skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there is no guarantee that a Yes vote won't result in the same either. Seeing how Czechoslovaki spit and ended up going the opposite that many had expected; they expected left/socialist ideals...
I think looking at it as pessimistic is simply wrong. The point is not to be optimistic but to look around and explain the major challenges that seem to be impeding rapid advancement.

The biggest problem I see in science seems to be the incentive structure (publish or perish). This overwhelmingly biases against large scale breakthroughs and towards minor amendments and advances. I remember when I first started doing research around 2011 I was extremely disappointed by the low quality and shallow vision of a lot of research being produced today (this was in AI). The volume was incredibly but the content was anemic. So I don't think the <1% figure is totally wrong-headed - we're in an age of 9-5 scientists whose desires to create long-term breakthroughs are often met with negative incentives while bulk publishing low-quality content is considered productive and desirable.
The issue I see is what options the court has to break your canary. The general arguement for a canary is that: A) the government cannot infringe on your freedom of speach without cause (so it is legal prior to the request), and B) the government cannot force you to lie (so it is legal to remove the cannary after the request). However, with a per user cannary, once the request has been made, the court might be able to order you to remove the canary from all users to protect the legitamite government interest of maintaing secrecy about who is being targeted.
I wonder how this got so much points..
Reflected XSS in 2014, yeah..
You got me thinking further, after my previous reply, so I thought outloud on Medium. I'd be happy to hear more of your thoughts, with this more complete reply to yours, once I further digested your perspective today:

https://medium.com/@DonovanKeme/brand-as-relationship-vs-inf...
"[Yahoo] will have raised nearly $8.3 billion through the offering"

If I'm reading that right Yahoo stands to triple their cash position almost overnight which today stands at around $4b.(1)

Given Marissa Meyer's appetite for acquisitions this puts them into a potentially interesting new ballpark of scale.

(1) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=yhoo
I wasn't sure how to phrase it. The first two real MMOs (in the massive sense) where UO and EQ, with UO coming first. That said I think modern MMOs would claim more in common with EQ than UO.
Renting something for a longer term is usually cheaper because there is less overhead and risk. Renting a single day requires extra overhead in cleaning and advertising plus the risk of not having it rented. My guess would be nightly stays would need to be in the neighborhood of 150% of the monthly price to make it worthwhile, and possibly much higher if there is a low season.
I'm not a netadmin, so don't know the innards of how it all works, but one day I watched a domain of ours pointing to an amazon load-balancer spread across multiple AZs - the IP address would change in DNS every so often, flipping between the AZs, presumably.
Mark Steyn has also commented brilliantly on the fizzling out of technological innovation: http://www.steynonline.com/6425/holding-pattern

Quote: "The first half of the 20th century overhauled the pattern of our lives: The light bulb abolished night; the internal combustion engine tamed distance. They fundamentally reconceived the rhythms of life. That's why our young man propelled from 1890 to 1950 would be flummoxed at every turn. A young fellow catapulted from 1950 to today would, on the surface, feel instantly at home – and then notice a few cool electronic toys. And, after that, he might wonder about the defining down of 'accomplishment': Wow, you've invented a more compact and portable delivery system for Justin Bieber!"
Canada has debated similar issues for most of my lifetime, with the general conclusion that separatists are emotionally driven romantics who believe that since their cause is "right" it must also somehow be practical, although they have never been able to give us anything remotely resembling a practical plan.

I actually think the Scottish referendum question is ridiculous, because it makes it sound like the process of becoming an "independent country" is simple and straightforward, or even meaningful. The most recent (1995) referendum question in Quebec was convoluted and bizarre, but that actually reflected the reality that the "oui" side would be voting for.

My bet is that even if the "aye" side wins in Scotland (unlikely, even with 16-year-olds voting) the result will be an "independent nation" that is so fully entangled with England that it will look more like a Canadian province than a European nation-state. This is doubly true if an "independent" Scotland keeps the pound.
Here's what I've learned in 10+ years of web marketing, and it's simple.

