skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To 99% in the startup scene or at the big companies it's not to make the world a better place. It's not to be creative and productive. The main drive is ambition.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm also not convinced "most founders are in it to get filthy rich," as lemming says elsewhere in this thread. I think there's a spectrum of motivations, including:

* Ambition

* Creative drive/wanting to build something

* Aversion to corporate culture/large organizations

* Opportunity to make a lot of money

* Social needs

* Other

It's possible to have multiple motivations. But the one that interests me is "social needs." This includes everything from wanting to work with a great team to doing something because it's the "hot thing" or the activity that gets the most respect in the community. The recent news about YC applications rising 40% YOY may reflect some of that, and also explains the huge turnout for pitch events, networking sessions, etc.
Just thought the same thing.

However, Linux on the Desktop (almost) already had its time, and it passed. It was around 2009, Ubuntu was at its pinnacle, it was the time of Compiz and Gnome 2 and transparent terminals and themes and whatever. A lot of my (non-technical) friends were suddenly interested in Linux (well, distros of GNU+X11+Desktop Environment+Free/Open Source applications). This was a free alternative to Windows, better than Vista or XP, actually easier to use for many tasks ("I can't believe that it is so easy to install new fonts, I never knew how to do that on Windows"). This was before all of the experimentation (Gnome 3, Unity, ...) that, while in principle a good thing, the way it was executed effectively killed the old lineages (Gnome 2). When it comes to languages: Python 2.7, and on-topic: Perl 5. This was also before all the annoying in-fighting for mostly political reasons (systemd cough but there are many more examples). I don't know whether politics is an issue for Perl.

But that there is no golden way of transitioning to a new version in the FOSS world definitely is a problem that is harming so many projects.
When will be the Year of Hurd on the Desktop?
Would you like to email me? I actually know two guys, and they're both really good.
Most mobile web applications that would use this polyfill wouldn't have a separate mobile / desktop site and have just a good responsive design, so mobile users wouldn't feel a need to request the desktop site. That feature is usually used (I assume) because the mobile versions of websites often offer limited functionality.
Agreed. That's why I like to start with a process and then build a tool. If people find the process valuable enough to follow it then you know the tool will be providing real business value
You're conflating the archival properties of the medium with the decision about what to save. Oil paint on canvas is durable. It doesn't mean that a museum needs to retain every piece of crap that anyone paints.
You usually don't have only 3 moths left when you have a psychiatric disease, so waiting looks like a better option.

I can't find a well known horror story of experimental drugs just now. But if you want to read a horror story of experimental surgery you can start with HM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison .
No, autonomous cars will not “abolish transit” in dense cities
Union strikes in Belgium? Here's a crowdfunding campaign to cover the damages
What are the 10 algorithms one must know
“US smartphone users stopped growing. Biggest news in mobile for 7 yrs.”
Why does it matter? All the fixes will already be there after rebase anyway.
3D Printing a Lunar Base and NASA Finds Floods of Cosmic Light
I read that first answer (and the others) carefully before writing the above, and I don't think it does. Well, let me be more precise.

The answer addresses the question I think the questioner intended to ask. What the answer does not do is fully disambiguate the question as asked, nor does it even point out that the question as asked is ambiguous. It just takes what it thinks is the most obvious interpretation, and answers that.

Which is fair enough. Most people are going to adopt that interpretation and understand the intent of the question. That's not addressing the point I'm trying to make, which is that the question as asked is ambiguous, and yet a simple re-wording would not be ambiguous. Or at least, not as ambiguous.

But I guess my point is lost, and people will down-vote this thinking I'm just picking nits. Lost cause, but I honestly don't understand why programmers of all people should care so little about the careful and precise use of natural language.

They appear not to, and I'll have to take that as an axiom without understanding.

To be honest, your reply has made me stop completely and reassess everything. In particular, the fact that you of all people seem not have missed completely my intended point makes it perfectly clear to me that I quite simply have failed utterly to make my point at all. I know your posts and comments on HN, I recognize your nick, so to have you not see the point means that, somehow, it's simply not there to be seen. I'll have to go away and think again as to whether it is in fact possible to make the point, and if possible, whether I'm a good enough writer to do so. Current evidence suggests not.

And finally, you say ...

That's actually the first thing the
answer in the post addresses ...

Maybe I've mis-interpreted your use of "that's", and perhaps I don't know which part of what I've written you think is being addressed in that first answer. Perhaps we're just talking past each other.
I enjoy this article:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-way-to-prevent-this-says...

Yes, it's satire.
I wasnt able to do this..
But only because web developers buckled and added loads of workarounds for older versions of IE.
The title is too buzzfeedy but the graph is indeed informative!
"apparently so many things work on mice but not people?"

