skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You make excellent points, but consider that "upside" isn't entirely measured in dollars, and the situation the OP describes isn't the only possible one.

I've done my time at Acme Corp, and it doesn't interest me. I built really great, really fast software that did [insert generic thing here], for people who didn't even want to be doing that, but did it because they were paid $9.25 an hour to operate the software I wrote to do [generic thing].

In addition, I had very little agency of my own -- I did what I was told to do, and I did it quite well, and was rewarded for doing so.

But human beings are bright sparks in a simmering universe of dust -- I feel like in some existential sense, we as humans not /meant/ to toil at arbitrary tasks. We're meant to live, to experience, and to make connections. To be in love, to witness beauty. Maybe to create some beauty of our own.

What it boils down to for me that the independent way of operating, as opposed to the structure of a corporation, gets me that much closer to my dream of existing as a "real human being." You can't really buy that.
Wait a second.

1. "...it doesn't work because a "Resource" is just the end product of a "Service"...". I think we need to review the concepts. A resource is an abstraction, a thing that lives on the web, in no particular place, and that may have more than one representation. Actual implementation of a resource can be anything, and one option is to built a service.
2. Nor SOA nor REST are interfaces! Wrong, they are architecture styles.
3. Agree, same functionality can be achieved using either style. But app is not only the functional part, but the quality attributes too, and REST/SOA have different architectural constrains to deal with those attributes.
4. Finally, you are right, YOu can choose what to use, but it is not good to confuse them.
Wooden "Captain's Chair" from an "antiques" place but really just junk from a bar. I sanded it to get rid of the nasty laquer and it looks decent now. Unfortunately it is absolutely uncomfortable and completely unsuitable for sitting here for any length of time. So, I am also looking for a new chair...I like the look of the Aeron's but would like to find a lower-priced alternative. Please tell us what you find!
If you raised money, what percentage of the company do the founders still own?

That's pretty depressing that more than 1 in 10 of the responding founders said they owned less than 20% of their companies.
i got an invite yesterday and my bit of playing around in my own wave (no other contacts have wave) - was of no excitement (say compared to gmail when it came around)

however I can imagine super productivity in communication/im for teams sitting across continents.

A tiny advantage of wave is that you can watch your colleague typing realtime. Those two minutes of impatient waiting (specially during a heated discussion) now would be drastically shortened. You could forget IM etiquettes during 'waving'.

I also thought of similarity with etherpad (specially the code while on the phone interview which was discussed earlier on HN)- where the interviewer may see the interviewee coding live.

imho, google wave may not matter now, when the users grow to decent numbers, we will find out.

PS: your gmail id becomes your google wave id (I had a good wave-id in the sandbox, i ended up getting my gmail account to the public preview).
Unless of course he has borrowed against his stock, like many people did during the first bubble. I would hope that he would have the intelligence to not get over extended and count his chickens before they hatch.
I don't see search engines as being 'vaguely related to artificial intelligence' at all.
There has been some research in formal and universal models of AI. See below for an example.

Universal AI: http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
For the same reason people are surprised by these videos (I thought they were built like tanks!), presumably people thought "I want to make it safe, I'll build it like a tank".

Maybe there was a general feeling of "if building it like a tank doesn't work, maybe cars just can't be made safe in the event of a crash?"

We are talking a car from 1959 in the original link - before computer modelling, before low tolerance robotic manufacturing and assembly, before fast response electronics for airbags and seatbelt pretensioners, before the data from crash tests could be collected in an automated fashion. We're talking before stereo sound here. The past is a foreign country, we can't judge it by our standards applied to hindsight.

(Apologies if 1959 is within your memory - for me it may as well be the dark ages ;)

Also, cars were meant to carry you from A to B. They shipped because they could do that and make a profit. Survival in the event of an accident is sort of a side benefit.
I don't think he was implying conspiracy or discrimination as much as noting a common thread.
I have the same complaint about almost every other new site I visit - I don't immediately know what the site is about.

My screen is filled with "Movies Coming Soon."

The actual point of the site is barely visible at the very top, and the very bottom. And massive displays of rich media are drawing my eye to the center, so I didn't notice.

Were I a casual browser, I would have already closed the window, and totally missed the point.

In short, make your point visible, center-stage.
The thing about Html is that it is a medium which can be read and written by anyone and no one owns. No one owning Html means that it can spread "frictionlessly", with no restrictions.