If someone is giving you fake info, it's because they don't want to be contacted. It's a cold lead you'll just spend money chasing that most likely will never convert.
How Long Does It Take to Get to Tatooine?
> We've pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan because the Middle East is no longer strategically important to us

I think the U.S. pulled out of these two wars because they were stupid in the first place and became fiscally unstrategic at a straggering scale... Like we could have paid for Kyoto worldwide with that kind of money. Just washed down the drain, and we're not done dealing with the geopolitical costs, not to mention the human costs.

Also, Afghanistan is in Central Asia.

I agree with the rest of your point on oil innovation, even if it's just driving us faster towards the next anoxic event...
Maybe. But he's right.
I have not closely followed Theil's entrepreneurship or previously read his writing, but I did buy his "Zero to One" book on Audible earlier today.

The premise of the book, on the higher value of inventing totally new things rather than copying, sounded good to me.
Robots will do everything, even write code!

They're called compilers. Programmers still have jobs.

There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now.

Peak oil. We've been at/around 85 million barrels per day for about ten years. It seems to be more of a plateau, not exponential decline. However, prices are going up and so is environmental harm in getting the stuff, and those trends show no sign of slowing.

We still have to get off the shit. We just have more time than the doomsayers (always a minority even in "peak oil"-aware circles) thought. Whether we have 10 or 150 years before an oil-powered economy becomes unsustainable, it's not good for the planet to be belching all that carbon into the atmosphere.
I blame it on the Baby Boom coming of age.
Towards infinite-capacity wireless networks, with twisted vortex radio waves
Vilified Bitcoin Tycoon After Losing $500M: My Life Is at Risk
it has gone into improving efficiency, convenience, and reliability.

This is the important bit, and it matters a lot more than some of the anecdata the original post mentioned. Commercial airliners haven't got faster than Concorde, they've got slower. They've also got smaller wingspans and less buoyancy than Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. As impressive as the engineering accomplishments were, they optimized for the wrong goals; today's airliners might not be as interesting but they are fuel efficient, reliable and don't need to float. And regular people fly on them, regularly.

The billions that gets spent on making aero engines 1% more efficient every year might not be as glamorous as Concorde, but cheaper tickets for the general public (and satellite internet in BA1 for those senior executives rich enough to have previously considered Concorde on that route) actually delivered better outcomes.

If instead of looking at progression in maximum speeds one looks at how much people fly, we're in a phase of acceleration.
The essay "What happened to the future?" is, I think, notable for what it does not contain, which
is any mention of mathematics.

The Digital Math Library project has been going on for years in the background
(mostly in Europe). They have been doing conferences for years, and, at 30,000
feet, it looks like fascinating work:
http://cicm-conference.org/2014/cicm.php?event=nop&menu=gene...

The computerization of mathematical reasoning, and in particular directing AI
toward the study of the "pre-rigorous reasoning" aspect of mathematical work is,
in my opinion, a great "plan of attack" toward general AI. Mathematics is about
problem solving, and if computers can learn to do problem-solving well in the
mathematical domain, in a general way, it seems to me that there is hope that
computers will be able to solve problems in other domains as well.
You would have to consider the after-tax amount, which is going to be a bit less...around $5-6 billion.
My point was just to point out that criticism exists. Loads of people watch that video and don't do other research on the topic.
>> Desktop computers. Laptops. Cell phones. CT scanners. The internet. The Large Hadron Collider. The Hubble Space Telescope. Progress has slowed since the 1970s? Really?