If we experimented on people (tho it would take longer) we would probably find lots of things that work on people but not mice.
Trading functionality would be nice.. Or even, convert your game to gift and send to a friend functionality.
UK (or England in 1200) was definitely a wool-based economy, leaving us the Wool Churches (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wool_church) and the Woolsack still sitting in the House of Commons.

how do you even make clothes

Tailoring is a thing. You'd learn patterns in your apprenticeship, then tailor to the body of the person who will be wearing it. Basic outlines would be marked in your workbench for daily use, but obviously the exact size needs to be adjusted.
Virgin Galactic Doesn’t Just Benefit the Rich–It’s Good for Science
Domino's Becomes a Tech Company That Happens to Make Pizza
The main problem of this development is the fact that more and more old local people cannot afford the rents anymore and have to move to the suburbs although they have lived in the centre for almost all of their life.
A Kiez is changing very quickly: it starts with an abandoned Kiez which everybody avoids - low rents etc. Then creatives come and a scene is developing. Bars/Clubs etc get attracted, more people move there, rents rise, bars/clubs close again -> scene moves somewhere else.
Funny is that a lot of my friends who have moved to Berlin complain that their local club/pub has closed (cannot afford rent anymore) but in fact they're responsible for it.
Atm Berlin is still an awesome place with a lot of independent spirit but that might dramatically change within the next 10 years.
Will version 2.0 come with a camera and silent quadcopter, so it can watch you and quietly hover slightly out of your view? Forever?
Probably because it is used in Ericson switches etc? A lot of stuff has been sold on the back of Erlang even though it is probably a niche language in terms of users/popularity.
Not sure the trade off line has been drawn in the correct place here. TLS should be implemented as a filter; the world isn't limited to files and (blocking) sockets. What about integration with event loops, for example? How does one test this API?
I'd probably take the lumber job. Lots of time to think and built in exercise.
Photos of NASA’s Abandoned Launch Sites
Zero +: Lisp Dev Board with WIFI
Prediksi Bayer Leverkusen vs. Mainz 05 8 November 2014 Bundesliga
>An active post that leads to close to over sign ups in less that 48h

really..
AndroWish: Tcl/Tk on Android
China is making big moves to switch over to Linux. They are aiming to have a significant portion of their computers on Linux by 2020. The resources they pour into Linux may change the landscape considerably.

http://www.themukt.com/2014/10/30/china-will-uprade-pcs-linu...
StatusPage.io (YC S13) Is Hiring a DevOp/CIO in Denver, CO
To add to this, there is a time component as well. If your data only needs to be secure for 20 years, it has a different threat profile than one that needs to be secure for 200 years. Then the question becomes "20 years for who?". The safe industry, as an example, thinks about their security problems in this manner.
I used to be opposed to Python's whitespace too, but then I realized that no matter how badly written a piece of code was in Python, I could still read it. This makes dealing with legacy code so much nicer.
As someone who has written both Perl and Ruby (in that order), you might be interested in this Ruby gem to alleviate at least some of those problems: https://github.com/solnic/virtus
totally agree. Perl was super innovative in it's day. It's really hard for a language to evolve after it becomes established.
Black-hole mergers cast kaleidoscope of shadows
$0.75 seems incredibly inexpensive to me. Modafinil, by comparison, can be $50 per dose.
You're probably thinking about it the wrong way then. It turns out that even in cases where you don't have some massively distributed, scalable needs, there are a lot of cases to use Erlang. While it makes insanely difficult problems tractable, it can also make moderately challenging problems simple (and it sometimes can make simple tasks irritating; see usual list of Erlang complaints).

Just about any sort of web backend (that isn't having to do a whole lot of number crunching), any sort of interaction with hardware, handling/transport of binary data (as mentioned above), and of course any time you need reliability, it's worth considering.

But even in areas where there's not an obvious win, a lot of problems that are traditionally done in a single threaded manner can be made simpler in a concurrent language like Erlang.

An example I like to give is time based task scheduling. In a traditional language, you'd implement something like that with a priority queue. Which is fine, but you have a lot of work. First, what happens if timings change? You have to rejigger -everything-. What happens if you have multiple tasks at the same time? You need a threadpool or similar to dispatch these things onto. What happens if one task itself creates a new task for a later time? You'll have multiple people adding things onto the priority queue, so now you need to start locking. And of course, since you've got your dispatching process sleeping until the next task is to start, you have to make sure any time you modify the queue, you remember to notify that sleeping task, so it can update as necessary. There is a lot to get wrong.

In Erlang? You spin up a separate process for each task, with a timer. Done (with caveats; you likely will need to persist the task information and load it periodically into a task+timer process, but that's pretty trivial).

