skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, it's that your constant defense of Microsoft makes no sense. It's not a logical decision for Microsoft to make. It's hurting their business and their reputation, for almost no appreciable gain. Microsoft has the best chance in the last decade of retaking their market share and their position of power in the tech industry, but they're shooting themselves in the head.

It doesn't matter what their 'primary business' is. What matters is that their reputation plays into decisionmaking. What someone has to deal with at home is going to remind them of their irritation when it's time to make up their mind on a purchase at the office.
By that logic PHP is a much better language than Go, and has better engineers.
I know and agree dangerous criminals need to be in prison, but for some perverse reason I find myself kind of rooting for this guy.

Possibly it's the awe at the engineering marvel of his last escape tunnel. Anyway I'm guessing his luck and run out and betting he doesn't get away again.
This sums up internet commenting in 2016. Congratulations on entirely missing the point because you chose to focus on an irrelevant and pointless detail, which I'm sure will spawn a stupid subthread that changes no one's mind.
Seed fundraising is so confusing, especially for first-time founders. Everyone seems to have a different opinion and you can never be sure about people's bias or motives. I appreciate YC leveling the playing field with straightforward founder-friendly information.
I don't like to focus on the domains available. I think it's very shortsighted.
The article's statement about the administrative/registration contact is not quite correct.

The given email address seems to belong to this person, but he is still not the actual owner/registrant of the domain, which is the LLC.

The question now is who is the actual representative, respectively legal successor, of the LLC. This person/entity should be able to get the contact address changed to an address under their control.
The GCC developers talked about making uint8_t something other than unsigned char and figured they would probably get lynched if they did that (because uint8_t aliasing rules would be different). While the standard agrees with you, practice is somewhat different.
This Guide has a step baked in, which is move to Silicon Valley. I know this because it's the most important step, and geography plays such a defining role that I expected the guide to talk about it. I didn't see any mention of this. Then I searched the document for "geography" (0 hits) and then "silicon valley" which had 3 hits, in the two snippets below:

>A rule of thumb is that an engineer (the most common early employee for Silicon Valley startups) costs all-in about $15k per month. So, if you would like to be funded for 18 months of operations with an average of five engineers, then you will need about 15k518 = $1.35mm.

and

>Most seed rounds, at least in Silicon Valley, are now structured as either convertible debt or simple agreements for future equity (safes). 17 Some early rounds are still done with equity, but in Silicon Valley they are now the exception.

As you can see, this means the entire guide is written from the point of view of Silicon Valley. It still calls raising a seed round "brutal" and "long, arduous, complex, and ego deflating."

But it is, at least, possible. For the vast majority of the cases they are talking about, after the long, arduous, complex, and ego deflating process, outside silicon valley there is still no seed round that has been put together.

So, if you are reading this guide outside of silicon valley, please realize is that your first step toward having a crack at this arduous process, is to move to SV. Airbnb, based in San Francisco, still had these 7 famous rejections for its modest seed round: https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084

There's not a chance in hell it would have been funded on that model at all basically anywhere else in the world. Do what it takes: if your business needs a seed round, you owe it to your business to move to silicon valley.
We do it: gregarious.com.au
Satirical paper puts evidence-based medicine in the spotlight
This seems to be a trend, it reminds of having a blog for your product. It's a way to attract leads, gives your free SEO traffic, makes people that much more likely to convert. I'd like to see some numbers on how much more likely to convert (to join YC/others) hackers/founders will be after reading such posts.
This has been my personal project for the past few months. There are around 240k podcasts in the iTunes index and it is fairly trivial to scrape their feed urls.

Most of the podcast apps that have feed crawler backends (Pocket Casts, Overcast, etc) poll all 240k podcast feeds fairly frequently. More popular podcasts are polled on the order of every 2-3 minutes while less popular podcasts may only get polled every 10-15 minutes. This comes out to around 1.5 - 2 billion web requests per month.

It is important when you are making your feed requests that you set your last-modified and etag headers. These will speed up your requests significantly by having the servers send you a Not Modified (304) response if nothing has changed since your last poll. Something like 60% of the feeds support this.

You'll also want to keep a hash of the feed content. That way, when you get back a 200 response with the feed contents you can do a quick check to see if the feed content has changed since your last poll (for those servers that don't support etag). This will even further reduce the number of feeds you need to actually parse.

For those that returned a 200, and had a different hash, you now need to parse the feeds. There are a large number of podcasts which insert dynamic data into their feed. Some insert dynamic tracking query items into feed items. Or they make the some of the RSS feed dates the current time stamp (which is incorrect). These feeds with dynamic data will have to be fully parsed every time, which is a bummer. I've considered a future enhancement to my crawler that detects the feeds that do this and flip a bozo bit on them so I poll them less frequently.