A lot of these were actually invented/designed in the 70s or earlier, or are iterations of breakthrough ideas from those years. He's talking about actual breakthrough innovations.
GofundFlorida Offers Free Crowdfunding Platform for Florida
Sidecar SherpaShare Partnership Helps Drivers Maximize Pay
Right click works for me on OSX 10.9.4 FF32.0.2
Are you down to chill?
Larry Ellison may "get" more about running a Fortune 100 tech company than you give him credit for.
Sadly, you're right. For all the talk of their impact, start-ups can't disrupt society worth a damn, except possibly to create more and more conduits for the vapidity of bored consumers.
Some additional thoughts:
Maybe Thiel is right with his thesis. But I think we don't see the impacts of the latest "technology" like Facebook and Twitter or any social network that might come as a successor clearly yet. I had the same opinions, because it doesn't really feal like rocket science or flying cars. A German professor called Peter Kruse, changed my mind. He has a really interesting perspective on todays interconectedness using a system theroetical view:

His thesis is (roughly):
What we are currently doing is rapidly increasing the interconnectedness or the networking density of our society almost worldwide (e.g. social networks Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it) and the devices we use (e.g. IoT), we have also increased spontaneous activities in these networks (e.g. web 2.0 services where people can be interactive), additionally we have implemented functions that enable circular stimulus in these networks (retweet and share functions). If these 3 effects come together there is the tendency that these systems will carry signals that resonate and amplify themselfs. It is almost impossible to forecast when and how this happens, because these networks are non-linear. If you post something that resonates with a lot of people you can be very powerful from one moment to another. Technology is only the enabler here and I have no doubt that this has a huge impact on society - see the revolution in Egypt for example. One outcome is a shift of power, because it is really hard to control these networks. Even though we have very sophisticated mass-surveilance most events happen very uncontrolled.
Some ideas and hacks to use to get a lot of Wolfram language into a tweet: http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/12/17/the-mathematica-one-liner...
Peter Thiel's Management Philosophy
Show HN: GPS Tycoon, Android game where you compete to own land on Google maps
Lots of people "claim" lots of things that aren't true. What proof do you have, other than unsubstantiated rumors?
SAP buying Concur Technologies for $8.3B
Gosh....that's barely more than WhatsApp. Woulda done better selling it to Facebook.

More seriously, the Economist put a valuation at $55-$120b. This puts it at $168b. Or 9 WhatsApps. The IPO was expected to raise $20b, so this is really good.

It took 3 years after founding in 1998 to reach profitability.

It defies most conventional notions of a startup, despite having started in somebody's apartment. It's unbelievably unfocused, it does pretty much every kind of business you can do on the Internet.

It might be one of the first Asian-style conglomerates to be born on the Internet.

There are plans for it to open brick and mortar stores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group
Have a look here [0]on their documentation on buttons, also in their divider documentation[1].

0. http://semantic-ui.com/elements/button.html
1. http://semantic-ui.com/elements/divider.html
Basic virtualenvwrapper in ~100 lines of bash
> > > plus the cost of wear on the onboard storage system (battery, etc.)

> That falls under vehicle maintenance and does not play into the cost of fuel.

Whenever you talk about "fuel" with an electric vehicle, you are doing so by loose analogy; the battery electrolytes are the closest thing to "fuel" in an electric vehicle. I suppose one could quibble over the degree to which the battery is analogous to the "fuel tank" vs. part of the "fuel", the main point, in any case, is that even the electricity isn't even approximately zero cost.

> Yes, I was exaggerating but it is already pretty cheap. If memory serves, it is about $0.08/kWh

Which is equivalent (by GGE [1]) to $2.67/gallon of gasoline, which, while lower than current gasoline prices, is so by less than factor of 2, so its an incremental improvement improvement, not the kind of orders-of-magnitude implied by "essentially zero", even allowing for a bit of artistic exaggeration.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent
Ask HN: What can CTO do if he doesn't code and is a bad manager?
I'm a lead developer in a startup with a team of several engineers and designers. I have an awkward situation with our CTO that has been going on for two years, and I wonder if anyone can share related experience.

As a team, we have been working on a product together for two years. The CTO joined founders early. Although he is technical, he rarely touches the code. He wouldn't manage the project either, instead trusting us to manage ourselves.

