skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As much as I want to hate on this article with the rest of you guys, I can't. I was expecting a load of "Look! Bobby has a blog with AdSense. How cute." But, grammar aside, it surprised me. It's not just Mark in this list who's made actual money. That Ashley girl has been in business 5 years and employs a parent!

Which is a lot more success than (as far as I can tell) the vast majority of HNers.

So, yes, I hate things that focus on age. Sure, by most accounts I was a child prodigy and blah blah blah blah. The age-related attention certainly never did me any good. It made me lazy, and vain, and I think I missed out on a lot of opportunities because of it.

But whether or not these are teens to "watch," they should be considered a challenge for anyone who's clocking all their time on the next revolution in social bookmarking or social network messaging shopping kablooey.

Reality check: Ashley makes enough money to employ herself, a parent, and apparently friends, too... off a site for free MySpace layouts.

That should tell us all something.
Yet another semi-random sample from logopond.com. Flagged.
Healthcare execs see EMR data as their most valuable asset
It turns out to be as simple as:

(setq mac-function-modifier 'super)

I discovered this after spending an embarrassingly long time failing to figure out how to bind Capslock to Super instead. I thought that would be relatively straightforward given how often people talk about rebinding Capslock, but I couldn't figure out how to do it (from Emacs anyway).
Digg2, Hacker News plug and Techcrunch
Something big is bubbling beneath the surface of Digg proriator's mind. Kevin Rose is in competition with Hacker News and he makes this important announcement about there latest update. He underlines there service as similar to how America is now run, this goes out similar across the board. This will effect the whole world. Something has changed online. Watch this video for clues. Additionally they big up Hacker News.
I recently switched to Slicehost. For me, it's exactly what I want. A flat monthly fee for a server instance and easily upgradable as needed. They provide a choice of Linux systems, and from there you're free to build as you see fit. They offer reverse dns, which is vital for running mail servers and not available on Amazon( last I checked. )
I mean this could count for criminal negligence. I wish they would release more info on how the failure happened and why the backups aren't working.
I also grated at seeing that reference to Nietzsche in there. Probably because I recently read On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, but still. Nietzsche is probably Top 3 on the list of 'most abused philosophers.'
the redundancy idea scales as much as you want it to; this post remixed: http://socialfact.com/reader/seemore-how-much-are-you-willin...
Strong AI?
Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage (video)
The rockstar thing is a strawman wrt to me. I never said I wanted to hire rockstars. What I said was, I only interview people I know or who know me through my physical and virtual networks, and doing so has by and large given me a decent number of hires.

p.s. And that is an entirely debatable strategy regardless of whether such people are or are not rockstars :-)
If you use Gmail, Facebook, or any kind of SaaS, you are very much from "this day and age" and using the latest from the greatest and is trusting your data exclusively to a server!

Heck, you trust your money to a bank! You trust your bus driver not to crash the bus, your doctor to properly heal you, and your lawyer to put you out of trouble, you also trust your cook to make the meal you like.

Everyday, you give trust to many individuals and entities to whom you delegate tasks that you may or may not know how to do.

Sidekick screwed up, but I would never blame the ones who trusted them what they(the clients) did is completely normal!
This is a good reason to think of what are the quickest ways to bring one of your own sites down and try to prevent them.

In 2002 I lost the data to a small (~200 users) hobby site I built and to this date it still haunts me as my biggest failure. So now I'm taking precautions such as offsite backups, forbidding DELETE for all SQL users, etc., to limit the chance of such a thing happening.
I don't know, why did they buy them in the first place? Just to kill them?

Did they fire the whole system staff they used to have? I just can't believe they just know stopped running backups and let it die. Sounds odd, and prone to being sued by T-Mobile quick. (Maybe Microsoft is going after T-Mobile for android?)
The iPhone does have a stopwatch.
Yes, especially since I agree with much of what Ted is saying.

p.s. Not that anyone needs further evidence I am imperfect, but if we must have a bash at it, here are two flaws with my original article that I think have merit:

1. I presented a dichotomy between two strategies, first hiring people who know me or whom I know through networking, the Internet, and so on. Second, using monster.com and recruiters. Isn't this a false dichotomy?

