skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my experience - Ruby on Rails, some kind of Javascript framework (Ember, Backbone, Angular), Postgres & Redis as data stores, hosted on Heroku.

As you scale to the point at which Heroku is expensive, move over to AWS.
> Polish authors found plenty of ways to be critical without having to divert into genre fiction.

There is this misconception popular even among young Poles that the communism in Poland was a period of hardship and oppression. Sure, many things were bad, but if one talks to one's parents and grandparents, they seem to be mostly happy with that period and in many ways would gladly trade it for what we have today.

Especially censorship in Poland was mostly a façade. The system paid lip service to it, but generally people were free to criticize the government, communist reality and made a great lot of self-criticizing works of art.

Living might have been harder in other Soviet states. It definitely was bad in Russia. But here in Poland, we had as benevolent socialist system as one could be. You could be known as a religious person and not a member of the Party, and still hold a top accounting position in a strategic government enterprise.
Thanks for the links, I'll look them up.

> The term of a patent […] is meant to allow an inventor an opportunity to capture the rewards of their invention.

This is not a valid justification. Granting the inventor a monopoly costs more to society than it benefits the inventor himself. As such , the inventor doesn't matter. His invention does.

What would be a good enough justification, is if granting the patent hastened the creation of the invention. To me, it is not clear this is generally the case. First, there is this "independent invention" thing. Second, there are other ways besides monopoly. Being first to market can be a pretty good incentive for innovation. Third, patents can slow down incremental inventions —improvements to patented ideas. Fourth, granting a monopoly to the inventor could encourage him to get lazy, and stop or slow down his output. Fifth, inventors could seek out monopoly-friendly innovations, instead of more useful ones —rent-seeking behaviour. Sixth, in practice, many patents are filled after the invention has been completed for other reasons.

Finally, there's the sheer bookkeeping costs of the whole patent system. 0.1% of patents only are being asserted? Does that include licensing deals as well as litigations? Anyway, there's the patent office, the effort of writing the patent in the first place, patent lawyers, the judges and juries that take time to rule litigations, and of course any effort directed at patent circumvention (compression algorithms have several good examples). Such overhead is not trivial.

Innovation fostering has to be significant enough to compensate for the various costs (monopolies and overheads). This sets the bar rather high in my opinion.
You have to look at it in context. The alternative to HTML5 EME is not un-DRMed content but rather the entire commercial video industry mandating non-web technology. That leads to vendor lock-in, security problems and increases the barriers to entry for everyone involved in video:

* Cool device? Now you need to convince (read pay) Adobe or Microsoft to port Flash/Silverlight to it or develop a native app and make it non-horrible e.g. for Netflix users to find and use.
* Create a new video codec? You have to add support to Flash/Silverlight before most people can use it
* Want to put video online? If any of it's for sale, you have to build out a full Flash/Silverlight stack to support it.

That's expensive and as we've seen it's a huge security hazard and generally holds technology back – e.g. neither Flash nor Silverlight play back H.264 anywhere near as efficiently as the native OS despite having years to add decent hardware acceleration.

From the perspective of a web-focused company like Google, that's a lot of downside with no advantage. Even Microsoft and Adobe aren't interested in doing much with Flash and Silverlight and they're expensive to keep alive as niche media playback platforms. That's why we ended up with EME in the first place – it allows every single component except for the actual decryption to use the standard web stack.

If Firefox shipped Daala tomorrow, YouTube could start serving it next week rather than wait a year or two for it to go through the release cycle at Adobe/Microsoft.

If a video site needs to support both open and encumbered media (a given for all but a few markets) this allows them to keep every single part the same except for the encryption stage without a degraded or inconsistent user experience.

DRM won't go away overnight, so we're going to see sites selling both and making that process as easy as possible will hasten the time where we can see an actual market response to restrictions – both from consumers being less willing to pay full price for encumbered content and from sites who are tired of DRM licensing eating into their revenue. If that's as simple as unchecking the “Use EME” box, you'll see a lot more willingness to experiment that you will if it's “Change our video production and serving pipeline away from the expensive Flash Media Server setup we already paid for”.
I thought textbooks was a bad fit for me until I started my university studies. Turned out to be the most superior option...
> It's a travesty that rational discussion is impossible.

It's difficult when you are entirely dismissive of an idea because of a few bad personal experiences. Literally, there is nothing else to your argument besides that. That is neither compelling nor rational.

Furthermore, upon the shaky basis of your beliefs, you want drug use to be forbidden for everyone. Take away the rights of everyone because of a few bad apples.. if you're going to do that, you better present some VERY compelling evidence. You have presented none.

Not only that, but you have ignored the positive effects of drug decriminalization. Portugal was pointed out - nothing from you. Portugal has seen a decrease in new HIV cases, fewer overdoses, and a large uptick in people seeking drug treatment.