The majority of podcast feeds are RSS 2.0. I'd have to check, but I think < 2% of podcasts in my database used Atom feeds. This was something that surprised me when I started the project. I spent a lot of time worrying about Atom feeds, or older RSS feeds but you could almost ignore them entirely and still capture most of the podcasts.

Parsing these feeds robustly is a whole topic unto itself. Many RSS/XML parsers are very strict. However, for this use case you don't want strictness. You want to extract the info out of the maximum number of feeds possible, even if some of them are malformed in some way. Perhaps the user didn't properly specify an XML namespace they are using. Or they are missing a closing tag for an element, etc.

Because the RSS spec doesn't require a GUID for items in the feed, you have to come up with your own algorithm for matching items with your new feed response. Many articles will tell you to use GUID if available, and if not, use Link. Or some combination of the above. However, for podcasts, you can almost always be assured that a podcast will have a url to the media file. So, I suggest using that as part of your matching algorithm in the absence of a GUID.

I plan on writing a more detailed article on this project as I get closer to finishing my crawler and submitting it to HN. As a further constraint, I'm attempting to get the monthly hosting costs for my distributed crawler to around $100/mo and it be capable of updating every podcast feed every 5 minutes.
Even after YC and with the full support of PG himself, AirBnb was turned down by one of the top VCs in the country:

http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html

And that's just one public example. (Chris Sacca also turned them down.)

Empirically it would be shocking if they were the only 2 investors who had the opportunity to invest but didn't.
FBI hacks world’s largest child porn site, 1,300 arrested
Academic Torrents, a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets
This was a great writeup with lots of great information. One thing that bugged me though was the "When to Raise Money" section. It says, in part: "However, for most it will require an idea, a product, and some amount of customer adoption, a.k.a. traction."

There was a great comment on HN a while back (I wish I remembered who said it) that said, "If you're asking about traction or revenue, you aren't making a seed investment".

Andy Bechtolsheim was a seed investor in Google -- he gave them a check based solely on their idea and who they were. Paul Graham/YC made a seed investment in reddit and Justin.tv and whole host of other companies -- none of them existed as more than idea when YC invested.

But VCs are risk averse people (ironic given they are in the risk business), so it makes sense that they would rather invest after a company can show a little traction, especially now that it's so easy to get that initial traction.

I just think we need a new term besides "seed" to differentiate it from the true seed investments.
Maybe because AirBnB found success in commercial property rental, not renting out your couch to someone, the original pitch. But I still don't think it's clear why AirBnB succeeded.

(Although parent didn't mention AirBnB?)
True Object-Oriented and Immutable Java Web Framework, 0.30 Released
Surely the resolution to any trademark conflict would be a domain transfer or not. "Let it lapse and end up with some other random owner" benefits only the lawyers.

That said, I can see why some owners may wish to immediately disavow a domain if they consider it to be a legal or reputational risk. In that case, it can simply be transferred to another owner, so I don't see why it would be a problem for anyone to renew it (though payment fraud might be a separate concern from some registrars).
Programming a single-board computer in JavaScript is reasonable. But why embed the JavaScript in HTML? There's no browser, no screen, and no user.
The great thing about threaded textual commenting is that you can have a sub-thread to discuss a side point, without removing the ability to debate the main point in parallel.

The comment struck me as incredibly anachronistic, bordering on offensively so.
How Credit Cards Tax America
Oops! LinkedIn error. Please check your url.
But I'm pretty sure my URL is correct. It's the gray little URL underneath my profile picture? Similar to the example shown in the text input on your page?
Gyroscope Annual Report 2015
How friendly is your AI? It depends on the rewards
> Self-organization by the way of deciding what to do just based on the current state of the local context

Isn't this only a problem because the "local context" is limited? Humans can handle really large "local contexts" (otherwise, who'd make the plan in the non-stigmertic organization?), and we can add a big set of time-dimension information to that context ("here's what we're trying to achieve and the information we have about best doing that")

In the end, swarm methodologies are about empowering individual agents with intelligence and information such that they "inherently" coordinate and the result of that coordination is the desired, overall effect. "Hire good people, keep them informed, and get out of their way."

But yes. The downside of things that focus on rapid iteration (which is how stigmertic stuff works) aren't good at large, single-chunk problems: if you can't iterate your way to a solution, these methods won't work for you.

There are some problems and individuals that are well suited to multiple agents iterating closer to an optimal solution, and there are problems and individuals that aren't. The world has me convinced that technology development is the latter and product development is the former: it depends on how quickly I need to adapt to changes beyond my control.
They may be investing indirectly, like with their 401(k).