2. Although the linkbait headline of my post said something about people who code outside of work, the post itself actually said something about networks and communities. Clearly someone can belong to the HN community without coding oustide of work. According to my headline, I wouldn't hire them. According to my post, I would. Which is it, Mr. Braithwaite?
The logos are quite nice though. I enjoyed looking at them.
Galloping/Hyper inflation. Extreme devaluation of the dollar.
BOXING! I haven't gotten in the ring yet, but its an amazing workout on top of my usual regiment (granted, I'm an exercise junkie).
So that's very true, but when your target market is developers, the buy vs. build thing can get funky, especially when it's "buy funky offbeat bug tracking vs. build funky offbeat bug tracking".

People (like me) might buy Lighthouse for "normal" tracking, because it's a known quantity, and homebrew for "light" tracking (which we actually also do, for the "submit a bug" link in our application's header).
>>a few times i will have a bug because i mispell a variable name

Huh, that spelling problem would give me errors every page.

Python have no warnings for uniquely created/used variables? There is no possibility to demand some declaration of existing variables?

It is quite easy to parse Python(?), so the IDEs should catch this, at least?
Not to defend the US's policy towards travellers, but this makes no sense. Brazil needs visitors and investors far more than the US does, so by engaging in a little tit-for-tat it does nothing but hurt itself unnecessarily.
Uh, what?

Every day there are posts here about how great the Cloud is, and how we should just dump our data there and not have worry about data centers ourselves. Isn't that exactly what was done here - individual handheld users put their personal data into "the Cloud" (in this case, Microsoft's cloud) and then got hosed when the Cloud busted, as happens in traditional Cloud-computing applications. Should we now say that everyone who loses data when EC2 crashes deserves what they get as well?

As for your second point about where users knowing where their data is located, I call BS on that. The majority of people out there over the age of 40 have no concept of the abstract notion of "data", or that it has a location. For them, data is located where they physically access it. Technology is (should be?) about making life simpler and abstracting away bits that people don't need to know about or have the knowledge to make decisions about - for 95% of people, this includes where the contacts on their mobile phone are stored.

If you think people should know where their individual bits of data are, try explaining to my mom how her contacts could live on her SIM card, in her device's memory, and on her desktop computer, and then ask her what the best place is for them.
Even if all good programmers were programming at home the knowledge that a programmer is coding at home wouldn't give us much.

G - good programmer
C - coding at home

P(G|C)*P(C) = P(C|G)*P(G)

P(G) = 1% # percent of good programmers among all
P(C) = 20% # percent of programmers that code at home
P(C|G) = 100% # assume that all good programmers code at home

Probability that a programmer is a good one given that it codes at home:

P(G|C) = 1.0 * 0.01 / 0.2 = 5%
Ideas which could change healthcare: summary from Health 2.0 Conference
Seems like a big assumption since we don't know any details. Perhaps a malicious sysadmin?
You're right, I meant static and not strong typing.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/09/exclusive_pink...

The most relevant bits:

"The final operator who is going to be pissed is T-Mobile, who has been just as loyal of a partner to Danger as Sharp has been. I don't know exactly what Microsoft has been telling them, but they have no doubt realized that they've been cut out of this deal in favor of their largest competitor. What's worse is that apparently Microsoft has been lying to them this whole time about the amount of resources that they've been putting behind Sidekick development and support (in reality, it was cut down to a handful of people in Palo Alto managing some contractors in Romania, Ukraine, etc.).