He did, however, agree to unrealistic deadlines CEO hoped for, and kept defending them even when it was obvious we were not going to make them. It happened several times. Although he never blamed anyone on the team, we felt left on our own. He would often come into the office and we'd have no idea what he was even doing.

During that time I started taking more responsibility. Some time passed and I became de facto team lead while the CTO stepped back from the product, taking on less sexy parts, such as infrastructure, deployment scripts, tweaking admin panel, managing hosting, etc.

These days I'm not sure what he's doing because he would often take some sysop task and sit on it for a few weeks, and it doesn't seem to be finished. He doesn't communicate what he's doing and why it's important. He also hates to displease people, so he'd rather agree to a crazy deadline than say “No”, rather leave team disorganized than micromanage when it's needed.

Now, the product gets built largely without him (although he makes some good engineering suggestions from time to time—pity he won't program!) Management prefers to plan product iterations with me because he doesn't manage risks and expectations while it is running. I feel silly keeping him out of the loop but it's just more productive that way.

Have you been in a similar situation with your superior? Is this none of my business? He's really a good guy and professional as a developer but is it OK for a CTO?
Amazon buys .buy
The reviews on yelp have never been ordered by voting. They're not even ordered by time -- the order changes based on a variety of factors, such as your login status, who your friends are, etc.

That's why nobody takes these claims seriously. They don't hold up to even casual scrutiny, if you know anything about the site.
Oh you're correct - they did update it. It still works on a few other sites.
I am pretty sure these guys are a little crazy - they said Twitter was crushing their brand and they had no resources, then wouldn't let their users export their photos and now are being acquired. Something fishy is going on.
I believe his point was that it sounds like a situation where Ellison will be retaining de facto control despite giving up the 'top title'.
Deep Dive PhoneGap / Cordova Training Class, San Francisco, October 23rd
"A majority of Congress"
What this article seems to miss is part of the raison d'être of Object Oriented Programming. It's not just about how you encapsulate state and how you act on that state. Forget the exact way the type system works, or what extension methods are, or even what polymorphism is.

The big advantage of OO is that it acts as a distillation of how humans think. We're accustomed to thinking in terms of 'things that do stuff'. What OO provides is essentially a skeuomorphic element to your code, where your basic units have some resemblance to real items and concepts. This makes it a lot easier to reason about large codebases, and makes them easier to document (in theory). It means the most important thing you need to understand how a piece of business logic works is knowledge of the business. You don't need to know anything about the data, or how the application is composed in order to comply with the needed use case. If you know the concepts and their behaviour in the problem domain, you will be able to make sense of how the code is written.

FP has its place, as does procedural code, but advocating either of them as a complete replacement for OO is short-sighted. Claiming FP is a solution to OO's shortcomings is too. Each has its place. If anything, we should be working towards next-generation models, that combine the advantages of both and mitigate the downsides of both.
Agreed, and kudos for writing so much, so well, about these new paradigms.
thanks. Right click work here on HN and all other pages. But not on Facebook! Weird
Hi fiatjaf, we've got some in the works and should have those up soon. It's super simple to get started with the app, but you can also email lindsay@socialight.io for some screenshots.
5 Things We Learned from Entrepreneur on 'Forbes 30 Under 30'
> I think an interesting aspect is that a shift toward pushing our transportation energy through the grid might (maybe) lead to some additional economies of scale that could bring down energy costs more broadly.

I do think that both the economies of scale that this involves and the fact that it makes the shift to alternative (whether "cheaper" or "cleaner" or both) fuels one that involves changing grid inputs without requiring changes to vehicles, fueling infrastructure (once you have the electric charging infrastructure in place), etc., are big gains.