And at the end of the day, you're not going to stop people from using drugs. Keeping them illegal doesn't seem to work. Keeping them illegal means people will get bunk drugs, a danger it it's own. Keeping them illegal forces drug users to buy from drug dealers, the chain eventually leading back to drug cartels and violence; if drugs were legal, less money would make its way back to cartels. In the United States, the war on drugs aka prohibition costs a ton of money, puts a ton of people needlessly in prison, and we still have a ton of addicts. It's a lose-lose-lose situation.

On the issue of mushrooms (since opiate addiction is a much different problem), the only thing I'm hearing from you is that ONE guy had his life spiral out of control because of mushrooms. Have you even considered the number of people that mushrooms has helped? I could point to plenty of anecdotes of people who self-treated their depression with psychedelic drugs and were quite successful at it.
I had a college professor for an OpenGL graduate class that regularly told us:

"Don't shade your eyes, plagiarize."

It meant the same thing you said. Lots of what you are trying to do has already been done, reuse it.
I think there's some validity to that. During the Vietnam War, LSD was associated with the same groups of people that were trying to stop the US from being involved, something that was pretty annoying to American military interests. While do think that that's part of the reason LSD got banned, I don't think that really contributes to why it's still banned.

I've been on the anarchist side of things for a lot longer than I've been doing psychedelics, but certainly on psychedelics you are more aware of the things constraining you. I remember being in a convenience store on 300ug of LSD, and seeing rows and rows of products. And my mind would look at a box of food and think "wow! that food says it's healthy for my family - I want to buy it", and looking at the next box of food and thinking "wow! this reduces heart risk - I want to buy it", and then being able to also take a step back and realize that this was all processed food and utter garbage, yet in my vulnerable state I was completely being manipulated by the branding. And I was horrified that this was considered a 'normal' way to shop. Misleading information (even if technically true) was being thrown at me left and right.
Unfortunately there not so many soviet and contemporary russian authors are translated. So besides already recommended Strugatskie borthers there almost nothing.
I strongly recommend the works of Jacek Dukaj. His "Black Oceans" is one of the most idea-dense science fiction book I have ever read. And eerily relevant to our times, especially wrt. HFT and proliferation of surveillance.
It's also replacing GIF in places and seems to nullify the claims that missing support in Safari or IE is a problem. My gut feeling is that Microsoft and Apple have competitive (destroy Google) or ulterior motives and financial gains in mind in terms of actively blocking WebM. This stinks of anti-competitive behavior in need of regulation. If Google had actually acted on their plans to push WebM and phase out H.264 it could have either destroyed YouTube (highly unlikely) or fixed the video codec situation.
Yes, they did. This particular law is consumer protection.

It's a law designed to protect an existing marketplace.
(US-based comment.)

While a great list, the mistake is being made of assuming disruptive startups (through technology, business processes, or both) will solve problems in several of the sectors. Some being Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Transportation & Housing, Telecommunications, and--most of all--Government.

It's not because smart people haven't developed solutions to the problems they see in these sectors. It's that government--through policy and/or bureaucracy--often prevents those solutions from being implemented.

For example, I have family who are in the pharmaceutical industry. PhDs and all. The amount of money spent on the bureaucratic steps to obtain government approval (FDA and others) to bring a new drug to market is the vast majority of development costs.

I won't even go into my experiences working with various levels of government on technology projects. Suffice it to say, never again.

You want great, efficient solutions to hard problems? Get government out of the way. Government involvement hinders progress, and makes what progress there is extremely expensive.
How did you get $.20 CPA?
I thought you guys were using Clojure?
Good. I've seen people cut by those drones and it isn't pretty. The manufacturers should have put safety cages around each prop, even if it cut into performance. But since they don't, I think they should be banned.
"Only be sure always to call it please... research."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E
There is a similar chapter [1] in the book Beautiful Code in which Brian Kernighan explains how to implement a regular expressions matcher using code written by Rob Pike in C.

[1]: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea...
SailsJS,Heroku, Angular @ MotionLead
Test Android Apps on Free Intel Atom-Based Devices
4 Takeaways for Twitter Success
Did you just call Amazon a startup on the brink of extinction? Amazon is a giant old company like Google
And that tax has served Europe very well.

It's diverted monies which would have gone to oil companies (and states), allowed for infrastructure investments, and hugely increased energy efficiency, particularly in transportation.
> My original comment is pointing out the title is stupid and uninformative.