"The reason for the deceit wasn't purely to cover up the development of Pink but also because Microsoft could get more money from T-Mobile for their support contract if T-Mobile thought that there were still hundreds of engineers working on the Sidekick platform. As we saw from their recent embarrassment with Sidekick data outages, that has clearly not been the case for some time."
Some amazing future phone designs
here is the non-paginated link
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/concept-phones-ceatec/all/1
Does anyone have any experiences with Rackspace Cloud Sites? Is it a good way to get scalable hosting without worrying about provisioning new instances and such?
here is the non-paginated link
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/concept-phones-ceatec...
Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass
Startups are substantial projects which primarily seek profit or growth.

"Websites" are typically small projects, without serious focus toward profit or growth.
Good link, terrible headline. The link us an interesting video about the benefits of taking a year long sabbatical every seven years, but it doesn't claim that the sabbatical is what made Stefan Sagmeister a design genius. He was insanely talented before he started taking sabbaticals, and they just made him more productive.
Panera as a whole is great but their food is way too salty for my taste. That usually implies that the food itself is of lesser quality.
http://www.sagmeister.com/index.html ... makes me feel nauseous/dizzy
.txt?
Totally agree, of course, that it's cool. I'm just saying that as a Canadian I would gladly take this scenario:

- going on a road trip
- almost done book 1
- probably should buy book 2 before we leave

... to this one:

- not available in Canada

:)
I recently started running, it's awesome!
This has been brought up here many times:

http://searchyc.com/banach+tarski

I actually think the wikipedia article is pretty good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox

I think the article lunk to here is not actually a very good explanation. It mixes folksy and technical too freely, really being neither one nor the other, and even though I actually know the proof quite well (and its 1D and 2D relations) I still found it unhelpful and awkward.

YMMV - I'd be interested to see if anyone here finds it enlightening.
Oh. My. God.

I was one of the first Sidekick customers, long before the MS buyout. It was an amazing email/texting device, far easier and more comfortable to use than a Blackberry. Plus the web browsing was decent, and the UI was simple and elegant. All in all, a really cool phone.

Unfortunately, the first generation of hardware was super flaky. I had five of them die on me in a year, often failing within weeks. Since there wasn't any PC sync tool, the only thing that saved my bacon was the server-side data model. When a phone died, I'd get a replacement, drop in the SIM card and all my stuff would be there same as always.

Back in the day, there was no data sync with your PC. I think they eventually released Outlook syncronization, but most consumers don't use Exchange/Outlook. I would guarantee that a huge number of Sidekick owners (most? all?) have never had any of their phone data anywhere but the Danger servers.

To make matters worse, the Sidekick becomes kind of a brick when the servers are down. I can see a lot of people resetting their device because it's suddenly become unresponsive, just expecting their data to magically come back from the server.

This is an unmitigated disaster.
I think it's less about vacation time/'time off' and more about just disconnecting from your normal routine (often times fairly rigid as we're natural creatures of habit)...and giving yourself the freedom to explore different paths/options/ideas.
Food processor and a multifunction rice cooker and steamer. No more burger king :)
Just a name :) It is ~/.emacs in my machine.

http://github.com/ki/my-dot-emacs/raw/master/dot-emacs.txt
Bad can be good (when it comes to marketing)
I liked the article, so no worries if you do as well. And as others have pointed out, I'm (a) old, (b) have two kids of my own., and most importantly (c) just spent my Saturday morning racing a bicycle rather than learning Haskell or solving a Project Euler problem. I suspect I'd like Ted if we ever met ff.
Obviously they get a lot of love here, but I'll list them again:

Dropbox

I find I am majorly neglecting by USB thumb drive. And sharing files with random people is much easier now.
I found that especially on enterprise software, being web-based limits the amount of damage a mediocre programmer can do. Of course there are myriad ways of messing up the web experience, but native apps have all the OS resources at their disposal to make your life miserable. And when the OS is Windows, well...
Based on the wording of the statement it seems likely they had no usable backup solution at all. Offsite or otherwise. Even a 24 hour daily backup should have provided some data. Sounds like a classic case of neglect to me. They probably had a solution in place but didn't verify it was actually working.
[mugasha] listen to it
The dangers of the cloud...