A similar case can be made for functional compared to a more procedural approach. That's a little too long winded for here, but even examples that seem -ideal- for OO, can oftentimes be described more simply in a functional, data-centric manner, and future refactorings are made simpler as well in doing so.
Huge raid to shut down 400-plus dark net sites
Indeed. Functions like tls_connect and tls_connect_fds don't belong at this level. A TLS library should do only TLS, and behave like a black box, from which you pull data and into which you can push data (in a non-blocking way).

Mixing in OS-related stuff only complicates the API.
I use Telegram too, because it is easy to use, secure, and you can use it even in Windows 7. If we don't have internet we switch to Babel Full, which works both on Android and iOS.
Paperclip.js
Yes, the Greek people really really didn't want to see the Drachma come back. They know that their corrupt and inefficient government would inflate away their currency at a prodigious rate if they went back to having their own currency and the rules imposed by the foreign lenders are really the best way to reform their governments. Kind of messed up, but there it is.

Do you seriously think Luxembourg is actually some kind of third world state that is only doing well because it has low corporation taxes? I think you should review the economies of countries painted as tax havens before concluding that. And of course big democratic countries can lower corporation taxes. If the citizens prefer not to do that, OK, that's their choice, but companies leaving is the expected outcome of that. It's not some kind of immorality on the behalf of other citizens of other countries to exploit that. Unless you're going to paint all Irish people as immoral, for example, which is absurd.
French bank security breach 25m loss
Computer science through dialogues – “search”
I once got a .net role and then was told all the work was php. At that point i left, otherwise all projects i have ever met have had language chosen based on specialisms of colleagues which makes the question somewhat redundant. In what context would you ask this?
Can you mention which 4-5 companies you think are doing a good job of taking on WordPress? I can only think of one or two, off the top of my head.
Qt4 will be removed in Debian Jessie+1
Root access for students at Penn Manor
Yyyyeah uh, a browser-implemented polyfill is also called a 'supported JS feature'. Polyfills are for older browsers that don't support a certain feature yet (or I guess for features that are not yet implemented in newer browsers).
Prediksi Eintracht Frankfurt vs. Bayern Munchen 8 November 2014 Bundesliga
APIs in Enterprise MBaaS Platforms: Data Access APIs
I think Wired was the first with the first Silk Road bust, too, or in similar FBI operations. Does the Wired have FBI "sources" or FBI PR contacts that give them these almost-exclusives?
Do you know of anyone with a signify (or reop) key tattoo yet?
> Perhaps we're just talking past each other.

Probably. I think most of us saw the title and reacted like the guy posting "well, technically, nothing" and moved on to the however, which is a fairly straightforward list of "what are the things this system is the best at", which is mostly what we're interested in as programmers and/or startup people.

I didn't downvote you, of course, since people can't downvote stuff on articles they have posted.
>This is an old argument, it was made about writing, printing etc

One difference is that technology is replacing more and more of what we one might consider "mundane", but really involves higher order thinking that is important for creativity, critical-thinking, problem-solving, etc. For instance, the ability to draw from a broad swath of stored, assimilated, and well-understood information is a critical element of problem-solving and finding creative solutions.

Because functional intelligence to a large degree involves drawing on information and experiences to assemble solutions. This requires a "working set" from which to draw. It is not enough to simply look things up, because you don't know what to look up.

And, in general, what computers do for us that, say, simply printing or other older "technology" didn't supplant includes executive functioning (e.g. algorithmic tasks like mapping directions, etc.) Beyond simple information retrieval, computers actually solve problems for us. In fact, it's so different from something like printing that I am not sure I understand your analogy.

>we're better at using information because we have much more access to it now

Sounds intuitive, but I am not sure we have evidence for this. Ironically, though, computers are better at using information.

>it is actually more efficient to spend our time learning other things

I mentioned that this could be one theoretical upshot but, in general, I think our culture is going in the opposite direction with a tendency towards mindless distraction. Exclude tech people and reconsider your statement.
>I associate Perl with inscrutable cat-walked-on-the-keyboard programs and little else.

That's because Perl had a lot of "convenient" shorthand and quirks in the language that could be abused, leading to unreadable, "cat-walked-on-keyboard" code. However, that is just a stereotype. One could also force Perl to straighten its posture with a strict pragma, making much of the eccentricity disappear. I have worked on several large Perl 5 codebases that were/are clean and easy to understand and maintain.
I'm confused...the post says that the speaker is Larry Wall. Is he really considered a 'random outsider' to the Perl 6 community?
Bascially, the Javascript language standard defines a set of default API functions. These have been expanded over time, most notably with ES 5, which added things like .map() to arrays.

However, older browsers like IE <9 do not support ES 5, so if, as a developer, you try to call .map on an array in IE 8, you'd get an error.

A polyfill uses Javascript's awesome ability to add functions to basic types, and extend the language in other ways. So if a browser does not ship with, for example, array.map() itself, a polyfill can do array.map = function() {} and implement it.

