an alcoholic over a stupid decision and the resulting stress is a bit far fetched…

i second that; you might increase the amount you're drinking on a dailly basis for a bit of relief, but that has absolutely nothing to do with being an alcoholic.
That sounds a lot like what we're vuilding at http://devo.ps.
What I wish Android had

- up to date Java language version

- official tooling support for the major alternative JVM languages

- a proper simulator that does not require alternative solutions like Genymotion

- proper tooling support for editing Renderscript and OpenGL shaders

- OpenCL support instead of NIH Renderscript
I wrote a little post up to show: https://gist.github.com/superjamie/72f7bf3b6a22371d24f7
Relevant course notes from a course at Carnegie Mellon - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/15122-s11/recitations/reci...
Android L Release Date – Features Expected
I have just joined daily diary (was on ohlife for 3 years). If you added the feature of emailing previous entries to us, that would be enough. Very exciting!
If you are trying to prove (formally or informally) that a program is correct, loop invariants allow you to prove that loops do what you want. Contrapositively, if you can't write a loop invariant, you probably do not really understand what the loop is doing.

I have had Dijkstra's book for many years, and love it. It's a great read, and it should be reprinted or put into the public domain.
> I have a family

Its going to be 10x harder for you, if you have a family.

Why dont you start working on weekends/spare time on your idea, if you get some traction then you can think about quitting your job.
Having several datacenters running Kafka with MirrorMakers between then (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pa...) is far from being central data storage, it's more like a graph of (reasonably) ordered data distributed across the globe, which is available to any application.

I don't really see much of a relationship to unix text stream processing. Maybe in something like a Kafka -> Samza -> Kafka style system -- but even then, it feels like a stretch. There's much more of a focus on the ordering of messages rather than the concept of log here, process there.
Trevor Re: Java's Cover
Japanese company Obayashi announces plans to have a space elevator by 2050
London’s Tech Boom Is More Than Just Hype, the Hard Numbers Say So
It's a ripoff, but sadly also the industry standard.
Well, 30 years maybe a bit exaggerated, but multiple years in jail were well on the agenda if Swartz would not take the plea agreement, as the facts of the case were against him and the jury probably would not (and would be instructed not to) relate to his motives and why he did it. Then it would come to the sentencing and as the feds were determined to make an example of him... it would be hard to expect much leniency, especially given the fact that Swartz probably didn't think what he did was wrong (even if how he did it may be against he law) so he would not get the "regret" leniency too. So maybe not 30 years, but multiple years still, which is very harsh and can ruin one's life.

P.S. btw, please look up what "dichotomy" is. You can not have dichotomy of one thing, at least in the meaning of the word we're dealing with here.
I am only 10 minutes into this talk, but John is one awesome speaker. No PR talk at all, he is speaking his mind freely and in fact started with shortcomings of the product. The segue between different sections is so smooth. I do not have background in VR, but he explains things so smoothly. He is just freely talking about supply chain, and what the product constitutes. And he has been standing in the same spot. What a genuine speaker. Also, looks like Facebook's influence has been minimal. There is just no iota of bullshit in him. I like him already. My first John Carmack video, and I am already hooked. Now onto watching the full video.
I can be interested. What is cost of SSL certoficate ?
There are a lot of really interesting things happening that this article looks at from exactly one angle -- the billing. What I want from NYT is an article which really examines the situation, and not just sensationalizing numbers.

For example, Medicare would have paid only 1% for the assistant's work; that's the market rate that they set. This has all sorts of implications... I assume doctors must have some reason to accept those rates, other than out of some ethical responsibility. It sounds like private insurers are hugely subsidizing Medicare by paying 100x the price. If everyone paid the same rate, Medicare would have to pay a lot more, or there would be a lot less of these procedures.

On the other hand, anyone who actually pays that list price is giving the doctor a gift. If they explained the median price patients pay the doctor out-of-pocket, I wonder if the examples would line up.

It is interesting to read about some patients who went to extraordinary means to discover ahead of time what their costs would be, only to be basically assaulted with an outrageous bill in the end. For a planned procedure and even for an emergency, I think the doctor performing the work should find a way to work with their patient's insurance plan. And insurance plans should have reasonable coverage and customary payment terms which are accepted. The doctors shouldn't get to fleece the insurance companies either.

The level of price discrimination is completely out of control, but I think the legal framework is in place, right now, to protect patients and insurers both from these bills. It's a tax on the rich and middle class, since the doctors collect some small fraction of total billings. It's like a lose-lose double lottery.
Actually it depends on what one understands by managed.

Strong typed languages with automatic memory management, having native compilers and used for writing OS, exist since Mesa/Cedar (70's at Xerox PARC)

Back when C was UNIX only, no one talked about C ABI. The only ABI that mattered was the OS ABI.

Amoeba, OS/400, Lisp Machines, Oberon are a few examples of having multiple languages interoperate via the OS ABI..
I currently work for an MLM business. It literally is a pyramid scheme.

I'm shopping around for something better, but the pay is decent.

Standard Advice for your situation. Do the best you can in your current job, while looking for something better. You already have a job, so you can be somewhat picky about your next project. Knowing that you will have an new job in 1-12 months means that it's easier for you to put up with their foolishness for now.
Unlimited Detail Update [video]
This looks like a great first attempt at writing two Emacs major mode packages. I am going to try it tomorrow.
Because strong type alternatives to C and C++, like Modula-2, Modula-3, Ada, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, ... faded away while UNIX conquered the enterprise.