Edit: Long live local copies!
Are you storing your Hacker News comments client-side? To use the Internet is to trust servers.
We have 4 developers sitting in a room with a giant white board. When someone discovers a bug, or one is reported to us, we write a few words or a sentence up on the board; enough so that we'll be reminded what its about. When a developer decides to fix one of the bugs, they stick their initials next to it and check it off when completed, which signals to someone else that it needs to be tested and erased.

The goals of our bug tracker are to get bugs fixed and tested quickly, with the main goal of having no known bugs in the system. Specifically, we realized that most tracking systems are optimized for bug archival, whereas we wanted a system which is optimized for getting the bugs fixed, given our environment.

I've found that I have a very strong preference for an empty bug-tracking whiteboard, and the more items on it, the more I feel compelled to fix bugs rather than work on other things. It's great for communication, because you can just go talk about the item on the board. Even the process of marking something off on the board makes everyone else peripherally aware that something changed, so nobody has to check whether there's something for them to fix/test - they know. Often bugs are fixed and tested within the same day they're discovered. If something stays on the board for a while it's obvious to everyone that there's a more serious issue that we need to discuss.
I'd agree with you if you said that they deserved an outage of a few hours; that's the risk you run when someone else controls your data. Once in a while, things fail; when it happens to you and you control the data, you spend those few hours fixing whatever's wrong. When your data are in someone else's hands, you sit around writing angry tweets about it until it's fixed.

In the worst case, maybe you'll lose up to 24 hours of changes in case a backup needs to be restored.

For the data to be lost entirely, with no backup whatsoever, simply beggars belief.
please link to TED directly.
'If you've read any of Ted's past stuff or followed his startups at all, you'd probably find plenty of evidence that he's a very skilled programmer.'

Actually, you do have a way.
Obviously I read the article. Does "its complacent I-learn-as-much-as-I-need-by-osmosis-just-by-working-at-a-startup-and-reading-reddit-and-besides-I-have-kids attitude" work better for you?
Interesting comment here from a purported inside source:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/10/t-mobile-we-probably-lost...

> I've been getting the straight dope from the inside on this. Let me assure

> you, your data IS gone. Currently MS is trying to get the devices to sync the

> data they have back to the service as a form of recovery.

> It's not a server failure. They were upgrading their SAN, and they outsourced

> it to a Hitachi consulting firm. There was room for a backup of the data on

> the SAN, but they didn't do it (some say they started it but didn't wait for

> it to complete). They upgraded the SAN, screwed it up and lost all the data.

> All the apps in the developer store are gone too.

> This is surely the end of Danger. I only hope it's the end of those involved

> who screwed this up and the MS folks who laid off and drove out anyone at

> Danger who knew what they were doing.
This is incredible. In no way is it even remotely acceptable for them not to have backups.
Assuming a sampling rate of 44100 samples per second, and 16-bit PCM, there are actually (2^16)^44100 possible 1-second-long, CD-quality recordings (which is way, way more than 1445068800).
But what you're missing is they had no guarantee that the data would be backed up. No one told them the data would be backed up.

If you hand priceless data over to someone who openly tells you they won't back it up they might be the idiot but you're still irresponsible.
How do you know the changes you do check in actually work without the changes you don't check in? "git stash" or "hg shelve" seem much less sketchy.
On Windows 7: Windows+1, Windows+2 ... Windows+0, bring to the foreground any of the first the first ten items in your taskbar.
I'm sorry but if you are content to leave the only copy of priceless things such as contacts, treasured photos, etc... in the hands of companies with no contractual obligation to you than yes, you're a fool.

The bank legally owes me my money. The bus driver is guilty of a crime if he crashes the bus. The Doctor is guilty of malpractice. If gmail deletes your account you have absolutely not recourse what so ever. None, Zip. Zilch. Zero.