People with significant credit card balances may be paying 15%, 18%, 25%, or more on them. Even with the tax advantage of the retirement account, it's better to suspend contributions and pay off debt.

Assume you're in the 25% tax bracket. If you have a $100 debt accruing interest at 24.99% for 10 years, you end up owing $931. If you have $133 in a pre-tax account earning at 7% for 10 years, and withdraw it and pay 25% in tax on the $262, you have $196 left. You don't have to be a genius to figure out that still leaves you $735 in the hole, which is far worse than paying the tax on your $133 paycheck up front and using the $100 to pay off your debt instead of investing it.

As it turns out, your interest on debt doesn't need to be nearly that high. If you owe at 10% and invest pre-25% tax at 7%, it still makes sense to stop investing entirely until paying off the debt.
New research from the Computational Neuroscience Lab at the University of Tartu looks at what happens when multiple AI agents are competing or collaborating in the same environment. The research (built on some of the pioneering Deep Reinforcement Learning work done by Deepmind) shows that AI agents will tend to try to maximize their rewards. Leaves interesting questions about the role of researchers in defining these rewards clearly and ethically.
Ship him to a supermax in the US.
I guess I could, but it's been beat to death all over the Internet.
I don't know what he thinks of it, but everyone should give these two pieces (especially the second one) a read. I was absolutely ready to hate it given the title of the first one (I, too, am in the "buying a dream" rationality camp), but the second piece especially was just too damn good.
Oh they are certainly real people. Real people who will beat and rob you for $3. That's just how people can be at their basest level. Communication and charity doesn't go very far on that plane of interaction. Of course if you are in that part of town as a "customer" than it's different....
What content? Netflix in 4K looks considerably worse than true BluRay at 1080p.
The resolution is really not the most important factor as most of the content most people consume now is streamed we lost pretty much all of the benefits of HD with squeezing 1080p HD content to a bitrate lower than that of DVD without much improvement with our encoders.
H265 can produce some seriously small files but atm the configuration isn't optimized yet (h264 still looks better) that plus some decent client side post processing can probably help to bring back HD content to it's full glory.
Could this be used for online Bitcoin wallets?
> they'd have some inkling as to what's currently in demand and what may be underrepresented.

My working assumption is that the lessons learned from the prediction engine they've built are a qualitative leap over just "what's popular, assuming all of the US is composed of identical viewers." Or even a few demographic divisions.

Eh, I could be wrong though. Maybe this is just a gutcheck, I think Netflix is better at data science than other studios, because they have more experience working with programmers and large datasets.
With an infinite supply of drug money and weapons coming in from the United States, what is PRI or the PAN or the PRD supposed to do? Mexicans are proud, and the notion of immediately extraditing him to the country that gave him power is an incredibly bitter pill to swallow.

I wouldn't be surprised if he just has an "accident" in the following months that leaves him dead and buried where he committed all this injustice: in Mexico.
This guide is quite good. However I don't see the harm in using nesting and ampersand selectors when using a preprocessor. I feel like knowing that the specificity is precise has saved me from worrying about collisions. Extracting the styles to make them more generic is no big deal, to me it's better than naming things like my-rad-class_____descendant-----sibling__-attribute.
Googled that quote and can't find a source; who is it?
Isn't that the idea behind Alphabet (formerly Google): Permit lots of small(er) independent companies under the same umbrella parent corp?
I'm guessing that the US traded some serious intelligence help for an agreement that he'd be extradited to the US following his capture.
There is absolutely nothing to root for. He's killed (and his cartel continues to kill) a tragic number of innocent people: women, children, and the poor, all across Mexico. He's a vulture.
it fails for me :-(
A lot of this kind of thing in the "real world" is managed by social convention. People understand that there is a difference based on context, that can not fully be captured by the law. For example it may be perfectly legal to take photos of strangers at the beach, but we all understand why that is creepy.

The thing is that on the world wide web the social convention is strongly in favour of being able to slurp up data, at least as long as it does not cause technical problems. Mostly people get this and understand it.

Other apps have emerged that follow different social conventions. For example if you share something on SnapChat you are suggesting that the information should be ephemeral. But you can't expect people/crawlers to infer the context without having that strong hint.
White House Officials Meet with Tech Leaders on Thwarting Terrorists
Honest question: in that case, what would be the reason for creating states on the land as opposed to just leaving it an unincorporated Federal territory? Other than just to satisfy the people petitioning for statehood?
Peach Is a New Messaging App from the Founder of Vine
On-chip Maxwell's demon as an information-powered refrigerator
We're talking about the spy data, not generalized actuarial tables.
> Gödel doesn't say anything about "non-trivial" any more than Turing does.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Quote: "Rice's theorem generalizes the theorem that the halting problem is unsolvable. It states that for any non-trivial property, there is no general decision procedure that, for all programs, decides whether the partial function implemented by the input program has that property. (A partial function is a function which may not always produce a result, and so is used to model programs, which can either produce results or fail to halt.) For example, the property "halt for the input 0" is undecidable. Here, "non-trivial" means that the set of partial functions that satisfy the property is neither the empty set nor the set of all partial functions."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

Quote: "Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems capable of doing arithmetic."