Everything that one might imagine would replace Html does not have these characteristics. That means that as mobile access to the web becomes the norm, it will replace any mobile specific technology, no matter how clever one makes them. What would you prefer - Kindle with no web or web with no Kindle? This should happen in Africa in the same way it has happened here.
Great design, clever idea. I would signup for this:

http://www.fandango.com/affiliateprogram

and add a nice big button for "buy a ticket to see this movie". Seems like that would deliver better than adsense.
Yes, only short of touting the new 'best' programming language. Thanks for the demonstration. Name a programming language without horrid drawbacks, I dare you.
Who doesn't have a small sample size when it comes to work? Even the most determined job-hopper can only work at a small number of companies long enough to really understand the dynamic. And even the most perceptive outside observer won't really know what it's like to have devoted a big chunk of one's life to a job.

There's an endless variety of human experience and we only get to live one fragment of it ourselves. That's the point of swapping stories.
When I saw the vid, I just realized I've been pronouncing "Posterous" wrong all this time. I assumed it was long o, as in "post". But to hear them pronounce it, it rhymes with preposterous. My way seems better to me, but what do I know.
Yes, the derivative is the inflation rate. If we want to talk about that, why not look at a graph of that instead?

And assuming we can't for some bizarre reason, the log graph is better at comparing inflation rates, huh? So in which graph do you spot the 1665 to 1945 price stability first?
I think the best defintion of "free will" basically boils down to "unpredictable in detail absent simulation". This sounds weird at first, but the results probably match your intuitive understanding of free will. Given that, I think that any general intelligence approaching human level will have free will.

That doesn't mean that it won't have certain goals, though it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to design a clean goal system with a top-level goal (see also "Friendliness"). Humans clearly do not have this kind of goal system.
Their original tagline was something along the lines of "it's preposterously easy to use." (I say it as "post-erous" too, don't worry).
Yes, but it's too late to change (see seiji's downvoted comment below).
I can read logarithmic graphs. And it took longer for my brain to pick out that feature in the second graph.

Remember that there is always information trade-off going to a log-scale. In this case, I argue that the trade-off is not worth it. The first graph has a clear and recognizable feature. The second graph is noisy.
As someone who used to program mostly in Java, but now works mostly in Ruby and Lua, I can say that I enjoy programming in Ruby and Lua more than Java. But I think I was still a fairly productive programmer before I made the switch.

I'm not sure how much of this is due to the languages themselves or the sort of overall culture of how software is developed in each one. You can have 500 character class names and factories that make factories that make factories in both Ruby and Java, but you only see people doing that in Java.

Since many projects end up using a lot of preexisting code in the form of open source or commercial libraries, if the language you're using has a culture of convoluted hierarchies like Java developers often seem to create, then you're going to inherit that pain if you use that software, and it will likely slow you down.
Startups make bad day-jobs. They make good "doing important stuff" vehicles. BigCo is great when you just want to not care, and sometimes, that's perfectly valid. (e.g. when I was doing most of my open source work and needed something to pay the bills)
O'Reilly History of Programming Languages Poster [pdf]
What's your endgame? Are you thinking of trying to sell data to movie studios/theaters/marketers? Might be helpful for them to know what trailers generate the most excitement.
I have data. I want you to be able to use that data. I create a service so that you can INTERFACE with my data.

Again, the reason "Information Architecture" has become a dirty word in most IT organizations is because of these little mental circles. Like when you say "Actual implementation of a resource can be anything". What does that even mean? Are you saying there's some form of "resource" that isn't data of some kind? Because if all resources are data of some kind than there has to be some process to deliver that data. That process is called a service. Hence resources are the end result of services (as I said)
It isn't actually clear whether intelligence is anything other than some emergent phenomenon of suitable connected 'simple heuristics' and 'learning algorithms'. If you as me, we also are overglorified Eliza's.
Example of what? Business model?

There are plenty of examples both in the article (bicycle calling providers) and elsewhere (mobile micro-finance).

And there are thousands of other uses people in places like Africa might be hungry for, but nobody really even tries to provide them with a solution.
Clojure Cheat Sheet [pdf]
Fujifilm starts shipping 3D imaging system
They're related. If a startup/team really has the first three they probably made a good language choice naturally.
It seems to me that people are associating the platform with the price its software should cost, rather than on the quality, playability or usability of said software.

Sure, some of the App Store games you could easily picture winding up on one of those "5,000 Games!" CDs if they were developed on the PC. Those Apps probably should be free or 99 cents at the most. Some of the games and apps could easily be considered full featured desktop products that might sell for $10-$20 on a PC/Mac. It's my assumption that one of the reasons these are NOT desktop apps already is because it's notoriously hard to market and publish desktop software and because the iPhone/iPod Touch has the "IT" factor right now. But just because it's an iPhone app and not a Mac app, why should it cost any less?

Unless of course you consider the extra marketing and publishing costs of putting out games for a PC or Mac into the cost of the product. But does that really make a $20 app a $1 app if you remove those costs?
More information on how the design defect in the Citicorp building was fixed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center#Engineering_cr...