Sidekick did screw up but it doesn't make the people who lost their data innocent either. You have to take responsibility for that which you value.
If my comments disappear tomorrow it's not going to have a huge negative impact on me. Not like losing my entire address book would.
"We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience."

Inconvenience. Wow. Catastrophe seems to fit better.
What is the class action lawsuit being referred to?
Oh come on. "Any of Ted's past stuff"? I've read a lot more than any, and all I remember are a lot of sarcastic rants alleging stupidity on the part of others. I played along for a while, thinking that the author had a minor gift for satire, until it became clear that he was writing the same thing over and over again and never going deeper. But there's a more substantial point here. You can't tell from blog posts whether someone is a skilled programmer. You can only tell that by working with them or with their code. I haven't done either, so what I said was true.

The gap between blogging about programming and actually being skilled at it is no different than the general gap between talking about any X and doing X (which is one of the most noticeable properties of the human race).
You should add any insight to the eproject wiki:

http://wiki.github.com/jrockway/eproject

Glad you enjoy using it :)
Things for Mac OS X and the iPhone.

I'd never really kept up with a to-do list before (I usually just used a piece of paper at my desk), but I'm able to do more things now because I want to get rid of the red reminder icon.
1. I'm sorry but any admin who trusts their data solely to the cloud is foolish. It's just that simple. You really think an admin in a company is going to keep their job if they trust all their data to the cloud and then the cloud company screws up and loses it. No, because they were the one responsible for the data and they should have made backups.

Same here. Sidekick screwed up. No question. But that doesn't make it ok for the users not to have this data backed up.

2. How about you read my post before commenting on it. I didn't say they did know where their data is I said they had a responsibility to and if they weren't they were being irresponsible.
> Above all, I can't stand insulting somebody by insulting the work they've done.

1 comment previous:

> But I don't blame you for needing to snark at other people after seeing adamhowell.org.

"Above all" is kind of a relative term for you, huh?

I worked at Google, too, so I wouldn't go around your whole life using that distinction as your measuring stick for smart people. "Any club that would have me for a member" and all that.
I am a new Panera customer and I think I would come back more frequent.
I am very bothered by how he said "synthesizer."
Actually, he says that he may work on refactoring an existing forge project to add the features he deems necessary to free it's users from the "data jail."

No idea if that will really happen, but if so it's a tad better than the normal complain-but-do-nothing approach it's so common to find.
Resizes the browser, too. Why would anyone do that in 2009?
This summary took me 1 minute to read, not ~20. It's worth the indirection.
Yeah, calling it an "instrument" is incorrect. It's a controller, plain and simple. It is a pretty cool one, granted.
We use a similar system, only we use post-its (and scotch tape) to write on, as the white board is too small to write everything on. Also, our handwriting tends to suck.
You see, the fact that I took your exact line and modified it to mention your web site instead of his web site ought to have ticked you off that perhaps I was trying to point out how immature your post was.

I worked at Google, too, so I wouldn't go around your whole life using that distinction as your measuring stick for smart people. "Any club that would have me for a member" and all that.

I know. It says so on your web site. It also says you founded JotSpot, an unoriginal wiki concept, and that Google bought you to make Google Sites, which is one of Google's failed services.

I'm sure that you're bright and motivated and very very capable. My point isn't that you're any sort of failure. My point is that neither is Ted.
I think he is trying to be sarcastic.
Practice at a young age isn't a bad thing. But the music community, while it acknowledges prodigies, usually doesn't appreciate music more or less based on age. The first example that comes to mind is Chris Thile, who was in a Grammy Award-winning band at 12. He was a prodigy, yes, but he became famous not for that but for the music he produced.
I use Linode for my sites and haven't had any problems. I've heard that Slicehost has a better control panel (Linode has practically nothing apart from allowing you to provision your resources), but I didn't really need those. I just needed a VPS with root access that wouldn't break the bank, and Linode fit the bill.
Are they still active during the checkout? If they do that with credit card data then Visa is entitled to sue them for violating under PCI DSS at 500k per day of offense.