> It would be nice if we could verify Coq in Coq itself ...

I was planning to bring this issue up, but you've done it for me. The simplest explanation of these two related theorems involves the issue of self-reference. Imagine there is a library, and a very conscientious librarian wants to have a provably correct account of the library's contents. The librarian therefore compiles an index of all the works in the library and declares victory. Then Gödel shows up and says, "On which shelf shall we put the index?"

In the same way, and for the same reason, non-trivial logical systems cannot check themselves, computer languages cannot validate their products (or themselves), and compilers cannot prove their own results correct.

> And it seems to be worthwhile to prove things correct in a proof assistant, even without a computer-checked proof of that proof assistant's own correctness.

Yes, unless someone is misled into thinking this means the checked code has been proven correct.

> This is not waving away the problem ...

When someone declares that a piece of code has been proven correct, in point of fact, yes, it is.
Dude! $250 doesn't make any sense. I've been running a MUCH more complex side project in Heroku with ~80k visitors per week for way, way below that, closer to what you would pay with DigitalOcean or the like. For a checklist app and your traffic you shouldn't need the dynos or the database upgrade.
I don't see the "sad sentiment regarding Elon Musk's mansion" anywhere at all in this discussion. Someone said Musk seemed like the kind of person who would put every cent he owned into his businesses and not buy a big house or a yacht or anything. Someone else said: no, as it happens he's got a big house. No one has suggested that he shouldn't have a big house. No one has suggested that having one makes him a bad person. I think you're seeing things that aren't there.

On the rest: I wonder whether you misunderstood what I was doing in that paragraph. I am not endorsing any of the arguments I mentioned (though as it happens I agree with some of them). I was listing all the things that people in this discussion had (at the time) said in favour of higher taxes, and pointing out that none of them involved saying that wealth is evil or that rich people are evil.

So responding by countering a few of the arguments misses the point. I wasn't making those arguments myself. I was pointing out that none of them involves the idea that rich = evil.
According to this, the #1 is the "top choice".

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/travel/faq-52-places-to-go...
You raise some excellent points. I have a few minority opinions and I have to essentially avoid some threads because I see how some brave souls who shared an unpopular opinion get vilified. It does hurt to be called names even on the internet. Thanks for replying!
If they intended to use it for some purpose other than destroying a vast habitat so they could grow their own personal wealth, you may have a moral high ground to stand on.
IIRC the tunnels are built by coerced labor, usually killed after the project is completed.

(They kidnap engineers to build submarines for smuggling operations, too).

There is little here that is glamorous.
When 1 character domains expire, they are not available for re-registration- Just FYI
I saw the headline and thought it was a startup parable with the $100 representing VC money and $800M a huge exit. I need to be less cynical!
VR porn is here and it's scary how realistic it is
I feel like I'm fundamentally the same person at 16 myself. Even though many years later I'm wiser, more self-confident, know more, have a more developed personality and less energy. The radical transformations that happen to your mind and personality from 12 to 15 didn't happen at 15 to 18. Probably something to do with puberty.
I suppose it is conceivable that going 65 in the right lane when all the other right lane and merging traffic is expecting to go 70 or 75 could still be unsafe. If there's a big gap ahead of you and a long line of cars behind, it's probably a good idea to speed up regardless of lane (assuming weather's good and your car can handle it).

What's really frustrating and unsafe though is when drivers try to merge onto the freeway going 35 or 45 and traffic is going 70 in a 70 or 75 zone.
"heap burning coals on his head"

wff? if that's the endgame is I'm not giving anyone water ever again.
$149 drone plane runs Linux and streams 30fps video
If anyone has questions about data we collect and how you can use it to improve your year let me know.
>It's only right that the federal government own the land

there is no right or wrong here. The current situation is just the result of the most recent applications of force on that issue - with Indians in particular loosing in those "applications of force", and until bigger force gets involved it will stay about the same. That is how human race has so far been managing the surface of this planet, or any other resource...
At least one person downvoted the above. If someone who did is reading this: I would be very interested to know why.

(I don't at all object to being downvoted. But if I'm thinking incompetently or writing badly or being obnoxious or something, I'd like to know what's wrong so that I can fix it. And I haven't been able to figure out what's downvote-worthy in the parent of this comment.)
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