Original New Yorker article:

http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm
There is one big difference: we can reason about reason (meta reason), Eliza can't.

It is not a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind and seems to be unique to higher primates (you can learn a dog to do tricks, but it won't spend its time coming up with new tricks), one of the most interesting science videos I have ever seen is one where a bonobo learns to write a symbol that had been on a computer it used to express its emotions.
That's certainly an option in some cases. I couldn't do that for tarsnap, because at the point I started bringing people to test tarsnap, I didn't have the accounting code written yet.
I think the blog post clearly mentions that there is indeed one standardised resource management service for REST over HTTP, and given its simplicity and ubiquity, that particular standardised service orientation is uninteresting and largely ignorable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory

It's a heavily researched topic right now. The Worlds concept, as far as I can tell, is actually more general than STM and what you described. In STM, there's the global state everyone can see, and then there's local states that try to commit atomically to the global state. With Worlds, I don't think there's one true global state. I think it would give you more explicit control, which I'm not convinced would be a good thing.
Fandango makes you apply for that on Commission Junction, and they've turned me down twice so far. I'm going to keep trying, and I figure now that the site has launched publicly, they'll be more open.
Web version: http://clojure.org/cheatsheet
Most of the stuff I post to the front page is quite dry and technical: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mbrubeck But sometimes I just want to cheer on an entrepreneur who's done something clearly awesome.
You weren't "bought for a small portion" of what you were worth, or someone would have paid more; more likely you had an inflated notion of what you were worth.
Awesome name. I like the design, but I think it would be better if you had more movies that were already voted on in the first screen. My first impression was "okay, here are a bunch of things that I can vote on tomorrow... not sure what to do now."

Also, I think the font for the 3 headings ("coming out this week", "released last week", etc) could stand out more.
Yea, it's funny---I was reading the blog entry and found myself agreeing that most of what he said was often true about the startups I've worked for or had acquaintance with. The difference is that's how I like it. Chaos is fun. Of course, there are certain undesirable consequences of disorder you want to try to minimize in order to maximize the chances of success.
Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"
Formerly successful speculator loses all in what he thought was a sure-thing bet due to economic downturn. Stop me if you've heard this before.
How do you feel about we also are overglorified Eliza's?

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Thank you all very much for your replies. I hadn't even thought of networking at conferences. I'll definitely put that in the plans.

Also, like idlewords said, I'll join a small open source project and see if I can contribute in some meaningful way.
Cheap office chair from staples/office centre. Works fine, but I did rip off the arm rests so it can get closer to my work table.
When I was editing this post I thought for about 5 seconds about replacing that screenshot. Then I got over myself and did something useful instead.

Not everything in life needs to be a competition.
Buffett: Rock Star of American Capitalism
Given the start-ups he described, he's wrong for the job. Ok, I'll go along with your proposition. Out of curiosity, What kind of person would be right for the job?
Why do I get the idea that this will end up like all the other government IT projects? Massively over budget, too late, full of bugs and too slow to actually do anything?
Posted elsewhere, but sometimes good posts sink for no reason here...and this story deserves some love. 270Gbps is nothing to sneeze at!

Nature link is an $18 paywall, but the Cornell Photonics group put all their papers up as pdf so I'm sure this one will jin them soon - http://nanophotonics.ece.cornell.edu/publications.html - there's a nice mix of blue-sky and coming-soon stuff.
An overwhelming response, thanks for reaching out. I'll get back to your emails in the next 24 hrs but to answer the most common questions:
- I'm expecting this to be ~1 week long trip. Spend some time checking out what we have, make some recommendations and have some fun.
A Steelcase LEAPV2. Great chair.
Mark Zuckerberg on innovation: "Move fast and break things"
Falcon was only started in order to counter this threat. It would have been several more years for it to gain traction.

Now that it's all under the same roof, it's moot.
Why would there be something generalizable about rails programmers, or any language for that matter. Honestly, this whole notion always seems so out there.
Besides the Intellectual Curiosity, Systemic Thinking, and Healthy Paranoia, I got the 2 more traits of a successful leader/problem solver:

* Be Proactive	- "Never wait for problems to come, seek them out and embrace them. Successful leaders do not see problems as threats; they see them as an opportunity to learn and improve."

* Acknowldege personal fallibility - "Effective problem-finders acknowledge their personal fallibility, rather than cultivating an aura of invincibility." Me: This probably is most helpful if you have people around you that complements you in your fallible side.
First, thanks for giving us an inside perspective on the project.

Second...Your comments are exactly the point of the article: these technologies are already here in some form, they are simply being refined/updated/improved/applied,etc Furthermore, whether or not Indect succeeds in its objectives, the objectives themselves will be accomplished by someone.