That way, a developer can simply use array.map and not have to do a different implementation (fall back on a ye olde for-loop).
Block-scoped fixtures in C++ unit testing
Ebola-tackling robots to be discussed by the White House
Your use to Facebook is not anonymous but your use to your local ISP or non-technologically-advanced government would be shielded.
Making Yosemite Faster: Lowering Out of Control WindowServer CPU Usage
I think most of the good* features of Ruby came from Smalltalk, though you can definitely see the Perl influence.

*at least for my definition of "good"
I wonder if these attacks, along with some clever fingerprinting of the server host, and advanced techniques on traffic correlation, were enough to determine the whereabouts of the servers:

http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2013/papers/4977a080.pdf

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/ccs06hotornot.pdf
Would you trust 1,700 students with root access to their Linux system? This teacher does. A great story. Every school in America should be doing this.
Maybe they're just buying drugs on those websites
The point is that if you're not continually merging development down into your feature branch, then rebasing becomes overly difficult. Merging can introduce bugs if not done correctly.

At my company, we eschewed feature branches about a year ago. We have two branches - development and main, with a branch ("tag" in git speak, we use TFS) created for each release of our product (we're a software company, not a service company). Development happens in the development branch, and is merged up into the main branch after code freeze.

This does not preclude us from releasing often. With judicious use of feature toggles, it's simple to release with a feature that's not done.

Feature branches would just create a mess for us as there's necessarily many communicating parts between teams, and the number of feature branches required to keep them all in sync would be exponential.
If I was ever going to buy from New Relic, I wouldn't now - I've seen their retarget ads at least a thousand times. If I didn't care about click fraud, I would have made a point to make sure I cost them a few dollars.
Why does it matter? It doesn't work!

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"I hate watching this at lunch time during work hours"
This is a complement on how great I think the series is.

I absolutely love this series of videos. Its supremely comprehensive and makes me just want to quit my job, drive home, and build an amazing company.

Unfortunately bills gets in the way so I have to work these 8 hours. That said, every time I do watch these videos I'm coding and planning on my off hours. Startup school in NYC was an amazing experience as well.
> "I hope to heaven that the startup never ruins my marriage but it's not impossible to see it could happen"

I know it's (way) easier said than done, but I would suggets to stop hoping and start doing. I have never been married nor in a big commitment relationship, but I would assume than when you start thinking that a bad thing could happen, it's probably happening right now, or soon.

Good luck anyway, hope everything work out for you.
I think another problem is that an OS is not analagous to a website, it's more analagous to a web framework. And it's not like there are any framework building frameworks floating around
Top Five Popular Smart Home Apps
> I didn't downvote you, of course, since
> people can't downvote stuff on articles
> they have posted.

I knew that, but thanks for mentioning in.

>> Perhaps we're just talking past each other.

> Probably. I think most of us saw the title
> and reacted like the guy posting "well,
> technically, nothing" and moved on to the
> however, which is a fairly straightforward
> list of "what are the things this system is
> the best at", which is mostly what we're
> interested in as programmers and/or startup
> people.

Indeed, and I agree entirely with that. It still completely ignores the point I was trying to make, though, hence my confusion. So to elaborate minimally:

The question as asked is ambiguous. People are putting a reasonable interpretation on it and answering that interpretation, and that's fair enough. I'm trying to point out that more precise use of language costs little, and creates significant benefits in more effective communication.

Seems it's a lost cause, even among programmers, for whom ultra-precise communication is part of their work.
> The saddest thing about this post to me is the fact that he could only write it because his startup is apparently doing great.

Agreed.

> Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.

...and let's also not forget all the folks who are barely making ends meet at their existing jobs, putting in 60+ hour work weeks for a measly salary that's been stagnate for years or all the folks needing to work an extra job or two just to survive.
The difference in rents is very small, as far as I can tell. Out of curiosity I've looked for cheap apartments even in the eastern suburbs, but they don't really exist.

You'll probably have an easier time getting one, but you won't be paying much less. I pay €450 for a decent two-room place in a beautiful part of Kreuzberg, and it doesn't go much lower than that anywhere in Berlin.
Modern smartphones are always listening for "siri" or "ok google", and are regularly sending keep-alive packets, so I doubt that the battery drain for spying would be significantly noticeable, if done properly.

> why do one or the other?

Because resources are limited, even at government agencies. Effort spent hacking a device that will probably sell in the tens of thousands when they could be targeting devices that sell in the hundreds of millions just seems silly.
Amazing slides, but seems like a lot of work and not really a natural fit for (graph)relations.

Ever thought about a multi-model database like Orient or ArangoDB? The latter allows multi-collection JOINS on documents and graph's and is extensible by Javascript.

https://www.arangodb.com/key-features