It didn't come across that way, which is more likely why you were downvoted. I read it as a snide remark equating psilocybin to heroin and didn't understand what you meant until you explained it. Make your comment less ambiguous next time and you won't get downvotes.
Safari is supported, you just have to enable WebGL. I am using it just fine with Safari 7.
Pretty much as I'd suspected.
Lem was actually pretty critical of the whole "SF by coincidence". By his own definition, if you can easily replace lasers and spaceships with cloaks and daggers, then it is not SF.
Have a startup idea sitting in the back of your mind?
One's proficiency in a language is more important than using a newly learnt shiny thing out there. Given the people who get in the YC batches are deemed to be smarter of us, I would not expect them to be judgmental about these things.
We seem to perceive it in something closer to hsl space (3d) than rgb space (also 3d). You can tell that it's "purple" but you can also tell whether it's saturated or not, and if it's bright or dark purple. Also check out Lab space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space
"I'd rather not flip the coin on drug use."

So, you like to make decisions for yourself do you? That's interesting because you seem to want to take away everyone else's capacity for making this same decision, by keeping all drugs illegal.

Maybe we should make Penicillin illegal next because my mum is allergic to it.
Focus on these 3 things to propel your freelance business
Actually, no, and that didn't seem to be apparent in the materials posted. Do you feel like telling me or should I start playing 20 questions or consulting my talismans?
Reliable wireless inductive charging for cell phones doesn't even exist. I imagine an inductive charger for a car would function very well as a harddrive eraser as well, especially in 'inductive road' form.

There will be significant power losses (10-20%) and alignment issues.

One thing I really like about the whole inductive road concept is that it totally removes the need for a battery, one of the most expensive parts of an electric car.

You'd basically have a full-size slot car (if you remember those) track (but without sliding contacts).
Except that VP9 isn't patent-free. MPEG LA and other patent holders simply haven't bothered to flex their muscles because VP9 adoption is pretty much non-existant.

That's why I much prefer H.265. It is a defacto standard.
Its not "As hire As". It's "Bs hire Cs, so As must be careful to not hire Bs"
Anyway it's a trite face not supported by research.
Embedded firmware engineers are so conservative I bet the firmware for tricorders will be written in C.
This is what the world in production looks like. Things may move at a glacial pace but that's because there is a steady stream of real world issues to iron out.

Even if you started work on a superiour alternative today, expect to keep working on it for the better part of a decade before you see any real world uptake.

Not even IP itself did conquer the world overnight.
Thanks for the kind words. Your final paragraph is the exact issue I'm working on solving now.

The general gist I'm getting is that people often feel insecure about streaming their coding sessions due to perhaps not feeling confident in their skills, workflow, tools or various other issues.

I'm planning on chatting to some established streamers to understand their process and analyse what's currently missing which I could help them with. I then need to chat to some programmers who have never streamed before to understand what stops them from doing so and if anything can be done about that.

If you've got any thoughts or feedback they'd be much appreciated.
A couple months ago, someone asked "Why isn't there a twitch.tv for programming?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8039299

I believe my answer still holds true. Programming isn't as well-suited for constant live streaming because:

a) The viewer can't leave the stream in the background (as you would television)

b) A very large amount of dead air where nothing is happening and the streamer needs to fill dead air. (even worse if you have to debug something)

c) It would require a very optimized overlay that makes it easy to see the code at sub-1080p resolutions. (almost no screencast even now does this because it impacts usability)

d) The presenters need to be socially engaging; given the demographics of people who are the best coders, this is not a guarantee.

In the meantime, I've done some code streaming Hello World PoCs just for fun, with a few optimizations to solve the problems above. They haven't gone well (need to fix a sound desync issue) but there is potential: http://youtu.be/DWRI_7HgZwk
only abstract seems to be freely available online:

http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/06/026988111454...
Haha, I will actually be doing that! Probably over on hitbox.tv to begin with, eventually porting over to devv.tv once I've actually built something.
I have to say that the sequence "errordevelopper" responding to "codehero" is quite funny. :)
Setting critical literature in fantastical or allegorical contexts is as old as writing. You'll find it in Aesop's fables, Dante, Shakespeare, Swift, and more. Soviet rule was particularly harsh in this regard, and music was another outlet (Shostakovich in particular wrote a number of pieces now considered highly subversive).

Lem is excellent, though.
> using behavioral finance to automatically accumulate more assets over time

Can you explain what that means?
If you are in creative flow, the urge to splurge literally goes away. Whatever it is - coding, writing, sport, painting - doing something obsessively takes attention away from one's boring ego driven needs.
Depends on how it affects someone else.

Lets say I'm fed up with my life and decide I want to drop out of Stanford and go live in the wild on my own, doing my own hunting, and at large leaving society. This decision is going to greatly affect my parents, my close friends, and (if I have any) my kids.

Should it be illegal though?

Everything we do affects other people. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse, but drugs are not much different from other major life decisions. Deciding to climb Mount Everest is dangerous; you've got a high probability of dying. Deciding to repeat this every year is exceedingly dangerous, experience won't protect you from many of the things that kill climbers. Should mountain climbing be illegal for people who have friends and family/dependents?