Third: It is up to the public to make decisions about what kind of privacy it wants and needs, and to do so they need to be informed. At least Project Indect has made its objectives known and open for review. I'm sure there exist many other programs with the same objectives that are operating in secret. If the public decides it can accept the 'new privacy' then Indect should continue and metachris and everyone who works on that project should feel proud to do so. If the public rejects the invasion of privacy then they need to push for new technologies to defeat/defend against the intrusions because the development of the intrusion technology cannot and will not be stopped.
Reproducing physical keys from photographs
No. Two words: Semantic Web.
Google fights to keep four executives out of prison over video clip
Completely off topic, but this is the sort of place I'm looking for now. I've sat in the start up, older dot com, and now in the ginormous corporation but I'm looking for a middle ground. I'd be curious to find out where you work, but I won't pry. Of course, I've been told I should set up shop for myself more than once. I'm just not sure its time yet.
Glad you enjoyed your time, thanks for those insights. We actually have hot water via solar water heaters. To be honest, most days you wish your shower was a little colder!

A metropolis this is not, but it's worth it when you have your pick of several deserted beaches :)

PS Where'd you get that aerial shot? Was that a Twin Air flight?
The article that this article references was posted earlier today.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=855389

actual article: http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazons-ec2-gen...
WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125440678661956317.html
I worked in a large successful tech company right after school. One of the best periods of my life. I learned a lot, worked on really cool technology, and I was treated well. I left for reasons unconnected to them, with much regret.

There exist great start-ups, great big companies, lousy start-ups and lousy big companies. And within great companies, big or small, there exist lousy situations. Your immediate boss and your colleagues have more to do with your happiness than almost anything else.
Nvidia Ups Parallel Processing Ante with Fermi
And I just bought my C1060 Tesla four months ago...
All programming languages have drawbacks, but PHP has more than its fair share.
I know its hard for us at HN to believe to someone is actually happier working for the man. It's a personal choice. He likes the structure of cooperate life to the adhoc environment in the previous startups he worked for. I can appreciate his sentiments.
On #3:
"The firm brought in Robert Nardelli in try to could save the already-struggling automaker..."

Not trolling, but that is one damn bad for a sentence make.
Seeking Co-Founder(s) for BigTweet & Social.com
Interesting idea, it might help users form an opinion faster by making the rotten tomatoes score more prominent, and perhaps add it to the white space on the right of a title on the home page.

It would be nice to integrate the trailers for the 'Coming out this week' by playing them when the user clicks the large image.
> (1) it's just so tiny parts and (2) if i'm not doing it somebody else will.

Think about other moments in history when people justified their actions by this reasoning. OTOH it's not just your responsibility. Leak as much information as possible before the system makes that dangerous ;)

Do other people you work with feel bad about what they are doing? Then realize that they keep doing it because you keep doing it, and you do because they do.
It's funny how languages shape the community around it. I feel like I spend more time these days debugging Zend, PHPUnit and Propel than I do debugging my team's code. I am continually astounded at how bad PHP can be.
Why? It's memorable, and with modern browsers you're only going to have to type the whole thing once at most (sure enough, now I can just type "rat" and it will autocomplete)
I had the same problems. After checking the url to figure out what the site was called, I finally got it.
The author states that people won't be using HTML, they'll be using SMS, MMS, or WAP. This is reasonable, but the author doesn't seem to understand that SMS (and the MMS extension of SMS) and WAP are protocols, whereas HTML is a markup language.

Perhaps a better dichotomy might be, "the next 4 billion connected won't be using HTML, they'll be using WML," or "the next 4 billion connected won't be using HTTP, they'll be using SMS/WAP."

But mixing up protocols and markup languages makes the author look like they don't understand the topic they're writing about.
even if, there will be a lot of new knowledge generated (even 'open' in form of papers) -- especially on where the problems with such a systems are and some ideas on how to solve them.

the next approach will build on that and eventually succeed. else the next, and so on.
The reason this "upside" notion is so pernicious is that it's fed by powerful biases. We read about the successes. Even the failures we hear about, we're reading about them by and large because they were "successful".

You hit the nail on the head. I know 4 very talented engineers who have been in silicon valley for 12+ years each. I have tried to recruit all of them at various times, but they have always been swimming in great offers, in good times and bad, so they are good. Between them, they have worked in at least 10 start-ups. While none of them are starving, no one got rich either. They have lived frugally, so they have a decent pile saved up, but that was done the old fashioned way, not through hitting the lottery.
Researchers Break Vanish Security System
Computer scientists say they have cracked Vanish, a security system that attracted wide interest because it protects data by making it unreadable. Now a team called Unvanish claims to have broken Vanish.