When I was dismissing the idea that electric vehicles had a near-zero energy cost, I wasn't intending to dismiss the idea that electric vehicles offer some real opportunities for improvement.
All this Channels are very useful. I want some more
Flockport launches ready to deploy containers of popular web apps based on LXC
This one's a looser fit to Tesla. Better examples might be anything that replaces a built-in touchscreen with your smartphone's. In Tesla's case, by going all-electric they were able to make a drastically simpler drivetrain (and sure, this in some ways contradicts the previous point). I think that resulted in a much better cost-for-performance than a startup would've been able to get building around a combustion engine.
Alibaba going for a higher selling price just makes the continued undervaluing of Yahoo itself increasingly hilarious. At some point, I would think someone will want to buy them for all of this free money they have sitting around.

YHOO market cap : 42.3bn
+ liabilities : 3.7bn
= 46bn (to own outright)

Meanwhile:

Cash on hand = 1.1bn
+ Other assets = 15.3bn
+ Cash from Alibaba sale = 8.3bn
+ Value of remaining Alibaba stock = 22bn
+ Value of Yahoo Japan stock = 9bn
= 55.7bn (of value, if you can unlock it)

So simply by buying them, firing everyone and selling everything in a firesale, without even cashing those checks from advertisers, you can make $9.7bn. Seems like a sweet deal.
To me this seemed like a good strategy to force twitter to buy them.
Best project I've seen in years.
The thing that is weird to me is that Ellison is CTO. I don't really think he's a highly technical person, or is he?
Have they had some grad student just go and camp in an area like this for a full year? I would think that would help you get some insights and plausible hypothesis.

It seems the rocks-sliding-across-the-desert mystery could have been solved the same way many years ago.
If I had been using it every day since 2008 or so I probably wouldn't have seen the issue. Coming back to djangoproject.com after 4 years, it now feels like kind of a rats nest. Really wish they'd offload the documentation to ReadTheDocs.org, I love the information architecture of that site
It's just a lengthy ad for an app. The actual home page can be found here:

http://downtochill.com
Accounts created just to vote for the same story usually get banned.
CTO is the new PANDA
at least the UK has something somewhat specific (and actually fits XSS quite well).

CA 502c just says:
"(3) Knowingly and without permission uses or causes to be used computer services" amongst other very broad subsections

http://support.piercecollege.edu/1521a/References/California...
I want to get excited about Wolfram and Mathematica again. All of their blog posts are rather informative great reads. But then I head over to the pricing page and am reminded of why I love open source tools.
Yeah, I think Ellison is heading for a "phased" retirement. Eventually, he'll give up the CTO role and just be Chairman. Then he'll give up the Chairman role (perhaps when he dies).
You are kind of assuming that you can have a "firesale" that realizes the full current market value of the $31 billion in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stock. That's somewhat improbable.
Mildly paranoid rant follows:

The 1970s was when the Club Of Rome, The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb and all the Malthusian overpopulation scare mongering went absolutely bonkers and the elites bought into it completely. Rich people have been fascinated with reducing the world's population growth ever since. There is no "good" future anymore among "serious" prognosticators. It's wall-to-wall eco-doom. This has led to a almost pathological derision of any new ideas in energy, food production, and transport as they just contribute more to our success as a species and more overpopulation.

The developing world, namely India and China didn't get the memo and now they've quickly caught up and there is a lot of angst coming out of the west about how they can't control the carbon emissions of the BRICs and slow down their economies. The BRICs say that the west is responsible for the majority of the carbon emissions when their economies were developing so they should pay the economic burden.

I really think revolutionary technology is poised to come out of China. They've caught up and now they are going to surpass us with the development of new nuclear reactors, alternative energy and their massive rollout of high speed rail across the country. They might even surprise us with something we weren't even expecting. Broad Corp's ultra-fast skyscraper building techniques seem like a sign of things to come.
Gosh downvoted by Django devs, ouch.. don't want to sound ungrateful, a big amazing open source project built by very smart people, after almost a decade the documentation's bound to get a little unruly..

just been bashing my head against the wall trying to re-master django over the last few weeks and OP's topic hit a nerve
Will it be possible to integrate my product base to the Assistant? You have a gold mine of Assistant users that I would like to tap into.