There are responsible approaches to drug use, and how it affects me and my ability to be a person should not be your primary concern. If it makes me commit crimes, you now have a case, but until I've committed crimes, my life is my own, and the fact that my life decisions impact my friends does not mean that I do not have control over what those decisions are.

Social responsibility is a construct that should be enforced socially (IE my wife pressuring to leave me and take the kids if I keep mountain climbing), not legally.
We Writers Are Wanderers: Chaos Theory in Practice
The children who succeed turn their backs on the cookie, push it away, pretend it’s something nonedible like a piece of wood, or invent a song. Instead of staring down the cookie, they transform it into something with less of a throbbing pull on them. Adults can use similar methods of distraction and distancing ... When a waiter offers chocolate mousse, imagine that a cockroach has just crawled across it.

It sounds a lot like something we often call "cognitive dissonance" in other contexts. It's easy to imagine that this sort of self-deception is an important foundational part of a lot of belief systems and zealotry of all stripes. The more you try to change a believer's mind with facts, the harder they concentrate on the imaginary cockroach that just crawled across the mousse. It could help explain why people who are very effective at changing the world around them are often also profoundly irrational believers in something, completely resistant to facts; the same basic disciplinary mechanism underlies both zeal and self-discipline.
I'm not a YC startup, although my product was forked by a YC startup.

I mostly pure javascript (no frameworks) on the front-end and C++/perl/php/mysql on the back-end. Incredibly reliable and stable.
I've long thought this could be interesting. Please implement a feature to do a time lapse at varying speeds on replay.
Laravel is indeed the thing I am learning next from PHP, and I love the Startup ecosystem (and working in one), so I guess I'm not the only one. Also, take into account different countries; I'm from Spain and the Rails ecosystem is really weak here.
Fair enough, I guess I just question your two premises. Can you link me to anything that would support the Petawatt number? If China can make use of a 20 GW plant (the Three Gorges Dam) and the Congo can make use of a 40 GW plant (the proposed Grand Inga Dam) at locations determined by nature, don't you think that many countries on earth could make use of 100-1,000 GW plants with significantly more freedom for location?

Thanks for your thoughts.
Sad ending. However its heartening that someone tried to save the baby elephant. The world needs to do so much more to protect wildlife. It seems things have gotten so much worse over the last decade or two.
I like Go and feel quite productive when building web services with it. It works well, but I think the Golang team neglected many advances in Computer Science, particularly the ones coming from the functional world, and the result is a nice language which could have been great. Rust appears to be that great language.

When you see Rust it's clear that they have taken note of these advances and added them to the language. Pattern Matching, Algebraic Data Types, Hindley-Milner type inference accompanied by a sophisticated type system, everything is an expression (well, most), immutable variables by default and type classes are all things that many of us who were exposed to the functional world miss sorely in mainstream languages like Java. Rust includes all of them while Golang doesn't, and C++ doesn't have some of them.

And it doesn't end there, in Rust you can also do OOP, though it's different from Java (no classes, more similar to Go). You have concurrency primitives baked into the language as in Go. You have generics as in C++ (the most cited criticism of Go, which lacks them). It lets you manage memory but in a safer way than C. And it can be made compatible with C, which lets a library written in Rust be used by other languages.

So, Rust really feels like the superior replacement of C++, and possibly C, that Golang promised at first, and it has a chance of becoming mainstream when it's stable. Rust offers all the things that Golang does, and many more. The tooling is generally better in Go, but it surely can be improved.
You have it completely backwards there. It is Google that has the ulterior motive/financial gain in not adopting H.264/H.265. They are the only major player who has not adopted it. And if Google decided to force WebM in YouTube it would absolutely destroy it.

This whole weird misadventure Google has embarked on will be abandoned sometime soon. There simply is nothing to be gained from it.
I don't see what's traditional in this plan. It takes an hour to fill, 10 minutes to update. It's not a huge commitment, and you can always change direction, but in the meantime everyone on the team is on the same page.

A lot of founders just don't know how to get started with marketing. Now I can link to this. This a better time investment to fill this out than to read half of the so called marketing advice you can find online.
My co-founder once put 1.5 hours of coding on YouTube. Quite some enthusiastic responses on YouTube and HN. Recently we got the idea of streaming more code sessions. Didn't execute on it yet. You find his video here: http://youtu.be/cYrbc-g6R-U

Judging from the responses there is a place for a platform that shows long coding sessions as a tool for people to learn. With all the online courses available today, these kind of video's are a nice way to facilitate further learning and practice.
Looks like chatgrape is positioning for a Goog acquisition, I don't think I would use a service this important w/o owning the software. Or at least an escrow.