Now to get back what was lost in terms of safety, new languages are required, as the old ones are considered legacy by the average Joe/Jane coder.
Hrm that's trickier, although the specifics depends on your family situation (does your significant other work?). I have a family myself, wife and two kids. I can say from experience that what would have helped was having a large rainy day fund - e.g. 1/2 your annual salary. I had a much smaller amount set aside, which was only barely enough to make it to a comfortable job as a higher up in a startup (see my edit above). And to be honest the stress and uncertainty almost destroyed my marriage, even though she was very, very supportive of my choice.

Having a much larger savings would have helped. Having a plan B is also good. With a family you need a safety net.

I'll be honest that your options are more limited, but I'm proof that it is possible.

But is it what you really want? Whether you go this route depends on what is driving you, and how strongly.

Are you local? Feel free to reach out to me if you want more advice from a parent entrepreneur. My email is in my profile.
> Why dont you start working on weekends/spare time on your idea

I suspect you don't have a family ;)

If you have a family it is better to start moving on your idea within normal business hours, where legally possible (some creativity may be required).
A salt, not salt.

Salt: sodium chloride (NaCl, table salt, etc.)
A salt: an ionic compound from an acid-base neutralization
Want Open Office!
Ugh. Got hit by this. My insurance company listed a hospital as covered. I took my daughter to the ED...then got a $400 bill in the mail for a physician we saw for 2 minutes. The rest of the visit was covered. He wasn't. Apparently all doctors who work for the hospital are covered by the insurance...but he was a visiting physician. I hate health insurance.
I think that Andrew is making an easy prediction. Of course most search queries will be over voice or image.

My wife and I usually use speech input for web search on our phones. Also, the current Google image search is very nice. Have you tried using it? Go to Google image search and drag a photo to the text input field. I have used this to identify pictures of small mechanical parts and also to identify plants.
This is spot on. In programming communities, design is frequently dismissed as an "implementation detail" or part of "making it look good" (i.e. marketing). This is a distinct and recurring cultural blind spot – more conceptually interesting programming tools than I can count have been torpedoed by a lack of attention to visual/UI/UX/HCI design.

Design is absolutely critical when it comes to helping people understand complex systems. Well-designed tools work with the human brain to mitigate cognitive load, allowing the user to focus on making stuff happen rather than on juggling handfuls of information. Few programming tools, experimental or mainstream, fit this description; even fewer have anything like it in mind.

Successful efforts to make programming less opaque and more accessible will necessarily involve massive leaps forward in design. I'm glad to see design beginning to make some inroads into programming culture, but we've got a long way to go yet considering how frequently the Unix CLI is still held up as the state of the art.
The abundance of laundry detergent, mop, swiffer, and other home cleaning ads seems like a counterexample to the points about bed sheets and gas stations. Toilet paper ads are another counterexample.
DOE Wants to Know If We Live in a Hologram
Michael Abrash's keynote is worth checking out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4yEyt5Qes
what a pile of shitty mess. tl;dr the assistant surgeon,whom he never meet, charged him separately and the price went from 6,200 to 117,000. why? because the assistant was an out-of-network doctor.

" Insurance experts say surgeons and assistants sometimes share proceeds from operations, but Dr. Tindel’s office says he and Dr. Mu do not. Dr. Mu’s office did not respond to requests for comment."

before you talk to anybody in a medical building yell "Are you in my network!?!?!"
Yet another example of the ridiculous arms race between payers and providers with patients caught in the middle.
Thoughts on Declarative and Imperative Languages
Any type of pointer to start with. The first thing you notice (and do) in the demo scene is try and reach out and touch something.
I don't buy this. As CEO you have the right to say "You know what Big Important Customer? You're a dick and I don't want to do business with you."

That is a strategically stupid thing to do. You may not ever actually do it. But being able to do that without having to answer to anyone but yourself is enough. There's a very real psychological difference.
Prevalence and impacts of GMOs on livestock populations
I realized it was not, honestly, directly germane to HN, but decided to post it because I figured this crowd would into especially-good data visualizations. I'm glad someone else agreed!
Great to hear that 360 degree position tracking is in. You'd think it would be only a small thing, but almost immediately once you get the sense of presence you start trying to look behind you.
Rust prevents significantly more than reading freed memory, it is designed to make all memory safety problems (dereferencing an invalid pointer, reading freed memory, data races, ...) impossible without explicitly opting in.

Memory safety bugs are particularly bad bugs, as they represent a program that is completely off the hooks, allowing an attacker to take control of the program/computer by inserting shell code or to read private keys directly out of memory (for example). Even if you're not in a situation with aggressors, memory safety problems can lead to the program scribbling all over memory resulting in random crashes and misbehaviour, and these are so hard to diagnose since there's spooky action at a distance, and they can easily be timing sensitive/heisenbugs.

The memory model of C/C++ is definitely broken, look at all the security flaws in programs in those languages.

> Frankly Go seems to have this "don't introduce new nonsense" problem under much better control, so if I need to pick a horse in the race, it's that one, not Rust.

If you're doing something were Go is the appropriate tool for the job, that's sensible... but, if you're trying to write a library to be called from other languages, or run on embedded devices, or have precise control over memory layout (including the heap), languages like C, C++ and Rust will likely be much easier.